Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield is the author of nine collections of poetry, including the forthcoming Ledger (Knopf, March 2020), The Beauty (Knopf, 2015), longlisted for the National Book Award, Come Thief (Knopf, August 23, 2011), After (HarperCollins, 2006), which was named a “Best Book of 2006” by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times and shortlisted for England’s T.S. Eliot Award; and Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award); as well as two now-classic books of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. She has also edited and co-translated three books collecting the work of women poets from the distant past, and one e-book on Basho and the development of haiku, The Heart of Haiku. Hirshfield’s other honors include The Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 40th Annual Distinguished Achievement Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, an honor previously received by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams. Her work has been featured in ten editions of The Best American Poems and appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement/TLS, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, Orion, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. Hirshfield’s poems have also been featured many times on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac as well as two Bill Moyers’ PBS television specials. She has presented her poems and taught at festivals and universities throughout the U.S., in China, Japan, the Middle East, the U.K., Poland, and Ireland. In 2019, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Hirshfield's appearance schedule can be found at:
“How fragile we are, between the few good moments.”
“There the beloved red sweater,bright tangle of necklace, earrings of amber.Each confirming: I chose these, I.But habit is different: it chooses.And we, it's good horse,opening our mouths at even the sight of the bit.”
“The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.”
“And that other self, who watches me from the distance of decades,what will she say? Will she look at me with hatred or with compassion,I whose choices made her what she will be?”
“Neither a person entirely brokennor one entirely whole can speak.In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.”
“You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.”
“The Cloudy VasePast time, I threw the flowers out,washed out the cloudy vase.How easily the old clearnessleapt, like a practiced tiger, back inside it.”
“TreeIt is foolishto let a young redwoodgrow next to a house.Even in this one lifetime,you will have to choose.That great calm being,this clutter of soup pots and books--Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.”
“Standing DeerAs the house of a personin age sometimes grows clutteredwith what istoo loved or too heavy to part with,the heart may grow cluttered.And still the house will be emptied,and still the heart.As the thoughts of a personin age sometimes grow sparer,like the great cleanness come into a room, the soul may grow sparer;one sparrow song carves it completely.And still the room is full,and still the heart.Empty and filled,like the curling half-light of morning,in which everything is still possible and so why not.Filled and empty,like the curling half-light of evening,in which everything now is finished and so why not.Beloved, what can be, what was,will be taken from us.I have disappointed.I am sorry. I knew no better.A root seeks water.Tenderness only breaks open the earth.This morning, out the window,the deer stood like a blessing, then vanished.”
“Let reason flow like water around a stone, the stone remains.”
“As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.”
“I thought I would love you forever—and, a little, I may,in the way I still move toward a crate, knees bent,or reach for a man: as one might stretchfor the three or four fruit that lie in the sun at the topof the tree; too ripe for any moment but this,they open their skin at first touch, yielding sweetness,sweetness and heat, and in me, each time since,the answering yes.”
“Everything has two endings-a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.”
“The heart's actionsare neither the sentence nor its reprieve. Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite. One bird singing back to another because it can't not.”
“as some strings, untouched,sound when no one is speaking.So it was when love slipped inside us.”
“Perimeter is not meaning, but it changes meaning,/as wit increases distance, and compassion erodes it.”
“Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.”
“You must try,the voice said, to become colder.I understood at once.It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze,braced in stone. Only something heartlesscould bear the full weight.”
“One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.”
“Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.”
“It is, of course, we who house poems as much as their words, and we ourselves must be the locus of poetry's depth of newness. Still, the permeability seems to travel both ways: a changed self will find new meanings in a good poem, but a good poem also changes the shape of the self. Having read it, we are not who we were the moment before.... Art lives in what it awakens in us... Through a good poem's eyes we see the world liberated from what we would have it do. Existence does not guarantee us destination, nor trust, nor equity, nor one moment beyond this instant's almost weightless duration. It is a triteness to say that the only thing to be counted upon is that what you count on will not be what comes. Utilitarian truths evaporate: we die. Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.”
“One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.”