Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Jane Hirshfield

American Poet, Essayist and Translator

"A certain amount of housekeeping also goes on in my poems. I wash doorknobs, do dishes, mop floors, patch carpets, cook."

""And" seems to me closest. "And" nods toward the real. And "and" is the path to perspective. To feel and see from more angles and know all of them true, even the incomprehensible ones, even the ones that contradict one another."

"A good question can send you on a long journey in rain and cold. It can terrify, bringing you straight into your own fears, whether of heights or of loss or of all the mysteries that never go away--our own vulnerability, the heart's utter exposure, the capriciousness and fragility of events, of relationships, of existence."

"A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand."

"A person?s heard voice is replete with information. So it is with the voice of a poem."

"A poem can use anything to talk about anything."

"A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry's language carries what lives outside language. It's as if you were given a 5-gallon bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves."

"A poem's essential discovery can happen at a single sitting. The cascade of discoveries in an essay, or even finding a question worth exploring in one, seems to need roughly the time it takes to plant and harvest a crop of bush beans."

"A studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life and a little beyond."

"A scrap of sorrow, like a bird, lights on the heart. I carry this in my body, seed in an unswept corner, husk-encowled and seeming safe. But they guard me, these small pains, from growing sure of myself and perhaps forgetting."

"A regular returning in one dimension can bring unexpected turns in another: hunting a rhyme, the mind falls on a wholly surprising idea. This balancing between expected and unforeseen, both in aesthetic and cognitive structures, is near the center of every work of art. Through the gate of concentration, defining yet open, both aspects enter."

"A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow."

"An ordinary hole beside a path through the woods might begin to open to altered worlds."

"Always there is desire, only the shape of what is desired shifts, each love giving way to another."

"And when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend."

"Americans distrust artful speech, believing that sincerity and deliberation cannot coexist? Romantic temperament ? equates spontaneity and truth. But the word art is neighbor to artifice, and in human culture, as in the animal and vegetable worlds, desirability entails not only the impulse of the moment but also enchantment, exaggeration, rearrangement, and deception. We don?t find the fragrance of night-scented flowering tobacco or the display of a peacock?s tail insincere ? by such ruses this world conducts its erotic business. To acknowledge rhetoric?s presence in the beauty of poems, or any other form of speech, is only to agree to what already is."

"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?"

"Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled."

"Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It's more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art's discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinar"

"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."

"Any artist, in any field, wants to press deeper, to discover further. Image and sound play are among the strongest colors available to poetry's palette. For a long time, I've wanted to invite in more strangeness, more freedom of imagination. Yet music, seeing, and meaning are also cohering disciplines. They can be stretched, and that is part of poetry's helium pleasure. But not to the point of breaking."

"Art can be defined as beauty able to transcend the circumstances of its making."

"As some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us."

"Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life..."

"At some point I realized that you don't get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it, that you need to agree to the entire experience, to the full spectrum of what happens."

"As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it."

"At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink. What I've chosen, what's happened unchosen, can't be unmade or redone. Poetry, though, is a door that only continues to open. Even the unchangeable past changes inside a poem. Not the facts, but the feeling, the comprehension."

"Bash? wrote, The moon and sun are travelers of a hundred generations. The years, coming and going, are wanderers too. Spending a lifetime adrift on boat decks, greeting old age while holding a horse by the mouth?for such a person, each day is a journey, and the journey itself becomes home."

"At another level, though, poems can craft an eraser - we can't revise the past, but poems allow us some malleability, an increased freedom of response, comprehension, feeling. Choice, what choices are possible for any given person, is another theme that's run through my work from the start."

"Before we can concentrate easily, we need to know where we stand. This is the work of rhetoric? Traditionally defined as the art of choosing the words that will best convey the speaker?s intent, rhetoric?s concern is the precise and beautiful movement of mind in language."

"Because it thinks by music and image, by story and passion and voice, poetry can do what other forms of thinking cannot: approximate the actual flavor of life, in which subjective and objective become one, in which conceptual mind and the inexpressible presence of things become one."

"Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity."

"By concentration, I mean a particular state of awareness: penetrating, unified, and focused, yet also permeable and open. This quality of consciousness, though not easily put into words, is instantly recognizable. Aldous Huxley described it as the moment the doors of perception open; James Joyce called it epiphany. The experience of concentration may be quietly physical ? a simple, unexpected sense of deep accord between yourself and everything. It may come as the harvest of long looking and leave us, as it did Wordsworth, a mind thought ?too deep for tears.? Within action, it is felt as a grace state: time slows and extends, and a person?s every movement and decision seem to partake of perfection. Concentration can also be placed into things ? it radiates undimmed from Vermeer?s paintings, from the small marble figure of a lyre-player from ancient Greece, from a Chinese three-footed bowl ? and into musical notes, words, ideas. In the wholeheartedness of concentration, world and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done."

"But it also lives in the moment, in us. Emotion, intellect, and physiology are inseparably connected in the links of a poem?s sound. It is difficult to feel intimacy while shouting, to rage in a low whisper, to skip and weep at the same time."

"Creativity itself is a joyous unlatching. The act of creative imagining, inventing, saying differently, crafting a metaphor or image, then crafting another metaphor or image when you go further or when you revise - all these take whatever you think "is" and make clear that other possibilities exist as well. The sense of possibility, the amplitude and freedom that sense of malleability brings - for me, that cannot help but be joyous."

"Desire is the moment before the race is run."

"Clear moon, a boy afraid of foxes walked home by his lover."

"China: whales follow the whale-roads. Geese, roads of magnetized air. To go great distance, exactitudes matter. Yet how often the heart that set out for Peru arrives in China, steering hard. Consulting the charts the whole journey."

"Call one thing another's name long enough, it will answer."

"Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World: If the gods bring to you a strange and frightening creature, accept the gift as if it were one you had chosen. Say the accustomed prayers, oil the hooves well, caress the small ears with praise. Have the new halter of woven silver embedded with jewels. Spare no expense, pay what is asked, when a gift arrives from the sea. Treat it as you yourself would be treated, brought speechless and naked into the court of a king. And when the request finally comes, do not hesitate even an instant--stroke the white throat, the heavy trembling dewlaps you'd come to believe were yours, and plunge in the knife. Not once did you enter the pasture without pause, without yourself trembling, that you came to love it, that was the gift. Let the envious gods take back what they can."

"Difficulty then, whether of life or of craft, is not a hindrance to an artist. Sartre called genius ?not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances.? Just as geological pressure transforms ocean sediment into limestone, the pressure of an artist?s concentration goes into the making of any fully realized work. Much of beauty, both in art and in life, is a balancing of the lines of forward-flowing desire with those of resistance ? a gnarled tree, the flow of a statue?s draped cloth. Through such tensions, physical or mental, the world in which we exist becomes itself. Great art, we might say, is thought that has been concentrated in just this way: honed and shaped by a silky attention brought to bear on the recalcitrant matter of earth and of life. We seek in art the elusive intensity by which it knows."

"Difficulty itself may be a path toward concentration ? expended effort weaves us into a task, and successful engagement, however laborious, becomes also a labor of love. The work of writing brings replenishment even to the writer dealing with painful subjects or working out formal problems, and there are times when suffering?s only open path is through an immersion in what is. The eighteenth-century Urdu poet Ghalib described the principle this way: ?For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river ? Unbearable pain becomes its own cure.?"

"Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased as the not quite imaginable first."

"Every good poem begins in language awake to its own connections ? language that hears itself and what is around it, sees itself and what is around it, looks back at those who look into its gaze and knows more perhaps even than we do about who are, what we are. It begins, that is, in the mind and body of concentration."

"Each poet probably has his or her own cupboard of magnets. For some, it is cars; for others, works of art, or certain patterns of form or sound; for others, certain stories or places, Philip Levine's Detroit, Gwendolyn Brooks's Chicago, Seamus Heaney's time-tunneled, familied Ireland."

"Every other year or so I go to one of those great generous places, the artist retreats. Some of the poems in The Beauty were written at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, and others at Civitella Ranieri, in Umbria."

"Evolution tells us how to survive; art tells us how it's possible still to live even while knowing that we and all we love will someday vanish. It says there's beauty even in grief, freedom even inside the strictures of form and of life. What's liberating isn't what's simplest; it's the ability to include more and more shadows, colors and possibilities inside any moment's meeting of self and world."

"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."

"Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement."

"For me, a good poem is a poem that leaves me feeling transformed, enlarged rather than narrowed, with a greater sense of my own existence and the existence of others, with a greater capacity for being a kite available to many winds and still able to stay aloft. Good poetry is a recognizable experience, but hard to name in generality, because so many different strategies can create it. Its own awareness is also part of what creates it. Poetry makes poetry."