Literary Birthday – 24 February – Jane Hirshfield

Happy Birthday, Jane Hirshfield, born 24 February 1953.

Jane Hirshfield Quotes

1. Solitude, whether endured or embraced, is a necessary gateway to original thought.
2. Poems want to awaken intimacy, connection, expansion, and wildness.
3. At some point I realised 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.
4. Zen pretty much comes down to three things — everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.
5. How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
6. History, mythology, and folktales are filled with stories of people punished for saying the truth. Only the Fool, exempt from society’s rules, is allowed to speak with complete freedom.
7. The creative is always an act of recombination, with something added by new juxtaposition—as making a spark requires two things struck together.
8. You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
9. Poems give us permission to be unsure, in ways we must be if we are ever to learn anything not already known. If you look with open eyes at your actual life, it’s always going to be the kind of long division problem that doesn’t work out perfectly evenly. Poems let you accept the multiplicity and complexity of the actual, they let us navigate the unnavigable, insoluble parts of our individual fates and shared existence.
10. Poetry’s work is the clarification and magnification of being.

Read: Why Jane Hirshfield Writes

Jane Hirshfield is an award-winning American poet, essayist, and translator. She is the author of 10 collections of poetry, including The Asking: New and Selected Poems, Come Thief, After, and Given Sugar, Given Salt; as well as two now-classic books of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, Essays and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985, the Academy of American Poets’ 2004 Fellowship for Distinguished Achievement, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 2005. She was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. Follow her on Facebook.

Source for quotes /Source for image: Author’s Facebook Page (as suggested by her publicist)

by Amanda Patterson

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