Quotes from Jane Hirshfield

The fairy tales warn you: Do not go in, you who would eat will be eaten.

Do not follow the ancient masters, seek what they sought." However strong his opinions and theories, Bash?'s primary allegiance was to the living moment and its accurate, full-hearted presentation. Of the formal requirements of haiku, he said, "If you have three or four, even five or seven extra syllables but the poem still sounds good, don't worry about it. But if one syllable stops the tongue, look at it hard.

Tenderness does not choose its own uses. It goes out to everything equally, circling rabbit and hawk. Look: in the iron bucket, a single nail, a single ruby - all the heavens and hells. They rattle in the heart and make one sound.

those who follow their own breath will come to know both Being's nature and their own.

An hour is not a house" An hour is not a house, a life is not a house, you do not go through them as if they were doors to another. Yet an hour can have shape and proportion, four walls, a ceiling. An hour can be dropped like a glass. Some want quiet as others want bread. Some want sleep. My eyes went to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.

It doesn't matter what they will make of you or your days: they will be wrong, they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man, all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention. Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad, you slept, you awakened.

The griefs of others—beautiful, at a distance.

In poetry's words, life calls to life —Jane Hirshfield

Free verse follows 'the breath of a thought where it leads'.

In the poems of . . . Robinson Jeffers, it is a style of consciousness rather than of language we see most in an altered light, some shadowed corner of experience newly illumined and made perceptible by words.

Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R. P. Blackmur said.

YÅ«gen's hallmarks [are] mystery and depth .. . . it is characterized by sadness, unspoken connotations, imagery of a veiled, monochromatic nature, and an atmosphere of haunting beauty.

from "Nine Pebbles" Library Book with Many Precisely Turned-Down Corners I unfold carefully the thoughts of one who has come before me, the way a listening dog's ears may be seen lifting to some sound beyond its person's quite understanding

Robinson Jeffers longed throughout his life ]for a poetry of 'pure undoubtable being'], but could not bear to relinquish his moral connection with the humanity he continually condemned for its self-centeredness.

No matter how difficult the subject, while writing, a poet is unchained from sadness, and free —Jane Hirshfield

If the blue morning held in the glass of the window, if my fingers, my palms. If my thighs. If your hands, if my thighs. If the seeds, among all the lost gold oft the grass. If your hands on my thighs, if your tongue. If the leaves. If the singing fell upward. If grief. For a moment if singing and grief. If the blue of the body fell upward, out of our hands. If the morning held it like leaves.

Plants, stones, utensils, each thing has its individual feelings, similar to those of men," Bash? wrote.

But mostly we are made of a heavier stuff, the slow descent of breast, foot-arches flattening towards earth, the hundred ways the body longs for home.

have little to offer in this time when nothing lasts, only that desire to which you come as to a well. Even the language tells it: to satisfy and sadness rooted on one stock, the faithful breathing back towards shadow of everything that once bent to the sun. And still, the long slanting days pull us in, the warmth, the pitch of the hills, and everything in us wants to give over again— Only a little further, a hand's extending, a single word; the mirage, beautiful, beckons us on.

Un giorno è sconfinato Un giorno è sconfinato Fino a mezzogiorno Poi è andato L'acqua del laghetto di ieri m'intreccia ancora i capelli Non so che ora è Impossibile capirlo Ma possibile rinunciarvi p#159

Pompei Quante case diventano una Pompei vivente, non spolverate, non sgombre La catastrofe non è soltanto improvvisa I cuori si fermano in tutti i modi non solo uno A volte la chiave di casa va perduta a volte la serratura A volte il significato di una fine sta nel bussare che non è stato fatto p#163

In a human-sized room, someone is setting a human-sized table, with yellow napkins, someone is calling her children to come in from a day whose losses as yet remain child-sized.

How close to human must the breathed-in air come before it develops a sense of shame or humor?

Every pocket I put you in had its hole.