A Steepening Gratitude
Jason Myers in Conversation with Jane Hirshfield
I encountered the prose of Jane Hirshfield before her poetry, stumbling upon Nine Gates in a bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The friend I was visiting had a couple volumes of her poems, too, so I borrowed them. Stole might be the more appropriate word. In both her essays (primarily about poets and the kinds of attention that reading and writing poems requires and cultivates) and her poems, Hirshfield attunes readers to the senses. Her work abounds with vivid images, bowls of fruit, meals being made or remembered, sounds of animals and musical instruments. She makes the world that eludes perceptibility, what some call spirit, equally compelling and acute. Hirshfield is the author of ten volumes of poetry, two collections of essays, and has edited and co-translated four books presenting world poets from the deep past. Alfred A. Knopf published The Asking: New & Selected Poems in September. We corresponded throughout the year.
Jason Myers: What did you discover, about your own life and the lives of poems, as you worked on The Asking? I am always curious about the process and the decisions that go into making such a book. How did you choose to put the new poems first, and how did you select the poems that follow?
Jane Hirshfield: Bringing out a New & Selected book was my editor’s suggestion, one I’d declined at least four times before, saying it felt premature. But this time I’d lost that excuse–as my editor said in proposing it, 2023 is the year I turned seventy– and assembling this book became part of a year of looking both back and forward. A chance – in something close to the literal shopkeeper’s sense –to take stock of the arc of my life..
During the first stages, though, I was mostly distracted with all the decisions. I knew from the start that I wanted to begin with the newest work – the present moment’s meeting is what any writer or artist is most interested in – and then to go back to the beginning and work my way forward. If you review your own life, that’s what you do–the person you are now considers the journey of the person who got here. One mid-period poem, “I Imagine Myself in Time,” wonders about some future self looking back at the choices I was making when I wrote it. With this book, I became that future self, now doing the looking. You keep meeting yourself, with larger – because longer – perspective.
Still, it wasn’t until I recorded the audio book–and found myself saying every poem in The Asking all in a row, over a day and half in the studio–that I fully began to take in the book as a single arc. The conversation between the poems over time became suddenly clearer. I was weirdly surprised by the experience, and surprised, too, by being surprised. It felt as if I were re-visiting every subway stop of my life at once… and I don’t spend a lot of time in ordinary life in that kind of retrospective review. My eyes usually face what’s in front of them now.
In truth, I’ve actively wanted over my life as a writer not to be overtly self-aware of my themes, or of my strategies of feeling and thought. If you think that you know what you do, you might not do something new. Repetition brings no discovery. But saying this book aloud all at once, I couldn’t help but recognize connections I hadn’t seen before. How certain kinds of questions have drawn me in from the beginning. The recurrence of certain images over a lifetime: how many apples, figs, and sandwiches are in my poems. And how much longing is in them to make of the broken something whole.
But I could, reading through all the poems, feel something like the Doppler shift of Novalis’s aphorism: “You spend the first half of a life looking inward, the second half looking outward.” That saying is not entirely true for me. Recent poems continue to look at realms interior, personal, private to my own heart, life, and mind, and from the beginning, some of the poems have always looked at war, at hunger, at the suffering we learn from the news. Long before I found my way to reading the great Polish poets of the twentieth century, I wrote a poem (it’s not in the book) about women in Poland, who were at that time standing in lines for milk or potatoes. Even so, the proportions have shifted. Many more poems over the last decade look at the crisis of the biosphere and the crises of injustice and violence, at our human failure to recognize kinship and shared fates. A poem titled “Global Warming” goes back to 2004, but the 2020 collection, Ledger, holds the biosphere and our social compact as its central axis, even as it also holds a suite of poems that face the illness and death of someone I’d loved for fifty years.
JM: Do you think any of the poems not in the book rue their exclusion?
JH: If a person speaks to me now about a poem not in the book, I’m of course sorry I left it out. It meant enough to someone to remember for years, and any poem I’ve published means something to me. In making the choices, you just do the best you can, knowing it’s going to be imperfect. The earlier books are still in print–those poems can be found. (And then there’s a quite early poem that was just put up by an online site that I simply forgot to ever put in a book, and so also never thought of for this one–but there it is, out in the world, still having a life on its own. Ttwo friends sent me an email after it was posted, saying how much it struck them– which is the only way I knew that was even happening. I’d slip that one in now, if I could.)
JM: I have been revisiting the writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel, and this observation seems to have some bearing on the title of your book: “A living thought is like a seed. In the process of thinking, an answer without a question is devoid of life. It may enter the mind; it will not penetrate the soul. It may become a part of one’s knowledge; it will not come forth as a creative force.” In what ways do poems, reading them and writing them, penetrate our souls? What are the questions that are coming forth as creative force for you right now?
JH: That’s a marvelous quote. I hadn’t known it. I’ve come to think of poems as the way we can bring response to the questions that cannot be answered. There is no answer to love’s transience, no answer to death. No answer to cruelty, selfishness, the pathologies of power. Yet our lives include all these things, and you have to keep opening your eyes to the next day and breathe. To do that, you need to find, if not a solution, then some antidote to despair, what Robert Frost described as “a momentary stay against confusion.” Poems, the ones that most matter, restore us to the one reply we can bring to a life’s unanswerable questions: embrace of what is, embrace of every part of what is.
As to the work being done now by particular poems–I can never predict the next one. I have no prior plan, and writing for me isn’t general, it’s one poem, then another. I can say that the greatest bewilderment of recent years for me continues–our human failure to see what seems so entirely obvious: that our fates and the fates of all humans and all living beings of every kind are inseparably connected. How can we be so blind to this, in our societal choices? I’m sure the crises of biosphere and justice will continue to bring new poems. My grief and bewilderment are too overwhelming not to need to speak into them.
One other thing has arisen ever more strongly for me these past years: a steepening gratitude before existence, and a simple tenderness toward this world, in all its fragile and resilient multitudes. Any twig of it: alive. I once found myself walking through a grove of trees and saying to each of them, “sister, sister, sister.” Saint Francis has already written that poem directly, in his “Canticle.” My own must come in other language, other ways. Here, for instance, is one of the small pebble poems from this book’s new-poems section:
My Failure
I said of the view: “just some trees.”
I rely on the reader to do the math backwards, and arrive at their own recognition of “sister, sister, sister.” I hope that happens, when people read this.
JM: You observe in one poem how “we fail so often, in such ordinary ways.” I am curious how poetry can both record and resist our failures, and how it can be a repository for both the ordinary and the extraordinary.
JH: Poems are for me, quite often, a response to failure. My own failures, and those I see in larger realms. That line comes from an early-eighties-written poem, “In A Net of Blue & Gold,” I can now see it as almost an early draft of many of the poems in the 2020 book, Ledger, and some of the new ones in this book as well. So many poems I’ve written in recent decades might share the title “Cataclysm.” First, the poems are records, as you say. The grief of our individual and societal failures needs first to be seen, to be named. But observing and naming is the beginning, not the end. A poem is the embodiment of a changed relationship to what it sees, or, sometimes, the embodiment of a change of seeing. If there’s no shift, there’s no poem, only a journal entry. It may be that the transformation comes when the seeing, the naming, draw in some reminder that the extraordinary is always also possible, and can be summoned. Sometimes it may happen by remembering tenderness. Sometimes it might come by perceiving the comic. There are many ways to shift view. But whenever we’re able to recalibrate our relationship to the sources of suffering, delusion and narrowness loosen, and we gain some ability to act differently– whether by offering restorative justice, by standing with others in protest, by registering new voters, or just by setting a single, homely milkweed plant into your yard, to help a monarch butterfly or two along in their thousand-mile migration.
JM: The line “we are many even alone,” from “December Solstice, ’73,” strikes me as a variation on Whitman’s declaration of largeness, containing multitudes. What largenesses do you discover in solitude, and how do they differ when you are in company?
JH: Thank you for noticing that line, written when I was twenty. It speaks to a relationship of solitude and connection that’s run through my life. To give the personal version of an answer: solitude is for me – an introvert by nature – the portal to largeness. Being with others is the portal to intimacy, to conversation, to curiosity, to connection and collaboration; also to both the bludgeons of misunderstanding and to knowing this world in its radiant and orchestral fullness. But poems are written when you bring that broad life into solitude– by most of us, anyhow. And for me, I’m most able to do what one poem describes as “taking off the third skin, taking off the fourth” when I find myself in solitude and non-disturbance. This isn’t Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility,” not for me anyhow. For me, a poem is its own this-moment enactment of thought and feeling’s search. It is a meal in the process of being created with this moment’s salt and rice and water, this moment’s fire.
I think we humans vary in our relationship to solitude. For some other people, it’s exactly in the company of others that the great openings arrive. Playing or listening to music together, marching together or standing in silence with others while holding candles. I don’t mean to say these things don’t move and sustain me also. They do. But in the moments of deepest saturation and largeness and opening, the sense even of an “I” has not been present. These different relationships to solitude are idiosyncrasies of the psyche. When we study the lives of the world’s mystics, or the accounts in Zen koans, it’s clear that the precipitant of epiphany can be anything. The particular circumstances are necessary but arbitrary. It's the readiness to be precipitated that makes the difference. And also the singular, central recognition that there is a largeness. That we stand, as the Navajo Blessingway ceremony describes it, with all beings and things, in beauty. That suffering can be healed by remembering beauty.
JM: Your poem “A Plenitude” invokes one of my favorite poems by Elizabeth Bishop, “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” in which she remarks on the tenuous nature of connection: “everything connected only by “and” and “and.”” I love the way Bishop’s poem ends, with the desire to “look and look our infant sight away.” Do you feel like the way you look at things has changed over time?
JH: It must have. Both what I look at and how I see… Some things, though, seem to be constant. Questions I had as a child are still questions now–things like where a “self” begins and ends, where and when I becomes we. Much though has changed. The ground of grammar and syntax has expanded in my poems over the years, and that too is a form of seeing as much as of saying. But also, the way the larger world looks at things has shifted enormously over my lifetime, and my work reflects that too. A way of seeing is always a collaboration. If a person’s lucky, the instruments of observation grow more varied and many, rather than fewer. I have wanted my poems, as I’ve wanted in my life, to be able to see more things, in more ways. This feels to me a fundamental good, in life as in poems: to not look at anything in ways that narrow what is seen or the one who sees. Tto not simplify what is complex, multidimensional, provisional. Poems that narrow the eyes and heart are not poems, they are slogans.
As an aside, I see the history of lyric poetry in exactly this way–the lyric began with a set of basic subjects taken as home terrain, then continually expanded those subjects over the millennia. Even in my own lifetime, I’ve seen this happen. When Galway Kinnell wrote about the birth of his son Fergus, that’s the first poem I know in which a man witnesses his child being born. Women’s poems of birth-witness came into view only a little earlier. Or think of the poets of World War I, Owens and Sassoon. In the Western-lyric tradition, they may have been the first to question the violence of war itself, beyond any justification. Poets of classical China, living in times when the country was wracked by civil wars did that much earlier. Homer saw what Owens described as “the pity of war,” perhaps, but was also a poet of kleios–the Greek ideal of dying young, in battle, as something preferable to growing old without glory. Or think of poems whose image systems are based in cooking and cleaning–of which I have written a startling number. Again, quite recent. Farming, and gardening, yes, we find those subjects/settings early on in the history of the lyric. But I can’t think of one poem by Horace or Su T’ung Po that mentions straightening a bed in the morning.
JM: The theme for this issue of the magazine is friendship. What friendships, both with your contemporaries and the dead we befriend through their works, have been the most significant for your poems?
JH: I’m terribly bad at making lists–neither my mind nor my memory are good at it. I’ve also been wildly promiscuous in my friendships with the world’s poets. I can point to influences that no one ever seems to think of when they write about my work–for instance, Horace and Catullus, Cavafy and Pessoa, some poems by Bertolt Brecht and Miroslav Holub, the New York School poets, especially Kenneth Koch. Of course the two classical-era Japanese women poets I co-translated in The Ink Dark Moon, Izumi Shikibu and Ono no Komachi. There are poems I would never have written had I not loved their work. Count also almost all of the usual Anglo-American poets of the tradition. These have all been friends. But any list of those I might make would leave too many out.
In life, I feel grateful that I have met and known as friends so many of the poets I treasure as pantheon elders. Czeslaw Milosz, Seamus Heaney, William Merwin, Gary Snyder. But there are those I missed, whom I might have but never heard even read. Elizabeth Bishop. Gwendolyn Brooks. There are some I only met briefly, but whose meeting I treasure: Tomas Transtromer, Adrienne Rich, Lars Gustafsson, Wislawa Szymborska.
I won’t begin to list the poets of my own generation, or the generation a half-step earlier. They and their poems and our conversations have, though, meant the world to me.
JM: In thinking of your poem “Theology” and the various things you have written and said about bewilderment, including in this conversation. I wonder if you could tell us how belief (which I always point out has more to do, etymologically, with love than cognitive principles) and bewilderment inform you.
JH: The poem “Theology” begins with thoughts about death. The embrace of both love and finding yourself lost in the incomprehensible wilds of this world– that twin response does seem about right for meeting such thoughts. We live in the deep knowledge that we are mortal. If we and all we love are going to vanish, we need to feel this world has been well worth the grief of its leaving, the weight of its suffering. Another poem comes to mind, “Salt Heart,” about a friend’s dying. It ends with the lines:
I begin to believe the only sin is distance, refusal.
All others stemming from this. Then come.
Rivers, come. Irrevocable futures, come. Come even joy.
Even now, even here, and though it vanish like him.”
The only other title I considered for this book was Even Now, Even Here. I think The Asking is better. But if a posthumous Collected Poems ever comes out, it could do worse than carry a title that says, at least to my ears, “Yes, it was worth it.”
There’s a Buddhist teaching that good practice rests on a three-legged stool: right effort, right faith, and right doubt. Remembering that “faith” (“belief”) includes the deepest affection we can feel for one another is a good expansion. We who are human are mammals, not rocks. We nurse one another into existence. Allegiance to existence matters. Life loves, and needs, life. There will always be parts of any life that feel confounding, unnavigable, bewildering. Finding a way to say yes – finding a way to continue to love – even amidst a life’s unfathomable thickets, that is one reason to write and read poems. They are road signs to places for which there are no other directions.