{"id":143465,"date":"2020-03-11T09:00:35","date_gmt":"2020-03-11T13:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=143465"},"modified":"2020-03-12T12:49:00","modified_gmt":"2020-03-12T16:49:00","slug":"a-poem-is-not-a-frontal-assault-an-interview-with-jane-hirshfield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/03\/11\/a-poem-is-not-a-frontal-assault-an-interview-with-jane-hirshfield\/","title":{"rendered":"A Poem Is Not a Frontal Assault: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Jane Hirschfield (PHOTO \u00a9 MICHAEL LIONSTAR)<\/p><\/div>\n

I first met Jane Hirshfield about fifteen years ago, after one of her readings in San Francisco. She reads her poems with intensity, but not loudly. Her voice is even, quiet. I was struck by the many tonalities of her silences. Still, there is a distinctly recognizable passion in her quiet moments. Speaking with her, I was fascinated by how much I was able to gather from the moments between her sentences, by the way those sentences follow one another, surprising at each turn. This is also true of her poems: reading her work, I catch myself thinking that Hirshfield is the poet who orchestrates silences, which is perhaps fitting for someone who says that her medium is lyric poetry. It isn\u2019t easy these days to find a poet who can do this while being also perfectly articulate and clear. Reading Hirshfield, I find myself coming back to Mahmoud Darwish\u2019s idea that clarity is our ultimate mystery.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jane Hirshfield\u2019s nine books of poetry include <\/em>The Beauty<\/a>, long-listed for the 2015 National Book Award; <\/em>Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award; and <\/em>After, short-listed for England\u2019s T.S. Eliot Award and named a \u201cbest book of 2006\u201d by the<\/em> Washington Post, the<\/em> San Francisco Chronicle, and the <\/em>Financial Times. She is also the author of two collections of essays, <\/em>Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and <\/em>Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World<\/a><\/strong> (2015), and four books collecting and cotranslating the work of world poets from the past. Hirshfield\u2019s ninth poetry collection, newly published this week, is <\/em>Ledger. This interview took place by email.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Auden called art \u201cclear thinking about complex feeling,\u201d and in your 2015 book of essays, Ten Windows<\/em>, you speak about the \u201cextra pressure of meaning that infuses\u201d Auden\u2019s \u201cMus\u00e9e des Beaux Arts\u201d\u2014a poem written in December 1938, a time of deep political crisis. I see a strong element of the poetics of engagement in Ledger. <\/em>This isn\u2019t new. I think of your 1994 poem \u201cManners\/Rwanda,\u201d for instance. Yet the element of engagement comes across more strongly in this new book. So, I want to begin by asking about the way you relate to those \u201cextra pressures\u201d of our own crisis today in the U.S., about how they have impacted your work and this book.<\/p>\n

HIRSHFIELD<\/p>\n

A poem, a poet\u2019s life, and the larger world are one continuous fabric. Ledger <\/em>is a book of stock-taking, a registration both of the personal and of the grievous era all our lives are now visibly part of. As you say, I\u2019ve written poems for decades that speak of the environment, social justice issues, what feel like unceasing wars. What\u2019s changed in this book is the urgency and centrality of these subjects. The time line for swerve feels shorter, the precipice raised to heights fatal not only for individuals, but for the planet.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know how a poem can touch the catastrophe of the biosphere and what feels like a breakdown of the basic social contract\u2014that we care for one another and that we care for future beings\u2019 well-being. It may be that poetry\u2019s speaking is essential but preparatory, oblique. That our work, yours and mine, is the tilling that precedes planting. That our images and metaphors and statements are like the multitude of tunneling earthworms that keep the earth\u2019s microbiome alive, its structure lightened and turnable, viable for crops. Any one earthworm seems not to matter, yet the existence of earthworms matters. An ethics of preparation means also that poetry\u2019s work may be less to solve than to speak of, to speak on behalf of, that which needs solving. Our human capacities for imagination and art-making, for grief and joy, exist in the service of survival of the single, solitary self and of the whole. Poems sustain the complexity, multiplicity, and peculiarities of lives, not their erasure. They carry the sense of wholeness and unblind us to connection. These allegiances are currently desperately needed.<\/p>\n

Goethe wrote, \u201cDo not let what matters most be at the mercy of what matters least.\u201d The two, though, are not separate. An ants\u2019 nest comes into a poem, and reminds that what may seem small\u2014noticing it, wanting its continuance on this perishable and fragile planet\u2014is<\/em> what matters most. No part of existence is discardable. <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I see in this new book also some shift in style, and wondered if you might say something about that. Was it a deliberate, chosen response to the pressure of current crises?<\/p>\n

HIRSHFIELD<\/p>\n

The styles and textures of my work have altered gradually. Some poems have grown sparer and simpler, others more opulent, intermittent, strange. That shift comes, I think, partly just from time. A tree, over decades, changes its expression. But then, the weather and soil the tree abides in change it as well. I have changed. The world has changed. My poems\u2019 ways of speaking and directions of looking have changed. But none of this is for me a matter of will or conscious choice. Will is too narrow to write poems. Its oxygen is too thin. I feel myself as much amanuensis as author.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Your line \u201cless to solve than to speak of what needs solving\u201d reminds me of Chekhov\u2019s statement, \u201cArt does not provide answers, it can only formulate questions correctly.\u201d What does this mean for an artist in our specific moment? One of your earlier poems, \u201cIn Praise of Coldness,\u201d begins with another quote from Chekhov, \u201cIf you wish to move your reader, you must write more coldly.\u201d It is a beautiful poem. \u201cIn sorrow, pretend to be fearless,\u201d you say. \u201cIn happiness, tremble.\u201d How do you relate to this statement from Chekhov now, after having written equally beautiful\u2014but not at all cold\u2014poems in Ledger<\/em> that do, I think, provide answers, despite what you\u2019ve said. I\u2019m thinking of poems such as \u201cLet them Not Say,\u201d for instance, or \u201cOn the Fifth Day.\u201d<\/p>\n

HIRSHFIELD<\/p>\n

Perhaps an answer in the realm of the arts is different from the right or wrong solution we bring to a problem in chemistry or mathematics. Arts \u201canswers,\u201d but in that word\u2019s other sense of response<\/em>, of reply<\/em>. Both the poems you\u2019ve named are bells rung hard. They summon attention. When you see a fire, you can\u2019t stay silent.<\/p>\n

I, though, do feel in them Chekhov\u2019s coldness. A poem\u2019s meaning requires an engineered, structural soundness, not so different from that of a building or bridge. Language, syntax, verb tense, soundscape, the placing of ink and ink\u2019s absence on a page, are material things, just as steel is. Words experienced as comprehensible, consequential, do follow rules, though they are rules that a writer, like an architect, can test, press toward their outer limits. New materials bring new shapes of meaning and feeling. Those two poems feel strongly, but they are not an uncontrolled weeping. They argue, in the old-fashioned, rhetorical sense of that word, for something that matters, and make their argument in the ways art mostly does\u2014from the side. I think it\u2019s a good thing that poets work far from the center of our celebrity- and economics-driven culture. From the periphery, you can see more of the whole. From the center, any view will be partial. A poem is not a frontal assault, it is the root tendrils of ivy making their way into the heart\u2019s walls\u2019 mortar.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You are deeply invested in the lyric poem. But your work has also long been interested in the idea of poetic sequence, poetic cycle. I am thinking of your Pebbles sequences and your Assays, both of which began with After<\/em>, and have continued to make appearances in more recent books. Can you speak more about how you see these forms, their reappearances from book to book, their conversation between books?<\/p>\n

HIRSHFIELD<\/p>\n

The series poems have always begun with just one poem that felt to me different, somehow distinctive, like a horse moving into a single-foot gait. Assays began with a poem written after I\u2019d reread Edgar Allan Poe\u2019s stories while writing an essay on how hiddenness works in poems. Some of the qualities of essay exploration and prose step lingered in its music and mode of thinking. At the time, I was regularly seeing the journal Science<\/em>. On the back would often be advertisements for half-million-dollar machines for performing assays. That word\u2014close to essay<\/em> and sharing its root in the idea of an attempt, a try\u2014refers to discovering a thing\u2019s nature by breaking it into its elemental parts. The poem became \u201cPoe: An Assay.\u201d That approach to writing, of testing a subject for its discoverable parts, imaginative and factual, caught. I began writing others. \u201cJudgment: An Assay.\u201d \u201cTears: An Assay.\u201d \u201cAnd: An Assay.\u201d In Ledger<\/em>, the one labeled assay is about capital, money. But other poems in the book also use the assay mode and strategy. They just don\u2019t carry the label.<\/p>\n

The pebbles are very <\/em>brief poems with a certain flavor. They are individual poems written independently. I run them as series in the books because it feels rude to the trees to have so many pages of paper with so little ink on each. The pebbles, I\u2019ll add, are not haiku and not aphorisms. They are much more hybrid. They do draw from Asian poetry\u2019s concision and compression, but are more discursive. They draw also from Novalis, from a few pieces in Pound\u2019s Personae<\/em>, from fragments of poems from ancient Greece and early poems from Sumer and India, Turkey, and Mesoamerica. They draw from a handful of very short poems by Brecht I find irresistibly precise.<\/p>\n

A pebble holds its rock recalcitrance lightly, portably. The pebble poems try to do large work in the smallest possible container. In their feel of doing investigative work, they are the assay form\u2019s bookend. Both forms, when they became conscious, expanded my vocabulary of poetic exploration. Neither, I\u2019ll add, is a radical invention. The poetic form of \u201ca meditation on\u201d is close in spirit to the assays. Brief poems go back to the earliest writings we have. These modes are forms for me the way the sonata form or etude function in music\u2014they invite a particular kind of experience. They\u2019ve become a self-propagating invitation of possibility. And yes, of course, the poems in these modes do connect across books, making their own discrete libraries of registration.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

There\u2019ve been a few other series in your work as well. Ledger <\/em>holds its notably distinctive series of Little Soul poems. How did you come to those? Were these pieces in some way a response to Hadrian?<\/p>\n

HIRSHFIELD<\/p>\n

Oh, yes. Since this book has no endnotes, I must trust that readers will recognize \u201clittle soul\u201d as Hadrian\u2019s phrase. It comes from his one known poem, written on his deathbed. He addresses his departing life with that endearing diminutive, \u201canimula.\u201d I looked for some equivalent term of my own, but could find nothing as tender. Hadrian\u2019s poem also framed the mood and tone of my poems, written over months, when a friend of forty years was dying. Here is the Hadrian:<\/p>\n

Little soul, drifting, gentle,
\nmy body\u2019s guest and companion,
\nwhat places do you now go to live in,
\nwithout color, unyielding, naked,
\nnever again to share our old jokes.
\n(tr. JH)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hadrian\u2019s \u201clittle soul\u201d made for me a door through which I could contemplate the unbearable. My friend\u2019s death, my own death, all of our dying, are in those eight poems.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In Ten Windows<\/em>, you say, \u201cMost good poems hold some part of their thoughts in invisible ink… Lyric poetry rests on a fulcrum of said and unsaid.\u201d Can you speak a bit more about that, and about how the unsaid works in this book?<\/p>\n

HIRSHFIELD<\/p>\n

One poem in Ledger<\/em> is entirely ellipsis, \u201cMy Silence.\u201d There\u2019s a small lineage of poems that are only title\u2014I know at least three. It\u2019s a form that wants sparing usage, but my poem was genuinely, honestly written. It holds an unsayable grief. Its invisible ink depends on the reader recognizing that the whole book is the context for that silence. Late in the publishing process, I wondered if I shouldn\u2019t have retitled it \u201cMy Grief.\u201d That would have been a clearer signpost. But that choice would also trust the reader less, bully them more. Poems oughtn\u2019t bully.<\/p>\n

Leaving something inexplicit or unsaid in a poem risks misunderstanding. What a reader does with invisible ink is his or her mirror, revealing that reader\u2019s mind, predispositions, and heart. \u201cMy Silence\u201d is an extreme case. But a poem that tells everything, instructs completely, would be also unbearably plodding. Poems exist to hold what cannot be said in more ordinary speech. Poems remove the insult from the old cowboy saying: they are five pound sacks holding ten pounds of rice.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m more and more wanting to trust the reader to hear, to understand, the unsaid thing. Japanese haiku, read rightly, are built on that foundation of tact and trust and active collaboration. Good poems may always be math problems that end with the equal sign, leaving their conclusions to enact themselves inside us. The actualities of our lives are immense beyond naming. Yet we somehow raise them, honorably, with small hands and inked words. The idea of humility has become increasingly central to my sense of a correct navigation of our current age. To think the unsayable can be said would be hubris. Yet something, somehow, manages to be said, into the brutalities and the largenesses of existence.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

An old question, but one that still burns, at least for lyric poets, is, What is it that walks on four legs at morning, two at midday, three at evening?<\/p>\n

HIRSHFIELD<\/p>\n

Ah, when we know what it is to be human, when we become able admit to ourselves our own frailties and dependence, perhaps then we will start acting and speaking in ways more fully humane.
\nIt feels almost irremediably late for such a hope. But as the close of one of the Little Soul poems proposes\u2014so long as a person is alive, even now, it is early.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ilya Kaminsky is the author of\u00a0<\/em>Deaf Republic\u00a0(Graywolf Press) and\u00a0<\/em>Dancing In Odessa\u00a0(Tupelo Press). His awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writer\u2019s Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters\u2019 Metcalf Award, Lannan Foundation\u2019s Fellowship, and the NEA Fellowship. His poems regularly appear in Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Read his poem \u201cFrom \u2018Last Will and Testament\u2019\u201d<\/a>\u00a0in our Winter 2018 issue.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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