Interview: Jane Hirshfield
Acclaimed poet and writer Jane Hirshfield is visiting Hawai'i this week for the Kauai Writers' Conference. Through the Engaging the Senses Foundation (ETSF), she will give a presentation titled, “A Larger Yes: Poetry as a Vessel of Discovery, Mindfulness, Expansion, and Engagement,” Saturday, November 9, 2019 at the Kaua‘i Marriott Resort Hotel. The event includes a lunch and reading. Register in advance at www.kauaiwritersconference.com.
Jane spoke with MIA co-organizer Spencer Kealamakia over the phone about poetry and place, from one coast to another.
Reading Jane Hirshfield’s poetry is like being cast out into the wild dark alone, fearful, if not for a “stubborn faith” in the few reassurances life gives: the ground beneath, the ground before, “ . . . in rotting / that ripens into soil” (from “November, Remembering Voltaire,” in Of Gravity & Angels, Wesleyan University Press, 1988). As a fresh college grad from the Northeast, Hirshfield craved something away from the East Coast. “I set out in a red Dodge van—not the archetypal Volkswagen bus—a red Dodge van that I lived in while I drove around and looked for where I was going to land.” Wandering took her down unlocked US Forest Service roads and led her to creeks clean enough to drink from without filtration. In 1974, six months after setting out, Hirshfield landed in California. Though she’d grown up in New York City, she felt a stronger connection to the natural world than city life. — SK.
ON Island Life
“The question basically asks does urban culture disguise certain geological realities, and it wouldn’t have to. With greater awareness—I mean the terrific Oliver Sacks was swimming around Manhattan. He knew it was an island. But when I was a child I knew there was an East River and a Hudson River, and a Statue of Liberty down at one end and bridges one drove over, but I don’t think I had all of the conception, which I now understand, so much more deeply.”
On Letting Go
“It is part of poetry’s role to allow the heard and felt and investigated—exactly the things that words can magnetize but not hold—and to not only acknowledge that but to like it. [There’s a] part of the psyche that wants control of everything but that’s just pure delusion. Much better to learn to be really happy with what is beyond control.”
ON Wave Riding
“I’ve never done it but I imagine that is part of the joy of surfing—you are collaborating with what you cannot hold. Surfing is a really good analogy in that you have control of your own response to something which you are deliberately engaging that is immensely larger and more powerful than you are, and that’s the reality of our lives.
“In writing a poem, in surfing, in mountain climbing—when you engage with something larger than yourself (and I’m going to go way out on a limb and say the same can be true of spiritual life)—this is one of the human experiences that feels the most central, and the most deeply true to our task of these seconds and minutes and hours we’ve been given. How can we spend them in ways that are rich and not trivial?”
On Hawai‘i Poets
”It’s been made clear to me that Hawai‘i has an absolutely thriving community of poets. I might not know the details, but I’ve already glimpsed the shape of it. It’s wonderful.”
Mahalo to Jane Hirshfield and the Engaging the Senses Foundation (ETSF) for coordinating this discussion and connecting writing communities across the Pacific.