Award-winning poet, essayist, and translator Jane Hirshfield is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Ledger, The Beauty (long-listed for the National Book Award), Come, Thief, and Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. Her two extraordinary collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World are must-reads for anyone seeking to understand why poetry is a staple of the human spirit. A member of the first full class at Princeton to include women, Hirshfield received lay ordination in Soto Zen in 1979.
Working at the intersection of poetry, the sciences, and the crisis of the biosphere, she has been poet-in-residence at both the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon and a neuroscience research program at the University of California, San Francisco. Her many honors include awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Academy Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets.
I connected with Hirshfield on Zoom shortly after the publication of her monumental new book, The Asking: New and Selected Poems, and inquired into her thoughts on hope — particularly in times of trouble — and the notion that “beauty will save the world,” as Dostoevsky once claimed.
Mark Matousek: A student recently told me that hope seems beyond her grasp, while hopefulness is possible. How do you feel about that distinction?
Jane Hirshfield: Every morning when I awaken, the first thing that comes to mind is an Australian expression of happiness, You beauty. No matter what the day holds, no matter its current events or my personal travails, I open my eyes to the moment of recognition that there is always beauty to be found. Then let all of the griefs pour in because I want to be permeable to everything. To remember for even one fraction of a second that beauty is possible, I think that brings an attitude of hopefulness to the world.
MM: Ralph Waldo Emerson was adamant about this. “Don’t waste yourself in rejection nor bark against the bad but chant the beauty of the good.”
JH: Largeness of soul gives one a certain fearlessness. When we recognize the interconnection of the fabric of existence, our own griefs and sorrows become another color in the tapestry. When we recognize that what happens to anyone happens to all of us, the heart becomes tender and unbarricaded. It becomes the ally of existence. Flashes of anger or despair tell you a great deal about your relationship to the world, but that doesn’t mean you let them reify or become cages of hatred.
If you narrow your view to your own deep sense of right and wrong, you lose the range of possibility. All the mystics have known this, just as in Buddhism, we talk about dwelling in both the absolute and the relative. But having an occasional glimpse of the large does not release me from my obligation to make life better for all beings.
MM: In one of your poems, you write, “hope is the hardest love we carry.” Could you share that poem with us?
JH: I’d love to. It’s called “Hope and Love.”
All winterAll winter
the blue heron
slept among the horses.
I do not know
the custom of herons,
do not know
if the solitary habit
is their way,
or if he listened for
some missing one—
not knowing even
that was what he did—
in the blowing
sounds in the dark.
I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry.
He slept
with his long neck
folded, like a letter
put away.
MM: Beautiful. Why is hope the hardest love that we carry?
JH: To hope is to stay vulnerable. Sometimes love showers itself on us, and sometimes love leaves us battered. To hope is to turn the antennae of your existence towards connection to other people. While this poem was written in the context of Eros and relationship, I think it speaks to people in different contexts. For us to hope right now for the world, particularly in its zones of conflict, that’s a hard love to carry.
MM: Do you think that pessimism is a failure of the imagination?
JH: I do, and I’m quite prone to it. My family’s basic tenor was pessimism. That’s the tone I was raised into. Maybe they had some reason to be pessimistic about the state of the world, but pessimism precludes possibility.
MM: William James said that humans aren’t made for hopelessness, that the “iron bands pinch too hard,” and the anguish of despair becomes too much.
JH: I read a story about refugee children in Sweden who simply gave up and went to bed. You cannot blame those children who gave up in surrender when so much was asked of them. But for most of us, it is possible to work with our lives a little. Finding resilience is one of the great tasks of a human life. I find it through writing poems. Since childhood, this has enabled me to enter the dark experiences, the confusion and bewilderment of human life.
The other way I make malleable and workable the darkest moments is by turning towards what I can do. Recently, I’ve written postcards to encourage people to register to vote, to vote early, or vote for a particular person. I can do that with my time and my hand. I can buy stamps. Any shift of intention is connected to all of our fates. Because I lead something of a public life, I also speak in public to try and bring forward the feeling of compassion and connection, rather than feelings of hatred and separation.
MM: In another poem, you write, “Don’t despair of this falling world, not yet. Didn’t it give you the asking?” What do you mean by “the asking”?
JH: My best relationship to the world is one of questioning, not making big declarations or adamantly stamping my foot. Not doing what I think I know, but asking, what else? What more? What am I not seeing? What am I not hearing? What am I ignoring? I do this in my interactions with other people, but also in revision; asking it of my poems. What more shocking? What more surprising? What more peculiar? It calls into my life more possibility and also more kindness.
MM: That reminds me of David Whyte’s idea of conversational reality—the notion that everything is in conversation with everything else. Questioning is our human superpower. As long as we can keep asking questions, there’s reciprocity and connection.
JH: The inquiring mind is the mind of the creative. It allows the wisdom of the world to come in and assist us. In the Greek myth of Psyche, she has three impossible tasks if she wants to move forward in her world. The tasks can only be done with the help of other beings. When an immense room of grains needs to be sorted before dawn breaks, the ants help her. Inquiry gives portals to the ants, portals to the birds that will pick the sheep fleece off the thorny bushes and gather it for nests. We too are an ant and bird in other people’s lives in ways we might never even know about.
MM: In what ways is being a person “an untenable position,” as you’ve written?
JH: As a people, we have not been behaving well in recent years. We are continually faced with the evidence of how unkindly we treat one another and ourselves. So, beginning a poem in this way was my working through for myself the question of whether I still believe in us or not.
The poem ends in a suspended image of an open drawer and waiting work boots. Perhaps we might evolve yet into being fully human beings. The conclusion remains open. Give us more time.
MM: One final question. I love what you’ve written about resilience, and not wanting the bounce-back pliability of a pillow but rather the “sinuous tenacity of a tree, finding the light newly blocked on one side, it turns in another.” What is that difference?
JH: We all know that trees can shade each other out, but crown shyness is about adaptation. If a tree grows near the light of another tree far before it is shaded, it recognizes that the color of the light has grown greener, and it simply decides to go elsewhere. Trees don’t conquer, they cooperate and collaborate.
It’s a magnificent moral for us human beings to try to figure out. What would crown shyness look like in our lives? What would it look like if rather than fight for what seems a limited resource, we could instead, find our way toward a shared ecosystem? I believe that type of adaptation would help us move through this complicated world.