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Jane Hirshfield
USA
http://www.barclayagency.com/hirshfield.html
Sunday, December 09,
2001 01:00 PM
Jane Hirshfield, author of
Given Sugar, Given Salt
Appears on/at: SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY-MAIN BRANCH
San Francisco, CA
Tel: 415-673-9413
Jane Hirshfield is author of five
collections of poetry: Alaya, Of Gravity & Angels, The October Palace,
The Lives of the Heart, Given Sugar, Given Salt, and the book of
essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. Hirshfield's awards
are many and glowing: Poetry Center Book Award, Bay Area Book Award,
Commonwealth Club of CA Poetry Medal, Guggenheim and Rockefeller
fellowships. Work has appeared in Best American Poems, Pushcart Prize
Anthology, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New
Republic, and others. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and
teaches in the Bennington College's MFA Writing Seminars.
William Matthews has deemed her work as "praise of ceaseless
mutability as life's central splendor." Of her latest book of poems,
Given Sugar, Given Salt--in which
the following six featured poems appear--W. S. Merwin has said, "These
are poems of space, air, and a remarkable precision of observation and
revealed feeling."
In an Atlantic Monthly interview, Jane Hirshfield says of poetry:
(see: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/bookauth/jhirsh.htm)
"I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation,
and so I've looked at specific poems I love, and at poetry's gestures
in the broadest sense, in an effort to feel and learn what they offer
from the inside. There's a difference in how you experience an art
form when it's engaged with from within; even a little practice with
dance lets you feel a ballet inside your body rather than simply as
something observed..." Here is some of the poet's own dance with her
art: |
POEM WITH TWO ENDINGS
Say "death" and the whole room freezes--
even the couches stop moving,
even the lamps.
Like a squirrel suddenly aware it is being looked at.
Say the word continuously,
and things begin to go forward.
Your life takes on
the jerky texture of an old film strip.
Continue saying it,
hold it moment after moment inside the mouth,
it becomes another syllable.
A shopping mall swirls around the corpse of a beetle.
Death is voracious, it swallows all the living.
Life is voracious, it swallows all the dead.
neither is ever satisfied, neither is ever filled,
each swallows and swallows the world.
The grip of life is as strong as the grip of death.
(but the vanished, the vanished beloved, o where?)
POEM HOLDING ITS HEART IN ONE FIST
Each pebble in this world keeps
its own counsel.
Certain words--these, for instance--
may be keeping a pronoun hidden.
Perhaps the lover's you
or the solipsist's I.
Perhaps the philosopher's willowy it.
The concealment plainly delights.
Even a desk will gather
its clutch of secret, half-crumpled papers,
eased slowly, over years,
behind the backs of drawers.
Olives adrift in the altering brine-bath
etch onto their innermost pits
a few furrowed salts that will never be found by the tongue.
Yet even with so much withheld,
so much unspoken,
potatoes are cooked with butter and parsley,
and buttons affixed to their sweater.
Invited guests arrive, then dutifully leave.
And this poem, afterward, washes its breasts
with soap and trembling hands, disguising nothing.
INFLECTION FINALLY
UNGRASPABLE BY GRAMMAR
I haven't yet found the pronoun through which to touch it directly.
You may feel differently.
You may think you can simply reach through all the way
with your hand, like petting the shoulder of an old dog, who, when
she can no longer stand, lies on her bed, watching her kingdom
arriving and leaving, arriving and leaving, until at last
it only departs.
We want our lives and deaths to be like that--something formal, a kingdom.
Filled with the sense of the manyness of existence. As the French say
"Vous" to that which cannot yet be made familiar.
They do this less and less these days, it seems.
ALL EVENING,
EACH TIME I STARTED TO SAY IT
All evening, each time I started to say it,
something would interrupt.
It was not a thought so very large--
it could in fact have slipped through any window
cracked open a bit for air.
Yet each time I started to say it, at that table,
someone else would speak, the moment would pass.
After the fifth time this happened, I began to be amused.
Runt-of-the-litter thought, I thought, unable to get to the tit.
Then suddenly wanted to lift it up,
to feed it an eyedropper's measure of mare's milk,
some warmed sugar water, a little colostrum of badger.
It suddenly seemed to me the kind of thought,
not large, on which a life might turn.
There are many such: unheard, unspoken.
Their blind eyes open and close,
the almost audible valves of their hearts.
But all evening, each time I started to say it,
something would interrupt, the moment would pass.
SPEED AND PERFECTION
How quickly the season of apricots is over--
a single night's wind is enough.
I kneel on the ground, lifting one, then the next.
Eating those I can, before the bruises appear.
OPTIMISM
More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs--all this resinous, unretractable earth.
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We at PoetryMagazine.com extend our sympathies
to Jane Hirshfield for the recent loss of her father.
© All Copyright, Jane Hirshfield.
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