POET

Jane Hirshfield (1953 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Award-winning poet and translator Jane Hirshfield is the author of several collections of verse, many of which are influenced by her Zen Buddhist practice and her knowledge of classical Japanese verse. In addition to her own published collections, which include Of Gravity & Angels and The Lives of the Heart, Hirshfield has translated works by early women poets in The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan and in Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women. The Eastern and Western poetry that often inspires Hirshfield are short forms with a turning point or moment of insight. "Such moments arise in Hirshfield's own poetry," asserted Common Boundary reviewer Rose Solari. "There is a wholeness, a sense of completeness in her work."

Hirshfield published her first poem in 1973, shortly after graduating from Princeton University as part of that institution's first graduating class to include women. She then put aside her writing for nearly eight years to study at the San Francisco Zen Center. "I felt that I'd never make much of a poet if I didn't know more than I knew at that time about what it means to be a human being," the poet told Solari. "I don't think poetry is based just on poetry; it is based on a thoroughly lived life. And so I couldn't just decide I was going to write no matter what; I first had to find out what it means to live." While Hirshfield does not use Zen terminology in her verse, she once told Contemporary Authors that "it is my hope that the experience of that practice underlies and informs it as a whole. My feeling is that the paths of poetry and of meditation are closely linked—one is an attentiveness and awareness that exists in language, the other an attentiveness and awareness that exists in silence, but each is a way to attempt to penetrate experience thoroughly, to its core."

After completing her studies in Zen in the early 1980s, Hirshfield began to write and teach, earning numerous grants and awards throughout the remainder of the decade. Her work has been inspired by a series of new influences, in both the Eastern and Western traditions: "Greek and Roman lyrics, the English sonnet, those foundation stones of American poetry Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, 'modern' poets from T. S. Eliot to Anna Akhmatova to C. P. Cavafy to Pablo Neruda—all have added something to my knowledge of what is possible in poetry," Hirshfield explained to Contemporary Authors. Equally influential have been classical Chinese poets Tu Fu, Li Po, Wang Wei, and Han Shan; classical Japanese Heian-Era poets Komachi and Shikibu; and such lesser known traditions as Eskimo and Nahuatl poetry.

The poems that comprise Hirshfield's collection Of Gravity & Angels most often depict nature. "The beauty and reassurance of the natural world constantly infuses Hirshfield's work with freshness," remarked Frances Mayes in the San Jose Mercury News. In Contemporary Women Poets, essayist Allen Hoey also commented on the influence of poet James Wright on Hirshfield's work, particularly the poem "After Work." Several other critics remarked on the theme of transcendence in Hirshfield's verse. "Lyrical, attentive to color and light, precise in focus and in naming, this godless but holy book sanctifies the homely and the here-and-now," pronounced poet Emily Leider in the San Francisco Chronicle. "Concrete and wedded to the tactile world, the poems give off an other-worldly beauty and resonance." Mayes commented: "Hirshfield is a strong new talent. Her sensibility is lyric, and her intellect is as sharp as any ax in her toolshed."

In 1987 Hirshfield began collecting sacred verse by women after the poet and translator Stephen Mitchell asked for her help in compiling his anthology of sacred verse. "I had a feeling that women had always written about these things and that it was just a matter of finding them," she explained to Joan Smith of the San Francisco Examiner. "It was like a treasure hunt." The result of Hirshfield's research appeared in 1994 as Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, a collection that spans the centuries from 2300 B.C. to the early 1900s and includes the work of seventy poets from many cultures, spiritual traditions, and social classes. "The Ink Dark Moon and Women in Praise of the Sacred were each done in the effort to make more widely known the work of historical women poets whose words I found both memorable and moving, able to enlarge our understanding of what it is to be human," Hirshfield explained to Contemporary Authors. "They were also done to help counteract the lingering myth that there were no historical women writers of significance."

The poetry collection The October Palace is, in the words of its creator, "about awareness, about waking up to the substance and sensuousness and depths and wideness of our existence." Encompassing an even more vast expanse of references than her previous collections—from Zen monks to modernist painters—Hirshfield's "knowledge never seems donned like a valedictory robe, . . . but [instead] serves to illuminate recesses of thought," according to Hoey. "I chose the word October because for me it means transience," Hirshfield told San Francisco Review of Books critic Pam Houston. "I think the hardest thing people have to deal with in their lives is that everything changes." The poet viewed The October Palace as a response to the pressures of everyday life. "You can either fall into total grief or total joy—you never know which way it is going to go. The effort of this book is to accept the terms of the world, but it's not easy; it's never easy." Summing up The October Palace, Houston wrote, "[Hirshfield's] poems are honest and beautiful, sensuous and clean, as full of passion as they are full of grace, as risky as they are wise."

In addition to her verse publications, Hirshfield also wrote Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, a collection of prose pieces. Based on her lectures before writing conferences or adapted from essays published in literary journals, Hirshfield's essays touch upon such subjects as originality, the nature of metaphoric mind, translation, and the psychological shadow. Praised by Booklist contributor Donna Seaman as an "enlightening volume [that] does exactly what Hirshfield hoped it would: it intensifies our response to poetry, hence to life." The nine essays cite numerous examples from familiar works written in English, as well as from Japanese works in translation (Hirshfield does not read Japanese). "With her feet firmly planted in both the Western and Eastern canons, Hirshfield delivers a thorough and timely collection on our relationships to poetry, our relationship to the world, and everything in between," maintained a Publishers Weekly reviewer in praise of Nine Gates.

Hirshfield once told Contemporary Authors: "My primary interest has always been the attempt to understand and deepen experience by bringing it into words. Poetry, for me, is an instrument of investigation and a mode of perception, a way of knowing and feeling both self and world. In one sense, then, I write for myself; but poetry is also a mode of being in which subjective and objective can approach and become each other—in the lyric poem, choices of outer description inevitably reveal inner being, while the most seemingly subjective expression touches the universal experiences of passion, grief, love, loss and the subtler experiences of both daily life and what, for lack of any better term, I will call metaphysical inquiry. The speaking voice of a poem during its composition is intensely private, but the finished work is nonetheless a way of bringing the fruit of my innermost thinking to others. I am interested in poems that find a clarity without simplicity; in a way of thinking and speaking that does not exclude complexity but also does not obscure; in poems that know the world in many ways at once—heart, mind, voice, and body."

CAREER

Freelance editor, 1983—, and translator. University of San Francisco, lecturer in creative writing, 1991-98; University of California—Berkeley, visiting associate professor, 1995; University of Cincinnati, Elliston Visiting Poetry Professor, 2000; faculty member of numerous writers conferences and in-school programs, including California Poets in the Schools, 1979-85, Squaw Valley Art of the Wild Writers Conference, 1992—, Bennington College M.F.A. writing seminars, 1999—, and Port Townsend and Napa Valley Writers Conferences. Djerassi Resident Artists Program, board director; member of Marin Arts Council and Marin Poetry Center.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY

• Alaya, Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Series (Princeton, NJ), 1982.
• Of Gravity & Angels, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1988.
• The October Palace, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1994.
• The Lives of the Heart, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1997.
• Given Sugar, Given Salt, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2001.
• After, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2006.

Work represented in anthologies, including What Will Suffice: Contemporary American Poets on the Art of Poetry, Gibbs-Smith, 1997; Poetry: An Introduction, Bedford Books, 1997; Wild Song: Poems of the Natural World, University of Georgia Press, 1998; Best American Poems, Scribner (New York, NY), 1999 and 2001; and The Pushcart Prize XXVI: Best of the Small Presses, Pushcart Press, 2001. Contributor to periodicals, including American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Five Points, New Republic, Georgia Review, Nation, New Yorker, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Whole Earth Review.

OTHER

• (Editor and translator, with Mariko Aratani) The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan, Scribner (New York, NY), 1988, expanded edition, Random House (New York, NY), 1990.
• (Editor and translator) Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1994.
• Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1997.

FURTHER READINGS

BOOKS

• Contemporary Women Poets, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1997.

PERIODICALS

• American Poetry Review, July-August, 1988, p. 39.
• Antioch Review, winter, 1995, pp. 121-122.
• Artists Dialogue, October-November, 1994, pp. 2, 4.
• Bloomsbury Review, July-August, 2001, interview by Leza Lowitz, pp. 9-10.
• Booklist, September 1, 1997, Donna Seaman, review of The Lives of the Heart and Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry.
• Common Boundary, March, 1994, article by Rose Solari, pp. 33-34, 39.
• Hungry Mind Review, winter, 1994, p. 54; winter, 1997-98.
• Library Journal, October 1, 1997, p. 86; February 15, 2001, review of Given Sugar, Given Salt.
• New Mexican, April 15, 2001, Miriam Sagan, review of Given Sugar, Given Salt, p. F2.
• New York Times Book Review, July 3, 1994, Carol Muske, review of Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women and The October Palace, p. 19.
• O, March, 2001, Pam Houston, review of Given Sugar, Given Salt, p. 155.
• Ploughshares, spring, 1998, Peter Harris, "About Jane Hirshfield," pp. 119-205.
• Publishers Weekly, August 11, 1997, review of Nine Gates, p. 394.
• Ruminator Review, spring, 2001, Thomas R. Smith, review of Given Sugar, Given Salt, p. 49.
• San Diego Reader, February 15, 2001, Judith Moore, review of Given Sugar, Given Salt, pp. 64-67.
• San Francisco Chronicle, May 8, 1988, Emily Leider, review of Of Gravity & Angels; April 29, 2001, Carmella Cíuraru, review of Given Sugar, Given Salt.
• San Francisco Examiner, May 4, 1994, article by Joan Smith, pp. C1, C4.
• San Francisco Review of Books, April-May, 1994, Pam Houston, review of The October Palace, pp. 18-20.
• San Jose Mercury News, January 22, 1989, Frances Mayes, review of Of Gravity & Angels; June 25, 1994.
• Village Voice, August 26, 1997, Barbara O'Dair, review of Nine Gates, p. 60.
• Yale Review, April, 1995, pp. 147-152.