Spiral-bound mornings:Jane Hirschfield

Today is the birthday of Jane Hirshfield (books by this author), born in New York City (1953). She started writing poems as soon as she could write, and she bought her first book of poetry — a one-dollar book of Japanese haiku — when she was eight. “I don’t know what drew me so strongly to those poems,” she said, “or what I could have seen in them at that age, but I recognized something that I absolutely knew I had to have in my life.” At Princeton, where she was a member of the first graduating class to include women, she began studying classical-era Japanese and Chinese literature. She published her first poem in 1973, and her first book of poems, Alaya, in 1982. Her other poetry collections include The Beauty (2015); After (2006); and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001).

She was born to Jewish parents who weren’t particularly observant; she received no religious education, but they did hold a Passover Seder each year. She enjoyed customs like the bitter herbs and the salted hard-boiled egg, but never really felt that the Jewish tradition belonged to her and vice versa. At one point, when she was very small, she wished her family were Catholic so that she could be a nun when she grew up. Now she is an ordained lay practitioner of Zen Buddhism. “I came to California in 1974,” she said, “in a red Dodge van with yellow tied-dyed curtains, looking for a place to live and for what I thought might be a waitressing job that could support me while I wrote. But on the way, I took a detour. I was curious about Zen and knew there was a monastery, Tassajara, in the Ventana Wilderness inland from Big Sur. Because it was the summer guest season rather than the stricter winter practice period time, I was able to drive in over the rather perilous 14-mile dirt road and stay for a week as a ‘guest student.’ […] I decided to stay a few months, until I understood what Buddhism was all about. After a few months, what you understand is that you know nothing about what Buddhism is all about. […] I think of this time as the diamond at the center of my life. Whoever I now am came out of that experience.” She practiced Zen Buddhism full time for eight years, and wrote only one haiku during that period. When she left the monastery, she returned to poetry. “The ability to stay in the moment, to investigate it through my own body and mind, was what I most needed to learn at that point in my life,” she says. “To stay within my own experience more fearlessly. I think that’s why I needed to practice Zen, rather than go to graduate school. You cannot write until you know how to inhabit your own experience.”

In addition to her eight books of poetry, Hirshfield has also published two collections of essays. Her first was Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997). She wrote the essays over a span of 10 years. Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World came out in 2015. She’s translated a volume of Japanese poetry (The Ink Dark Moon, 1990), and has assembled an anthology of women’s spiritual writing (Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, 1994).