By Yongbo Ma

Yongbo Ma: What first inspired you to write poetry? What stages have your poetry gone through? What are the main poetic philosophies or ideas driving each of these stages?

Jane Hirshfield: As soon as I learned how to write, I set down on a big sheet of paper in carefully drawn, big letters: “I want to be a writer when I grow up.” I would not have remembered this, myself, but my mother kept it, and presented it to me when my first book came out. I do recall that the first book I bought on my own, at age eight, was a book of Japanese haiku translated into English. I still own it. I was a child of New York City, growing up in a twelfth-floor apartment of a red-brick housing project. What I understood in those brief poems at that age, I can’t now say—but I think I recognized two things that I recognized were missing from my life, and that called me. One, the natural world, a cosmos not entirely shaped by human hands and minds. The other, the knowledge that there were meanings under meanings, that words could mean both what they say and also talk, in hidden ways, about other subjects, other feelings. It was as if a gate to a different way of being human was opened. I have been walking through that gate ever since.

For the rest of this question, I must stay silent. Poems emerge for me from a collaboration of the conscious and unconscious mind, from every part of experience and psyche—the intuitive and emotional as much as the intellectual and comprehended. They emerge from mystery and travel, through words, toward meanings beyond what words can hold. Otherwise, we would not need poems. What can be spelled out can be done in prose.

I will say that someone else might speculate about these matters in my poems—philosophies, ideas about poetry—and they might be right, they might be half-right, they might be quite wrong. My poems reflect the life I have lived, the thoughts and the ideas I have had. These things must change and ripen over a lifetime. One hopes the ripening has been toward increase of sustenance, as a fruit grows fragrant and more rounded with time. But I try to preserve my own poems’ working from the analytic speculation I might bring to teaching someone else’s poems. If I knew what I do as a poet, I might not do something different, something new. And each poem I write is an attempt toward some new, changed relationship to existence, event, understanding.

Ma: Do your poems have postmodern elements?

Hirshfield: Again, I will say—they must. I am a product of my own time and all of its ranges of thought and writing. But that is not a foreground aspect for me. I know that some of my poems have been influenced by ways of writing I don’t seem much to embrace. Influenced in ways more or less subtle, more or less under the surface. But it isn’t my place to point to them.

In a more general sense than the specifically “postmodern” signals in some contemporary poetry, visible at once in certain poets’ work, my poems are very much of this time. They trust the reader to have learned how to read what they do, to follow how they move. They would be difficult to parse, peculiar, and probably ugly to a reader of the 19^th century. Such a reader would not hear some of my poems’ tones, would not look for their under-the-surface meanings. But that is always the way with art, as it changes in textures, techniques, and subjects. It isn’t specific to my own work, some of which, I would hope, would be (in translation) understandable to a person living in earlier millennia, let alone centuries, just as some poems written twenty-five hundred years ago carry this moment’s presence, beauty, and meaning for me.

Ma: Do you belong to a particular school of contemporary American poetry; and if not, do you have your own distinct poetic philosophy?

Hirshfield: I am profoundly hybrid as a poet. All poets are, I believe, regardless of their sometimes-embrace of a philosophy or label. I would never choose to align myself even with “American” poetry, let alone any particular school of it. I have been influenced by the poets of the world, from the deep past to this week. What some writers who live elsewhere have described to me as the “American” school of poetry, I, who live in America, experience, and describe, as the “international” school of poetry. Whitman was influenced by the cadence of the King James Bible; his free verse has its roots in the Hebrew long lines of the psalms in translation. The Imagists drew from the poetic traditions of China and Japan. The fragments of Sappho and the Czech immunologist Miroslav Holub and Su Tung Po are among my influences. I am American, of the now-21^st century. I live in California, I am a woman, I am a person who has practiced Zen meditation for fifty years. But the deep aquifer of poetry that comes into this person, this life, runs under every continent, drinks from every mountain, in ways that cannot be tracked or bounded except perhaps by a list of specific poems and poets too long to name.

My single philosophy of poetry—that a good poem, whether written or read, leaves a person changed. The world and the person, the eyes and the ears, will be different once that poem has come into them. Poems foment revolutions of being and understanding. These revolutions may be large, or very small, but a life with poems is like walking out in a mist so fine you may scarcely feel it, but after a while, you find you are soaked to the skin. And around your feet, new grasses put out their new green shoots.

You may draw from that the conclusion that I am interested in poems’ effects on our lives, not their surface aesthetic qualities. Those qualities do matter. They are essential. Still, there are many strategies of writing, many directions of seeing. Any of them, done well enough, will fulfill poetry’s task: to hold and make available over time, space, language, cultures, some trace element of human possibility, experience, and transformation.

Ma: As a woman, is your poetry related to feminism? How does your female identity manifest in your poetry, and can you provide specific examples from your poems?

Hirshfield: As a person, I was a feminist before I knew the word. It never occurred to me that I could not do anything any other person might wish to. I never received the message that it wasn’t allowed. I simply followed the heart, mind, life, and body I found myself within, putting one foot down then the other. I have wanted to be a human poet. I don’t have to worry about whether the particulars of my own human life are present—it is inevitable that they will be. And many things are present in a person’s poems that are not being directly looked at. My assumption that I can, as a poet, look at anything that feels worth engaging—that is in itself a feminist assumption. But one that only matters to a person for whom such a thought would even occur.

Over my lifetime, there have been evolving stages of feminism. The one I came of age into, I would call “equality feminism.” Equal pay, equal opportunity, equal respect, equal dignity. Later, the ideas of “difference feminism” came into view, proposing that women’s language, for instance, is—and should be—different from men’s. I will say that I am an equality feminist, and not a difference feminist. There are so many different ways to be a human being, I cannot divide them up into male and female. That is too close to stereotyping, ignores the realities of individual variation, and I find it more likely to be limiting than useful. I also object to some “difference feminism” hypotheses. To say that linear, straightforward speech was invented by men and is somehow “dominating” feels to me absurd. Logical and non-logical ways of understanding the world are available to anyone.

Still, I can give you one example of a feminist decision I’ve made as a poet. First some background that perhaps everyone knows. In English, you must almost always ground poems in some grammatical voice, and also give the third person pronoun for humans a gender—he, she. When I was growing up, the convention was that “he” was the universal pronoun. If you meant “a person, whether male or female,” you said “he.” But by the middle of my life, a certain unease had arisen about that. People looked for a pronoun that might mean both. Currently, it is still undecided. It looked for a while as if we might have been arriving at “they,” but now that word is being used to refer especially to people who are choosing to be gender-fluid rather than identify as a man or a woman, a boy or a girl.

Here is my example of that forced choice of pronoun becoming a dilemma. In 1996, I wrote a poem called “The Poet.” It imagines a person writing in a place where their work might never have a chance to become known—not to be published, certainly not to be translated. Perhaps this writer is barely able to set words down on paper at all. My poem’s premise: that such unseen poems are important, necessary, world-changing. My poem wants to acknowledge the importance of all that is written, even in circumstances that may erase it from further knowing.

When I first wrote the poem, I used the “universal” he. But it troubled me, that I—a feminist, a woman poet, myself, who had edited an anthology bringing forward the voices of historical women poets from the world’s many spiritual traditions—Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women)—would say of this imagined poet, “he.” And so I changed it, and the poem now begins: “She is working now, in a room /  not unlike this one, / the one where I write, or you read.”

I would still like to have a pronoun that didn’t say either male or female. But I must write with the language my time has given me.

Ma: As a Zen practitioner, please discuss the relationship between faith and poetry. How does this relationship manifest in your poetry?

Hirshfield: I have never wanted to wear any label—including the label of “Zen poet.” I have practiced Zen for fifty years now. I spent eight years in formal training, three of them at a monastery deep in the wilderness. This is part of who I am, part of how I see and feel. But I have fewer explicit references to Buddhism in my poetry than some American poets who have probably never sat on a meditation cushion. There is the famous opening of the Tao Te Ching—in English translation: “The Way that can be ‘Wayed’ is not the Way.” The same is true of Zen. If you put it in some box, it is no longer Zen. The teachings of Zen and of Buddhism are open to any human being, who looks with clear eyes at our human condition. Beings suffer. There are ways to increase that, and ways to lessen it. There are ways to act, see, and feel more largely with more compassion. Zen practice offers one set of ideas and, more importantly, actions, conditions of body, mind, and attention, that are useful in exploring what is possible in a different understanding of our lives. But so does the practice of poetry. So does the practice of being part of a family. I once said—and it has been much repeated, even carved into at least two public-art sculptures—that all Buddhism could be found in seven words: “Everything changes. Everything is connected. Pay attention.” I later realized only the last two are needed. If you pay attention, with clear eyes and clear heart, you will see that everything changes, you will see that none of us is separable from all beings and things. And you will behave and speak differently when living inside these kinds of awareness.

Ma: Are you familiar with classical Chinese poetry, and how has it influenced you?

Hirshfield: I have loved Chinese classical poetry since I first read it, when I was perhaps fourteen. It has influenced me more profoundly than I can describe. For one thing, it was how I discovered that Buddhism and Zen existed. But it is also how I discovered a way of poem-making—the way that images can hold meaning, and the way that statements with parallel structures can awaken a powerful music and deepened understanding. I still own some of the anthologies of Chinese poetry I’ve carried with me for over fifty years. Poems that I put a little pencil dot next to when I was sixteen are still very often the ones I continue to be most drawn toward. I love these poems now as a human being whose life has been shaped and changed by my having read them. They have broadened my understanding of what a human being can know, feel, see. And so, yes: classical Chinese poems are in my bone marrow, as person, as writer.