Jane Hirshfield

Poetry as contemplative practice

I heard her voice in the morning – a slow and confident wisdom. A guest on Tara Brach’s podcast.

“This person truly gets it!” I kept muttering to myself. Amidst traffic, stoplights, concrete, I found this voice of clarity on my commute to brighten my day.

Rewind. Re-listen.

You can feel it in the space between her words: the laughter, the openness, the acceptance. The depth of her metaphors an exploding palette of imagery and feelings.

Her name is Jane Hirshfield. She is a Soto Zen practitioner and highly lauded poet, but I’d never heard of her before that morning. She combines her zen practice with poetry, viewing each as complementary to the other. As Hirshfield describes in the podcast with Tara Brach:

“All of this for me has been: left foot practice, right foot poetry.”

I ordered some of her poems and essays. I started watching her videos and her talks. So full of wisdom!

Within what I’ve explored, there are two types of poems Hirshfield writes that I wanted to share: Assays and Pebbles.

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ASSAYS

Assays are meditations on a word, theme or idea. Part essay, part poem, part deconstruction.

Here is an example from Hirshfield’s book, The Asking:

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“Of”: An Assay

Its chain link can be delicate or massive. In the human realm, directional: though one thing also connects to another through “and,” this is not the same. Consider: “Science and elephants.” “The science of elephants.” “The elephants of science.” In nature, however, the preposition is bidirectional and equal. The tree that possesses the roots is not different from the root-possessed tree. The flashing red of the hummingbird’s crest is the bird; the crust of a bread loaf, the loaf. The interior nonexistent without the external, each part coequal. And so grief too becomes meaningless in that fortunate world.

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Hirshfield talks about Assays in an interview:

Assays began with a poem written after I’d reread Edgar Allan Poe’s stories while writing an essay on how hiddenness works in poems. Some of the qualities of essay exploration and prose step lingered in its music and mode of thinking. At the time, I was regularly seeing the journal Science. On the back would often be advertisements for half-million-dollar machines for performing assays. That word—close to essay and sharing its root in the idea of an attempt, a try—refers to discovering a thing’s nature by breaking it into its elemental parts. The poem became “Poe: An Assay.” That approach to writing, of testing a subject for its discoverable parts, imaginative and factual, caught. I began writing others. “Judgment: An Assay.” “Tears: An Assay.” “And: An Assay.” In Ledger, the one labeled assay is about capital, money. But other poems in the book also use the assay mode and strategy. They just don’t carry the label.

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PEBBLES

“Pebbles” are small clouds of inspiration. They’re almost haikus but with an open structure.

Here is “[Five Pebbles]” also from The Asking:

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     Here & Now

try to describe it

even one quick line
drawn with unlifted pencil

already wrong


     Words Stop

Words stop.
A great tenderness rises.

Why do I set this down now in words?


     My Failure

I said of the view: “Just some trees.”


     Chrysanthemum

it doesn't need to know          its own fragrance


     Vestment
for the pear, for the fig,
no difference

they ripen

even in ashfall

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Hirshfield talks more about Pebbles in the same interview:

The pebbles are very brief poems with a certain flavor. They are individual poems written independently. I run them as series in the books because it feels rude to the trees to have so many pages of paper with so little ink on each. The pebbles, I’ll add, are not haiku and not aphorisms. They are much more hybrid. They do draw from Asian poetry’s concision and compression, but are more discursive. They draw also from Novalis, from a few pieces in Pound’s Personae, from fragments of poems from ancient Greece and early poems from Sumer and India, Turkey, and Mesoamerica. They draw from a handful of very short poems by Brecht I find irresistibly precise.

A pebble holds its rock recalcitrance lightly, portably. The pebble poems try to do large work in the smallest possible container. In their feel of doing investigative work, they are the assay form’s bookend. Both forms, when they became conscious, expanded my vocabulary of poetic exploration. Neither, I’ll add, is a radical invention. The poetic form of “a meditation on” is close in spirit to the assays. Brief poems go back to the earliest writings we have. These modes are forms for me the way the sonata form or etude function in music—they invite a particular kind of experience. They’ve become a self-propagating invitation of possibility. And yes, of course, the poems in these modes do connect across books, making their own discrete libraries of registration.

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Inspired by Hirshfield, I’ve also put pen on paper. Moving into “poetry mind” I started to dabble in imagery, spending a few minutes writing poems at the end of the day. I’ve found it requires me to shift into right-brain mode, and like painting and drawing, I need to soften my eyes and open the senses.

I used to refer to Alain de Botton/Ruskin’s term “word painting” to describe something like this act, but I realize it was just a start. Writing poetry - for your self, to help you relate to your world - is self-expanding.

Hirschfield writes in her book Ten Windows: How Great Poems Change the World:

[…] The writing of poems must be counted as much as a contemplative practice as a communicative one, and in the contemplative byways of every tradition, a reshaped intention is the ground of change. [...]

[…] Poetry’s addition to our lives takes place in the border realm where inner and outer, actual and possible, experienced and imaginable, heard and silent, meet. The gift of poetry is that its seeing is not our usual seeing, its hearing is not our usual hearing, its knowing is not our usual knowing, its will is not our usual will. In a poem, everything travels both inward and outward.

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If you want to learn more about Hirshfield, I recommend starting your path with the podcast that kindled this post or with some of her poems online. Her writing and talks are a gift.

🙏

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Del Mar, California, 2023