Poet embraces the silence

Most of us remember our childhoods. Some of us can even call our very first memories with precise imagery.

Jane Hirshfield certainly can. And the way she relates it fits her profile as an award-winning poet.

“I remember,” she says, “lying on my back in a grassy field, a blackberry hedge behind my head, blue sky above me and the taste of blackberries in my mouth.”

Here’s the thing: Hirshfield was born and raised in New York City, specifically on the Lower East Side of Manhattan – not exactly the kind of environment in which you’d expect to find grassy fields and blackberry hedges.

Hirshfield, who visits Gonzaga University on Tuesday as part of a new reading series, isn’t lying. She isn’t even using so-called poetic license.

What she’s recalling is an afternoon’s visit to the countryside and an immediate connection to a life she recognized as inherently hers.

“I just have a feeling that something in me went, ‘This is how it was supposed to be,’ ” Hirshfield says, “and I couldn’t wait to get back to it.”

She got there. After graduating from high school, being part of the first class at Princeton University to graduate women and spending time at the San Francisco Zen Center, Hirshfield settled down to a career of writing and teaching in a setting far from Manhattan.

A practicing Buddhist, she lives in Mill Valley, Calif., a bucolic community north of San Francisco that gives Hirshfield what she most needs: quiet.

“I want silence the way a sponge wants water,” she says. “And even though I grew up in New York, when I go back and visit my mother … it’s just incredibly hard on my system to be with that level of noise.”

It’s in quiet that Hirshfield has written such poetry collections as “Alaya,” “The October Palace,” “The Lives of the Heart,” “Given Sugar, Given Salt” (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award) and, most recently, “After: Poems” (HarperCollins, 112 pages, $23.95).

Her work tends to attract glowing critical commentary.

“By paring down the moment to its essential elements and allowing ephemeral thoughts to be anchored within the tangible things of the world, Hirshfield comes up with poems that brilliantly portray even mundane experiences as if they were nothing short of revelation,” wrote a reviewer for the Washington Post.

“We are very excited that Jane Hirshfield is coming to Gonzaga to initiate the university’s visiting readers program,” says GU English professor and fellow poet Tod Marshall. “She is, simply, one of the most distinguished poets in the country.”

To Marshall, one of the reasons why Hirshfield’s work is so powerful “is that it achieves what I might call a certain tranquility – a clear and open responsiveness to the world – while also offering an honest recounting of the tumultuous emotions with which we all struggle.”

Ask Hirshfield and she’ll tell you she doesn’t know where her poems come from. In fact, she says, “I never know what I’m writing about when I start a poem.”

Case in point: Her poem “Justice Without Passion” captures the emotions that struck her during the fractious hearings involving Robert Bork’s 1987 nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Yet the genesis of the poem began one afternoon when, while trying to work, her concentration was broken by a neighborhood child practicing scales on the piano.

“All I knew was that I couldn”t ignore the sound of this kid going plinka-plinka-plink,” Hirshfield says. “So I started to describe it.”

What emerged, she says, was the melding of “the annoyance of my wonderful silence being broken and the deep pain it caused me that our country had come to a place where suddenly things that I had grown up thinking we stood for as a culture and as a country were not being valued.”