Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City in 1953, and grew up on East 20th Street. She started out in P.S. 40, went to a girls school, then Princeton, from which she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1973. After college, she worked for a year on a farm, then hopped into a red Dodge van hung with tie-dyed curtains and slowly headed west. She's lived in Northern California ever since.

Hirshfield has been a lecturer in creative writing at the University of San Francisco, and a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She serves as a member of the faculties of numerous writers conferences and in-school programs, including California Poets in the Schools, 1979-85, and the Port Townsend and Napa Valley Writers Conferences.

Her books include Of Gravity & Angels (poetry) (1988); Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (1994); The October Palace (poetry) (1994); Ink Dark Moon (Japanese translations); Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (essays); and The Lives of the Heart (poetry).

The Lives of the Heart collects poems whose subjects are as various as a horse or tenderness ("It goes out to everything equally,/circling rabbit and hawk."). These are poems that aren't puzzles; they don't demand unraveling. They speak directly. They leave behind, in Hirshfield's words about another poet, a "surplus of beauty and meaning."

Hirshfield writes in one of her essays, "Poetry and the Mind of Indirection," "Journey far enough in the terrain of language, it seems, and the heart will begin to speak." That sentence is a good guide to reading her poems.

When we talked, I asked Ms. Hirshfield if she remembered when she first fell in love with books.

"My love for books and writing must have begun with a teacher at P.S. 40, Mrs. Barlow, who taught me to read and write. I don't know what she did. Maybe she simply praised one thing I wrote, and that set my course for life. But after my first book was published, my mother surprised me by pulling from her dresser one of those large sheets of lined paper given to first and secondgraders, in which I had written, 'I want to be a writer when I grow up.'

"I loved being read to as a child. I particularly recall weeping terribly at the end of Charlotte's Web. There was a poetry anthology I loved when I was ten, a small green book with the usual selections, things like 'The Highway Man' and Walter de la Mare. The first book I bought for myself was a haiku collection in the Peter Pauper Press series, so I was drawn to Japanese poetry and ideas from the time I was nine or so. I remember, too, being fascinated by some tiny leather-bound books my parents had — all of Shakespeare or the Romantic Poets or the Bible contained in a two-inch by one-inch volume. I think the idea that such huge worlds could be held in such small containers amazed me."

Hirshfield's poems and essays return again and again to the praise of silence and attentiveness. A rock, a horse, a cup of tea, according to her, each has its lesson for the person who pays attention. I asked, "What constitutes attentiveness?" I asked, "What, for instance, do you believe, that a horse will teach the attentive person?"

"Attentiveness is the only means by which we can know the nature and qualities of our moment-by-moment existence — the entrance gate through which a person can not just 'be' his or her life, but know it, taste it, consider it, work with it as a potter works with clay. Attentiveness is what opens us into a conscious human experience, different from that of a tree or stone. And yes, I do see the development of a continually deeper and more clarified and refining attentiveness as the path through which art and craft as well as life are more fully realized. The realm of the poem is a small cosmos in which the large cosmos of our existence is also held. For me, it's something like the Heraclitean formulation, 'As above, so below' — as in life, so in poems.

"The great human joy is to lead a known life, and an interconnected life. To know what we are, within the self and in relationship to the rest of being, is to be enlarged. Poetry, and the attentiveness that comes with reading or writing it, brings that kind of knowledge to availability to me.

"And, as you suggest, this isn't a process confined to language. A garden, a horse, a relationship teach it too. If you make a mistake, or if you do well, that other half speaks back to you about it, if you're awake and listening. Weeds grow, the horse trips, and you realize that whatever else was going on, your attentiveness was too little, too scattered. Attention takes place in the world, not just the self. Horses are good for seeing this because being with a horse, you are with an animal whose entire being is involved in communication. A horse feels each shift of your weight, of even your mind, and tries to decipher the meaning, and respond to what it thinks that meaning is. You can dull that communication, or make it more sensitive, by your own awareness of what goes on between you. A horse is a good teacher in that way because it is both a creature of passion and of the moment. Horses don't lie, and they'll live out the experience they're having in immediate and visible ways. Either you're moving along as almost one creature, or you're on the ground looking at hooves galloping way, or you're somewhere in between, but with a horse, you can always know where you stand."

Copyright © by Judith Moore.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.