slip knots

As a teacher of poems, I’ve been investigating the deep workings of poetry for almost forty years now, both Japanese and Western. I believe in the happy accidents of cross-fertilization and that different traditions have always informed one another. There are two essays in Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry that talk about Japanese poetics and translation. My interest is always the same: in how poems work, precisely, in why they affect us they do, and in bringing in whatever background helps us read more vulnerably, openly, accurately, and deeply. I think this is especially needed for haiku. We teach haiku to third graders, but in fact it’s an art form that requires some real initiation to be truly practiced or read. Haiku are the most immediate of art forms in one way, but in another, they are slip knots that you need to know the knack of, to untie fully. The more I learn about haiku, the more I feel how much I have not yet learned. It is bottomless, really. Any good poetry is.

- Jane Hirschfield, from an interview with Frogpond Journal about her 2011 essay The Heart of Haiku. You can read the whole interview here.

a fan in winter

Basho’s teachings about writing are as relevant and provocative now as they were when he was alive. “Poetry is a fan in winter, a fireplace in summer.” “To learn of the pine, go to the pine.” “Don’t imitate me, like the second half of a melon.” His navigation of the creative life and poverty, his restless curiosity, his losses, even his death was exemplary, really—Basho’s last spoken words take the point of view of the flies his students were trying to chase from the room. They show how supple and compassionate a poet’s sense of existence can be.

- Jane Hirschfield, from an interview with Frogpond Journal about her 2011 essay The Heart of Haiku. You can read the whole interview here.

a recipe for its own reenactment

I myself don’t make that strong a distinction between looking at poetry as a writer and as a reader. Every serious writer needs also to read alertly, with a real depth of attention—both her or his own work, and the work of others; and every act of reading a poem is a recreation of the original energies of its writing—that is what a poem is: not a record of thought, experience, emotion, realization, but a recipe for its own reenactment.

- Jane Hirschfield, from an interview with Frogpond Journal about her 2011 essay The Heart of Haiku. You can read the whole interview here.

poems that are alive will have a life of their own

I teach punctuation as a form of orchestration and musical notation. I teach close reading, rhetoric, transitions. But the opposite of all this, equally important, cannot be taught; it can only be remembered and acknowledged. After a poem is written, something of what has happened outside the writer’s consciousness can sometimes be named. But during the writing, the poet cannot know everything about the poem. In lyric poems, I suspect the poet often enough may not know much of anything. Not what it is about, not where it is going. The poem needs its first draft intoxication, its subversive trickster energies, its whistling in the dark, its unexpected and unfendable off pang of longing. A poem too sure of itself will have no crack for breathable air to enter, and will die for lack of permeability. Poems that are alive will have a life of their own, beyond the control of the writer. The writer’s only task when that life arrives is to get out of its way.

We are the amanuenses of our poems. They dictate us. Or so it seems to me. We learn everything we can of craft so that what we know can be of service to what wants to come through us.

- Jane Hirshfield, in discussion with Ami Kaye about the themes of her essays (later collected in her excellent book Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise: Three Generative Energies of Poetry), over at Pirene's Fountain. You can read the whole interview here.

good poems always travel in more than one direction

I’ve come more and more to believe in the presence and centrality of... invisible ink [in poems] — or, to use a different metaphor, to believe that there is a set of hidden clockworks beneath the surface of any poem we find ourselves moved by. This is true, paradoxically, even of poems that seem to tell everything outright. A poem may seem naked or plain, but if it moves us, there will always be something else at work, under the surface of its words. This second, undertow life is what differentiates poetry from instruction manuals, journalism, or, for that matter, a diary-type journal. Good poems always travel in more than one direction. They do not soothe us with platitude knowledge, they broaden us with complication, multiplicity, permeability to the subtle, and with unexpected perceptions, gestures of language, and comprehensions.

In addition to this larger scale dimension of hidden energies in poems, there is also a set of particular craft devices that might be described as “invisible ink.” One example is the deliberate choice to leave something out. A poem can convey an emotion or event’s presence by walking around it, revealing its shadow, alluding without naming, pressing back against it. Poems can create meaning in the same ways that mimes create walls, tables, balls, out of thin air and their own responses. This mode of communication falls into the category of what rhetoric calls periphrasis. Think of those Chinese scrolls in which the moon is a circle left uncolored. It is simply the paper, unpainted. That is an act of visual and physical periphrasis — the ink brush touches everything but the moon itself, which is, as in the physical sky, beyond any actual touch or reach.

- Jane Hirshfield, in discussion with Ami Kaye about the themes of her essays (later collected in her excellent book Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise: Three Generative Energies of Poetry), over at Pirene's Fountain. You can read the whole interview here.

halts the mind's unthinking plummet

During the years I was at Tassajara, I wasn’t writing. Everything was very strict and very simple. We were told, “Do nothing but practice Zen,” and I wrote one haiku during those three years’ time. When I returned to poetry, a rather different person in many ways, I brought with me two things I now can see would be useful to any young aspiring writer: the monastic model of non-distraction and silence, and the experience of calling oneself into complete attention. The ability to stay in the moment, to investigate immediate existence through my own body and mind, was what I most needed to learn at that point in my life, and to learn to stay within my own experience more fearlessly. I never considered going to graduate school. I did this instead. It wasn’t necessarily a conscious weighing of one course of study against the other, but something in me did know: you cannot write until you can first inhabit your own life and mind.

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A work of art offers a paradoxical liberation: it is something that changes everything while being perfectly useless in any ordinary sense. I suppose some people collect paintings because they think their value will increase in ten years or a hundred years, or because owning a certain object conveys social status. Thorstein Veblen’s conspicuous consumption is patently real. But I think poetry, as an art form, proves that cannot be the whole story—no one gains social status from knowing or “owning” a poem. Art’s role in the contemporary world may well be precisely to be un-useful, to reveal the importance of uselessness in our lives. You can’t eat a painting. You can’t do anything except stand before it, know the world differently, and walk away changed. That’s what a painting can do, what a poem can do. Art halts the mind’s unthinking plummet and lets you see the experience as a new whole.

- Jane Hirshfield, in interview for A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith, as excerpted in the February 2012 issue of Poetry Magazine. You can read all of Poetry Magazine's excerpts from the book here.

to say one thing is simply not to say enough

Poems, if they are any good at all, hold a knowledge elusive and multiple, unsayable in any other form. Resonant, fragrant, travelling more than one direction at a time, poetic speech escapes narrowing abstraction and reification as richly as does life itself. This is why lyric poems are so rife... with irony - good poems undercut their own yearning to say one thing well, because to say one thing is simply not to say enough.

- from "Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise: Three Generative Energies of Poetry," by Jane Hirshfield