Essay: Jane Hirshfield the American poet

Growing up on East 20th Street and attending Public School 40, Jane has had a very real sense of the outside world since a young age. However, instead of being interested in city life, Jane was more interested in expanding her knowledge about the natural world, according to Twentieth-Century American Nature Poets by Mark A. Eaton. When Jane Hirshfield, now 62, was in first grade, she dreamed of becoming a writer. Jane Hirshfield was born on February 24, 1953 in the most populous city in the United States, New York City. New York City is a very fast-paced, bustling area. It’s full of opportunities, experiences and different types of people.

 

In an interview in 2001 with Mark Eaton and Abigail Keegan, Jane recalls one of her earliest memories of life. She states “…I remember lying on my back in the grass, with the taste of blackberries in my mouth and something in me must have thought, ‘This is how the world is supposed to be.’” Even in her earliest ages, Jane knew that there was something deeper about the world. She knew that maybe it was not always what it seemed, but what it meant. It’s as if she was born with a certain knack for writing. Jane mentions that she wrote all throughout her childhood: “I’d stay up late at night, often until three in the morning, writing poems…” she remembers. It takes a lot of dedication for such a young child to continuously write on his/her own. In a biological essay written by Mark A Eaton, her poetry is described as “unthinkable without her life, and vice versa” and that “nothing is insignificant in her conception of the world.” Jane also remarked in a different interview “poems have taught [her] how to be a human being.” Reviewer Rose Solari, in the Common Boundary, states that there is a wholeness, a sense of completeness in Jane Hirshfield’s work.

Hirshfield then continued her education at Princeton University. Her studies then flourished and progressed, leading her to win publication in The Nation magazine, which later became the Discovery Award. She was a Phi Beta Kappa and graduated with the school’s first graduating class to include woman in 1973. She received her bachelor’s degree and went on to work on a farm for one year. In a biography written by Gale, it is pointed out that Jane Hirshfield put aside her writing for nearly eight years while studying at the San Francisco Zen Center. Hirshfield proclaims “I felt that I’d never make much of a poet if I didn’t know more than I knew at that time about what it means to be a human being.”

In her later years, she proceeded to teach in colleges and universities cross-country. Throughout her life, Jane Hirshfield has published five books of poems, a book of translated Japanese poems, a book of essays, and an edited collection of spiritual poetry by women. However, not only was she a writer and educator, she was a freelance editor and translator, a board member and director, and an advisory editor. Hirshfield has received an abundance of awards, beginning with her first in 1973 and her latest in 2005.

In Contemporary Poets by Gale, Jane Hirshfield comments,

My primary reason for writing has always been the attempt to understand and deepen experience by bringing it into words. Poetry, for me, is an instrument of investigation and a mode of perception, a way of knowing and feeling both self and world. In one sense, then, I write for myself; but poetry is also a mode of being in which subjective and objective can approach and become each other … I am interested in poems that find a clarity without simplicity; in a way of thinking and speaking that does not exclude complexity but also does not obscure; in poems that know the world in many ways at once – heart, mind, voice, and body.

Poetry is a very complex and intriguing way of explaining feelings and views. Instead of telling a story, writers such as Jane think deeper into the process of which words flow together. Since childhood, Jane has always had a way of describing her experiences in a more elaborate way. For a person to vividly recall a memory from over a decade ago is remarkable.

Jane Hirshfield, evidently, is a very gifted and talented woman. To have such a view of the world must be an incredible sensation. Being able to recall your experiences with such meticulous writings is a gift that not everyone has. Jane Hirshfield, however, seems to have had this gift with her for her whole life. From working on a farm to educating others, and winning award after award must be so rewarding to someone who puts their all into what they do.