Over the course of the past four decades, many renowned figures from the high and rare echelons of American poetry have paid a visit to the little farmhouse off Route 110 in West Hills, birthplace of Walt Whitman, to take on the mantle of Poet in Residence; and place their shoulders to the wheel of poetry with the putative ‘pater nostra’ of their field.
Some have embodied modern versions of the Good Gray Poet’s poetics. Others have subscribed to or paid deference to his politics or philosophy.
In her recent visit to the Whitman birthplace's 2019 poet in residence Jane Hirshfield -- a figure who has firmly taken her place in the firmament of contemporary American poetry -- proved herself well suited to her tenure in the position.
It's not just that Hirshfield possesses an impressive list of credentials -- a train of national awards and prizes trailing behind like daffodils on a well-worn wooded path in April.
More than that, her eclectic set of influences are particularly well-matched, in the bicentennial of Whitman's birth, to the Good Gray Poet's ideas -- from his linking of the specific to the universal and his insistence that a democracy 'does not know national borders to his 'I encompass multitudes' mantra.
And in fact her remarkable poetry is informed by a galaxy of influences that stretches across thousands of years and span continents.
Ancient Greeks and Romans. The ancient court of Japan. Chinese classics and Buddhist Zazen. Horace. Eliot. Akhmatova. The Taoist poet Yu Xuanji. Cavafy. Neruda. Simone Weill.
And importantly, Long Island’s own Walt Whitman, who with fellow 19th century poetry giant Emily Dickinson form the foundational Father and Mother figures of modern American poetry.
“They are our great forefather and foremother,” said this year’s poet in residence, “each bringing profound originality to a tradition that hadn’t previously existed. Whitman’s was an outward form of observation, Dickinson's work was oriented towards interiority. Between them they make the whole.”
There is an arresting ‘nowness’ and specificity to Hirshfield’s poetry which is understandably late 20th century. One often finds her probing the harrowing and hopeful moments ‘at the turning point’ of ordinary experience, seeking aperture to revelatory perception.
Take as just one example her poem The Husband, which appeared in The New Yorker in 2015.
‘Some things can surprise you both coming and going,’ she writes in her opening line, and then goes on to define a turning point in domestic relations that sends the readers heart and mind in several directions. ‘I took you as a husband, love. Then you left me.// I took surprise for a husband instead.’
From here, she doubles down on the intense scrutiny of the transformative possibilities embedded in turning points in relational understanding such as these – contemplating the shape of the Phoenician letter ‘heth,’ origin of our H (H as in husband). Heth the poet notes, was a triple-runged ladder, symbol of destination, vision and quest, dwindling over time to a more domestic ‘double-hung window.
Husband, surprise, I climbed you, I climbed right out you.’
These are poetics that possess an intent focus on the moment of common human experience, offering aperture into wisdom and insight. A poetics firmly rooted in the late 20thcentury American grain.
Beyond that, however, they are grounded in world poetry, and particularly ancient Japanese and Chinese writing.
And in a corollary way, it helps explain her role in exploring the poetry of indigenous languages in North America -- including Nahuatl, a language native to the American/Mexican borderlands that is
foundational to the emergent borderland culture of America’s Southwest.
And while the poet tips her hat to Whitman for this impulse to embrace indigenous languages, she adds that she actually came to Nahuatl poetry “early on, from a Fresno poet named Peter Everwine."
"Part of that,” she says, “was because it makes use of something similar to the vocabulary of ancient Japanese poetry – flowers, impermanence, the idea that our lives are transitory," a ‘narrow environment’ that only opened up during a family excursion to the countryside when she first saw ‘the blue sky above her, and tasted blackberries growing wild in the broad world of nature.’
For those following contemporary trends in American poetry, of interest is Hirshfield’s take on identity poetry. She’s aware, she says, there is a need for a kind of poetry that accurately addresses "the true and lasting griefs” of those feeling the effects of marginalization in society.
But she adds that rather than creating ‘separation between human beings,’ poets may serve a different function than that -- ie, to stand at the threshold between worlds, making poems as 'gates' that open people’s worlds to each other.
“I have a certain skepticism with identity,” she declared in a 2012 Youtube interview with Michael Collier, Howard County Poetry and Literary Society of Maryland. “The necessity is (the search for) an authentic self; the danger is an ego-based narrow self which limits a life and creates between human beings an ‘I am this you are that,’ mentality."
This corresponds to her idea that literature is more than an expression of identity, but an opportunity for the reader to expand their identity through cultural learning.
“If we could not be influenced by work coming from lives different from our own, if experience could not be passed from person to person by art, what would reading be?" she asks in a recent Agni interview with Ilya Kominsky. "To deny the power of art to transmit the whole of human comprehension from person to person is to deny it any standing, seriousness, consequence.”
Where does this perspective of hers come from?
East 20th Street, New York City, Hirshfield explains, in the projects where she grew up. It was, she recalls, a 'narrow environment that only opened up during family excursions to the countryside, when she saw 'the blue sky above her, and tasted blackberries growing wild in the broad world of nature.'
Her first experience of that, she remembers, was at the age of two. and it was the moment, she says, she first recognized her hunger for a larger existence.
“I tasted the sweetness of blackberries in my mouth,” she explains. “I looked around and I knew there was more. Something in me said ‘yes there is a larger world, and I will make my way towards it.’”
”For me, literature was that way.”
By extension, poetry can be that for any of us. And the poet -- the one who has built a gate in perception allowing us to pass through and experience that larger world.
Next time you enter a poem, think of a gate that joins people to each other, and to the larger world beyond them.
Think of a poet who has made that gate and stands there, beckoning people to walk through it and see what she has seen.
Think of Jane Hirshfield, inviting you to pass through one of her poems and taste, as she has, the sweetness of blackberries.
(As seen in the Long Islander Newspaper, 4.18.19)
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