Jane Hirshfield is one of the world’s most celebrated poets. The New York Times describes her as “among the modern masters.” Jane and Marc have been friends since their days as young Zen students living at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. During this intimate and enlightening conversation, Jane describes what brought her to Zen practice and her life-long journey to poetry. They discuss and Jane reads her poetry about optimism, surprise, and embracing the fullness of the world.

 

ABOUT MARC’S GUEST

Jane Hirshfield, writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today,” according to the New York Times, and described as “among the modern masters” by The Washington Post, is one of American poetry’s central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere. Lay-ordained in Soto Zen in 1979 during her eight years spent in full-time residential practice, including three years of monastic practice at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in California’s Ventana Wilderness, she explores transience and interconnection, shared fate and interiority, with equal allegiance. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the founder in 2017 of the online and traveling installation Poets For Science, Hirshfield is the author of nine collections of poetry, including most recently Ledger (Knopf, 2020).

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:01] Marc Lesser: Welcome to Zen Bones: Ancient Wisdom For Modern Times. This is Marc Lesser. Why Zen Bones? Our world is in crisis and ever-shifting, and now, more than ever, more wisdom, clarity, and courage are essential, especially in the world of work, business and leadership.

My guest today is Jane Hirshfield. David Baker from the New York Times described her as one of our finest, most memorable contemporary poets. In 2019, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. I’ve known Jane for many, many years. We were students together at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, and I thought our conversation was quite wonderful, enlightening, and intimate. She reads a variety of poems about optimism, surprise, and embracing the fullness of the world. I’m excited to share my conversation with Jane Hirshfield.

[music]

This is Marc Lesser and Zen Bones: Ancient Wisdom For Modern Times and I am very happy to welcome my dear friend and poet and human, Jane Hirshfield. Hello, Jane.

[00:01:31] Jane Hirshfield: Hello, Marc. Lovely to be here with you.

[00:01:34] Marc Lesser: Jane and I were hanging out many, many years ago at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. One of the stories that– I don’t know if this actually happened or not, but someone purportedly said that they asked you what you were going to be when you left Tassajara, and you said, “I’m going to be a poet,” and here you are.

[00:01:57] Jane Hirshfield: Here I am more to my surprise now than perhaps my hopes then. Now when people remind me of such things, I think, “What hubris, how on earth could I have hoped for such a life?” Now I look back and I think, “How amazing, I am a person who actually the fates have allowed to do what it is I most wanted to do from childhood.” That’s luck as much as whatever it was that I did that brought me here. It’s also luck and I never want to forget that.

[00:02:35] Marc Lesser: I don’t think I ever asked you what brought you to Zen and Zen Center.

[00:02:40] Jane Hirshfield: Ah, poetry did, of course, and life. My exposure to Buddhist ideas, thoughts, and imagery began when I was eight years old and on the lower East side of New York City, Manhattan, walked into a stationary store with my allowance money in my pocket and chose a book off those spiral bound display cases that they had up near the front. For some reason, the book that I brought home with me was a book of Japanese haiku.

I’m sure I understood nothing of what is truly meant by haiku in those days but something drew me. In retrospect, when I look back on my life, no matter what I was reading, and this includes the Western tradition as much as the Eastern tradition, every time I nodded and said to myself, “Ah, that’s a worldview that feels right to me, that’s a way of being that feels right to me and a set of awarenesses that I recognize as true,” every time, it turned out to be things that are in accord with the teaching of Zen and of Buddhism.

Sometimes that could be the epicurean and stoic poets of ancient Rome, and sometimes it could be Herocritus, and sometimes it could be ancient Chinese poets. When I was graduating from college, a friend of mine had a copy of the Tassajara Bread Book. In the early days, the inside back cover of the Bread Book had the monastic schedule on it, which was how I knew there was a Zen monastery.

When my life was opened up, I did a year of farm labor after graduating from college and then set out across country in a red Dodge van with tie-dyed curtains looking for my future which I thought was going to be a waitress somewhere beautiful and writing poems in a cabin someplace. I knew Tassajara existed, and I was curious. I went to see what it was and ended up staying within the three Zen Center communities for eight years of full-time training and practice.

Then practice returned me to poetry just as poems had brought me to practice. Now they both go forward in left foot right foot ways in my life.

[00:05:25] Marc Lesser: Interesting that Tassajara Bread book, which was actually my first, I was living in San Francisco, and there it was on the shelf, and next thing I knew I was walking in the door of 300 Page Street.

[00:05:37] Jane Hirshfield: Oh, we share that. Everybody else seemed to come because of Alan Watts’ radio programs. I’d never heard of Alan Watts’ radio program, but I had read a lot of ancient Japanese poetry, and I had come across the Bread Book.

[00:05:53] Marc Lesser: You mentioned you’re going to be spending some time in Ireland on a fellowship.

[00:06:00] Jane Hirshfield: I am the third Seamus Heaney International Visiting Poetry Fellow for this year. They had invited me for last year, but the pandemic was still too unpredictable then, so we put it off for a year. I will be based at Queen’s College, which has a Seamus Heaney Center.

This rather means the world to me because Seamus and I were friends, and so to be going to Northern Ireland for the first time– I’ve been to the Republic, but I’ve never been to Northern Ireland. With his arm around my shoulders, that means a great deal to me.

[00:06:39] Marc Lesser: That sounds wonderful. This practice, the practice of poetry, the practice of Zen, and this crazy mixed-up world– I woke up this morning, like, “What a world?” Looking at the newspapers like, “Is this really happening? Is this– How could this be?”

Actually, I was rereading, last night, your writing in your book, Ten Windows, the chapter on surprise, which I really love. I love that, and so much of, I think, in some way, waking up and looking up the newspaper was all about surprise as was in the world of Zen and the world of poetry. I think it’s wonderful that you’re unpacking that and talking about as– and I almost see it as a healing property or waking-up property. I wonder what’s surprising to you these days?

[00:07:47] Jane Hirshfield: Oh, everything is surprising to me. Surprise, really, is the great unrecognized emotion of our life or neurochemistry of our life, perhaps. In that surprise is what throws open the brain’s portals to recognize something new and changed. I have become more and more interested in this moment of permeability and vulnerability that surprise offers us.

One of the things which interests me, there was– A long time ago, a study was done, which has stayed in my mind, where when the neuroscientists were first beginning to study meditation, and they would put people into a FMRI machine and monitor their brains and normal people, if you ring a bell repeatedly every 50 seconds, eventually the attention extinguishes itself and the sound of the bell no longer evokes any big response in the brainwaves.

When they put experienced meditators in the same situation, every ring of the bell evoked a fresh and complete response. It was always new. Now, one thing that I have noticed about myself in the past years since the results of the 2016 election and everything that led up to it, I have noticed I never get over my shock and my surprise at what has happened to a country that I thought I knew but, obviously, did not know.

I hear some other people speak and it sounds as if they’ve somehow acclimated to the truth of this, but for me, as you described yourself this morning, every single day I look at the newspaper, and I am freshly stunned by who we are, and I mean the large we, the entire– not only the American culture but the world’s culture. Can you imagine being in Britain right now with what’s going on there? It is just as chaotic.

Then in completely other ways, imagine being in Ukraine this morning. Imagine being a refugee trying to cross the Mediterranean this morning. Imagine being a young woman in Iran protesting the head scarf enforcement this morning. As somebody who came of age into the first Earth Day in 1970, I was a young person then. I looked at that event, and I thought the world was going to change.

It is 50 years from that day, everything we needed to know, we knew in spring 1970, April 22nd, the first Earth Day. We had seen a photograph of the whole Earth. We knew the environmental crisis that only now are governments beginning to take seriously and respond to. We could have done this 50 years ago. The civil rights movement was in full cry in the ’60s when I was a child. How can we have made such little progress?

The ideas of Buddhism of compassion, of not clinging to some sense of self and other, that was also completely available to us. By the time you and I were children, how is it that these truths have not yet been found worth embracing? That is, for me, one of the great koans of the age, is how the forces of fear and reification, and, forgive me, greed have managed to forestall the obvious that is needed.

[00:12:38] Marc Lesser: Yes. I’m fond of saying that greed, hate, and delusion have been quite popular for at least 2,500 years. It is stunning. I think both the sense of hope that you described and the sense of not exactly hopelessness but the despair of turning back this– it looked like– so maybe the lesson is it’s not a straight line. Perhaps we’re still– Again, maybe it’s my cautious optimism that likes to think that– Well, there’s something–

It’s also amazing looking at how much people’s consciousness seems to be growing around Buddhism and meditation. Those ideas continue to grow and spread, and partly through people like you and your work that you are in stealth and not so stealth ways bringing consciousness into the world through your writing and your poetry.

[00:13:54] Jane Hirshfield: Poetry is such a small backwater in the culture, but somehow over the centuries, a few lines of poetry have stayed with people, and they do affect how we think and feel and what we recognize and what we’re able to see.

Can I read you a couple of poems I’ve had? As we’ve been talking, various poems have been coming into mind, and one of the ones was one I had thought earlier that I might want to open with, and we’re well past opening, but I have a poem from earlier, which is called Optimism and I think it’s relevant to this point in the conversation. I wrote it with the environment in mind but also my personal need in mind. It had both behind it at the time that I wrote this.

Optimism.

More and more I have come to admire resilience.

Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.

But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs, all this resinous, unretractable earth.

There is that poem, and I also want to give you a poem that I co-translated but did not write. It’s a thousand years old, written by the great woman poet of Japanese literature, Izumi Shikibu, who lived in the Heian Court in the year 1000. Most of my life, I’ve thought of this poem as a poem about the necessity of being permeable, and only this morning did I see it as also a poem about optimism.

It’s very short, 31 syllables in the Japanese, 5 lines in English.

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

When I translated this, I had all of the words, I had all the images, and I couldn’t quite understand the meaning. I just understood a great poem was there. I worked with a Japanese collaborator, Marco, our attorney, and we would do word-for-word Japanese into English. When the penny finally dropped after a week of studying it, I finally understood it, and then I was able to bring it into these English words.

What I understood was that it is a poem about not walling yourself up too tightly. If you are afraid of cold winds, if you are afraid of grief, sorrow, loss, fear, anxiety, every one of the emotions that we human beings so often try to push away from ourselves because they do not feel comfortable, you will also be walling yourself off from the radiance, from awakening.

The moonlight in Japanese poetry often means the fullness of things, but of course, it is also a trope for Buddhist awakening. Just this morning– Poems always have multiple meanings. They can be understood different ways in different contexts at different times in your life, and it stunned me, it surprised me, but only this morning did I realize, “Oh, that’s also a poem about optimism.” Here it is again.

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

Maybe it is only when your house is ruined that the moon will come into it. I also have a poem about surprise, but maybe that’s enough poetry for this moment. Up to you. [laughs]

[00:18:34] Marc Lesser: As you were reading that poem, I remembered that– For me, after I left Zen Center and found myself doing work in the corporate setting, that one of the core gifts I think of Zen and Buddhism and maybe of poems like you just read is shifting our relationship with pain and difficulty. That was so present and unique to the conventional business world where the assumption was pain bad, don’t look there, and somehow opening to that, having a different relationship was a major shift kind of feeling some of that in that optimistic poem that you just read.

[00:19:34] Jane Hirshfield: You’ve just named a theme that has run through my poetry from the beginning until now, and I think that’s because it is fundamental, as you just said, to the work that poetry does, which is– You probably remember from our time at Zen Center there was a phrase that was much repeated in those years, I don’t know if it’s still is, “Say yes to everything.”

Learning to say yes to what is difficult was, for me, a lifelong task. Has been not only the task that the world asks of us, but the task I wanted to learn how to do, how to live a 360-degree human life and understand that that is indeed, if you are going to live at all, you will have to be open to every possible weather of our existence. This theme has run through my work from beginning to end.

It is indeed the path that poems show us. Poetry offers, as Buddhist practice offers, a way to stay inside the difficult moment and understand that it too leads to the moonlight coming through the ruined house’s roof. It is the beauty of poems married to the difficult circumstances which so often provoke them into existence. That lets you feel that a life of alloy, a life of hybridity, a life of the mixed is fuller, more satisfying, more interesting than a life of not even the sweet, but actually the saccharin that is so often what our culture proposes.

The saccharin is not only bad for you, but it is delusional. It’s mostly simply dissatisfying to me to look in only one direction without your eyes ever moving. The retinas tire, the cells in your eyes glaze over with exhaustion. We need change to refresh us, and we need reality which includes both the amazement of awe and the terror of something snapping in the woods behind you when you’re not quite sure what it’s going to be, and the grief of inevitable losses.

This is the terrain of poems, is to say, “Oh, yes. I want to include that, also. I must include that also,” because what a human awareness wants, and a human heart-mind wants is the fullness of what the world actually will bring, whether we want it or not.

[00:23:02] Marc Lesser: I noticed that the phrase that I was anticipating when you talked about the often used phrase at Zen Center, which I think is parallel to the one you named, is, “It’s good for your practice”.

[00:23:21] Jane Hirshfield: [laughs]

[00:23:24] Marc Lesser: Which, in some way, essentially, it was used pretty much anytime anything was painful or disappointing. “It’s good for your practice.” It’s a kind of saying– It’s another way of saying yes in a slightly different way.

[00:23:44] Jane Hirshfield: Then there was that other wonderful word, which is just to say “that’s interesting”. Very interesting. Interest likes surprise. What’s wonderful about interest is it is an opening of a portal because to be surprised or to be interested or to be curious, all of these are states of mind and being in which we are outside of judgment. They are prior to judgment. There is a great purity and joy in the taking in of things.

Now, judgment, I also have a poem about that. I have a poem about so many things. Judgment is interesting to me because as much as Zen and Buddhism often proposes that the way to opening is to avoid picking and choosing, that famous phrase. The perfect way is not difficult, just avoid picking and choosing. Of course, we pick and choose all the time.

I think the perfect way doesn’t mean becoming stupid or apathetic, or nondiscerning. Discernment is one of the great qualities of all of the paramitas is to recognize when your foot is falling into quicksand and when your foot is landing on something that allows you to take the next step forward, but it is not to be attached to, these judgments, these recognitions. It is just, “Oh, this moment.” This moment. It’s information, and information is interesting to us and delicious to us.

From infancy, evolution has created in human beings a creature who wants to find the world interesting and sometimes wants to find the world amazing and sometimes wants to drop off body and mind and be beyond all forms of judgment or weighing just inside and extending without boundary in each moment into the absolutely unnameable fullness and emptiness that existence is.

Those moments don’t last. We come back from them to the world of picking and choosing, saying, “I think I’ll make rice for the monastic lunch this morning, or I think I’ll make white beans for lunch today.” That’s necessary too. You were a head cook, weren’t you? Were you head cook at Tassajara?

[00:26:56] Marc Lesser: I was.

[00:26:57] Jane Hirshfield: Yes, I remember that. [laughs]

[00:27:00] Marc Lesser: I was completely surprised, talk about surprised, that I kept being asked to do different jobs in the kitchen. From that summer that I first met you, I was the dishwasher, and then I was on the kitchen crew, and then I was the assistant to the head cook for a year, and then I was the head cook. I feel like I grew up in the Zen kitchen.

It was also surprising as almost like a training in seeing the world of work through completely different lens, that it was some strange combination of letting go and service, as well as this very high standard of what great good tasty vegetarian food is like, but somehow held lightly. It’s almost hard to– and I think I’ve spent my life in some way aspiring to work in that way and to try to teach others to work in that way, but it’s still a bit of a mystery what all was happening there.

[00:28:27] Jane Hirshfield: Being a young feminist when I was at Tassajara, I think I was the only woman student who never did any time in the kitchen at Tassajara. Of course, the karmic result of that was when I moved to Green Gulch in 1979 and Zen Center was just opening Greens Restaurant, I was immediately assigned to work in the kitchen at Greens.

I arrived there and had cooked at Madison, who is an old, old friend at that point, said, “Oh, Jane, it’s so wonderful to see you. Remind me your history with cooking at Zen Center.” I said, “Deb, I don’t know how to hold a knife.” She turned white, and then she taught me how to hold a knife, and I cooked at Greens for its first three years of dinners.

[00:29:14] Marc Lesser: This seems like a perfect setup for a poem about surprise.

[00:29:19] Jane Hirshfield: Ah, we will have that then. All right. Everything described in this poem is true.

I Wanted To Be Surprised.

To such a request, the world is obliging.

In just the past week, a rotund porcupine,
who seemed equally startled by me.

The man who swallowed a tiny microphone
to record the sounds of his body,
not considering beforehand how he might remove it.

A cabbage and mustard sandwich on marbled bread.

How easily the large spiders were caught with a clear plastic cup
surprised even them.

I don’t know why I was surprised every time love started or ended.

Or why each time a new fossil, Earth-like planet, or war.

Or that no one kept being there when the doorknob had clearly.

What should not have been so surprising:
my error after error, recognized when appearing on the faces of others.

What did not surprise enough:
my daily expectation that anything would continue,
and then that so much did continue, when so much did not.

Small rivulets still flowing downhill when it wasn’t raining.

A sister’s birthday.

Also, the stubborn, courteous persistence.

That even today please means please,
good morning is still understood as good morning,
and that when I wake up,
the window’s distant mountain remains a mountain,
the borrowed city around me is still a city, and standing.

Its alleys and markets, offices of dentists,
drugstore, liquor store, Chevron.

Its library that charges, a happy surprise, no fine for overdue books:
Borges, Baldwin, Szymborska, Morrison, Cavafy.

[music]

[00:31:56] Marc Lesser: Thank you. I’m a little surprised. I don’t know why, just that my heart is bursting open being here with you this morning and your generosity and the lifetimes that you and I have known each other, so thank you.

[00:32:13] Jane Hirshfield: You’re very welcome.

[00:32:14] Marc Lesser: I also want to go on and on. I feel like we’re just getting started, so maybe this is part one.

[chuckles]

[00:32:24] Jane Hirshfield: At another conversation to follow at some point.

[00:32:27] Marc Lesser: Yes. Is there anything at all that you would like to say or do or read as a way of closing this section?

[00:32:38] Jane Hirshfield: I’ll close with one more poem because poets always like to close with poems. There are things– One of the things maybe we can talk about next time is an idea that in some email or other past, back and forth, which is the permeability of selves, because none of us is only oneself. The nature of what is self, what is not self, the portals that connect the two and lead between them, the fluidity of pronouns in poetry. You can say I, and it means we, and you can say we, and it can mean human, non-human universes, galaxies.

I’m going to close with an intimate poem having to do with this house and room that I sit in, and a kind of calibration of our personal lives and the large of the lives. Right out my window, there is a redwood tree, second-growth redwood tree. We also share a hometown, Marc and I, and it is a town that was logged over to rebuild San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire, but redwood trees have a way of coming back, and one has been coming back near this house. I will never remove it.

Someday, its trunk will get large enough that it– and the house will be having an even more intimate conversation than they do now, but it was here first, and I think that’s important. I’ll close with this poem called, simply, Tree.

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.

Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

[00:35:05] Marc Lesser: Jane, thank you. What a treat and delight to get to spend this time with you, and let’s do it again.

[00:35:16] Jane Hirshfield: Thank you, Marc. Good luck with everything, and I hope that everyone listening today has a bit of immensity tapping at their windows, even if it might eventually break them.

[music]

[00:35:37] Marc Lesser: Listen in each week for interviews, teachings, and guided meditations. You’ll receive supportive tools for creating more meaningful work and mindfulness practices to develop yourself, to influence your organization, and to help change the world. Thank you for listening.

[music]

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