For a long time I keep the guide books out on the table
in the morning, drinking coffee, I see the spines:
St. Petersburg, Vilnius, Vienna.
Choices pondered but not finally taken.
I'm Jane Hirshfield, I graduated from Princeton with the class of 1973 and
I designed my own major in creative writing and literature in translation
My interest in poetry began so early. I went to PS 40 in New York
and somewhere in there something must have happened because by the time I left
I had written on one of those large brown pieces of paper with blue lines:
I want to be a writer when I grow up.
Poems became the vessel with which I understood my life.
I understood the world and for me it created a kind of
privacy and safety, pond perhaps in which I could craft a self
I entered Princeton with the class of '74 but I was in a great hurry so
I went through in three years and graduated with the first class of women.
My first year there, we had a visiting writer teaching poetry, and that was
rather surprisingly Anthony Burgess. Mostly what I recall him saying to me
was: write more, write longer, expand! and that was very useful because
my second two years I worked with the wonderful professor Theodore Weiss.
All he said to me was: cut, cut, cut! I took a lot of courses in the
East Asian Studies program. One of the most important things
that happened for me in Princeton was Gary Snyder came to campus.
What I did go to was his East Asian Studies coffee hour presentation
on the Yamabushi Mountain Monks.
I think that was a quietly transformative event for me.
When I graduated from Princeton I got in my, it being the 70's,
a red dodge van with tie-dyed curtains and made my way west slowly
looking for where I wanted to live. And so when I reached California
I knew only that there was a Zen Monastery
in California. And so I was permitted to go in and be what they called
a guest student for a week. And I ended up staying for 8 years
During the Monastery years, I wrote nothing. You weren't supposed to
do anything but Zen, so I wrote one illegal Haiku, which came upon me and
wrestled me to the ground and I had to write it so I did.
Then, towards the end of my training poetry began to return to me.
I was allowed to write and very gradually began a slow transition
to living my life as a poet and as a person of words.
What I have kept and what is a through line is the invitation to pay attention.
I have always drawn my material from what is at hand to be seen.
Very often it is what is physically in my eyes and ears,
a fig that I am eating from my tree in the garden,
the mountain that I'm seeing from my window.
These have become vehicles for thinking about
both themselves and much broader issues.
There is an odd moment when you suddenly realize you're not
going to go back and ever be a horse trainer, or a ballet dancer
or any of the myriad lives which have been open to you until a certain point
and you realize: actually the shape of my life has been written.
If you lived higher up on the mountain, I find myself thinking,
what you would see is more of everything else, but not the mountain.