What is Learned Slowly | Ellen Goldsmith
Lately, Jane Hirshfield’s new book The Asking. New and Collected Poems (2023) is taking me on an extended journey through landscapes of the mind and of the natural world. Hirshfield’s poetry speaks to the moment and the momentous. Abstract realities are peppered with birds, ants, and proteins. There are so many openings and entrances. Still, mystery remains.
The first thing I love about the book is the title., not just Asking but The Asking. Doesn’t the article elevate and enlarge the project? The shift from product to process resonates with Hirshfield’s view of poems as “...responses to questions that have no answers.” Thus, the poet’s job is to continue to ask, to have an inquiring mind. In my prose poem “Swimming” memories are asking for a permanent home.
Lately, I’m seeing poems as places to put things. Moments that haven’t dissolved yet haven’t found their own poem and they ask to stop floating around like dust in the air or debris on the water. Like when I swam and swam and swam in Lake Michigan, kept going because every other lake I’d been in I could swim to the other side. And after a while I was so tired, not sure I could swim back to shore. But I did. And it wouldn’t be right to reduce the experience to one lesson learned, a one sentence main idea. In our sixth-grade Friday-afternoon club, we played Five Objects. One of us hid these small things in plain sight so a penny disappeared into the design of a plate. I liked it best when I couldn’t separate the object from its new home.
This poem recounts a frightening swimming experience that calls up a childhood game and leads to an embracing of connection. So many poems are about seeing—what’s in plain sight and what we lose sight of. I love what Anna Quinlan says about how most of us experience poetry, “...the heart coming around the corner and unexpectedly running into the mind.” Hirshfield says something similar when she identifies poetry is “a place where the thinking of the heart, mind and body come together.” The connection between thought and feeling is one of the enlarging features of poetry. Reading The Asking, poem after poem by the same poet brings to mind the range and scope and variety of poems.
For Galway Kinnell “poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.” For the poet and for the reader, things come out of the shadows, as in my poem “Out of the Shadows—“:
The phrase floats from the kitchen radio as I’m chopping vegetables for our Chinese dinner. It could be a good thing, emerging into light from darkness, or bad, a hidden danger revealed which brings to mind uncertainty. Like what happens when I stand before a painting, let’s say a seascape with a rosy sky and gold-streaked clouds entitled “Broad Cove” and I can’t tell if it’s sunrise or sunset. I love that, when the back story and the future don’t matter the way one line from an Auden poem—“About suffering they were never wrong”—has an independent existence. And don’t you think some melodies from symphonies have existed forever and Dvorak or Copland just found them?
Turning on the radio while chopping vegetables brought together the experience of uncertainty, an imagined painting of Broad Cove, the recollection of a great poem, and melodies from Appalachian Spring and From the New World. For Auden, “a poem is a clear expression of mixed feelings.” I can think about those words for a long time. His poem—“Musée des Beaux Arts”—refers to Breughel’s painting, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” Painters, poets, musicians are often in conversation with each other. “And Then” uses phrases from a Jane Hirshfield poem to follow my thoughts and recapture memories.
“And Thean”
—after “Meeting the Light Completely” by Jane Hirshfield
Even the long remembered
was once
an empty vessel.
Just so,
the faded gaze
of my mother as a girl,
a recurrent dream
with a wolf under the table
might also,
loudly and softly,
open doors.
Wallpaper with street scenes of Paris.
Empty rooms.
Each time,
the past rearranges itself.
Is that what it means to grow old?
And then
what is learned slowly:
to drink from a broken cup.
I’m hoping this essay takes you to The Asking and to the Camden Festival of Poetry; to register for this free, public event.
Ellen Goldsmith’s latest collection of poems is Left Foot, Right Foot. “Out of the Shadows—” was published in Connecticut River Review, “Swimming” in Off the Coast” and “And Then” in Third Wednesday. She lives in Cushing.
