I Write to See What Comes: On Jane Hirshfield | Ellen Goldsmith
Poetry resists definition. It is so various, as are the impulses that call us to write poems. Still, I find a kind of answer in the two-word title of Jane Hirshfield’s remarkable New and Selected Poems. The Asking turns poetry into inquiry, exploration, a continuing quest. And not just Asking but The Asking. How this one word, the, brings dignity, even urgency to the act of asking characterizes Hirshfield’s poems. Every word counts as well as what’s missing.
“Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me” begins
The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken fractured?
Do you ask, fractured what? Are you jarred? Or do you enter the poem, move into your life, our country, the world and provide words, phrases? Does it bring new thoughts and feelings? I think of how much emerges from not completing the thought.
There is so much room for the reader in Hirshfield’s poems. She says
Poems are made of words that act beyond words’ own perimeter because what is infinite in them is not in the poem, but what it unlocks in us.
Her poem entitled “Tree” presents the dilemma that will arise when a young redwood planted next to a house begins to grow.
Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.
I stay in the poem and also travel to a fertile and complicated territory of choices – personal and political as well as past, present and future. I had the pleasure of developing craft talks about Jane Hirshfield for The Poets Corner and chose the themes of Openings and Transformation as an orientation to poems I selected to explore. I read the poems over and over until they became a tapestry, a collage, or maybe a map with much open space.
They point to angles of reflection on one’s life: “Three Times My Life Has Opened,” “I Would Like,” and “I wanted to be surprised.” “To Be a Person” begins
To be a person is an untenable proposition
and ends
Or the question may be considered still at least open—
an unused drawer, a pair of waiting workboots.
Both in the poems and in other writings included in her fine essay collections—Nine Gates and Ten Windows—certain descriptive words recur with some frequency: open, porous, permeable, spacious and balance.
“The Weighing” posits
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
There is darkness and acknowledgment of the difficult in many of Hirshfield’s poems. In “Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me” we find
Words still bespangle,
bewilder
Putting together adornment and confusion exemplifies Hirshfield’s large embrace.
In writing about Jane Hirshfield, I continue to think about what poetry does, why we come to poetry, why those who write poetry do so. Hirshfield tells us
I write to meet what comes—to stay upright, to speak into shock and grief. Yet somehow, the beauty of the fragile world also steepens, grows brighter. The new poems hold, too, my gratitude for being alive for this open eye-blink of a lifetime.
On May 17, 2025 at the Third Annual Camden Festival of Poetry, Jane Hirshfield will deliver the keynote address entitled “Living by Poems.” Once again, as with The Asking, the title points to a way of being.
Ellen Goldsmith reads, writes and teaches poetry, all with equal enthusiasm. Her first chapbook, No Pine Tree in This Forest Is Perfect won the Slapering Hol Chapbook Competition. Her most recent book, Left Foot Right Foot is an illness and recovery narrative in 28 poems. Are We There Yet?, a full-length collection, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. Professor Emerita of the City University of New York, she lives in Cushing, Maine.
