photo (c) Robert Hatch Photography
(Ed. note: This is the final installment of Brian Bouldrey's three-part interview with Jane Hirshfield occasioned by her just-released collection Come,Thief. Kevin Young selected Hirshfield's poem "The Cloudy Vase" for the Best American Poetry 2011. Go here for a schedule of Jane's upcoming readings. Go here for Part 1 of this interview and here for part 2.)
Brian: I know you’ve been developing over the past couple of volumes something you call “pebbles," very short poems that seem influenced by both eastern and western traditions. Can you describe the growth or emergence of the pebbles?
Jane: The first book I ever purchased, at age eight, was a Peter Pauper Press book of Japanese haiku. I co-translated (with the indispensable help of Mariko Aratani) both Japanese tanka poems (the 31-syllable form that preceded haiku), for The Ink Dark Moon (Vintage Classics, 1990), and more recently haiku, for The Heart of Haiku, an extended essay on Basho and haiku that was brought out earlier this summer as a Kindle Single. But for my own writing, as I said, I felt I needed to find my own form, rather than practice the traditional ones, and after a while I began to name them “pebbles” in my mind, taking the title from Zbigniew Herbert’s famous “Pebble.” They are not haiku, but they are short, slightly intransigent poems that require some response in the mind of the reader before they are finished—as Herbert describes his pebble as inescapably warmed by the hand that holds it. I became much more conscious of these very short poems’ nature and means after writing an essay about them, “Skipping Stones,” for Stephen Berg’s anthology, My Business is Circumference: Poets on Influence and Mastery (Paul Dry Books, 2001). In the book that followed, After (HarperCollins, 2006), I grouped a series under a kind of basket title “Seventeen Pebbles.” Each is meant to be read as an individual, free-standing poem, but putting them in a series seemed more polite to the trees, rather than have 17 pages of a book with only a few lines on each. There’s a similar series, “Fifteen Pebbles,” in Come, Thief. A pebble isn’t just a “short” poem, and while it resembles other brief poems, it’s not quite the same thing as an aphorism, a haiku, an epigram. They have their own flavor, for me. Here are two— Mountain and Mouse Both move. One only more slowly. Opening the Hand Between Here and Here On the dark road, only the weight of the rope. Yet the horse is there. After I’d published After, someone told me that Herman Melville had written short poems he also referred to as “pebbles.” They were hard to find, and didn’t resemble mine much, but I was pleased to discover I shared something with the author of Moby Dick. Brian: Poetry, for so much of human history, has covered all the modes—love letter, persuasive thinking, discourse, argument, storytelling—and in many ways, much of that variety has died off. Not so for you: I feel as if there are all these things and more in your poems. I’m especially enamored of the way you place story or tale or anecdote or fable into your poems, because, while these seem the realm of prose, they are decidedly poetry in your hands, even back to Of Gravity & Angels. I’ve memorized the encounter on the road between the messenger and Giotto, from “A Plenitude,” in The October Palace. Can you speak to your claims over storytelling within poems? "A poem wants to tell something telling, wants the telling detail, wants the slip of incident that holds a world. It wants the 'tell' in poker: the gesture that reveals more than the player would choose to show, yet can’t quite conceal." Jane: Well, that’s what I love about you as a reader, Brian—you see what’s actually there. No one has ever categorized me as a story-telling poet before now, I don’t think; they usually save that for the confessional, Southern, or narrative poets. But one reason for poetry’s existence is that it expands what’s possible to be said, what’s possible to be comprehended, and also expands the ways a person has of doing those things. Stories are part of that, and also the adjective “telling”—that holds some of the intention I think you’re seeing here. A poem wants to tell something telling, wants the telling detail, wants the slip of incident that holds a world. It wants the “tell” in poker: the gesture that reveals more than the player would choose to show, yet can’t quite conceal. You hear a story that feels “telling” in that way, or learn some fact that stays with you, and it waits for its poem the way certain seeds wait for a fire before they can germinate. “Heat and Desperation,” in Come, Thief, for instance, tells the story of the invention of the wildfire-fighting technique of backfiring by a smoke jumper caught in the 1923 Mann Gulch Fire. I read that poem up in the Yosemite Meadows Poetry Festival, and a Forest Service firefighter who was there asked for a copy to bring back to his crew—that was confirming. “Left-Handed Sugar,” right next to that one in the book, came straight from a scientific article. I just looked through Come, Thief, and you’re right, there’s a leaf litter of story running right through those poems. They often also point toward a narrative able to be intuited from behind what the poem explicitly offers—a technique that runs through the Japanese tanka poems but is rarer in the briefer haiku. I think, though, you were probably talking about “borrowed” stories in your question, stories that come from something I’ve heard or learned? The clearest example of that I can think of is one of the pebbles from After. Something I read reminded of a story from the history of Australia: when Captain Cook first arrived off the coast, the native people did not react at all to his ship. It was outside the conceivable, and so they simply did not see it. As soon as smaller ships were launched to bring sailors to shore, the aboriginal people responded with great alarm. I wrote down that story in four lines, I could feel the poem in it. But it wasn’t a poem yet—it was just an anecdote, or as you say, was prose, until I could find another pole of meaning to attach it to. A string hung from a post is just a string. Tie it to another pole, tighten it, and you have the beginning of something, depending on what it’s made of—a stand up bass, a tie-line for a horse, a telegraph wire. It becomes useful. So I wondered, what was the second post, what was the new use I was feeling in this story? I carried the question for days, and then, I thought—global warming. I have never understood how anyone could deny climate change and its disastrous consequences—don’t they have children, grandchildren? When I put this story next to it, I understood. And so the story turned into this: Global Warming When his ship first came to Australia, Cook wrote, the natives continued fishing, without looking up. Unable, it seems, to fear the too large to be comprehended. The point of telling this at such length has something to do with my own relationship to stories in poems. A poem can be, as a whole, a single story—and I love many poems that are like that—but mostly mine use a story as one post for the string. And the string goes from post to post, a phone wire able to carry many stories, all of which lead toward something of ultimately untellable proportions.
