Waseda University Tokyo March 28, 2009
Poetry readings are unpredictable affairs. The poet-performer sets the tone and mood for the audience to receive, interact with, and reflect on the power of words. If we feel reconnected to the power of language, rather than to the poet's ego, we feel grateful. Jane Hirshfield's reading and talk on translation yesterday at Waseda University gave cause for such gratitude. This Zen-trained poet brings a wealth of Buddhist perspectives to her historical imagination, as well as historical perspectives to her Buddhist-influenced imagination (see her prose work, Nine Gates). But if the measure of a poet lies in her ability to evoke the range and depth of earthly experience via words, Jane Hirshfield transcends both the Buddhist and the historical to touch, as poet, on the transforming effects of language itself. Her poetic voice evokes less Whitmanesque extravagances and vastnesses and more Dickinsonian qualifications and enigmas, which offered this listener much food for thought. She recounted the story of how, as an 8-year-old child, she fell in love with a book of haiku poems. It was a love, she pointed out, which she 'never lost'. 'Forebearance,' 'robustness,' 'resilience,' 'tenacity,' 'persistence'-- one imagines, after hearing the poet casually and repeatedly reference them, that these are not merely verbal abstractions that mark her aesthetic sensibility but in fact offer one-word precepts she lives her life by. Spending time in this poet's company for those two hours or so yesterday brought home the efficacy of the phrases she used to describe her love affair with ancient Japanese poetry: "They touched my heart. They woke me up."
-- Alan Botsford
