[New-Poetry] 'Pebbles' and 'Assays', Sunken Garden series kicks off...

[JforJames at aol.com]

_http://www.courant.com/features/booksmags/hc-janehirshfield0604.artjun04,0,35
9062.story_ 
(http://www.courant.com/features/booksmags/hc-janehirshfield0604.artjun04,0,359062.story)  
 
Poet Hirshfield Brings Her 'Pebbles' and 'Assays' To Sunken Garden 
 
By CAROLE GOLDBERG
Courant Books Editor
June 4 2006
 
Although she has never been there, Jane Hirshfield knows just what to  expect 
at the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington on Thursday, where she will open  the 
15th season of the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival.
 
"I always find that every reading I give brings unexpected intimacies and  
exchanges" with the audience, Hirshfield says in a phone interview from her home 
 in the San Francisco Bay area.
 
"The loveliness of having the poem, the reader and the writer in the same  
conversation is always fresh. And I'm stunned by the exceptional gifts of some  
locations" where she has read, such as Utah's Red Rocks desert and Dove 
Cottage,  the home of William Wordsworth in England.
 
Hirshfield, whose spare but startling poems often take inspiration from the  
natural world as well as fine art, will appreciate the exceptional beauty of  
Hill-Stead, which is known for its 152 acres of lush gardens and meadows and a 
 stunning collection of impressionist art by Monet, Manet, Degas and others 
in  the restored 1901 Colonial Revival mansion that was the home of architect  
Theodate Pope Riddle and her parents.
 
The museum, at 35 Mountain Road, will host six outdoor readings at its  
annual summer festival, featuring nationally known poets and winners of national  
and local competitions, along with music, every other Thursday through Aug. 17. 
 Hirshfield's 7:30 p.m. reading with be preceded by South American jazz by 
the  Marta Gómez Quartet at 6:30. The grounds open at 5:30. Should it rain, the  
program will be held under a tent. New handicap access that meets federal  
standards has been added to the Sunken Garden area. (See accompanying story on  
Page G4.)
 
What audiences at such events gain, Hirshfield says, is the same thing she  
gets from reading works by other poets.
 
"Poetry," she says, "magnifies and increases our comprehension of what it  is 
to be a human being. Poems name an experience that is resonating and subtle  
and can be named by only that particular set of words." Its goal is nothing 
less  than "the alteration and transformation of self."
 
Hirshfield, grew up in New York, graduated from Princeton University and  has 
published six volumes of poetry and an essay collection. A recipient of many  
major honors, including an Academy of American Poets fellowship, a Poetry 
Center  Book Award and California Book Award, she frequently travels back to the 
East  Coast to work on her poems, at retreats such as Yaddo in Saratoga 
Springs, N.Y.,  but fears she has lost her pacing as a New Yorker.
 
"I was house-sitting in Manhattan and was at the Fairway and could not  
choose among the cheesecakes," she laments. "It was startling to feel that I was  
not a New Yorker anymore."
 
Hirshfield's latest collection is "After" (HarperCollins, $23.95), poems  
written following a period in which she suffered personal losses. It contains,  
among others, poems she calls "assays" and "pebbles," dissimilar forms that  
nevertheless encourage the same thing: "thinking and feeling through observing  
something."
 
The assays, which may be about people or concepts or even a single word,  
tend to move from the theoretical to the concrete, while the shorter pebbles  
begin with a specific image and expand to a universal concept, as in  "Maple":
 
The lake scarlets
the same instant as the maple.
Let others try to  say this is not passion.
 
Her pebbles poems, Hirshfield says, "are very short and similar to the  
Eastern tradition I love. They have a brevity and dryness and concision and can  be 
funny or serious. In the book, they come like a flurry of hailstones, but  
were written as individual poems."
 
The assays, which began when she wrote a meditative poem about Edgar Allan  
Poe, occupy the "borderline between criticism, prose and poetry. They have a  
different note, a different timbre," she says. "It's the border between 
thinking  with feeling and feeling with thinking."
 
She writes of Poe:
 
... What could simply be seen, named, described was not his  interest.
Half-close your eyes, he advised, to double the world.
The  process of a discovery accomplished was his interest, 
Its after-savoring his  appetite and pleasure....
 
Having lived for several years at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery in  
California, Hirshfield has been influenced by its philosophy, which informs the  
spareness of her poetry and the clarity that reveals unexpected depths. But, 
she  says, her audience does not need to have studied Zen Buddhism to 
understand her  poems.
 
Hirshfield's work, says Alison Meyers, who is now in her seventh summer as  
artistic director of the poetry festival, "has a surface simplicity and deals  
with the daily details of life, the familiar," yet is profound. Every good 
poem,  Meyers says, has "the turn, the surprise - and that's Jane's specialty."
 
It's Meyer's job to select the poets who will read at Hill-Stead each year.  
She often attends the Dodge Poetry Festival in Stanhope, N.J., the largest 
event  of its kind in the country, to scout poets for Sunken Garden. She heard  
Hirshfield there two years ago and knew she would be an excellent choice.
 
"It's always a critical element to hear a poet read," Meyers says.
 
"Sunken Garden has a loving and loyal audience that may not have any other  
poetry experience all year. It's a personal experience for them and we choose  
poets who are decipherable on the first hearing."
 
The poets are selected "in the context of what is good for Hill-Stead and  
that comes back to the Hill-Stead audience," Meyers says.
 
Hirshfield says one of the great rewards of writing poems is experiencing  
the creative process known as "flow."
 
"For me," she says, "it is the great desirable state of being to fall into  
my work and to not know what is happening and then to find out what will happen 
 next. That state is the core - it's what we were made for. It's a mystery. 
It's  where discoveries come from."
 
While surveys suggest that Americans are reading less and that poetry is  far 
down on the list of favorite genres, Hirshfield says that is not borne out  
by the reception her work receives. And, she says, festivals such as Sunken  
Garden help poetry thrive by offering a place to hear well-selected works.
 
"People are avid for what poetry offers," she says. "It's a counterweight  to 
economic and power and survival questions.
 
"Poetry is doing its work in the culture. I have no fear for poetry."
 
Reach Carole _Goldberg at cgoldberg@courant.com_ 
(mailto:Goldberg at cgoldberg@courant.com)   
Copyright 2006, Hartford Courant  

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20060604/1deb3b60/attachment.html