Jane Hirshfield's "To Be a Person"

On four years of writing about poems

To Be a Person

To be a person is an untenable proposition.

Odd of proportion,
upright,
unbalanced of body, feeling, and mind.

Two predators’ eyes
face forward,
yet seem always to be trying to look back.

Unhooved, untaloned fingers
seem to grasp mostly grief and pain.
To create, too often, mostly grief and pain.

Some take,
in witnessed suffering, pleasure.
Some make, of witnessed suffering, beauty.

On the other side—
a creature capable of blushing,
who chooses to spin until dizzy,
likes what is shiny,
demands to stay awake even when sleepy.

Learns what is basic, what acid,
what are stomata, nuclei, jokes,
which birds are flightless.
Learns to play four-handed piano.
To play, when it is needed, one-handed piano.

Hums. Feeds strays.
Says, “All together now, on three.”

To be a person may be possible then, after all.

Or the question may be considered still at least open—
an unused drawer, a pair of waiting work-boots.


from The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Knopf, 2023)

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This is the fourth time I’ve written one of these yearly essays, which is wild, truly, because I can still remember sitting in a different apartment with a different window, sometime in mid-2020, wondering what might happen if I started writing little essays about poems. And, well, this is what happened. I’ll talk about that in a second. Whatever I mean by — gesturing wildly — this.

I’ve written about Hirshfield’s work before, but as often happens with these yearly reflections, I find myself gravitating toward poets who are lodestars for me, whether W.S. Merwin or Linda Gregg or Raymond Carver. And now: Jane Hirshfield.

I’ve spent the better part of a week sifting through my library copy of Hirshfield’s The Asking — her recent collection of new and selected poems — trying to find a poem that might encapsulate, I don’t know, everything? An impossible task. It led me to dog-ear twenty-three poems, including one that made me smile as I turned down the page’s corner:

Library Book with Many Precisely Turned-Down Corners

I unfold carefully the thoughts of one who has come before me,
the way a listening dog's ears
may be seen lifting
to some sound beyond its person's quite understanding.

What I love about Hirshfield’s work is how each poem is a space of observation and distillation. Here, in today’s poem — the observations:

Unhooved, untaloned fingers

a creature capable of blushing,
who chooses to spin until dizzy,
likes what is shiny,
demands to stay awake even when sleepy.

Learns to play four-handed piano.
To play, when it is needed, one-handed piano.

And then, the distillation:

To be a person may be possible then, after all.

I imagine that Hirshfield might, at times, draw comparison — and not in a best-intentioned way — to someone like Mary Oliver. I imagine that someone with a little cynicism and a lot of bad faith might claim, of both poets and perhaps of many more, that they are poets of too much distillation. Poets of a kind of easy aphorism. I imagine that same someone might throw the word sentimental in there, and then, well, might reduce it all to trite romanticism. I have heard such criticisms before. And what I think such criticisms neglect, of many things, is the work — of observation, of awareness, of craft, of play (yes, the work of play and the play of work) — that goes into a poem such as today’s.

Notice how, in today’s poem, there are really only two complete sentences:

To be a person is an untenable proposition.

To be a person may be possible then, after all.

There are sentences in between these ones, yes, but mostly, in between these more complete, wholly defined things are mere fragments. Phrases without subjects, or without verbs. Phrases that are entirely referential. And yet, in such phrases, an idea blooms. In such phrases — incomplete and fragmented and one-worded and jarring and jutting — a person is defined. Such is the poem’s movement — how it is a poem that literally makes possible in the space between these sentences, how it is a poem that allows for a mind to be changed (from a place where something is untenable to a place where something is possible — a massive change), and for the very idea of personhood to blossom in all its weirdness and oddity and insecurity and playfulness and love and strangeness and care. And how generous is that? To make something complete and possible out of fragments?

Playful work, don’t you think?

And I love that about Hirshfield’s work. Reading through a lifetime of her poetry, I found myself struck by that relentless desire to look, to keep looking. To acknowledge. To witness. So much of that work — and the appreciation of her ability to do such work — is encapsulated in another one of her poems, “My Wonder,” which reads, in full:

That it is one-half degree centigrade.
That I eat honeydew melon
for breakfast.
That I look out through the oval window.
That I am able to look out through an oval window.

And it’s there, too, in moments that have helped me find language for what it feels like to be aware and alive. Here, a description of waking life itself, from “Each Morning Calls Us to Praise This World That Is Fleeting”:

Mortal, alive among others
equally fragile.

And look! How this echoes a line from a poem of Hirshfield’s from years and years before, “Vinegar and Oil”:

How fragile we are, between the few good moments.

And here, some lines about wanting to be wary of getting too certain in this life, from “To Hear the Falling World”:

But they guard me, these small pains, 
from growing sure
of myself and perhaps forgetting.

And, finally, that humility that comes from the same wariness mentioned above, from “Like Others”:

In the end,
I was like others.
A person.

Sometimes embarrassed,
sometimes afraid.

When “Fire!” was shouted,
some ran toward it,
some away—

I neck-deep among them.

The relentlessness of Hirshfield’s work is a relentless desire to wonder, to acknowledge, to admit, and to be surprised. It’s a work of openness that the world allows for, but only if you commit to such work. Indeed, the first line of Hirshfield’s aptly-titled “I wanted to be surprised” is:

To such a request, the world is obliging.

And then, what follows? A litany of observation:

In just the past week, a rotund porcupine,
who seemed equally startled by me.

The man who swallowed a tiny microphone
to record the sounds of his body,
not considering beforehand how he might remove it.

A cabbage and mustard sandwich on marbled bread.

What a joy it is to be able to read a poet such as Hirshfield. And I know now that I am reading her work this week because of the persistent openness that her work enacts, that forever-acceptance of fragility, that being-okay-ness of it all. Online, you can find a letter Hirshfield wrote to a 10th grade student from a few years ago. In that letter, she writes:

I am, I think, a little unusual in liking to feel insignificant, not so important. To be only one small decibel in the great chorus of beings is to recognize how much we are part of all existence. None of us is the whole orchestra. Yet what happiness, to be part of that music.

Yeah. I love that. It echoes one of my favorite lines from any poem, from Denis Johnson’s “Looking Out the Window Poem” (a poem-cousin to Hirshfield’s “My Wonder,” now that I think about it):

If I am alive now,   
it is only

to be in all this
making all possible.

I love these moments of poetry and humility especially now, as I sit here writing this on what is sometime around the fourth anniversary of starting this little newsletter. I want to talk about that now, if that’s okay. About these four years. Because, well, maybe, reading this, you are wondering if I realize — as you probably have, if you’ve read at least two of these over-two-hundred-essays — that nearly every one of these essays is about possibility or frailty or wonder or attention or humility or limitation or permission or awe. And the answer is yes. Resoundingly. I do realize that. And I accept it. And I am trying to embrace it lately, if I am being honest. Because so much of this world is about change and growth and adaptation and things like that. Change or die, people sometimes say. Adapt, adapt, adapt. But then I pick up Hirshfield’s entire oeuvre from the library and see that, in 1988, she wrote a poem that began with the line Some questions cannot be answered and that, in 2023, she wrote another that contained the lines Each day it grows harder to say / how all this happened / and continues to happen.

Thirty five years in between those lines, and still the questions.

What I mean is that, despite all of our emphasis on change, which is often an emphasis that exists in the name of capital and consumption, I read a book that contained a whole poet’s life and saw, through such reading, a near-obsessive openness to the unanswerable, a belief that it is okay to sit in one place by one window and look, and look, and look, and to find, through such looking, not the answer that will stop such looking, but the various possibilities that will make you keep looking, and asking, and wondering — all the way until the end, whatever the end means.

And maybe that is one definition, among many, of poetry. The looking without answering. The asking. The wondering. And the fact of it all — forever.

And maybe that is one thing, among many, that I have learned in these years of writing these little essays. Because I feel the pressure of the opposite. Believe me, I do. And by the opposite, I mean: I have felt, over these years, the pressure that pushes against the unanswerable, the wonderful, and even the ordinary. It is a pressure that asks so what or how much or both of those questions and more. It is a pressure that is overt. It’s there in the emails I receive, near daily, from Substack — emails that give me advice on how to monetize this newsletter, to help it generate revenue, emails that tell me which things I should put behind a paywall or how many more clicks I would get it if I just moved that subscribe button a little further up the page.

It’s a pressure that exists everywhere. It exists, sadly, in all the years I’ve spent teaching both before and while writing these little essays. The pressure that might tell me a class is only as good as its testing data. The pressure that defines success for a student as their monetary gains in the years that follow. It’s a pressure that takes complexity, wonder, questioning, astonishment, and awe, and then asks, of a child: so what or how much or what will you do with this? It reduces the possible. It shrinks a child’s conception of the future into one career, into an idea of work. Sometimes, too — it shrinks their joy into seriousness, as if joy is not serious. I’d like to unshrink it all. To believe in people’s capacity to be open to the possible, and to let that openness help define their life, not in some narrow way, but in a way that is at once accepting and imaginative.

As I have written some version of the same essay nearly every week for the last four years, I have been struck by this — how, just by virtue of being someone with subscribers on this platform, I am being asked to change, to generate, to innovate. And it’s true that, just by being alive and aware in the world, I have also felt that pressure internally, from a place inside of me, the place that sometimes wonders about clicks and likes and subscribers and all of that. Oh, I don’t like that place inside of me. But it’s there. And, for me, at least it is somewhat of a privilege to be able to try to ignore that place and that pressure, seeing as I have a job I love (for the most part, despite the burnout I often feel and the emails and texts I end up ignoring and the standards I am asked to hit and the strangeness of the various dissonances I feel along the way, in every classroom, every day).

And so yes, one of the great joys of reading poems over these past four years is the permission that they have granted me to wonder, so often, about the same things. It is a gift. I think of what Eula Biss wrote about the “gift economy” of poetry in Having and Being Had:

The poets I knew made their money like everyone else, as teachers or bartenders, but what they did for poetry, and for each other, was most often given away.

And later, from an interview in The Believer:

That’s the gift of literature—it’s transformation, but it’s transformation you have to participate in.

One dissonance of this world is that it shouldn’t be this way — that poets and those who spend their time wondering about the possible and the permissible and the wonderful and the strange should be able to live in this way and amidst such questions without resorting to competing amongst each other for money and recognition and fame in order to make do. And yet, despite the sorrow of living in a world that rarely appreciates the complexity of the unanswerable, there is something beautiful about the gift of it — about the words I’ve heard for free in the back rooms of bars and the books inscribed for me by people I’ve only met once and the countless stacks of dog-eared pages I have next to me right now, little and long lines of wonder that have reminded me that it’s okay to think a little different or look a little longer or dream a little bigger or be a little more joyful or rage, yes rage, for another hour or two or more.

For all the talk of change and adaptation in this world, for all the drive to monetize and individualize and revamp, when I read poetry each week and when I sit down to write these little essays, I enter a space where it is okay to obsess about the same things. To turn over the same page in the light of the same window. That’s fucking awesome, I think. I think it really is.

And so I think I’d like to keep doing it for a little while longer. Because it still feels like a little gift I’ve given myself, a way to talk about something I care about, and a way to be read for such care — wild fact that is. Thank you for that, really. All of this still feels like that gift. Like a way to appreciate friends, or read again a poet I once heard years ago in the back room of a bar. A way, sometimes, maybe often, to ruminate about the same things, and a way to learn — which I am still learning — how to not shame myself for all that sameness. Because poetry has taught me that, among many things. That it is okay to be obsessive. Maybe more than okay. That obsession is part of being aware and alive.

To be a person might be possible then, after all.

To be a person. To be a poet. To be in love. To be different. To be the same. To be someone who asks, over and over again, the same question. To be here for the short and long time. To be fragile and frail. To be obsessed. To be grateful and graceful and even a little stumble-y. To be alive. To be alive at all. It might be possible then, after all.

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Some notes:

1. As I will continue to mention, Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here. Here, too, is a link to the New York War Crimes page — their ongoing publication.

2. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.