few words about Jane Hirshfield’s After:

An odd thing about the blurbs: Robert Bly cites “The Envoy” as “one of the greatest poems of the last fifty years”—but “The Envoy” doesn’t seem to be in the book. Also, Hirshfield calls several of these poems “Assays.” The term “Assays” was used by Kenneth Rexroth as a title for a book of his “essays.” In Rexroth there are various jokes, puns and ironies present in the term. In Hirshfield I don’t think quite as many are present. Rexroth’s term undoubtedly included a reference to our hindquarters, for example; I don’t think Hirshfield’s does—though she may be suggesting ironically that her poem is the product of an ass (donkey, silly person). It’s like one of those Borges stories in which the same text generated by different people has different meanings. At any rate, Hirshfield never mentions that she takes the term from Rexroth.

Several of the poems printed in After appeared initially in The American Poetry Review. This essay (assay) includes what I wrote in response to the APR selection along with some additional comments.

I rather liked APR’s opening Hirshfield poem, “Theology,” but the very next poem, “Hesitation: An Assay,” had these unintentionally funny lines:

The rain 
comes to it hard or less hard, 
but knows nothing of hesitation’s rake-toothed debate. 

What in the world is that supposed to mean? Sometimes it rains “hard”; sometimes it rains “less hard.” True enough. (Sometimes, one might add, it fails to rain at all.) If these lines weren’t by a poet of some reputation, would they have been published in so widely read and influential a periodical as APR? What exactly is “hesitation’s rake-toothed debate”? Are we talking the Hamlet problem here?

I think in fact the lines mean very little. People have consciousness, make choices, and so they sometimes hesitate in making these choices. “The rain,” on the other hand, operates in a very different mode of causality. That’s perfectly true. But there is an oracular quality to Hirshfield’s language (“comes to it hard or less hard,” “hesitation’s rake-toothed debate”) which seems to insist that that truth has more significance than in fact it does. These poems are constantly winking at you, telling you, “I’m saying this, but really I mean something different and much more profound.” “A fidelity to the ungraspable lies at the very root of being,” Hirshfield writes in an essay—also published in APR—“Thoreau’s Hound: On Hiddenness.” The lines quoted above seem to be a perfectly “graspable” assertion trying hard to assure us that it is ungraspable. Indeed, the opening poem of APR’s selection (“Theology”) sounds like a kinder, gentler John Ashbery—minus Ashbery’s ever-present irony:

If the flies did not hurry themselves to the window 
they’d still die somewhere. 
Other creatures choose the other dimension: 
to slip

into a thicket, swim into the shaded, undercut 
part of the stream. 
My dog would make her tennis ball

disappear.... 

It seems to me that these lines verge on the unintentionally comic, as do many of Hirshfield’s lines. “If the flies did not hurry themselves to the window / they’d still die somewhere.” True enough—flies die—but also certainly on the trite side. The poem immediately veers away from its opening formulation, however, trying to assure us of its profound intent with the mysterious, portentous line, “Other creatures choose the other dimension.” The other dimension, oh, yes. Faced with the utter failure of explanation—its inability to explain anything—the tramps in Waiting for Godot respond to such formulations with “Ah!” Perhaps that is how Hirshfield expects her readers to react. (One of the poems in After is called “‘Ah! An Assay.”)

While occasionally veering towards the philosophical (as in “the other dimension”), Hirshfield’s language is unfailingly genteel and for the most part rather flat and prosy. Who would want to defend the musicality of a passage like this—also from “Theology”?

The flies might well prefer the dawn-ribboned mouth of a trout, 
its crisp and speed, 
if they could get there,

though they are not in truth that kind of fly 
and preference is not given often in these matters. 

That sounds like a passage T.S. Eliot would rightly have excised from Four Quartets. (“Its crisp”? The only current meaning I can find for the word “crisp” as a noun is British: “potato chip.”) Compare such language to any lines at all by Gerard Manley Hopkins or Dylan Thomas. Hirshfield comes nowhere near such poets. The exciting “musicality” of poetry—of language—is not to be found in her work.

Jane Hirshfield is a real person who actually exists and who writes poetry with a serious intention. Yet suppose for just a moment that she were, like Ern Malley, a hoax created to expose the stupidity, pretentiousness and lack of humor of the reader. How would that affect our response to lines like these?

What can I do with these thoughts, 
given me as a dog is given its flock? 
Or perhaps it is the reverse— 

Wouldn’t we find them funny (which is not what the poet expects us to find them)?

Jane Hirshfield is a poet of considerable reputation, and I doubt that what I am writing here will have any effect on that fact. Certainly what I’m writing may be genuinely unfair. Yet, as I read through her poetry, I couldn’t help thinking, “Isn’t there anyone to say something about this kind of writing, with its immense pomposity and its utter lack of humor? Is the Empress decked out to the nines—as she appears in APR’s cover photo—or is she naked?” “Mystery,” writes Hirshfield in “Thoreau’s Hound: On Hiddenness,” “secrecy, camouflage, silence, stillness, shadow, distance, opacity, withdrawal, namelessness, uncertainty, shyness, lying, erasure, encryption, enigma, absence, darkness—these are some of the kaleidoscope names of the hidden, each carrying its own description of something whose essence it is to elude describing.” Perhaps. But perhaps it is not a question of “eluding describing.” Perhaps it is simply a question of eluding detection—a deliberate obfuscation of the commonplace in order to appear profound. (“It is not precisely true that they are absent,” Hirshfield writes in “Poe: An Assay,” “though it is true that they do not appear.”)

I don’t deny that there are some effective poems in After. The elegiac, haiku-like “Red Scarf,” for example, is genuinely touching—though it is perhaps a little too close to Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow”:

The red scarf 
still hangs over the chairback. 
In its folds, 
like a perfume 
that cannot be quite remembered, 
inconceivable before. 

For L.B. (1950-2004)

But the book contains such a weight of the portentous: “Questions and answers are not the business of rain”; “Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons”; “A person is full of sorrow / the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.”

What do people like when they say they like Jane Hirshfield’s work? “Wisdom” is a word which comes up often in discussions of Hirshfield. “Poems of quiet wisdom, steeped in a profound understanding of what it is to be human,” runs one of the blurbs to After. But “wisdom” which does not in any way astonish or thrust us into the realm of the new is all too likely to be simply a reflection of the beliefs of the status quo—what Heidegger called the “They Self” (das Mann). That, I’m afraid, is the realm of Hirshfield’s poetry. Her deliberate oracularity (I sound trite but I’m really being profound), her flat language, her utterly bourgeois sensibility, and her clichés masquerading as discoveries are all on display in “Tree,” a celebrated poem published in one of her earlier books:

It is foolish 
to let a young redwood 
grow next to a house. 

Even in this 
one lifetime, 
you will have to choose. 

That great calm being, 
this clutter of soup pots and books— 

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. 
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life. 

Is that poem really any better than Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”? Is it really any different from Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”? Isn’t its sentimentality, its vague religiosity (is a redwood tree really a “great calm being,” does it really represent “immensity”?) essentially the same as Kilmer’s?

I think that I shall never see 
A poem lovely as a tree. 

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest 
Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast; 

A tree that looks at God all day, 
And lifts her leafy arms to pray; 

A tree that may in summer wear 
A nest of robins in her hair; 

Upon whose bosom snow has lain; 
Who intimately lives with rain. 

Poems are made by fools like me, 
But only God can make a tree.

© Jack Foley