Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise: Three Generative Energies of Poetry

by Jane Hirshfield

In this innovative series of public lectures at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by "Bloodaxe", giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject. Jane Hirshfield examines the roles of hiddenness, uncertainty and surprise as they appear in poetry and other works of literature, in the life and psyche of the writer, and in the broader life of the culture as a whole. "Poetry and Thoreau's Hound Explorations of Hiddenness" go back to the beginning of literature. There is no paradise, no place of true completion, that does not include within its walls the unknown. In this lecture, Hirshfield explores the centrality and necessity of hiddenness in our lives, and elucidates both the uses of hiddenness and hidden meanings in the work of writers ranging from Homer to Cavafy, from Auden to Jack Gilbert.Poetry and Uncertainty - To be human is to be unsure, and if the purpose of poetry is to deepen the humanness in us, poetry will be unsure as well. This lecture illuminates the ways uncertainty - in poems, and in life - allows both broadened feeling and enlarged knowledge. Translations are central to this talk, which includes poems by Izumi Shikibu, Anna Swir, Fernando Pessoa and Paul Celan. "Poetry and the Constellation of Surprise Poems" preserve their inaugural newness in part because they are like the emotions - not object, but experience, event. Poems that last are those that do not lose the power to astonish. This lecture examines surprise as a central, unrecognised fulcrum of great poems. Three poems are then looked at in detail by Hirshfield as "Ithaka" by C.P. Cavafy, "Oysters" by Seamus Heaney and "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost.

Genres: Poetry, Writing, Nonfiction

64 pages, Paperback

First published March 10, 2008

About the author

Jane Hirshfield is the author of nine collections of poetry, including the forthcoming Ledger (Knopf, March 2020), The Beauty (Knopf, 2015), longlisted for the National Book Award, Come Thief (Knopf, August 23, 2011), After (HarperCollins, 2006), which was named a “Best Book of 2006” by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times and shortlisted for England’s T.S. Eliot Award; and Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award); as well as two now-classic books of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. She has also edited and co-translated three books collecting the work of women poets from the distant past, and one e-book on Basho and the development of haiku, The Heart of Haiku. Hirshfield’s other honors include The Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 40th Annual Distinguished Achievement Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, an honor previously received by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams. Her work has been featured in ten editions of The Best American Poems and appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement/TLS, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, Orion, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. Hirshfield’s poems have also been featured many times on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac as well as two Bill Moyers’ PBS television specials. She has presented her poems and taught at festivals and universities throughout the U.S., in China, Japan, the Middle East, the U.K., Poland, and Ireland. In 2019, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Hirshfield's appearance schedule can be found at:

Reviews

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three rather erudite essays about poetry, one each dedicated to hiddenness, uncertainty, and surprise. Why? Because, Jane believes, good poetry depends on at least one of these, better on two, and best on all three. No surprise there!

The first essay impressed me most not so much for JH's connections to poetry but to nature. She is well-versed in the importance of hiding and camouflage to life. Good poems, then, have ideas that often hide in plain view.

She quotes Keats: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter." Thus is hiddenness equated with imagination and wistfulness.

She quotes Emerson: "Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree." As anyone who has ever written a poem can tell you, the "night" hovering in fir trees on sunny days is really what they are after when they take pencil to paper, keyboard to monitor. Speak, antithesis, and all that.

In uncertainty, JH praises "committing ourselves to the toss." Yes, poetry is controlled, but it is also tethered uncertainty with all its lovely contradiction. Leap, and you land in new locations, changing the perspective and leading, perhaps, to discovery.

We must, then, make of uncertainty a home, says JH. I can only add in reply, "Don't we do this already as part of the Faustian deal called life? We enter and must accept quotidian uncertainty until Death seals the deal (and most certainly, too)."

Finally, best of all, surprise. I particularly liked this essay because JH spends some time unpacking three wonderful poems: Cavafy's "Ithaka," Seamus Heaney's "Oysters," and Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay." I was very familiar with the first and last, less so with the middle, but I was glad to meet Heaney's poem and found it stood in good company without being overwhelmed in the least.

If you're looking for earth-shattering insights into poetry, this might not be the book. JH's is a lighter touch. Her essays wander like a child in a garden with time on her hands. Before long, she is hidden. Before long, her presence in the garden becomes uncertainty until -- surprise! -- she emerges from its topiary maze and shows off her knowledge.

Leisurely and edifying, then. And a voice of both innocence and experience....

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Always a delicious pleasure and true joy to follow the mind of Jane Hirshfield wending its way through the byways and conundrums of poetry. As often, she adds perspectives from science that sharpen and improve the view.

[Bohemian Book Lover · Rating 5 out of 5]

*Hirshfield's profound examination, lyrical insights & wide-ranging reflections on poetry's hidden depths, its resigned negotiations with the
*Unknowable, & its vital element of astonishing the mind are the life-attuned/affirming lessons of not only an expert poet in her own right, but that of a great
*Sage/Zen Master who didn't need 300+ pages to illuminate, enrich, engross & blow me away with every paragraph perused & poem elucidated. These 3 exceptional essays were read on the very date of her 73rd birthday, which made the reading experience of them even more special.

[Jenny Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a rich and inspiring read and reread.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jane Hirshfield is a favorite port of mine, and I love her essays as well as her poetry. She uses very good examples of poems in these essays. One of her comments on Jack Gilbert's "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" in the essay Hiddenness is "To read it is to feel oneself restored to some partially forgotten complexity and fullness of being..." I love that.