Though Hirshfield had minimal exposure to the traditions of her Jewish heritage during her childhood, her maternal great-great-grandfather was a rabbi, and her maternal grandfather, who she describes as “something of a mystic,” was a member of the secretive Rosicrucian Order.Ĭurrently, Hirshfield lives in the Bay Area with Carl Pabo, a molecular biophysicist she affectionately refers to as her “sweetie.” She wears her long, wavy brown hair pinned loosely away from her face, a veil drawn back to frame wide, green eyes. It’s easier to trace her spiritual inheritance.
“No one in my family was literary,” she says, acknowledging that there’s no definitive answer to the question of why she became a poet. Hirshfield was born in New York City in 1953 to Robert Hirshfield, who worked in the garment industry making housecoats, and Harriet Miller Hirshfield. “Life is a good teacher, I find, if you pay attention,” she says. Although she no longer has a formal Buddhist teacher, she continues to practice Zen sitting meditation, or zazen. Her most recent collection, After, will be published in February by HarperCollins. Since leaving Tassajara she has published six collections of poems and a book of essays on “the mind of poetry.” In 2004, she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which puts her in the company of legends like Robert Frost and Robinson Jeffers. Hirshfield had been writing since she was a child and won The Nation prize for undergraduate writing, but during her residence at Tassajara she did not write at all, focusing instead on her Zen studies. She stayed only a week that first time at Tassajara-the first Zen training monastery in the West, founded by the late Shunryu Suzuki Roshi-but would soon return for three years in residence. “I just refused to leave.” Twenty-one years old, pitching herself from East Coast to West Coast, Hirshfield couldn’t have imagined where this journey would ultimately lead her, what future success she would have as a poet, or how deeply Zen and poetry would intertwine in her life. “But I unwittingly sat my first tangaryo,” says Hirshfield, alluding to the Zen tradition of a student demonstrating her commitment by sitting steadfastly at the entrance to the monastery, for days if necessary. In the summer of 1974, when poet Jane Hirshfield drove down the steep and dusty road to the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center just inland from the rugged northern California coast, no one was expecting her.
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