An APR In the Studio column, from American Poetry Review, January/February 2009
A studio is a place felt safe enough for changing inside of. It can be as tiny as a beach cabana whose modesty door goes down only so far as the knees. Outside, the feet of others pass by, some bare and sandy, some sneakered, others in thin white rubber thongs. Inside, sweatshirts, pants, wet bathing suits smelling of salt water and mildew, your own awkward and slightly ridiculous body. I have not been in or thought of such a space—it can hardly be called a room—for 40 years now. But this is what studio-thinking does: throws light outward, in every direction of place and time. A studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life and a little beyond.
A studio can be pin clean or a disorderly shambles, as can the person inside it, sometimes going from one to another in the space of a sentence. For some, it can be a loved bench in a public park. But for me, the ability to be (as in that prepubescent beach-side changing room with its muffled wave sounds) invisible and unlooked at is the roof, walls, woodstove, and foundation of every workable studio I've had, and so my earliest studio was not a place but a time. Throughout childhood I wrote late at night, when my family slept and I could turn a light back on without knock or fear of interruption. I hardly knew who I was then, but I was bent on the work of assemblage and dissassemblage, of making and unmaking the brickwork and pollen-dust that would reveal to me my own feelings and my own life. This late-night labor I did not speak of, and showed no one. Work not done for school or parents or friends, it was simply a task I could not turn away.
I skipped my second year of college not least to be given sooner a room of my own.
After graduating, I worked for a time on a New Jersey farm. The farmer, a thin, kind man in his early thirties, was the last of four sons of a family whose name, spelled Cordelieu on the earliest tombstones, must have meant "heart of place." They had kept that land for 400 years. Kip and his schoolteacher wife were trying to make a go of what must have long ago now become many-acred tracts of high-end houses. In some back yards, an ancient peach or apple perhaps still stands; I have never gone back to see. Even for an acrophobic, those trees' rowed, fragrant heights, entered by tall, three-legged ladders, were a paradise: an intoxicating opening between worlds for someone who had grown up on East 20th Street in New York. Even the flat cornfields, with their orderly standing ledgers of Silver Queen and Buttter & Sugar, were a silked counterbalance to the kinds of knowledge I was used to consuming. I ate the sweet-milked kernels raw, a few fattened ears each morning for breakfast, before starting to pick for the farm's roadside truck stand. An open-faced shed, over the seasons its offerings moved from spring lettuce to plums and apricots, to peaches, apples, pears, tomatoes, potatoes, and finally cider and pumpkins before shutting down for the year.
My then-boyfriend and I rented, along with three others we hardly knew, a large house on another farm, already failed, in Hightstown. Our section was a suite of two rooms accessed by either the main entryway's staircase or a narrower set leading up from a small white door at the back of the kitchen. For someone who had grown up in a postwar apartment project made of red brick, without any unknowable history or hidden dimension (except when the elevator would abruptly stop between floors and open its door to grey-stained concrete), that back staircase was itself an unflagging, private pleasure: It was possible to get somewhere by more than one route.
Our rooms had belonged to the son of the vacating farm family, who, on his return from the Vietnam War, had painted the hallway and larger room—our bedroom—an inexplicable, painful pink. We bought rollers and brushes but also cannibalized a leaning shed, a chicken or pig coop probably, for its boards. Ed hammered the splintered, silvery wainscoting up to our shoulders; it was like sleeping inside a fence of spellbound and tarnishing mercury. But the other, smaller room—that room was mine. We steamed and scraped the layers of wallpaper down to plain boards, then painted the walls yellow, the floor dark red. Two double-hung windows looked out over the barnyard and beyond, to soybean fields rented out to a neighboring farmer. We brought in an oak desk and bookcase, a birds' eye maple dresser, a chair. The floorboards muttered under a Baluchistan rug I still own, its torn corner finally repaired, bought for $25 at the same splendid flea market as the other furnishings. Those I left behind when we moved on to our separate futures, believing it would be easy to find such treasures again as cheaply.
Back then, I wrote to music. One night, I put on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue. If I was writing when it began, by the time the album ended, writing had stopped. As I had. The last note finished, and no music was there, no self, no Jane, no room, only the repeating click of a phonograph needle approaching over and over the central spindle and falling back to reapproach again; beyond that, darkness and audible rain extended without any limit in every direction, a vastness into whose ship's hold I had vanished. Ed came running into the yellow room: Why was I crying? I could not answer, but knew it was not anything so personal as grief. Something closer, I can say now, to what the Romans called lacrimae rerum, or the Japanese mono no aware, had taken my eyes, my ears for its own. I wept for the beings and things, their suffering, their transience, their plunging perfection, and I wept because I had somehow stepped onto and into a scale without measure.
Within the year, I had made my way to a monastery in California, the first in America where a person could practice Zen in the traditional Japanese way, rising at 3:40 in the morning, sitting zazen and eating with oryoki bowls in the zendo, living and working mostly in silence. I have never listened to Sounds of Blue again. Such doors do not open twice.
In monastic life, the studio shrinks to the size of a small black cushion, and what is made is shaped in the kiln of ribs and hips, the open oval of the hands. The place of words in my life was not on the page. When those three years of intensive training were finished and I moved on to practicing Zen in a setting less rigorous of schedule, poetry refound me. Still, it was seven years before I again had a room whose only purpose was writing.
That 1981 studio still seems to me the one closest to archetype, and it remains the strongest in memory, as perhaps any first love is recalled most fiercely. A ten-by-ten foot outbuilding, its three outward-facing walls entirely window from waist-height to roof, it sat at the far edge of the deck of another shared house, in Muir Beach, a tiny enclave north of the Golden Gate and south of Bolinas. The community had put in a system of potable water only a few years before; before that, people carried their drinking water over the hill by car. The rental came furnished, and in the studio a captain's bed, along the one unwindowed wall facing back towards the main house, offered its large wooden drawers for my papers. I was cooking at Greens Restaurant then, but had also begun working part time outside the Zen commmunity, teaching poetry in the schools. A small set of shelves held what books I had with room to spare. When I moved into that house, everything I owned could still be transported with ease in the back of a van, though by then the red Dodge Sportsman with tie-dyed curtains that had carried me from New Jersey (and had been for a time itself my studio, bedroom, kitchen, library, and moveable shelter) had been sold to a woman a few years younger, en route to Alaska.
While still living communally, at Green Gulch, a residential farm and Zen practice center in Muir Beach, I had finished my first book of poems in a borrowed studio half a mile up the road—an attic entered by ladder, with a little basket on a pulley to bring books or a sandwich and thermos of coffee up and down. The space was alchemical, and gratefully borrowed—as I have borrowed many writing spaces over the years since, at artist colonies or in the houses of friends—but it was not mine.
The hundred-square-foot writing cabin overlooking the beach, though, was mine, and a kind of vow: it held the life the yellow room had flung me out of and summoned me back to. Out its windows, across a quarter-moon cove of ocean studded with mussel-draped rocks, cows grazed the facing hills green with winter rains. Red-tailed hawks wheeled over the flatter fields behind the beach, looking for voles, snakes, any liftable and living thing that might move beneath, distracted from their circling by its own need to forage. I was twenty-nine, my first book would come out that August, in a volume of The Quarterly Review of Literature's series that included as well the first English-language translations of work by Lars Gustafsson and Wislawa Szymborska. From then on, I knew that somehow, however I lived, there would be some spot, if only the size of a corner chair, kept separate, preserved for poems. There would be a threshold, a place whose crossing would grant the refuge that keeps an animal—or a perplexed and lonely child—safe inside even her own fraught hungers.
About the Author
Jane Hirshfield's books of poetry include After (HarperCollins, 2006); Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Lives of the Heart (1997), The October Palace (1994), Of Gravity & Angels (1988), and Alaya (1982).
Philadelphia
Editors: Stephen Berg, David Bonanno, Elizabeth Scanlon
Copyright © 2009 by World Poetry, Inc.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
