I usually feel like a seamstress when I interview a poet. I ask a wide range of questions and then piece together the responses, trying to make a cohesive whole.

But when I interviewed Jane Hirshfield (below) recently, she made me feel more like a needle, diving into a sea of multi-hued fabric.

That was especially true when we talked about the approach she brings to her writing. Her training in Zen Buddhism – she spent three years in a monastery – gives her a perspective on mental attention that many will find helpful in our sound-bite, never-slow-down world. For her, the writing process is about more than finding an answer to some question – although that’s where her poems begin.

Writing is about more than identifying a tear in “the fabric of our contentment or inattention” – as she calls it – and stitching the torn parts back together so that what's left is “something stronger and deeper than the original material before it required re-making.”

Her ideas really struck me, because they help answer some age-old questions: How do I bring my writing more fully to the page? How do I train my thinking so that I’m more open and effective as a writer?

The labels we give ourselves – spiritual poet, nature poet, language poet, etc. – don’t really mean much.

What does matter, and what colors poetry, is the experience of plunging into and rising up from that mental space where we feel most alive, most essential, most ourselves. This sounds esoteric, I know, but every poet needs to find some way to reach this place. The questions and answers below, which didn’t fit into the profile I wrote on Hirshfield, may help in that process.

What kind of mind-set do you have when you write? 
My poems usually begin, paradoxically, in silence rather than words. Nothing new can arrive if the canvas is already filled, already crowded, and so each new poem, for me, comes out of a kind of unknowing and waiting in the face of whatever question is in me. This silence becomes a form of invitation, into which some new answer can begin to emerge.   

The kind of silence I’m describing shouldn’t be confused with nothingness. It’s more like a honing of concentration, or like the attentiveness of a hunter waiting to see what new life might be coming into view. A good poem creates some fresh distillation of life, worth remembering, worth revisiting.

And though it must come from your own life – what else is present, when sitting in that quiet place, but everything you are and know and have lived – it also feels like something that has arrived from a place of mystery, outside the already known.

Is writing like meditation?
Meditation and writing are, I feel, parallel paths. Each is a matter of entering into an altered state of mind and concentration, each is an opening toward what comes, shaped by the intention of invitation – 'I’ll open this door and see what comes through it.' The door is opened by the quality of the seeing.

What kind of meditation do you do?
Meditation is by its nature hard to describe objectively. But the form of zazen meditation I practice is called shikantaza: ‘just sitting.’ Its quality is that of a goal-less, ever-deepening awareness.

You sit, you breathe, you stay awake to what is. Just that. Eihei Dogen, who founded this particular school of Soto Zen in the 13th century, once said, “Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.” That feeling of intimacy, and of the immediacy and connection that exist between your own life and everything, is the experience of this kind of zazen.

“Just sitting,” without interruption or defense or distraction, you might notice that you are neither the instrument nor the player of your own existence. As with many simple things, the effect can change everything.

Tell me about the voice in your poems.
Voice in poetry is akin to a fingerprint: it cannot help but reveal the full and unique life behind it. It is not only what is said, but how: the timbre, the order of occurrence, what’s there and what isn’t there.

Voice comes from the part of the self that’s larger than the ego and larger than what can be consciously known. When I write my poems, in part what’s happening is that I hear them – not as an actual auditory hallucination, but they come in words, and those words have an intonation and a music that is a part of what they mean.

Is the imagination, or the self, enough? Or must you engage with the outside world?
I think there has to be engagement. Imagination and self can’t exist in isolation. Even a person who seeks out as much solitude as  I do must recognize that human experience and any sense of human meaning emerge from the meeting of inner and outer worlds and of moving through our engagement with others, whether those others are people or the existence of trees and insects and rivers and stones.

Self can’t exist in a vacuum, it’s made both of what we perceive as the self-inside-the-skin, so to speak, and of everything around that self. So the idea of any self-sufficient self is something of an illusion – at times a useful one, but still, more an image or a metaphor than the reality of who and what we are.

Our connection with all of existence is unbreakable as long as we live. It’s the source of our passion, our grief, our thoughts, our physical sustenance, and certainly our art, which is made after all of the shared substances of the world: language, stone, pigment, motion, song.”

Do you try to live a certain way?
I attempt to live with an honest, perhaps even a brutally honest attentiveness. I don’t know any other path than this to try to be an open and vulnerable participant in my life and what it brings me.

Everything I think about the nature of this life comes down to seven words: “Everything is connected; everything changes; pay attention.” And really, you only need the last two – if you’re paying attention, you’ll find out whatever else you need to know.

Do you have a muse of some sort?
'The muse' is really a name for the generative and creative power which is already present, or potentially present, in each of us, and yet not within the ego’s conscious control. Maybe the closest parallel would be to say that for me the muse of writing is similar to the one found in dreaming. We make the dreams, and yet the dreams are larger and wilder that we ourselves could ever be.

Is it a matter of tapping into some universal intelligence, where the poem has already been written?

No, I don’t think there’s a great supermarket in the sky where we can just go shopping for inspiration and wisdom and original thought and perception. It’s harder than that, and we ourselves have more responsibility than that.

If we want to live in a way that isn’t shallow or superficial or more than half asleep, we have to do our part. The life matters. Our job is to cultivate the field so it can grow something never quite seen before.”

Does that sense of discovery change or improve the poet? 
I’d say “enlarge” or even “liberate” rather than “improve.” Where does the self begin and end anyhow? Poetry crafts a larger self, one that knows more than the self that began writing the poem. That self isn’t quite 'me.' It’s closer to “us.”

All of us, even the trees and the mountains, each proposing each moment’s questions and answers to the great mystery that is existence. Maybe the only important exchange going on every moment is the question of attendance. “Here?” the universe asks us. 'Here,' we answer. Fulfilling that 'here' is what we will have of our life, in all its examinable and passionate details.