What struck me most about the birthday party I attended July 29 was not the gifts – a Bartlett pear tree, a proclamation from the governor – or the fact that the guest of honor was not there (he was resting at his summer home in Provincetown). No, what stood out about this celebration, in honor of poet Stanley Kunitz’s centennial year, was what happened once the cake was cut.

Yes, the dedication ceremony on the grounds of the Tower Hill Botanic Garden in Boylston, Mass., was lovely. The leaves of the pear tree swayed in the breeze as the president of the Worcester County Botanical Society talked about Kunitz’s boyhood in the city of Worcester. He described the poet’s two forms of cultivation – gardening and writing – and the early losses Kunitz suffered. (His father committed suicide before he was born, and the stepfather he adored died unexpectedly.) As the president noted, Kunitz had “turned a sand dune into an oasis,” and not just at his home in Provincetown, Mass.

Then Debra Kang Dean, an accomplished poet in her own right, read Kunitz’s famous poem, “My Mother’s Pears.” The last stanza, as you may know, ends with “Make room/for the roots!‘’ my mother cries,/ “Dig the hole deeper.” In many ways, that’s what Kunitz has done all his life. Making room for both poems and younger poets.

After she’d finished reading, Ms. Kang Dean noted that,“A poet’s words travel. Poems become kind of a body, or an essense that we give body to with our voices.”

Once we’d moved inside for cake, it was easy to see how everyone at that celebration became part of a larger body. The room was full of people who wouldn’t normally spend time with one another: Young men with long ponytails and white-haired women in their bold red hats. Writers from the Worcester County Poetry Association – which co-sponsored the event – and children too young to hold a pencil. Poets who had studied with Kunitz, and people who knew only that he was a first-rate gardener.

But as each person took a slice of the cake – decorated to look like an open book – he or she offered a tribute to Kunitz, or a related story. One woman talked about a teacher of hers, who had studied with the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet years ago. He would read her work with a red pen in hand, and then draw a line through the last stanza. “The poem ends up here,” he would tell her. He expected excellence, but his approach was calm and evenhanded.

Imagine if everyone in the poetry world behaved the same way, rather than giving the kind of “swashbuckling” critiques and reviews so popular today. Does anything thrive when it’s  attacked with a machete?

But things do flourish, as one man explained, under the right circumstances. The anecdote he shared was of Kunitz two years ago, when, at 98, he seemed to be on his deathbed. Several of his closest friends had gathered around him, to say goodbye. Kunitz began talking about his garden, however, and the more he talked, the more he seemed to perk up. “Contact with soil and plants can be revivifying,” the man concluded.

The story I told was of watching Kunitz 10 years ago, when the New England Poetry Club had a cake in honor of his 90th birthday. He bent down to inspect the confection, a look of quiet satisfaction on his face. Then he picked up a knife and carefully cut around the 90 in the icing. He put that piece aside for himself, and then began slicing for others. It seemed so typical of the mentoring he had done over the years, as a founder of the Poets House in New York City and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He had nurtured poets at the college level and as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

The last comment I heard, as I was leaving the party, was from the president of the Botanical Society, who was showing people pictures of Kunitz’s yard. “We need to see the poet in his garden, or the creator in his Eden,” he said.

In many ways, we already had.

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.

A reader in France e-mailed me a question recently: "What do you do when words desert you?"

That’s a very different question than, "How do you deal with writer’s block?"

Often a block is temporary, and can be dissolved once the cause is identified.

Losing your words is much scarier, because the situation feels like a second shadow, and the voice that speaks to you over and over sounds suspiciously like your own. “Forget about writing again," it whispers with soft insistence. "You never really had the gift of poetry to start with. That was a fluke, an illusion."

Don’t let that mockingbird fool you.

If you listen, it will flood your mind with its chatter. It will follow you from room to room and build nests in the backyard. Once that happens, it will attack anyone – or anything – that approaches.

Shoo the annoying bird away – no matter how loud it squawks – and then the cat hiding under the bushes can emerge.

Poetry often disguises itself that way, sitting so still that you almost miss it, except for the occasional flick of the tail or a tiny half-meow that says, “Feed me.”

If you’ve ignored poetry for a while, or it seems to have ignored you, then the cat may be in someone else’s yard, and you need to go find it.

Once you do, the feline will test your devotion, just as art will, circling a bit closer each time, but always remaining slightly out of reach. “How badly do you want me?” is the unspoken question both ask.

That’s what happened to me last summer, when I was trying to reclaim my poetry after months – years, really – of estrangement.

I had to relearn the rule of cats. Don’t pursue them, coax them.

In my case, the teacher was a white and orange feline that I happened to notice as I was walking down the street one day. The cat was sitting on the lawn of a large, prim white house that stands next door to a small, slouching cream house.

I said hello to the little sphinx, which ran toward me, and then backed away when I stuck out my hand.

When he approached again, I could see how very thin he was, with bald patches on his head and neck.

“You could be a beautiful creature,” I told him. But that would mean my feeding him every day – since no one else was, obviously – and sitting on the edge of the lawn every night, until he trusted me enough to let me look at his wounds.

“How badly do you want me?” was the nightly challenge.

Poetry asks the same thing, with a twist. “Do you want me enough to believe in your own abilities? Will you trust your silent center, rather than all those other voices?”

Those are difficult questions, especially if the world – or the face in the mirror – has convinced you that you have nothing valuable or new to say.

If you answer in the affirmative, though, poetry, like that cat, will assert its authority. It will allow you to lounge on the lawn one night, and make you sit in the middle of the sidewalk the next, even though you’re attracting the neighbors’ attention.

I can’t tell you how foolish I felt, sitting two or three feet away from the road as car after car sped by.

Night after night a local man walked past me, on his way back from some secret destination. He would stop and ask the same questions:

“Is the cat a boy or a girl?”

“A boy,” I’d answer.

“What’s her name?”

"I don't know."

A four-year-old girl who lives in the cream-colored house often came outside with questions of her own. One evening, she wanted me to see her pink princess blanket. The two of us – and the cat – sat on the blanket on that dirty strip of pavement and acted as if the situation were perfectly normal.

That’s what poetry asks us to do – to outgrow our hesitancy and disbelief, our paralyzing self-consciousness.

That’s when the words return. They insist on following you home, just as that orange-and-white stray finally did.

I named him Rumi, by the way, after the great mystic poet.

A poet friend told me about a strange scene he saw last week. Police had stopped traffic in his Boston neighborhood so a funeral procession could pass uninterrupted. The lineup began, as many do, with three policemen on motorcycles, followed by two black limos. But then there was an ambulance – an ambulance? – trailed by dozens of cars with funeral placards.

My friend later learned that the funeral was for a young Marine killed in Iraq. Inside the ambulance was his father, now a resident of Florida, who'd been so overcome by grief that he tried to set himself on fire. The story had been all over the news.

After a long silence, my friend and I started talking about poetry – its ability to offer comfort or solace, to be an antidote, even briefly, to the news. That's one of the things we love most about the art form, and I don’t think we’re alone.

Good poems are like secular prayer, or a primal scream that comes from someone else’s mouth. The right words remind you that you’re not alone. In some ways, they release you. Perhaps that’s why so many people feel an instinctive pull toward verse in times of trouble, even if they haven’t read a stanza in decades.

I kept thinking of these things – news and poetry, agony and antidote, the Marine’s father and unspeakable longing. Every time I pulled a book of poems from my shelf, the image of that ambulance sprang to mind. Does this effort measure up? Is there any balm here? Anything worth passing along?

Too often the answer was no (and I say this about my own poems, as well), despite that famous quote from William Carlos Williams: “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

In most cases, I would have settled for some genuine humanity, never mind lifesaving news. But even that was hard to find, especially when I picked up some recent literary journals, to see what they offered.

None of the poems seemed to get past the level of intellectual gymnastics. The prose about poetry was even worse, especially when it spent as much time complaining about an author’s personality as what he or she had written.

Attitude was more important than insight, it seemed, and anyone who’d made headlines was fair game. What would that grieving father think of such peevishness?

Most likely he wouldn’t have cared about the poetry world’s machinations, given what he had lost. But I raise the question because too often we poets have no idea how our behavior comes across to the general public. What might seem like scholarly debate to us looks like petty foolishness to people who are worried about burying a child, paying for daycare, or losing unemployment benefits.

One piece of commentary I read would have left many Americans saying, “See, this is why no one pays attention to poets.” The author, who may have been aiming for humor, went on and on about how useless poet laureates are. The wrong people get chosen (there is some truth to that), and making the art form accessible dilutes and debases it. Who wants his poems to be understood?

The “keep yourself pure and obscure” argument may be fashionable – in print and at literary parties – but it isn’t new or particularly helpful. In fact, it’s another example of how poets don’t see things the way others do.

Many in the literary world think that poet laureate appointments are meant to reward the best of the best. The title is one more prize to add to a full trophy chest.

Ideally, state and US laureates should be our finest writers. But news flash, many “average” Americans think that laureates are chosen for their benefit, and they believe that a laureate’s job is to connect with people who might not find poetry’s salve – or its passion – any other way.

Personally, I agree with that viewpoint, and I admit to feeling a twinge of hope whenever someone new is appointed. I want another Robert Pinsky – who continues his Favorite Poems project several years after leaving the office – or another Billy Collins, who brought poetry into high school classrooms in a subtle, non-threatening way.

Those are the laureates most people will remember. The ones who made news for all the right reasons. The ones who make the public feel that poets do care about the feelings of people riding in black limos or the back of ambulances.