Frogpond 34.3 • Autumn 2011 (pdf) - Haiku Society of America

Essays
At the Heart of The Heart of Haiku: An Interview
with Jane Hirshfield
by Ce Rosenow, Eugene, Oregon
This interview was conducted by e-mail in August, 2011.
CE: Thank you, Jane, for agreeing to this interview. I think your
Kindle Single, The Heart of Haiku, will be of interest to many
haiku poets, as will your comments about this essay. You have
a long history of printed publications, and you have described
yourself previously as someone who is not especially comfortable
with computer technology. What prompted you to circulate
The Heart of Haiku as a Kindle Single?
JANE: Thank you—I appreciate the chance to talk about this
with what I see as this piece’s most natural audience, the haiku
community.
Bringing this piece out as a Kindle Single was an experiment—I
had never read an e-book myself before this came out. I have
to admit, I don’t really like reading on-screen. But many others
do, and mostly I did this because the description for the Single
program fit exactly what I had: an essay-lecture too long for
publication in any magazine, but not long enough for a formal
printed book. I had thought about expanding it into a regular
book—but I’d have needed to polish many more of the new
translations I’d done (with the invaluable help of Mariko Aratani,
my co-translator for the classical-era tanka poets in The Ink
Dark Moon), and I’d also have needed to round the book more
fully. I do now wish I had put some back matter into even this
Single—a “further resources” section, for instance. But I never
could quite decide to expand it, the piece stayed on my desk, and
when the suggestion to submit this to the new Kindle Singles
program came up, I took it almost on impulse. I didn’t actually
expect them to accept it—it’s by far the most literary thing
on their list so far. And then from acceptance to publication
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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