Poetry: The Unfolding Of What Is Hidden with Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield points out that many people turn to poetry in times of great life transitions. She says, “You know when people fall in love, or when they lose love, or lose someone they loved, that is when they want a poem. When they get married, they want a poem. These great transitions are larger than the normal, ordinary consciousness. And what poems do is give us a vocabulary for understanding things, which isn’t available through any other use of language.” Her poetry alludes to far ranging subjects such as time, nature, and even science. Here she reads some of her poems and talks of the inspiration from which they come and why they speak to us and move us beyond our rational minds and our busy intellect through metaphors and images. She shares with us why poetry, and other art forms like music, speak so deeply to the heart and soul. (hosted by Justine Willis Toms)

Bio

Jane Hirshfield is a poet, translator, and essayist and is the author of many collections of poetry and other books, including three collections of women poets from the past. Her awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Arts, three Pushcart Prizes, the California Book Award, The Poetry Center Book Award, and other honors. Her poems appear regularly in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry and have been included in six editions of The Best American Poetry.

Her poetry books include:

• The October Palace: Poems (HarperCollins 1994)
• The Lives of the Heart: Poems (HarperCollins 1997)
• Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (HarperCollins 1994)
• Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (Perennial 1998)
• After: Poems (HarperCollins 2006)
• Given Sugar, Given Salt: Poems (HarperCollins 2001)
• The classic translation of the ancient Japanese court women, The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Onono Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (Vintage 1990)
• Come, Thief: Poems (Knopf 2011)
• Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Alfred A. Knopf 2015)
• The Beauty: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf 2015)

To learn more about the work of Jane Hirshfield go to www.facebook.com/janehirshfield.

Topics Explored in This Dialogue

• What is the history of the word observation
• Why do many people turn to poetry when great transitions occur in their lives
• How poems help us to fully inhabit what is incomprehensible through logic
• How writing poetry should be an act of discovery, rather than a transcription of what we already know
• How does poetry stop time
• How lichen is integral to the health of old growth redwood forests
• How can we cultivate the attention of a writer
• What is the seven word description of Buddhism

Host: Justine Willis Toms          Interview Date: 9/7/2011         Program Number: 3410

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