Jane Hirshfield - Possibility, Poetry, and a Life of Attention
It would feel wrong to place labels on Jane Hirshfield. Language would fail to reach there, ironic for someone who has devoted their life to the practice of poetry and the practice of Zen Buddhism. Jane is a modern master, change-maker, and wise and winsome voice.
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In the wake of Jane's life is poetry, essays, teachings, and wisdom. She's the author of ten collections of poetry, including The Asking: New and Selected Poems (2023); Ledger (2020); The Beauty (2015), longlisted for the National Book Award; and Come, Thief (2011), a finalist for the PEN USA Poetry Award.
She’s also a magnificent essayist, authoring two books of essays on poetry and how it works and the poetic mind: Nine Gates, Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows, How Great Poems Transform the World.
Her poems and life increasingly reflect her long-standing interest in science and the meeting places with poetry. She has been a part of pioneering programs to create and foster dialogue between artists and scientists, including visiting artist positions in neuroscience and ecology departments country-wide. In 2017, Jane organized the first "Poets For Science" gathering--a component of the main Washington D.C. March for Science held on Earth Day. Poets For Science remains a participatory project and a meeting place for different ways of knowing.
Jane received her BA from Princeton University in its first graduating class to include women, and went on to study at the San Francisco Zen Center for eight years, three of them in monastic practice.
In attempting to reckon with what years of reading Jane's poetry have worked in me, I can only start with a list of words, emotions that emanate from me as I think across: attention, spaciousness, meditation, hunger, tenderness, sensuality, roundness; Indeed, many of the words that come to mind seem paradoxical--immensity and smallness, majesty and mundanity, exhilaration and stillness, revolution and refuge--but they are paradoxical only until we change ourselves around them. Her poetry seems simple, but reveals itself most complex; seems to be about the ordinary, but whose lifeblood is the deepest moral, ethical, and spiritual questions.
So this is a conversation about how these words begin to rub together--the makings of poetry, and in the way that poetry is a part of us, not something separate, the makings of a life. And it is also a conversation about what poetry works in us.
Jane Hirshfield's writing, like all art, is a gift. And it is a gift to be able to speak with her.