Jane Hirshfield

About:

The cultivation of close and permeable attention will be the taproot of this advanced-level workshop. In writing new poems, and in reading work by fellow participants and others, we will bring an open, intimate, and tenacious looking to words, worlds, and the craft-informed relationship between them where poetry begins. The workshop sessions will include generating a variety of poetic "starts" (whether rough drafts or near-finished poems), and, equally important, making conscious the nameable elements of craft that underlie poetry's power to conjure, transform, delve, evoke, counter, move, unravel, expose, augment, and surprise. Both mystery and generosity are also part of any genuinely creative act. These are ungovernable and ultimately undomesticable forces. Yet they too can be invited, welcomed. A permeable and acute attention is the door through which unforeseeable energies slip into good poems.

The morning workshop will include writing experiments, close-reading responses to poems, and conversation on craft. Afternoons and evenings will be left free for writing, reading, and exploring Key West. Please bring writing materials, copies of four poems not your own (a page or less in length) which you particularly admire, and copies of one recent poem of your own for possible workshop discussion.

Requirements:

This workshop is past.

Biography:

Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City and graduated from Princeton University in 1973. She then worked on a farm for a year, picking corn, peaches, apples, and pumpkins. After moving to California, she studied for eight years at the San Francisco Zen Center and Tassajara Zen Mountain Center– which she first learned of through an early edition of the Tassajara Bread Book. As part of her training in Zen, she was made one of the original dinner cooks at Greens Restaurant, where she worked for three years with founding chef Deborah Madison; she later helped edit The Greens Cookbook. The author of six books of poetry, including After, which was named a "best book of 2006" by The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and England's Financial Times, Hirshfield has taught at UC Berkeley, Duke University, and Bennington College.

Hirshfield's other poetry collections include The Lives of the Heart and Given Sugar, Given Salt, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also written the highly influential prose collection, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and translated and edited the works of early women poets in several collections, including The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu. Her poetry has been called "radiant and passionate" by The New York Times Book Review, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Slate, Orion, and England's Times Literary Supplement, as well as various textbooks, anthologies, and five editions of The Best American Poetry. She is regularly featured on Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac public radio program, and has been the subject of two Bill Moyers PBS television specials.

Hirshfield's honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets 40th Chancellors' Fellowship, an honor previously held by Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Frost. She lives in California and is at work on a new collection of poems, First Light Edging Cirrus, forthcoming from Knopf in August 2011.