Jane Hirshfield - Poetry 2003 - Key West Literary Seminar

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Kim Addonizio
John Ashbery
Lucille Clifton
Billy Collins
Robert Creeley
Martín Espada
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Carolyn Forché
Forrest Gander
Dan Gerber
Jane Hirshfield
Carolyn Kizer
Dorianne Laux
Semezdin Mehmedinović
Sharon Olds
Charles Simic
James Tate
Quincy Troupe
Derek Walcott
Richard Wilbur
C. D. Wright

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TWENTY-FIRST ANNUAL
Key West Literary Seminar

the beautiful changes
poetry 2003

Jane Hirshfield
Read Jane Hirshfield's The Poet

Jane Hirshfield's poetry, called "radiant and passionate" by the New York Times Book Review, expresses the interconnection of human and natural worlds. Through five collections of poems, her work addresses the life of the passions, the way the objects and events of everyday life are informed by deeper wisdoms, and the darkness, losses, and fracturing that are also our shared fate. Whether writing about aging, ink, the Velvet Revolutions of Eastern Europe, or the heart as an origami-like field assuming ever different shapes, Hirshfield searches continually for the points where new knowledge of the world and self may appear. Resonantly clear and shapely, her poems hold penetrating feeling and insight in a clean and moving marriage of image and statement. Hirshfield's essays on "the mind of poetry" have been called by The Japan Times "an indispensable manual for any writer"; Ploughshares magazine has said that Hirshfield's prose "reinvigorates our thinking about art" and called Nine Gates "surely one of the most eloquent books ever written about poetry." In addition, by compiling two widely read anthologies collecting the work of women poets from the past, Hirshfield has helped create a widened awareness of the long literary record of women's spiritual and emotional lives. As writer, public reader, and teacher, Hirshfield demonstrates an intimate and profound mastery of her art, and both her readings and workshops are much in demand. A former visiting associate professor at UC Berkeley, Elliston Visiting Poet at the University of Cincinnati, and lecturer in University of San Francisco's Masters in Writing program, Hirshfield is currently on the faculty of the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars; she has served as a guest poet at the Universities of Alaska, Minnesota, Alabama, and Michigan, as well as summer conferences and writers centers throughout the country.

"Hirshfield's poems renew, reaffirm the power of language to move deeply, to articulate experience precisely . . . Her poems are meant to endure." --- The Antioch Review

Jane Hirshfield is the author of five collections of poetry: Given Sugar, Given Salt, The Lives of the Heart, The October Palace, Of Gravity & Angels, and Alaya, as well as a book of essays on poetry, Nine Gates. She also edited and co-translated two poetry anthologies: The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan and Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women. Hirshfield's honors include The Poetry Center Book Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, Columbia University's Translation Center Award, the Commonwealth Club of California Poetry Medal, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, and many other Publications.

The Poet

She is working now, in a room
not unlike this one,
the one where I write, or you read.
Her table is covered with paper.
The light of the lamp would be
tempered by a shade, where the bulb's
single harshness might dissolve,
but it is not; she has taken it off.
Her poems? I will never know them,
though they are the ones I most need.
Even the alphabet she writes in
I cannot decipher. Her chair --
let us imagine whether it is leather
or canvas, vinyl or wicker. Let her
have a chair, her shadeless lamp,
the table. Let one or two she loves
be in the next room. Let the door
be closed, the sleeping ones healthy.
Let her have time, and silence,
enough paper to make mistakes and go on.

© Jane Hirshfield

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