Poetry at the Albany Library

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First Thursdays: Featured Poet and Open Mic

December 4, 2008   7:00 to 9:00 p.m.

Featured Poet: Jane Hirshfield

The Jane Hirshfield Interview
from MiPoesias Magazine

Books by Jane Hirshfield
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 Jane Hirshfield           © PJ Taylor

A superb poet, essayist, translator, and teacher, Jane Hirshfield has been praised for work “both passionate and radiant” (New York Times Book Review) and “poems that brilliantly portray even mundane experiences as… revelation” (The Washington Post).

In addition to six poetry books, Hirshfield has co-edited and co-translated anthologies of women’s poetry and has published two essay collections that speak to the pleasures and challenges of a creative life.

Jane Hirshfield describes her current themes as “personal, environmental,  ?political, and universal (transience, our interconnectedness, gains, and loss),” but she quickly follows with the warning that “generalizing is the opposite of poem-making.” Her long practice of Zen Buddhism might contribute to how she discovers a poem by “allowing the mind to range as the psyche’s appetites direct  me . . . to see some new thing from the corner of the eye, and turn towards that.”

Bill Moyers featured Hirshield in his PBS series, “The Sounds of Poetry,” and in his book, Fooling With Words. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, and in five editions of The Best American Poetry .  She has been awarded grants from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and from the NEA and the Academy of American Poets.

After, Hirshfield’s most recent book of poetry, was short-listed for a T.S. Elliot Award and named Book of the Year by The Washington Post,  the San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times.

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