Jane Hirshfield

Finally, she just left.

And she wrote these beautiful poems and songs to Krishna, which have been translated now by a number of American poets, including Robert Bly and Jane Hirshfield, and they're amazing.

They're beautiful from a lot of different perspectives.

I mean, they're beautiful as devotional songs, but they're also amazing poems.

And I think, I mean, this poem reminds me as, as different as they are.

It reminds me of Decapo, the poem by Jane Hirshfield that we read a week or two back where she's, you know, take the used up pebble of your heart and throw it far out and then go home, chop onions and, satay and oil, and she gives us a recipe for re-enlivening ourselves.

And I think there's a lot of that in the body movement here that Olga is capturing.

But remember, the opening line is lineated such that the first thing that's articulated is slowly learning again to love.

Mm.

Um, and this book, if you're a poet, if you write poems and you don't have this book, what's going wrong with you? Um, this is Jane Hirshfield, Ten Windows.

Mm-hmm.

Why Ten Windows is important is basically it says poetry does change the world and why it changes the world and uses 10 great poems and 10 great poets to explain how they've changed their world.

Um, and it just, the, the book is written in this way, which again, it's a full poem.

It's 300 pages of a full poem.

Everything Jane Hirshfield writes is a poem.

Her poems are incredible, but her books are poems.

And maybe we pray it won't be utterly merciless and of a scale that we can scarcely comprehend.

I wanted to bring back Jane Hirshfield one more time.

So if you'll just bear with me, I love Jane and I want to share one more of hers as we wrap up today.

So let me find it.

I'm not gonna unpack all of it, but just a portion of it.

The poet is Jane Hirshfield.

Some of you might know that, uh, she's a well-known celebrated poet.

Uh, she lives here in the Bay Area and she's a Zen practitioner and lived at Tassajara which is a, a big, uh, Zen center that's associated with the San Francisco Zen Center.

So she's a practitioner and a poet and some of her poems point to something that I just, uh, take delight in.

So I'd like to share that with you this evening and, uh, I, um, heard somebody kind of like describe Jane Hirshfield's poems as offering pocket-sized dharma gates.

Pocket-sized.

Like you can just put it in your pocket and carry it with you.

I'm guessing that he was playing some games of Go, or at least thinking about it, to incorporate that into the poem.

I want to come back to Jane Hirshfield and contrast her... style with snyders even though they're both sort of inheritors of pounds revolution in poetry and the impact of asian poetry on on the western poetry but any other thoughts before we push on from rip rap here we can always reference back to it but i just want to ask if anyone has other shares

Well, I just find that kind of interesting, the body of the mind.

Yeah.

So we even know it's like the season of rebirth.

And yeah, I'm guessing she was maybe in Northern California.

She's often lived in Northern California, Jane Hirshfield, and practiced at Tassajara for three years.

So a lot of that pervades this poem, I think, and the love of the natural world and of horses.

Like that quote is from Brandi Carlile is so amazing.

And then there's one from Jane Hirshfield which is another one of my favorite poets, and Virginia Woolf.

A few other, um, a few other goodies.

Yeah.

And I sort of belatedly set out.

desperate last minute instructions, please read Jane Hirshfield and Gary Snyder poems in addition to the introduction at the beginning of the book.

And some of the background that I'll touch on tonight and in weeks two and three is in the introduction, particularly about Ezra Pound, the American from Idaho.

Like, by the way, Red Pine, or Bill Porter, as he's known in civilian life.

And this was a long poem that Snyder worked on for much of his life.

And again, as in no nature, he's pushing us to feel into, think into, appreciate the interdependency of all beings, including sort of no beginning, no endings.

Jane Hirshfield, we're going to start with poems from her book, The Lives of the Heart, this lovely 1998 volume.

This is a paperback edition, again, a very slender volume.