[APPLAUSE]
Good evening.
Welcome to the Poetry Center, and thank
you so much for being here.
It is my great pleasure, and true honor
tonight to introduce the award winning poet, essayist
and translator Jane Hirshfield.
She is the author of 10 poetry collections,
including "Ledger," "The Beauty," "Come, Thief,"
and "Given Sugar, Given Salt."
We're very excited to hear her read tonight
from her upcoming 10th collection,
The Asking: New and Selected Poems,
which will be out this September,
and is available by pre-order now.
Hirshfield is also the author of two exquisite essay
collections, Nine Gates: Entering
The Mind Of Poetry and 10 Windows:
How Great Poems Transformed The World.
She's also edited and co-translated three books
collecting the work of women poets from the past,
an anthology with Robert Bly and The Heart of Haiku,
a book that explores the essence of haiku,
and its seventh century, 17th century founding
poet, Matsuo Bashō.
Her many awards include fellowships
from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Rockefeller
Foundation, the Academy of American Poets,
and the Guggenheim Foundation.
She'll be reading tonight from a range of work over time,
including The Ink Dark Moon, her co
translation of two foremost women poets
of classical age Japan.
Poems written 1,000 years ago.
And some new poems from The Asking: New and Selected Poems,
which draws from her previously published books of poetry,
most recently The Beauty and Ledger.
It's really a thrilling reading list.
Hirshfield's poems flourish in the liminal space
where scientific inquiry, empathetic knowing,
aesthetic experiment, and astute observation meet.
A poem about the dwindling numbers
of Siberian tigers and red legged egrets
juxtaposes the sound of heavy furniture being moved upstairs.
A symbol of extinction's invisible yet oppressive
weight.
Doubt, hunger, and longing are interrogated
as intimate companions.
Rapture and paradox are inextricably linked
in a poem of bells tolling on All Souls' Day in Italy.
Slipping easily between the intimacy of the quotidian,
and the expansiveness of the philosophical,
Hirshfield's poems seek to house a world in which perception
can be delicately distilled.
Where the surreal can flash with clarity.
Where the luminous carries undercurrents of anguish,
and where the precision of observation
is held in tender awareness with the imprecision
of human nature.
Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz wrote
of Hirshfield's profound empathy for the suffering
of all living beings.
And indeed we see Hirshfield's poems
grapple with the powers of poetic imagination,
as well as the realization of the human capacity
for both profound connection and ecological destruction.
The poet Jules Supervielle once wrote
about decanting his deepest poetry only
by dint of simplicity and transparency,
seeing to it that the ineffable becomes
familiar at the same time it guards its fabulous origins.
Like Supervielle, Hirshfield makes use of poetry's seeing.
Her poems are luminous windows and gates,
and doors, which peering through or stepping into,
one can encounter a thrumming vibrant communicative
intelligence.
They are modes of inquiry, invested in possibilities
and awakening perception.
They invite us to notice our entanglements with one another,
and with the species around us.
They call us to think, feel, and imagine more expansively.
Please join me in welcoming the visionary Jane Hirshfield.
[APPLAUSE]