Post by sophiago116 on May 30, 2013 18:25:36 GMT -5
Jane Hirshfield was born into a working class family in New York City. Her father was a clothing manufacturer and her mother was a secretary. From a very young age, Hirshfield knew that when she was older she wanted to be a writer and a poet. As a child in elementary school, when asked by her teacher to write about what she wanted to be when she grew up, she wrote that she wanted to be a writer. In fact, the first book she ever bought was a book of haikus at the age of nine.
Hirshfield studied at Princeton University, where she created her own independent major in creative writing and literature in translation. After graduating in the first class to include women, Hirshfield decided to take time off from her writing to focus on the study of Zen. She moved across the country to San Francisco where she studied at the Zen Center for eight years. Although she is so much more than a “Zen poet,” her poems span both Western and Eastern culture and incorporate many Buddhist virtues. In order to write, she felt she needed to learn more about herself because she believes that “there are openings in our lives of which we know nothing.” Hirshfield even spent three of the eights years in the wilderness, living without electricity. She explained, “solitude, whether endured or embraced, is a necessary gateway to original thought.”
Hirshfield’s poems are heavily influenced by nature, time, and love. She can turn something as mundane as “a chair” into a “sumptuous” visual feast when placed in solitude, covered “in snow.” Her prose forces us to look within ourselves and accept our humanity in all its imperfections; to experience love and aging like a deer passing through a “quiet opening between fence strands,” seamlessly and gracefully, yet making an impact. A lifelong theme in her work is “saying yes to what’s difficult.”
Polish Nobel Prize winning poet, Czeslaw Milosz, says of Hirshfield:
“[She has] a profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings…in its highly sensuous detail, her poetry illuminates the Buddhist virtue of mindfulness.”
Along with writing seven books of poetry, Hirshfield has published two anthologies of women’s poems, in order to draw more attention to the work of women writers. She has won many awards in her literary career, including, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and was a finalist for England’s T. S. Eliot prize. She is currently living in Northern California and she has taught at UC Berkeley, Duke University, and Bennington College.
I would like to thank Jane Hirshfield for taking the time out of her day to share with us her beautiful poetry. I hope everyone is as inspired by her work as I am. Now please welcome Jane Hirshfield as our visiting poet.
Hirshfield studied at Princeton University, where she created her own independent major in creative writing and literature in translation. After graduating in the first class to include women, Hirshfield decided to take time off from her writing to focus on the study of Zen. She moved across the country to San Francisco where she studied at the Zen Center for eight years. Although she is so much more than a “Zen poet,” her poems span both Western and Eastern culture and incorporate many Buddhist virtues. In order to write, she felt she needed to learn more about herself because she believes that “there are openings in our lives of which we know nothing.” Hirshfield even spent three of the eights years in the wilderness, living without electricity. She explained, “solitude, whether endured or embraced, is a necessary gateway to original thought.”
Hirshfield’s poems are heavily influenced by nature, time, and love. She can turn something as mundane as “a chair” into a “sumptuous” visual feast when placed in solitude, covered “in snow.” Her prose forces us to look within ourselves and accept our humanity in all its imperfections; to experience love and aging like a deer passing through a “quiet opening between fence strands,” seamlessly and gracefully, yet making an impact. A lifelong theme in her work is “saying yes to what’s difficult.”
Polish Nobel Prize winning poet, Czeslaw Milosz, says of Hirshfield:
“[She has] a profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings…in its highly sensuous detail, her poetry illuminates the Buddhist virtue of mindfulness.”
Along with writing seven books of poetry, Hirshfield has published two anthologies of women’s poems, in order to draw more attention to the work of women writers. She has won many awards in her literary career, including, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and was a finalist for England’s T. S. Eliot prize. She is currently living in Northern California and she has taught at UC Berkeley, Duke University, and Bennington College.
I would like to thank Jane Hirshfield for taking the time out of her day to share with us her beautiful poetry. I hope everyone is as inspired by her work as I am. Now please welcome Jane Hirshfield as our visiting poet.