Jane Hirshfield has been a poet in residence for an experimental forest in Oregon and a neuroscience research program at UCSF. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages and her TED-Ed animated lesson on metaphor has received over 1.3 million views. Her nine published poetry books (most recently Ledger), two books of essays, and four books collecting and co-translating world poets from the deep past have received the Poetry Center Book Award, California Book Award, Columbia University’s National Translation Award, and been finalists or longlisted for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and England’s T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Founder of the traveling and online installation Poets for Science, a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and a member of Orion’s advisory board, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. The Asking: New and Selected Poems comes out this September.
Jane Hirshfield
Feature
Jane Hirshfield Answers the Orion Questionnaire
In which we get to know our favorite writers and poets better by exploring the sacred and mundane Award-winning poet, essayist, translator, and Orion advisor Jane Hirshfield is the author of Continue reading
Feature
Wild Ginger
The journey from ignorance to seeing is made by borrowing others’ eyes. A friend points out the litter of disassembled fir cones under a tree in one place, and I become Continue reading
Poem
Cataclysm
It begins subtly: the maple withdraws an inch from the birch tree. The porcupine wants nothing to do with the skink. Fish unschool, sheep unflock to separately graze. Clouds meanwhile declare Continue reading
Poetry
Not One Moment of This a Subtraction
all day the daylight coming over the sill like a wagon drawn by invisible big-hooved horses working hard soon now your breathing will climb inside it, go with it away all Continue reading
Poetry
Bamboo
What exists wants to persist. Even the knock of bamboo on bamboo spilled outward continues. And you who have lived — restless, ambitious, aggrieved. A Walter, a Shirley, a Tim. A Continue reading