Jane Hirshfield

Poems tend to come to me from one really precise, sharp perception that raises a question that wants to be gone into further, felt through further, understood more deeply or felt more deeply.

So the poem often begins for me with seeing something or having a thought and then responding.

But when we're talking about poems of the earth and poems of actual perception, I both want to bring in what I know about that from my experience and from my mind, but also always what I feel about it.

The interior response needs to meet the outer world precipitant of the poem.

Well, I think one of the things that poetry teaches, if you read good poems and let them do their work upon you, is that there's always at least one stitch from the other side of the fabric.

And that is how you avoid cliche and sentimentality.

So if you look at any good love poem, somewhere in it, it is murmuring either explicitly or in a way that the reader hears, even if it's not directly said, and we're going to die.

And any...

Poem of grief, any elegy, any poem of loss or even despair.

If it is a good poem, there will be in that black surface a gold stitch of, ah, but the world was beautiful.

Oh, it's marvelous.

It's absolutely marvelous.

It is the kind of experience that profoundly alters a life because I loved when Kim was speaking earlier, she said how your ego, yourself, your individual fate and concern with all of that kind of falls away into the large space.

and that is an instruction that changes our lives, changes our actions, changes our relationships with both the beyond human world and also our fellow humans.

Listening to it in the context of this program, what I was hearing is the difference between recounting such an experience in prose, you're just telling it to somebody,

And what would Chris have done if he were writing a poem?

How would it have been different?

And maybe Kimberly wants to speak to that.

Maybe you start with some of those specific perceptions and observations, the things that he recounted seeing.

I see this great opportunity.