Poetry: An Embodied Experience

In this 2023 conversation with Justine Willis Toms, award-winning poet Jane Hirshfield takes us beyond our analytical minds and lands us in an embodied experience. Hirshfield offers that this helps us meet the despair which inevitably rises up in the darkest moments. She adds that poetry can cut windows and doors in your despair and give you a way to walk back into the world with others. Against the torrent of data and information that issues from an increasingly polarized and rageful culture, poetry can enlivening our hearts. It can take us to a grander landscape and leads us to the wholeness of things. It helps us see from a vantage point that includes wonder and awe without denying the dangers and the challenges humanity faces. 

Jane Hirshfield has authored many books including:


- The October Palace (HarperCollins 1994)
- The Lives of the Heart (Harper Collins 1997)
- Women in Praise of the Sacred (HarperCollins 1994)
- Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (Perennial 1998) 
- After (Harper Collins 2006)
- Given Sugar, Given Salt (Harper Collins 2001)
- Come, Thief (Knopf 2011)
- Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Alfred A. Knopf 2015)
- The Beauty: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf 2015)
- Ledger (Alfred A. Knopf 2020) 
- The Asking: New and Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf 2023)

Interview Date: 9/1/2023     Tags: Jane Hirshfield, Poetry, Hersch Wilson, bryophyta, mosses, kinship of all life, despair, March for Science, beauty, Poetry, Art & Creativity, Ecology/Nature/Environment, Philosophy