Poets & Writers Theater

“There are kinds of knowledge, in both science and poetry, that can be made visible only by their enacting.” For this recording of the Academy of American Poets’ 2024 Blaney Lecture, Jane Hirshfield discusses the visible versus the invisible and examines poetry’s ways of naming through some of her favorite poems.

In this 2009 reading filmed at the Dodge Poetry Festival, Jane Hirshfield reads her poem “For What Binds Us,” which is included in her latest collection, The Asking: New and Selected Poems, forthcoming in September from Knopf. A profile of Hirshfield by Danusha Laméris is featured in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind.” In this animated TED-Ed video, poet Jane Hirshfield discusses the art and use of metaphors in our daily lives and in the works of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and Carl Sandburg.

“I love the deep attribute of poetry to pause, to look, to listen, to respect, to pay attention to variety and learn something new.” Naomi Shihab Nye, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Jane Hirschfield discuss poetry and the poet’s role in America at the 2015 National Book Festival in this video from the Academy of American Poets.

“When you’re looking at the transitions in your own poetry, one of the things to do is feel as you’re reading over your poem, ‘Am I bored? Do I feel lectured at?’” says Jane Hirshfield in this video from a 2011 Poets House event. “Take out some of the transitions. Allow more mystery. Allow things to stand on their own two feet.” Hirshfield is the author of nine books of poetry, including her most recent collection, Ledger (Knopf, 2020).

“So few grains of happiness / measured against all the dark / and still the scales balance.” In this video produced by the Academy of American Poets, Jane Hirshfield reads “The Weighing” from the new anthology, Here: Poems for the Planet, which will be published this week by Copper Canyon Press. The anthology includes poems by Margaret Atwood, Kwame Dawes, Ross Gay, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Hass, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Mary Oliver, and others.