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Jane Hirshfield
- Red Hen Press
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86 rattle conversations Jane Hirshfield is the author of six collections of poetry, including After; Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award); The Lives of the Heart; and The October Palace; as well as a book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She also edited and co-translated The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan; Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women; and Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems. Hirshfield’s other honors include The Poetry Center Book Award; fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; and the Commonwealth Club of California’s Poetry Medal. Her work has appeared in The NewYorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, five volumes of The Best American Poetry, and many other publications, and has been featured numerous times on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac program, as well as in two Bill Moyers PBS television specials. In fall 2004, Jane Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets, an honor formerly held by such poets as Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop. Jane Hirshfield April 20th, 2006 Fox: How did you come to live in this lovely home in Mill Valley? Hirshfield: I had been living at Green Gulch, in Muir Beach, very near here—[phone rings] Fox: I will turn this off. Hirshfield: I should turn mine off too. [laughing, unplugs hard line telephone] Fox: I was at a dinner—James Ragan had been the head of the Masters of Professional Writing Program at U.S.C. for twenty-five years and they had a dinner last night. They had a number of speakers including Shelley Berman, who’s one of the teachers there, and Shelley was speaking when my cell phone went off. I think Shelly got one of the biggest laughs of the evening when he looked at me and said, “Take the call.” [both laugh] I put the cell phone under my leg and I turned it off. All right, we were talking about how you were . . . Hirshfield: Let me start earlier. I arrived in California in 1974, in a red Dodge van with tie-dyed curtains, as one would do at such a time, and soon went into eight years of formal Zen training. The last place that I lived as a full-time practitioner was Green Gulch Farm, in Muir Beach, just a ridge over from here. I made a very gradual transition back into lay practice life, and didn’t go far. That’s how I ended up here. Fox: Are you familiar with Spirit Rock, which also isn’t far from here? Hirshfield: Yes, I edited two of Jack Kornfield’s books. Fox: Oh! I’m a very good friend of Jack’s. 87 [18.209.66.87] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:16 GMT) 88 rattle conversations Hirshfield: Really? Maybe at some other event we’ll say hello then. Fox: Absolutely. What impact did your Zen practice have on your writing? Hirshfield: Well, those eight intensive training years were from age twentyone to twenty-nine, so I can’t really know who I might have become had I not done that. The most honest answer I can give is to say the influence is both complete and unknowable. Fox: That’s good. When did you start writing? Hirshfield: As a child. My mother still has one of those big brown sheets of writing paper that they give you in first or second grade, with the wide-spaced blue lines. On it, it says, “I want to be a writer when I grow up.” Fox: Wow. Hirshfield: I don’t remember writing or thinking that, only that I was always a lover of words. I read voraciously. I’d choose books over sleep every time. Fox: And what types of things did you write when you were a child? Hirshfield: Always poetry. For school I’d write whatever I was asked to, but it was always poems for myself. I don’t have a narrative mind or aptitude. If you’re a person who wants to investigate the world through language and you don’t tell stories, what’s left is...