Four Poets for March beginning with Jane Hirshfield

March 4, 2020

As you all know by now, many of the poets and publishers who were scheduled to appear at the AWP conference in San Antonio this week have had to cancel due to concerns about the Coronavirus. It’s possible that by the time you read this post, the entire conference may be shut down. People who have cancelled their participation have done so unselfishly, not just worried about their own health but by the possibility of being vectors in the communities to which they will return. It is my hope that those of us who can will support poets and their publishers this month. So much hard work and expense has gone into the creation of many books that would have seen robust sales at the conference.

Today’s post will highlight the first of four poets with recent publications that I’ll be featuring over the next week or so: Jane Hirshfield. Future posts will include Patrick Cahill, Ulalume Gonzalez de Leon and Joseph Zaccardi.

Before moving on to Hirshfield’s work, however, I’d like to share one comment I received about the work of Buffalo poet Irene Sipos, WordTemple’s most recent highlight.

“Katherine, thanks for the introduction to Irene Sipos. Sometimes it amazes me to think how many fine, unrecognized poets and writers there are in the world. I especially enjoyed the imaginative quality of ‘Globe.’ One of those poems I wish I had written! ‘Election 2016’ was sobering and brought back some memories I’d rather forget, but that’s a sign of the effectiveness of the poem. I love the quoted sign from the Women’s March: ‘My arms are tired from holding this sign since the seventies.’ Isn’t that the truth! Thanks for your blog. It is so wonderful to hear your voice speaking about poetry (and I can hear it in my mind). It reminds me of the wonderful introductions you gave to poets who came to WordTemple.

— Jodi Hottel, Santa Rosa CA

Jane Hirshfield

I gave a heads up about a month ago that Jane Hirshfield has a new book coming out, her ninth, from Knopf. The book is Ledger and will be released on March 10. When I asked her to provide me with a personal statement about the collection, Hirshfield couldn’t help being her kind, generous self:

“I’ve so long admired the work Katherine Hastings does on behalf of poems and poets, from the time I was part of the launch reading of her WordTemple Poetry Series…in Sonoma County, until now: This new book, in turn, is trying to work on behalf of beings wordless, speechless…newts and old-growth cedars, spider monkeys and jumping spiders, rivers and marshes and mountains. They are of course also foundation stones, rafters, and windows of this temple we live in.” — Jane Hirshfield

Ledger has already been called “masterful” by Publisher’s Weekly and “clarion” by Booklist, in starred early reviews. The San Francisco Chronicle praises its ‘exploration of the capacity for life, its value and purpose.’ Knopf says this is a “book of personal, ecological and political reckoning…(it’s) center of gravity lies in poems that recount, and take account of, the crises of the biosphere and social justice. There are poems with other subjects as well — poems on wanting to be surprised, on reading a library book with previously turned-down pages, on the death of a friend of forty years. Hirshfield has come to stand among the ranks of our master poets. This new book, both tonic and essential, faces the challenges of the current world with acute tenderness and compassion, amid the abiding remembrance of shared fate.”

Here now are a few poems from Ledger by Jane Hirshfield. I welome your comments.

Let Them Not Say

Let them not say:   we did not see it.

We saw.

.

Let them not say:  we did not hear it.

We heard.

.

Let them not say:   they did not taste it.

We ate, we trembled.

.

Let them not say:   it was not spoken, not written.

We spoke,

we witnessed with voices and hands.

.

Let them not say:   they did nothing.

We did not-enough.

.

Let them say, as they must say something:

.

A kerosene beauty,

It burned.

.

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,

read by its light, praised,

and it burned.

.

A Ream of Paper

I have a ream of paper,

a cartridge of ink,

.

almonds,

coffee,

a wool scarf for warmth.

.

Whatever handcuffs the soul,

I have brought here.

.

Whatever distances the heart,

I have brought here.

.

A deer rises onto her haunches

to reach for an apple,

though many fallen apples are on the ground.

.

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 to the sky

they have nothing to do with the sky,

which is not visible as they are,

.

nor knows the trick of turning

into infant, tumbling pterodactyls.

.

The turtles and moonlight?

Their long arrangement is over.

.

As for the humans.

Let us not speak of the humans.

Let us speak of their language.

.

The first person singular

condemns the second person plural

for betrayals neither has words left to name.

.

The fed consider the hungry

and stay silent.