This week, we continue to celebrate National Poetry Month with a conversation from the 2023 Portland Book Festival.
Jane Hirshfield is one of our most important living poets, and last year she released The Asking, a new and selected volume. Hirshfield has published ten volumes of poetry, two now-classic essay collections on the craft of poetry, and she has co-translated four books presenting world poets from the deep past.
Hirshfield is in conversation with her friend and fellow poet, Major Jackson, host of The Slowdown podcast and newsletter, who also released a new and selected, titled Razzle Dazzle, which collects two decades of his work. Hirshfield and Jackson share a send of the global and the personal, and a love of language.
Our moderator is a celebrated poet himself, Matthew Zapruder, whose most recent book is the memoir Story of a Poem.
They talk about the experience of revising the past to create these overviews of their work, and their excitement about the new poems. Hirshfield talks honestly about how emotional it was to revisit her past work and therefore a version of her past self, which Jackson described as a kind of time travel. They also talk about our present moment, and the role of art when there is so much urgency in the world at large—the importance of poetry, of art, to bear witness to that urgency.
Bios:
Writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten collections and is one of American poetry’s central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere. Hirshfield’s honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and finalist selection for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She’s also the author of two now-classic collections of essays on the craft of poetry, and edited and co-translated four books presenting world poets from the deep past. Hirshfield’s work, which has been translated into seventeen languages, appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019.
Major Jackson is the author of six volumes of poetry. His honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The poetry editor of the Harvard Review and the host of the podcast The Slowdown, Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Matthew Zapruder is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently I Love Hearing Your Dreams, forthcoming from Scribner in September 2024, as well as two books of prose: Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017) and Story of a Poem (Unnamed, 2023). He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. From 2016-7 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine, and was the Editor of Best American Poetry 2022. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.
