Apr 11, 2021
Jane Hirshfield on her selection:
“The Lives of the Poets”
Poems are about our human lives--their knowing by stories, language, feelings, comprehensions, perplexities, musics. Because the lives of poets include the making of poetry, some poems are about that. I've chosen a half-dozen, from a range of persons, places, and directions, from a folder I’ve long been keeping that I think of as “The Lives of the Poets.” Because this selection is for the 92nd St Y, a place where people have long come, and will come again, to hear poems said by their makers, and because we’ve all been through a year now of pandemic uncertainties, I begin with two that show the other side of the fabric of public readings.
Anna Swir: “Poetry Reading” (translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan) https://bookshop.org/books/talking-to-my-body/9781556591082
Lucille Clifton: “After the Reading” https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-carry-water-selected-poems-of-lucille-clifton/9781950774142
Han Shan: “Here we languish, a bunch of poor scholars” (translated by Burton Watson) https://bookshop.org/books/cold-mountain-one-hundred-poems-by-the-t-ang-poet-han-shan/9780231034500
Yannis Ritsos: “Necessary Explanation” (translated by Kimon Friar) https://bookshop.org/books/yannis-ritsos-selected-poems-1938-1988/9780918526670
Adrienne Rich: “XIII (Dedication),” final section of “An Atlas of the Difficult World” https://bookshop.org/books/an-atlas-of-the-difficult-world-poems-1988-1991/9780393308310
Frank O'Hara: “Autobiographia Litteraria” https://bookshop.org/books/frank-o-hara-selected-poems/9780375711480
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0