As women members of the Heian court of medieval Japan, poets Ono no Kamachi and Izumi Shikibu lived lives that were proscribed and governed by artifice. Through poetry they found ways of expressing their feelings and insights about those lives. This book from the 2015 reading list was recommended to me by my wife Lea who…
Rachael Guynn Wilson, Three Books and a Poem - Journal #125 March 2022 e-flux.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from e-flux.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Writer’s Chronicle, and
The Rumpus, where she is a senior poetry editor. She teaches at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.
INTRODUCTION
Being a poet has taught me the value of practice and patience. I have learned that my next poem will reveal itself to me if I simply follow language by engaging with it through my (mostly) daily reading and writing practice and if I wait for that small, persistent thing a scrap of language, an image, a question that won’t leave me alone that opens a door in my mind. I’ve also learned that for me, at least poetry is slow. I often work on poems for several years before they’re finished. This morning, I think I finally found the right form for a poem I’ve been working on for four years. Last month, I finished a poem I started working on in 2010. My poems spend a long time resting, waiting for me to come back around and try again to get it right. I’m not a particularly patient person in other
The Beauty: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and
Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins, 2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her ninth collection,
Ledger, is forthcoming from Knopf in March 2020. She has edited and cotranslated books with Mariko Aratani and Robert Bly. Hirshfield’s honors include the Poetry Center Book Award, the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Literature, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, Columbia University’s Translation Center Award, and the Commonwealth Club of California Poetry Medal, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Her work has been selected for seven editions of