Jane Hirshfield Lecture: Old Ponds, Leaping Frogs, and the Making of this Moment’s Meaning

The phrase “words’ leaves,” koto no ha, was sometimes used to say “poetry” in classical-era Japan. Over a thousand years later, images drawn from the natural world (and beyond) continue to be at the heart of how poems work, expressing interior feelings and thoughts by speaking of what we see and hear, touch and taste. This talk, drawing from poems written centuries ago in Japan and Jane Hirshfield’s own practice of poetry today, will explore the way images of plants and animals, places, objects, and seasons, are universal in both understanding and expressing our current lives. Lectures are free, open to the public, and no ticket or registration is required. About Jane Hirshfield, Award-winning Poet, Translator & Essayist Jane Hirshfield, in poems described by The Washington Post as belonging “among the modern masters” and in The New York Times Magazine as “among the most important poetry in the world today,” addresses the urgent immediacies of our time. Ranging from the political, ecological, and scientific to the metaphysical, personal, and passionate, Hirshfield praises the radiance of particularity and reckons the consequence of the daily. Her poems and essays traverse the crises of the biosphere, questions of social justice, and the myriad interior quandaries of heart, mind, and spirit. Her work lives at the intersection of facts and imagination, desire and loss, impermanence and beauty— all the dimensions of our shared existence within what one poem calls “the pure democracy of being.” Learn more about Jane and her work here.