Jane Hirshfield: An Afternoon with the Poet

well I'm very grateful for that eloquent appreciation of my work thank you so much it also helped me decide I've been wavering about whether I should start with the recent work and go earlier or start with the earliest work and come up to the new book and now I'll start with work from the new book and then we'll leap backwards can you hear me okay is this good okay the envoi one day in that room a small rat two days later a snake who seeing me enter whipped the long stripe of his body under the bed then curled like a dussell house pet I don't know how either came or left later the flashlight found nothing for a year I watched as something terror happiness grief entered and then left my body not knowing how it came in not knowing how it went out it hung where words could not reach it it slept where light could not go its scent was neither snake nor rat neither sensualist nor ascetic there are openings in our lives of which we know nothing through them the beld herds travel at will long-legged and thirsty covered with foreign dust I think that most of us who work in the arts believe of course entirely and passionately in the importance of the Arts in human life that they do matter that they do make a difference and yet anyone who works in the arts is also going to be assailed with the guilt at times of thinking why don't I do something useful you know there are people in the world who do things that are useful and so this is a poem which comes out of that side of it some of you may recognize it starts describing a building about two-thirds of the way through and that building is the Mormon Tabernacle where the choir used to sing I think they're building a new one for it now but it's a pretty accurate description of the place mathematics I have envied those who make something useful sturdy a chair a pair of boots even a soup rich with potatoes and cream or those who fix perhaps a leaking window strip out the old craft buddy lay down cleanly the line of the new you could learn the mirror tells me late at night but lacks conviction one reflected eyebrow Quivers a little I look at this borrowed apartment everywhere I question it the wallpapers pattern matches yesterday a woman showed me a building shaped like the overturned hull of a ship its roof trusses under the plaster lashed with soap draw the columns marble painted to seem like wood though possibly it was the other way around I look at my unhandy hand innocent shaped as other's hands are shaped even the pen it holds is a mystery really rawhide it writes and chair and marble eyebrow later the woman asked me I recognized her then my sister my own young self does a poem enlarge the world or only our idea of the world how do you take one from the other I lied or did not lie in answer the room for two years it lay almost unintel for an insect hatch of empty cartons then something spiraled stirred in a corner demanded and so came the sanding and painting the washing of windows replacing the cracked half glass of the door so came a bed a wooden dresser a desk laying over the dressers top a dowry cloth from Uzbekistan embroidered cheerful worn absurdly expensive before the desk a chair with woven seat the hunt for a rug began and during all that time no idea at all of why these choices of furniture disuse late the realization that something was being courted and then a small tremble of and fear for still it was uncertain what was being prepared for when the guests would come or in whose shape which half-starved shivering hopes might follow it in there's a poem by frank O'Hara quite a wonderful poem called something like a true story of talking to the Sun at Fire Island and when I read this next poem I often think in my head a sort of false title for this which is a true story of my birthday a couple years ago it is very literally an account of that day on which this poem was written and it's a great way to spend a birthday actually I recommend it to you Apple I woke and remembered nothing of what I was dreaming the day grew light then dark again in all its rich hours what happened a few weeds pulled a few cold flowers carried inside for the vaz a little reading a little tidying and sweeping I had vowed to do nothing I did not wish to do that day and kept my promise once a certain hope came close and then departed past by me in its familiar show scented with iodine would smoke I did not speak to it nor it to me yet still the habit of warmth travelled between us like an apple shared by old friends one takes a bite than the other they do this until it is gone for any of you who know my earlier work this book is surprisingly cluttered with human things there aren't so many dressers and rugs and desks and my earlier books something seems to have altered and the regular stuff of human life entered my work as a subject matter in a more I don't know that it's normal because all poets feel terribly abnormal I suppose I think all human beings feel normal but you know the stuff that other people think about has become more present in my poems so in this particular poem what I was thinking about is how to what extent the habitual governs our life and how truly mysterious it is you know where does it come from this stuff which in fact governs so much of what we do so the poem is called habit the shoes put on each time left first then right the morning potions teaspoon of sweetness stirred always for seven circlings no fewer no more into the cracked blue cup touching the pocket for wallet for keys before closing the door how did we come to believe these small rituals promise that we are today the cells we yesterday knew tomorrow will be how internet and unthinking the way the toothbrush is shaken dry after use the part we wash first in the bath which happens we learned from others and which are ours alone we may never know unbearable to acknowledge how much they are themselves our fated life open the traveling suitcase there the beloved red sweater bright tangle of necklace earrings of amber each confirming I chose these eye but habit is different it chooses and we it's good horse opening our mouths at even the sight of the bit I think of this as my bitter little poem about aging this was once a love poem this was once a love poem before its haunches thickened its breath grew short before it found itself sitting perplexed and a little embarrassed on the fender of a parked car while many people passed by without turning their heads it remembers itself dressing as if for a great engagement it remembers choosing these shoes this scarf or tie once it drank beer for breakfast drifted its feet in a river side by side with the feet of another once it pretended shyness then grew truly shy dropping its head so the hair would fall forward so the eyes would not be seen it spoke with passion of history of art it was lovely then this poem under its chin no fold of skin softened behind the knees no pad of yellow fat what it knew in the morning it still believed at nightfall a nun conjured confidence lifted its eyebrows its cheeks the longing has not diminished still it understands it is time to consider a cat the cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus yes it decides many many at your cacti in blue and red painted pots when it finds itself disquieted by the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life it will touch them one then another with a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame there's a long tradition of well actually not so long there's a recent tradition of American poets writing poems about objects and again you know earlier this was not something I so much did and suddenly objects became quite fascinating to me I think this is actually the poem that began the intrusion of domestic objects into my work and it's about a particularly small one it's about a button so it's called button it likes both to enter and to leave actions it seems to feel as a kind of hide-and-seek it knows nothing of what the cloth believes of its Magus like powers if fastening and unfastening are its nature it doesn't care about its nature it likes the caress of two fingers against its slightly thickened edges it likes the scent and heat of the proximate body the exhilaration of the washing is it's wild pleasure a moralist sensualist dependent of cotton thread its sleep this curled like a cat to a patch of Sun calico and round its understanding is the understanding of honey and jasmine of letting what happens come a button envies no neighbouring button no snap no not no polyester braided toggle it rests on its read checked shirt in serene disregard it is its own story completed brevity and longevity mean nothing to a button carved of horn nor do old dreams of passion disturb it the once it wondered the 10,000 grasses with the musk fragrance caught in its nostrils though once it followed it did I tell you that wind for miles this is a poem that touches on an experience I imagine everyone in the room has had I don't think I need to say any more about it than that except that I was really delighted I don't think of myself as a person who often brings things into poetry which have never appeared there before but I'm willing to wager that this might well be the first poem to ever feature badger colostrum in it you know the the the first before real milk comes in colostrum comes in and I just haven't come across another poem that has badger colostrum in it although who knows maybe it's going to start a fad all evening each time I started to say it all evening each time I started to say it something would interrupt it was not a thought so very large it could in fact have slipped through any window cracked open a bit for error yet each time I started to say it at that table someone else would speak the moment would pass after the fifth time this happened I began to be amused runt of the litter thought I thought unable to get to the tit then suddenly wanted to lift it up to feed it an eye droppers measure of mares milk some warmed sugar water a little colostrum of Thatcher it suddenly seemed to me the kind of thought not large on which a life might turn there are many such unheard unspoken their blind eyes open and close the almost inaudible valves of their hearts but all evening each time I started to say it something would interrupt the moment would pass I lived quite a long time ago in a place that had no heat or electricity or hot water and this is a slight residue of that experience a cedar e fragrance even now decades after I wash my face with cold water not for Discipline nor memory nor the icy awakening slap but to practice choosing to make the unwanted wanted the gallop there are days the whole house moves at a gallop bookshelves and counters bottles of aspirin and oil chairs sauce pans and towels I can barely encircle the neck of a bounding pen with my fingers before it breaks free of their notions open the door before the dog of lop-eared hope sleeps through it pick up the paper before it goes up as kindling barely eat before something snatches the toast from my plate drains the last mouthfuls of coffee out of my cup even these words before the blue ink track has dried on the paper they've already been read and agreed to or flung aside for others I don't yet know of and well before I have dressed or brushed out the braids of my hair a woman with my own shadow has showered and chosen her earrings bought groceries and fallen and loved grown tired grown old her braids in the mirror shines with new ribbons of silver like the mane of the heavy warhorse he stands in the silence as if after battle besides heaving spent this is a short odd poem the title has very little to do with the poem the title is a carbon-based life form in quotations and that simply means us all life on this earth is carbon-based life forms a person tired from happiness grows sober another worn through by sadness stumbles into a kind of joy it is like a dog alone in a house barking to hear its own kind nothing needs to be added yet we do and the last poem from this book is what I think of as my second growth poem I live in a town just north of San Francisco called Mill Valley and it was named after the mill which took all the redwood trees off Mount Tamalpais and if you look at photographs of Mill Valley from 50 years ago it's a sunny place and if you look at Mill Valley now it's a shady place the trees are coming back including some within my small domain tree it is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house even in this one lifetime you will have to choose that great calm being this clutter of soup pots and books already the first branch tips brush at the window softly calmly immensity taps at your life so now we're going back to the oldest poem that I still give at readings and often begin readings with and I never know whether I should describe it as a love poem or as an end of love poem because it is in fact both those things for what binds us there are names for what binds us strong forces weak forces look around you can see them the skin that forms in a half empty cup nails rusting into the places they join joints dovetailed on their own weight the way things stay so solidly wherever they've been set down and gravity scientists say is weak and see how the flesh grows back across a wound with the great vehemence more strong than the simple untested surface before there's a name for it on horses when it comes back darker and raised proud flesh as all flesh is proud of its wounds wears them as honors given out after battle small triumphs pinned to the chest and when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies stronger darker and proud how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend I had expected an audience slightly more skewed toward students I guess simply because there was a daytime reading so I don't need to explain this poem to quite as many of you as I usually do there's something in it it's a poem which will date me very nicely for you it's title is a year the year is 1973 and it is talking about my first job after graduating from college which was doing farm labor in New Jersey and there are many references to the period most of which you know even now people who weren't born then you know you know about the Vietnam War and you probably know about the novelist Ken Kesey and you might know about his then-girlfriend mountain girl who went on to become Jerry Garcia's girlfriend and you know all that stuff is okay but the one thing which really does have to be told younger people is in the ancient days cars had something called manual chokes and on cold mornings when you started your car there was this little knob on the dashboard that you had to pull out to change the fuel air mixture or your car would die and so I have to tell you this because otherwise you'll think I was eating artichokes for breakfast and I was not okay 1973 that winter we took turns stepping into the barely started morning's to turn ignitions until they caught complaining roughly of the cold then ran back to finish our coffee cereal toast while chokes pulled full out exhaust poured white across the glass that kept us we named them Big Mama tomato snooze each was our first as we were each other's first in the farmhouse for rent for the first time in 40 years surrounded by soybeans we'd whited over the pink room the Sun had painted when he returned crazed with Vietnam we'd made the man come back for the thin black lab left chained in the yard the 13 cats stayed soon more all wild our own would come to the window by way of a three-story oak and mush shingled porch roof to new us awake and then in every day Kesey and mountain girl scrolling their signatures snow mornings on the quilt we nailed planks from the old barns onto the walls by our bed scraped a dozen layers of peeling paper from the next room the older they got the more lovely that one we made cheerful yellow where I wrote the wildly sad poems of the very young when we got to the farm you took a tractor I loaded my van with sacks of produce and drove off Kip supervised us all the piece Corvette the kids just out of school picking his peaches that summer the best work I've done the closest to paradise I've seen that are propped in his trees all sold now gone his farm the one we lived at the ground fall cider the cars us too of course long shaken free though I still cook bluefish the way you taught me and carrots I thought I would love you forever and a little I may in the way I still move toward a crate knees bent or reach for a man as one might stretch for the three or four fruit that lie in the Sun at the top of the tree too ripe for any moment but this they opened their skin at first touch yielding sweetness sweetness and heat and in me each time since the answering yes the love of aged horses because I know tomorrow his faithful gelding heart will be broken when the spotted mayor is trailered and driven away I come today to take him for a gallop on DEA's rich returning he will whinny for his love ancient spaff and her white parts red with he'll dust her red parts whitened with the same she never answers but today when I turned him loose at the bent gate with the taste of chewed oat on his tongue and the saddle sweat rinsed off with water I know he will counter however tired whinnying wildly up the ridges near side and I know he will find her he will be filled with the sureness of horses whose bellies are green filled whose long ribbed loneliness can be scratched into no longer lonely his long teeth on her withers her rough-coated spots will grow damp and wild her long teeth on his withers his oil teakwood smoothness will grow damp and wild their shadows crisscross will Fleck and fill with flies the eight marks of their fortune stamp and then cancel the earth from ear flick to tail switch they stand in one body no luck is as boundless as theirs I feel so badly for the people coughing I had this wonderful glass of water up here I could give it to you but then only one of you would want it so okay we're approaching we're getting closer to the present now so just a few poems from what used to be my most recent book and as of today no longer is this first one is is has a word in it which I'm sure most of you are familiar with but in case anybody isn't the word is Co long and a Cohen is the testing question used in Rinzai Zen practice the most famous one amongst general American currency is what is the sound of one hand another one might be show me your face before your parents were born so you know unanswerable questions which yet can somehow be met and this poem well it's not completely about this a great deal of it is describing to two monks who basically flunk their Co on there they're trying to deal with this Sunday they can't the heart's counting knows only one in some China two monks friends for 60 years watched the geese pass where are they going one test at the other who couldn't say that moment's silence continues no one will study their friendship in the Cohan books of insight no one will remember their names I think of them sometimes standing perplexed by sadness goose-down sewn into their quilted autumn robes almost swallowed by the vastness of the mountains but not yet as the barely audible geese are not yet swallowed as even we my love will not entirely be lost the this second last book has a lot of poems which I think of as recipes for getting through difficult times in one's life so you know if one poem doesn't work you can try another there there various strategies I think I've only picked out one to read you today and this one literally is a recipe it's a very good recipe and if you would like to make it you can find it in the first green's cookbook I come by it honorably I cooked it greens for three years Annie Lamott once said that there's no woman writer who hasn't done her time in the foodservice industry and so far I've asked around and it seems to be so everybody's either wait restore cooked or something the title of the poem is an Italian term from music da capo and it appears at the end of a piece of music and is an instruction to go back and play it again from the top da capo take the used up heart like a pebble and throw it far out soon there is nothing left soon the last ripple exhausts itself in the weeds returning home sliced carrots onions celery glaze them in oil before adding the lentils water and herbs then the roasted chestnuts a little pepper the salt finish with goat cheese and parsley eat you may do this I tell you it is permitted begin again the story of your life three foxes by the edge of the field at twilight one ran her nose to the ground a rusty shadow neither hunting nor playing one stood sat lay down stood again one never moved except to turn her head a little as we walked finally we drew too close and they vanished the woods took them back as if they had never been I wish I had thought to put my face to the grass but we kept walking speaking as strangers do when becoming friends there is more and more I tell no one strangers nor loves this slips into the heart without hurry as if it had never been and yet among the trees something has changed something looks back from the trees and knows me for who I am okay three more poems and two of them are short weird poems so you're in the last for long of the gallop here the bearded woman each time she noticed she had meant to pluck the three black hairs but the days were short her fingers touched her chin then forgot thus fatigue group curling into wisdom so that's short and weird in one way this is short and weird in another it's kind of a riddle and I won't tell you the answer if you ask me in the Q&A people have tried I'll tip you off to what the riddle is the poem is called lying and your job after you've heard it does you know some poems only complete themselves when you've chewed them over a little bit they aren't finished with what's on the page they have to finish with something added by the reader or the listener even by me when I wrote it I still had to add this component so the poem is called lying and what has to happen for it to be complete as you have to try to figure out what part of it is the lie he puts his brush to the canvas with one quick stroke unfolds a bird from the sky steps back considers takes pity unfolds another and the last poem I'll read I'll give you a little background on I was staying at a retreat for scholars and artists in Italy that the Rockefeller Foundation runs in in Bellagio on Lake Como and this was a kind of extraordinary experience I've been to artists retreats in America before and and they're amazing you get to concentrate on your work for a month without distraction your meals are provided somebody changes your sheets and vacuums once a week you're given a bedroom and a workspace and it's an amazing opportunity to sink deeply into only doing the one thing you most want to be doing but Bellagio because it's in Italy because it's the Rockefeller Foundation because it's scholars as well as artists and I guess scholars live higher than artists it's kind of like a cross between a five-star hotel and one of those English country manners you see in the movies and an artist colony and I was quite intimidated by being there I felt quite guilty that all of this existed and that I was getting to benefit from it and I was thinking about all of the particularly poets who live in circumstances so much less blessed than mine even in normal life let alone their poets for whom publication might be impossible for whom even having sufficient paper might be impossible and yet you know that great work is being done I may never get the chance to see these poems and yet I am confident that all over the earth in obscure corners in obscure languages poems that I will never get and maybe no one will ever get to read are being written and this matters enormous ly to me so that that is what lies behind this the poet she is working now in a room not unlike this one the one where I write or you read her table is covered with paper the light of the lamp would be tempered by a shade where the bulbs single harshness might dissolve but it is not she has taken it off her poems I will never know them though they are the ones I most need even the alphabet she writes in I cannot decipher her chair let us imagine whether it is leather or canvas vinyl or wicker let her have a chair her shadeless lamp the table let one or two she loves be in the next room let the door be closed the sleeping ones healthy let her have time and silence enough paper to make mistakes and go on thank you I've never read a poem where it was more appropriate to have a baby gurgling in the back of the room than for that one so as I understand that anyone now who would like to talk about anything um this is when we do I first saw you on the Bill Moyers series this is fabulous thank you and as a writer I want to ask you how you prepare yourself to write do you write longhand computer what is your technique mm-hmm you know when you first ask how do you prepare yourself to write the answer which lept into my mind was that's been a lifetime's enterprise but I think you mean it in a slightly more confined sense than that you know I have over my life I have worked in a number of different processes as far as the technology is concerned I mean you ask particularly about what what the technology is and for many many years starting I think I learned to type with two fingers when I was in third grade and I typed a lot of my work when I was young but I also wrote longhand a great deal when I was young because I was writing at 2:00 in the morning and hiding things under my bed which I thought my mother wasn't seeing you know for a for me poetry was a very private activity in which I basically cultivated a self and it was something done in secrecy and and just for myself and I'm still surprised now that I actually do things like publish poems or give readings because I know how deeply it was rooted in solitude and how much it still is and so the one preparation which never changes is I will never be one of those who writes in a crowded cafe some do some very good poets can only write in public surrounded by the buzz of human life and human language and for me the most essential thing is undisturbed time and space the feeling that nothing is going to come crashing through the door one of the great discoveries of recent years that that poem Apple about my birthday referred to is I learned I could unplug the phones you know not just turn the ringer off detach them makes a huge psychological difference for me to be able to do that so for four years you know at first I hand wrote I typed I worked on computers for some years and now I'm back to hand writing again my current pattern is to wake up in the morning make the essential mug of latte which has been a lifelong it's my one great vice I must have my morning coffee and then often not always but often if my life can be quiet that day if I don't have to have the phone plugged in for some reason I will write first thing in the morning in bed longhand and for some reason that I don't understand but I know there's a poem in the new book which refers to probably where it started I write on my old paper it's like discarded drafts because then I do you know work on them a great deal more of course but on the backsides of old drafts that I'm no longer keeping I tear the paper in half and I keep it in a pile next to the bed and that's what I'm writing my first draft song this is just absolutely inexplicable to me it is such a strange thing to be doing but I've done it for about a year and a half now and the poem that started it or was I was actually I was teaching at a writers conference the Port Townsend writers conference up up in Washington State and I usually never wrote when I'm teaching when I'm on the road don't write but for some reason up there that time I had a cabin the cabin had a typewriter I was writing and I hadn't brought any paper with me because I hadn't expected to write and one morning and I realized I was down like two sheets I'd only had maybe 10 sheets of blank paper with me and one morning I woke up from you know a heavy dreamless sleep with an auditory you know a sort of voice saying to me use your failures for paper and what it meant quite literally was you know the nine sheets of paper in the wastebasket you can use the back of them and I've been doing that ever since it's a compost so I don't think these are things that other people should emulate we asked writers how they write in the hope that you know maybe something will allow us to do you know I love you know many poets go around now saying you must write every day you must do it when you first wake up or you must do it at 5:00 in the afternoon you must make an appointment with your muse you must do this you must do that I don't think there's anything anyone must do I think our task is to find what works for us which will change over the course of a lifetime as mine certainly has I mean writing first thing in the morning I was a night person all my life the idea that I could wake up and write poetry would have been laughable to me ten years ago and then something switched and now that's what I do but if any of you want to take your old drafts and tear them in half and leave them next to the bed you know go ahead try it maybe it'll work for you but mostly I think you find out what does work for you and you follow that like a hound dog following a scent to see what your muse is pleased by and then be open to surprises be open to suddenly going back to longhand after years on a computer and you know I I coat each with spend brokers who I'm afraid might murder me if he heard me say that I sometimes have written on computer for years but my own experience of it is it makes no difference to the kinds of poem that I write what technology I use I hear the poems and all I want is to get what I hear onto paper and then I will revise by whatever means are available you know if that means 80 sheets of paper done by hand that's what I'll do it's I don't think the process influences the outcome I think he might be correct I don't know if any of you even know what I'm talking about when I just say Sven Burkert some the Gutenberg elegies it's a marvelous book brilliant gorgeous writing he's a fabulous critic but he does say that writing on computer will ruin your writing that it will ruin your thinking it will make you quick and sloppy and casual and my own experience is it doesn't that's all I mean to say another question I was wondering I want to slip in to questions actually I'm curious about what your influences have been in writing both in terms of Zen practice and other writers and I'm also wondering what your revision process is how much time you spend revising influences are far and wide you know I think the earliest book of poetry that I ever bought I was nine years old and I bought a little collection of haiku in one of those dollar Peter popper press editions and I adored it I don't know what I was understanding them as I was a child growing up in New York City reading you know nature poetry from Japan but I knew something in there mattered to me and that love of Japanese poetry has of course recurred throughout my life I did a co translation of two women poets from the Heian era and so that that has been a deep influence from early but so of course has been the English sonnet particularly I think you know Milton's sonnets Shakespeare's sonnets Keats Wordsworth Shelley for some reason less of all the Romantic poets he's the one that I've never quite taken to and every time I go back I kind of have the same experience you know maybe one poem will sneak in but mostly there's something that Shelley's temperament in mine which don't accord I took Latin when I was young I've forgotten it all but Horace and Catullus were huge influences on me not only as poets and they are remarkable poets I mean so wild and colloquial and vivid and you know there they are the the Frank O'Hara's of their day there's no question about it Frank O'Hara is not actually an influence on me but Harrison could tell us were but also the stoic and epicurean philosophy is quite close to them carpe diem and Zen you know their poems are full of references to the transience of the world and so they sent me towards Buddhism as much as Japanese or Chinese poetry sent me towards Buddhism I have of course read a great deal of classical Chinese and Japanese poetry and translation but then you know I go all over the map I've gone through periods the Greek poets affair us a long time ago and then between then and now fell completely in love with Cavafy who I'm still in love with the Russian poet Mandelstam the the contemporary polish poets Josef mellows of course Szymborska is Vigny of Herbert who's now dead they were important to me Bertolt Brecht's poems were important to me and I'm just all over Galway Cannell early merwin Audrey enriched I mean from each of them something has been taken rich taught me that it was okay to think in poetry the dream of a common language those long lined poems in which she thinks and feels at the same time enormous permission given to me as a young woman poet from those poems she translated some puzzles of the Urdu poet Holly that sent me back to the scholarly book on Holly he was an influence on me so you know I just I'm all dance with anybody revision process I love revision somewhere along the line it stopped being something that was I mean lord knows when it's not working out it's still painful you know when I've got three-quarters of it there and I can't bring it the rest of the way in that process it's awful but when I'm not right it's I imagine it's like childbirth you forget the pain most of the time and and what I now feel about revision is to revise is as good as to write it is a rien into the creative calling forth of a clarified being in this world and for me the pleasure of making a poem better truer weirder stranger wilder of diction simpler any of those directions that a poem will want to go it's the same thrill as writing the first draft as some of my poems come out pretty clean and they don't change hugely from first draft to completion others I mean I wasn't joking when I said 80 pages I have revised poems 85 times going wildly different directions on route poems that were very problematic and difficult for me to figure out what am I doing here there was something I couldn't let go of but I didn't know what it was and for me the process is very much asking the poem what are you what do you want to be what needs to come for to make you more completely yourself it feels like a dialogue it's not me telling something what to do it's something telling me what it wants me to help it do and and so I'm I'm us happy to revise us to write although of course you have to write first in order to have something to revise and I think that change of attitude from oh it's not good enough - this is a chance to discover something made all the difference you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

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Keywords: poetry, Jane, Hirshfield, humanities

Id: acbL-YcBkqY

Length: 59min 31sec (3571 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 23 2008