Dont Despair of This Falling World with Jane Hirshfield

Published: Sept. 13, 2023, 10 a.m.

When poet Jane Hirshfield first arrived at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center nearly fifty years ago, a Zen teacher told her that it was a good idea to have a question to practice with. She\u2019s been asking questions ever since. Both in her Zen practice and in her poetry, Hirshfield is guided by questions that resist easy answers, allowing herself to be transformed through the process of asking. With her latest poetry collection, The Asking: New and Selected Poems, she takes up the question, \u201cHow can I be of service?,\u201d inviting readers to resist fixity and certainty and instead to dwell in not-knowing.\nIn this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle\u2019s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Hirshfield to talk about the questions she\u2019s been asking recently, why she views poetry as an antidote to despair, and how Zen rituals have informed her creative process. Plus, she reads a few poems from her new collection.