Read By: Jane Hirshfield

<p>Jane Hirshfield on her selection:</p> <p>“The Lives of the Poets”</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Anna Swir: “Poetry Reading” (translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan) <a href= "https://bookshop.org/books/talking-to-my-body/9781556591082">https://bookshop.org/books/talking-to-my-body/9781556591082</a></p> <p>Lucille Clifton: “After the Reading” <a href= "https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-carry-water-selected-poems-of-lucille-clifton/9781950774142"> https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-carry-water-selected-poems-of-lucille-clifton/9781950774142</a></p> <p>Han Shan: “Here we languish, a bunch of poor scholars” (translated by Burton Watson) <a href= "https://bookshop.org/books/cold-mountain-one-hundred-poems-by-the-t-ang-poet-han-shan/9780231034500"> https://bookshop.org/books/cold-mountain-one-hundred-poems-by-the-t-ang-poet-han-shan/9780231034500</a></p> <p>Yannis Ritsos: “Necessary Explanation” (translated by Kimon Friar) <a href= "https://bookshop.org/books/yannis-ritsos-selected-poems-1938-1988/9780918526670"> https://bookshop.org/books/yannis-ritsos-selected-poems-1938-1988/9780918526670</a></p> <p>Adrienne Rich: “XIII (Dedication),” final section of “An Atlas of the Difficult World” <a href= "https://bookshop.org/books/an-atlas-of-the-difficult-world-poems-1988-1991/9780393308310"> https://bookshop.org/books/an-atlas-of-the-difficult-world-poems-1988-1991/9780393308310</a></p> <p>Frank