Celebrated Poet Jane Hirshfield in conversation with Helena Feder

Helena Feder | September 2023

Feder: That’s a great comparison, and I’m pleased they named the rover Curiosity (and not, say, Enterprise). I’ve often wondered if astonishment is the sudden realization of deeper, unconscious curiosity. What details of the natural world continue to astonish you? 

Hirshfield: I suspect anything looked at with fully open eyes can astonish. What astonished me yesterday was going out on a foraging walk. Outbound, I saw no mushrooms at all, edible or inedible. On the return, something caught my eyes—two mushrooms, five feet uphill of the trail. They turned out to be large coccora, a two-mushroom feast. It astonishes me that they were there. It astonishes me that I know what they are. And all we’ve learned in recent decades about mushrooms and the mycelial mats by which trees communicate and sustain one another, that astonishes me too. Anywhere you put your attention, the world releases hidden fragrance and unexpected abundance. 

Feder: You’ve mentioned that you can see Mt. Tamalpais, a mountain with many layers of human and more-than-human meaning and history, from your window. It appears in quite a few of your poems. Has your relationship with Mt. Tam changed over time? And does it inform your made word, “mountainal,” in the poem of that title in Ledger? 

Hirshfield: Some years ago, my neighbors’ twin sons started a rock band. The drummer practiced diligently for many years, just a few feet from my writing studio’s back wall. I changed from writing in the afternoons in that studio to writing mornings, in my bedroom, with Mt. Tam in view. I’d also taken to walking the mountain much more. But the Tam of the poems is almost always seen—or sometimes not, when there’s clouds, fog, or fire smoke. One part of the way Tam calibrates my life is in the last lines of an earlier poem, “Vilnius”: 

If you lived higher up on the mountain, 

I find myself thinking, what you would see is 

more of everything else, but not the mountain. 

That thought is literal, and also metaphysical. It holds, among other things, the choice to stay low. The choice for earthly gravity over transcendence, for humility over grandness, for experience over overview. I’ve come more and more to value humility, which feels to me a right relationship to the world. “Peak” experiences are central precisely because they are rare and hard-won. Awe comes with meeting something larger than we are, and offers a glimpse of the actual size and magnitude of existence—something we’re mostly unable to bear the knowledge of, yet such knowing changes a life. 

The poem “Mountainal” holds a different entrance. Mt. Tam is inside that word, yes, which appears also in the poem’s final line: “I wanted to be mountainal, wateral, wrenal.” The thought pledges my troth to the beyond-human world, to my place as one part of a whole in which we humans are members without special privilege. Our species seems bent on an erasure of others, which will bring also our own. Yet the world-community continues to hold us, as a mountain holds all that lives on and within it. 

Feder: Have the wildfires in California influenced, quickened, or sharpened your writing? 

Hirshfield: Fire is part of the ecosystem here—but major fire events were once infrequent. Now every year brings its season of smoke. 

I helped protect Tassajara, the Zen monastery where I then lived, from the Ventana-Cone Fire in 1977, at that time one of the largest the state had seen. Those weeks of cutting fire-line, of watching the night-glow on ridges approach, and then the weeks afterward, living inside the burn zone where the interior of trees continued to ember for almost a month, remain among the most powerful experiences of my life. Also, unexpectedly, among the most beautiful, and most tender. Seeing the first quail return. Where had they sheltered? Seeing the entire ecosystem slowly return, before it burned again, fifteen years later, and then again, in 2008. 

Those fires are in my body and psyche. But fire now is in all our bodies, when the smoke of West Coast fires is breathed in Vermont and New York, the smoke of Indonesian fires breathed in Alaska. A few of my poems speak of wildfire directly: “Beautiful Dawn,” “Sonoma Fire,” “Heat and Desperation.” But all the poems of biosphere and climate catastrophe, especially the ones

in Ledger, hold fire’s witness in them. I haven’t written yet of September 9, 2020, the day the Bay Area sky stayed red with smoke. Street lamps, house lights, car headlamps stayed on, needed. 10:00 a.m. was darker than 8:00 a.m. It felt to me as if the scrim of normality had been pulled back, and we could see with our own eyes the world’s actual damage. Not an imagined, apocalyptic future. Now, here. That day without light left me permanently harrowed. 

Feder: In more ordinary circumstances (if we may still say such a thing) what is your poetic practice like? 

Hirshfield: When I’m at an artist colony, my practice is to write one new poem each day—it can be a terrible poem, but it must be a poem, not a phrase, not a free-write. Often the first thing I do on waking is look at what I wrote the day before—and sometimes find in what I’d thought ought to be discarded a line of possibility, and begin a revision of that, before starting the new one. This has happened enough times, over decades, that I’ve learned to try to suspend judging new poems at all, when they’re first written. Poems I thought were good turn to dust, poems I thought worthless can spring to their feet. This doppler shift can happen over days, weeks, and years. If there’s anything at all that magnetizes, a poem stays to hand.

Artist retreats are for me monastic—protected time and place, where my entire attention and intention can turn in a single direction. My life at home is distracted by many things, as everyone’s is. Perhaps I’m singularly undisciplined, but when home, I write only when a poem demands writing, and otherwise don’t. If I try to command the muse, what comes is a mannequin, not a living poem. Prose, I can write on will power. Each piece in the two essay books, Nine Gates and Ten Windows, holds months of daily work. But to write a poem, I need to become permeable, without skin. To fall out of time, without worrying that at some hour I’m supposed to be someplace else. I trust the poems will come. During the times when they don’t, I try to practice what Robert Hass once advised a student: “You don’t have to write every day, just do something each day that connects with your life as a poet.” 

Feder: While the practice of writing is sometimes difficult, the practice of finishing seems harder still. How do you know when a poem is, for lack of a better word, finished?

Hirshfield: When its ink no longer changes under my pen as I read it. Time is a large part of the process. I begin to revise as soon as a poem is on the page. But then I walk away for a few minutes, for an hour, overnight. A few days, a few weeks. When I no longer see things shift, not a comma or line break, the poem is done. A few months later, I may see something new again. One early poem, “Autumn Quince,” I changed four times over four print runs of its book before it finally settled down. Amazingly, Wesleyan University Press, Of Gravity & Angels’ publisher, let me.

Equally difficult is knowing whether or not a poem is good. There are times I truly can’t tell on my own, and during this pandemic time of not giving readings, I can’t hear others’ responses. Even when an audience is silent, perhaps especially when the audience is silent, you can sometimes feel a poem sink in and take root: the room grows even more silent. Hearing that tells me something.

Feder: Your penultimate public reading before the pandemic, with Gary Snyder, had “rock concert” lines wrapped round several blocks to get in. What is your view of poetry in America now?

Hirshfield: Oh, that reading! What a joy it was to join Gary at the public library of my hometown, his own long-ago hometown, at the base of a mountain he’d circumambulated many times.

Over my life, I’ve seen poetry become more central and less central in the public sphere. During the Vietnam protests, the Beat era, the late ’60s and early ’70s, poets were vanguard figures. Robert Bly, Gary, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. My early political and environmental awareness was in part made by poets. I learned the concept of watershed, for instance, from Gary Snyder. Some early glimpses of Buddhist views came from Kenneth Rexroth’s translations of classical Japanese and Chinese poets. Robert Bly brought many of my generation our first news of Rumi, Kabir, Hafiz, and Mirabai, of Holderlin and Rilke, Vallejo and Neruda, when schools’ curriculum was still confined to the lineage in English. There’ve been quieter years for poetry also, of course. Right now, poetry is thriving—almost co-opted. It appears in major media, is voiced-over in car ads, PSAs against smoking are offered in spoken word rhyme. Poems go viral, even some of my own. The poem I read at the March for Science in 2017, “On the Fifth Day,” was given a full section-front page in The Washington Post. It also was passed from hand to hand among scientists, starting the night it was written. Both ways of a poem’s traveling matter. 

The “state of poetry” doesn’t much matter. So long as poems are being read at weddings and memorials, exchanged by lovers, sought in times of transition, poetry is fine: irrepressible because the work it does is humanly needed. Difficult public eras are good for poetry’s public service. This is such a time, so poetry is visible. But the poems that serve quiet, interior needs matter as well. They do what Ivan Illich called “shadow work,” immeasurable and indispensable even when hidden. 

Feder: Poems travel... and poets too. Have visits to particularly unique or fragile landscapes or cultural sites informed your work? 

Hirshfield: For a long time now, I’ve travelled only where poetry invitations take me. Those places sometimes appear later on, in poems. After the pandemic began, and traveling ceased for us all, I found myself blinking at the number of far-flung places named in Ledger. A Silesian coal mine-turned-museum, 300 meters under the earth. The Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, in the Arctic, where I went for an environmental symposium. I’ve drunk kopi (a cheap-bean coffee roasted in butter or margarine and served with condensed milk; I loved it) in a hall of food stalls in Singapore, in the company of a poet almost singly responsible for the thriving community of young poets who live in that city. Poetry took me to the Terra Cotta Warriors and Wild Goose Pagoda in China’s ancient capital, Xi’an; to the Summer Palace outside Beijing; to the causeway built by the poet Su T’ung Po when he served also as the governor of Hangzhou in the eleventh century. To the Golden Temple and a pickle restaurant in Kyoto. I’ve read in the cathedrals of Krakow, and in a tiny coffee shop in the Kazimierz, that city’s former Jewish ghetto, before it became the tourist mecca it now is. Poems in Ledger speak of refugees not least because I met with university students in Aleppo and Damascus in 2007, before the civil war that must have so entirely changed their lives. I’ve been to Ramallah, Havana, Nanjing, Galway, London, the Isle of Skye, Lake Como. I’ve worked in a former cane-cutter family’s shack on Captiva Island in Florida and lived in a castle in Umbria. This is entirely implausible to me. To list, let alone to have lived.

The era of poets traveling that way may be over. Zoom burns almost no extra fossil fuel when I join an Australian environmental group’s memorial for extinct species. But then, I’m still hoping to be at Queens College in Belfast in November, 2022, as the third Seamus Heaney International Visiting Poet, a year late; conversations and shared meals do matter. My life as a poet has been one of carrying a few grains of pollen across borders. Poetry itself is a pollen crossing borders. I’ve read since childhood the poets of other languages, times, cultures, beliefs, experiences. If I can repay that debt even a little, I will. 

Feder: You studied Zen for many years and your influences are both eastern and western. Has this been a wholly generative meeting of many traditions, or have you ever felt a tidal pull between east and west?

Hirshfield: I’ve found different descriptions investigating one terrain. Within the Western tradition I was born into, I was drawn early to Heraclitus, to Horace and Catullus, to Emerson and Thoreau, long before I could recognize how closely some elements of their work accord with the practice of Zen. The Nahuatl flower songs of Meso-America eerily resemble certain classical Japanese poems. 

Awareness of transience, of nonseparation, connection, and interdependence; awareness of suffering and its causes; the dapple of radiance and loss—these are human taproots. They aren’t confined to any one place, time, language, or story. They don’t live under only one label or one tradition. Each tradition holds its own stories and angles of view, as each ecosystem holds its own plants and birds, clothing and weathers. But oxygen and water, fire and minerals, gravity and wind-lift, are recognizable anywhere on earth.

Throughout my life of writing, I’ve wanted my own relationship to these taproot questions, to find an individual and hybrid expression. I’ve co-translated both tanka and haiku, but my short “pebble” poems aren’t written in either of those forms. They draw from them, and draw equally from the Western traditions of very short poems. To write in Japanese forms directly would, for me, have been too great a temptation, like putting on borrowed clothes. 

My task—any poet’s or person’s task—is to find the taste of my own time, my own life, in my own tongue.

Feder: Rereading your work, from your earliest books to your most recent, Ledger, I was struck by how many poems are odes to things themselves—as Williams might say—to objects, or object-lessons—and also how many are koans.

Hirshfield: Seeing with objects, listening to what’s kept half-hidden in the between-notes of silence, is, I think, the way my own psyche naturally parses the world. In museums, I’m drawn to the rooms that hold the still-life masters. As a child choosing my first book to buy, I reached for a book of haiku. 

There’s a teaching of the 13th-century Zen master, Eihei Dogen: “To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to awaken into the ten thousand things.” Any painter who falls into the 

square of sunlight momentarily visible on a piece of curved glass awakens into the ten thousand things. 

Feder: Have any of your new poems surprised you more than the others?

Hirshfield: By the time this piece appears, the answer will doubtless have changed. New & Selected will be published in 2023, and I hope more new poems will arrive for that. 

Truly, though, all new poems surprise me. I never have any idea what I may write or say next. I don’t pre-assign myself subjects, and I don’t tend to work in series, though some poems do—to my surprise—after the fact become larger sets. The assay poems did, for instance, beginning in After; the “heart” poems and “spell” poems of The Lives of the Heart; the “My ” poems that began in The Beauty; the “little soul” poems of Ledger. Each of these started with a single poem whose way of speaking felt distinctive and unexpected and opened a door that led then to other rooms. 

I want to write varied poems, in varied registers. A new mode of speaking, grammar, music, lets me think things I haven’t before, feel things I haven’t before. A change of syntax can be a portal to a new life. And then, too, if we’re to live in a viable way on a viable earth, some new strategies of existence and expression, of imagination, even of happiness, are desperately needed. 

Years ago I wrote an essay in Ten Windows, “Poetry & The Constellation of Surprise.” In writing that, I became more consciously aware how deeply the experience of surprise (both large and minute) runs through good poems, often under the surface. Art confounds expectation; the predictable doesn’t move, enlarge, give news or give pleasure. Then, too, if a person already understands something fully, there’s no reason to write a poem. Poems respond to the questions that can’t be otherwise answered. 

You asked for examples of poems that surprised me. Here are three: that the travel vest I’d been wearing for years became “Vest,” a poem placing salt packets, Steinway pianos, and my sister’s death into its pockets. Then, a line in a newer poem, “Tin”: “To be a train station of existence is no small matter.” Where does such a thought come from? And third, that years after writing that essay, the subject returned in a poem in Ledger: “I wanted to be surprised.”

Sometimes, naming the obvious can surprise. The poem “Let Them Not Say,” with its opening stanza: “Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw.” That poem, written in 2004, has become something of an anthem—itself a surprise—simply by saying what was there to be seen at a moment when that needed seeing, needed saying. Some experiences put into the simplest words become flashlights of changed feeling, changed understanding. 

Feder: You’ve quoted Ezra Pound’s dictum that literature is “news that stays news.” What is the news of poetry? While it is not “information,” might it combat misinformation, and its consequences?

Hirshfield: If a poem is good, the news it holds will be singular, faithful to reality, and applicable beyond its own boundaries. I sometimes think of poems as a single, long, compound, newly-made word, constructed as many words in German are, by attaching one to the other. A word that is, in the end, its own only possible definition. 

The poems that stay news are the ones that speak to an experience or understanding we need in the lexicon of our lives. Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians,” for instance, speaks directly into this moment’s global politics of scapegoated outsiders and those who conjure their fearing to stay in power. Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is a poem of inward news, one that returns to me equally often, for different needs. James Baldwin’s “Untitled,” I’ve not stopped pondering since the first time I read it. Its news is of a state of being, a state of soul. The same state of soul is in Kay Ryan’s “Blandeur.” Both are indispensable poems, for me.

As for poetry countering misinformation, I think reading good poetry both makes us smarter and increases the love of accurate weighing. If the scale is rigged, the reader feels that deception and walks away. You don’t buy vegetables from a dishonest farmer. Evasion, posturing, borrowed intentions, self-puffing-up, pre-settled conclusions, are as recognizable as a bruised apple. 

We shouldn’t mislead ourselves, though, about poetry in general. “Verse” is a neutral technology, turnable toward any end. There are poems that hypnotize, that fan the worst flames of the psyche. Music and prosody, pattern and syntax, are persuasive; that’s the reason Plato banned poets from his Republic. But good poetry—as I feel it, anyhow—contains its own corrective, and doesn’t bully, connive, mislead, oversimplify, deceive. 

Feder: How might poetry puncture the solipsism of modern information technology, the lure of virtual worlds?

Hirshfield: Poems ask our full presence. You can’t understand a poem at all except with the whole body, the entire life. This is the opposite of the skipping-stone mind and deluge of the online world. It is the opposite of the disembodied trying to mimic embodiment. A poem’s ink on a page is also “virtual,” but its relationship to time and intention is very different. It isn’t consumerist, or trying to lure you to some other destination. It is the destination, and wants you to linger, not click. 

News loses its weight and meaning when pressed between invitations to buy something. We become passive before what keeps turning into the next thing, the next thing, the next. Most entertainment is similarly larded with conscious and unconscious seductions to dress and think in certain ways, to possess certain things. To compare. Poetry, though, is like Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘teatro povero’ [poor theater]: the bare stage increases its power. We fill in what’s missing with our own imagination and lives. To feel poverty as an increase rather than a diminishment is, in itself, no small gift. Every person will at some point be reduced to almost nothing—by illness, suffering, accident, history. By life. Poetry shows that a sustaining reservoir always is present. That even when there seems to be nothing, the world is inexhaustible and can be remade. 

Feder: Several poems in Ledger are explicitly political (“Practice,” “Cataclysm,” “My Silence,” and “Ledger,” to name a few). The last lines of “Cataclysm”, in particular, have stayed with me: “The fed consider the hungry / and stay silent.” 2 Can you speak a little about the politics in or of poetry?

Hirshfield: Within the very bone marrow of good poetry—how it works and also how we understand it—is a set of humane understandings. To enter a poem at all asks some sense of connection, empathy, permeability to other lives; some fidelity to the real, to feeling, to unnarrowed thought. Keats’s “negative capability” of not-knowing, not grasping, is needed as well. Poems clarify without reducing or making simple. They make genuine inquiry. Your question names some of my own poems that are overtly political, but this humane quality is present and active in any good poem, I believe, regardless of subject. Good poems practice the politics of life, not power. They don’t obfuscate, lie, or bribe. 

As for the language of our current, outer politics, I think first of Yeats’s “Byzantium,” how accurate its respective descriptions of ”best” and ”worst” still are. Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” comes to mind also. These pieces tell us our current dilemma is not new; also that it has not been solved. Dog whistles summon tribalist divide. Demagoguery cudgels words unconscious. These tactics appear, as in the past, to be working. 

I don’t begin to understand how we can step back, in our current era, from the edge of brutally conjured division. But Orwell’s essay suggests that if you can’t fix the language and actions of power, you might try an approach from the other side, and fix the language. 

Good poems may help do that. They have for me. Poetry’s cross-hatchings of tenderness and kinship and self-questioning see more than either rage or despair do. Czes?aw Mi?osz reminds me that condemnation that does not also judge the speaker’s own self would not be poetry. Horace and Po Chu-i remind me that exile, outer or inner, can bring a person to tillable fields. Hikmet, Tu Fu, Akhmatova, Swir remind me that others have survived catastrophe to bear witness, and beyond that, to continue to love this world. Mandelstam reminds me that those who do not survive bear witness and world-love as well. 

Novalis wrote that a person spends the first half of a life looking inward, the second half looking outward. All my books hold poems speaking into the larger events of shared fate. Each holds the awareness of how much suffering is brought into the world by the way we humans fail to address power and powerlessness, justice and injustice, equality and inequality. But also, yes, the proportion of work turned that direction has grown higher, especially in Ledger. That book was written into both the crises of climate-change and the ever-increasing visibility of a politics of cruelty and reality-bewildering assertions. These failures grieve and enrage. They cannot be ignored. And as I said earlier, when I cannot ignore and cannot solve, I turn to poems. Sometimes to seek a path toward change, sometimes to find a way to simply agree to keep breathing, keep waking, keep putting one foot after the other. 

Feder: Ten Windows holds one of the best, and most sensitive, readings of Adorno’s famous pronouncement, “After the holocaust, there can be no poetry.” You read his thought in terms of its formal effect, as well as its content: “the ferocity of its self-judgment is in itself a return of considerative, aesthetic awareness from reeling silence.… In condemning literature, Adorno was doing the work literature does: looking into the unbearable, he responded with words that have long outlasted their original speaking.” 3 

I’ve also always read it thusly: Adorno is, himself, articulating a poetics in which there is no “after” for such horror and suffering. In Culture and Society, Adorno puts it a little differently: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.” 4 Does this framing of the thought alter your consideration of it?

Hirshfield: What an interesting close-reading question that is. I’ll offer in answer a haiku by Issa:

In this world,

we walk on the roof of hell,

gathering blossoms. 

Any circumstance of existence holds multiple truths, multiple responses. Perhaps we keep writing poetry, even after Auschwitz, because we keep breathing even after Auschwitz, and humans who breathe will also dream, fall in love, pick flowers, have children, write poems. 

The trick is not to forget when we are in paradise that hell exists, and not to forget, when we are in hell, that paradise does.

Feder: A perfect choice of haiku. You’ve translated Japanese poetry, written about translation, and have written about poetry originally written in many languages. Is the practice of translation meditative (seeking an essence or no-essence), ecological (forming connections), or convivial (finding solidarity with, in similarity and difference)?

Hirshfield: I like your question’s three categories of possibility. All apply. The third one makes me think of a comment Kenneth Rexroth made, in his essay “The Poet as Translator”: one reason to translate is the caliber of people you get to spend time with. That covers the conviviality part rather well. But yes, translation also awakens a concentration close in kind to spiritual practice. It engages the full self and all it knows, while placing you also inside pure selflessness. Your life vanishes into the life of the poem you co-inhabit, into the life and mind and tongue of its original maker. And then, yes again, translation helps create the resilient ecology of world literature. We’re all sustained, consciously or not, by the entire history and global landscape of words. Any writer, making any poem of their own, draws from that shared seed vault. And yes again, to translate is to enter a foundational sense of community—of writers, but much more importantly, of human lives. Of shared fate. 

Feder: One last question. You’ve written about art’s immediacy, its way of addressing fear and awakening “animal joy.” Is that connected, for you, to art’s work as something that “makes an encounter with the uncertain a thing to be sought”? 5 

Hirshfield: The connection, I think, is something I’ve perhaps not spoken of here enough: amplitude. The gift and the cost and the hungering to know the full scope of our lives. To embrace uncertainty is one way to open yourself to the full weather of existence. To be willing to be overwhelmed—by uncertainty, anxiety, fear, but also by joy, by beauty. You can’t know the outcome of becoming permeable, in advance. As Rilke said, every angel is terrifying. Many people seem to spend their lives avoiding their lives. A poet can’t do that. Art asks us to be vulnerable to whatever comes. To say yes to not-knowing, to agree to what happens—this has been one of the central—and hardest—tasks of my life. 

But also: poems are themselves experiences, actual as a river, a roof, or a cyclone taking that roof then away. Life turns itself into poems, but the poems also turn themselves into our lives. I mean to say only, simply, that they are real, that they augment and revise us. That is part of their immediacy, too. 

There’s an untitled quatrain I love by Yeats, about revision: 

The friends who have it I do wrong 

Whenever I remake my song 

Should know what issue is at stake: 

It is myself that I remake. 

Doesn’t that make you hopeful? To think that we’re not only our poems’ weather, but also their weathervanes; that the grip of fate and event isn’t quite so entirely, painfully, fixed, when a change of punctuation, pronoun, or verb tense can change a life. 

Helena Feder has published essays, poems, interviews, and articles in ISLE, J/ASAP, Guernica, North American Review, Orion, the Writer’s Chronicle, After the Art, Radical Philosophy, Another Chicago Magazine, Critical Read, Green Letters, Twentieth-Century Literature, The Georgia Review, Women’s Studies, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Western American Literature, and other venues. She is the author of one book, Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture (Routledge), and editor of two, Close Reading the Anthropocene (Routledge) and You Are the River (NCMA). Helena is Professor of Literature and Environment at ECU.

Excerpt from The Asking: New and Selected Poems

SOLSTICE 

The Earth today tilts one way, then another. 

And yes, though all things change, 

this night again will watch its fireflies, 

then go in to a bed with sheets, 

to lights, a beloved. 

To running water cold and hot. 

Take nothing for granted, 

you who were also opulent, a stung cosmos. 

Birds sing, frogs sing, their sufficient unto. 

The late-night rain-bringing thunder. 

And if days grow ordinarily shorter, 

the dark’s mirror lengthens, 

and one’s gain is not the other lessened. 

Notes 

1. Hirshfield, Jane. Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (New York: Knopf, 2015), 266. 

2. Hirshfield, Jane. Ledger (New York: Knopf, 2020), 35. 

3. Hirshfield, Jane. Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (New York: Knopf, 2015), 253–254. 

4. Adorno, Theodor W. “Cultural Criticism and Society.” Prisms. Translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber, (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), 34. 

5. Hirshfield, Jane. Ten Windows, 123.