Mind Matters Talk with Jane Hirshfield

“One Continuous Enactment”: Poetry as a Way of Being in the World

Art and Aesthetics in the Enactive Fold

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“I don’t think poetry is based just on poetry; it is based on a thoroughly lived life.” — JH

For a year in which we will be reflecting on the deep synergy between art, aesthetics, and the enactive approach, we could think of no better voice to open our 2025 online programming than the legendary poet, essayist, and translator Jane Hirshfield. Jane’s decades-long oeuvre lies at the interstices of eco-poetics, science, phenomenology, and contemplative wisdom. A Zen practitioner of over fifty years, her poetry not just investigates, but enacts, modes of attention and perception familiar to practitioners of Zen, but extending far beyond any single tradition: hers is a poetics of self and non-self writ large, questioning the usual dualities between realms felt as private and collectively shared, between domestic concerns and our larger biosphere. As she says, “the monastery does not end at its gate or even in Buddhist practice.” Rather, practice is the path of engaging with compassion, with suppleness of view, heart, and mind, and with skillful means, the myriad worlds already at hand. At a time when many are wondering how to remain permeable, and how to say yes to a world that is difficult to say yes to, her poetry comes as a much-needed compass of sanity. 

The evening will follow a different format than usual: we’ll open with a reading by Jane Hirshfield from her most recent collection The Asking, which will be followed by an interview, and finally an open discussion with the live Zoom audience.