When poet Jane Hirshfield first arrived at Tassajara Monastery nearly fifty years ago, a Zen teacher told her that it was a good idea to have a question to practice with. She’s 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 and paying attention. With her latest poetry collection, The Asking: New and Selected Poems, she takes up the question, “How can I be of service?,” inviting readers to resist fixity and certainty and instead to dwell in not-knowing.
In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Hirshfield to talk about the questions she’s 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.
Tricycle Talks is a monthly podcast featuring prominent voices from within and beyond the Buddhist fold. Listen to more episodes here.
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Jane Hirshfield, "The Asking: New and Selected Poems" (Knopf, 2023)

Interview with Poets about their New Books
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A collected series of intertwined poetic essays written by acclaimed Japanese poet Hiromi Ito--part nature writing, part travelogue, part existential philosophy. Written between April 2012 and November 2013, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits (Nightboat Books, 2023) adopts a non-linear narrative flow that mimics the growth of plants, and can be read as a companion piece to Ito's beloved poem "Wild Grass on the Riverbank". Rather than the vertiginously violent poetics of the latter, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits serves as what we might call a phyto-autobiography: a recounting of one's life through the logic of flora. Ito's graciously potent and philosophical prose examines immigration, language, gender, care work, and death, all through her close (indeed, at times obsessive) attention to plant life.
For a better understanding of this collection and the author, the following books are recommended by translator Dr. Jon Pitt:

Hiromi Ito - Wild Grass on the Riverbank


Hiromi Ito - The Thorn Puller


Robin Wall Kimmerer - Braiding Sweetgrass


Hope Jahren - Lab Girl


Jeanie Shinozuka - Biotic Borders


Banu Subrahmaniam - Ghost Stories for Darwin



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Hiromi Ito, "Tree Spirits Grass Spirits" (Nightboat Books, 2023)

When I decided to try my hand at interviewing authors for the New Books Network, one of my dream guests was Steve Mentz. Steve’s work in the environmental humanities marries a rigorous archival work, pathbreaking close readings, and a fluent and innovative approach to scholarly writing. I think he’s charted a course for early modern ecocriticism that has been both impressive and energizing.
Steve Mentz is a Professor of English at St. John’s University. He has produced numerous books that have shaped the emerging field of the blue humanities, including Shipwreck Modernity; At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean; the Bloomsbury Objects entry Ocean; and the recent An Introduction to the Blue Humanities. He has published a chapbook of poetry, Swim Poems. His Bookfish blog is also a wonderful index for scholarly and creative work happening right now. Today, I am excited to discuss his most recent book of blue poetry, Sailing Without Ahab, just published by Fordham University Press in 2024.
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Steve Mentz, "Sailing without Ahab: Ecopoetic Travels" (Fordham UP, 2024)

In Memoriam: David Ferry (1924-2023)
In this Recall This Book conversation from 2021, poets David Ferry and Roger Reeves talk about lyric, epic, and the underworld. The underworld, that repository of the Shades of the Dead, gets a lot of traffic from heroes (Gilgamesh, Theseus, Odysseus, Aeneas) and poets (Orpheus, Virgil, Dante). Some come down for information or in hopes of rescuing or just seeing their loved ones, or perhaps for a sense of comfort in their grief. They often find those they have loved, but they rarely can bring them back. Comfort they never find, at least not in any easy way.
The poets talk about David’s poem Resemblance, in which he sees his father, whose grave he just visited, eating in the corner of a small New Jersey restaurant and “listening to a conversation/With two or three others—Shades of the Dead come back/From where they went to when they went away?”
"I feel the feathers softly gather upon
My shoulders and my arms, becoming wings.
Melodious bird I'll fly above the moaning
Bosphorus, more glorious than Icarus,
I'll coast along above the coast of Sidra
And over the fabled far north Hyperborean steppes."
-- from "To Maecenas", The Odes of Horace, II: 20.
Their tongues are ashes when they’d speak to us.
David Ferry, “Resemblance”
Roger reads “Grendel’s Mother,” in which the worlds of Grendel and Orpheus and George Floyd coexist but do not resemble each other, and where Grendel’s mother hears her dying son and refuses the heaven he might be called to, since entering it means he’d have to die.
Henry Justice Ford, ‘Grendel’s Mother Drags Beowulf to the Bottom Of The Lake’, 1899
So furious. So furious, I was,
When my son called to me, called me out
Of heaven to come to the crag and corner store
Where it was that he was dying, “Mama,
I can’t breathe;” even now I hear it—
Roger Reeves, “Grendel’s Mother”
Mentioned in this episode

David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, University of Chicago Press

Virgil, The Aeneid, translated by David Ferry, University of Chicago Press

Horace, The Odes of Horace, translated by David Ferry, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux

Roger Reeves, King Me, Copper Canyon Press

Roger Reeves, Best Barbarian, W.W. Norton Press

Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric, Harvard University Press


Read transcript of the episode here.
Listen to the episode here.
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David Ferry, Roger Reeves, and the Underworld

Father Verses Sons: A Correspondence in Poems (Rare Bird, 2024). When the global pandemic forced his ninety-six-year-old father into isolation, filmmaker Ari Gold became concerned that loneliness would kill his father's spirits. As a prolific novelist who began writing in his twenties, Herbert Gold's incredible oeuvre included twenty-four novels, five collections of stories and essays, and eight nonfiction books. So, Ari mailed his father a poem, asking for one in return. Later, Ari's twin brother, Ethan, also got into the game. Thus was launched a lifesaving literary correspondence, and a testament to the bonds of family. The resulting poems are playful, honest, funny, and moving. Secrets are invoked alongside personal - and often painful - history. Ari and Ethan's mother, Herbert Gold's second wife, died in a helicopter crash alongside the famous rock promoter and impresario Phil Graham in 1991. Her ghost roams through the poems and the wonderful archival photos included in full color throughout. In Father Verses Sons, a lushly illustrated "correspondence in poems," ranges across the life, family, and death of a remarkable father. The father and his sons write tenderly of their hunger for connection, about the woman that all three men have lost (a mother, a wife), and about the passion that all three seek. Ultimately, these poems tell a singular story of men bumbling their way towards love.
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Herbert Gold and Ari Gold, "Father Verses Sons: A Correspondence in Poems" (Rare Bird Books, 2024)

Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American writer, is the author of four poetry collections, including Only More So (Salmon Poetry, Ireland), and Quarantine Highway (FlowerSong Press). Among her awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Fulbright, CantoMundo, Creative Capacity, the California Arts Council, Foundation for Contemporary Arts (Covid grant), Yaddo, Portuegese National Cultural Foundation, and the Barbara Deming Foundation, "Money for Women." She lives in Topanga canyon.
From re-definition to re-calibration, the poems in Quarantine Highway are artifacts to the early and mid-days of the pandemic. Though not specifically labeled as "Covid poems," they strike to the heart of the universal yet individual struggles of solitude, confinement, justice, isolation and, ultimately, self-reckoning. The poems push and pull between the constantly knocking global news cycle to the stillness of a surreal inner world.
Find more of Millicent's writings here.
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Jane Hirshfield, "The Asking: New and Selected Poems" (Knopf, 2023)

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