Featured on Word Temple are Jane Hirshfield and Nathaniel Tarn. Born in Paris in 1928, Tarn was a leading anthropologist for many years, and the pioneering translator of Pablo Neruda. His own poetry was praised by Octavio Paz for it's "rich temperament, a remarkable linguistic inventiveness, and a vision both original and universal." Tarn talks with Katherine Hastings and reads from his latest collection, Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers.

Jane Hirshfield, the popular author of six collections of poems including her latest book, After, reads new poems from her home in Northern California. Robert Bly says, "There is something subtle and new in Jane Hirshfield's poems...She has absorbed the vertical line through her discipline, and it gives her poems and intensity that doesn't kill ordinary life, or subdue the body as some vertical studies do."

Hastings also plays French music by popular French musicians and composers.