Jane Hirshfield is a member of the core faculty of the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars and the author of The Lives of the Heart, poems, and Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, essays, both from HarperCollins in 1997. Other recent work of hers appears in The American Poetry Review, Slate, AGNI, The Atlantic, and The Yale Review. Her fifth collection of poems, Given Sugar, Given Salt, will appear from HarperCollins in 2001. (updated 2000)

Read “Zen and the Art of Poetry: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield” by Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler in AGNI Online.