This October 20 to 23, we will present our annual Poets Forum in partnership with the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, featuring a reading by the Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets and a series of conversations among the distinguished poets.
Here's an excerpt from the Dodge Blog's new Q&A series Ask a Poet, in which they interviewed Jane Hirshfield, one of the Chancellors who will participate in the festival.
Dodge Blog: What is something you have recently discovered about poetry?
Jane Hirshfield: Even the already-known becomes in newly-read words a new discovery. Partly that’s because poems hold things you can’t quite remember—things that slip through the mind and heart as soon as you aren’t fully present inside them. I suppose it’s like any other kind of sustenance. You can’t actually remember a sandwich or a bowl of ice cream. They can only be known on the tongue. Yet you take them in, and they become you; you say them to others, and they become in that moment the listener’s own heart and mind, knowledge and life. That’s what the Dodge Festival does: it gives its attendees word-world after word-world after word-world to live in, and recognize as their own lived-in life.