Read Ten Windows How Great Poems Transform the World Jane Hirshfield 9780345806840 Books

Product details Paperback 320 pages Publisher Knopf; Reprint edition (February 21, 2017) Language English ISBN-10 9780345806840

Ten Windows How Great Poems Transform the World Jane Hirshfield 9780345806840 Books Reviews

• With TEN WINDOWS Jane Hirshfield, one of this planet’s premier poets, has left her indelible mark on literature-- even if she never produces another book of prize-winning poems. Let me support that claim with a little back-story. I was an English literature major at Harvard, was married to a best-selling novelist for forty-five volatile years, have published three editions of a legal treatise, and three volumes of prose-poetry.
  That’s why I’m in awe of Jane’s ability to pack such powerful, original, and creative analysis into such lucid prose. No high-school English teacher should start another term without digesting TEN WINDOWS. On the other hand, I doubt most college English professors would dare mention the book, lest students force them to re-cast their own lectures to accommodate Hirshfield’s exhilarating compendium of insights.
  The depth of Hirshfield’s penetrating gaze isn’t confined to poetry, however. Sparkling beneath the surface of her unique literary analyses rest gems of profound wisdom about life itself. Indeed, I was so often dazzled that I could only absorb a few pages per day from her treasure trove. Let me cluster some samples appearing between pages 250 and 251
  “The abiding necessity of surprise [in poetry] is one reason that factual recitation alone, though highly effective as an element, rarely leads to the transformation we seek and feel in good poems. The difference between ‘fact’ and ‘truth,’ the physicist Niels Bohr once said, is that a fact must be either true or false, while two opposing truths can be equally right, resonant, and informing. For determining facts, we turn to science (or, less happily, at times to courtrooms), but the business of writers is not answers; it is finding right questions…. Good poems make clear without making simple…. Pleasure, not purpose, mates one creature or image with another, and art’s seemingly useless pleasures are not idle. They are imagination serving the future in ways beyond will’s reach.”
  Glittering revelations like those will soon draw me back again to page one, so I can re-read, re-inforce, and re-enjoy her entire volume. Although her ideas have been neatly corralled behind ten “windows,” this beguiling arrangement scarcely contains her legions of strikingly new ways to comprehend poetry— and life.
• As a lifelong poetry reader (not an academic or a poet I really enjoyed this book -- both the ideas and the poetry selection. There was the delight of seeing from time to time that she had picked one of my own favorites, and the wonderful selection of haiku and other translated poetry that was new to me and very rewarding. I highlighted passages and poems all the way through to go back to. Next I will read her poetry.
• These collected essays by Jane Hirshfield regard the writing and reading of poetry as a contemplative act more than a communicative act. This is the rationale for her prolonged consideration of various motifs such as paradox, surprise, and other matters. There is a wonderful chapter on Basho and haiku poetry that provides an informative account of the poet's life and travels as well as the processes of his poems. Another chapter on Thoreau is tantalizing, though not really about Thoreau, or at least not sufficiently about Thoreau for my interests, but still interesting in its exploration of "the hidden" in poetry. A chapter on what is "American" about American poetry left me a bit dazed by the end, not as engaging as Hirshfield is capable of being, even though the topic interests me. Overall, a good book (and the second whole book that I read on my new Paperwhite), though I still prefer her earlier book "Nine Gates."
• This is a wonderful, complex, but conversational book about poetry and what it means to human culture. The selections are uniformly terrific, and many were unknown to me. I would have liked some representativeness, though. I liked her inclusion of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, but it was small and not reflective of his great power. Her choice from Pessoa seemed stronger. It would have been great to see something of Robert Penn Warren or James Dickey, given her focus on the American tradition for some of the book. Other Americans from the Fugitive poets or agrarianism tradition would have matched nicely with some of the frontier exuberance of Whitman. And i thought the Basho was a bit much. I would have substituted some Tsvetaeva or Akhmatova or, more contemporaneously, the fabulous Ha Jin. These are minor quibbles of taste or choice, though, and I'm hardly in a position to challenge what she chose. A great, accessible book by a fine poet and critic.
• Jane Hirshfield doesn't just write some of the finest poetry being published at this moment, she is also a great explicator and celebrator of poems. In Ten Windows, she argues that since language has power and poetry is uniquely powerful language, poems can indeed change the world. I gave up on trying to write the world whole decades ago, but she still makes good points as she gives excellent readings of powerful poetry
  
  "And by changing selves, one by one, art changes also the outer world that selves create and share."
• If you accept Jane Hirshfield's invitation to enter the house of poetry wiith her, you will find yourself in intimate conversation with a trustworthy, generous, and accomplished guide. You will see more, appreciate more, than you would when reading on your own. Lovely book.
• heard her speak on the radio, had to get the book. I inhaled all her books, actually, and am so impressed with her continuing growth.
• A GREAT ENGAGING WORK WORTH THE READ!