Poetry Fridays: Jane Hirshfield
Friday, June 26th, 2009Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry
A hundred years have passed since the free-verse revolution. Yet the question still emerges of what makes a piece of writing that doesn’t rhyme a poem, and how does it differ from prose. It helps if you begin with a simple distinction: The basic building block of prose is the sentence; the basic building block of poetry is the line. Now listen to Jane Hirshfield read five short poems.
Yes, these five poems are written in recognizable sentences. But the movement and pacing of the language, which creates the rhythmic shape of each poem, is determined by the line. Hirshfield is so attentive to the shape of language that you can almost hear the poem progress, line by line, as she reads.
That we can’t see the printed lines to know where they break on the page offers an opportunity to experience more fully the difference between the line and the sentence. (more…)
