Eavan Boland Weekend - Poetry Masterclass with Jane Hirshfield

This one-hour master class will look at the question of questions in poetry in several dimensions: how almost any lyric poem can be understood as the response to a question -- whether or not that question is explicitly given -- but also some ways that acts of interrogation can open a poem to unexpected expansions and directions, admit uncertainty, or allow a poem to say things that might not be otherwise sayable. The session will include at least one generative experiment, perhaps two--please bring notebook and pen or some other way to write.

We encourage attendees to arrive by 11:45am for 12:00 noon start.

Jane Hirshfield, described as writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine) and “among the modern masters” (The Washington Post), has become one of American poetry's central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the founder of Poets For Science in conjunction with the 2017 March for Science, Hirshfield is the author of ten collections of poetry, including The Asking: New & Selected Poems (US: Knopf, 2023; UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2024). Her books have received the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and Columbia University’s Translation Center Award, and been short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award and England’s T.S. Eliot Award. The author also of three now-classic collections of essays on poetry's deep infrastructure and craft, and editor and co-translator of four books presenting the work of world poets from the deep past, she's taught at Stanford University, Queen's University Belfast, U.C. Berkeley, and elsewhere. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and China’s Zhongkun International Poet Award, which she was the first English-language poet and the first woman to receive. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Irish Times, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, and ten editions of The Best American Poems, and has been translated into over twenty languages. In 2019, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Poetry Ireland / Éigse Éireann is proudly funded by The Arts Council of Ireland / An Chomhairle Ealaíon and through The Arts Council of Northern Ireland National Lottery Funding.

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