Feb. 24, 1953

Jane Hirshfield, an American poet,  was born February 24, 1953, in New York City. By way of an introduction, here is an excerpt from "Against Certainty" :

There is something out in the dark that wants to correct us. ...

Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.
When the cat waits in the path hedge,
no cell of her body is not waiting.
This is how she is able so completely to disappear

I would like to enter the silent portion as she does.

To live amid the great vanishing as a cat must live
one shadow fully at ease inside another.

This poem was published in Literary Imagination Volume7, Issue2 (2005)

Jane Hirshfield's poetry is published widely, including in the New Yorker; she also teaches, edits Japanese poetry and writes literary criticism,. Her sixth volume of poetry After (2006) was shortlisted for the British T. S. Eliot Prize, and named a best book of 2006 by the Washington Post.

Hirshfield, after graduating from Princeton, studied more years at the San Francisco Zen Center.
She has written: "My feeling is that the paths of poetry and of meditation are closely linked—one is an attentiveness and awareness that exists in language, the other an attentiveness and awareness that exists in silence, but each is a way to attempt to penetrate experience thoroughly, to its core.”