Poets & Writers Theater

“So few grains of happiness / measured against all the dark / and still the scales balance.” In this video produced by the Academy of American Poets, Jane Hirshfield reads “The Weighing” from the new anthology, Here: Poems for the Planet, which will be published this week by Copper Canyon Press. The anthology includes poems by Margaret Atwood, Kwame Dawes, Ross Gay, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Hass, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Mary Oliver, and others.

"Part of the role of poetry and poets is to force ourselves past the common ways of looking at things." Jane Hirshfield, whose poetry collection The Beauty was released by Knopf in March, speaks about the responsibility of the poet in America today.