The Poem as This Moment’s Response
with Jane Hirshfield and Host Michael Lerner
* Sunday, December 6 | 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm PST
Join us in Gallery Commonweal or on Zoom
$25 suggested donation, no one turned away
A lay-ordained practitioner of Soto Zen, 2026 Visiting Fellow of the Harvard Divinity School, and the founder of Poets for Science, Jane has described poetry as a way to meet questions that cannot ever be fully answered, yet require of us a this-moment response, bringing to past, present, and future the resilience of words and work that may serve.
As the winter solstice approaches—a time for contemplation, exchange, and renewal—and Commonweal nears the end of our 50th year celebrations, this conversation will attend to how we might best address ourselves to the invitations of precipice and turn: with a spirit of permeability, imagination, and embrace of change. We will explore how, with a heart-mind open, engaged, and questioning, poems can help us reimagine the future—as well as meet, bear, and begin to repair current fracturings of biosphere, of community, of intimacy, of witness, of attention. | Photo credit: Kyra Epstein
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Gallery Commonweal is a 1,500-square-foot gallery with 30-foot ceilings, large north- and south-facing windows, and unique historic detail. For 25 years, we've featured arts that heal our bodies, minds, and souls. Gallery Commonweal is on the 2nd floor of our historic building, and there is no elevator.
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Jane Hirshfield - Writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), Jane Hirshfield has become one of American poetry’s central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere and interconnection. Her ten poetry books include The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Knopf, 2023), holding fifty years of poems, and she is the author also of two now-classic collections of essays on poetry’s infrastructure and craft and four books presenting world poets from the deep past. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Poetry Center Book Award, and the California Book Award. An interactive traveling installation she founded in 2017, Poets For Science, has appeared across the country at universities, museums, research centers, conferences, and the National Academy of Sciences. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Hirshfield was elected in 2019 into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Michael Lerner is the president and co-founder of Commonweal. His principal work at Commonweal is with the Cancer Help Program, CancerChoices.org, the Omega Resilience Projects, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, and The New School at Commonweal. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Prize Fellowship for contributions to public health in 1983 and is author of Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Therapies (MIT Press).