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What does a poet who spent three years in a Zen monastery know about not knowing?

HOMO ARTIS: A Manifesto for Creation in the Age of AI is OUT NOW.

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H8SR2NMR

Get the book and the first 4 chapters free:

https://homoartis.comhttps://poetsforscience.org

Subscribe to the podcast on Substack: https://marcopalou.substack.com/s/dont-freak-out

Marco Palou, author of HOMO ARTIS, sits down in San Francisco with Jane Hirshfield, poet, co-founder of Poets for Science and author of The Asking: New and Selected Poems. On this episode of Don’t Freak Out, a podcast about being human in the future that came, Jane reads four poems, explains why she starts every poem without knowing what it will become, and lands on the two words she would give anyone who is freaking out: help someone.

You’ll learn:

* Why “don’t know mind” is where all the possibility lives

* What three years of monastic silence did to her relationship with music

* When a meal, a paint color or a dovetail joint stops being practical and becomes art

* Why a poem doesn’t fix grief but changes your relationship to it

* What happened when her students asked her to stop saying “hit the bell”

* Why the difficult emotions are information you can’t afford to suppress

Poems read in this episode, all from The Asking: “My Life Was the Size of My Life” · “I moved my chair into sun” · “Late Prayer” · “The Weighing”

About Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten poetry collections, including The Asking: New & Selected Poems, Ledger, and The Beauty, long-listed for the National Book Award, plus two essay collections, Nine Gates and Ten Windows, and four books of translation. The Washington Post has placed her poems “among the modern masters,” and her work has been set to music by John Adams and Philip Glass. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2012 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019, and received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in 2026. In 2017 she co-founded Poets for Science, the traveling installation housed with the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University and launched at the first March for Science in Washington. She trained for years in Soto Zen, including three at Tassajara, and lives in the Bay Area.

Jane Hirshfield on Substack:

The Asking: New & Selected Poems: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/715681/the-asking-by-jane-hirshfield/

Poets for Science:

https://poetsforscience.org

Poets for Science Gathering, Kent State University, November 12 to 14, 2026: https://connect.kent.edu/register/poets-for-science-gathering

Produced by Amarte Labs LLC