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On whether writing a book of analysis makes her self-conscious while writing her own poetry

I'm very lucky in that I have one of the worst memories you'll ever meet. And therefore, I remember nothing I've said when I'm close-reading other people's poems. I don't have an internal checklist that I then bring to the writing of my own. My entire body, mind, heart when I'm writing a poem are simply inside that experience.

I do think that having spent, you know, something like 30 years now closely attending to other people's poems and to what I feel makes them as magnificent and mysterious as they are — that must affect my relationship to my own writing. But one thing happens in one room and the other happens in another.

On her poem 'Two Linen Handkerchiefs' and expressing grief in poetry

Two Linen Handkerchiefs

How can you have been dead twelve years

and these still

The poem is broken off in exactly the way a life is broken off, in exactly the way grief breaks off, takes us beyond any possible capacity for words to speak. And yet it also, short as it is, holds all of our bewilderment in the face of death. How is it that these inanimate handkerchiefs — which did belong to my father and are still in a drawer of mine, and which I did accidentally come across — how can they still be so pristinely ironed and clean and existent when the person who chose them and used them and wore them is gone? ...

Compassion, in a way, is one of the most important things poems do for me, and I trust do for other people. They allow us to feel how shared our fates are.

- Jane Hirshfield

I think compassion, in a way, is one of the most important things poems do for me, and I trust do for other people. They allow us to feel how shared our fates are. If a person reads this poem when they're inside their own most immediate loss, they immediately — I hope — feel themselves accompanied. Someone else has been here. Someone else has felt what I felt. And, you know, we know this in our minds, but that's very different from being accompanied by the words of a poem, which are not ideas but are experiences.

Read an excerpt of Ten Windows

Read an excerpt of The Beauty

This week, we've brought the show to New Orleans, where Troy Andrews — better known as Trombone Shorty — began playing music at age 4. He was touring with his brother's band by age 6, and went to the same performing arts academy as Harry Connick Jr., Terence Blanchard and the Marsalis brothers. Now, just shy of 30, he's doing his part to spread New Orleans music around the world.

We've invited him to answer three questions about obscure musical instruments.

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And I think then what happened is that ... as an alternative [to asylums], people sought treatments. But the treatments turned out to be, in retrospect, pretty barbaric. And it's only really been in the last 50 years that psychiatry has established a scientific foundation for itself and developed treatments that truly work beyond a shadow of a doubt and are safe.

On Sigmund Freud's contributions to psychiatry and what he got wrong

Freud is undisputedly a towering figure and the most famous person in the history of psychiatry. And in the absence of any scientific theory of mental illness, he introduced concepts that were completely novel to civilization and endure today as valid and have really been given new life in the context of cognitive neuroscience. ...

I think his biggest mistake was that he was a very strict controller of how the theory was handled by his disciples. In other words, he permitted no deviation or modification of his theory or methods, and he didn't encourage any research to empirically validate his theory. So basically people that followed him and embraced this theory had to take it on faith.

i

In the 1940s, psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich touted his orgone energy accumulators, exhibited here in 1956 by the Food and Drug Administration, as a treatment for emotional disturbances. Eventually, the FDA ruled Reich's treatment to be a "fraud of the first magnitude." Henry Burroughs/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Henry Burroughs/AP

In the 1940s, psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich touted his orgone energy accumulators, exhibited here in 1956 by the Food and Drug Administration, as a treatment for emotional disturbances. Eventually, the FDA ruled Reich's treatment to be a "fraud of the first magnitude."

Henry Burroughs/AP

On psychiatrists going back and forth as to whether mental disorders are inherited

It's long been known that specific mental illnesses tend to run in families. But then, you know, the notion of this being kind of a Mendelian type of genetic condition was really not accurate. And if you looked at a family pedigree, you could see that schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, depression, autism often skipped generations in families or would occur in families that had no other biologic relative. So the mystery of the genetics of mental illness was really much more complicated than ever imagined and it's only recently started to be solved.

On whether the future of psychiatry is in the medicine chest

Not solely, no. And this is something that is commonly, I think, misunderstood. The cornerstone of the healing profession and the physician is the patient relationship. ... So medications were extraordinarily important — they were miraculous developments — but medications alone can't do it.

On why he wrote the book

In order for us to genuinely make a case for why psychiatry is a medical discipline that deserves sort of equal footing and respect as other medical specialties, we needed to fess up in terms of what the past was. And so in order to do so, we needed to tell the unvarnished history of the field and then describe why things may not have been helpful — and [in] some cases harmful — then [and] why that's different now. And nobody should avoid seeking treatment if they think they need it because of uncertainty or fear.

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Univision host Rodner Figueroa has been let go for offensive remarks about First Lady Michelle Obama.

It all started on Wednesday, when a picture of Obama flashed on the screen of the popular program El Gordo y La Flaca. Figueroa commented "Michelle Obama looks like she's part of the cast of Planet of the Apes."

Quickly, Figueroa was fired. Univision released this statement: "Yesterday during our entertainment program 'El Gordo y La Flaca' Rodner Figueroa made comments regarding First Lady Michelle Obama that were completely reprehensible and in no way reflect Univision's values or views. As a result, Mr. Figueroa was immediately terminated."

Figueroa released his own statement addressed to Obama: "I was verbally notified that because of a complaint from your office, my employment was being terminated." Figueroa claims his joke was a criticism of an artist's depiction of Obama.

The Washington Post reports Univision executives deny that the White House called to complain.

In his statement, the Venezuelan Figueroa, who was a fashion and entertainment commentator for the network, said he'd voted for Barack Obama twice. He also spoke about his own background, saying he comes from a biracial Latino family, and his own father is a black Latino. But he apologized, saying his comments where inexcusable, and that they "could be interpreted as offensive or disrespectful."

Figueroa's firing comes on the heels of another high-profile falling out over race and fashion. Recently on the popular E! show Fashion Police, host Giuliana Rancic was blasted for commenting on African-American actress Zendaya Coleman's dreadlocks. "I feel like she smells like pachouli oil," Rancic remarked "Or weed!" Rancic was accused of being racist, and a few days later co-host Kelly Osbourne quit the show. Shortly after Osbourne left, host Kathy Griffith stepped down, and released a statement on twitter, saying "Listen, I am no saint...But I do not want to use my comedy to contribute to a culture of unattainable perfectionism and intolerance towards difference. I want to help women, gay kids, people of color and anyone who feels underrepresented to have a voice and a LAUGH!"

This is hardly the first time Univision has gotten in trouble for racist remarks and humor. In 2010, when the World Cup was played in South Africa, the network aired a segment where the hosts wore Afro wigs and held small spears. Univision apologized.

NYU Professor Arlene Davila studies Latino media, and she says she's not surprised. "I think that anybody who watches Univision regularly ... will notice the white, white space that station historically has been." She says, "You're not going to see Indo-Latinos, you're not going to see Afro-Latinos." In fact, she says, the Univision landscape is often whiter than mainstream U.S. television.

Davila says Latino television largely echoes, imports and repackages Latin American programming, with all its pitfalls. "Already in Latin America, our very [media are] skewed and not a representation. But then you're talking about the U.S. Latino world., you would think that it would be a different world — a world that would not be tied to the traditional racist views of our countries, but that rather would try to imagine a pan-Latino universe."

What troubles Davila is an idea "that you can't apply the same standards of racism because we have our humor and we are not racists, because we are Latinos, and we can get away with that without getting regulated."

How to regulate is an ongoing issue. In a recent New York Times opinion piece, lawyer Francisco R. Montero wrote, "Once a sleepy backwater of the broadcasting world, Spanish media is now big business and there is barely a city or town in the country where you cannot find some type of Spanish broadcasting on TV or radio. So it was only matter of time before questions of indecency would arise ... we still don't know precisely what Spanish terms may be 'indecent' in the F.C.C.'s view."

Davila adds that Spanish language media have a captive audience. "You can't blame the people that watch it," she says, "because those are the people that don't have the power to change it, you know? And they're watching it because it's what's available, it's the lack of choices in Spanish language television."