By Justin Balog
Jane Hirshfield’s latest collection, Ledger, released March 10th, 2020 from Knopf, is a record of our responsibility to the climate and social justice crises as inhabitants of a global community. The consequences then, of these global crises, are at the center of the speaker’s musings in Ledger, which span from considerations of alternative universes, to ants, falcons, and other inhabitants of the natural world, to deeply intimate spheres of grief, longing, wonder, and silence.
Hirshfield is also the author of two now-classic books of essays, Nine Gates and Ten Windows, and four book collecting and co-translating the work of world poets from the past. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, long-listed for the National Book Award, and winner of the Poetry Center, Donald Hall/Jane Kenyon, and California Book Awards, Hirshfield’s other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, and ten selections for The Best American Poetry. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Orion, et al, and has been translated into over a dozen languages. A former chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, she was inducted in 2019 into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
In curating this issue of MQR: Mixtape, I reached out to Hirshfield because I admire her work, specifically, as the founder of #PoetsforScience, the work she has done to bridge the gap between poetics and science. To that end, I was curious to learn more about Hirshfield’s insights on the relationship between poetry and science in the context of her new collection. Our interview took place between May and August of 2020 via email exchange. Responses and questions were edited multiple times throughout by both me and Jane Hirshfield.
Justin Balog: Obviously, a strong scientific influence is on show in Ledger. To me, Science and Poetry share a lot in common but one of the main similarities is a record of observation, recording data, moments or events. How does observation work, in general, in Ledger? What is this a “ledger” of?
Jane Hirshfield: What a rich opening question, thank you. I may run with it for a bit, if I may, just thinking aloud.
Awareness, looking, observation are foundational, primary activities, fundamental to the sciences, the arts, farming, cooking, relationships… The ability to take things in, as they are, is the pre-condition for any accurate form of knowledge, for any appropriate form of action.
Etymologically, “observation” is about seeing, but also about “watching over” and “keeping safe.” It holds the idea, too, of “service.” Only certain holidays are “observed”—the ones that ask something of us. A person might observe the Sabbath, Lent, or Ramadan, but that’s not a word you’d use in association with, for example, July 4th.
The word “observe” holds the knowledge that seeing is never passive; there’s something active and directional in observation. This is as true in the observing of the sciences as it is in the observing of poetry. We offer our attention (a word which holds inside its own etymology, a similar sense of “tending”) for safe-keeping and furthering. Observation and attention are not trivial: we only look closely at what we find important. All this means that the awareness of observation isn’t neutral, it’s engaged. Even when we want to be objective, unswayed by the pull and wishes of self, there’s still a larger condition of inseparable connection. Observation is a relationship.
And then, in another meaning yet, observation can mean also, simply, a comment. In that usage, “observation” may seem casual—an observation isn’t a conclusion, isn’t a scientific result or a poem. But perhaps it’s less casual than preliminary. You jot observations down in a journal, before you work with them further. Observations are trial thoughts, beginnings of understanding. In the same spirit, the English word “essay” emerges from the French essayer, “to try.” An essay is written with the mind of exploration and pre-cartography.
The observing of Ledger – to begin to answer your question more directly – felt objectively summoned by the world it was written into; it’s a book written in service, though that was something I discovered only during the writing of it, it wasn’t planned. The earliest poems in the book come from 2014, a time for me of increasingly foreground awareness of the crisis of the biosphere and of the crisis of our torn social compact. These subjects stepped forward with even more urgency, after the 2016 election.
I’ve found myself, all my life, baffled by our human choices of violence, narrowness, and the impulses of destruction. All my books look at this in at least some of their pages. But in Ledger, these subjects and the grief of them stand at the center. I do take more direct, outer actions – one every day since the 2016 election. But I also want to understand, and in ways more deep, more subtle, nuanced and multiple, with greater compassion. That, for me, is the work of poems.
There are poems of interior and personal life in Ledger as well—that will always be part of poetry, for me. But our lives are a continuum, and the personal is inseparable from the communal. And so, I found myself writing of the crisis of refugees, both in the Mediterranean and in this country; of climate change, species loss, outpoured toxins of every kind; of the tragedies behind Black Lives Matter; of the travesties of willful manipulation, of blindness, of systemic delusion and separation.
The aphorist Novalis said “We spend the first half of a life looking inward, the second half outward.” That may be part of it too. I’ve come to feel the sense of shared fate more and more strongly in every direction. The private losses, questions, fractures, and joys of any human life are shared by all. The public losses, questions, fractures, and joys are shared by all. And this earth we live on: shared with all other beings. One of the strongest things the Covid-19 pandemic has proven is the foolishness of thinking any fate can be walled off from the fate of all. Not environmentally, not geographically, not in how we choose to treat one another in the realms of social justice, equality, economics.
I’ve gone on too long already, but last, a few thoughts about the title, which came first for the poem that carries it, then for the book… A ledger is an account book, a keeping of balances owed and received. The weighing that runs through Ledger isn’t so very different from earlier books – a weighing of suffering and losses on one pan of the scale, of beauty and praise on the other. But in this book, our shared future is at the center. I was seventeen when the first Earth Day happened, fifty years ago now. The image seen everywhere that day was the photograph known as “Earth Rise”: the first time we saw our planet from a distance. Two years later came the first photograph of the entire earth. I was nine years old when Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s sounding of the biological damage our human ingenuity was causing, was published. Mine is the generation that has been always aware of these things. Inside the word “ledger,” there is also the word “ledge.” This moment is precipice, this lifetime is precipice. The poems in the book stand at that edge and look past it, trembling. I stand at that edge, hoping to name some part of the world we’ve arrived in, to weigh what my debt to it is. I’ve hoped to find a path through these things that is not so dark it leads toward only despair.
JB: Thank you so much for that comprehensive answer, Jane. I never quite thought of observation being a relationship, that an observation might preserve a moment in time, a specific action or event, but that it is our relationship with the observation in the future by which the “work” or observation might become more apparent and offer insight. I also love this idea that our lives exist on a continuum and as you put it, are “inseparable.”
Another commonality that I find with Science and Poetics is a sense of scale, similar to what you’ve elucidated here. We have those who look for answers with microscopes and we have those who use telescopes. How does Ledger navigate this use of scale? And why is this sense of scale so necessary, in poetry as much as in science?
JH: One of the great freedoms of poetry is its ability to leap in scale. A poet, unlike a scientist, can move, in a few syllables, from electron microscope to telescope to radio-antenna array. A poem can confound scale entirely: think of how many poems look at some small, particular, passing thing and speak, through only that looking, of the largest questions.
Particle physics similarly studies the origin of the universe by investigating the behavior and nature of its smallest parts. Still, there are differences between the practice of science and the practice of poetry. Scientists might spend years or decades working with a single instrument on a single question. Poets – some of us, anyhow – change questions with every poem. Poems are instruments for boundary-crossing and boundary transcendence. All poets and scientists thirst for an altered understanding. But the scientists want to understand the object or phenomenon in the lens’s focus. Poets, even the ones we think of as naturalists – Christopher Smart, Alison Hawthorne Deming, some of Ed Roberson, Gary Snyder, Pattiann Rogers, Camille Dungy, Robert Hass – are using outward-turned observation to engage and en-word the world, but also the psyche.
Poetry’s alchemical intention is inner: to transform us, not the world. Though the two outcomes are of course connected: transforming our eruptive, incendiary, scorched-earth human lives, psyches, and feelings will transform our effect on the lives of all the beings around us, on the lives of rivers, mountains, mosses, whales. Good poems unfasten us from the fixities of separation. They change what we mean when we say “I,” “we,” “self.” The passage through a good poem cannot help but make a person larger.
Some poems in Ledger allude to microbes, some to glaciers. One line might move the reader through both. There’s a poem in the book that speaks directly of science, and of size, which I suspect you may have been thinking of in asking this question, “Ants’ Nest.”
Ants’ Nest “On Being the Right Size,” Haldane's short essay is titled. An ants' nest can be found at the top of a redwood. No bird that weighs less than. No insect more than. The minimum mass for a whale, for a language, an ice cap. In a human-sized room, someone is setting a human-sized table with yellow napkins, someone is calling her children to come in from a day whose losses as yet remain child-sized.
This poem begins with thinking directly about scale, through the lens of J.B.S. Haldane’s famous essay chastising his fellow biologists for neglecting to think about size. The essay is itself wonderfully brief. Its compactness is part of its nimbleness of thought and strength. So it is, too, with poems: their size-scale affects both what they can do and how they can do it. I am a great believer in the very short poem, even though this new book has in it many poems that are for me longer-than-usual. (By that, I mean poems that fill a page, or a little over, nothing too grand). The book also has the shortest poem I’ve yet written. It is only its title: “My Silence.” (The poem, I’ll add, was genuinely written… in the book’s full context, I hope its full meaning and grief are felt.)
But going back to “Ants’ Nest,” you can see that it begins by looking directly at the paradox of scale, noticing how those very small beings, ants, can sometimes ascend the heights of a redwood to nest in the canopy branches, and can – as the food web ecologists would say – make a living just fine in that aerie. The small and the large coexist. This is obvious terrain, perhaps, but I’m drawn to questions of parts and wholes, of selves and the community of shared lives and shared fates. Each part of existence has its right size and scale to have its own right life in. What minimum size, lessened further, would mean that an ice cap can no longer exist? How few speakers before a language will vanish? An article published in 2007 says that one language disappears from the world every two weeks.
Right scale is survival. Forests need a certain number of trees to be forests. Coastal redwoods make their own weather. What then, a reader might ask, is this “human-sized” room? Tautologies, in poems, enforce a shift of the lens. This one (all rooms are, after all, sized for humans) offers a place for human-sized griefs, for the grief of a child who may have lost a beloved toy, or whose friend is moving away. Human-sized griefs are needed for human-sized lives. But the loss of a viable planet? That is not human-sized. It is monstrous, untenable, unforgivable when recognized as a loss of our own deliberate and careless making. A mother wants to protect her children from such knowledge. But the poem asks its reader to see.
There are poems throughout Ledger trying to make, each in its own voice and way, this unfathomable world-loss visible, feel-able, takeable-in, foreground and not background. What we feel as untenable and unbearable, we might do something to stop.
JB: I’m so happy that you brought up the poem “Ants’ Nest” as an example of scale and of the ecopoetics that the majority of Ledger is also concerned with. Many poems in the collection such as “On the Fifth Day,” “Ghazal for the End of Time,” “O Snail,” etc., overtly grieve the climate crisis. It’s also apparent, as evidenced by “Let Them Not Say” and “My Debt” (respectively, the first and last poem of the collection), that apathy toward or normalization of these environmental tragedies, especially in the face of gross political negligence or direct attacks on climate change, is worse than, as one of your poems reflects, throwing “empty soda cans out bus windows.”
We’ve already talked about observation in poetics, but in what ways are poets indebted to be observers, specifically, of climate change? What role can poetry play for the climate crisis?
JH: Poetry’s role in climate activism, I think, is two-fold: to foster awareness, and to offer a vessel of felt response. Before a person is moved to activism, you must feel your grief, your outrage. You must feel within your own body, heart, and mind your own exposure, your loved ones’ exposure, the entire world’s exposure. You must find your own yes, your own no.
What happens to any of us happens to all. Poems are one way people can come to feel that. They offer empathy an entrance. They turn factual knowledge and observed knowledge into felt knowledge. That is no small thing. Emotion is how we register consequence. When a person is closed off from or numbed to the knowledge held in the newspaper or news feed, perhaps a poem can slip past, through a side door, and make real what is otherwise too abstract, or perhaps too unbearable.
Photographs of course do this, too, and novels, plays, paintings. It’s the role of all art to bring into awareness the three-dimensional, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree experience of being alive. To—through the seductions of beauty, of music, of story, of indirect invitation—reawaken our desire for fullness of being. Art increases courage. It shows us that being vulnerable to the actualities of our lives is more desirable than barricading ourselves against them. To feel pain is better than numbness, it’s the sign of awakeness. Art makes grief, anger, outrage recognizable to us as inseparable from love, connection, joy.
The preserving of the world has to feel worth it. Numbness makes nihilism. Art amplifies. Amplifies thirst, hunger, the willingness to be alive and exposed and the willingness to be joined in the narrative of existence with all other beings. Art makes radiant even the difficult, even the fear. Narrative shows us that we can face the unfaceable and go on. It shows us that others have done this, borne witness, and survived. This is why children’s fairy tales are so often frightening. They are needed instructions in resilience, continuance, connection.
JB: What was the effect on your life, when you found yourself writing so many poems looking into the crises of climate and, as you put it, shared fate?
JH: Writing these poems, perhaps oddly, increased my activism. I’ve always been an engaged person, to some degree. I went to D.C. to protest the Vietnam War when I was sixteen, and railed against it in many bad poems. I fasted for a week when this country bombed Cambodia, sending my food money to a relief group. All my books, from the start, have held some poems that looked at questions of violence, injustice, war, the environment. But I have now become a person who takes one action, however futile, every day. I wrote “Let Them Not Say,” and found I then had to obey its imperative, its awareness of cliff-edge. We stand at many cliff edges at once right now, it feels, and they are inseparable from one another. The environmental catastrophe, the catastrophe of inequality, the catastrophe of racism, the catastrophe of magical thinking, the catastrophe of this country’s mismanagement of the pandemic, the catastrophe of believing a wall or border can separate any country’s fate from the fate of all others… The root causes of all are in one fundamental misunderstanding. The belief that we are separate. We are not. What to do with this knowledge of kinship, how to live in the knowledge of kinship, becomes the question. It’s a question without any arrivable-at final answer. But it’s no longer possible not to keep asking.
JB: Your response, especially what you’ve said regarding kinship and connection, reminds me a lot of Mary Midgley’s point in Science and Poetry that the natural crises that we face make globalization unavoidable, “Disasters do not respect natural boundaries. Ships that sink tend to sink at both ends.” It seems to me that it is the duty of poetics, as it is in science, to offer us a wholistic view for wholistic problems; observation is a way to avoid the precipices that individualism or nationalism have created for us.
The reason why I bring this up, and the reason why I think it’s interesting, is that Midgley uses this wholistic point as evidence to extend poetics not only to the realms of science but also to a place of spirituality and religion, as, in her opinion, there must be a spiritual force that compels one to undertake the labors and questions brought forth by both science and poetry.
In the last section of Ledger there seems, in my reading, to be undercurrents of spirituality. My final questions for you are: In what ways, if any, do spirituality or religion play a role in your writing? Do you view poetry, science, and religion as connected entities, and, if so, how do you see them existing together?
JH: We keep returning to the inseparability of things in this conversation, don’t we?
Language can create false divisions. I use words like “religion,” “spirituality,” or “sacred” with hesitation, even though I lived as a monastic for some years. They set off such different and unmanageable associations in people’s minds, and for me, those realms are inseparable from daily life. I once spent a happy hour on the phone with Barry Lopez as we looked for any word we both could accept as the title for a conversation we were asked to hold for the Key West Literary Seminars. We settled, finally, on numinous. “Numinous” is unusual enough to not be entirely degraded; it evokes but is not exactly the same as “luminous,” carrying more chiaroscuro. Mostly though, I like it for its etymological root: it comes from the simple physical act of nodding in affirmation.
An early line of Cavafy’s has haunted me from the moment I first came across it: “For some people a day comes when they must declare the Great Yes, or the Great No.” Our sense of the numinous is how we find ourselves acknowledging the Great Yes that existence offers every person, without exception. It is what allowed James Baldwin the embrace and advocacy of love even while naming, precisely and without blinking, hatred’s grievous forms and toll on this country and on his own life. It is what Hikmet found in the poems he wrote while in prison; what Anna Akhmotova set into the lines of her Requiem. Without the yes that affirms us, how could anyone go on? It lets us bring to our lives, relationships, decisions, and choices what travels under the term “in good faith.” Keeping good faith has little to do with religion in any organized sense. Though organized religion can be a portal into it, every form of reality both gives and asks of us our good faith. Good faith does not mean ignoring our human frailty, our human fallibility, our evasions; those, too, are in us all. Still, to keep good faith with beauty, kindness, connection, wholeness, without blinding ourselves to fracture and failure, is the gambler’s debt of a viable existence. Evolution needs us to be hopeful, to desire, to take pleasure. To turn toward and not only away.
Ledger closes with the poem “My Debt” because I realized, late in the book’s writing, that to fail to recognize and praise the world’s still-existent beauty is simply rude. While there are stars, winds, rain, whales, manatees, mosquitoes, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ potsherd, patch, matchwood, and immortal diamond, surely gratitude has a place in our words, in our hearts and minds. What are activists, scientists, artists working for, if not all beings’ amplitude and thriving? We speak of applied physics, practical science. Yet “practice” is also the term we bring to the spiritual, the musical, the athletic, the arts. These things are inseparable. Open your eyes to anything, you open them to everything. Grief and fear; anger and hope; eros, joy, and awe— these are keys on the one piano that is a life. Poems hunt the chords that make of them one beauty.
Justin Balog is a graduate of the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. He has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the University of Michigan. He currently is an Assistant Editor at Michigan Quarterly Review. His poems appear in Narrative Magazine and Ploughshares.