Every year the US poet Jane Hirshfield writes a poem on New Year’s Day. One such poem concludes with the admonition: “Don’t despair of this falling world, not yet …” (‘Counting, New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me’).

Hirshfield, who was appearing at Hexham book festival with her UK editor, Bloodaxe’s Neil Astley, asking some pertinent questions, said she believed despair was “a little arrogant, as if you are sure the worst is coming”.

Nevertheless, she is “haunted by the very long sense of crisis, which I did not expect when I was young”. She mentioned “the current situation in America, for which I apologise”. Introducing a poem from her most recent UK publication, The Asking, New and Selected Poems, with its opening line, “None of this had to happen”, she said: “I thought we had everything we needed … in 1970. And we did, but we have not acted on it.” The poem, ‘Day Beginning with Seeing the International Space Station and a Full Moon over the Gulf of Mexico and All Its Invisible Fishes’, concludes with an alternative, hopeful vision:

 

     Across the world a man pulls a woman from the water

     from which the leapt-from overfilled boat has entirely vanished.

     From the water pulls one child, another. Both are living and will continue to live.

     This did not have to happen. No part of this had to happen.

 

A number of her poems have been prompted by science articles in the New York Times: “Most of my close friends now are research scientists.” One of her poems, ‘Mosses’ came from an article about mosses in the Mohave desert that survive on four per cent of daylight. In 2014 she “wrote a poem that scared me so much it changed me, and I’ve tried to live up to it ever since.” That poem was ‘Let them not say’, which went viral. She acknowledged that things have got worse since then, with the censoring of climate research by President Trump’s first administration. That led to another poem, ‘On the fifth day’. 

Hirshfield, who lives in northern California, is a practising Buddhist. Responding to a question from Neil Astley about Zen, she said: “Any path to opening your eyes further is good.” She had lived in a monastery for a while, where she had agreed not to write: “Poetry needs silence, as much as it needs words.” But it was not a lifetime commitment: “I didn’t go to graduate school. I did that instead.” Despite the long titles of some of her poems, there are also many very short poems in her work: “I have always loved their distilled intensity.”

Replying to another Astley prompt, she talked of three poetry beliefs: the need for ‘hiddenness’ (“My poems depend on you catching the scent of the animal hidden in the den”); ‘uncertainty’ (“I don’t want to be lectured in a poem”); and ‘surprise’.

She said: “One of the reasons I turn to poetry, is to turn blind anger into a larger grace.” Despite the “crises of justice and social compact”, it was very important for poets “not to abandon the inner life”.

Was there a connection between beauty and hope, Astley asked. “If you only see the damage and the cruelties, you are closing yourself off,” she replied, and in this regard cited and praised the Australian exclamation of happiness: “You beauty!”

At Astley’s request, she read a final poem, ‘I wanted to be surprised.’, which includes these lines:

 

     What did not surprise enough:

     my daily expectation that anything would continue,

     and then that so much did continue, when so much did not.

 

Jane Hirshfield, The Asking, New and Selected Poems, Bloodaxe, £14.99

 

Background: US poet re-posts poem from 2017, in protest at Trump silencing scientists - again

Background: Cato Pedder review of ‘The Beauty’

Background: American Life in Poetry – Jane Hirshfield

 

Jane Hirshfield with Neil Astley at Hexham book festival