How do you describe nature? Two poets help us

[MUSIC PLAYING] FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, I’m Flora. And you’re listening to Science Friday.

[BEEP]

SPEAKER 1: Flora just asked me to leave a message about a special place.

SPEAKER 2: I wanted to share one of my favorite places on the planet.

SPEAKER 3: Calling about my place in nature that just heals my soul.

FLORA LICHTMAN: To mark Earth Day, we asked you to take us to your favorite places on this planet. And you brought us to the woods near Traverse City, Michigan.

SPEAKER 4: I experienced the joy of the birdsongs and the joy of the wind through the trees and the joy of the sun coming through the canopy of the trees. And it’s literally magical.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You took us to Long Island Harbor, where you spent your summer as a kid.

SPEAKER 5: It always smells briny. And the wind coming off from the sound is great. It’s just you feel like you’re 1,000 miles away.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You took us to a lake in Oklahoma.

SPEAKER 6: Every morning, I walk my dog down this lane. And it’s dark. And it’s quiet. And there’s no one anywhere. And every time I come upon this little hidden cove, there’s some surprise. If I go late in the day, it might be a gorgeous Grand Lake, Oklahoma sunset.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Basking in a sea breeze, admiring a sunset, I mean, these are basic human pleasures. But how do you take these moments and turn them into meaning? How do you pin them down with language? And how do you do it without sounding like a big cliché? That’s my question. This is the very difficult job of my next guests.

They’re poets. Jane Hirshfield is the founder of Poets for Science. And Kimberly Blaeser is the former Wisconsin poet laureate. Jane and Kim, thank you so much for being here today.

JANE HIRSHFIELD: It’s a pleasure.

KIMBERLY BLAESER: It’s a delight.

FLORA LICHTMAN: When you’re doing what our listeners are doing, capturing a place or a moment and then doing this difficult work of turning it into a poem or writing, where do you begin, Jane?

JANE HIRSHFIELD: Poems tend to come to me from one really precise, sharp perception that raises a question that wants to be gone into further, felt through further, understood more deeply, or felt more deeply. So the poem often begins, for me, with seeing something or having a thought and then responding.

But when we’re talking about poems of the Earth and poems of actual perception, I both want to bring in what I know about that from my experience and from my mind, but also always what I feel about it. The interior response needs to meet the outer world precipitant of the poem.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Kim, what about you? Raising a question, does that idea resonate with you?

KIMBERLY BLAESER: Absolutely. So my process is, when I’m doing nature especially, is that I’m paying attention. I always say poetry is an act of attention. And so just looking closely and especially at the intricate aspects. And as the one clip that you played mentioned, surprise, it’s allowing yourself to be surprised again.

But also, for me, it’s a little bit falling into whatever is there and kind of letting go of my ego. So I think the experience is first. And the poem follows on the tail of the experience. But when I go to that writing phase, it’s often trying to get close to both the beauty, but also, as Jane suggests, the questions.

Or for me, it’s like getting to the edge of the experience of what can’t be known or what maybe language can’t even touch, the ineffable. So as a poem, it wants also to invite the reader to that space, both to the space of experience and to the space of mystery.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hm. Are there limits to what you can capture in words?

KIMBERLY BLAESER: So I believe there are. But what poetry also employs is what we call gesture. So everything’s not in the poem. But the poem becomes an invitation to discover what can’t be said or isn’t said there. The poet has a little restraint that they use because then it leaves a place. I call this generosity to the reader. It leaves a place for the reader to enter the poem and help make meaning.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Jane, this might be– I don’t even if this is too basic of a question. But how do you avoid the beautiful sunset trope? Do you ever find yourself falling into a cliche? Or are you beyond that?

JANE HIRSHFIELD: Well, I think one of the things that poetry teaches, if you read good poems and let them do their work upon you, is that there’s always at least one stitch from the other side of the fabric. And that is how you avoid cliche and sentimentality. So if you look at any good love poem, somewhere in it, it is murmuring either explicitly or in a way that the reader hears, even if it’s not directly said. And we’re going to die.

And any poem of grief, any elegy, any poem of loss or even despair, if it is a good poem, there will be in that black surface a gold stitch of, ah, but the world was beautiful.

FLORA LICHTMAN: We asked our listeners to reflect on their favorite places. And we got this call from Christopher from Tampa.

CHRISTOPHER: In 1995, my mom and I did a crosscountry trip for the first time from Florida all the way out to the desert Southwest. And when we drove into Zion, my young brain was just, like, totally blown away by this 2,000-foot crack in the Earth that you’d come in from the bottom. And I just couldn’t believe how beautiful this place was.

And it’s like time stands still there, like a natural wonder time capsule. And you remember the first hike you went on with your mom. And you’ll be an old person. And you’ll remember that same trail with those same cracks and crevices and petroglyphs and waterfalls and mirror pools. And they will kind of lock you in. It’s such a beautiful experience. So thanks for taking my call. And happy Earth Day.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Any feelings on that one?

JANE HIRSHFIELD: Oh, it’s marvelous. It’s absolutely marvelous. It is the kind of experience that profoundly alters a life because– I loved when Kim was speaking earlier, she said how your ego, yourself, your individual fate and concern with all of that kind of falls away into the large. And that is an instruction that changes our lives, changes our actions, changes our relationships with both the beyond-human world and also our fellow humans.

Listening to it in the context of this program, what I was hearing is the difference between recounting such an experience in prose. You’re just telling it to somebody. And what would Chris have done if he were writing a poem? How would it have been different? And maybe Kimberly wants to speak to that.

KIMBERLY BLAESER: Well, the one thing that I was noticing that I would mind as a poet is that gesture towards the eternal because he’s talking about the physical. But in the same moment, he’s already, as Jane suggested earlier, looking back on the present, longing for something. But also, there’s a little bit hint of the continuum and the cycle and the eternal. And somehow, I think if the poem can place the reader in that tension between the two, that’s where the magic would be.

JANE HIRSHFIELD: Maybe you start with some of those specific perceptions and observations, the things that he recounted seeing. I see this great opportunity. Early on, he spoke of the enormous crack in the Earth. And there’s so many directions that the mind and heart can go when they consider a crack is a place of opening. It is a place of revelation. It is a place where you see the geological strata of time. And it is also very much a metaphor for brokenness and for the fracturing of our lives.

And I heard that. And I went, ah, there’s so much you can do with that. So if he wished to write a poem, having had the experience, having captured it, those are some of the directions I would look. You start with the seeing. And then, you find the thing that invites seeing differently, more, another direction, and additional direction. And in placing those things next to each other, it’s like the spark gap in an old combustion engine car. It is the space that allows something new to come forward and move everything in another direction.

KIMBERLY BLAESER: And also, that crack is the same crack that he experienced in his life. He’s on the other side. And it’ll never be the same place again or vision once he’s been through that experience. So I love the suggestion to use that as a metaphor.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hm. Moving from that huge crack in the Earth, Kim, you have a collection of poems about small things. Will you read us one of those poems and then tell us about it?

KIMBERLY BLAESER: Absolutely. I’d be delighted. And I just want to say, to preface this, is that, for me, I thought I was writing a series of poems. But I realized this is actually an aesthetic. It’s a way of engaging with the world and the way of engaging with poetry. And so now, I understand it more as that. And for me, it comes out of two different traditions. One of them is the Anishinaabe dream song tradition. And one of them is also haiku. And there are a lot of similarities between what I’m attempting in these poems and that, especially haiku in the zen tradition.

The way we love something small,

Inky, leaf shadows on snow,

Each animal track a hollow,

Trace of bird feet,

Double oval of deer,

The glyphs we make, the ones we follow.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Beautiful.

JANE HIRSHFIELD: Oh, I love Kim’s specific and awakening language. And short poems have been written in every tradition all over the world. And so there’s this interesting conversation between all the different ways that you can make a very short poem which opens into an immensity. And that is the work of the very short poem.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Speaking of opening into immensity, we have to go to break. But when we come back, how the work of poets is similar or not to the work of scientists. Please stay with us.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Kim, on this show, we’re always talking about the purpose of science. And often, the shorthand for that is discovery or creating new knowledge. What do you see as the purpose of poetry?

KIMBERLY BLAESER: Well, poetry is also an investigation. It’s a search. And it’s for that idea, that experience, that detail that we don’t know. And we kind of want to put ourselves against that and see what happens. We keep– there is no end to it in the same way that there is no end to the research of a scientist. Right? And I think it’s, in my mind, it’s to get to know that being or reality. Because I always think, as an Anishinaabe woman, of the world as animate and as a thinking, intelligent world. So I’m just trying to get to my relatives in poetry.

JANE HIRSHFIELD: Well, I would like to say that I agree with Kim entirely about the shared endeavor of science and poetry. And each of them is an art and a practice that concentrates the attention in order to observe and sometimes experiment– because poems are experiments in search of meaning. But the great difference for me between poetry and science is that we turn to science to face questions that we hope and believe are going to be answerable, at least provisionally, for 50 years, until the science changes.

But we turn to poetry exactly in order to enter questions that don’t have answers– dilemmas of human life, perplexity, bewilderments, mysteries, radiances, for which there are no answer. But these are questions that require of us response. And the difference is that the response of a poem leads to what Robert Frost famously called a momentary stay against confusion. But the question is going to need answering all of our life.

And so you need new poems. You need different poems because you will continue to have the unanswerable questions. And you want new answers to unanswerable questions. The poem is a way to say yes to existence in all of its perplexities and all of its difficulties and all of its joys.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Kim, you also write in Anishinaabemowin, the language of the Anishinaabe people, does your poetry change?

KIMBERLY BLAESER: Does it change when I use the language?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah.

KIMBERLY BLAESER: So I do think it does because that’s a different kind of gesture in the poem. Sometimes it changes because of the musicality of the language. So sometimes I use the language because it’s beautiful. And it has an amazing quality of song to it. But sometimes it’s also because the language itself carries lots of traditional knowledge. And there are embedded in it already allusions. So sometimes it’s because the language itself carries traditional knowledge and already has embedded allusions to different kinds of information about the world. Or what really happens in the language itself is there are root words. And then on either side of the root words are these other morphemes that show relationship.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Could you give me an example.

KIMBERLY BLAESER: Sure. Oh, my gosh, I want to give you– OK, I want to give you the longest word in the Ojibwe language.

[SPEAKING ANISHINAABEMOWIN]

So that is 64 letters. And if you, quote-unquote, translated it, it means simply blueberry pie.

[LAUGHTER]

But within that word, you have relationships. But it’s also– it’s really a story. So I like to talk about this one moment in there. So [ANISHINAABEMOWIN] is bread. Right? And so there’s a moment when the blueberries are lying. And their little faces are being covered up by the bread. I mean, there are images within the language itself. And it’s also– it situates different aspects of what happens in the seasons. So it’s a pretty cool word.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Amazing, amazing. OK. I have one more call from a listener that I really want you to hear. This is from Susan in Pennsylvania.

SUSAN: I live in a lush, green valley between two ridges in southwestern Pennsylvania. The land has been in my family since the early 1800s. My grandparents gave 30 some acres to my parents, who built a home on the side of the hill facing south. So the sun helps warm it in winter. This place is beautiful every season. But it’s spring now. And every day, we find some new delight– trout lilies and cutleaf toothwort in the woods, spring beauties and violets, sorrell dotting the grassy areas, dogwoods and redbud making a spectacular display.

A chorus of birdsong greets us each morning. And we rejoice in the bluebirds who occupy the homes we’ve built for them. A barred owl calls in the night. And the eerie sound of coyotes echoes in the distance. Last summer, I watched the entire process as a monarch butterfly emerged from its chrysalis.

Ironically, what makes this place more precious is the fact that we are increasingly surrounded by gas wells. And within the next few years, we’ll be undermined by longwall coal mining. There’s a good chance we will lose our water and perhaps our home. By then, we will be too old to rebuild. And our adult children, though they love this place, are not in a position to give up their lives to move here when we are gone. So each day, even as we savor the beauty and marvel at our good fortune in living here, we feel the poignancy of impending loss.

KIMBERLY BLAESER: Wow. That’s so powerful. And it reminds me of a line from Basho who wrote, even in Kyoto I long for Kyoto. It’s actually hearkening back to what Jane said earlier about that duality. And what’s so heartbreaking and moving in this voicemail is that the person is offering us this stunning images of a place they love so much and also are sitting in the foreknowledge of loss, which is the human condition. Right? And I think that is where poetry can be of service.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, stitch from the other side of the fabric.

JANE HIRSHFIELD: Yes. And I feel, hearing that story, I feel the enormous grace and courage the speaker brings to reality and to knowing that whatever the future brings, whatever fracturing of the Earth is going on right now, to still love this world, to still love existence, that is the antidote to despair. And there is a great– to use an old fashioned word– gallantry. The gallantry of that description is that even in the face of not being able to change a loss that is coming, you love where you are. You love the beauty of this world. And that lets a person keep opening their eyes every day, that love. Because otherwise, we fall into despair.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Jane, will you leave us with a poem too?

JANE HIRSHFIELD: I will. So I live in Mill Valley, a place on Mount Tamalpais north of San Francisco that was logged of all of its trees after the 1906 earthquake and fire. But redwoods come back from the roots. They are resilient creatures. So, Tree.

It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house.

Even in this one lifetime,

You will have to choose.

That great calm being,

This clutter of soup pots and books,

Already the first branch tips brush at the window.

Softly, calmly,

Immensity taps at your life.

KIMBERLY BLAESER: Beautiful.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I’ve been talking with Jane Hirshfield, poet, founder of Poets for Science and author of The Asking– New and Selected Poems, and with Kimberly Blaeser, poet and founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets and author of Ancient Light. Thank you both for sharing your thoughts with us today. It was really so delightful.

KIMBERLY BLAESER: Thank you for giving us this time.

JANE HIRSHFIELD: Thank you, Science Friday, for always including a bit of poetry during National Poetry Month each year.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Thank you both. And thank you to everyone who called us with your stories. We loved going all over the world to hear about your favorite places. This episode was produced by Peter Schmidt. I’m Flora Lichtman. Happy Earth Day. Thank you for listening.

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