Jane Hirshfield

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, you know, 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, you know, 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, an 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.

Oh, I love Kim's specific and awakening language.

And, you know, 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.

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, and

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.