Chapter 1: What favorite places in nature do listeners share?
Hey, I'm Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday.
Flora just asked me to leave a message about a special place. I wanted to share one of my favorite places on the planet. Calling about my place in nature that just heals my soul.
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.
I experienced the joy of the bird songs 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.
You took us to Long Island Harbor, where you spent your summer as a kid.
It always smells briny and the wind coming off from the sound is great. It just feels like you're a thousand miles away.
You took us to a lake in Oklahoma.
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.
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?
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Chapter 2: How do poets capture the essence of nature?
How do you pin them down with language? And how do you do it without sounding like a big cliche? 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 Blazer is the former Wisconsin Poet Laureate. Jane and Kim, thank you so much for being here today. It's a pleasure. It's a delight.
When you're doing what our listeners are doing, you know, capturing a place or a moment and then sort of doing this difficult work of turning it into a poem... or writing, where do you begin? Jane?
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.
Kim, what about you? Raising a question. Does that idea resonate with you? 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 tale 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 writer,
it wants also to invite the reader to that space, both to the space of experience and to the space of mystery.
Are there limits to what you can capture in words?
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Chapter 3: What challenges do poets face in expressing nature's beauty?
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, 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.
And also that crack is the same crack that he experienced in his life. Like 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.
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?
Absolutely. I'd be delighted. And I just would 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 itself. 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.
Beautiful. Beautiful.
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Chapter 4: How do Jane and Kimberly begin their poetry writing process?
What do you see as the purpose of poetry?
Well, poetry is also an investigation. It's a search. And it's for that idea of that experience, that detail that we don't know. And we kind of want to put ourselves against that and see what happens. You know, like 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 know my relatives in poetry.
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.
Right.
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.
Kim, you also write in Anishinaabe Moen, the language of the Anishinaabe people. Does your poetry change?
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