How do you describe nature? Two poets help us
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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?
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?
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.
Jane, this might be I don't even know if this is too basic of a question, but how do you avoid the beautiful sunset trope? Like, do you ever find yourself falling into a cliche or are you are you, you know, beyond that?
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.
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