Poetry's Political Role and Historical Precedent

In the words of Jane Hirshfield, “science exists to try to answer the questions that can be answered. Poems exist to answer the questions that cannot be answered and yet require of us some response.” Her poems do just this, but with the dexterity and finesse of a Zen koan. Jane is an unusual voice in the landscape of contemporary poetry, in that she has spent much of her life as a serious practitioner of Zen Buddhism, bringing that particular ethos of attention to her inner life, but also to issues of social and environmental justice. Known the world over for her ten collections of poetry and several more collections of essays and translations, her voice can just as easily be found in The New York Times or The Guardian as on a stage before 50,000 people in the March for Science. 

In this conversation, Jane generously took us on a tour of her many influences, practices, and ponderings: from her introduction to Gregory Bateson and the Lindisfarne Association, to what she sees as the role of poetry in democracy and society, to her deeply kinaesthetic process of making poetry, to the intimate crosstalk between poetry and science, and, finally, to what we both see as being the ‘ethics of poetry’. Jane has spoken of her poems as “an enactment of a struggle to say yes to that which we would prefer to say no to” — a statement which seems as poignant as ever, and indicative of how capacious her mind and practice are. We spoke about the uncanny power that poetry has to convey beauty and grief in the same breath, and how to embrace what she calls the ‘ambush of amazement’ in times that might otherwise compel us to go numb. Ultimately, the conversation was an enactment of what it means to stay awake and tender in a world of such unutterable complexity. 

More about Jane Hirshfield: Writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), Jane Hirshfield is one of American poetry's central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere, the values of interconnection, and the alliance of poetry and the sciences. A practitioner of Soto Zen for fifty years, she received lay-ordination in 1979 in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. Hirshfield's honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and Columbia University's Translation Center Award. In 2024 she received the Zhongkun International Poetry Prize, China’s premier independently-given award for a world poet. Author of the recently published The Asking: New and Selected Poems (US, Knopf, 2023; UK, Bloodaxe, 2024); nine previous poetry collections; two now-classic collections of essays on art's infrastructure and craft, Nine Gates and Ten Windows; and four books presenting world poets from the deep past, she has presented at festivals and universities worldwide and her work has been translated into eighteen languages. A 2026 Visiting Fellow and Poet in Residence at Harvard Divinity School and former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected in 2019 into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

For anyone who missed Jane’s singular Mind Matters talk in February 2025, you can view it on our YouTube channel at any time. 

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