My Latest: 'While this everywhere crying'
Conversations with Jane Hirshfield, poet of the present moment
Dear friends,
I truly hope everyone will read this one—not for my words, but for the words and wisdom of Jane Hirshfield, one of the great living poets of our time, and one of the great souls, whose recent work has helped me face our moment of ecological and political catastrophe—without succumbing to fatalism.
I had the privilege of corresponding and talking with Jane at length and in depth, in a series of wide-ranging conversations, during the course of the past year and more. Her new, career-spanning volume, The Asking: New and Selected Poems, was published by Knopf in September, and my feature in The Nation’s current issue contains three of her poems reprinted in full, as well as generous quotes from others. I can’t thank the magazine’s editors and designers enough for giving a piece like this the space to breathe, in print, where it should be read. (Subscribers can now download the issue in PDF; the piece will be available online for non-subscribers as of Tuesday. Maybe you should subscribe… Just a thought.)
There’s a lot going on in this piece, a lot beneath the surface. It comes from a place where words can’t reach. Perhaps more than any piece I’ve written in a long while, I wrote it for myself. But I also wrote it for my comrades in the movement for a livable and just future, especially those who may struggle, as I do, with despair.
There are two comrades, in particular, whose friendship has helped me get through the past few years: Marla Marcum, director and co-founder of the Climate Disobedience Center, and Isaac Petersen, an organizer of the No Coal No Gas campaign in New England. I’ve learned more from each of them than I can calculate. Marla and Isaac, it’s been a rough year, and y’all are so loved. This one’s for you.
-Wen