Portrait of Jane Hirshfield. Photo courtesy of the Poetry Foundation
Poet Jane Hirshfield participated in three events celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Consortium Library on Sept. 28. Two of the events were hosted at UAA: a creative writing talk at noon and a panel conversation at 4 p.m.
The event was co-hosted by the Consortium Library and Alaska Quarterly Review.
According to the Poetry Foundation, Hirshfield’s works have been finalists for multiple awards. Hirshfield received the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Seats were filled for both her creative writing talk and the panel discussion. At the talk, which took place at noon, Hirshfield explained her writing process. She said that, “a poem always begins with some precipitant,” some idea that would then later become the basis of a poem.
Hirshfield said that a lot of her ideas come from observations in the world around her. Recently, much of those observations are on the changing environment around her and its connection to climate change.
“I have lived long enough to see the world I’ve grown up in change,” said Hirshfield. She talked about how she used to be able to go camping without water filters, but now filters have become a necessity with increasingly polluted waters.
Once a few words have come to her, she begins her writing her poems.
Hirshfield told aspiring authors to write “noble failures,” because, she said, writers who aren’t creating failures aren’t taking enough risks. She reminded the audience that everyone writes badly sometimes.
The panel discussion at 4 p.m. featured Hirshfield, former Alaska Writer Laureate Nancy Lord, climate action advisor for The Nature Conservancy Stephanie Holthaus and Iñupiaq poet Marie Tozier.
Like Hirshfield’s creative writing talk, a large part of the panel discussion focused on the intersection of science and poetry in the context of climate change.
Lord said that poetry and science are parallel ways of looking at the world, not opposites.
She said that when it comes to creating art around the environment and climate change, a way to combat hopelessness is to write about something that encompasses joy, and to center on solutions-based issues.
Holthaus said that she is not a poet, but that poetry was a part of combating climate change.
“We need poetry to understand why we’re doing what we’re doing.”
Tozier said that it’s important to center indigenous ways of knowing in these conversations, and that there are lessons to be learned from indigenous communities – especially when facing climate change. She said that it can sometimes be hard to share her poetry, because it is often from a different point of view from other poets, but that it increases her drive to share them.
Hirshfield talked about her project “Poets for Science,” which was born out of the 2017 March for Science, when Hirshfield curated a series of scientific poems that she brought with her on the march.
Poets for Science has grown into an entire collection of posters, banners and exhibits of curated scientific poetry that has traveled across the United States.
According to the Poets for Science website, “Each poem in the Poets for Science collection was specifically chosen by Jane Hirshfield to demonstrate the connection between poetry and science, and how each discipline can inform the work of the other.”
Hirshfield’s final event in Anchorage was a poetry reading and book signing at the Anchorage Museum.
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