ENV CRSS the environmental crisis, both mourning and praising “our cataloged vanishing unfinished heaven.”

the environmental crisis, both mourning and praising “our cataloged vanishing unfinished heaven.”

Evolving Planet,” which tracks the 4.6-billion-year history of the Earth and its life forms. This unfathomably long (“beyond measure,” in Hirshfield’s words) and unlikely chain of events—from the formation of the planet to the emergence of single-celled life, onwards to lichens and plants, sea creatures, and land-animals—that led to us today, at this particular moment, is astonishing to behold.

Species loss, environmental degradation, the disappearance of animals and atmospheres, aging, mortality—how does poetic practice affect your (and everyone’s) encounter with these forms of loss? What can a poem change?

For answerable questions, we have mathematics, science, engineering, all the immense machinery of care-taking that we humans have devised to keep ourselves fed, clothed, housed, cloaked in the folds of community and culture. Poetry—and spiritual teachings, philosophy, the other arts—are how we approach questions unanswerable in other ways.

I write to meet my life and the world’s lives fully, with my own eyes. The pupils widen further when they look for a new phrase, a new gesture. I need this impractical, unmeasurable, sometimes startling experience—need its capacity to make visible and audible the wholeness of heart that can be present even in fear, even in grief—to allow me to touch my life’s fabric. Poems also show us that we are not alone, not passive, not helpless, not without choice, whatever the circumstance. Even in the face of what seems unchangeable, by writing it down, we change it, and change ourselves. The literal meaning of the Greek poiesis is “making.” The writer R.P. Blackmur (1904–1965) said, “A good poem expands the available stock of reality.” It feels so to me. That breathing room and expansion let me go on.

Buddhist practice figures into this also. Can you speak to the role that Zen plays for you in excavating or facing these difficult things?

The practices of poetry, of Zen, and of daily life feel, for me, continuous. I bring to each the same hands, the same set of hopes and intentions: To know the world and not obstruct it. To sustain openness to what is. To bring forth in body, speech, and mind an original expression of the life and world and age I’ve been given to carry. To act with an awareness of interconnection. To lessen rather than add to suffering. To glimpse, a few times in my life, the full abundance of being and of beyond-being. To know existence directly, to live with these ears and eyes unconfined by the bell jar of narrow self. But also to treasure that small self, to care for it as we would care for any small, fragile being, any carpenter’s chisel, any washed bowl set carefully down.

The practice of zazen [meditation] awakens many things—among them, courage. Meditation trains courage, and it encourages. Zen’s formal practice has given me sustenance and tools—meditation, mindfulness, silence; certain stories and koans; the precepts and paramitas [perfections, or ideals]; the simple, helpful stubbornness of vow and intention. Also a basic stance of humility and non-grasping; keeping a don’t-know mind is one useful antidote to despair.

Transience, doubt, failure, grief, even a sense of waiting: these words come to mind when I try to describe this collection. One poem is titled, and celebrates, “My Doubt;” another question is contentment. Yet there’s also a sense of mystery and un-knowing, of possibility (“What word, what act, / was it we thought did not matter?”). How does the book address these two poles and move between them? 

Your question beautifully captures the balancing act of my own psyche these past years. When I contemplate the future, it is hard to feel hopeful. But mystery and keeping a don’t-know mind remind me that I cannot know the future. The future will always surprise.

These many emotions are the music a life is conducted by and one way that we know the full dapple and opulence of existence. They are also the body and psyche’s weather, which comes and goes from sources too subtle to ever predict or understand completely. A world without weather would be narrow, boring, diminished. And so, in my poems, all the emotions, especially the difficult ones, are wanted, are welcomed. But when I found myself, these past years, leaning too hard toward darkness, I understood that such a view was incomplete. Despair does not help beings’ hearts or futures. And so, the last poem in the book, “My Debt,” was written with exactly this spirit of navigation. It attempts to correct something I came to realize was amiss late in writing the book: I had not praised enough, not thanked enough, the abundance of beings and beauties that are still here.