Jane Hirshfield: Fighting for Science and Climate in Poetry

Jane Hirshfield is the author of nine much-honored poetry collections, most recently Ledger (Knopf, 2020), a book centered on climate change, as well as two essay collections and four books collecting the work of world poets of the deep past. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. Elected in 2019 into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Hirshfield’s other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the NEA, and The Academy of American Poets.

Hirshfield’s poems have long combined engagement with nature, science, and a concern for social justice. In 2017, she read to 40,000 people on the Washington Mall at the first March for Science. The poetry tent she organized for that event led to Poets for Science, https://tinyurl.com/poetsforscience, an ongoing traveling project in collaboration with Kent State’s Wick Poetry Center.

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Poetry & Planet is produced by Ethan Goffman. “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman and “To Earth (with friendly greetings)” by Rolf Jacobsen are read by Michael Oliver.  The latter poem is translated from the Norwegian by Jane Hirshfield. Musical excerpts from “Elements of Life” and “Earth Revisited” are written and performed by Reginald Cyntje, with vocals by Christie Dashiell.  Aural interludes are by Douglas Harvey.

The opening poetry chorus is voiced by Jomo K. Johnson, Dr. Michael Anthony Ingram, Marianne Szlyk, and R. Michael Oliver.