Jane C: I notice that you use the image of ‘opening’ throughout the poem, which slightly surprises me, as the poem is about the end of things, when we might think of them as closing down.

Jane H: The paradox of speaking of opening while thinking of ending is, yes, at this poem’s centre. I’m contemplating breakage, and a breaking always involves both fracturing and a new opening. Humility reminds me: I cannot ever know the future, cannot know what may come into existence through our current, broken-open moment.

Barbara: Is it your hope that readers might find in this poem a paradoxical strengthening against the despair that can threaten when we look at the state of the world?

Jane H: Yes, exactly. The thought of an unbearable future could easily lead only to despair and surrender, to evasion, to a plunge into distraction. Yet for me, the opposite happens. Despair awakens its own countering: determination. Whether or not hope is futile doesn’t matter. I cannot simply acquiesce to this festival of self-and-world destruction.

My first feeling about this poem, as I’ve said, was shock at its depth of abyss. The role of the poet is to see with open eyes, to feel with exposed nerve-ends, and to give name. The depth of the biosphere’s loss is not future: it is now, and actual. And into it, the poems come. To give voice and name, to imagine and feel the full consequence. To acknowledge and witness. And then also: to thank, to praise. As I said earlier: we only work to save what we first love.

Poems muster awareness, not action. A person writing or reading or hearing a poem is doing only that. But poems do make things happen. After I wrote an earlier poem in Ledger, imagining the future, ‘Let Them Not Say’, I became a person whose vow was to fulfil the poem’s premise’s mandate. I began to take some outward political action every day.

Jane C: You call your poem a ghazal – an Arabic form of love poetry. Is this poem then about the loss of what we love?

Jane H: I’ve never, myself, thought of ghazals as primarily love poems, though your thought about the loss of what is loved feels entirely fitting. My introduction to the ghazal form came from a 1971 Columbia University Press book, The Ghazals of Ghalib,[4] whose poems are seated primarily in the spiritual. Spiritual poetry in many traditions turns at times to the vocabulary of the lover. The Beloved is the divine in Sufi, Hindu and Islamic poetry. You see it also in the biblical Song of Songs. Longing is longing. Union is union. The impulses of eros and spirit to go beyond narrow self and narrow life are not so very separate.                  

I can’t recall precisely when in the process of finding this poem it became clear to me that it wanted to bow toward the form of the Persian ghazal. But by the time I had the first line’s statement and music in my ear, the ghazal’s energies and gravitation were shaping the poem that followed. I think differently when the engine of a poem’s thought is primarily sound-driven. Rhyme elasticises and magnetises both imagination and ideas.

The departures of this poem’s form from the traditional pattern have their own meaning. The line of short declarations – ‘Fish vanished. Bees vanished. Bats whitened. Arctic ice opened.’ – that is the drumbeat of a funeral cortège. That this poem’s form is a fractured, fissuring version of itself embodies and enacts its contents. The traditional exactly-repeated word at each couplet’s end becomes here unstable, for instance, mirroring the growing instability of our weather. What once could be relied upon now cannot. In a traditional ghazal, my own name would appear in the final couplet. In its place, I set down all our name: Burning Ones, as we are.

I’d like to add a moment’s thought about forms and their evolution, if I may. Here in the U.S., some years ago, a Persian-speaking poet famously rebuked the poetic community for not using the ghazal form correctly. Yet hybridity in poetic form, as it crosses time and languages and cultures, feels to me important and indispensable. Its evolution resembles the recombinations of biological DNA. New combinations bring forward new forms of beak and hoof, of thought and feeling. They expand the ranges – and the radiance – of the possible.

Jane C: You have taken an interest in other sorts of poetry – for instance, you have published co-translations of classical Japanese verse [5] – but you are also engaged in science. You’ve been a poet in residence in different scientific settings which encourage dialogue – a neuroscience department and an experimental forest – and founded ‘Poets for Science’ [/] in 2017.

Jane H: Poems reach into every realm of human life, into every form of investigation, feeling, and expression. Our lives are hybrid in multiple ways, how could our arts not be also? Across culture and category, even inside our own bodies, intermingling governs. For a person reading a poem that says ‘orange’, neuroscientists say, the tongue’s taste buds grow larger. If it says ‘ladder’, the legs’ muscles begin to grow ready to climb. A line of shaped ink somehow becomes the portal into every dimension of body, spirit and psyche, because what awakens that ink into meaning is the person reading – our lives, our libraries of multiple knowledges, our history, both as individuals and as parts of multiple communities of history, as humans, as animals. How can words on a page change a person’s molecules? Yet they do.

The lexicon of the sciences is one central repository of current understanding. Delving its cupboards’ shelves and file cabinets’ drawers, its rooms of reassembled skeletal bones and computer-code-held DNA, each new concept expands the knowable world, the knowable life. What a person learns about mosses, horseshoe crabs and lichens becomes what they know of themselves. It seems to me almost inevitable that I’d find my way to writing a poem (in an earlier book, The Beauty [6]) that includes natriuretic peptide b and the microbiome. The title is ‘My Proteins’, but the field of investigation is where self begins and ends, and the self’s felt, or unnoticed, connection to what’s beyond its own skin.

May I say one thing further about science and poetry? In our current political–cultural moment, when so much is asserted as if repetition alone made a thing true, research science feels to me a balancing practice, a necessary restorative against propaganda and the sway of rhythmic, memorable phrases. Beautiful language is a neutral technology, able to be turned in any direction. Even a poet is forced to concede why Plato was sceptical of letting poets into his ideal Republic. Research science, done rightly, is selfless, as a good detective is selfless. So I try to test my poems against reality’s rigour. Not to constrain the reach of emotion or imagination, but to focus them towards investigations whose outcomes might matter.

Our Curious Human Nature

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Barbara: We chose this last poem, ‘Amor Fati’, to stand for many that seem to hold the paradoxes and sheer oddness of being human, often with an enigmatic quality. They sometimes make the reader smile, laugh even (for Jane’s reading, see right or below).

Amor Fati

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Little soul,
you have wandered
lost a long time.

The woods are dark now,
birded and eyed.

Then a light, a cabin, a fire, a door standing open.

The fairy tales warn you:
do not go in
you who would eat will be eaten.

You go in, you quicken.

You want to have feet.
You want to have eyes.
You want to have fears.

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Here you seem to catch the human propensity for walking the knife-edges of experience – the pleasurable scariness felt by the child daring to do something slightly risky. It is also the desire for knowledge and curiosity of Eve as she considers eating the forbidden fruit in Eden, or even the call to the wandering soul coming into consciousness and life itself. Your poem is playful, but holds the serious creative possibilities of facing the dangers of the unknown.

Jane H: Oddity-appreciation and wonder are both qualities that matter to me. You’ve captured the poem beautifully in your comments. After my second book of poems, Of Gravity and Angels, was published, in 1988,[7] I read it through and felt two qualities were missing. And so I made a direct request to my muse: to become braver in the making of outright statements, and to become more strange. Both had to do with risk-taking, as does this poem.

One further aspect of this poem’s meaning for me comes from an element beyond its own words’ boundaries. Perhaps I should have put in a footnote, a dedication, something. ‘Amor Fati’ is the first of a series of poems in the book set off in a section of their own. All but the last have as their opening phrase what the Roman emperor Hadrian said in the one poem by him that we know, written on his deathbed. ‘Little soul’, he addressed his own departing spirit. More specifically still, the ‘little soul’ poems in Ledger also came from the three-year illness and death of glioblastoma in 2016 of my first love, the love of my twenties. These poems, written over that time, speak into his life and death, into my own, into all our mortality.

Life is perilous and requires courage – ‘you will be eaten’. But it’s also the one adventure we’re given to have. And so ‘Amor Fati’, this first poem contemplating my friend’s coming death, looked first, as you’ve noted, at the spirit’s willingness to be born, to live. To suffer, but also to taste the fairy tale cabin’s soup or stew or gingerbread. Recognition that assenting to joy means assenting also to suffering runs through all my books, along with its less visible counterpart: that the assent to suffering is the assent to joy.

Poetry and Zen

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Jane C: You have been a long-time practitioner of Buddhism, and are initiated into the Soto Zen tradition. I know that you do not like to be pigeonholed as a ‘Zen poet’, but it seems incomplete not to ask you about this part of your life and its influence on your poetry.

Jane H: A book well known in certain circles is R.H. Blyth’s Zen in English Literature.[8] Blyth emerged from a World War 2 Japanese prisoner-of-war camp as one of the early translators of both Japanese haiku and the teachings of Zen to English-language readers. In this book, though, he points to the many classics of the Western tradition in which ideas recognisably ‘Zen’ already appear. In Shakespeare, in Wordsworth, and long before them, Heraclitus, Horace, there is ‘Zen’. To perceive the world as altering, transient, interconnected, as subject to suffering, doesn’t require any special vocabulary or training. These are human truths. Sometimes truths of physics: Lavoisier wrote in his 1789 Elements of Chemistry: ‘Nothing is lost, nothing created: everything is transformed.’

From childhood, anywhere I encountered these ideas, they felt to me an understanding that fitted my direct experience. When, in university, I read Chinese and Japanese classical poetry and Japanese Nōh plays and began looking at Buddhist art and texts, I found that their worldview, especially as presented in Zen, reflected my own. Gary Snyder gave a talk at an East Asian Studies coffee hour. From that, I learned that a living poet with a ponytail, earring, and sense of humour could practise Zen. Three years later, I drove over a somewhat perilous fourteen-mile mountain dirt road to the only Zen monastery that then existed in the U.S. I thought I would spend a few months learning a little more about what had so drawn me. That became eight years of formal training, three in that mountain wilderness monastery.

During training, we were told to do nothing outside of the practice. In those three years, I wrote one haiku. When I returned to a situation less strict, poems returned also. And there is of course a long tradition of the use of poems in Zen – in koans, in capping verses, in the tradition of writing a poem on one’s deathbed. In traditional Japanese culture, no experience was quite complete until brought into a poem. But I didn’t want to write ‘Zen poetry’. I wanted to write only the poems of my own tongue and time and life. If there is Zen in my poems – and people do find it there – it is because it’s in my tongue. I don’t want a conceptual barrier between any other life and my own. I don’t want people looking for anything hidden or special in my work. It’s not there. If it were there, it would not be Zen anyhow. It would be just one more stumbling block between the actual moment and the actual moment.

From childhood, reading and writing poems offered a life raft. Poems brought me to practicing Zen; Zen returned me to writing poems. These paths of understanding and embodied awareness have always felt to me the left foot and right foot of one walking. A human being’s walking, though, not a set of beliefs. Both Zen and poetry ask you to find your own footfall and language.

Barbara: We might describe you as a poet who explores the depths of the human condition, its extremes and paradoxes. Are you happy with such a description?

Jane H: Yes, I am.

But other aspects of poetry do also come into the exploration. Language aware of its own music is the marker of words doing the feeling–thinking of poetry. Awake diction, syntax, grammar, music, are instruments of seeing. Image, arc, the under-the-fabric back-stitching of uncertainty and the unspoken; the sense of an original saying and of an arrived-at alteration of understanding, of relationship of self and world; these are all part of any poem, for me. All are turned toward a shared end. In each poem, to bear witness to and carry forward this life I was given, that we each have been given, for a moment or two, perhaps for a few decades. Into our ten-fingered hands, into our two eyes, two ears, two legs, hungers, hopes, has come this unfathomable, immeasurable one-life quotient of life.

How astonishing that is. And so, we exclaim before it. Late in his life, the great Polish poet Czesław Miłosz wrote a series of very brief poems titled “O!” Perhaps that “O!” is every poem’s secret purpose and title.