Course:Ledger by Jane Hirshfield
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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| Important Course Pages |
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Ledger is the ninth collection of poetry by Jane Hirshfield, described by the publisher as “a pivotal book of personal, ecological, and political reckoning,” and presciently published on the cusp of the pandemic, March 10th, 2020. As a teacher, ‘Let them not say’ (Ledger) was my point of entry into her work. I was struck by the devastation it conveyed in seventeen short lines, and I shared it with all of my students.
Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough.
Let them say, as they must say something:
A kerosene beauty.It burned.
Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,read by its light, praised,
and it burned.
At the culmination of this term-long apprenticeship, which has taken me deep into her oeuvre, Ledger remains my favourite of her collections. It is weirder and more experimental, more mature and assured than her other work, but it is also her most urgent response to the climate crisis—a central concern in my life and writing. Hirshfield acknowledges that this collection feels different than her previous books because: “The time line for swerve feels shorter, the precipice raised to heights fatal not only for individuals, but for the planet.” As she states in this interview, her project in this book is asking:
What is our conversation? What is my responsibility? What must be suffered? What can be changed? How can I meet this in a way which both lets me open my eyes the next day and also, perhaps, if I’m lucky, can be of service?
These are also the questions that I am circling at this stage in my life. I wonder, sometimes, how poetry can touch a crisis so vast, complex and impossible. Of this, Hirshfield says:
It may be that poetry’s speaking is essential but preparatory, oblique. That our work, yours and mine, is the tilling that precedes planting. That our images and metaphors and statements are like the multitude of tunneling earthworms that keep the earth’s microbiome alive, its structure lightened and turnable, viable for crops. Any one earthworm seems not to matter, yet the existence of earthworms matters. An ethics of preparation means also that poetry’s work may be less to solve than to speak of, to speak on behalf of, that which needs solving. Our human capacities for imagination and art-making, for grief and joy, exist in the service of survival of the single, solitary self and of the whole. Poems sustain the complexity, multiplicity, and peculiarities of lives, not their erasure. They carry the sense of wholeness and unblind us to connection. These allegiances are currently desperately needed.
Ledger is an account book of grief and ragged but persistent hope. It feels relatively close to Hirshfield on a personal level, sustaining the peculiarities of her life: "A woman long dead now/ gave me, when I told her I could not sing,/ a kazoo." She writes about the loss of a close friend and her sister: “I said/I believed/a world without you unimaginable./Now cutting its flower to go with you into the fire.” But also climate grief, the grief of planet-sized death. She writes of our division (“How came separation to chisel, to cherish, to chafe?”) and of our yearning. I’ve struggled, at times, with the universalism of Jane Hirshfield’s work. She has spoken of having wanted, through her study of Zen, to find: “a way of being in the world that didn’t make my own skin such an important thing.” Personally, I’m not sure it is possible to escape my own skin, or if I should even try. Hirshfield also says:
…I want my ‘we’ to be absolutely continuous amongst my fellow humans, amongst living beings, amongst the largeness of the expanding universe, down to the tiniest physics and particle. I want—I want to feel like part of a single fabric and to behave as if my responsibility is to the entire fabric.
I deeply relate to this desire, but I hesitate with the pronoun ‘we’ out of respect for the “multiplicity, complexity,” and diverse lived experiences of my audience. I believe in the paradox that universality is achieved through specificity. At times in this apprenticeship, when attempting to imitate Hirshfield’s voice and her ‘we’, I felt the authority (to speak for all humanity) was unearned. That said, when I read her work I feel I am in the presence of an elder who has spent a lifetime in deep contemplation of what it means to be human. Maybe, for Hirshfield, it is earned?
Ledger points to the narrator’s experience, with poems titled: “My doubt,” “My Dignity,” and “My Silence,” a title with no other text wherein the silence speaks volumes. She also uses ‘we’: “What word, what act,/was it we thought did not matter?” However, I think the scale of her concern in this book—our species-wide predicament—cannot possibly be addressed with any other pronoun. Reading this collection, I felt held in my grief, and comforted but not lulled. As part of the 'we' of humanity, I felt, very profoundly, the joy and sorrow of existence. As Hirshfield says: “acknowledging the fullness of things is our human task.”