My son Joshua and I gather in a weekly chavruta. The word is Hebrew or Aramaic, and literally means fellowship or group of fellows, and is a traditional rabbinic approach to Talmudic study in which a small group of students meets to analyze, discuss and debate a shared text. Joshua and I meet online, as he lives in New York State and I in northern California. Our chavruta is devoted each week to the work of one poet, and we've sometimes spent several weeks if our imagination is particularly taken by the work of a given poet, as it was most recently by the writing of Emily Dickinson.
I wanted to speak here of our hour this morning. We had agreed to focus on the poetry of one of our favorites, Jane Hirshfield. We chose her work because Joshua had read, and proposed that we discuss together this morning, a wonderful interview of Hirshfield by Ezra Klein of The New York Times, on March 3, 2023. Klein is known as a skillful and insightful writer and podcaster, and this interview Klein entitled "The Poet Jane Hirshfield Invites Us to Embrace Habits of Deep Noticing and Attention⸺and Observe the Beauty that Unfolds."
Klein begins their discussion by introducing Hirshfield to his listeners: "She's the author of many collections of poetry, including her most recent "Ledger," which is probably the book of poetry I've gifted to others most often. She's also the author of two very beautiful books of essays on poetry and how it works and the poetic mind. And if you are intimidated by poetry, I really recommend these, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World.
I'll end this brief discussion with the first poem of Jane Hirshfield that Ezra Klein asked her to recite during the interview. It is a 2014 poem illustrative of Hirshfield's increasing attention in her work to the climate crisis.
Let Them Not Say
Let them not say: We did not see it.
We saw.
Let them not say: We did not hear it.
We heard.
Let them not say: They did not taste it.
We ate. We trembled.
Let them not say: It was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
We witnessed with voices and hands.
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.