What a Poetic Mind Can Teach Us About How to Live
About this episode
The conversation explores poetry as a practice of deep attention and transformation. Hirshfield, a poet and author of collections including Ledger and the essay books Nine Gates and Ten Windows, argues poems work not through linear argument but through receptivity, holding complexity and contradiction. She discusses climate complicity — poems that acknowledge the beauty made possible by carbon-intensive modernity — and foregrounds embodiment, permeability of the self, and kinship with the natural world. Her eight years of formal Zen training, including three at a wilderness monastery, taught her attention and acceptance carried into ordinary tasks. Klein and Hirshfield consider how poetry preserves difficult experience in memorable form, addresses unanswerable questions, gathers people at life's transitions, and counters despair. They conclude that both science and poetry share a wonder at existence, and that receptivity to the world's otherness is itself an ethical stance.