The Worlds We Find Ourselves In: Mark Doty and Jane Hirshfield in Conversation
Jane Hirshfield (photo by Curt Richter) and Mark Doty (photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths). In late February, 2020, friends Mark Doty and Jane Hirshfield, both poets with new books then on the verge of publication—Doty’s What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, and Hirshfield’s Ledger: Poems—began exchanging emails exploring each other’s work and the relevance of poetry in today’s chaotic and frightening times. As their exchange unfolded over the early spring, they found themselves increasingly entangled with the question of how a person can write not only into the longer-standing crises of climate, social fabric, and justice, but into the arrival of the global pandemic—which informed their missives to each other, as it did their lives.
Dear Mark,
When I think of your life and your poems, even the proscenium part—the public words of the published pages, set in front of the curtain of the personal life—seems so vast it’s impossible to sum. Names and nouns, persons and places, race through my mind: Wally, Beau, pipistrelle, Jackson Pollock, Broadway, Atlantis. Still, the word that arises for me, just now, as a central, abiding quality is “iridescence.” According to my Merriam-Webster: “a lustrous rainbowlike play of color caused by differential refraction of light waves (as from an oil slick, soap bubble, or fish scales) that tends to change as the angle of view changes.”
Even in those dictionary examples, it seems that iridescence—a beauty born of perspective, of layers, and of the angle of relationship between seer and seen—travels in the company of visible suffering. An oil slick is both beautiful and a substance profoundly out of place: even the few drops of gasoline rainbowing a puddle are an insult to the earth’s well-being; whoever drinks that water will sicken. A soap bubble? The very definition of transience. Fish scales— marine-biology iridescence seems always to arrive as layers answering friction. And then also, what of the fish? I read “fish scales” and think of the ones in Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses”:
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
[…]
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.
I’ll digress to say that I’ve always been surprised that those who write of your work and its lineage never seem to mention Bishop. Do they think a male poet doesn’t read the poems of women? You can of course correct me, if you think I’m wrong in finding so much resonance between her work and yours, but either way, Bishop was also a poet of rainbow, of gleam found companion to suffering. There’s not only the famous rainbow at the end of “The Fish,” but others, including the one in her last-started finished poem, the posthumously published “Sonnet”:
[…]
Freed—the broken
thermometer’s mercury
running away;
and the rainbow-bird
from the narrow bevel
of the empty mirror,
flying wherever
it feels like, gay!
Mercury’s gleam released by having been broken; the mirror empty, its observer absent…This poem’s entered freedom is a wing-spreading joy. And still, a person might be forgiven for wondering if gleam is ever
