Jane Hirshfield and Poets for Science
“Poetry and science each seek to ground our lives in both what exists and the sense of the large, of mystery and awe. Every scientist I know is grounded in curiosity, wonder, the spirit of exploration, the spirit of service. As is every poet.
~ Jane Hirshfield
Our friend, poet Jane Hirshfield, is known for writing about the interconnectedness of life and the crisis of the biosphere with, as Vladimir Nabokov, lepidopterist, poet, and novelist encouraged, “the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.” She has been the poet in residence for the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon and for a neuroscience program at the University of California, San Francisco, and, in 2019, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
As Hirshfield has said, “Poetry and science are allies, not opposites.”
On Earth Day in 2017, in conjunction with the March for Science in Washington DC, she co-founded Poets for Science to support and celebrate scientific discovery and expression with an interactive installation of science poems that’s now traveled to universities, museums, research centers, parks, and festivals across the US.
Hirshfield spoke about Poets for Science and the power of poetry at the Nobel Prize Summit in 2023, a periodic high-level conference hosted by the Nobel Foundation and organized by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Stockholm Resilience Centre to address critical global challenges.
To those wondering what poetry has to do with scientific facts, she said:
“Reality is foundational. No animal ignoring the actual will long survive. The presence of poetry at the March for Science was about advocating for a feeling — the sense of shared lives, shared fates, shared existence.”
Earlier this week, Hirshfield offered readings along with other poets at a Poetry for Our Planet event hosted by the Climate Museum and American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
And this November, the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University will host the first ever Poets for Science Gathering, “celebrating nearly a decade of public work linking poetry with scientific inquiry.”
What began as a response to scientific censorship has now become a movement, exploring the connections between poetry and science, with calls for poems, international gatherings, and campaigns integrating poetry, science, and social action.
Her poem “Optimism” calls our attention to this very resilience, creativity and persistence. To, as Maria Popova wrote, “the improbable and inhospitable environments in which life, against all odds, persists — the raw optimism of nature.”Nothing is fixed or finite, even in the midst of seemingly impossible situations.
OPTIMISM
by Jane HirshfieldMore and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow,
whose foam returns over and over to the same shape,
but the sinuous tenacity of a tree:
finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another.
A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs —
all this resinous, unretractable earth.
Source: Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2001)
Join Zen Peacemakers on Tuesday, September 29th for a Peacemaker Circle with poet Jane Hirshfield
Art, Activism, and the Practice of Peace:
A Conversation with Poet Jane Hirshfield
September 29, 2026
1:00pm - 2:30pm US Eastern
Join Poet Jane Hirshfield and Geoff Shoun O’ Keeffe for a dialogue about art-making and activism, the ways that creative heart-mind increases compassion, and the perennial question of meeting the difficult with tenderness, humility, and courage.
> LEARN MORE ABOUT POETS FOR SCIENCE