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Poet’s Choice: ‘Optimism’ by Jane Hirshfield

Sunday, September 20, 2009

I wrote “Optimism” at a time when the resilience it speaks of was needed. As poets do, I waited for some image or idea to open the hard field those weeks and months were. What came was “crown shyness”: the way that trees, rather than compete for light, sometimes withdraw from their neighbors’ shade and grow instead toward any available brightness. A basic and exemplary sanity. The poem began, then, at the confluence of personal crisis and ecological pondering. But poems have their own fates, and this one has had many. It’s been framed on hospice walls and put into a series of letterpress broadsides responding to the invasion of Iraq. Throughout the 2008 presidential race, I gave it at readings as an expression of hope for our country’s saner future. Most recently, a young writer from Zimbabwe, Petina Gappah, used it as the epigraph for her first book. When I e-mailed to ask how that happened, she answered that someone had sent her a copy and she’d thought the words “embodied perfectly the spirit of the Zimbabwean people.” Marianne Moore once said, “Poetry watches life with affection.” In this spirit, poetry itself is an instrument of resilience, reflecting life’s continuing embrace of its own implausible, risky existence. Both poetry and life take whatever challenge comes — painful or joyous — as a lattice for invention, a chance to increase possibility, variety, beauty, warmth, endurance. Each holds a limitless capacity to surprise and go on.