Earth Day Poetry and Science: Exploring Place, Perception, and Meaning

Overview

Science Friday marks Earth Day by exploring how poets translate favorite places in nature into meaningful language, and how poetry and science share an investigative spirit. Host Flora Lichtman speaks with invited poets about beginnings, perception, and the limits of language.

Key insights

• poetry begins with precise perception that raises questions
• poetry is an active attention that welcomes surprise
• poetry invites readers into mystery through restrained gesture

Overview

In this Science Friday Earth Day edition, Flora Lichtman welcomes two poets, Jane Hirschfeld and Kimberly Blaser, to discuss how a moment in nature becomes a poem and how that poetic process mirrors scientific inquiry. They unpack a poet's starting point, the intersection of interior response with external reality, and the challenge of pinning perception into language without sliding into cliché. Their exchange frames poetry as a disciplined, attentive practice that aims to reveal the world more deeply rather than to narrate it superficially.

"Poems tend to come to me from one really precise, sharp perception that raises a question that wants to be gone into further, felt through, further, understood more deeply or felt more deeply." - Jane Hirschfeld, founder of Poets for Science