About the Project
Poets for Science started on Earth Day, April 22, 2017, when demonstrators around the world participated in a March for Science in a call to support and safeguard the scientific community, fact-based decision making, basic research, and freedom of speech for scientists.
Partnering with Poets for Science founder, poet and environmental spokesperson Jane Hirshfield, the Wick Poetry Center joined the marchers at the Teach-In on the National Mall in Washington D.C. Today, Poets for Science is both an exhibit and a movement exploring the connections between poetry and science.
project stats
1400+
website visits
160
posters carried
23
banner & poster
designs
7+
exhibit stops
and counting
“Hirshfield, who curated the poems, describes the posters as ‘Human-sized poems,’ bringing forward the human side of science—how we think and feel with its knowledge, how its knowledge touches our lives in ways from galactic to microscopic.”
FROM “THE TWO FEET OF ONE WALKING: POETS MARCH FOR SCIENCE”
BY DANA ISOKAWA, POETS & WRITERS
Poetry and science are allies, not opposites.
Both are instruments of discovery, and together they make the two feet of one walking. We can only weigh the full meaning of facts by how we feel about them. Feelings are meaningful and useful to us because they emerge from the truths of this shifting, astonishing world.
Observation and imagination, the microscope and the metaphor, the sense of amazement—you need all of them to take the measure of a moment, of a life. 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
about jane hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield’s nine collections of poetry include Ledger (Knopf, 2020); The Beauty (Knopf, 2015), long-listed for the National Book Award; Come, Thief; After (shortlisted for England’s T.S. Eliot Prize); Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award); The Lives of the Heart; and The October Palace. She is also the author of two now-classic books of essays, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, 2015) and Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperCollins, 1997), and has edited and co-translated four books collecting the work of world poets from the past.
Hirshfield’s interest in science and the ecological world has long infused her poems. She has been artist in residence for both a neuroscience program at UCSF and an experimental forest in Oregon’s Western Cascades. Her honors include The Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2004, Jane Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets, an honor previously held by such poets as Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop. In 2012, she received the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry, and was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2019, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
© 2015 CURT RICHTER
about traveling stanzas
The Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University, home to the award-winning Traveling Stanzas project, is one of the premier university poetry centers in the country. It is a national leader for the range, quality, and innovative outreach in the community.
The mission of Traveling Stanzas is to bring poetry to everyday lives by fostering meaningful conversations and encouraging new voices. The program offers people moments of pause to slow down and reflect on their lives, their communities, and to participate in a shared creative experience.
Learn more at TravelingStanzas.com
about
Traveling Stanzas is a project of the College of Arts and Sciences’ Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University in collaboration with Visual Communication Design students and alumni. The purpose of Traveling Stanzas is to facilitate a global conversation through the intimate and inclusive voice of poetry. Learn more about the Traveling Stanzas project by visiting travelingstanzas.com.
© TRAVELING STANZAS 2022
