WETNESS: AN ASSAY
—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
__________
Jane Hirshfield: “I first wrote a poem and subtitled it ‘an assay,’ in 2002. I thought it was a one-time event. That poem needed, I felt, some explanation for its unusual gait, its mode of thinking by almost prose-like propositions. I came to the term through both the assaying machines of science, which disassemble a substance into its component parts, and the French essayer, the sense of an experimental ‘try’ that lies also behind the word for ‘essay,’ a form that thinks its way through its subject in often-meandering but still measured and measuring ways … ‘Wetness: An Assay’ is a loose embodiment of this form I’ve worked in for what’s now been over twenty years—but the poem gained something for me when I tried on this title. Its stanzas do feel to me a series of small tries. It wants to discover something about what it is to be an abstraction, what it is to be a perceived and perceiving light in the large dark, and finally what it is to be a person: susceptible to shifting and unpredictable experience, vulnerable to everything around us, sometimes soaked through to the skin—and finding that soaked state beloved.”
