The Physiology of Selfhood in the Hybrid Poetics of Jane Hirshfield and Diane Ackerman
Jasmine Tan Hui Jun

In American poetry, selfhood has been conceptualized as twofold: individual and universal. This individual self is contingent on the relationship between human beings and our interconnectedness with the more-than-human world. As the study of life and living things, biology aligns with this construction of identity. One possible locus of identity that bridges the external (physical) and internal (emotional) worlds is the heart in Jane Hirshfield’s “The Lives of the Heart” and Diane Ackerman’s “Intensive Care”. I will contrast both poets’ depictions of the heart and explore how agency is manifested in the anatomy and physiology of the heart that enacts its own quest for selfhood. I believe that a clearer picture of the self is revealed in this so-called hybrid (applying the concept of chimeras in biology) intermingling of the literature and science. Alone, science and literature are insufficient modes of understanding the self because the microscopic view of science (dissected into the body’s constituent parts) is a reductionist approach that reinforces essentialist notions of the self as entirely dependent and predetermined by biology. Hence, there has been a movement in recent years where “Science itself has come to the paradoxical realization that it can no longer reject emotions and values if it wants to understand life” (The Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling, and the Metamorphosis of Science, Andreas Weber 21). I argue that the demotic space of poetry elucidates and enhances the significance of scientific concepts in our macroscopic view of reality. I seek to uncover how the self is transformed by a self-awareness, one that both acknowledges a parallel relationship between the arts and sciences but also an asymmetry between the way that biology and poetry confront the world.

Jasmine Tan is a graduate Master of Arts student at Nanyang Technological University. Her research interests are in the intersections between science and literature. Using the theoretical frameworks of biopoetics/bioaesthetics, she is currently researching on the assimilation of biological metaphors in Jane Hirshfield and Diane Ackerman’s poetics and its implications on selfhood. She is also an aspiring poet, having published “The Water Cycle” in To Let the Light In: A Poetry Anthology on Life and Death.