Considering science through poetry:

An Interview with Zoë Hitzig

What are the limits of enlightenment thought, and how can poetry pick up where scientific rationality is no longer the most reasonable world-view? In this interview with Zoë Hitzig, she tells us about her latest collection Mezzanine (Ecco, 2020) which considers the relationships between manmade structures and unquantifiable feelings, asking too which systems will hold (or transform) in the future. A poet and PhD candidate in economics, Zoë says that poetry “has unique power to help people imagine different possible futures. Imagination is an enormous asset to policymaking and in thinking about what our future could or should look like.” What ideas could poetry unlock? How might it lead to concrete change?

We want to congratulate you on your first published collection Mezzanine. Could you tell us more about how you came to that title?

What I saw as linking these poems together was not so much a particular theme, but more the predicament from which they each were speaking. The poems speak from a state of radical in-betweennesss. Like purgatory. All the poems are caught in this world that is almost like the one that we live in now but also very different––turned on its head. It’s a world that has the same institutions as ours: prisons and wars and markets, and so on. But it's also a world where subjectivity and objectivity are muddled, where the mechanical crashes into the organic, and as a result responsibility and blame are hard to tease apart.  

I also wanted the title to latch on to our present, and the word ‘mezzanine’ is richly evocative in contemporary culture. Every shopping mall in America has a mezzanine floor. Every glassy office building. The public swimming pool. Concert halls and opera houses. The mezzanine is ubiquitous in our particular moment in the anthropocene. Some friends warned me against using a title that’s used elsewhere––but I ignored them. I like that ‘mezzanine’ speaks to previous works. It echoes Dante just enough (“Nel mezzo del camin…”). There’s that Chekhov story “The House with the Mezzanine.” Then there's Nicholson Baker’s bizarre novel (The Mezzanine). And Massive Attack’s 1998 album, Mezzanine, one of the greatest albums of all time!  

There are so many things you can do with a title. I decided to use it to invite the reader into this purgatorial space. Since the title is very open-ended, I tried to use the structure of the book to provide more of a compass. I grouped the poems into five sections. In the first section, different voices bounce around between different objects and different artifacts in the built and natural world. That section contains the poems “Object at the Department Store Speaks” and “The Tamping Iron Speaks” and “The Levee Speaks” and one spoken by a crypotographer and another by an auctioneer. And so that first section is like an introduction to the “mezzanine” of the collection: here are the range of perspectives that we will hear in this world. This is the kind of thinking that happens in this world. These are the kinds of feelings that are felt in this world. The subsequent sections are loosely grouped around themes: nature, politics, money, body. I’m not unlocking the code of the book through these descriptions, but this is how I imagine its structure––it’s just the story of how I put it together. 

Can you describe the path which led you to explore both a career in poetry as well as a PhD in economics?

It's hard to say how I came to this strange career (if one can call it that). I don't ever feel like I chose it, really. I did what I love to do and I was very lucky. I’ve been blessed with friends and mentors, both on the research side and the poetry side, who haven’t ever made me feel like I had to give up the other thing. That kind of encouragement is hard to find. To some extent I think I’ve consciously sought mentors and friends who understand that the creative and the analytical side are complements not substitutes.  

Poetry creates space for me to react to some of my encounters in the scientific world. Often, economics makes its way into my poetry through a kind of disgust. The language of economics is defined by self-interest, scarcity, competition, optimization and so forth. It’s a worldview that has been very powerful in bankrupting the world. Formal language, more broadly, erases so much of what is most important and interesting about being human.

Many of your poems such as “Huttonian Theory of Earth” and “Pernkopf Atlas” interweave scientific diction with emotions. For example, you write in “Pernkopf Atlas (II)”:

Our necks sticking to hair, hair standing in for veins, 

veins for arteries, are bloodless as carefully drawn legacy, 

wan as encephalon drawn in an anatomy book. 

Something flowers in her. I feel it too....

How do you understand the intersection between narrative and anatomy? Between economics and emotions?

The way you phrased this question reminds me of the aphorism “knowledge is power.” As an aphorism, it's thrown around pretty harmlessly.

But there's a dark underbelly to that expression. And in some ways, many of the poems in Mezzanine started as an encounter with the grim, perilous side of that expression. That is certainly the case for the poem you quoted, “Pernkopf Atlas.” That poem is about an anatomical atlas made by Nazis. The Atlas represented a huge leap in the scientific understanding of the body. It was also heralded as a gorgeous work of art––the first anatomical atlas done in color. But then you think, Okay, what was it that allowed this knowledge to emerge? Well, it was a steady supply of fresh, otherwise healthy bodies from the war that could be dissected––a steady supply of prisoners of war and of Jews. (Using prisoners for dissection is not a Nazi invention, by the way––one of the earliest anatomists on record, Herophilos who lived around 300 BC made all his most important discoveries through the vivisection of prisoners.)

What are we supposed to make of this? If you're a policymaker, you might have to make a decision about what to do with this knowledge. You might have to make an ethical decision about this thing––a librarian might have to decide whether to have this book in their library, a medical doctor, or a teacher at a medical school, might have to decide whether to use this to teach. I'm sure they have better references now, but there's still this inability to escape that type of darkness that was part of the origin of knowledge. In that poem and in many others, I tried to explore what that mediation felt like and what it might tell us about what it means to be here now, trying to relate to each other in a way that is both enlightened, in the sense of scientific rationality, and fair.

Your collection examines shifting power relations into the posthuman era, and we were wondering what role you see poetry playing within these increasingly technological interactions.

Poetry has unique power to help people imagine different possible futures. Imagination is an enormous asset to policymaking and in thinking about what our future could or should look like. What poetry can do, especially as we face these truly global threats like climate change, is help us feel what the future will feel like when we're gone. Poetry can throw you far into a possibly catastrophic future. From there, it helps you work backwards and discover what needs to be rewired in order to avoid that catastrophic future. 

Inhabiting the perspective of objects helps me access longer timescales. Many objects have been around for longer than we've been around. If we could feel or see from the perspective of a levee or a railroad tie or a mountain, we might be able to feel more easily the crushing weight of capitalism and technology––how capitalism is destroying the natural world and how technology is undoing our freedoms, and eroding so much of what it means to be human. Poetry is about helping us understand the ways in which we are our own weapon of choice. 

What you’re saying reminds us of Katherine Hayles’s work in How We Became Post-Human––she talks about how the stories we tell in literature are themselves creators of this new world and its consciousness. 

Right. Mezzanine’s epigraph is from a book by Carolyn Merchant called The Death of Nature––it's one of my favorite books. In it, Merchant talks about how the Enlightenment and the advent of modern rationality set off a mechanical way of understanding the world. So many different processes of domination––the domination of women, of nature, of solidarity and altruism through the advent of global capitalism––have come to be through the mechanistic worldview born in the Enlightenment. Merchant’s book shows us how it’s a way of thinking that handed us these hierarchies rather than an innate truth: it was actually a set of metaphors that allowed people to more easily see the world as a machine and therefore, as something that could be altered and tinkered with and...messed up. So then, why should it not be a new set of metaphors that help us reverse course? 

We were fascinated to read the backstory of your poem “The Tamping Iron Speaks,” first published in the London Review of Books. Could you tell us more about how this poem came to be and its relation to the story of Phineas Gage?

I don't remember when I first heard the Phineas Gage story, but I loved it. Phineas Gage was working on a railroad in the mid 1800s when he improbably survived a freak accident: a crowbar shot through his skull and destroyed much of his frontal lobe. Though he survived, he became a pretty wretched guy. The story haunts me. It does so much of what we've been talking about––confusing our usual notions of responsibility and blame––Who or What is Phineas Gage if he had a completely different personality after he survived the accident? It’s like, Okay, if we can reduce all of personality and even the morality, the goodness of a person to a piece of the brain, then why do we let our institutions determine people’s life outcomes based on this arbitrary chemistry? Why do we punish people for not having a particular chemical makeup? Some make one mistake and end up in prison for the rest of their life just because they didn't have this specific set of dendrites and axons dancing with each other in a particular choreography. In short, the Phineas Gage story is often on my mind because I'm obsessed with responsibility and agency. What does it really mean to call a person a person. Why do we act like people have fixed identities.

So that’s the philosophical stage onto which the poem entered. The occasion of its entrance was, basically, happenstance. When I was writing the Pernkopf Atlas poem, I went to visit an old edition of the Atlas at the Countway Library of Medicine in Boston.  When I was leaving the library, I saw, on a landing between floors in a display cabinet: the tamping iron! The one that went through Phineas Gage’s skull! I was in poet-mode. I was overtired, as usual. And the iron  spoke to me. I mean, that sounds crazy, but I really did feel like I was talking to it. So I scribbled some key points in my notebook. 

Writing that poem was an instructive experience. It’s one of the oldest poems in the book. When I first wrote it, I thought that it was too weird to show to anyone. It’s funny, but also deadly serious. And it asks more questions than it answers.  Like, why is this artifact speaking? What is it trying to say? Does the reader have to know the story of Phineas Gage to understand what it is that it’s trying to say? Why does it have this strange music and specific vocabulary and weird syntax? I learned, partially through that poem, that if the voice in the poem is strong enough, the poet doesn’t need to answer any of those questions. The voice needs to rise to the occasion. It’s all about voice. 

How do you imagine poetry and economics working together in the future? Is there a central message you hope to share with this work?

I don't have a view about how poetry in particular needs to work with economics in particular. Those are the two domains that I happened to end up working in––one is creative and one is analytical. I would interpret the question more broadly and think about how artistic and analytical modes of thought can work together. In my own work, I hope that combining the artistic and analytical generates a willingness to question everything and firms up the feeling that the institutions and social configurations and ways of being that govern our lives are not the ones that we need. They're not the ones that we want. Nobody really chose them. There was no good logic there to begin with. Both understanding that in an analytical way and really being able to feel that in a visceral, emotional way can help us unlock new avenues through which to undo some of the damage that we are doing to ourselves and to the planet and to each other.