Taylor Swift (For)Evermore: 113 Poets Pay Tribute #1

Taylor Swift forevermore! More than one hundred poets pay tribute in a new book. Taylor Swift’s impact on music is incalculable. The top-grossing tour of all time. Re-recording her own albums and garnering even more acclaim and sales! Rewriting the rules for women in music! But her impact doesn’t stop there because Swift is also recombining the DNA of songwriting into something newer, more personal and more powerful. And songwriting is just one step away from poetry, the art of words without music (just the right words and not one word more).

You won’t be surprised to hear Taylor Swift’s impact can be felt in the world of poetry. (Not for nothing is her new album called The Tortured Poets Department.) A new book proves it.

Taylor Swift (For)Evermore: 113 Poets Pay Tribute #1: Breaking Open

Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Music of Taylor Swift edited by Kristie Frederick Daugherty ($26; Ballantine Books; out December 3) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Here’s how it happened. Daugherty had an idea: give poets their own, personal, “secret” Taylor Swift song to be inspired by and help spark ideas. Gather the contributions together. Share them with the world. The response was overwhelming: artist after artist said yes, including Pulitzer Prize winners, National Book Critics Circle Award winners, best-selling poets and the 23rd US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (the first Native American to be honored with that role).

I'm offering one new poem a week for the next four weeks from this collection, an exclusive first look. You’ll find a poem inspired by Swift, followed by the poet’s thoughts on Swift, how the poem came to be,  whatever they want. What the poet won’t tell us is which Swift poem they were assigned as their personal touchstone for the project. Your guess is as good as mine! I’ll feature four poems in all, concluding with editor Daugherty’s touching and penetrating thoughts on her journey with this project.

I love this observation by our first poet, Jane Hirshfield: “In every language, the word that means ‘poem’ first meant “song.” 

The following is excerpted from INVISIBLE STRINGS by Kristie Frederick Daugherty. “And now from the distance of time” by Jane Hirshfield, copyright© 2024 by Jane Hirshfield. Used by permission of Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

"And now from the distance of time" 

By Jane Hirshfield


And now from the distance of time
when stories are over

one in a frame on a dresser
one left to remember

you left with nowhere to leave to
a world where nothing can vanish can vanish

from inside the trees or above them
the moon blameless        as I was      as you were

call it weather
call it something that lives outside measure

a lifetime apart            a lifetime together
are neither forever nor never

a lifetime together       a lifetime apart
one person turns into another

forgive past     forgive future   departure
a story continues beyond its erasure

we were two oars dividing one water
and time cannot sever


Two Selves Breaking Open from Jane Hirshfield

My first Taylor Swift was a Japanese poet who lived in what is now Kyoto, 1,200 years ago, Ono no Komachi. She wrote in one tanka, the five-­ line poetic form of her era:

How invisibly
it changes color
in this world,
the flower 
of the human heart. 

And this: 

I thought to pick
the flower of forgetting 
for myself, 
but I found it 
already growing in his heart.

Another woman poet of that time and place—­ the only golden age of world literature created by women writers—­ was Izumi Shikibu, who wrote, around the year 1000: 

Remembering you . . .
the fireflies of this marsh 
seem like sparks
that rise 
from my body’s longing. 

Even earlier, this fragment from the Greek songwriter-­ poet Sappho, who wrote around 600 BCE:

A strong wind 
thrashing the branches of a strong oak— 
like that, 
love shook my heart. 

In every language, the word that means “poem” first meant “song.” These poems read across time, across distance, across cultures, held my own life, my own shaken heart. Met at eighteen, in translation, they showed me I wasn’t alone in love’s thrashings and breakings open. They showed also that words could hold the breaking open, could hold me.

The Taylor Swift song Kristie Daugherty chose for me to respond to brought the same shock of meeting yourself suddenly inside a mirror: My own story was in hers, almost exactly. With one difference—­ Swift’s song imagines a future self, while I listened with both her song’s selves, present and future. I knew how my story had turned out, and I wrote my response from inside two time states at once—­ the self of first love that the song plunged me back into, and the self who has lived past love’s changing into something else.

Both selves kept breaking open. Life does that. Songs do that. The gift of songs and poems and stories is that they help you know that you want even what you write or sing to live past and survive—­ the weeping, the anger, the longing, the bewilderment, the shaking, the having, the losing. That you want your life in all its rising and falling, its words, notes, and pauses that hold who you were and will be. The song I was given carries Taylor Swift’s signature knowledge: that a person can sing their life into becoming their life. Hearing the song, writing the poem, was like watching your shadow walk in front of your walking. The light behind you lets you see both yourself as you are and where you are going.


Excerpted from INVISIBLE STRINGS by Kristie Frederick Daugherty. “And now from the distance of time” and the essay Two Selves Breaking Open by Jane Hirshfield, copyright© 2024 by Jane Hirshfield. Used by permission of Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten collections of poetry and two collections of essays, among other works. Most recently, she published The Asking: New and Selected Poems and the essay collection Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform The World.

Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Music of Taylor Swift edited by Kristie Frederick Daugherty ($26; Ballantine Books; out December 3) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

The Asking: New and Selected Poems by Jane Hirshfield ($35; Knopf) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform The World by Jane Hirshfield ($20; Knopf) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org