I'm preparing to speak at the Become the River Literary Festival in Coloma this afternoon. One of the questions we'll be addressing is: How can writers use their connection to wild spaces and rivers to utilize the power of the pen to activate and inspire action? Here are my notes to organize my thoughts:
Protest
& Witness
“Poems are visible right now, which is terribly ironic, because
you rather wish it weren’t so necessary,” she said. “When poetry is a backwater
it means times are O.K. When times are dire, that’s exactly when poetry is
needed.” – Jane Hirshfield
“Poems, for me, are written because there is some fracture thatneeds addressing,” Hirshfield says. “You write because something is off-kilter,
bewildering, devastating. If you’re built the way poets are, one way to remit
the fabric of the world is to find language that will let in the grief and the
beauty of these things.”- Jane Hirshfield
On January 24, President Trump’s fifth day in office his first
time, media outlets reported that the White House had banned Environmental
Protection Agency scientists from posting about their research on social media,
instructing them to relay their research to the public only after obtaining
prior approval. By the end of that day, Hirshfield had channeled her outrage
into a poem called “On the Fifth Day.” She sent it to a few scientist friends.
They sent it to a few more, and soon the poem went viral.
When organizers announced the March for Science a few days later,
Hirshfield contacted the volunteer committee and offered a few ideas.
The recent resurgence of protest poems reflects a new strain of contemporary
American poetry, one that is deeply engaged with public policy and the latest
executive orders coming from the White House.
On the fifth day by Jane Hirshfield
the scientists who studied the rivers
were forbidden to speak
or to study the rivers.
The scientists who studied the air
were told not to speak of the air,
and the ones who worked for the farmers
were silenced,
and the ones who worked for the bees.
Someone, from deep in the Badlands,
began posting facts.
The facts were told not to speak
and were taken away.
The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent.
Now it was only the rivers
that spoke of the rivers,
and only the wind that spoke of its bees,
while the unpausing factual buds of the fruit trees
continued to move toward their fruit.
The silence spoke loudly of silence,
and the rivers kept speaking,
of rivers, of boulders and air.
Bound to gravity, earless and tongueless,
the untested rivers kept speaking.
Bus drivers, shelf stockers,
code writers, machinists, accountants,
lab techs, cellists kept speaking.
They spoke, the fifth day,
of silence.
2. Education
and Healing
Hirshfield had begun Poets for Science to grapple with her own
emotions over the state of politics and science policy. 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.
“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, 2017
The Hope River project in Davis, California, shows just how
powerful expression through poetry can be for young people. In 2021, Julia B.
Levine, a retired clinical psychologist and now the Poet Laureate of Davis,
began developing a pilot program introducing middle schoolers to poetry to cope
with climate-related fears.
She developed a 5-week course for middle schoolers at a public
charter school, Da Vinci Junior High, in which students would read poetry about
the environment and then write their own poems. At the end of the 5 weeks, the
teens would walk down a path behind the school while listening to recordings of
their poems on a smartphone app, the flow of cyclists and pedestrians on Davis’
bike trails reminiscent of the flow of a river.
Sixteen Rivers Press, a poetry collective based in Northern
California, is publishing a selection of 22 of the Hope River poems, along with
all of Levine’s instructional materials from the class. The book is called Dear
Earth: Hope River Poems from Young Teens.
“One thing poetry helps you do is speak to your higher self,”
Levine says. Writing makes young poets “feel as if they matter, as if their
voice counts,” she adds. “It’s an antidote to what’s happening all around
them.”
3. Equity for
people and environment
Listen to Camille Dungy in her article "Is All Writing Environmental Writing?":
"We are in the midst of the planet’s sixth great extinction, in a
time where we are seeing the direct effects of radical global climate change
via more frequent and ferocious storms, hotter drier years accompanied by more
devastating wildfires, snow where there didn’t used to be snow, and less snow
where permafrost used to be a given. Yet some people prefer to maintain
categories for what counts as environmental writing and what is historical
writing or social criticism or biography and so on. I can’t compartmentalize my
attentions. If an author chooses not to engage with what we often call
the natural world, that very disengagement makes a statement about the author’s
relationship with her environment; even indifference to the environment
directly affects the world about which a writer might purport to be
indifferent. We live in a time when making decisions about how we construct the
products and actions of our daily lives—whether or not to buy plastic water
bottles and drinking straws, or cosmetics with microbeads that make our skin
glow—means making decisions about being complicit in compromising the Earth’s
ecosystems.
"What we decide matters in literature is connected to what we
decide will matter for our history, for our pedagogy, for our culture. What we
do and do not value in our art reveals what we do and do not value in our
times. What we leave off the page often speaks as loudly as what we
include.
Writers
exploring ecopoetics ask themselves questions such as these: How does climate
change affect our poetics? How do we write about resource extraction,
agribusiness, endangered bird species, the removals of indigenous peoples,
suburban sprawl, the lynching of blacks, or the precarious condition of gray
wolves and the ecosystems dependent upon them? Our contemporary understanding
of ecopoetics takes into account the ways human-centered thinking reflects on,
and is reflected in, what we write. And, contemporary ecopoetics questions the
efficacy of valuing one physical presentation of animated matter over another,
because narratives about place and about life contribute to our orientation in,
and our interpretation of, that place and that life.
"All of our positions on the planet are precarious at this moment
in history, and attentive writers work to articulate why this is the
case—including many writers of color who were already engaging in this mode of
writing long before the ecopoetics movement took off. (Works by Alice Dunbar
Nelson, Lucille Clifton, Claude McKay, Anne Spencer, Sterling Brown, June
Jordan, Evie Shockley, Sean Hill, and Ed Roberson spring immediately to mind.)
But only as the ecopoetics movement gained traction has such de-pristined
writing finally been identified as environmental writing and, therefore, begun
to be seen in a new light.
"The history of human divisions is often constituted of stories
about one set of people being hostile toward the presence of others. An
ideology that would demand the exclusion or subjugation of whole populations of
human beings is an ideology quick to assume positions of superiority over all
that is perceived to be different. If you can construct a narrative that turns
a human into a beast in order to justify the degradation of that human, how
much easier must it be to dismiss the needs of a black bear, a crayfish, a
banyan? The values we place on lives that are not our own are reflected in the
stories we tell ourselves—and in which aspects of these stories resonate with
us. To separate the concerns of the human world (politics, history, commerce)
from those of the many life forms with which humans share this planet strikes
me as disastrous hubris and folly. We live in community with all the other
lives on Earth, whether we acknowledge this or not. When we write about our
lives, we ought to do so with an awareness of the other lives we encounter as
we move through the world. I choose to honor these lives with attention and
compassion." - Camille Dungy
______
*From What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen
Press, 2006).
Sources
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/books/review/american-poets-refusing-to-go-gentle-rage-against-the-right.html
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2319793120
https://poetsforscience.org/about/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/04/14/on-the-fifth-day/
https://www.thegeorgiareview.com/posts/is-all-writing-environmental-writing/
