Do you know where you were on April 22, 1970?
On a warm April Wednesday, I was on the parade ground at Louisiana State University, sitting in the grass with about a thousand other people. We were part of the first nationwide Earth Day, inspired in part by the infamous Santa Barbara oil spill the year before. We listened to speeches and music, we signed petitions, and we chanted slogans. We knew we had become something larger than ourselves, and we knew that college and high school students all over the country were doing exactly what we were doing.
I also got sunburned.
Four days earlier, on April 18, poet Allen Ginsburg participated in what may have been one for the first Earth Day poetry readings. At Sr. Generosity’s in New York City, Ginsberg and two other poets read Earth Day poetry. Ginsberg’s reading, apparently, included chanting along with Hare Krishnas.
Earth Day 1970 witnessed the birth of the national environmental movement, bringing together a number of disparate streams of concern that had been building over the previous decade. Twenty years later, in 1990, Earth Day went global.
More than 50 years after that first Earth Day, we’re still concerned about the planet. We’re still observing Earth Day. National governments have made the environment a special area of focus.
And we’re still reading, and writing, poetry about the earth. It turns out we’ve been doing that far longer than Earth Day 1970.
Writer, artist, book illustrator, dancer, and medieval armorist Sara Barkat has edited a collection of 93 poems about the earth or some facet of it. Earth Song: a nature poems experience includes poems well-known and not-so-well-known. It includes poets who are household words and poets who are striving to be household words. It includes poems you might expect and some you don’t. And it surprises: I didn’t know, for example, that novelist Louise Erdrich also wrote poetry.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.
2 comments:
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