Experiencing Nature and the Earth with “Earth Song” by Sara Barkat

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.

"Prairie Spring" by Pete Dunne

In 2007, Pete and Linda Dunne of New Jersey packed up their RV and head west. Their destination was America’s Great Plains, the land stretching from Missouri to the Rockies and the Dakotas south to the Texas Panhandle and New Mexico. Their purpose: experience springtime on the prairie. 

Except there wasn’t much prairie left. But there were pockets, as often on state and federal park land as on the land owned by farmers. The story that results is Prairie Spring: A Journey into the Heart of a Season. Pete, a writer and an officer with the New Jersey Audubon Society, and his wife Linda, a photographer, traveled to sites in Nebraska, Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, and Montana. Pete writes as much about the people they meet as he does the prairie and its wildlife. Linda takes photographs, and she’s usually concerned with getting the light just right (at least, that’s as Peter tells the story).

 

Pete Dunne

They look for and find the sandhill cranes in Kearney, Nebraska; experience a foot-plus snowstorm in Pawnee Buttes, Colorado; and tell the story of the great grasslands, sodbusting, farming, and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. They attend a high school baseball game, comparing it to the mating rituals of the prairie chicken. They travel the same land seen by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado in 1540 (like Coronado, they never find the seven cities of gold). They get caught in a sandstorm. 

 

They visit small-town restaurants and cafes, the ones that have survived the building of the interstate highways. They talk about the origins of soil conservation. They explain how a canyon is part of the prairie ecosystem. They get confronted by a farmer who believes that the Dunnes, like all other RV people, are there to dump trash on his land (they convince him they’re looking for birds). And they tell the story of the American buffalo, whose near demise because of over-hunting contributed to the prairie’s destruction.

 

Prairie Spring, first published in 2009, is in turn funny, poignant, informative, and eye-opening. The Dunnes concern themselves as much with the people of the region as they do with the natural environment. And they tell (and show) a story worth telling, about a region that has helped to define American history and culture.

"Havergey" by John Burnside

It is some decades after the plagues, which ended in 2032 and ultimately reduced the world’s population from nine billion to two billion. Much broke down, of course – infrastructure, systems, nations.

John had been working with a scientific project on time travel in 2017 and volunteered to be the first to go into the future. The apparatus he’s enclosed in resembles the Tardis of Doctor Who, except it’s not the red telephone box but a dark blue police call box. He finds himself on a beach of an island called Havergey, somewhere north of Scotland. He’s found by Ben, a watcher who helps keep an eye on the coast. Because he left in 2017, he’s missed the plagues.

For several days, John will need to remain in Quarantine, a rather pleasant but isolated house, as he learns about the society of Havergey and decides whether he will fit in or not. Ben brings him food. He passes the time by reading a selection of books called the Archive, which explain what Havergey was before the plagues and what it became after. And so he reads the Scholar’s book, the autobiography of John the Gardener, journal fragments, letters, and other materials comprising the Archive. And he discusses what he reads with Ben.

And while the society of Havergey is supposedly not based on individual stories, it almost can’t help but be.

Havergey by novelist and poet John Burnside may sound a bit science-fiction-ish, but it’s not. It is a rumination of what could happen if population outstrips the planet’s resources to provide. It’s the story of individuals who attempt to create something different. It’s also a study of what makes us human, what we think is important and what turns out to be important.

John Burnside

Burnside is the author of 16 poetry collections, 11 novels, and 6 non-fiction works. He was also a writer for the TV series Dice. He won both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for Black Cat Bone (2011) and has won numerous other awards for poetry and fiction. He is also a columnist on nature for New Statesman.  Havergey is published by Little Toller, which has been producing a series of monographs on writing about the natural world.

Havergey is a small novel, some 167 pages. It avoids slipping into polemic, which is too often too easy to do when a novelist tackles a theme like sustainability or resource capacity of the planet. The stories of the people involved are what make it quietly real.

Top photograph by Zak Boca via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Norman Nicholson: Poetry of Landscape and the Environment

A few weeks back, as I was reading A Poet’s Guide to Britain, I discovered a poem by Norman Nicholson (1914-1987) called “Scafell Pike”. It is a landscape poem, but an unusual one, as it explores an industrial landscape imposed upon a natural landscape, but the industrial landscape is becoming a ruin and being reclaimed by nature.

In a sense, the poem is also a story poem, the story of the great industrialization of Britain in the 19^th century and the deindustrialization of Britain in the 20^th. Nicholson’s landscape was very specific – the region of Cumbria on the western side of England’s Lake District and butting up against the Irish Sea.

I looked for more poems by Nicholson, and found them. I looked for biographical information online, and found it. Then I went looking to see if I could find any of his poetry collections online, and I could. But few had been republished; generally, what’s available are used editions at various book shops in the UK. (some priced reasonably and some not).

One resource I did find was a biography written in 2013, Norman Nicholson: The Whispering Poet by Kathleen Jones. It was written at the request of the Norman Nicholson Society, and it’s available in Kindle format. It’s highly readable and covers Nicholson’s life and his works in detail.

To continue reading (and to read one of his beautiful poems), please see my post today at TweetspeakPoetry.

Wendell Berry’s “Our Only World”

Until I retired in May, I worked for a company prominent in agriculture, a company that was no stranger to controversy. Maintaining a near-religious belief in science, the company often struggled with what it saw as the forces of “anti-science” arrayed against it. To observe openly, as I occasionally did, that this often intense criticism actually didn’t spring from “anti-science” but from something else was typically met with a blank look.

That something else was Wendell Berry. People in the company weren’t familiar with him. Michael Pollan, yes. Wendell Berry, no. It was a serious mistake.

For most if not all of his adult life, writer Wendell Berry (born 1934) has been remarkably consistent in his belief and his worldview that the industrialization of America had created a kind of violence upon the land, communities, and the people. In more than 50 works of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, he’s adhered to that belief, which is informed by his Christian faith.

Industrialization includes everything from an agriculture dependent upon fossil fuels and chemicals and mining practices that scour the landscape to the destruction of forests. He sees both major political parties have having facilitated this, and indeed often with the collusion of environmental groups. And he sees corporate capitalism as having wreaked destruction upon the political, social, and economic landscapes as well as the physical landscape.

In Our Only World: Ten Essays, Berry continues his discussion of that violence and destruction, along with a focus on examples of where he sees people are making a difference. The title is something of a misnomer; the 10 essays are actually 10 articles, speeches and essays. But they are simultaneously vintage Berry and contemporary Berry. And he has much to say, and much that needs to be listened to and heeded.

Wendell Berry

The two longest essays in the book are the fullest discussions of his philosophy and belief. “A Forest Conversation” discusses historical forestry and logging practices but focuses on a family in Pennsylvania that has undertaken sustainable forestry for decades. “Our Deserted Country” focuses on agriculture, and considers how industrialized agriculture has changed local communities, the land, our attitudes about the land, and even our attitudes about the value of people.

“Caught in the Middle” tackles two social issues that Berry sees as connected to what industrialized has wrought – abortion and homosexual marriage. He generally opposes the first and supports the second, but he laments that both have become so politicized that the middle ground has essentially been destroyed. Even if you disagree with him on these issues, his gentle and thoughtful arguments will at least make you consider just how well your own beliefs are thought out. And his arguments are well worth reading.

Our Only World is not a long book but it is a worthwhile one. Much of what he says resonates with common sense, and much of what he says about industrialization is, I would say, on the mark. The question, as he well knows, is what do we do about it.

Related:

My review of Berry’s That Distant Land.

Wendell Berry and the Land

My review of Berry’s Jayber Crow.

Wendell Berry and This Day: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Wendell Berry and Terrapin: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.