A cool thing has been going on on Twitter for the last month. On March 15, poet Tara Skurtu (@TaraSkurtu) tweeted:
“This unprecedented time of social distancing is a very lonely one. We need each other. People often turn to poetry in tough times, so I’m starting Poetry Circle—a growing thread of people reading their poems and their favorite poems.”
And with that she published her first video poem with the hashtag #InternationalPoetryCircle.
Happily, the idea has caught on and her initial video has now been seen 124,000 times. And, in just over a month, more than 1000 video poems have been contributed.
I have contributed a few videos so far of other poems I’ve enjoyed.
The first one I read was a favorite by Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese” with the lines:
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely
The world offers itself to your imagination”
Someone replied to my tweet with “I don’t know how you read this without sobbing” and I replied, “I got that out of the way ahead of time.” (insert smiley 🙂
I’ve long been a fan of the Tang Dynasty poets Li Bai, Tu Fu and Wang Wei, among others, and so I read four translations of Li Bai’s “Taking Leave of a Friend” (in two parts)
My latest contribution is the poem “Water” by the Polish Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska. I had to do two takes of the poem because the line, “How gently the world touches me,” caught me on the first take.
I loved the video that Greenpeace produced a couple of years ago to bring attention to climate change in the arctic. Pianist Ludovico Einaudi plays his own composition, Elegy for the Arctic, on a barge while around him the glacier ice melts. I wrote a poem about the video and published it in the Amsterdam Quarterly. Now, with the permission of Greenpeace, I have put the poem together with the video and some minor video editing — you can see the result here.
I didn’t notice the tree right away. I’d lived on the block for several years and it took me awhile to tune into it. But once I did it became my favorite tree. It took its time with its autumnal leaf changing, a month or even six weeks. In 2015, I was able to record the transition, though my photos were haphazard. I vowed the next year to be more consistent, get the photos from the same location, the same time of day and so on. But I never got a chance. The tree died in September 2016, when it dropped its leaves suddenly several weeks before it usually did. I didn’t know it was dead until I saw that it didn’t bud again in the spring. It stood dormant on my block for another year and was removed in April 2017.
I wrote several short prose pieces between the time the tree last dropped its leaves and when it was removed and have now made films out of them. They’re collected in the album on my Vimeo page, a memorial to a great tree. Still some tweaks to do here or there, but let me know in the comments what you think, which one is your favorite and so on. Thanks for watching.
How do we as citizens and writers respond to loss in the natural world? Since I began to write my book, Brief Eulogies for Lost Animals (now available), several years ago, loss in nature has been frequently on my mind. I gave my first-ever poetry workshop on this theme at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival last weekend, and judging by how early the session filled up (soon after the schedule was announced, back in April), people are hungry to engage the topic.
Responding to Loss in the Natural World: An Ecopoetry Workshop at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, May 2017
What have we lost? I asked the participants at the beginning of the session.
They answered:
fireflies
honeybees
the flight of the monarch
coral reefs
clean water
the night sky
the sounds of nature
and more.
A formidable list, which I supplemented with elephants, tigers, rhinos, pangolins, sharks, orangutans, bluefin tuna, songbirds, amphibians, mangroves, wetlands, neighborhood trees, sea grass beds, glaciers, mountain tops, and diversity in nature (see the work of Bernard Krause).
Our task as writers is to engage challenging issues and I would love to see poets take on loss in nature more frequently. Whether to grieve and lament, honor and eulogize, forewarn and remind (not to mention rant and rave!), our responses in poetry can help others process their own feelings regarding environmental change. Look at Mary Oliver’s poem, Lead . After the two inciting incidents (the loons dying over the winter and the friend’s description of one in its death throes) she folds in all the things she loves about loons – the things we all love, including its wild and uncanny call. Her response is our inspiration, a heartbreak that reminds us not to withdraw but to engage. “Here is a story/ to break your heart” she begins. And she ends the poem with:
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.
Without this frame, the poem would be incomplete.
Historically, loons nested in Massachusetts but were extirpated in the late 19th century. In 1975, a pair of loons was discovered nesting at Quabbin Reservoir. Today, there are approximately 32 nesting pairs of loons on 14 different lakes, ponds and reservoirs in the Commonwealth. Loons are listed on the Massachusetts Endangered Species Act list as a Species of Special Concern. In general they require 1000 acres of water per nesting pair, islands for nesting and limited human disturbance, which makes the Quabbin Reservoir ideal.
However, loons are being poisoned by ingesting lead fishing gear – hence the title of Mary Oliver’s poem – this is the leading cause of mortality of loons in New England. They do this either by eating the minnows used as bait, then swallowing the hook, line, and sinker or by scooping lead sinkers off the bottom when they ingest small pebbles. Lead sinkers and lead weights less than one ounce are now banned in all inland lakes in Massachusetts in an attempt to curb the problem.
While journalists and scientists have to tell stories and present evidence when they write about loss in nature, poets have an advantage in being able to draw from seemingly unrelated events – or from their own experience — in order to evoke particular feelings.
One of the shortest poems we looked at was Condor from The Dire Elegies, by Massachusetts poet Susan Edwards Richmond:
When there is no sky left
big enough
to hold that bird,
let it die.
Then dig my grave close by.
So terse, and yet so evocative at the same time. I love the prophetic voice she adopts in the first section of the poem. My hunch is that she took a simple detail like the ability of condors to soar, a detail that she loved, and turned it inside out to make it sound fresh and authoritative. Her real response follows in the last line Then dig my grave close by. As one of the workshop participants said, the success of the condor is our success, and its failure, should that occur, will be our failure too.
In a writing exercise, we tried to get at the prophetic voice she uses in the first section, but we didn’t have time to share responses. Still, I feel we accomplished a lot in that one hour frame. My blurb on the festival website promised, “By challenging ourselves to engage important environmental problems, you’ll come away both with new material and with renewed connection to the natural world.” Ambitious, to be sure. But if only it were that easy to connect with nature!
Nevertheless, given the engagement and energy of the participants and the response to the theme, I’m looking forward to doing more such workshops soon.
