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.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/
