Poetry… More than a thousand pictures or words.
In honour of World Poetry Day and International Day of Forests (March 21st), Susana Romao shares some inspiring and thought-provoking ecopoems and reflections with us. This is a day of appreciation for both nature and the arts. Perhaps it is a coincidence they share this day, or perhaps it was a subtle reminder of the inseparability between the two. Either way, the combination further reminds us of the power and importance these invaluable aspects of life hold.
Have you ever heard of ecopoetry?
I have just learned about it in a random late-night web surfing. It is a new poetical genre that puts emphasis on the pressure of human activity over nature. It started being a thing in the late 20th century… Funny how the century I grew up in is now a historical reference. Mid-age reflections apart, ecopoetics is a form of activism.
Any type of poetry is a communication tool that goes beyond words. Have you ever noticed that words can be like spells that open so many new doors into our brains? Poetry can also be interpreted as a hack to our brains (trying to reach out to software developers here). The poet does not write because she can. The poet writes because she must. Ecopoets write screams that pierce deep down into our souls. They go against the romantic views of nature in poetry, where nature is more like a film set, a nice background to something else. By their words, we are teased and pushed and torn apart. We are invited to think, to overcome our grief, we are aroused to change.
Joan Kane in Epithalamia says:
Butane, propane
and lungful of diesel.
I did not stand a chance.
Always with poison
breath, bill, responsibility:
a man with rote hands.
Everything in exchange,
rain in a frozen season.
Our roof, roofs strung
with hot wire. Our love,
what was, an impression
of light, gaunt: there is
nothing to get.
Or there is also another impressive sample in Juliana Spahr’s excerpts of Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache:
(…) We come into the world and we too begin to move between the
brown and the blue and the green of it. (…)We came into the world at the edge of a stream. (…)
And we began to learn the stream.
We loved the stream.
And we were of the stream. (…)
This is where we learned love and where we learned depth and where
we learned layers and where we learned connections between
layers. (…)And as we did this we sang.
We sang gentle now.
Gentle now clubshell,
don’t add to heartache.
Gentle now warmouth, mayfly nymph,
don’t add to heartache. (…)
It was not all long lines of connection and utopia.
It was a brackish stream and it went through the field beside our
house.But we let into our hearts the brackish parts of it also.
Some of it knowingly.
We let in soda cans and we let in cigarette butts and we let in pink
tampon applicators and we let in six pack of beer connectors
and we let in various other pieces of plastic that would travel
through the stream.And some of it unknowingly.
We let the runoff from agriculture, surface mines, forestry, home
wastewater treatment systems, construction sites, urban yards,
and roadways into our hearts.We let chloride, magnesium, sulfate, manganese, iron, nitrite/nitrate,
aluminum, suspended solids, zinc, phosphorus, fertilizers,
animal wastes, oil, grease, dioxins, heavy metals and lead go
through our skin and into our tissues.We were born at the beginning of these things, at the time of
chemicals combining, at the time of stream run off.These things were a part of us and would become more a part of us
but we did not know it yet.Still we noticed enough to sing a lament. (…)
But long before there was a specific label, poets have explored the deep connection between man and nature. Listen to Emily Dickinson for example:
Who robbed the Woods
The trusting Woods?
The unsuspecting Trees
Brought out their Burrs and Mosses
His fantasy to please
He scanned their trinkets, curious
He grasped, he bore away
What will the solemn Hemlock
What will the Fir-tree say?
Or have a look at the Tragic Error by Denise Levertov:
The earth is the Lord’s, we gabbled,
and the fullness thereof
while we looted and pillaged, claiming indemnity:
while we preened ourselves, sure of our power,
willful or ignorant, through the centuries.Miswritten, misread, that charge:
Surely we were to have been
earth’s mind, mirror, reflective source.Surely our task
was to have been
to love the earth,
to dress it and keep it like Eden’s garden.That would have been our dominion:
to be those cells of earth’s body that could
perceive and imagine, could bring the planet
into the haven it is to be known,
(as the eye blesses the hand, perceiving
its form and the work it can do).
Or just delight yourself with a more metaphysical view of our planet in La gota by José Emilio Pacheco:
La gota es un modelo de concisión:
todo el universo
encerrado en un punto de agua.La gota representa el diluvio y la sed.
Es el vasto Amazonas y el gran Océano.La gota estuvo allí en el principio del mundo.
Es el espejo, el abismo,
la casa de la vida y la fluidez de la muerte.Para abreviar, la gota está poblada de seres
que se combaten, se exterminan, se acoplan.
No pueden salir de ella,
gritan en vano.Preguntan como todos:
¿de qué se trata,
hasta cuándo,
qué mal hicimos
para estar prisioneros de nuestra gota?Y nadie escucha.
Sombra y silencio en torno de la gota,
brizna de luz entre la noche cósmica
en donde no hay respuesta.
It is simply wonderful, isn’t it? We are connected to nature because we are nature. And those who master the words have been warning us about our detachment, about our misconduct. We are now living an unprecedented age of comfort, feeling tremendously uncomfortable about it. Is it because we do not inhabit the natural world nowadays? Has our essence changed lately? If you prick us, do we not bleed anymore? Luckily we have our artists, our poets, opening windows to beauty, lifting our spirits, making us rethink our troubled relationships, planting a seed of bravery, giving a gentle push of encouragement… or simply reminding us of our humanity.
In our own way, at Vizzuality we are also artists. Starting with the more obvious, our designers create a visual language that can touch many different people. Our developers make that connection happen. Our scientists and researchers understand what the message must be. And everybody else fosters an environment where each and everyone can be herself or himself. Oh and let’s not forget our clients and partners, who have a vision, a mission, or a dream and trust us to make it a reality. Take forests for example…
Forests; many a poet's muse, and every human’s lifeline.
Reforestation and afforestation initiatives are booming around the globe. Rightfully so, considering how much value forests bring to humans and ecosystems alike, yet are being destroyed at truly alarming rates. At Vizzuality we have been touched by this reality and worked hard to be part of the solution.
We engaged with the World Resources Institute and the rest of our partners in GFW to create a new way of visualising forest data, in Global Forest Watch. It is the most comprehensive platform of its kind that offers the latest data, technology and tools that empower people everywhere to better protect forests.
Despite the promising increase in reforestation initiatives, not all are made equal. When done poorly, they can end up causing more harm than good. That’s why we partnered with Mongabay to design and develop an application that helps people navigate the complexity of selecting which reforestation projects to support. Based on 36 criteria that determine reforestation success, this is the place to go to ensure “well-intentioned” translates into positive action.
Final thoughts.
When we are allowed to explore our nature and our essence, in connection with others and with the same objective to drive positive impact, we can surely achieve great things. We can’t all be poets, but we can be poetry altogether.
“Arranged in words, coloured with images, struck with the right meter, the power of poetry has no match. As an intimate form of expression that opens doors to others, poetry enriches the dialogue that catalyses all human progress, and is more necessary than ever in turbulent times.”
Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO Director-General on the occasion of 2022 World Poetry Day.
Special thanks to Ana Luísa Amaral, Portuguese poet, and educator, for introducing me to so many wonderful poems and inspiring this blog.
