by Alex Madison | Contributing Writer
This essay is part of a series in which Poetry Northwest partners with Seattle Arts & Lectures to present reflections on visiting writers from the SAL Poetry Series. At 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 25, Francisco AragĂłn and Kimiko Hahn will read to celebrate the release of Here: Poems for the Planet at Broadway Performance HallâSeattle Central College.
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A confession: In the service of my own curiosity, I have wasted the time of environmental scientists.
Iâve sent emails requesting informational interviews, as research for my novel and essays, and been surprised when generous professors and Ph.D. students have written back. Over the phone, over coffee, and over cluttered desks with glimmering Lake Union views, they have eloquently described their fields and patiently fielded my probing about our worldâs impending doom.
Because my projects remain unfinished, these discussions remain unsharedâinflected with a personal quality in my memory, like old conversations with friends. One woman spoke about traveling with teenagers to plant grasses along riverbanks. The hope: for grasses to shade the waters, cool the salmon habitat, and create conditions for spawning and survival. A young man spent his summer on Mount Rainier, planting identical gardens up and down the volcanoâs microclimates. He fenced out nibbling deer, then returned ritualistically to see how well each elevation nurtured each species. His voice quickened as he described a then-fledgling effort to track touristsâ geo-tagged photos of wildflower blooms. When the snow melts, meadows blossom. People come. Snapshots swell into year-over-year climate data.
Grasses. Gardens. Wildflowers. These were moves like poems, I thought. Concrete gestures toward beauty, fragile investments in progress. Literal seeds sown.
Reading the new anthology from Copper Canyon Press, Here: Poems for the Planet, I was reminded of those tourists tagging their photos and those kids planting their grass. This book, too, offers its small, hopeful gifts to the world.
Edited by poet and activist Elizabeth J. Coleman, the anthology was conceived as a âlovesong to a planet in crisis.â The scope of the collaboration is impressive. It was supported by a crowdfunding effort of 461 backers and collects âmore than 125 poemsâ: the words of kids, Poet Laureates, Pulitzer-winners, and celebrated poets writing all over the world. The book opens with a one-page forward by Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, and ends with a 37-page âGuide to Activism by the Union of Concerned Scientists.â Yes: in these pages, scientists write to poetsâand to all of us who love poems. We are sharing common language, looking at the same marvelous, embattled world together and wanting it to stay.
The poems in the anthology are divided into five sections:
- Where Youâd Want to Come From: Poems for Our Planet
- The Gentle Light That Vanishes: Our Endangered World
- As If Theyâd Never Been: Poems for the Animals
- The Ocean within Them: Voices of Young People
- Like You Are New to the World: Poems of Inspiration
The arc is a journey: a joyful festival in honor of Earthâs beauty, a transition into a bald examination of our ravaged world, an invitation to mourn, a galvanizing reminder that this world belongs to kids, and finally, a call to action.
These nature poems donât remove humans from ânatureâ or wax melancholic for someplace âunspoiled.â The Dalai Lama writes in his forward that our natural world is ânot necessarily somewhere sacred or holy, but simply where we live.â In Here, humans arenât just worshipful observers of the natural world nor just instruments of its death. We are part of the fragile beauty being poisoned. The things of our lives are precious things of the world. We are nature, we are the planet. We live in these poems.
We live in Richard Jacksonâs âplastic cup with the broken handleâ and David Huertaâs âprotest in the streets.â We live in Wendell Berryâs search for âthe peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.â We live in Joy Harjoâs acknowledgment that, in Los Angeles, we canât see the Milky Way or âtaste the minerals of planets in hamburgers.â
The cycling lilt of Kimiko Hahnâs, âThe Fever,â considers bleached coral reefs alongside an âauntâs persistent use of hairsprayâ and a motherâs âvivid jewelryââhuman adornments wrapped up with dying underwater worlds. Francisco AragĂłnâs âFar Away,â captures a Nicaraguan ranch and says to an ox: âYou evoke tender dawn, the milking hour.â Human livelihood is hitched to lumbering animal and stitched to the sunrise. (Both Hahn and AragĂłn will read in Seattle to celebrate the launch of this book on April 25, just a few days after Earth Day.)
In âSnapchat Summer,â eighteen-year-old Maia Rosenfeld writes, âYour summer hides in an app on your phone, and a million views wonât make it real enough,â casting my mind forward to a time when Snapchat will be a thing grandmothers will have used in their youth. What will summers feel like by then?
Another confession: as I daily seek reasons to be hopeful about our trajectory, I seldom find them. The horror of it is too big to let inside me, so Iâve allowed numbness to settle instead. But reading this anthology, the poemsâ mounting din startled me into one of those momentary, electric jolts of awareness. Late at night, I read Annie Boutelleâs ârapture of beesâ and imagined the swift vacancy of the pollinators âas if theyâd never been.â I felt it: This is really happening to our planet, now. The horrors are already upon us, even if people like me, sitting safely with a book of poetry in Seattle, can still pour a glass of white wine on a warm day.
Of course, we all see the hurricanes, and on West Coast we are accumulating our flimsy smoke masks. We know itâs happening. But to continue getting our errands done and sending our emails, we have to forget. We share Catherine Pierceâs shame: âthat most days I forget this planet. That most days I think about dentist appointments and plagiarists.â We canât feel it all the time. But this book makes us feel it, for a time.
No section of Here: Poems for the Planet offers hollow promises that we small individuals can reverse the effects of climate change by shopping organic or rinsing plastic bottles before recycling them. I appreciate Elizabeth J. Colemanâs acknowledgement in her preface that poetry is âa form of secular prayer.â She writes that we can âcelebrate the earth as we grieve what weâve done to our splendid planet and its creatures.â
But even in grief, she argues, we should try to do something to stall the horrible path weâre on. The anthology invites us to, âTake in a new breath and then take action.â
Upon finishing the last poem, the reader encounters the Guide to Activism, offering a âladderâ of unintimidating steps toward influencing leaders and corporations. While itâs true that public pressure on our politicians matters a lotâthat itâs maybe our only hope of changing our trajectoryâthe appearance of the guide did little to quiet my own thrum of dread. (Iâm willing to concede this may be a personal problem.) The editors arenât subtle in their ambition, and the crowdfunding page for this book said, âWe envision distributing the book to every member of Congress.â I do love the thought of Mitch McConnell sitting down to read Kyle Dargan and Natalie DĂaz, but I think this is mostly a work for people who love art.
Rather than instructions for activism, the anthology’s greater gift is the permission it offers to mourn. Here takes a refreshingly frank look at our dire situationâbut mostly fixes its gaze on beauty. Weâre in a precarious moment, the book concedes, but we donât have to let go of our love for this world. We can still plant grasses for salmon. We can still pay attention to flowers. We can keep our eyes open and embrace secular prayers, such as Natasha Trethawayâs reminder that âeverywhere you go will be somewhere youâve never been.â
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Alex Madison holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from the Iowa Writersâ Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Harvard Review, the Indiana Review, Witness, and elsewhere. She teaches at the Hugo House and is a Writer-in-Residence with Writers in the Schools.