Earth is Hiring

It's the time of year for sitting through graduation ceremonies. Education is such a big part of the economy where I live, I think that people here have a much higher than average chance of sitting through at least one or two addresses. It's too bad that the two graduations I attended this year didn't feature this inspired speech, given by Paul Hawken at the University of Portland. Here's an excerpt:

"You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn't afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here's the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don't be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done."

My Emily Dickinson Walks

Having a bouncy young dog gets me out of my apartment three times a day for walks around the neighborhood. She's good like that, getting me my exercise. The downside is that I've been going far less often for longer hikes in the surrounding area. A few years ago, I would hike up Mount Norwottuck and Mount Holyoke regularly, in all kinds of weather and every season.

It's funny, though, all the different things I can get used to. I was blessed with a trip to New Zealand five years ago, and when I returned in March I was dismayed at the meager topography and the lack of altitude in Massachusetts. After a while that feeling faded and I became readjusted.

Now am becoming adjusted to the particular landscape of fading industrial town mixed with renewed artistic community, layered among the trees and houses and gardens that all make up Easthampton. I feel like Emily Dickinson, walking in the same small area every day but watching it closely for every change: the fence covered in grape vines progressing from soft spring leaves to fruits hidden beneath yellow foliage to bare vines that still dangle purple berries. Or the way Mount Tom changes color depending on the time of day, just like that cathedral Monet used to paint.

Now that it's still dark at the time of my dog's first walk, I can also watch the sun rise, "a ribbon at a time," just like Emily Dickinson. Even if your world is small-- a town, a block, a room-- there is life and death, and beauty and wonder to observe.

"If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold ever-more wonders." —Andrew Harvey, The Return of the Mother

Environmental Writing Contest

I recently received this notice from the Union of Concerned Scientists:

From Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth century to Rachel Carson and E.O. Wilson in the twentieth, writers have played a profound role in drawing attention to our natural environment and inspiring people to protect it. To continue this tradition and inspire action on global warming, the Union of Concerned Scientists has partnered with literary publisher Penguin Classics to encourage the public to submit essays and images about climate change for publication in a new online book, Thoreau’s Legacy: American Stories about Global Warming.

We want to hear from you. To participate, write a 200- to 500-word first-person account of global warming that relates to your life or the world around you. Is there a place that holds a special meaning to you that you want to protect? What people, animals, or activities that you love are at risk from a changing climate? Are you taking steps in your own life to stem the tide of global warming? Tell us your story, or send us a photograph related to topics like these. The best submissions will be included in Thoreau’s Legacy, which will be published online in spring 2009 and in a limited-edition hardcover version.

Two leading scientists and one of the nation’s most respected nature photographers have contributed representative works to the project to serve as examples of the kind of essays and photographs we are seeking. To view them and learn how you can submit your own essay or photograph, visit the UCS website.

It’s time for the writings of a new generation to inspire our country to take on the challenge of global warming and save our natural—and national—heritage. Submit your story or photographs today.

Dart, a new favorite poem of mine

I read Dart by the British poet Alice Oswald because it is a long-form poem about a river. Supposedly Oswald is Jeanette Winterson's favorite poet, so that was a good recommendation, I thought. I have been interested in river history and ecology since my first job, fresh out of college, as a tour guide at the fish viewing facility on the Connecticut River in Holyoke. Dart did not disappoint; indeed it is now one of my favorite books, one I can imagine reading again and again. Oswald’s playful and expansive uses of language and metaphor, as well as her seamless blending of the mundane and transcendent, bring her characters and the river they speak of vividly to life.

The poem’s form is shaped by its content. The genesis of the poem was interviews that Oswald conducted with people who live and work along the Dart River in England. She wove their first-person voices into distinct characters whose edges blur throughout the section-less poem. Oswald varies the form organically, according to which voice and character are speaking. At one point she alternates between a forester, who speaks in paragraphs, and a water nymph, who speaks in quatrains:

and here I am coop-felling in the valley, felling small sections to give the forest some structure. When the chainsaw cuts out the place starts up again. It’s Spring, you can work in a wood and feel the earth turning

woodman working on your own
knocking the long shadows down
and all day the river’s eyes
peep and pry among the trees (11)

Another formal technique Oswald uses frequently in Dart is the list, with which she creates a feeling of multiplicity, grandeur, and scale. Her lists are often alliterated or assonant, giving them a more sonorous weight, as in this section about a wool mill:

tufting felting hanks tops spindles slubbings
hoppers and rollers and slatted belts
bales of carded wool the colour of limestone
and wool puffs flying through tubes distributed by cyclones

wool in the back of the throat, wool on ledges,
in fields and spinning at 5,000 rotations per minute –
and look how quickly a worker can mend an end
what tentacular fingers moving like a spider,
splicing it invisibly neat look what fingers could be – (19)

Dart is innovative in form, and also in the language that constitutes the poem. Oswald uses lyric description to its fullest, infusing science and social history with metaphors that bring even the driest topics to life. Here, she discusses water purification:

This is the thirst that draws the soul, beginning
at these three boreholes and radial collectors.
Whatever pumps and gravitates and gathers
in town reservoirs secretly can you follow it rushing
under manholes in the straggle of the streets
being gridded and channeled up
even as he taps his screwdriver on a copper pipe
and fills a glass. This is the thirst that streaks
his throat and chips away at his bones between lifting
the glass and contact whatever sands the tongue,
this draws his eyehole to this space among
two thirds weight water and still swallowing. (25)

The poem runs the gamut in terms of topic (mining, industry, fishing, seal-watching, swimming, drowning, myths, dairy production), and it also presents a wide array of characters using journalistic detachment and a poet’s ear for contradiction. At one point, a speaker points out that the legal fisherman by day is probably also a poacher at night:

That’s your legal fisherman, he’s watching and listening,
he’s got a seine net and he hauls out from the shore and
back in a curve, like this.
But more than likely he’s got a legal right hand and a
rogue left hand and when he’s out left-handed,
he just rows a mesh net straight across the river – a bloody wall.
In twenty minutes he’s covered the cost of the net,
in an hour he’s got a celebration coming.
That’s where the crack is, that’s when fishing pays. (38)

The most brilliant moments in Dart come when Oswald describes those people who have some very intimate knowledge of an aspect of the river. The crystal-clear lens of lyric is perfectly suited to these things that can only be approached through direct experience or through metaphor. Of the ferryman and his route, she writes:

I work the car ferry, nudge it over with a pilot boat,
backwards and forwards for twenty three years.

Always on the way over – to and fro –
and feeling inward for a certain sliding feeling
that loosens the solidity of the earth,
he makes himself a membrane through which everyone passes into elsewhere
like a breath flutters its ghost across glass. (43)

And of the whitewater kayaker to the current:

We can’t hear except the booming of our thinking in the cockpit hollow and the river’s been so beautiful we can’t concentrate.

they walk strong in wetsuits,
their faces shine,
their well-being wants to burst out

In the water it’s another matter, we’re just shells and arms, keeping ourselves in a fluid relation with the danger. (14)

Oswald blends the mundane with the transcendent, cramming in as many contradictions as possible without judgment. She touches on arguments between polluters and conservationists, poachers and bailiffs, commercial fishermen and seal-watchers. Woolen thread that is spun in a plant near the river and dyed using the river’s water becomes a metaphor for the river itself and all of its stories: “We stretch and wind it on a spinning frame – a ring and travel arrangement twists it in the opposite direction and we end up with two-ply, a balanced twist, like the river” (20).

Dart is a wonderful synthesis of disciplines, a living organism, an interdisciplinary course in history, science, geography, myth, and poetry.

Oswald, Alice. Dart. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2002.

ps- I found my copy on UK Amazon