Spotlight on:
Published by Fly on the Wall Press.
From the cover of the book:
Far from a doom and gloom autopsy of the contemporary environmental crisis, ‘Awakening’ indulges in fun. From the craziness of shipping bottled water 6,000 miles, to how bacteria evolves for a counterattack, this collection laughs at humanity’s war on nature. After reading Love’s poetry, you will never look at nature in the same way.
“I generally find contemporary poetry overly pretentious, and intentionally opaque, but Sam’s poetry is lucid and provocative. Fifty years ago, as one of the first Earth Day regional organizers, Sam played a key role in Earth Day’s mobilizing millions of people. Now Sam writes beautifully of environmental shame and hope.”
- Denis Hayes, President of the Bullitt Foundation and National Coordinator of the first Earth Day in 1970
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It is my pleasure, as part of the blog tour for Awakening, to bring you a feature on eco-poetry and how it can raise awareness by Sam love himself. Read on to find out more!
How Poetry Can Raise Environmental Awareness
by Sam Love
Poets can play an important role in changing our environmental consciousness. They need to speak out in poems with clear messages about change. It is not a time for obscure images that we hope some people will get.
Environmental issues affect all of us. Poets and artists are gifted with the ability to hear humanity’s internal survival instinct screaming and they can visualize or articulate the cry for help.
Poets may be in the vanguard of charting a new reality about our relationship with nature and motivating people to become more aware of the impact of their lifestyle. They can articulate a new course to a viable future.
Poets have the ability to sharpen our focus on the details that we ignore.
Today we take so much for granted and never have to think about where our items and food come from and the impact of that supply chain. Science nerds may conceptualize the “carbon footprint” of an item’s production and travel but most people can’t relate to such an abstract concept.
In my poetry I try to get down to the basics and conceptualize images people can relate to. For example, in my poem “Blueberry Mourning” in my chapbook Awakening: Musings on Planetary Survival, I trace the 5,000 miles a blueberry travels from Chile to my granola bowl in North Carolina in January. I pose the question “How many miles per gallon does a blueberry get?” travelling from Chile to North Carolina? That’s an easier concept than carbon footprint for people to visualize.
In a 2013 article Paul Zak, in Greater Good Magazine, discusses how his cognitive research reveals how stories shape our brains, tie strangers together, and move us to be more empathetic and generous.
He writes, “Researchers are finding that narrative structures such as those used in fiction and poetry can have a much stronger impact than simple facts; when we read or hear the sensory details of someone else’s experiences, we respond to them neurologically as if they were our own experiences.”
He continues, “It has been said that the ecological crisis that we are facing today will not be solved through science and technology, and there is a growing interest in using the humanities to tackle these challenges.”
Poetry is all about rewiring the reader or listener’s mental images. My children’s book, My Little Plastic Bag, started as a poem. It describes what happens to plastic bags thrown on the side of the road. I got so angry at all the plastic trash thrown from cars that I wrote the poem to let people know where the plastic goes. A version of it appeared in Eno, Duke University’s environmental arts magazine, and several people said it should be a children’s story so I teamed up with a wonderful local illustrator, Samrae Duke, and she brought my words to life. I am impressed with how fast kids get the lessons that there is no away and there are cycles in nature. A Spanish version is being used in a literacy program in rural Mexico.
Each of the poems in Awakening addresses a pressing issue such as global warming, plastic pollution, endocrine disruption, our insane support systems, migratory pattern changes, and deforestation. But rather than present them as science tomes, I frame the issues in very clear language and new images that are relatable. I even have fun with some of them, for example in “One Word: Plastics” I speculated that aliens invented plastics, a material so “...enticing we couldn’t resist the lure of a plastic covered earth.”
We really are in a new era with ecopoetry. It breaks from the classical nature poetry of William Blake, Shelley, Keats, Mary Oliver, and Robert Frost who romanticized and explored the natural world. Their nature poetry describes the landscape out there apart from us. Other more contemporary poets such as Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder focus us on how we live within nature and ways to lower our impact.
One of the best contemporary ecopoetry books is Fly on the Wall Poetry Press’s anthology Planet in Peril. The publisher is now recording some of the poems and putting them on the web so you can hear the poet’s voice.
We are reimagining our relationship with Nature. It is no longer separate from us and challenges the King James Bible’s interpretation of Genesis where God grants humans “dominion” over the Earth. Here God admonishes humans to "be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." But Genesis’s authors never envisioned factory fish trawlers decimating entire species.
In my poem regretting the demise of the ecology symbol I write, “if everyone lives the American dream/ we will need a planet, three times the size of Mother Earth/ and the last time I looked/ she’s not gaining weight.”
With the emergence of an ecopoetry sensibility, poets are recognizing that we are integrated into nature and our actions affect the ecological construct of the web of life. Our very existence, with our cities, technology, engineering, reductionist science and blessing from the almighty is wreaking havoc on our planet and leading to massive extinctions. For ecopoets the clock is running out. Achieving sustainability may be the most radical concept facing our civilization. Our current ecological crisis is a call to arms for ecopoets.
It may even be time to imagine a new species because Homo Sapiens translated from Latin means “Wise Man.” Our culture hasn’t proven to be the wisest and it is time for a new post patriarchal species.
It is not enough for poets to describe the gloom and doom. In the poem “Each Day” I encourage people to take a positive step each day and let these steps “become your own ad agency/ and dream what can be done/ to sow seeds of optimism/ and one day our children/ will thank us.”
To learn more about my poetry www.samlove.net
or see visualizations of some of the poems from Awakening on Twitter: @Samlovepoet.
Many thanks to Sam for sharing his thoughts with us. Awakening can be bought direct from Fly on the Wall Press HERE.
I would also like to thank Isabelle Kenyon at Fly on the Wall Press for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.
About the author:
In 1970, he worked on the national staff of the first Earth Day as the Southern Coordinator and later edited the magazine, Environmental Action. He has written freelance articles on energy and the environment for magazines such as Smithsonian and Washingtonian.
Currently, he lives in New Bern, NC where he is president of Nexus Poets that organizes a monthly poetry reading. He considers it as good a place as any to observe the drama that currently passes for Western Civilization.
His poetry has been widely published in numerous publications including Kakalak, Slippery Elm, Voices on the Wind, The Lyricist, Flying South, Sleet, Burningword, and other publications. Eno published by Duke University has published six of his environmental poems and his poetry has also been featured on Poetry in Plain Sight posters throughout North Carolina. One of his poems Blueberry Mourning was published in the international anthology Planet in Peril.
His full-length poetry book, Cogitation, is available from Unsolicited Press. His illustrated children’s book My Little Plastic Bag is available in Spanish and English and has won numerous awards including a Nautilus Award.
About Fly on the Wall Press:
Publishing high quality anthologies on pressing issues, chapbooks and poetry products, from exceptional poets around the globe.
Founded in 2018 by founding editor, Isabelle Kenyon.
Thanks so much for this Sue! X
ReplyDeleteThank you Brown Flopsy for sharing your space with me. Happy for Isabelle that this blog tour is going so well.
ReplyDeletesam@samlove.net