Poetry & Science, Watershed 2022

(14 April, 2022, Knox Book Beat in The Berkeley Times) The five poet-scientists of Poetry & Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery; the poets and performers in Watershed: Writers, Nature and Community 2022; and Deborah Bachels Schmidt, author of Stumbling Into Grace; all share the world of animated nature. A holistic, vigorous, inspirational connection.

As Alison Hawthorne Deming says, “the denigration, suppression, and denial of science have rabidly spread in the last several decades,” even though “We are the asteroid” threatening Life On Earth, as Deming quotes C. D. Wright. Deming sensed “what poetry was for” as questions; “How do we know what we know? What are the forms of knowledge that I yearn for? That I trust?”

“Nothing was more interesting to me than the Big Story of Life on Earth,” and there was “Nothing more soul crushing than the diminishment of life on Earth at the hands of human cruelty and greed.”  

One of the “challenges” the “poet faces” is “getting beyond the outrage and elegy that are the dominant emotional hue of our discontent.”

Ann Fisher-Wirth, author of The Bones of Winter Birds, agreed with poet-physician William Carlos Williams that “the imagination”…(is) “the single force” able “to refine, clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live..” Poetry charged with scientific precision. Setting humans squarely in perspective, she begins the poem “Catalpa,” “This tree is older than Columbus.”

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke says, “Poets and scientists share a main line – curiosity. It inspires and activates us wholly.” Her “mixed” family “interwove a traditional sense of science and modern science… astronomy, medical terminology, physiology, chemistry were as typical a conversation as original stories or songs… an element of inclusion in all of this…when leaves fell, they were filled with anthocyanin. We also knew the traditional stories of the same trees… Just as poetry is life, science is.”

Elizabeth Bradfield was unable to participate in the Watershed reading, although her essay in Poetry and Science, “Grappling with the Ineffable: Sciencing the Science; Blurring Lines” makes me wish she had. Her own wonderful poems, welcoming in of other writers and the way “elder Willie Marks told the Tlingit killer whale origin story in the anthology Haa Shuká, Our Ancestors” knits together science, art, nature and culture. Under the umbrella of writings that “hold up the importance of (both) story and data, clear thinking and emotional resonance” “to blend experience, knowledge and story,” she opts for “not just storytelling but the telling of land, sea, and peoples (human and nonhuman) who live wholly in a place…” 

Lucille Lang Day, editor of P & S, read at Watershed. She puts it succinctly when she says, “Science looks askance at emotional reactions… whereas poetry embraces them, and by doing so, poetry allows a more complete expression of human experience.” In her poem “Lost Languages,” she bridges the rational/ personal gap with two lines:  

“Who knows what Cro-Magnons said 

to one another in sickness, love or fear?”

Clear images and stories expressed simply in excellent poetry both focused and moving. She sums up her essay with a connection to Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass author, who says of purely scientific language, “beneath the richness of its vocabulary and its descriptive power, something is missing, the same something that swells around you and in you when you listen to the world.”

The really wonderful small volume of poetry by Poetry Flash reader Deborah Bachels Schmidt, Stumbling Into Grace, fits well with P & S because of her straightforward, clear style, mostly couched in images of kind care for others, keen observation of the natural world and delight in harmony, language and music. All nearly perfectly crafted, balanced and sonorous.

Schmidt shares in “As If for the First Time” “Wondering at the creatures of earth, sea and sky,/ we take our place among them with new tenderness./ May it be so.”  

And from “Wild Goose:” 

“Flying in the wake, behind

and just above the last,

she will rest, uplifted,

in the vortex of their wings.

Together they will bring this flock

home.”

May we trust that we have this kind of homing instinct as well. 

----Poetry Flash Videos, including last year’s and this year’s Watershed and many other outstanding readings, including Barbara Jane Reyes, author of the poetry collections Letters to a Young Brown Girl (2020), Invocation to Daughters (2017), Diwata (2010), Poeta en San Francisco (2005) and Gravities of Center (2003) (photo left) can be found at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClwdR-uPFNz7XxbBbLcnoEA/videos   !

 

Wikipedia defines Deep ecology as a recognition that “non-vital human interference with or destruction of the natural world poses a threat therefore not only to humans but to all organisms constituting the natural order.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, (7 April 2022) “Deep ecology,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ecology    (8 April 2022)