Ecopoetry

The English Department of Concordia University Irvine held a poetry reading on November 12^th to celebrate publication of the anthology, Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, edited by Lucille Lang Day and Ruth Nolan (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2018).  The anthology offers “a generous record of California poets’ love and concern for their common world,” writes California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia in the book’s forward.  Co-editor Roth Nolan and contributors Thea Gavin and Candace Pearson were among those who read at the event.

Awake in the World: A collection of stories, essays, and poems about wildlife, adventure, and the environment, edited by Daniel J. Rice (Riverfeet Press, 2017), brings together diverse voices in celebration of wilderness and the practice of the wild.  “These words touch the primal self and remind us of our place in the Web of Life,” says Michael Meuers, author of Road to Ponemah.  “It is my view we need to incorporate nature into our lives to help us heal, to be healthy and happy human beings, and this reminds us how.”

Camp Fire, Butte County

11/18:  It’s the tenth day of the Camp Fire in Butte County, a disaster that’s burned approximately 135,000 acres, including the town of Paradise, California.  All over the San Francisco Bay Area, the sky is blanketed with smoke from the fire.  According to reports to date, seventy-three people have died and many more are missing.  In addition, hundreds of survivors have been left homeless.  Some of them, including children and seniors, are living in tents set up on a Walmart parking lot in the city of Chico.  Fortunately, FEMA and the Red Cross have stepped in to help with food, clothing, and temporary shelter.  To contribute, contact @redcross or @habitat_org.  For information on how to help a displaced family, log onto Facebook’s Paradise Fire Adopt a Family page.  The group now has more than 1300 members.

Writing Prompts

Revision:

Select an original poem that you’ve more or less forgotten about.  It should be one that you were never quite satisfied with but weren’t sure exactly why.  (Keep a copy of your original version for reference.)  Begin by rearranging the lines.  If your poem is in a fixed pattern such as quatrains, experiment by varying the pattern, possibly in couplets or free verse.  Play around with the line breaks, too, trying out new possibilities.  When you think you might have something, read it aloud to yourself.  Look for new openings to develop a thought, replace a word or image.  Change anything that doesn’t work until it does.  Now compare it to your original version.  Is the poem improved?  Why?  Why not?

On the subject of revision, it’s good to keep in mind Mary Oliver’s comment about “how many sweet and fine poems there are in the world — I mean, it is a help to remember that out of writing, and the rewriting, beauty is born…”  A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry, by Mary Oliver (A Harvest Original, Harcourt, Inc., 1994).

Don’t be too quick to toss out a revision that falls short.  You might want to come back to it another time.

Elegy

“Elegy helps us to examine our lives and make sense of loss…”  “Later, they remind us of where we were and how far we’ve come,” writes Robert McDowell in Poetry as Spiritual Practice: Reading, Writing, and Using Poetry in Your Daily Rituals, Aspirations, and Intentions (Free Press, 2008).  McDowell offers the following prompt for collective writing; it might work best in a small, established group where people know each other well:

“Work with any number of friends to write an elegy about the environment, which concerns all of us…”  “Alternate on composition of lines.  Mentor one another as you strive to create a memorable poem.”