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#POETRYCANSAVETHEPLANET and #LOP22
AN ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH POEM
For this poem, research a particular natural or social phenomenon, as Forrest Gander has done for his “The Redwoods (Links to an external site.)” poem sequence. Write a poem in which you present your research findings, allowing the material to be read both literally and as a metaphor (or allegory) for something more personal and/or social or emotional, which is implied by the poem but not mentioned explicitly. Or if mentioned explicitly, only in the most general way.
Model poems for Prompt #3:
“A narrow fellow In the grass, (Links to an external site.)” Emily Dickinson
“Vulture (Links to an external site.),” Robinson Jeffers
“Fly (Links to an external site.),” W.S. Merwin
“The Paper Nautilus (Links to an external site.),” Marianne Moore
“The Armadillo (Links to an external site.), Elizabeth Bishop
“Current (Links to an external site.),” Alan Soldofsky
WRITING A SAN FRANCISCO BAY ENVIRONMENTAL HAIKU
The Haiku form of poetry originated in Japanese Regna (a Japanese poetry form of 100 stanzas) in the thirteenth century. The Haiku became an independent form in the sixteenth century. The form of Haiku in English is generally composed of three lines: the first containing five syllables; the second containing seven syllables; and the third containing five syllables. Here is a link to the Academy of American Poets Haiku Webpage. Here is link to a quick Master Class on Haiku, with former U.S. Poet Laurate Billy Collins.
Traditional Japanese poets include a kigo word, an indirect reference to the season in the third line. The poems are generally expected to record concrete observations, images rather than statements or conclusions. The more specific the details the image contains, the more valued the haiku is.
Because the history of the San Francisco Bay is a very special place both in geography and history, you should visit a particular place along the Bay—as close to the water as possible—to compose at least one San Francisco Bay Haiku. Take a notebook with you. Also, take a few pictures with your phone. Then quiet your internal chatter, you know the voice(s) you keep hearing inside your head during the day. Look out at the Bay from whereever you are. Breathe deeply, then begin to write. In the first line, mention a specific example of plant or animal life you saw during your visit, or a description of the place you were. In the second line, mention
something you observed about the water in Bay—a physical characteristic that you observed first-hand such as the smell or color or the quality of light and shadow. Use concrete words connected to your five senses. And in the last line, include a kigo word. And San Francisco Bay shore was an important site inhabited by the indigenous Muekema Ohlone tribe, also try including a reference to what you know or have learned about the indigenous inhabitants of these regions. Maybe an indirect reference, such as using a single word or short praise the infers something about the role the Bay played in the lives of these people.
You can definitely write more than one Haiku. You might try linking your Haikus together in a group. Or respond to another person’s Haiku with your Haiku.
Here is an example of a modern English translation of a famous Haiku about water by great seventeenth century Japanese Haiku Master Basho:
The old pond –
a frog jumps in,
sound of water. (Translated by Robert Hass)
You may notice that the translation doesn’t exactly conform to the 5 – 7 – 5 syllable form. That’s because the rules for writing Haiku in English only approximate the Haiku in the Japanese language. But the key element of this Basho Haiku in translation is its compression of language, and its ability to depict an entire scene in just a few words. Now, try writing a Haiku of your own.
The Meditative Environmental Eye of Rilke
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes meditative lyrics, focusing his graceful language onto the intimate immediacies of daily life. In his New Poems, Rilke titles a number of poems after an object observed, for example, “THE PANTHER” OR “BLACK CAT.” While the titles deliberately name the overarching subject of the poem’s contemplations, the lyrics themselves interrogate INTO THE OBJECT, extrapolating immense wonder and mystery from the deep attentiveness of the lyric.
If you follow RILKE’S meditative structure, you’ll find him (1) setting the scene with intimate detail, (2) making analogies to what these intimate events are like, and, after (3) investing a moment of reflection to develop those analogies in order to (4) excavate from these “mundane” scenes a sincere depth, a value transcending the routine and every day through this imaginative correlation between what is seen and the analogical comparison to a human event.
The object of art is, as Rilke writes, “nameless as a plain is nameless or a sea that has a name only on the map, in books, and to men, but which, in reality, is nothing but distance, motion and depth.”
Rilke said, “But let us consider for a moment, whether everything before us isn’t surface, everything we perceive and explain and interpret?”
Rilke finds in the material surface of things. In focusing one’s attentiveness on the physical surface, the physical distance, the physical motion and depth, excavating into those materialities, one would open an uncanny energy:
“And what we call spirit [Geist] and soul and love: isn’t all that but a slight change on the small surface of a near face? .. And he who could see and render all forms, would he not (almost without knowing it) give us all of spirit; everything that has ever been called longing or pain or bliss or which can have no name at all in its ineffable spirituality?”
Prompt:
(1) choose a location or event to meditate upon just like Rilke: an everyday animal, a piece of art, adjoining rooms, you might choose a tree, a scene in a forest, a moment on the sidewalk,
the student center, etc.
(2) Write a meditative, short lyric (no more than a single page) following the “meditative structure” described above and
(3) title the sequence after the object or event described.