Rhyme does pay for poetry fans
Roses are red/ Poets are green/ You can now see the forest/ For the unforeseen — the unforeseen being a great response in Hamilton to the lush foliage of leaflets that Deborah Bowen and her students produced.
Yes, leaflets, that oh-so-cuttingedge medium. Leaflets on seven themes. Caring for: wild birds; wild creatures; degraded land; water; flowers and pollinators; food; and trees. The stem on which the leaflets has grown is The Poetry and Ecology Project that Deborah has pulled together.
The project’s subtitle is Renewing the Earth Through the Poetic Imagination. The poets are indeed green. It’s hard to imagine poetry without the environment, roses, forests and such. Joyce Kilmer’s Trees, for instance, would perforce be shorter: “I think that I shall never see/ A poem lovely as a ... nevermind.”
Likewise, it’s hard to imagine nature without poetry. You can’t really experience the full richness of an ocean surf without hearing, through Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, “the grating roar of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling ... with tremulous cadence slow, and bring the eternal note of sadness in.”
Deborah Bowen teaches English at Redeemer University College, and she’s fascinated by this interplay between poetics and environmentalism. Especially in an industrial (albeit partially lapsed industrial) city like Hamilton. Here, the struggle to coexist with our own air (and soil and water) has been longstanding, Promethean in scale, and consequently our dominating writerly theme.
And so, says Deborah, “I set out, with a grant from SSHRCC,
to explore what I initially called ‘The Voice of Environmental Hope in Contemporary Ontarian Poetry.’ I’ve been looking at the poetry of seven local writers who engage with environmental issues.” (Daniel David Moses; Madhur Anand; Greg Kennedy; Bernadette Rule; John Terpstra; Adam Dickinson; and Anna Bowen.)
That’s a lot to consider — poetry, ecology, their relationship. But Deborah had to go and branch the project out into two other areas. No big deal. Only science and religion. Poets, she says, often identify as stewards of the Earth and in doing so form common cause with many scientists and, increasingly, people of faith who see stewardship and awe as sacred duties. (She notes Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical On Care for Our Common Home,
among other evidence.)
You’d think she’d need to stage enormous academic symposiums and research projects to even scratch the topsoil of such deep interdisciplinary subject matter. There is some of that to come. But, says Deborah, the simple leaflets have been an unpredictably effective sell into the larger complexities. “When we were thinking up the project I didn’t think of leaflets and when we did I didn’t think they would take off quite this way.” They (the leaflets) are exciting interest from libraries, school boards and all kinds of environmental groups.
“In the initial grant proposal, when asked about disseminating what I would be learning, I talked about academic papers and presentations at libraries, and some kind of web presence or physical leaflet to give out locally. I have
given a couple of academic papers and am doing more in the near future.
“But it’s these leaflets that are having the most unexpected success.”
The leaflets each feature artfully illustrative photographs; three poems by area poets related to the theme; and links to local organizations interested in the theme, organizations like Trees Hamilton; The Mustard Seed Co-operative Grocery; Hamilton Conservation Authority and many others. The tag quote for the whole leaflet series, appearing on the cover of each, is “Poetry, like chlorophyll, is a catalyst for turning light into energy,” by Guelph environment scientist and poet Madhur Anand.
Among Deborah’s joys in doing the project was working with five senior Redeemer students — Rebeka Borshevsky and environmental studies student Liane Miedema, who researched and compiled the list of organizations; Elise Aresenault, who researched the poetry and interviewed poets; Josh Voth, who did the design work; and Jeff Vandergoot, who looked into grants and distribution.