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Arts and Culture PURPOSE: Bioregionalism is about making community and living in balance with eco-community, an endeavor that is in itself an art. Additionally, the arts – in bioregionalism and in all cultures and history – show us who we are, and how we can live. This page is offered as a gathering place for sharing bioregional arts that help us learn more about how to live in our home places, with one another in sustainable and sustaining community, and in growing awareness of the earth, sky and more-than-human life forms around us. BIOREGIONAL POETRY: We are delighted to feature these poems that focus on that essential bioregional question: how do we live. We invite you to submit bioregional poetry from your region. BIOREGIONAL PROSE: The following excerpt from Stephanie Mills’ book, Epicurian Simplicity, is a powerful example of bioregional prose. We invite you to submit bioregional prose from your region. A DO-IT-YOURSELF BIOREGIONAL WRITING WORKSHOP: Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg shares her ground rules and writing exercises for this do-it-yourself (or with friends, local bioregional groups or communities) writing workshop. FUTURE PLANS FOR THIS SITE: We would like to eventually feature bioregional poetry, prose; photographs of art, dance and other forms of the arts; and links to music and video. Our hope is to one day offer material in the four most prominent language of the hemisphere: Spanish, English, Portuguese, and French. Please send all potential writing and arts to: Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg (click on mirriamgoldbergc@goddard.edu) |
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The earth says have a place, be what that place The earth says every summer have a ranch The earth says where you live wear the kind Listening, I think that’s what the earth says.
I have made a footprint, a sacred one. (from Women in Praise of the Sacred, ed. by Jane Hirshfield, for educational purposes only)
Is it the eagles returning to Lecompton, Old Eagle Town, or is it those rivers we measure towns by, Or finding my grandfather during a storm, Is it the house I grew up in, Is it a locus inside a muddy muscle, (from Spring Geese, for educational purposes only) |
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Epicurian Simplicity and from “Prelude” from “Autumn” Although the Sonoran Desert, bioregion of my childhood, is a realm where cacti, not trees, are the charismatic megaflora, Phoenix had watered itself into oasishood, and the yards in our suburb had trees big enough to bond with. The native saguaros, chollas, octillos, mesquites, barrel cacti, and paloverdes were mostly to be seen on the rapidly receding outskirts of town or in date-palm pastiche desert-style landscapes at the old Scottsdale and Paradise Valley resorts. The desert and its cacti were with some justification regarded as hostile; park-like yards with lawns and elms were the conventional habitat of Anglo-American families such as mine. In the yard next door, there were leafy chinaberry trees where our little gang of kids could clamber into the cool shade. Behind the subdivision was a citrus orchard. With their low, smooth, elephantine branches, the grapefruit trees were friendly to small climbers. My family’s yard had eucalyptus trees that were worthless for climbing but impressively tall, and shading the west side of the house were American elms. The elms’ lowest branches were too high for a little girl to reach but made a good bandstand for the mockingbirds. Like any healthy, normal young primate, I became intimately acquainted with trees, if not forests, during my childhood. As most of us do, I outgrew that intimacy. As a young adult, my feeling for trees persisted but became a rhetorical relationship. Trees, especially redwoods, along with all the other conspicuous features of the earth’s imperiled ecosystems – sequoias, bristlecone pines, condors, gray whales, snail darters, Furbish’s louseworts – became objects of my general concern. Before the timber wars got going in earnest, I had left northern California. Now, courageous acts of civil disobedience have become a way of life for hundreds of human beings whose relationship with redwood trees and old-growth forests goes beyond rhetoric to a sacrifice of their days, their flesh, and even their lives. In the mid-1980s, when I moved to the North Woods, I came to a landscape that had been logged repeatedly and yet still grew trees. Dwindling tracts of second- and third-growth hardwoods, mixes of sugar maple, beech, bass, ironwood, ash, poplar, yellow birch, red oak, and hemlock, persist in different combinations and proportions, depending on soil and slope. There are a few white and red pines and white birches here and there, and near wetlands and flowing water, different forest communities: cedar, fir, spruce, and tamarack. Some ecologists are saying that the combined stresses of acid rain, drought, insects, disease and genetic impoverishment that results from cutting the best trees for the market may not be survivable by the forests, despite their current appearance. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, much of this land was cut over and kept cleared. Now it grows corn and hay and golf courses. The uplands are good for growing cherries and other fruit, and for sitting half-million-dollar trophy homes on with views. Then there’s all-but-defeated land such as mine, which was farmed to the limit. In our glacial terrain, the limit was reached after a few crops of potatoes, and the soil began to blow. Now it’s parked under pine plantations, where Christmas trees and timber are raised as crops. On my acres, the Christmas trees have been left to their own devices and have grown tall and gnarly, shading and sheltering numerous hopeful cherry, maple, and beech saplings. Our local mosaic of second-, third-, and fourth-growth woodlots, orchards, suburbs, woodburbs, oat fields, and cornfields is picturesque but lacks ecological integrity. None of it adds up to forest, but the robust remnants of the real thing are beautiful for now. When autumn comes to these woods, the green alchemist chlorophyll, having worked with earth, air, light, and water to grow the trees through spring and summer, ceases its labors. Then every single leaf reveals some different color, pattern, and intensity of pigmentation, going from green to gaudy. There’s a spectacle wherever there’s a patch of hardwoods. The sugar maple’s eye-dazzling range, from plangent yellow to blazing orange and gleaming ruby, makes that tree’s transformations the dominant feature of this most scenic season. After fifteen years of gaping at the sugar maples’ leaves, I have begun to see past them to the other trees in the forest and their less insistent but no less beautiful hues. The fall colors of the white ash’s compound leaves grade from butter yellow to garnet and burgundy, deep radiant tones that quietly invite the eye’s appreciation. Pien cherry leaves are among the earliest to turn and glow deeply as embers. Hope hornbeams and basswoods range from chrome yellow to citron. Beech leaves phase through sunny yellow on their way to paper-bag brown. The sugar maple’s millennia of upstaging the rest of the fall foliage may be coming to an end. Acid rain threatens these trees, and global climate change may drive their range northward. Whether the trees themselves will be able to migrate as quickly as the weather changes remains to be seen. The Asian longhorn beetle, an alien invasive species recently established in the United States thanks to the expansion of world trade, having arrived in the wood of crates containing goods from China, is likely to infest and decimate this tree species unless unprecedentedly successful vigilance against the beetle’s spread is undertaken and maintained. The sugar maple’s fellow dominant in these woodlands, the American beech, is even more immediately imperiled. Beech bark disease may eliminate as many as half of the beech trees. The possibility that the beeches and sugar maples could all but vanish from the woods, as did the American chestnuts and elms, which succumbed to alien organisms, signals change of quite a different kind from the movement of the seasons and their variation from year to year. These shocking final changes confront us everywhere these days, asking insistently, “How are we to live?” and “What are we to do?” If we live simply, attentively, and gratefully, it will go better. There is always beauty to see if you have an eye for it. Looking is a practice. Seeing is a gift that comes with practice. The light is autumn is so rich, warm, and romantic, tinted with all the bright colors of the land. Did it rejoice the hearts and souls of the old-times who lived here, engaged in subsistence farming? Were they amazed, grateful? And how did this glowing atmosphere with its rustle and snap strike the Odawa people, when the trees were many and great and the woods offered meat, furs, and medicine and the dangers of wolves and bears? Has it always been a great wonder to be here as the seasons hasten along, and has it always been a vexation to fend with the whipsaw weather that is fall? |
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Writing from the Earth Ground Rules for Writing Workshops 1. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar, and most of all, making sense. 2. Write what you know as well as what you don’t know. 3. Follow your writing, not the suggested exercise, the facilitator or what you think you should write. Write what wakes you up the most. 4. Feel free to experiment with poems, stories, dialogues, essays, letters, and whatever other form the writing wants to be. 5. Practice trust. Trust yourself to write what you need to write, how you need to write it. 6. Remember that all revealed in this workshop is confidential. 7. Treat all newborn writing with great respect and tenderness so that it can grow. 8. Reading your writing aloud is always optional. 9. No self-deprecating remarks allowed (especially when preparing to read your work). 10. Strive, as much as possible, not to compare your writing with the writing of others, and not to critique, interpret or analyze away what your writing is trying to show you. 11. Witness others. Listen carefully with your full attention. It will enhance your ability to listen to your own words. 12. Please share your responses to one another’s work—what moves you, what stands out for you – but please refrain from critiquing or analyzing the work. 13. Treat all you do as a delicious and invigorating experiment. Play. Take chances. See what way leads to way, and what words lead to words.
REINHABITION: Peter Berg, one of the key founders of bioregionalism, writes: RESTORATION: Stephanie Mills writes, RECIPROCITY: David Abram writes, Poetry as powerful means of using our senses because that’s how poetry works: it Language can help us connect with what’s beyond language: As Tomas Transtomer writes, Tired of all who come with words, word but no language
Exercises For all these exercises, give yourself (and pals) 10-20 minutes to simply write, and see what comes. If you’re with others, you can take turns reading aloud, and/or speaking about your experience writing, or you can always say, “pass.” These exercises may be especially effective at helping local groups to develop a bioregional presentation to share with others in their community and beyond. 1. After reading the poem below, write your own myth-poem starting with “In the very earliest time…” about where you life. Magic Words In the very earliest time, 2. What does the earth say to you? In Response to a Question The earth says have a place, be what that place The earth says every summer have a ranch The earth says where you live wear the kind Listening, I think that’s what the earth says. (from Stories That Could Be True, for educational purposes only) 3. Make a list of dappled things, and then join them together in your writing. Pied Beauty Glory be to God for dappled things – (from Norton Anthology of Poetry, for educational purposes only) 4. Take the repeated phrases and unfold them in your experience……for example, “May be it beautiful before me in……” or “I am restored in beauty by….” Dark young pine, at the center of the earth originating, Watch over me. I am restored in beauty. (from Women in Praise of the Sacred, ed. by Jane Hirshfield, for educational purposes only) 5. Use the phrase, “I have made a footprint,” or any other phrase that pops into your mind, and write it over and over, adding what comes from it each time. Or write your own initiation song for something important in your life. Planting Initiation Song an Osage Women’s Initiation Song I have made a footprint, a sacred one. (from Women in Praise of the Sacred, ed. by Jane Hirshfield, for educational purposes only) 5. List all the ways water is precious in your life, and then link these images and stories together in a piece of writing. Starwater Nursing my first baby I felt like a carrier for water, Astronomers tell us star dust So water travels the skies, (from Starwater, for educational purposes only) 6. Write your own list of questions about what place is to you. Place Is it the eagles returning to Lecompton, Old Eagle Town, or is it those rivers we measure towns by, Or finding my grandfather during a storm, Is it the house I grew up in, Is it a locus inside a muddy muscle, (from Spring Geese, for educational purposes only) 7. Write about what’s composting in your mind….or heart. On Top All this new stuff goes on top A mind like compost. (from Axe Handles, for educational purposes only) 8. Write your own pledge of allegiance. For All Ah to be alive Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters I pledge allegiance. I pledge alliance to the soil (from Axe Handles, for educational purposes only) 9. Simply read this poem aloud, outside….and then see what you have to say. The Family is All There Is Think of those old, enduring connections Seminal to all kin also is the open And there is pervasive clasping Remember the same hair on pygmy The family – weavers, reachers, winders Name something else. (from Splitting and Binding, for educational purposes only) 10. You guessed it. Roll on the ground, preferably naked (and wisely not in Kansas during chigger season), and then write. Rolling Naked in the Morning Dew Out among the wet grasses and wild barley-covered Lillie Langtry practiced it, when weather permitted. Just consider how the mere idea of it alone (from Splitting and Binding, for educational purposes only) 11. Write your own manifesto. Or write how you “practice resurrection.” Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front Love the quick profit, the annual raise, (from The Country of Marriage, for educational purposes only) 12. What saves you in this big world? Grace Abounding Air crowds into my cell so considerably Such times abide for a pilgrim, who all through I’m saved in this big world by unforeseen (from Even in Quiet Places, for educational purposes only)
IMPORTANT BOOKS ABOUT THE EARTH AND LANGUAGE Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than- Andruss, Van, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright, eds. Home! Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. Berry, Thomas. The Dream of the Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988. Chatwin, Bruce. The Songlines. London: Penguin Books, 1987. Elder, John and Hertha Wong, eds. Family of Earth and Sky: Indigenous Tales of Nature Griffin, Susan. Women and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. Sierra Club Books, Guss, David M., ed. The Language of the Birds. San Francisco: North Point Press, Jones, Edwin. Reading the Book of Nature. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989. Macy, Joanna. World as Lover, World as Self. Parallax Press, 1991. McLuhan, T.C. Touch the Earth. New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey, 1971. Orr, David. Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World. Roszak, Theodore. Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. Sierra Sanders, Scott Russell. Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World. Boston: Sauer, Peter, ed. Finding Home: Writing on Nature and Culture from Orion Magazine. Seed, John, et. al. Thinking Like a Mountain: Toward a Council of All Beings. New Shlain, Leonard. The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Snyder, Gary. Practice of the Wild: Essays. North Point Press, 1990. Swann, Brian, ed. Smoothing the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature. POETS WHO WRITE ABOUT THE EARTH (a small and biased sampling) |
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Sandra Alcosser Paula Gunn Allen A.A. Ammons Margaret Atwood W.H. Auden Basso Wendell Berry Elizabeth Bishop William Blake Phillip Booth Joseph Bruchac Lord Byron Billy Collins Samuel Cooleridge Alison Deming Emily Dickinson James Dickey Deborah Digges John Donne e.e. cummings Harley Elliott |
Ralph Waldo Emerson Louise Erdrich Robert Frost Patricia Goedicke Susan Griffin Linda Gregg Donald Hall Robert Hass Seamus Heaney Jane Hirshfield Joy Harjo Gerald Manley Hopkins A.E. Houseman Kenneth Irby Linda Hogan John Keats Galway Kinnell Maxine Kumin Stanley Kunitz Jane Kenyon |
Gary Lawless D.H. Lawrence Denise Levertov Philip Levine Perie Longo William Matthews Thomas McGrath Heather McHugh Sandra McPhearson W.S. Merwin Edna St. Vincent Millay Howard Nemerov Pablo Neruda Sharon Olds Mary Oliver Simon Ortiz Alicia Ostriker Stanley Plumly Al Purdy Adrienne Rich |
Rainer Maria Rilke Theodore Roethke Pattiann Rogers Rumi May Sarton Naomi Shahib Nye William Shakespeare Percy Bysshe Shelley Leslie Marmon Silko Gary Snyder William Stafford Wallace Stevens Gerald Stern Dylan Thomas Jean Toomer Walt Whitman William Carlos Williams William Wordsworth James Wright William Butler Yeats |
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FUTURE PLANS FOR THIS SITE: We would like to eventually feature bioregional poetry, prose; photographs of art, dance and other forms of the arts; and links to music and video. Our hope is to one day offer material in the four most prominent language of the hemisphere: Spanish, English, Portuguese, and French. Please send all potential writing and arts to: Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg | |||||||||||||
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