Brink: Poetry & Sustainability
ON THURSDAY, 11 February 2021, activist, poet and QC, Brian Walters will be sharing poems and good talk with me at an event called Brink, part of the National Sustainable Living Festival.
The event happens online, so you can join us wherever you are. Tickets are free. Join us online from 7:30pm Australian Eastern Summer Time. Book through Eventbrite:
https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/brink-tickets-137351316485?aff=erelexpmlt
In a poem once, I found myself writing: “language got us into this, and language will have to get us out.” When our language loses heart and speaks without humanity or any recollection of the dignity and divinity of things, when language becomes instrumental and exploitive, so do we, and the earth suffers. Poetry matters because it still knows the steps to the big dance; it still knows the metrics of creation. Poetry sustains, recharges and revivifies, re-animates and rewilds language, and conserving language, it sustains us. Poetry has not forgotten, as so many other discourses have, our organic natures, our interconnectedness with all beings, our kinship with each other and with place.
Poetry is a practice, though, not just a genre. And living poetically, one lives mindfully, aiming to do justice with one’s life to the gift that it is and to all things that sustain it.
Barry Lopez, whose recent death we mourn, wrote some words in Arctic Dreams I have lived by.
The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.
When we listen to land, it works on us like poetry, and like poetry, it improves us; when we listen to poetry, it works on us like land, and like land, improves us.
The work of sustaining earth is innately poetic.
All this and more Brian and I will talk about together on Thursday evening. Mostly we will share poems on point. Come with questions and requests and join us in sustainable and poetic conversation. We stand on a brink, and poetry can talk us down.
