poet | artist

Whatever the earth likes to do, that’s what we should do on Earth Day. And whomever the earth likes and trusts is invited. It’s earth’s special day, after all, and from the looks of it, we’re all luckily included.

But we’re relearning how to be good party guests on our planet. I recently found a magnificent publication online, Emergence Magazine, which is doing the good work of raising eco-consciousness. I love the way their audio and visual content brings the writing to life.

Jenny Odell’s essay, “Reading the Rocks,” about discovering geology’s language and ways of looking, gave me some insights and phrases for celebrating.

A smile in rock layers might have been caused by an earthquake. And a language of shapes tells us how rocks and water talk with each other. By reading the rocks, we might follow flow across time that is very far beyond us. Odell talks about learning terminology from geologist Andrew Alden. He even created the word “landslaughter” to describe the result of human disruption to existing ecologies.

She learned the term “listric curve, the shape of a creek that tumbles steeply down out of boulder-strewn territory into a gradual incline, where it meanders through a floodplain before ‘losing its identity’ in the marsh.”

While Odell searches for the creek that’s supposed to be in a neighborhood built up in the 1920s, she notes “the shape was visible once I put my attention there. Even when I couldn’t see the creek, when I looked around broadly enough, I could feel the direction of its curve.”

Mostly, I enjoyed the way her essay described the gentle shocks and pleasures of deepening one’s awareness. We are hailed by the earth in every breath, and what is listened to attends on our lives with generosity.

Another gem, which might take more time and attention to enjoy, is Jane Hirshfield’s 2024 Blaney Lecture on making the invisible visible. She too talks about engaging with the scientist’s attention to seeing and naming.

“Art and science both begin with seeing: with observation and description, and with the pointing past the observable world that the observable world makes possible. But to see in ways that matter past the immediate moment, you need something else: to preserve perception. What’s seen but not given a form retrievable to memory vanishes back into reality’s blowing, invisible dust.”

“We might ask what makes things invisible, whether in poetry or in science.

Some possibilities:

• Absence – needs no explanation
• Distance – what is too far, or sometimes too near
• Location – the viewer looks elsewhere
• Difference – what is so unfamiliar it isn’t seen: the way Captain Cook’s boat wasn’t seen when he first arrived in Australia
• Time – we’ve already spoken of
• Immobility – perception is weighted to register, first, what is changing”

Then what happens when the invisible becomes suddenly visible?

“Eureka,” or “wow” or “huh?” or “OMG.” Hirshfield goes into a long ramble about the “experience of felt discovery,” which is, of course, the nectar of poetics. In the sciences, this comes up as “mirativity,” which this paper I found on PubMed explains nicely as “one of the many linguistic reflexes of the more general cognitive process of surprise.”

And what about making things “retrievable to memory,” as she puts it? Poetry names things with a different aim than science. It is the embrace of the unknowing, uncertainty, and mystery, as it is.

Good poems show how we can move in that space, with grace. When we remember how do that, maybe helped by a poem or another piece of art, we might be in Earth’s embrace.