Rooting Poetry in Nature

On Arbor Day, Friday, April 24, a group of Upper School students and several English teachers gathered to engage with renowned Pulitzer-prize winning eco-poet and translator Forrest Gander in the outdoor classroom known as Cary Woods. The two-acre, tree-canopied spot behind the Cary building offers a circle of benches surrounded by untamed plants. 

Ecopoetics is a newer literary movement that emerged around the turn of the century (1999-2000) from the desire to raise the collective consciousness about our interdependence with and influence on the environment. Gander believes that the understanding that nature is inside us, not “out there,” is what differentiates an eco-poet from a poet. As the students settled on the benches and cross-legged on the ground, he set the stage for their work together. 

“You are always in dialogue with the world around you. Earth is constantly vibrating, and your body feels that. Rocks hum! It happens at a level we’re not conscious of, but the body still knows it,” he said. “What if we could write about this and it helped to gradually change how people feel about living on the Earth?” 

Gander instructed the students to wander around and take observational notes. The notes would be the makings of the poem, but they weren’t to think of writing a poem. 

“Use all your senses to process the world around you and note what you see when you look closely; What is in relationship to each other?; What do you think of when you touch that tree?” he prompted. 

After this exercise, the students returned to the circle.

“Who wrote about anything that was moving?” asked Gander.

As the students shared their notes, teacher Sam Sullivan typed. After Gander interspersed each share with feedback, Sullivan read the poem out loud. It was a surprise move; the students weren’t told that their notes would be woven together as one piece.

I imagine black 
Rushing and ramming against sullen bark 
Creatures unlike 
Find the orb 
Of their troubles 

Looking up, 
I see the silhouette of fragile leaves 
Gently twitching through 
The temporary gusts of uncertain air 

An insect flying so fast 
Impossible to identify 
Always in motion 
Unlike his friends 
Who rest on the shelf of fungus 

The breeze mixes with sunlight 
Feeling good  
Butterfly 
Flapping 
Too fast for me to tell 
What color its round wings are 

Sunlight 
Filtering through the trees 
Forming a mosaic 
Segregated but blurred 

How the bark looks like a terrain 

Winding dead vines 
Wrapping around 
Old jagged trees 

Oddly shaped tree branches
Lying on the ground 
Hard to balance 
Standing on them 

Before parting, Gander gave the students one more brief task. Because most of their sensory engagement in the first round was visual, he asked them to write one line about an observation that engaged another sense.

One of the students in the workshop and a member of the Environmental Action Club, Jay Hangley ’27, tried licking a leaf and then wrote about its texture.

“The experience made me think about all the tiny, different parts of nature that we don't notice most of the time,” Hangley noted “I'm inspired to start noticing more.”

The afternoon workshop followed a morning assembly at which Gander shared about his work and read several poems, including one that accompanies the film Whose Utopia, which is permanently housed and periodically on exhibit at MOMA in New York. The night before, Gander led a Writers Series reading at the Friends Free Library. The visit was a collaboration between the English and Sustainability departments in honor of Earth Week. 

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Forrest Gander, born in the Mojave Desert, lives in California. A translator/writer with degrees in geology and literature, he’s received the Pulitzer Prize and Best Translated Book Award. As a signal voice for environmental poetics, Gander often writes about human and ecological intimacies. His latest books are Mojave Ghost: a Novel Poem, the collaboration Across/Ground: Photographs by Lukas Felzmann, and the translation Even Time Bleeds: Selected Poems of Jeannette L. Clariond.