Poetry of Nature

Lower Kimball Lake, NH
by Kathleen Tyler Conklin

When we look for poems about nature, we usually expect to find lyrical poetry about the beauty of nature…poems about stunning landscapes or the change of seasons. We desire to bask in words describing nature’s gifts, words that help us to picture the exquisiteness of a field of flowers or of a singular beauteous bloom.

The poets came through for us, starting with the early Greek poets and their pastoral idylls and moving through time with Emerson, Frost, Wordsworth, Yeats, Dickinson, to the present with poets like Snyder, Oliver, Williams and Gluck (to name a few). I love these poems.

After the strongest hurricane ever hit Mexico, I became curious about the poetry written about the destructive side of nature. As inhabitants of the earth, subject to hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, blizzards, earthquakes, I knew that nature could be fierce and that there had to be poems about such catastrophes. They just didn’t come to mind as readily.

I did find some, even written by the same poets as listed above, but not as many seemed available as the more romanticized versions of nature. They made for a thrilling, sometimes chilling read.  Basho, a master of haiku, the distillation of nature poems, explored nature’s darker, more challenging side in his work.

Here’s one of his that gives us layers of meaning in this autumn season, also the season of numerous political debates.

                               speaking out

                              my lips are cold

                              in autumn wind

Poetry In The News

Jeffery Brown is a Journalist and PBS Chief Correspondent for Arts, Culture and Society. He co-anchors the nightly news program on PBS and also hosts “Art Beat”, the News Hour’s online arts and culture segment.

As a reporter, Brown speaks of the necessity of sticking to the facts and of not being able to express the emotions that sometimes arise with the telling of a particular news story.  He has now expressed some of these emotions in his recently published book of poetry aptly called “The News:Poems”.

The New Poet Laureate is the first Latino named to that position.  

Jose Felipe Herrera

Juan Felipe Herrera is the son of Mexican immigrants.  He was born in California to migrant farm worker parents. He traveled up and down California with his family, but with the help of a program for disadvantaged students was able to attend UCLA. He went on to earn a masters degree in Sociology from Stanford, but then turned to the realization of his passion for writing by attending the Iowa Writers Workshop for a MFA in poetry.

Write he did…poems, plays, children’s books…both in English and Spanish, sometimes combining both in one work.

Connecting with people is important to Herrera. “I used to stand on the corner in San Diego with poems sticking out of my hip pocket, asking people if there was a place where I could read poems.” It promises to be a lively year ahead for Poetry with our new Poet Laureate at the helm. Bienvenido Juan Felipe Herrera!

What Is it About Poetry?

I recently read two articles in the newspaper that touched and amazed me and started me wondering what it is about poetry that makes it powerful. The first story concerned a soldier, who upon killing his enemy decided to go through the dead man’s pockets. I’m not sure what motivated him to do this or what he hoped to find, but what he found shocked and puzzled him.  There on a folded piece of paper was a poem.

The second story was about a mother’s effort to reach her troubled teen-aged daughter who was deeply depressed. Her daughter was acting out her despair in a rebellious way by refusing to wear shoes to school. It came to an ultimatum from the school, shoes or no school. Shoes had become a touch point, a focus of her daughter’s depression. The mother was inspired to use the shoes as a place of connection and hopefully of healing. She began to leave a folded poem in her daughter’s shoe each morning to let her see 

that “people had been in pain before and had struggled to find hope.”  The poets took that pain, that struggle and put those thoughts into the best, sparest words they could.

After some time, the mother noted a change in her daughter…the dark cloud seemed to lift a bit.  At the same time, she found the poems unfolded in her daughter’s pockets.

She was reading them and they were beginning to have an effect. “Poetry knew where hope lived.”

An enemy soldier carrying a poem in his pocket, a troubled teen finding a poem in her shoe every day, reading it and finding hope again. Pretty powerful stuff.  I am not promising you a magic elixir, but it seems there is something about poetry that deeply touches the human heart, gives it comfort and helps it to heal. And perhaps more.