| Number
294 & 295
Summer/Fall 2005
The River Will Sing
JAMES LeCUYER
Copyright © 2005 Poetry
Flash
RIVER OF WORDS: Images and Poetry in Praise of Water, edited
by Pamela Michael, introductory essays by Robert Hass and Thacher
Hurd, Heyday Books, Berkeley, 2003, 78 pages, $12.95 paper.
RIVER OF WORDS, P.O. Box 4000-J, Berkeley, CA, 94704, 510/548-7636.
Fax: 510/548-2095. E-mail: info@riverofwords.org. Web site: www.riverofwords.org.
YOUNG AT ART GALLERY, Children’s art and poetry from
around the world, 2547 8th Street, Studio 13-B, near the corner
of 8th and Dwight, Berkeley, California, 510/548-7636. Hours:
Monday–Thursday, 9:00 a.m.–5:00, Friday 2:00–5:00.
 River
of Words: Images and Poetry in Praise of Water presents six
years of the best of the best children’s environmental poetry
and art as submitted to the International River of Words Contest.
While the book is beautiful and appeals to adults, it is one of
the few national publications for children’s creative work,
fine poetry with full-color art done by people ranging in age
from five to nineteen. The book is only part of a much larger
River of Words Program promoting literacy, watershed awareness
and the arts among youth throughout the world. Images and
Poetry in Praise of Water is available at the ROW office,
Young at Art Gallery in Berkeley.
Writer/organizer
Pamela Michael is the Editor, as well as Director of River of
Words. She was formerly Director of the United Nations Task Force
on Media and Education. She and Robert Hass, U.S. Poet Laureate
from 1995-97, and award winning illustrator Thacher Hurd collaborated
to make the selections in the book and to write introductory essays
on art and the environment. Images and Poetry in Praise of
Water would be lovely on any table or shelf, but is particularly
good for educators who could draw classroom examples from it,
or use them as a class set. The work represents youth speaking
to us through their common creativity across generations and cultures.
Classroom Art and English teachers would instantly recognize how
useful such a collection could be.
Since
Poetry Flash is not yet published in color, it’s
difficult to show the art in all its glory here, but the poetry
speaks for the qualitiy of the book:
Water Shed Poem
Tread of pale stream,
Hemming watery licks.
And pebbles promise
Tootsie nooks
Burrowed scarce
Amongst the wind
And willow creep.
Finger tips,
Strain of sky
Winged on ripping sun stripe.
Flight made on robin
Torn in a scarlet
Slaughtered breast
And moon bond leaves
Gilded in palms of dream brooks.
—Lucy
Barber, age 11
This
little list poem uses unusual syntax to hint at simple childhood
pleasures, the lick of water and nooks for toes, pleasures that
may be vividly recalled but often undervalued in our busy adult
lives. Then the poem turns, bringing in a ripped, deathly tone,
the scarlet breast of a slaughtered robin, and turning again to
a higher plane of “moon bond leaves” and “dream
brooks,” “gilded,” as if one were looking back
from Heaven on what was, while the environment was alive, heavenly.
Incomplete sentences and enjambment add to the cataloguing effect
and help create a longing voice from what is there now,
but could die. Better hold on to these pleasures, this poem suggests,
before they are torn apart into dreams. Of course, the poet is
eleven and living her joyful experiences, but aware they can be
lost. It is our children’s fears of the potential destruction
of our environment that brought Bob Hass and Pam Michael to their
work for River of Words. The poem’s tone begins to turn
at “scarce” and “creep,” but “pale,”
with its suggestion of weakness and illness, is right there in
the first line to undercut childhood joy.
More
than contests or books, River of Words is an extensive program
intended to make school curricula earth friendly. It encouraging
a youthful flow of energy that no corporate executive or politician
or administrator would wish to dam. Even conservative Republican
Newt Gingrich supported ROW because he saw it as helping American
children love the land and, in his view, become more patriotic.
ROW
is in every state; sometimes, as in Georgia, as part of the statewide
curriculum coordinated with state environmental standards. Seventeen
states currently award state ROW prizes. ROW has been reviewed
by such national organizations as the North American Association
of Environmental Educators. Members of the California Department
of Fish and Game, the Coastal Commission, The California Regional
Environmental Education Commission, the Department of Education,
the Department of Forestry and the State Water Resources Control
Board have helped carry the message of ROW. If a Girl Scout enters
a poem or painting in the ROW Contest and fulfills a few requirements,
she can get a Watershed Patch from the Girl Scouts (www.epa.gov/adopt/patch).
Thousands
of young people and educators now participate in ROW. There could
be millions if ROW were better funded, for there’s great
desire on the part of teachers and youth to do something about
the environment. (How about the Cissy Swig, Bill Gates, Henry
Corning, or George Soros Watershed Prize?) An Afghani boy in a
Pakistani refugee camp saw a ROW entry form on the back of a three-year-old
copy of a Ranger Rick magazine and got on line and asked,
in fractured English, if the contest was still on. He and seven
others from the camp sent in heartbreaking art and poetry.
But
children need not win to benefit. The environmental research and
preparation done by teachers and students changes them even if
they don’t see their work in print, or win a trip to Washington.
They see that others around the world have similar questions and
thoughts. In a most basic way, by discussing some of the problems
of their own watershed, they act locally as they think globally.
They begin to learn things about the natural world that most adults
have never considered, such as what is the local watershed?
Art,
some have said, comes partly from the artist’s desire to
relieve anxiety. The more anguish or oppression an artist feels,
the more intense the artistic effort can be. Destructive changes
that children experience in their world can be very threatening,
especially when a child first encounters wild nature and contrasts
it to what humans have erected or dammed or paved over. Once children
feel the archetypal power of a free river or untamed forest they
aren’t likely to spray trees with Agent Orange or drop phosphates
into pure waters. “The River is within us, the sea is all
about us,” writes T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets.
The River of Words Contest and Program encourages learning and
action. Environmental ideals are already within the hearts of
our children. We, who are about sixty percent water, have a sea
of troubles to take arms against, if I am allowed to mix Eliot
and Shakespeare.
River
of Words has addressed in a simple but ingenious fashion the most
basic problem facing humanity: How can we, creatures of air, earth
and water, and perhaps the most conscious in the universe, avoid
destroying ourselves and all the living beings that depend on
our good will? Because ROW is a contest, it is welcomed into schools
by administrators who might otherwise resist such difficult environmental
questions. Education from the earliest age is one key answer.
“In
wildness is the salvation of the world,” Henry David Thoreau,
David Brower, Gary Snyder and others have often said. As many
of us know, the wild is our own breath of life.
It’s
a disaster that many young people growing up in front of computers
or TV have little sense of the awesome reality of Nature except
through Discovery Channels. Many children from areas such as Hunter’s
Point or Harlem may have never seen the ocean, though they might
live two miles away.
Hass
writes in his introduction, “If you put the Earth’s
water—so I’ve heard—into a gallon jug, just
over a tablespoonful would be available for human use. Ninety-seven
percent of the planet’s water is in the ocean, and two percent
is locked in icecaps and glaciers…what’s left lies
in aquifers, often at inaccessible depths.”
Even
this water is not evenly divided. Lack of fresh water is increasingly
a cause of world conflict, a major reason, for example, for the
Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and is, therefore, one precursor
of the U.S. invasion of the Middle East. Global warming, partly
resulting from oil consumption, geometrically increases the uneven
distribution of the world’s fresh water as drier, hotter
areas are formed near the equator; these areas are more susceptible
to drought. Hotter air sucks up more moisture and carries it farther
toward the two poles, where the warmer, moisture laden clouds
cool and condense into powerful rain storms. Increased rainfall
near the poles melts reflective snow, leaving dark earth exposed
longer. As the dark patches absorb increasing amounts of heat,
the poles warm up even more, thereby increasing the rate of snow
and ice melt. While the world will increase in overall average
temperature some five to eight degrees Fahrenheit over the next
hundred years, releasing enormous amounts of formerly frozen carbon
dioxide and methane, the Arctic region may increase as much as
eighteen degrees. According to most scientists, there could be
a corresponding rise in sea level of some eight to twenty inches
as polar caps melt and the oceans warm and expand. This could
be enough to drown Venice and obliterate many coastal communities
worldwide, including much of Florida. The web of life is precariously
woven together on this ball of mud by air and water. (For more
information on global warming, see The New Yorker’s
three-part article by Elizabeth Kolbert, April 25, May 2 and 9.)
If one starts with a poem about the watershed, one may begin to
understand the whole cycle.
Down and up they go,
The waters that always flow,
The rivers that open their veins to the sea
And then return as snow.
Down from arterial hills
The circulation swills,
And down in the valley
The river will sing
As it refreshes everything…
—James
Broughton
(from
“The Water Circle,” Songs from a Long Undressing)
Nearly
fifty years after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring,
despite the most noble intentions of millions of people, there
are few school programs encouraging environmental action. Children
need the facts. ROW joyfully encourages them to begin learning
the important issues through this simple contest.
Thirst
Thirst, how I thirst to be loved
To be held
To be full like a river after the snow melts,
Or a puddle after the rain.
Thirst.
My grandmother says blessed are those that thirst
After righteousness for they will be filled.
Oh how I want to be full.
Thirst.
—Clarence
Adams, age 17, Anacostia Watershed Prize
Poetry
and Art from the River of Words Contest, 2004
River
of Words/Young at Art Gallery, Berkeley, California
The
analogy between rain, river and thirst on one hand and love—especially
a grandmother’s love—on the other, is quite powerful.
This thirst is of someone lonely for love, ready to drink down
all the snow that melts and flows as love into a river or puddle
after a rain. The opening is simple and personal. In the seventh
line it shifts to a Biblical tone: “…blessed are those
that thirst after righteousness.” This could be interpreted
as judgmental, almost eerie, except that love and thirst have
been equated, and the poet wants to be full of love, and if righteousness
is the way to go about getting love, that’s the way he’ll
go. And when he writes, “My grandmother,” one can
think of the special love children often have for grandmothers,
or of the Grandmother of Native Americans, the personal or the
mythological grandmother. “Thirst” is repeated like
a heartbeat or a drumbeat. Or a drip of water, not enough to satisfy,
just one drop at a time. The poet’s thirsty now, and he’d
like to be full, but will he take his grandmother’s spiritual
path, or will he find a more human, personal love? We can’t
keep our grandmothers forever, but maybe we can keep their love
alive by following their words. Or is that not enough?
Pam
Michael says, “A group of poets, educators, artists, river
activists and booksellers began meeting weekly above a pizza parlor
in Berkeley.” Among those initially there were Flash
Editor Joyce Jenkins, her new husband, environmentalists Mark
Baldridge and Nick Morgan, event producer Annice Jacoby, most
of the staff of International Rivers Network, and Pamela Michael.
Creative ideas began to flow. “Our goal,” said Michael,
“was to blend poetry, art, nature study, watershed awareness,
community service, history, and critical thinking into a flexible,
simple and elegant curriculum for school children…We’d
hoped to cause a few ripples in the education world; in fact,
we caused a deluge.”
The
deluge, nine years later, is a rising flood. River of Words flows
through the U.S. and some forty nations, through a refugee camp
in Quetta, Pakistan, to Kenya and Azerbaijan, China, Bulgaria,
Malaysia and Afghanistan. But with funding so tight now, ROW could
well dry up this year or next. Two people keep it going, Hass
and Michael. Too often so much depends on so few. Or one could
say, “A little goes a long way.”
Another
book offered for sale at River of Words’ Young at Art Gallery
in Berkeley is The Gift of Rivers:True Stories of Life on
the Water (Travelers’ Tales Guides, 200 pages, $14.95
paper), edited by Michael, with an introduction by Hass. It includes
a number of wonderful river adventures by authors such as Barry
Lopez, Wendell Berry, Isabel Allende, and Kim Stafford. The stories
are environmental and documentary.
One
of the best pieces is Michael’s childhood memory of being
rowed by her parents through a river of efflorescent bubbles.
Most of her early life she thought this was a dream, but was later
told that some vandals had dumped a truckload of laundry detergent
into the waters upstream, creating a beautiful but dangerous cloud
of suds.
Hass’s
introduction briefly covers the probable history of the relationship
of humans to water and presents some brilliant insights into his
own travels on the Danube, the Whangpoo, and the Nile.
The
River of Words Contest is free. Every child is acknowledged with
a personalized “Watershed Explorer” certificate. Children
may enter on their own or through schools, nature centers, libraries,
youth clubs and other organizations.
The
ROW Web site, which gives all the submission information, also
offers tools and incentives to help teachers and students begin
to explore their natural and cultural history. For example, what
is the natural history of the block you grew up on, the streams
that once ran through it?
The annual deadlines are: North American entries, postmark by
February 15; International entries, postmark by March 1. Entries
can be sent at any time throughout the year. Each year there are
eight U.S. winners, one International winner, and a ROW Teacher
of the Year honored during National Poetry Month at The Library
of Congress River of Words Ceremony in Washington D.C. Finalists
are published in the annual River of Words poetry and art anthology
published in affiliation with The Library of Congress.
On
June 5, 2005, the annual River of Words ceremony featured student
award-winners at San Francisco’s City Hall, as part of the
United Nations World Environmental Day festivities. Robert Hass
emceed and introduced readings by student poets from all over
the world. The ROW children’s art exhibit was also on display
on the Main Floor of City Hall. Award-winning students will also
read at this fall’s Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival
on the UC Berkeley campus, September 24. The children’s
compelling poetry readings and paintings, always a highlight of
Watershed, are also exhibited at libraries, conferences, and other
venues around the world.
Poet/environmentalist/educator Jim LeCuyer is the author
of A Brick for Offissa Pup. He was a high school English and Creative
Writing teacher at School for the Arts in San Francisco for many
years.
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