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Number
286
September October 2000
Some
Information
JOYCE JENKINS
Copyright ©
2000 Poetry Flash
Inside
News
WATERSHED: A
ridge of high land dividing two areas that are
drained by different river systems. Also called
water parting. The region draining into a river,
river system, or other body of water. A critical
point that marks a division or a change of
course, a turning point. [American
Heritage Dictionary]
As the Watershed
Environmental Poetry Festival convenes for the
fifth time in downtown Berkeley at the Civic Center
Park in Berkeley, it is a good time to remember why
Poetry Flash, why poets and artists are
addressing this 'watershed' idea. Watershed grew
out of the germinal idea and intitiative Robert
Hass conceived during his U.S. Poet Laureateship.
As a concept, it came from Gary Snyder's "Coming
into theWatershed," essay in A Place in
Space, from bio-regionalists like Peter Berg of
Planet Drum/Green City, from reading and
talking… it was in the air. Out of all of our
striving and thinking about the project has come an
unusual and very useful creative collaboration
between The Ecology Center--the people who bring
Berkeley curbside recycling and the Farmers'
Market--EcoCity Builders, and many others. Out of
all this has grown a wonderful, individual festival
that is a pleasure and privilege to be part of.
Watershed is, well, a
'watershed'. One of the many layered
interpretations of the word is a reaching for
critical mass, understanding and action, a 'tipping
point' of poets and artists and environmentalists,
a gathering of and for people who are actively
thinking about our earth, or who would like to.
Poets think--probably too much--and are natural
activists. (Remember Shelley's "Poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world," ?)
Matters of the environment are too important to be
left to those labeled or self-identified as
environmentalists alone. We all live here. All
poets, no matter how pop, how New York School, how
experimental, how academic, how formal, how
abstract, gay or ethnic or bilingual--are all here,
breathing the air and drinking the water and trying
to stay healthy. We all have bodies. We all have an
animal nature to share with the bear and the
salmon--poets like Michael McClure and Galway
Kinnell and Gary Snyder have always known this.
Poets like Al Young and Jane Hirshfield and Sharon
Doubiago and other poets who have read at Watershed
know it. Slam poets know it. Hip hoppers know it.
Even dot com poets know it. We all have to find our
own way to relate to this issue if we want to stay
alive.
For me, the Watershed
Festival has been about the idea of metaphor to
motivate human imagination; that spark is the start
point of action. Metaphors such as Salmon Run in
the Northwest or Buffalo Commons on the Great
Plains show that health of the salmon's habitat,
for example, is somehow our health; that we are,
somehow, one flesh. Poetry, being a kind of habitat
for the region-less, (as well as spirituality for
the religion-less), is a way to understand this
fact, to experience it. Poetry can bring a lot to
science, without sentimentality. And this is a way
for poetry to be of use. "Science is spectrum
analysis. Art is photosynthesis." (Karl Krauss)
Poetry, and poets, have a role to play in this.
Art saves lives. Making
sustains. In poet Mark Doty's memoir,
Firebird, discussed elsewhere in this issue,
he says, "I believe that art saved my life." Of
course, it's not that poets think that art can plug
the ozone hole, can literally hold up the
sky--though on second thought maybe it can. What
art does is give us a sense of the whole, a sense
that there is a universe out there that we are part
of, that is worth saving, and that we are valuable
because we are part of that cloth of community, and
that we can, through our imaginations, through
feeding our spirits, create the tools we need to
save the whole. What is inspiration--this often
trivialized idea that moves the intellect or
emotions or prompts action or invention--but
breath? And what is poetry but breath? As Mark Doty
says, "Making Sustains." As Kerouac would, maybe,
say: Go Watershed.
There are many editorial
matters to share; it's impossible to mention most
now. But there will be those of you reading this
who need to know that Michael Cuddihy, the poet and
famed founder and editor of Ironwood, an
important, a necessary poetry journal he published
for sixteen years before closing it in 1988, died
recently of pneumonia at his home in Tucson. He was
sixty-eight. He was a brilliant editor; he devoted
his life to poetry and writing. He had a critical
eye, and is credited with bringing writers such as
Tess Gallagher and Linda Gregg to prominence. He
published Robert Hass, Jane Miller, Alberto Rios,
Ai and George Oppen. Czeslaw Milosz was a
practically unknown in this country when
Ironwood dedicated an issue to his work.
Cuddihy had contracted polio while a college
student at Notre Dame University. Forced to drop
out of school, he spent the rest of his life in a
wheelchair. "I suppose he was rescued in a way from
academia because of the polio, said Tucson writer
Nancy Mairs. "He might have become a poet and gone
to some university to teach. He was spared--he was
able to go his own way. We're going to miss him
terribly." A memorial service is planned for the
fall in Tucson, Arizona.
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