For me, it was a line from Carl Sandburg that did it. In my memory it was a hot, stuffy afternoon English class, high school, one of those seemingly achingly endless school days just before summer break when the hands of the clock seemed glued in place. Our teacher understood, and would allows us, when we got restless, to stand up and walk around the room while he read aloud as long as we showed some semblance of paying attention. And I did, for even back then I knew that I loved two things: language and landscape. And our teacher was reading us poetry.
I loved the magic of poetry, the way poets could seemingly weave spells with their words. And I loved landscape, particularly tangled places with some of the wild still left in them. But I hadn’t yet seen the connection between the two. That is, until that day when the voice of a caring teacher sent one line of Carl Sandburg wafting across the heat of a stuffy classroom and into my soul.
“I know now it takes many, many years to write a river/ a twist of water asking a question.”
It was as if something clicked inside me, a single line that would trigger a life-long love of poetry and make clear that unbreakable connection between landscape and language.
Nearly fifty years later, I remember that moment as clearly as almost any other moment in my life. Yes, language could be used beyond the stuffy confines of an English classroom. Yes, a writer could entwine a love of landscape and a love of language into cords that can bind us to wild places, our love of nature, and the human role in all of it.
And it was that moment that I began to weave my answer to the question posed by John Felstiner in the title of a book I would read aboard the Little Dipper many, many years later: Can Poetry Save the Earth?
It is a weighty question but then some days — summer days drifting like a cloud atop the calm blue waters - seem fit for weighty questions. First, it is important to define the question “Can Poetry Save the Earth?” Felstiner says, “By ‘earth’ I don’t so much mean our planet, which will keep spinning till the sun gives out, but the natural world we’re both part of and apart from.”
We will not “save” the physical reality of the earth, which needs no saving. It is more humbling than that: will it save us, humans, our ability to survive on and with that planet? It is a question that goes directly back to the power of language to create the binds that form our connection to the landscape, to the power and necessity of poetry, to the world beyond stuffy high school classrooms.
Well used language, like a photograph in the mind, can bring into sharp focus the stunning beauty of the natural world. Like a good photograph, a well-turned phrase of poetry can snap us to attention, make us see, and awaken us. It is the “one little puff of air” that brushes William Stafford’s hand along a hiking trail in his poem, “Things That Happen." It is Mary Oliver watching her friends whispering a shy “hello” to a handful of rocks on the beach in “Watering the Stones.”
Epiphanies are not always earth-shaking events. We are not as hard to persuade as it may seem sometimes, the point Robert Francis was making throughout his poem, “Summons”:
“Keep me from going to sleep too soon / Or if I go to sleep too soon / Come wake me up. Come any hour / Of night. Come whistling up the road. / Stomp on the porch. Bang on the door. / Make me get out of bed and come / And let you in and light a light. / Tell me the northern lights are on / And make me look. Or tell me the clouds / Are doing something to the moon / They never did before, and show me. / See that I see. Talk to me till / I’m half as wide awake as you / And start to dress wondering why / I ever went to bed at all. / Tell me the walking is superb. / Not only tell me but persuade me. / You know I’m not too hard persuaded.”
Poems persuade us, convince us to look and see, awakening us to both of the world around us and our place in it. And love is the first step in changing the world. All great social causes have, at their core, love: a love for justice, a love for others, a love for the earth. We will stand up and fight for that which we love. Poetry can teach us that love.
But it is more than just a heartfelt moment. Love is a verb. It is not passive. From love, action, or as Felstiner puts it, “First consciousness, then conscience.” And once conscience has taken hold, the power of all human creativity, perseverance, and might is unleashed. There is no stronger fuel for passion than the power of love.
That is the power of a place like the Apostle Islands whose beauty makes us sit up and take notice, to come awake to the world around us. I see it in the wave-washed morning beaches, hear it in the whistle of autumn wings. “Earth’s most graphic transaction,” says Emily Dickinson, “is placed within a syllable.” In that way, there can be a syllable in every stone, every puff of wind, every “twist of water” that both awakens us to beauty and causes us to ask the question of ourselves “what am I going to do to protect that beauty?”
Can poetry save the earth? John Felstine himself says “For sure, person by person, our earthly challenge hangs on the sense and spirit that poems can awaken.” Because of a single line of Carl Sandburg poetry heard so long ago, I too would answer: Yes, when there is a poem in every wave.
— Jeff Rennicke (all photographs by the author unless otherwise noted).