Preparing a Ground for a Better Future through Ecopoetics
In the last article, I've featured a few poets writing on the environment. The articles now lead us to speculate further the origin of ecocriticism, the directions it has taken, and the debates that it brings to the table. Is poetry a possible artery for conveying our concerns for the environment and do so economically and elegantly? Can such poetry influence writers, readers, neighbours, and global species, to a literary meditation contemplating the future of the environment and the impending crisis?
Let's see how Madhur Anand, Canadian poet, professor, and ecologist, handles environment in A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes. In the book, Madhur Anand equates chlorophyll to poetry. Her poems in the volume are periscopes focusing on the future of ecology. While doing so, she treats her poems as objects of art that deliver insightful reading pleasure.
Interestingly, Madhur Anand didn't start writing poetry until she was 25. She knew she was a poet and writer from her childhood but never realized that her PhD paper on ecology would culminate into her first book of poems. In the book, Madhur isn't treating the environment as a popular trope but shows us how chlorophyll and poetry share the same vein.
Don McKay, author of Strike/Slip and the winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, states that Madhur Anand's "poems are alive with the potency of their own hybrid attentions – rapt, nimble, and capable of unlocking the energies asleep in eco-scientific jargon as well as popular culture and the poet's Indian heritage."
Furthering on "unlocking energies," A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes reveals to us the pattern of small changes culminating in colossal impact. At a TEDx Waterloo talk on environment, Madhur explains the vein shared by poetry and chlorophyll. She says, "Chlorophyll transforming light into energy is a scientifically important phenomenon that doubles as poetic concept as well. "What is poetry, if not a catalyst for a similar type of transformation?" she adds.
The collective scope of imagination in ecology and poetry is enormous. It is not something that either Madhur or I feel. It is something Albert Einstein said, "Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions." Here, it is like the visionary is always poetic is always practical. Madhur emphasizes, "And this is why I stand here now as a scientist...choosing the power of poetry and waxing poetic for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a true blue dream of sky and for everything natural, which is infinite."
Poet, professor, and ecologist, Madhur Anand leads us from the front. Young poets who hold it against "I wandered lonely as a cloud," Lines Written A Few Miles above the Tintern Abbey," Stopping by the Woods…," and the Lucy Poems, it is time for them to pause and get a taste of A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes.
We all want to be the indices—the "I- told-you-so person." So as poets, can we yield an entire field of poetry that engages in this rabid fight for environmental justice? Can we, without any bias, bring in more science and insight into our poetry that challenges the thinking of the generation and builds a more natural platform for environmental activism?