{"id":458,"date":"2021-07-16T14:56:00","date_gmt":"2021-07-16T14:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nclacommunity.org\/newdefences\/?p=458"},"modified":"2021-07-16T14:54:06","modified_gmt":"2021-07-16T14:54:06","slug":"defending-the-dawn-chorus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nclacommunity.org\/newdefences\/2021\/07\/16\/defending-the-dawn-chorus\/","title":{"rendered":"Defending the Dawn Chorus"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Linda France<\/p>\n\n

\u00a0<\/div>\n\n

The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong.<\/em>
The world is part of our own self and we are part of its suffering wholeness.<\/em>
Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing.<\/em>
And the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness<\/em>
of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature.<\/em>

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee1<\/sup><\/p>\n\n

\u00a0<\/div>\n\n

In my role as Climate Writer with Newcastle University and New Writing North, I am currently preparing a new participatory project (following last year\u2019s filmpoem Murmuration<\/em>) to gather people\u2019s voices in a Dawn Chorus<\/em>, a collective sound poem for the beginning of the world.\u00a0 Remember Caedmon\u2019s dream, when God told him, no singer till then, that he should \u2018sing the beginning of created things\u2019, and he woke up a poet (Bede 351).\u00a0 Who would think it necessary once again to \u2018sing the beginning of created things\u2019, to defend a dawn chorus \u2013 that magical chiming of the return of the light, the trilling and fluting of an orchestra of birds singing their hearts out, simply glad to be alive to live another day, build their nests and nurture their young?\u00a0 Why do we not wake up like that ourselves every single day \u2013 astonished at the miracle of life, the intricate engines of our bodies, connected within and without to all the elements and the beyond-human world, open to every possibility that comes our way?\u00a0 When did it get stale and humdrum, bleak and burdensome, a labour, not of love, but of Sisyphean effort and frustration?<\/p>\n\n

In 2020, in the UK alone, 40 million fewer birds took part in the dawn chorus than 50 years ago.\u00a0 Across the planet, 40 per cent of bird species are in decline. In North America, 2.9 billion fewer birds take to the air than during the 1970s. Some countries in Africa and Asia have charted even more catastrophic declines.2<\/sup><\/p>\n\n

Imagine, as Rachel Carson conjured in 1962, a \u2018silent spring\u2019, a world with no dawn chorus, no bird song.\u00a0 Waiting until this beautiful phenomenon we take so much for granted disappears will be too late.\u00a0 And so we must defend, preserve, remember, re-imagine our deep connection with these creatures from whom it is said we learnt our own human ways of speaking and singing.\u00a0 Keats summoned the eery possibility of a silent spring in his 1819 poem \u2018La Belle Dame Sans Merci\u2019, where the speaker, like Caedmon, wakes from a dream, but his is of a world under a spell, where, life starved of itself, \u2018The sedge is withered from the lake, | And no birds sing\u2019 (Keats, ll.\u00a0 3-4).<\/p>\n\n

Birds didn\u2019t just teach us the beauty of shaped breath, language and melody, they have also offered us the gift of their lightness, the mechanics of flight, the grace of flowing movement and their faith in flocking, roosting and nesting.\u00a0 In some cultures they represent the soul and its transmigration, sky-borne cycles of transformation.\u00a0 Trying to imagine a world with no birds is as difficult as it is, for a poet at least, to conceive of a world without poetry.\u00a0 Isn\u2019t that the moribund state Keats is imagining at the end of \u2018La Belle Dame Sans Merci\u2019 \u2013 human death, the poet\u2019s death, and the end of everything?<\/p>\n\n

Climate Change threatens us with just that \u2013 the end of everything: a threat very few people are able to wake up to, to feel in their own bodies, rather than simply “know”, as in mostly ignore, seek distraction from, despite the evidence.\u00a0 We see it in the media, where The End of Everything rarely makes the headlines, less important than dramas of much less significance or more celebrity appeal.\u00a0 Jorie Graham pointed out the cynical manipulation of reporting in a 2014 interview, still shockingly relevant today:<\/p>\n\n

\u2018When the Secretary General of the UN, at the climate conference, in Bali, said we had a small window of opportunity to take real action as a planet or we faced \u201coblivion\u201d, that comment ended up on page 8, I believe, of the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, in a tiny story. I actually called the international desk of the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0to ask them what on earth (literally) they thought they were doing? \u2026 And when the kind editor at the paper of record answered me it really took my breath away: yes, she said, what you say is true, but no action was taken by the US at Bali, and if nothing happens then that can’t really be a front page story. NOTHING HAPPENING is the story, I tried to say, as calmly as possible. But there you have it. That is, to my mind, how we are \u2018coming to terms\u2019 with it.\u2018<\/p>\n\n

Ever since earlier work appearing in her Selected Poems<\/em>, The Dream of the Unified Field <\/em>in 1996, keeping track of accelerating levels of emissions and a shrinking window to act, Jorie Graham\u2019s antennae have been tuned to ways of \u2018coming to terms\u2019 with man-made Climate Change, Mass Extinction and the existential crisis they have brought in their wake.\u00a0 In her latest collection, Runaway<\/em>, while she was \u2018accidentally | listening\u2019:<\/p>\n\n

\u2026The earth
said remember

me.\u00a0 I am the
earth it said.\u00a0 Re-
member me.

(\u2018Poem\u2019, ll. 7-8, 39-43)<\/p>\n\n

Like myself and many poets across the globe, Graham is choosing to face the facts and the feelings of how it is to live at this time of deep ecological awareness under extreme pressure.\u00a0 We are compelled to try to understand the cognitive dissonance shown by a species failing to take the necessary action to save itself, its fellow species and our shared environment when we have all the resources we need to make such remedial action possible.\u00a0 It is not only poets who are shaking their heads in disbelief.\u00a0 There is untold grief and confusion among the majority of the world\u2019s citizens.\u00a0 The difference is that poets seek to find the words for this most hyper of objects (Morton), to articulate the unspeakable, to make sense of it for themselves and for others.\u00a0 When the medicine is there, why do we persist in refusing to take it?<\/p>\n\n

If we do nothing else, we can tell the truth about what we see happening \u2013 which, whatever newspapers fail to report or governments neglect to address, is worthy of everybody\u2019s attention.\u00a0 We can bear witness to the decline in bird populations, the melting glaciers, the villages lost to floods and hurricanes and the forests on fire.\u00a0 We can try to find the words for how it feels in our suffering human bodies to see these losses and disasters, and know that if they are happening for a single person, they are happening for us all.\u00a0 Roger Robinson has called poetry a machine for empathy.\u00a0 A poem can connect us in ways that go beyond the words it summons in the air or on the page.\u00a0 In the midst of chaos, it invokes a glimmer of light to walk towards, often in someone else\u2019s shoes.<\/p>\n\n

Truth-telling and transparency are necessary to redress the balance of what goes unreported, what stays invisible and unspoken.\u00a0 If there is spirit and detail, we have become so bewildered by detail we have forgotten the spirit that keeps our raw humanity alive.\u00a0 A poem can be a small but powerful act of restitution and protest.\u00a0 It can change the atoms around its saying in ways beyond our rational understanding; a reliance on reason that has brought us to our current state of alienation, imbalance and disease, pollution, delusion and injustice.\u00a0 Our list of ailments is long.\u00a0 Woody Guthrie said that it is the folksinger\u2019s job to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.\u00a0 That is also poetry\u2019s task.<\/p>\n\n

In the right hands, a poem is an arrow to the heart.\u00a0 It lodges in the place where people feel, the ground they act from.\u00a0 Thinking alone solves very few problems and risks a fatal untethering from tender reality.\u00a0 We must remember we have bodies, strong and fragile, recall our natural compassion.\u00a0 Turning towards a more sustainable future begins there.\u00a0 The right poem at the right time could (and does) make all the difference \u2013 to an individual, a community or a culture.\u00a0 By virtue of its economy, a poem is concentrated, intense; a shorter form more suited these days to people\u2019s diminished attention spans.\u00a0 Look at the signs people hold aloft at Climate Change rallies \u2013 so much imagination and insight, wit and heartfelt intention painted on modest cardboard rectangles \u2013 aren\u2019t these also wild poetries, growing out of the cracks?<\/p>\n\n

As the cowherd Caedmon discovered, poetry is transfiguring, it makes the sacred possible.\u00a0 After turning into a poet, he went on to become ordained as a monk. \u00a0Once we are able to see the whole (holy) picture, it is impossible to commit a deliberate act of violence against the planet or any other creature:\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

Accept what comes from silence.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
Make the best you can of it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
Of the little words that come\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
out of the silence, like prayers\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
prayed back to the one who prays,\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
make a poem that does not disturb\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
the silence from which it came.

(Berry, ll. 23-9)<\/p>\n\n

A poem makes us literally stop as we read and take it in.\u00a0 In where?\u00a0 Heart, lungs or gut?\u00a0 So how is it digested?\u00a0 How does it release its sustaining nourishment?\u00a0 We grab it on the go at our peril \u2013 as well as soul food, poetry is slow food.\u00a0 This stilled but dynamic process changes our relationship with time so we are able to dwell in the ongoing moment.\u00a0 We open into an awareness of deep time and our place in the vast unfolding of life for its own sake, rather than a project governed by profit and domination, where we are expected to function like the machines on which we\u2019ve come to depend.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

Poetry is home-made, non-utilitarian, intimate.\u00a0 Belonging to everyone and to no one, it passes from mouth to ear to eye to mouth like \u2018a virus from outer space\u2019.3<\/sup>\u00a0 Relying at its most minimal only on pencil and paper (a good memory or a bar of soap if the poet is imprisoned), it defies unwieldy systems of industrial growth, the so-called free market and the laws of copyright.\u00a0 It appears to cost nothing, although:<\/p>\n\n

Quick now, here, now, always \u2013
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)

(Eliot, V.39-41)<\/p>\n\n

Yes, none of this is easy \u2013 going upstream, against the current, walking a path of paradox, articulating the unspeakable.\u00a0 As well as harnessing the energies of beginnings, we need to be brave about endings.\u00a0 Yang Lian says:<\/p>\n\n

\u2018I must write every poem as the very last piece\u2026Every step is the \u201clast poem\u201d: it pursues me like a precipice, so there is nowhere to turn back to, and I can only go forward.\u00a0 Every word I write is starting from the impossible.\u2019<\/p>\n\n

Poets know the difference between elegy and ode and how they\u2019ve become entangled.\u00a0 It is a human need to honour our pain for the world, express our grief for what we\u2019ve already lost and the great swathes of biodiversity and ecosystems we\u2019re at risk of losing.\u00a0 But we also need to sing the wonder and mystery of this life on this earth so that we know what it is we must stand up and protect:<\/p>\n\n

Stay away from anything\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
that obscures the place it is in.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
There are no unsacred places;\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
there are only sacred places\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
and desecrated places.

(Berry, ll. 18-22).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

A poem \u2013 whether writing or reading it \u2013 helps us step into our own agency, our natural authority as citizens to do whatever needs to be done to reverse the current dangerous momentum towards unchecked carbon emissions, species loss and rampant system imbalance.\u00a0 People languish in the thrall of paralysis and procrastination, enemies to active hope and positive, radical change.\u00a0 But once we feel ourselves enlivened, deeply connected through our own senses to the web of life, the human imagination does what it does organically, opening up new perspectives and solutions, fresh and helpful ways with language and concepts.\u00a0 These accumulate and spread, changing cultures, myths and the systems of which we are part.\u00a0 This is already happening but we need to gain momentum, reach a critical mass, when turning towards a better future rather than a toxic moribund one is no longer in doubt.<\/p>\n\n

It\u2019s more important than it\u2019s ever been to encompass community, collectivity and the oral tradition.\u00a0 Oriental and Judeo-Christian traditions offer variations on the same teaching:<\/p>\n\n

Wisdom tells me I am nothing.
Love tells me I am everything. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
Between the two my life flows.4<\/sup><\/p>\n\n

And there, poetry belongs to everybody.\u00a0 This is not the time for old hierarchies or the poet as hero, however unsung.\u00a0 Most people who aren\u2019t poets are more interested in the poem, not the poet.\u00a0 Stevie Smith said \u2018The poet is not an important fellow.\u00a0 There will always be another poet\u2019 (qtd. in \u2018Stevie Smith\u2019).\u00a0 Hallelujah to that.\u00a0 Humility is required as we broach the challenges of the Climate Crisis.\u00a0 Humility<\/em>, from the same root as humus<\/em>, the earth we\u2019re made of, the earth we depend upon for our humanity<\/em>.\u00a0 The way a single poem works within the culture is a paradigm for the role of the individual within a society on the brink of collapse \u2013 vital, but marginal without the weight of numbers.\u00a0 Patti Smith, another of this essay\u2019s dreamers, acknowledges her debt to Shelley and Blake, and shares the inheritance:<\/p>\n\n

\u2026the people have the power
To redeem the work of fools
Upon the meek the graces shower
It\u2019s decreed the people rule
The people have the power.<\/p>\n\n

And so we circle back to the singing body and \u2018the thing with feathers\u2019 we might bring to our experience of Climate Change.\u00a0 As environmentalist Joanna Macy points out:<\/p>\n\n

\u2018The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world \u2013 we\u2019ve actually been on the way quite a while.\u00a0 It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.\u2019 (Macy and Brown 34)<\/p>\n\n

With the robin, thrush, blackbird, wagtail, great tit, chiff-chaff, goldcrest, blackcap, treecreeper and wren, alone and together, we wake up to another day, with a renewed intention to do what we can, write and read, as if our lives depend on it.\u00a0 Which they do.\u00a0 Every day, beginning again with finding the words and what those words make possible:<\/p>\n\n

You have never possessed anything
as deeply as this.
This is all you have owned
from the first outcry
through forever;
you can never be dispossessed.

(Walcott, ll. 14-19)<\/p>\n\n

\u00a0<\/div>\n
\n


Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

1<\/sup> Quoted in Macy and Brown, p. 26.<\/p>\n\n

2<\/sup> You can read more about the impact of Climate Change on bird life here: https:\/\/geographical.co.uk\/nature\/wildlife\/item\/3860-dossier-bird-declines<\/a><\/p>\n\n

3<\/sup> Laurie Anderson attributes the title of her song \u2018Language is A Virus (from Outer Space)\u2019 to William S. Burroughs.<\/p>\n\n

4<\/sup> This teaching from Sri Nisagardattar Maharaj is cited by Jack Kornfield.<\/p>\n\n

\u00a0<\/div>\n
\n


Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation<\/em>. Translated by L. Gidley. James Parker, 1870.<\/p>\n

Berry, Wendell. \u2018How to Be a Poet\u2019, in New Collected Poems<\/em>. Counter Point, 2021.<\/p>\n\n

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring.<\/em> Houghton Mifflin, 1962.<\/p>\n\n

Eliot. T.S. \u2018Little Gidding\u2019, in Four Quartets<\/em>. Faber, 1943.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

France, Linda, and Sweeney, Kate. \u2018Murmuration\u2019. YouTube<\/em>, uploaded by New Writing North, 11 Nov 2020. https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=eFnkvGGZDuw<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

Graham, Jorie. The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems<\/em>. Carcanet, 1996.<\/p>\n\n

Graham, Jorie. \u2018Poem\u2019, in Runaway<\/em>. Carcanet, 2008.<\/p>\n\n

Graham, Jorie. \u2018Imagining the Unimaginable\u2019. Interview by Deidre Wengen. Poets.org<\/em>, 21 Feb 2014. https:\/\/poets.org\/text\/imagining-unimaginable-jorie-graham-conversation<\/a>. Accessed 15.05.2021.<\/p>\n\n

Keats, John. \u2018La Belle Dame Sans Merci\u2019, in The Complete Poems<\/em>. Ed. by John Barnard. Penguin, 1988.<\/p>\n\n

Kornfield, Jack. \u2018Love Says We Are Everything\u2019. Jack Kornfield<\/em>. https:\/\/jackkornfield.com\/identification\/<\/a>. Accessed 20.05.2021.<\/p>\n\n

Lian, Yang. \u2018Where did \u201cAnniversary Snow\u201d fall?\u2019. Poetry in Translation<\/em>, 26 Mar 2021. https:\/\/www.poetrytranslation.org\/articles\/where-did-anniversary-snow-fall<\/a>. Accessed 15.05.2021.<\/p>\n\n

Macy, Joanna, and Brown, Molly. Coming Back to Life<\/em>. New Society Publishers, 2019.<\/p>\n\n

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World<\/em>. University of Minneapolis Press, 2013.<\/p>\n\n

Robinson, Roger. \u2018Poets can translate trauma\u2019. Interview by Anita Sethi. Guardian<\/em>, 13 Jun 2020. https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2020\/jun\/13\/roger-robinson-poets-can-translate-trauma<\/a>. Accessed 14.05.2021.<\/p>\n\n

Smith, Patti. \u2018People Have the Power\u2019. Dream Life<\/em>. Arista, 1988.<\/p>\n\n

\u2018Stevie Smith\u2019. The Poetry Archive<\/em>. https:\/\/poetryarchive.org\/poet\/stevie-smith\/<\/a>. Accessed 14.05.2021.<\/p>\n\n

Walcott, Derek. \u2018Earth\u2019. Selected Poems<\/em>. Faber, 2009.<\/p>\n\n

\u00a0<\/div>\n
\n


Linda France<\/strong> has published eight poetry collections, including The Gentleness of the Very Tall<\/em> (Bloodaxe 1994 \u2013 a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; longlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize) and Reading the Flowers<\/em> (Arc 2016 \u2013 longlisted for the Laurel Prize; \u2018Bernard and Cerinthe\u2019 won the 2013 National Poetry Competition). Her work received a 2020 Society of Authors’ Cholmondley Award. \u00a0A new collection of poems, created from her PhD research into the ecology of women and landscape, will be published next year as The Knucklebone Floor<\/em>. \u00a0She is currently Climate Writer with New Writing North and Newcastle University.<\/p>\n\n

You can find out more about contributing to the collective Dawn Chorus project here: https:\/\/newwritingnorth.com\/dawn-chorus\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n

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Linda France<\/p>\n

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