The Third Ray » Poetry

Was Shakespeare A Conservationist?

Joe Zammit-Lucia — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 20:15:27 +0000

The ideas of conservation and environmental considerations had not yet been dreamt of in Shakespeare’s time. Yet his Sonnet Number IV already, in those times recognizes that Nature’s gifts should be used wisely, not wasted but preserved to benefit future generations. Here is the sonnet:

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thy self thy beauty’s legacy?
Nature’s bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free:
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thy self alone,
Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive:
Then how when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
Which, used, lives th’ executor to be.

Nature gives nothing but it lends

Why do you abuse the bounteous largesse that Nature gives?

Why do you use such great sums [of resources] and yet you cannot live?

And when you’re gone, what legacy will you leave?

These sentiments are highly relevant today but it seems amazing that Shakespeare would have put them forward them so clearly so long ago – centuries before Aldo Leopold or anyone else had even imagined them.

Cultural Response To Climate Change – David Buckland and Cape Farewell

Joe Zammit-Lucia — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 18:00:48 +0000

The creation, expansion and success of Cape Farewell maybe represents the most ambitious, most far-sighted and most successful effort to date to place the arts front and center in the debate about climate change. Created by David Buckland in 2001, Cape Farewell brings together artists, scientists, educators and the media in a series of expeditions to explore issues related to climate change. These expeditions result in the creation of artworks and other ideas and materials that are then brought back to influence the general public.

David Buckland: The Great White Sale. These images are made in a short window of time when the power of the video projector matches the light of dawn, when there is both message and ice. This fleeting moment of human excess is so short, two hundred years, but for the glacier it is barely a single breath taken.

Cape Farewell has already organized a number of art exhibitions as a result of the works created during the expeditions. The latest traveling exhibit – u-n-f-o-l-d opens in Chicago on March 16th. According to David Buckland, “We intend to communicate through art works our understanding of the changing climate on a human scale, so that our individual lives can have meaning in what is a global problem.”

This blog has reviewed the work of a number of artists that have collaborated with Cape Farewell. These include Lemn Sissay, Iain McEwan, and Lucy + Jorge Orta. Buckland also curated the highly successful EARTH exhibit at the Royal Academy in 2009.

Adriane Colburn: Forest for the Trees is a meditation on the complex relationship between nature and industry; sustained land vs. commodified land; matter on the surface of the earth vs. the matter below ground; the morphing of the forest into an industrial landscape; and the fine lines between use and exploitation.

Cape Farewell is probably the most important undertaking to date that, in an organized and concerted way, engages the arts in issues of climate change and the environment.

Lemn Sissay at the Royal Academy in London

Joe Zammit-Lucia — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 03:03:40 +0000

Lemn Sissay’s performance video of his poem WHAT IF? was, for me, one of the highlights of the Royal Academy’s current exhibit entitled EARTH – Art of a Changing World.

The exhibit “sets out to consider the impact of climate change, and our transition to a new world, on the practice of a broad range of contemporary artists, working in a wide-variety of media.” It is encouraging that an institution like the Royal Academy has chosen to address environmental issues in a major exhibit and that it has showcased the work of so many contemporary artists addressing these issues. Chris Jordan and Edward Burtynsky were two of the artists featured in the exhibit.

However, for me, Lemn Sissay’s poem performed on video was one of the more powerful works in the exhibit.

You can view the video here and the text of the poem is reproduced below.

A lost number in the equation
A simple, understandable miscalculation
And what if on the basis of that
The world as we know it changed its matter of fact

Let me get it right. What if we got it wrong?
What if we weakened ourselves getting strong?
What if we found in the ground a file of proof?
What if the foundations missed a vital truth?
What if the industrial dream sold us out from within?
What if our unpunishable defense sealed us in?
What if our wanted more was making less?
And what if all of this wasn’t progress?

Let me get it right. What if we got it wrong?
What if we weakened ourselves getting strong?
What if our wanting more was making less?
And what if all of this wasn’t progress?
What if the disappearing rivers of Eritrea,
the rising tides and encroaching fear
What if the tear inside the protective skin
of Earth was trying to tell us something?

Let me get it right. What if we got it wrong?
What if we weakened ourselves getting strong?
What if the message carried in the wind was saying something?
From butterfly wings to the hurricane
It’s the small things that make great change
In the question towards the end of the leases
no longer the origin but the end of species

Let me get it right. What if we got it wrong?
What if the message carried in the wind was saying something?

Long Live This Wounded Planet

Joe Zammit-Lucia — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:11:39 +0000

Poetry as a literary art form is once again gaining popularity. There is no shortage of poems addressing nature and Man’s interaction with it. I find this piece by Adrian Mitchell inspiring:

William Blake says: Everything that Lives is Holy

Long live the Child
Long live the Mother and Father
Long live the People

Long live this wounded Planet
Long live the good milk of the Air

Long live the spawning Rivers and the
Mothering Oceans
Long live the juice of the Grass
And all the determined greenery of the Globe

Long live the Elephants and the Sea Horses,
the Humming-Birds and the Gorillas,
the Dogs and cats and Field-Mice –
all the surviving Animals
our innocent Sisters and Brothers

long live the Earth, deeper than all our thinking

we have done enough killing

Long live the Man
Long live the Woman
Who use both courage and compassion
Long live their Children

Adrian Mitchell