Tag: climate

poetry appreciation

walking with bears (or, seeing while walking)

Oct 21, 2021 #awareness, #Catherine Pierce, #Clarion the Bear, #climate, #climate change, #climate disaster, #cop 26, #environment, #glasgow, #Pierce, #pilgrim, #pilgrimage, #planet, #responsibility by Lucy Crispin

To be more precise: one bear. On Wednesday I was, briefly, part of a Climate Pilgrimage in which a polar bear and his companion are walking from Shropshire to the Cop 26 in Glasgow. Seeing all ten feet of Clarion the Bear being moved with great care and tenderness along Kendal’s busy main street was profoundly, unexpectedly moving: all that attention being lavished on one, vulnerable creature—he looked so ectopic in the blare and bustle of town—while the actual vulnerable creatures are unprotected. It was simultaneously beautiful and appalling.

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poetry appreciation

an independent ambassador for conscience

Sep 16, 2021 #abandonment, #burke, #climate, #climate catastrophe, #compassion, #ellen hinsey, #empire, #environment, #evil, #function of poetry, #good, #hinsey, #Larkin, #moral, #Philip Larkin, #poetry, #practical criticism, #reader response, #responsibility, #war by Lucy Crispin

Here’s Ellen Hinsey on poetry: ‘Poetry is the conscience of a society… No individual poem can stop a war—that’s what diplomacy is supposed to do. But poetry is an independent ambassador for conscience: it answers to no one, it crosses borders without a passport, and it speaks the truth. That’s why… it is one of the most powerful of the arts”. Given what’s been going on in the world these last couple of weeks it feels like one of those too-apt-to-be-a-coincidence coincidences that I should meet Hinsey’s words in the same week as someone should bring to the 42 group Larkin’s ‘Homage to a Government’.

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