Wise words for the Earth…

April is Poetic Earth Month. We are celebrating this year with a generous contribution by Helen Nattrass (pictured right) and Victoria Field. Helen discusses the writing and poetry workshops which encourage people to not only gain inspiration from the world around them, but to open up and importantly, have fun...

Victoria Field and I co-operate to organise therapeutic and reflective writing workshops in Canterbury and East Kent. I am a retired geologist and engineer. Victoria is a poet and author who works in the field of therapeutic and reflective writing. 

A typical session involves a free-write to a prompt – 6 minutes of scribbling down anything which comes into your head in response to the prompt. Then there’s some reworking of nuggets which appeared in the writing, and finally reading a poem aloud in the group and responding to that. After each episode there is an invitation to share what you wrote. While this type of writing in the moment is generally just fun, it also invites people to write what they sometimes cannot say, things which bug and upset them.

There is evidence that this type of expressive writing, especially in groups, has a variety of health benefits. During lockdown our regular public library group wrote on-line together every week. It was a life-saver for us during that time of imposed isolation and uncertainty. We collated some of our writing and had it printed privately for ourselves under the title ‘It’s an Ill Wind’. We have now returned to our weekly in-person meetings at the library.

My study and experience of Geology and my more recent foray into the world of Geopoetry led me to introduce occasional writing sessions which consider the earth and the evolution of life. We have found that considering our planet’s 4,600 million year history, by looking at rock proxies for earth processes and reviewing the evolution of life, can be a rich stimulus for instantaneous creative writing.

This led to our ‘Wise Words for the Earth’ day in October 2022. We borrowed two boxes of rocks and fossils from the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge. Around a dozen people who knew virtually nothing about geology and the structure of the earth gathered round a table in Canterbury Public Library and wrote about rocks and fossils.

Here is a selection of geopoetry written during lockdown and in our 2022 workshop.

Geopoetry from lockdown 2020 Granite

As confident as a rock-
  those granite edges
  softened
  by the battering
  of the sea.
Would that I were softened- but
life’s battering
has sharpened me

Julie Frith 2020
_{(Previously published in Earth Lines – Geopoetry and Geopoetics 2020 eds Corbett P et al and included in ‘It’s an Ill Wind’ 2020 privately printed by Canterbury Library Wise Words Group)}

HAIKU ON EPIDOTE

MANTLE PLUME JEWELS’
BIRTH-PASSAGE FROM EARTH’S BELLY
FLAWLESS EPIDOTE

Helen Nattrass 2020
_{(Previously published in Earth Lines – Geopoetry and Geopoetics 2020 eds Corbett P et al and included in ‘It’s an Ill Wind’ 2020 privately printed by Canterbury Library Wise Words Group)}

Stones

Mythical and mystical, mysterious and beautiful
Stones torn from the earth, taken
Then hammered, chiselled, filed, and battered
Made to fit with style and mood of the time.
Worn now by women and girls
Where once such strength was male adornment.

Patricia Bowler 2020
_{(Previously published in Earth Lines – Geopoetry and Geopoetics 2020 eds Corbett P et al and included in ‘It’s an Ill Wind’ 2020 privately printed by Canterbury Library Wise Words Group)}

It will survive

It will survive,
Earth and rocks will still be there,
Under the hubris and hubbub of humanity.
It will dissolve and become architecture, archaeology
And become archaic and aesthetic
Once again.
Graffiti will become hieroglyphs of the ancients,
Foundations under the undergrowth become of interest
Or not… as the case may be.
But, “the grain of the granite” will survive
As a fortress against the swelling oceans
And out of the swing of the sea.

Wendy Blanchet 2020
_{(Included in ‘It’s an Ill Wind’ privately printed by Canterbury Library Wise Words Group)}

Writing from ‘Wise Words for the Earth – 2022’

MICA CRYSTAL

most precious and rare
perfect crystals, maybe gems
IN SKARN GRANITE’S EDGE VEINS
tourmaline zeolites
and mica, muscovite
IN SKARN GRANITE’S EDGE VEINS
platy flaky opaque
striated in the horizontal
IN SKARN GRANITE’S EDGE VEINS
slowly cooled from the earth’s cauldron
slowly grown in the rich mineral dross
IN SKARN GRANITE’S EDGE VEINS
prized and treasured
waiting for the knowing seeker
IN SKARN GRANITE’S EDGE VEIN

Helen Nattrass 2022

CONVERSATION WITH WENLOCK LIMESTONE

Response to ‘Conversation with a pebble’ by Alyson Hallett

Here’s what I’ve been wondering,
If the heart hides inside,
What hides in Limestone?

I hold the Wenlock Limestone
In my left hand. It looks like
A mesmerising leopard stepping cautiously in the savannah.

I do not know how long
It will take to notice me
And change its demeanour.

My time is slow
Limestone says, slower
Than it takes to forget.

I know this is true,
I stroke the leopard’s head,
See his gentle eye.

That’s what I’m hiding
It whispers. Fossils- trilobites
And brachiopod shells.

Ideas of what fossils
Can be. Yes, Limestone speaks
I am hiding all the world’s stories.

Elizabeth Mortimer 2022

SEA-URCHIN

Stony, slate-grey with etched ribs
Of bone-coloured stone,
Segmented like an orange.
Indented spaces where spines have been.
Hedgehog of the seas,
Spineless now and rolling
On the ocean floor
With pebbles of multifarious origins.
To be found on today’s shore
By small boys coveting sharks’ teeth,
Found on Herne Bay beach.
The main point of interest now:
The central anal mark, well-defined.
Was it for this its secrets were openly displayed?

Wendy Blanchet 2022

To find out more about writing for well-being and geopoetry in Canterbury and and East Kent, please contact the authors through this link //Thepoetrypractice.co.uk/contact.

With thanks from Scottish Centre for Geopoetics and the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge for their teaching sets of rocks.