A “Poetry for Sustainability” lunch

Today, we tried a new format of our “Transformation Thursdays” (come-as-you-are informal lunch meetings where colleagues who are interested in Teaching for Sustainability can join me and Terese to chat about Teaching for Sustainability. No preparation required, but you are welcome to bring questions and topics if you like!) — first of all, it was a Wednesday, and second of all, today we had a topic: “Poetry for Sustainability”.

For today’s meeting, Ellen Turner and Barbara Barrow from the Centre for Languages and Literature here at Lund University suggested we read two poems: Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, and Craig Santos Perez “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier (after Wallace Stevens)”. And that was so interesting!

We talked about all kinds of stuff: How in the first verse in one poem everything is still and only the eye is moving, the perception of the world is changing, whereas in the other one the glaciers are collapsing but nothing moves to do something about it. How the ending, “The glacier fits In our warm-hands” is so powerful and touching. How for some people glaciers and polar bears are so far removed from their realities that they are difficult to relate to (when for me, I have experienced both “in the wild”, and I used a picture that I took of a polar bear myself, when I drew one when first reading the poem, because it relates so much to my own experiences). And how we could use poetry in our Teaching for Sustainability. I had a #scipoem phase years ago, but I still remember how much I enjoyed writing those. And I think asking people to write poetry to express thoughts is, similar to the six-word stories that we currently use a lot in focus group interviews, a great method to help people get to the point. It emboldens them to be very clear in their language, because they have the excuse that they “had to” in such a short form.

We also talked about many other topics, and I always get a lot of energy from talking with people who want to make a difference! So I think this was very successful, and I look forward to doing something similar again soon!