Poetry and Environmental Justice — featuring Ed Roberson, Tiffany Higgins, Eli Clare, Lehua M. Taitano: April 17, 2021

Eli Clare reads several unpublished poems: "Bear," "How to Love for the Long Haul," a series of three poems titled "Tremors," and concludes with "Heartbreak," dedicated to Stacey Milbern, prominent queer disability rights activist, based in Oakland, who had recently died.

Tiffany Higgins shares the words and work, via video, of two indigenous Brazilian women, Márcia Wayna Kambeba, of the Omágua/Kambeba people, and Bel Juruna, of the Juruna people. Higgins reads "The Floating People" by Marcia Kambeba, in Portuguese and in her translation to American English, and speaks of the video with Bel Juruna regarding the Xingu River and the destructive effects of the Belo Monte Dam, a hydroelectric dam complex in the Brazilian state of Pará.

Higgins' note on "The Poetry of Climate Change in the Global South" (accompanying her translation of another of Márcia Kambeba's poems) appears at World Literature Today, Summer 2019).

Ed Roberson reads from Asked What Has Changed (Wesleyan University Press, 2021). He starts with the title poem, then goes on to read "A Drop of Water"; "The Street Knows It's Changed"; "Speculation," after William Blake's "The Tyger"; and ends his reading with "The Corner Unit."

Lehua Taitano reads her essay titled "The Language of Recognition: One Indigenous Approach to Pedagogy" (as published in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 62 No. 4, Winter 2021).

The four poets convene after their presentations and briefly address each other's work. Steve Dickison, as emcee, offers opening comments, remarking on the concept of "spiralized time" (viz Lehua Taitano) and how moments among the writers' work as presented overlaps. Lehua Taitano speaks of the pleasure of the poets coming to know each other here through their activism and "getting to the quick of things." Ed Roberson speaks to "the idea of making rituals that come from deeply inside yourself...to make of it a ritual that includes other people" in Taitano's presentation. Dickison remarks on the differences among the writers as working "not in opposition" to each other and points to Eli Clare's emotionally complex characterization of environmental justice. Clare then talks about the coexistence of love and rage, and what he sees as their inseparability.