Earth Day | Poetry as an ingredient in the environment

||| FROM SAN JUAN MAKERS GUILD |||

There was a time when nature, and the sea, seemed endless, a pristine resource that existed before and would endure well after human encounter. Can we imagine that time of endless wild? It is unknown to us.

Today we are achingly aware of our human impact on the natural world, our destruction, our frozen inability to turn back the wheel. Yet in this time of increasing self-awareness there is a place of deep emotional response, a yearning for what we may have lost, to ourselves, and to future generations, by our own hand. The beauty we behold is bittersweet. We can see it, smell it, touch it today. But will it be here for future generations? This intersection of the true wonder of the natural world, and our fraught human impacts upon the very place we love as home, is an embedded dialogue in the poetry of Jill McCabe Johnson.

You are invited to join Jill for a joint poetry reading with Washington State Poet Laureate Rena Priest at Emmanuel Episcopal Chapel in Eastsound on Saturday, April 22 as the day’s concluding Earth Day celebration. They will read from their works in the newly published I Sing the Salmon Home: Poems from Washington State.

Advanced poetry reading seating and book reservations are recommended and can be made at sanjuanmakersguild.com/eday23-spokenword/. The readings begin at 3 p.m. in the Emmanuel Episcopal Chapel, followed by a book signing and reception in the Parish Hall.

Jill McCabe Johnson is an Orcas Island resident who grew up in the Pacific Northwest and spent her childhood digging for clams and geoducks, harvesting wild berries, and reading in poor light. Jill writes narrative nonfiction and poetry, plus occasional forays into fiction with a deep social conscience and even deeper roots in nature and the natural sciences. Her aims and interests lie in protecting the endangered and leaning into what’s just and beautiful in this world.

A poet beloved by other poets, choosing to live surrounded by the nature that illuminates her writing, Jill McCabe Johnson “asserts that the world, specifically the sea, is powerfully alive and available to us by way of the imagination. With precise and lyrical language both scientific and newly created for the occasion, Johnson faces the pain of degradation, yet also celebrates the joyous, nurturing nature of the sea.” Her collection of poetry in Diary of the One Swelling Sea
“is an intimate portrait of elements-become-flesh, rendered by a consciousness and heart large enough, and generous enough, to face the complexity of hard truths. (Lia Purpura, author of Rough Likeness and King Baby)

‘For Love of Orca’s is an awarded collection of over ninety author’s works and was inspired by the Southern Resident orca Tahlequah who swam with her newly born dead calf for 17 days, touching hearts around the world. Scientists, poets, and writers responded to her grief and the plight of the endangered orcas in this moving anthology co-edited by McCabe Johnson with Andrew Shattuck McBride that features poetry, essays, and environmental writing from esteemed authors. Proceeds from the book benefit The SeaDoc Society for their efforts in helping restore the Southern Resident orca population.

In 2020, the Nautilus Book Awards gave For Love of Orcas the Silver Award in Animals and Nature. Nautilus Book Awards recognizes “better books for a better world.” For the Love of Orcas will be available at the Earth Day book signing. Living on Orcas Island, Jill McCabe Johnson is a close neighbor to the sea. In her briny poems, she takes us even closer–letting us read the sea’s diary. From sea ground to surface, we see the intimate, inside story. Careful observation, precise research, musical phrasing, and active imagining surge through these poems. Ninety-five percent of the earth’s oceans remain unexplored. What better metaphor for the vast mysteries of our existence–the constant change, the contamination, the resurgence, the essence of life and death. In these elegant poems, forces huge as magma shove up and forces delicate as brittle stars taste changes in sea water. Marvelous.” (Review for Diary of the One Swelling Sea from Peggy Shumaker, author of ‘Gnawed Bones’ and Just Breathe Normally.)

Visit Jill’s website with poetry and multi-media projects at jillmccabejohnson.com/.