HANOVER — Poets and environmentalists are working together to make more people aware about protecting open land and the nature around them.
As part of that effort, land trusts partnered with poets to publish an anthology that celebrates parcels of conserved land. The Upper Valley Land Trust worked with three poets who will share their work in a virtual reading Wednesday on Zoom.
Lis McLoughlin, a poet who runs a business called NatureCulture, led the project and edited the anthology, Writing the Land: Northeast.
“The Writing the Land project as a whole came to me because I am a poet, and I was very frustrated with the lack of opportunity (for) poetry to do real work,” she said. “Usually, you’re preaching to the choir as a nature poet. People find it, and they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s nice’.”
“I wanted to find a way to get poetry to support land trusts.”
McLoughlin lives in an off-grid cottage in a mature forest in Northfield, Mass, and she loves the wild nature around her home.
But she knows that the owners of farms and forestland are growing older, and she is anxious about development swallowing open land. Through the anthology, poets can promote the work of land trusts and do their bit for conservation “in a time when land needs all the help it can get to survive,” as she put it in her introduction.
The idea caught on quickly. In its inaugural year, the Writing the Land Project matched 11 land trusts and 40 poets. Each poet “adopted” one parcel of land and wrote a series of poems inspired by it. Next year, the project will be publishing four anthologies to accommodate 150 poets and over 50 land trusts.
Alison Marchione, the Upper Valley Land Trust’s program director, said that people often are surprised when they discover that a piece of land just minutes from where they live is conserved and open to the public. She hopes that the anthology will raise awareness about publicly accessible land that the land trust stewards.
This year, the project matched the UVLT with three poets. Jessica Purdy, of Exeter, N.H visited Hanover to write about 38 acres of wetlands in the headwaters of the Mascoma River ominously named the Dismal on Pressey Brook.
Christopher Locke, of Essex, N.Y., meditated on a fraught personal relationship in his poems about the dramatic gorge at Trues Ledges in Lebanon. Hope Jordan, of Canterbury, N.H., remembered her childhood as she wrote about 1,100 acres of open fields and forest in Charlestown.
This year’s anthology has a great “diversity of voices,” McLoughlin said, with poets musing on everything from the smallest individual leaf to the long and winding history of a river.
When Purdy visited the Dismal, two details caught her eye: The way the trees’ roots wrapped around rocks lodged below them, and a fallen tree sprawled across a waterfall.
“(The tree) almost ruined the pristine quality of this waterfall. But at the same time, that was the beauty of it,” she said. “In some ways, nature is not perfect, and imperfection is often what draws the eye.”
Locke traveled east from his home in the Adirondacks in November when the trees had already shed the leaves that are so popular on postcards. He found something majestic in the scene, appreciating “a sense of fortitude and persistence … with that particular land.”
He captured that solidity in verse, writing:
“Wind falters, pushes around, / the immovable as I busy / the shoreline with quick steps / pebbles spitting underfoot.”
“Not many people really know how to hear the voices of nature when they’re out in nature,” McLoughlin said. “Or they hear it and don’t understand it. Poets are good at understanding, and they have a unique role in presenting the relationship between humans and the rest of nature … They are touching people’s hearts and minds.”
To register for the poetry reading, which is at noon on Wednesday, Nov. 3, visit https://uvlt.org/calendar/.
Claire Potter is a Report for America corps member. She can be reached at cpotter@vnews.com or 603-727- 3242.
Correction
NatureCulture is a for-profit busines s based in Northfield, Mass. An earlier version of this story incorrectly described what type of organization it is.