Sometimes our inner poet reveals itself in such surprising ways.

A review and video has appeared on Amazon in relation to our book “Simple Habits for Complex Times.”  The Amazon Customer who posted the review ordered our book and ended up with a surprise.  The book had the right cover but the wrong contents.  See her video here.

On the inside of our covers, complete with our authors’ pic, was “Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene” by Lynn Keller.   I have a shelf of books on environmental thought.  I am wondering whether to add this one.  The Amazon blurb describes it as “cutting-edge work in ecocriticism” that assesses the work of 21^st Century poets who “respond to environments transformed by people and take “nature” to be a far more inclusive and culturally imbricated category than conventional nature poetry does.”  I was impressed with imbricated but I had to look it up.  It means “overlapped” like tiles on a roof.

Then I wondered what Simple Habits might look like recomposed as eco poetry.  Here are three haiku and a sonnet.

 

Three Haiku

 

The first habit is

To ask different questions.

What does the bee think?

 

Simple Habits says

“Take multiple perspectives.”

Fine for a fly

 

Slip into systems

Like Alewife heading upstream.

Fish or train station?

 

Simple Habits: The Sonnet

How can we see systems

When they are all around?

We go seeking little gems

When what’s commonplace astounds.

 

Perhaps a different question?

Seeking something unmatched?

We offer this suggestion

With a question mark attached.

 

Let’s take many perspectives

We can see the world anew

It helps avoid invective

And builds a bigger view

 

Our simple habits imbricate.

They naturally self-replicate.