ecoprinting from the heart
and ‘how to be a poet’
One of the poems I regularly read to my students is Wendell Berry’s “How to be a Poet”, shared here from the pages of Poetry Foundation
How to Be a Poet
(to remind myself)
i
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.
ii
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
iii
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
Working with leaves and flowers and cloth is much like that for me. When at home, bringing colour to cloth begins with a walk, sometimes barefooted if the weather is kind and the ants are not practicing their large formation military strategies. I can step over a line of ants, but walk through a sea of them I will not. First I look to see what the parrots have pruned, and gather up their offerings, then I supplement those with leaves gathered for their scent as much as their potential colour. It is rumoured that if each of us were to plant thirty-five trees a year, we might actually do something useful for the planet and slow down climate-change. Most years I think my contribution works out to about a tree per week, when averaged out…though the more trees I plant here, the harder it gets to protect them from the marauding kangaroos who have taken up residence within the established shelter belts. Lately many of my seedlings just end up being schnacks for marsupials who see tree guards much as we view the wrapping on chocolate bars, but the survivors contribute beautifully to my dyepots by shedding lovely leaves and dropping twigs to feed the fires needed to cook the bundles. The kangaroo and koala droppings print too, but require gloves to be worn when collecting, given the potential for zoonotic parasites. Parasites and poo are not exactly poetic, either, nor are plastic gloves and masks, so they will have no place on this garment.
I wanted my ‘shapeshifter’ to be infused with the essence of home, but not necessarily to be an exhibition piece of perfect leaf prints. In the years since I pulled the stopper from the bottle and released the genii from the bottle, ecoprint as practiced by many others has evolved into making prints that look as if they’ve come from a digital printer, involving sheets of plastic as barriers and infusions of the sorts of mordants that I would not feel comfortable pouring into my compost. Lurid backgrounds are added using layers of cloth pre-soaked in brightly coloured dye-powders. Some folks are even combining synthetic dyes like procions with leaves. That all leaves (pardon the pun) me cold. I like my cloth to look as though I found it in a forest, wrapped around a stone or tucked under a bush (except of course when I am in the trail of the indigo vat, whenI want to look as though I have been blessed by the Blue Fairy).
So when I had finished stitching the garment, sewn a button to the middle pouch to keep it closer to the body and added just one more pocket so that there were nine pockets in all, I took it for a walk around the farm, gathering windfall and the occasional pruned sprig into its capacious pockets, listening to the birdsong and hoping to be blessed by the muse.