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The Poetry of Science
Children Around the World Use Art, Writing and a "River of Words" to Discover their Connection to Place
by Candice Stover

Gather a few thousand children at the river, give them a new way to see what's in front of them, and you just might change how the next generation cares for the planet.

That conviction drives the current behind River of Words (ROW), an annual environmental poetry and art competition for children worldwide. Co-sponsored by a consortium of arts and environmental groups, the 1998 competition drew four thousand entries from forty-four states and eight countries and is spilling over into local channels of ROW committed to helping children discover, interpret, and care for their ecological addresses.

Since that's an address most kids-and adults-don't carry in their memory's hip pocket, learning how to locate it through science and express it through art and poetry is one way ROW combines this international contest with an innovative classroom curriculum. ROW's Teacher's Guide-2000 copies went out in 1998, though it's not required to enter-provides a "What's Your Ecological Address?" quiz, plus tips on how to find your bioregion, run poetry writing sessions, and create a watershed in your hand. None of the guide's individual and field activities is grade-specific; instead, they're designed to piggyback onto existing curricula to help teachers and students of all ages "Discover the geography of your own place." ROW also offers occasional teacher-training workshops around the country. The contest and the curriculum can be used either together or separately, and any child in the world can enter the contest, with or without a teacher's support.

Behind the curriculum stands an invitation to get kids out of the classroom and down to the river-or, if not the river, to the puddle in the schoolyard, the creek clogged with shopping carts, or the cracked bed where the water once ran. ROW's sponsors-which include International Rivers Network (IRN), a Berkeley-based nonprofit that links human rights and environmental protection in promoting sound river management, The Library of Congress Center for the Book, and former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass-believe getting kids closer to the worlds in the watershed gets us all closer to ecological survival. As Hass says in the guide's introduction: "The idea of River of Words is to ask our children to educate themselves about the place where they live and to unleash their imaginations. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it-if we are going to preserve it. Good science and a vital art and, in the long run, wisdom."

Call this combination of art and science, "The Key to the River," and see it in Jennifer Brisson's painting by the same name, which won the thirteen-year-old from Clarkton, North Carolina, a grand prize. During ROW's third annual awards ceremony at the Library of Congress last May, someone asked Brisson what the number twelve on her genial-looking turtle's key meant. The transparency of her answer fits ROW's philosophy, linking fact and imagination without a jiggle or a hitch: "I had a key with the number twelve on it."

Pamela Michael, ROW's whirlwind director, recalls early brainstorming sessions at IRN when a children's poetry competition encouraging that link and the name "River of Words" didn't exist. "We were looking for some hoopla around IRN's tenth anniversary [in 1996]," Michael says. "I woke up with the acronym for ROW in my head and knew we were on the right track." She met with Hass, who has a keen interest in literacy and the environment, and then a confluence of writers, activists, educators, and community partners who made ROW a reality. "ROW is centrally administered by us," Michael says, "but it's the teachers and park rangers and librarians and kids who make it happen."

Grace Grafton's classroom at Lakeshore Elementary School in San Francisco is one place it's happening. On a sunny Wednesday morning, Grafton is passing out slices of lemons, carrots, and apples, urging nineteen first and second graders to sniff and tasted, reminding them to "go slow for poetry" as they play with word patterns that could lead to poems. A teacher with California Poets in the Schools for twenty years, Grafton was one of the first teachers to respond to ROW's invitation for help in designing and supporting its curriculum; this year, ROW named her Teacher of the Year.

Grafton is passionate about the power of place and voice in the classroom; for her, ROW lets teachers take an environmental science question like, "Where does the rain go?," and use it to push boundaries and discoveries in language. "I ask kids what rain feels like on their skin, because it's important," Grafton says. "The five senses are their avenues into life."

So when Daniel Woo scrunches up his face into a lemon-pucker, then calls out, "Watch the lemon tingle into a Titanic!," and another student at the same table says, "No, it's like a shooting star; there's a solar system in my stomach!," Grafton knows the process she calls "appreciating the actual as the mystical" has begun. "Sometimes, I have to trick them into recognizing that poetry can be a power tool," she says. "But, really, what is science without love? Without a community of humanity in nature, what's the point?"

One way ROW extends that community is by encouraging the development of local ROWs throughout the country. Just two years old, Georgia's program has become a model for outreach and impact. Petey Giroux, coordinator for the state's Project WET (Water Education for Teachers), says a tape of Hass reading at an environmental conference was her inspiration. "His passion and feeling for children and understanding of the big picture of what we need to do to heal the Earth made this a perfect program to incorporate into our study of watersheds." Giroux began by sending flyers to every school in the state; today, Georgia's ROW distributes regionally specific resource packets and packs up a thirty foot blue satin "river" to exhibit student work at schools, conferences, libraries, and environmental centers. Over 8000 students viewed the 1997 Georgia River of Words, which included one national ROW grand prize winner and two finalists. "The power of the arts works," she says. "When all the senses are engaged, children remember."

"My training in river engineering was soulless," says one of IRN's founders, hydrological engineer Philip B. Williams, noting the limits of coming up through an educational system that values neither sniffing a lemon nor putting your feet in the puddle-much less using science to convey how you felt, either in a poem, or picture. "The straight flumes of the hydraulics labs we trained in are a metaphor for the simplest mindset: straighten the river, build a dam, exploit the resources. Today, the danger is in thinking the computer model is the river. It's not. How can you work with your five senses from just the neck up? Engineering school give s you craft, yes. But a river is an intricate, delicate, living system. Without art and poetry, how can you pretend to practice restoring it? That's metaphor, and that's where ROW comes in."

Across the river from this engineer praising ROW for bringing poetry to science, former poet laureate Hass lauds this project he helped launch for using science to deepen the teaching of literature and remind people we live in a place. "The job of the environmental movement," Hass says, "is translation, and translation is what ROW can teach. On the one hand, there is this almost religious idea of a river in American culture; on the other hand, there are actual rivers-canalized, abused, polluted, much used and much denied. If we say we love and respect the land but don't follow through, that's our generation's broken treaty. The connection ROW insists on between imagination and the natural world is crucial."

ROW is also a project he learns from. The practicalities of administering an international competition for children raise their own quirky ripples; this translator of Basho, Buson, and Issa now encounters haiku through children in Missouri and metaphor from the Florida Panhandle Watersheds. Reading the poems submitted to ROW with a nationwide panel of judges and a group from California Poets in the Schools (the International Children's Art Museum in San Francisco oversees art entries), Hass says what they're looking for is "freshness of language, local specificity, the quality of being alive to the place. Just looking at their work educates me about all of this."

Equally critical, says director Michael, is ROW's commitment to cultivating "the power of keen observation. You need these observation skills in science and ecology; you need them in poetry and art. ROW helps kids use these skills. We want kids to go beyond these skills. We want kids to go beyond stewardship into kinship with where we come from and where we are. We want them to learn how to look, listen, and feel connected to a place."

That place might be a village on the Ganges, a pane of water reflecting the moon, the perfect fin of a fish-all in prize-winning entries this year. It might lead a child to cross the bog on "hurricane-fallen trees," drawn by the sound of a real Sweetwater Creek, or inspire the invented word "trinkling," also from a child's poem, to slip the music of rain in your ear.

Talking rivers and their survival, ROW knows, you go to children as the source. Then, you listen.

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