River of Words: Press

In the News | Press Releases | Press Kit

For a new television program on water to be produced by the Foundation in 1998, members of the Foundation interviewed former U.S. Poet Laureate (1995-1997) Robert Hass to learn how he conceived “River of Words,” an annual, nationwide art and poetry contest for elementary and high school students. River of Words involves young people and their teachers in learning about the water ecology of their local environments. Robert Hass has written several books of poems, including Field Guide, Praise, and Human Wishes, and a collection of essays called Twentieth Century Pleasures. His most recent book is The Essential Haiku. Hass has garnered many awards and fellowships. In September he was named National and International Environmental Educator of the Year.

Robert Hass:

The job of Poet Laureate doesn’t have much definition. The position was created by Franklin Roosevelt and Archibald MacLeish over drinks sometime in 1938 or ‘39. Until 1980 it was called “Consultant in Poetry.” You’re given a small stipend and a beautiful office; you’re expected to set up a literary series for the community of Washington, D.C.; the rest is pretty much a blank slate. You are not expected to write a lot of poetry-no odes on nuclear submarines are required.

Although early American history is steeped in a passionate attraction to wild places, in the last one hundred years industries have been busy transforming the landscape and extracting from it. So I invited about 30 American writers in the environmental tradition, from poets to scientists, to novelists, to essayists- as many of the writers in the country who write about “place” as I could gather-to come to Washington and read their work and talk about issues in the environmental tradition in American writing.

And we thought, why not use my tenure as an opportunity to get kids involved early on in this kind of writing; to try to figure out ways of linking together in the schools the culture of knowledge and care about wild places with literature and science studies? By doing this, we could educate future generations of adults in a different way than we were educated. The idea ultimately took form as a poetry and art contest for kids on the theme of getting to know their own watershed, the rivers and creeks of the places where they live. That was the origin of “River of Words.”

The history of this country is so much a history of the culture of rivers. It doesn’t matter whether children are urban or suburban or live in the country, their relationship to water is fundamental. The first posters we put out said, “What is your ecological address?” so that they could get in the habit of locating themselves and the place they live by understanding how water flowed through, how it was used, what other life forms were supported and were there because of the waters that flowed through the places where they lived. We also hoped to put teachers and students together with activists who are cleaning up creeks, making hiking trails around reservoirs, educating in state parks in community after community around the country.

We designed a teacher’s guide, but it has been very exciting to find out how much original and interesting and obviously passionate and informed teaching is already going on in the schools. We were able to make connections among creative teachers-to show people in North Dakota what some interesting teacher was doing with the Everglades in Florida; or show a teacher in Nebraska alongside the Platte River what somebody on the Missouri River was doing.

The contest will continue. It is co-sponsored by the International Rivers Network and the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress, and there’s a governing board of people like Terry Tempest Williams and Gary Snyder who will continue working on the project. Each year eight winners, four in art and four in poetry, come to Washington, D.C., read their poems at the Library of Congress, and have their art displayed there. They see the library, the White House, the Jefferson Memorial, the Washington Monument, and meet some kids from the Washington area.

Some of the poems we receive are already so alive to the places where the kids live. There are haiku from Missouri; Walt Whitman-like odes on the rivers of Connecticut. Seeing the kids read those poems in their communities and mirror back to the people the sense of being held by the place where they live is a powerful thing. There was one lovely poem by a boy in San Francisco that wasn’t directly about a river, but we liked it so much that we gave it first prize in the category of first- and second-grade poems. It was a poem of extraordinary sweetness, with such a feeling for the formalities of poetry, too-the rhythms of repeated threes, the way the language ran through that little poem:

Oh sun, Oh sun,
Oh sun. How does
it feel to be
blocked by the dark
dark clouds?
Oh child, it doesn’t really
feel bad at all
not at all not at
all not at all.
Nicolas Sanz-Gould, 1st grade
San Francisco, California
First Prize (Grades 1-2)

One of the things I love is that you get a whole flood of different styles, from very bold, bright-colored, poster-style representations of things to, as the kids get older and more sophisticated, echoes of the different traditions of modern art that they’ve picked up. Some of them are immaculately careful in their expression. The image done by Maria Korsgaard, a junior in high school in New Jersey, looks as if it were an etching She makes lots of small circles and intricate patterns, and if you look with a squint, you could be looking through a magnifying glass at a cell, at the structure of life itself. But if you back up a little bit, you see that it is a rendering of a fish in a stream. In all kinds of ways, the students’ intuitive sense of the natural world educates me as I just look at their work.

Rivers are a deep and sentimental part of American lore. On the one hand, there is this almost religious and eschatological dimension to the idea of a river in American culture; and on the other hand there are the actual rivers-canalized, abused, polluted, much used and much denied. There’s that joke, “Denial is a river in Egypt.” Well, denial is every river in America. We don’t like to look at how we’ve treated them and what it says about our relationship to the land. In a way, a river is a kind of symbol of the repressed ecological problems in American society.

Historically, this repression of rivers occurred as a function of the development of railroads. It was fascinating to me to find out that Thomas Jefferson thought that everything west of the Appalachians and Adirondacks would probably have to be a separate republic because there was not the ease of communication needed to have the kind of democracy he envisioned. So he hoped that Lewis and Clark would be able to go up the Missouri to its headwaters and then float down to the mouth of the Columbia. If that was possible, he thought we might have one whole continental democracy. It turned out that wasn’t feasible. But in the meantime, developers started selling shares in railroads which became the travel infrastructure that pulled people together. The rivers sank into folk song and legend. And the America that was in love with the railroad was also in love with the machine, with technology in all its forms. We dammed all of our rivers, we exploited them to flush out the wastes in our manufacturing processes and to create hydroelectric power, and we gave very little thought for the cost of this to all the beautiful places that the longings in those folk songs spoke to.

It was John Muir, more than any other person, who sensed what was going on in the country. He began to write essays that mobilized the country to preserve Yosemite for us, to preserve Yellowstone. It was partly Teddy Roosevelt’s reading of Muir that launched the national park movement. I don’t think we have a very good sense of that tradition, of the depth of that tradition. I don’t think we have a very good sense of how much the anxiety and submerged angers and over-worked American malaise has to do with the feeling of loss of these orienting values and how profoundly our relationship to this land, to this country and its mountains and rivers and high mesas and deserts and wetlands and forests, is an important part of how we see ourselves, see our heritage.

As we sit here I am hearing the wind in the trees, and it is reminding me of a plaintive letter that John Muir wrote in the 1870s. He said, “We’ve got compulsory education. What this country really needs is compulsory recreation. I want people to go to the school of the wind and the trees.”

I think it’s important to have kids understand that part of their education is an informed knowledge of the place where they live. And the experience of the people who are working to save the environment and the places where they live will give them a sense of hope and power that we’re going to need if we’re going to take care of this land in the next century.

River of Words^® · 2547 Eighth Street, 13B · Berkeley, CA 94710 USA
info@riverofwords.org · Phone:510-548-7636 · Fax:510-548-2095