{"id":52585,"date":"2023-08-02T09:19:14","date_gmt":"2023-08-02T13:19:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/?p=52585"},"modified":"2023-08-02T09:36:17","modified_gmt":"2023-08-02T13:36:17","slug":"shade-the-introduction-to-sprout-eco-poetry-journal-issue-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/2023\/08\/02\/shade-the-introduction-to-sprout-eco-poetry-journal-issue-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Shade: The Introduction to SPROUT Eco-Poetry Journal Issue 3"},"content":{"rendered":"
Twelve poems and three meditations on the idea of shade. It is our aim with SPROUT to use poetry, and the space that poetry holds, to advance discussions about our cities\u2019 futures. SPROUT is intended to be a space of convergence\u2014a space where disciplines meet and where transdisciplinary conversations about the eco-urban through poetry take place. \u00a0<\/blockquote><\/figure>\n

For SPROUT<\/a>\u2019s third issue, the editors were inspired by The Nature of Cities\u2019 (TNOC) recent art exhibition, Shade<\/a>, and invited contributors to draw on the exhibition\u2019s virtual installation as a conceptual springboard to contemplate the theme of shade through a poetic lens. We asked poets to reflect on the role shade plays in the built environment, particularly focusing on shade equity\u2014i.e., how shade can make more inclusive spaces in the city, or, conversely, how the lack thereof can create inhospitable, hostile spaces. We were interested in soliciting work that considered shade from ecological, architectural, and environmental justice points of view.<\/p>\n

See the Shade issue here.<\/a><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n

In our first completely open call, we encouraged contributors to visit the virtual exhibit of TNOC\u2019s Shade<\/a> and wander through the installation of featured artists\u2019 umbrellas (manifesting different interpretations of shade). Curated by community-based arts organisation, Arroyo Arts, the exhibition welcomed emerging and established artists to use repurposed umbrellas as their canvas to explore the themes of shade, heat, nature, and climate change. One of the prompts provided to guide visual artists for the Shade exhibit\u2014which we, too, found helpful\u2014read as follows:<\/p>\n

In a warming world, shade equity is an issue that disproportionately affects low-income and working-class communities, people of color, and communities in developing nations who are more likely to work outdoors, rely on public transportation, and live in denser neighborhoods with a lack of trees and shade. As the climate changes and heat waves become longer, more intense, and more frequent, what was once thought primarily as an aesthetic amenity is increasingly recognized as a way of protecting the public health and well-being of marginalized communities. Urban heat causes more deaths than all other weather-related causes combined in an average year, and yet providing shade can be simple and effective and can be done in many creative ways including tree planting, bus stop sheds, and awnings, to name a few.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Our issue\u2019s treatment of shade reveals poems that chart the course of light and dark (in other words, the movement of shade), through the course of the day. They play with the idea of how shade shifts and maps itself over urban (and some less urban) spaces. The issue begins with Jean Janicke\u2019s poem inviting us to take action, asking us to put down what we\u2019re doing and \u201cHurry\u201d in order to not miss the sun lining up through the tree canopy in a transient moment where light communicates through the morse code of shade. Movement and the turning of the earth as light and dark alternate is then carried through to Adrienne Stevenson\u2019s poem, \u201cDegrees of Light\u201d, which sustains the ambivalence of both time standing still, with the sun at its noon-day height, and then its corresponding advancement into the shaded violet of night.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The heat of the day with its absence of shade appeared to interest a number of contributors and this is picked up further in Sue Woodward\u2019s \u201cstandard bearer (dawn at eselfontein)\u201d. The poem follows man and dog, walking from one farm to the next in the morning sun, as the shade spins around the axis of the man\u2019s vertical form. He is a flagpole, casting a giant shadow over his dog, which (ignoring for a moment the immediate relief it must provide to his dog) haunts the page with anthropocentric significance: what shadow do we, as humans, cast over the natural world through our activities? Like the blistering sun the farmer faces, Heather Wishik\u2019s diptych faces the topic of shade equity head on. In \u201cTwo Neighborhoods \u2013 1960s Pittsburgh\u201d, Wishik presents two urban portraits: one with shaded affluence juxtaposed against that of the workers\u2019 treeless sidewalks that \u201cburned children\u2019s bare feet\u201d.<\/p>\n

Mary Elizabeth Birnbaum\u2019s \u201cBurn\u201d seems to present a timely message on this front (with its description of \u201cseeded flame rooted rage\u201d)\u2014especially when forest fires and their attendant smoke and haze currently enshroud the northeastern seaboard of North America. Assuming a more transhistorical point of view, Gregory Haber\u2019s \u201cThe South Bronx Sea\u201d contemplates the impact of settler colonial urban planning with the Bronx\u2019s lack of shade as a result of deforestation and industry: both \u201chabitat and haven\u201d, which had previously been \u201cgifted\u201d by \u201csoft pine and hard hornbeam\u201d, are now \u201csun-beat hardscapes\u201d of \u201cextirpated shade\u201d. Not all is lost though, as \u201crebellious rebirth\u201d of the forests start to \u201cplumb concrete cracks\u201d, seeing shade finally start to return to the city. Is this a way in which to begin remediating both nature and city of the harm engendered by mercantilist imperialism? What does this mean for its people?<\/p>\n

This question seems to be taken up by the next two poems: Sihle Ntule\u2019s \u201cThe Sunset Clause\u201d and Erica Bartholomae\u2019s \u201cHeading Home\u201d\u2014both South African poets contemplating shade from a geopolitical perspective. These poems function dialogically, initiating conversation around the shade cast by the old dispensation of apartheid; both wondering whether the dawning of a new age is possible when the legacy of inequity runs so deep. Ntule\u2019s poem throws shade, figuratively, by raising the spectre of South Africa\u2019s fraught negotiated settlement in its transition to multiparty democracy (the \u201csunset clause\u201d presenting a temporary power-sharing arrangement to end the political deadlock), whilst Bartholomae\u2019s poem reflects how\u2014through the conceit of shade inequity\u2014very little has substantively changed in the country. The editors mulled over the choice of wording in the final lines of the poem: \u201cWondering how far she had to walk and if this country will ever \/ change\u201d [our emphasis]. We found the use of the demonstrative pronoun (\u201cthis\u201d) over the possible possessive determiner (\u201cour\u201d) interesting, and wondered what this could mean for the collective responsibility needed to overcome environmental racism. We invite our readers to allow themselves to be drawn into the world of this poem, and to sit with this discomfort.<\/p>\n

In Anna Rowntree\u2019s, \u201cIn the Shade of Some Newly Planted Thing\u201d, a considered reflection on newness runs through the poem\u2014\u201cI didn\u2019t think to bring a blanket; \/I am new to this too\u201d; \u201clittle walk to the park, the sort of thing new mothers do\u201d\u2014and with it, a sharp focus emerges on its opposite; the opposite here points to what is missing, what is absent, and it extends beyond the line, \u201cBut there are no trees here, \/ No ancestral oak with an inheritance of shade\u201d. In the place of time, age, and growth (all of them absent in the missing inheritance of shade), the new offers up an \u201cinvented kind of place \/ Contrived for the likes of you and me\u201d. By contrast, Deborah Leipziger\u2019s \u201cTell me, what are you most afraid of?\u201d, growth (growing older: \u201cLet me count my rings\u201d) and age (the active process of aging we are all involved in: \u201cAt last count, I am two hundred years old\u201d) are central to the offering of shade as both \u201cprotection\u201d and \u201ccover\u201d.<\/p>\n

In \u201cThree Acts in November Rain Play\u201d, by Tricia Knoll, we experience the ordinary-ness of a day, through the eyes of someone who has \u201cnowhere safe to go, no one expecting me\u201d. Safety and shade seem somehow linked here, and yet, ambiguity remains\u2014nothing is ever made clear, leaving the reader slightly unsettled. By contrast, the issue ends with a short poem, by Mary Salome, that offers us insight into the \u201cquiet offering of shade\u201d. It was a purposeful choice to close with this poem, reflecting how through optimism, collective action, and a renewed sense of responsibility and love (for community, habitat, ourselves and each other) we hope to work towards greener and more inclusive urban spaces despite the adversities we face in a world increasingly ravaged by the effects of environmental racism and climate change.<\/p>\n

It is our aim with SPROUT to use poetry, and the space that poetry holds, to advance discussions about our cities\u2019 futures. Being a creative project of The Nature of Cities, from its inception, SPROUT is intended to be a space of convergence\u2014a space where disciplines meet and where transdisciplinary conversations about the eco-urban through poetry take place. We view the medium of poetry, its form(s) and function(s), as providing a unique vantage point from which to initiate and allow these kinds of conversations to materialize and unfold. In the Meditations segment of each issue of the journal, we invite city practitioners (i.e., architects, academics, ecologists, civil servants, scientists, other artists) to consider and reflect on the works in the current issue, translating the volume into the register of their own meaning-making of the city.<\/p>\n

In this issue, we offer you the opportunity to engage with meditations on shade, framed by the work contained within the issue. Edith and Jolly de Guzman (curators of TNOC\u2019s Shade exhibition<\/a>), reflect on how amenities like shade are \u201cdefining a new era of climate injustice\u201d, while St\u00e9phane Verlet-Bott\u00e9ro, considers how poetry and the \u201cpoetic act opens interstices, margins, twilight zones\u201d, as a means to come to terms with the current state of the world. Finally, Paul Currie reflects on the \u201cbalancing act\u201d of his work, describing it as being \u201con a tightrope between joy and despair\u201d. We are delighted that his meditation echoes the hopeful note we aimed to strike and end on; and, with that in mind, we leave the final words of this editorial to him: \u201cjoy is a more powerful motivator for myself and so, every day in these vignettes of life I am seeking, yes, the gaps, but also the nuggets of possibility\u201d.<\/p>\n

Kirby Mani\u00e0 and Dimitra Xidous<\/strong>, Executive Editors
\nVancouver and Dublin<\/p>\n

Sprout cover image by Hannah Harm.<\/p>\n

On The Nature of Cities<\/a>
\n

\n
\n
Dimitra Xidous<\/div>\n
\n

about the writer
\n Dimitra Xidous<\/a>\n <\/h3>\n

Dimitra Xidous is a Research Fellow in TrinityHaus, a research centre\r\nin Trinity College Dublin\u2019s School of Engineering that focuses on co-creation and the intersection between the built environment, health, wellbeing inclusion, climate action and sustainability. She is an Executive Editor of SPROUT, an eco-urban poetry journal, run in partnership with The Nature of Cities.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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