It is the hope of a better home that drives migration, said
acclaimed poet and writer, Ruth Padel, in an evening session on Poetry, Nature and a Changing World, at the Bangalore International Centre, Bengaluru.
It was such an enthralling evening when the poet, who is the great-great-grandchild of Charles Darwin, talked about poetry, migration, conservation,
climate change, Darwin, and so on. She also read a few selected poems, old and new. And I manged to get a few books signed by the distinguished poet.
The evening started with the poet reading an excerpt from her book, Where the Serpent Lives, and then the conversation went to Tiger conservation. On her many trips to forests in India, the poet said, that in a forest, we see so many things like leaves, squirrels, otters; but
they are all related to the Tiger in one way or the other. And the Tiger is the meaning or at the heart of a forest.
In a similar vein,
whether it is a book or a poem, we see and read so many things with many valid experiences, but there is a central theme to each poem, she added.
About wildlife and their relationship to the landscape, she
said that conserving a Tiger meant that you conserve the entire landscape for
the animals and the humans’ dependent on that landscape. Referring to Greta Thurnberg, Ruth Padel said that the whole world
had woken up to the changes to the environment and the battle between the
environment and humans were going to happen everywhere very rapidly. She added
that climate change will result in more and more climate refugees and it is going to be very
scary.
On the variance between human and animal migration, she said
that humans migrated to stay or ‘colonize’ (even though there is
internal migration to cities for work) while birds migrate miles and then return to their homes. She did read a poem, The Choice, (about a Robin in her garden. It is the female Robins that migrate while the male birds stay), which was about the difficulty of deciding whether and when to leave a place.The choice to stay or not is a difficult one.
Terming Charles Darwin, her great great grandfather as a ‘careful’
person. Ruth Padel narrated an incident told to her by his biographer when one of
his friends asked him about ‘where’ he had felt the ‘presence of the sublime’, Darwin
initially said it was in the Andes, but later in the night he had a change of
mind and informed his friend at midnight that it was in the forests of
Brazil that he had felt the presence of the sublime the most. He had a very conscientious
mind, attention to details, she added. Darwin had read
Alexander Von Humboldt before he started his voyages.
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About her research on
Beethoven, she dwelt on the difficult city
of Vienna (she termed the city as 'monster in a labyrinth'), his (and Schubert’s)
reading of Hindu mystics and Shakuntala. Terming Oral Poetry as the beginning of
poetry, she said that poets do respond quickly to things happening around and
touched upon the ‘Poetry of Witness’, a term coined by Polish poet and Nobel
laureate, Czeslaw Milosz, and especially his poem,
A Poor Christian Looks At The Ghetto.
Other gems from the session:
- Reading is a mysterious alchemy.
- Science and poetry are so similar…both live in the particulars
and get to the bigger Universal thing: small things, concrete, and the big. Both say the same things, but in different words.
- Shakespeare answers about how self-serving enablers enable
tyrants to persuade the populace to put him (tyrant) on the throne against their
wishes.
- Poets have the responsibility to speak the truth.
- On many occasions, the poet does not know what they are telling.
- You (poets) write to discover.
