More Than A Few Poems: Caleb Parkin considers the role of poetry and language amidst ongoing ecological crises

It’s easy to dismiss the role of poetry, amidst ongoing ecological crises. My partner and I have a joke, based on a story a friend told us, where we put on a gruff voice and say, ‘It’s going to take more than a few poems to sort all this out!’ It was the friend’s colleague saying just that, about environmental poetry. Bah! Silly little poems! Fripperies! Decorations! As if politics is addressing the issue. Or the sciences, on their own. We have the facts – damning as they are – but they don’t seem to translate into action. People do not act as Homo economicus or ‘rational man’ (yes, it’s usually framed as a man). Homo sapiens lives through stories, makes choices based on irrational, mythic, imaginary, metaphorical engagement with the world around us, including – or especially – the more-than-human, or what we talk of as ‘Nature’. When we think of ‘biodiversity’, what do most people see, hear, feel? When we imagine its ‘renewal’, what kind of a world are we imagining ourselves into? Sometimes during an online RENEW meeting, I’ll turn to poem-making as a form of processing in an embodied, lively way. During a session on the term ‘Biodiversity Renewal’, I had fun colliding alternative word combinations together:

Biodiversity Renewal

Genetic Carnivalesque
Morphological Kaleidoscope
Mandibular Multifariousness
Hoofish Hullaballoo
Plumage Brouhaha
Organ-ic Overwhelm
Beastly Pedagogy
Critterly Mutiny
Factory Paucity
Abattoir Au-Revoir
Umwelt Seatbelt
Ultra Wilding
Landscrape Payback
Wasteland Counterattack

It always amazes and delights me what can be done by smashing together the particles of language and seeing kinds of energy emerge (Allen Ginsberg’s ‘hydrogen jukebox’ is a great example). Even in this condensed form, poetry makes us take a step back from well-worn phrases and ask questions about them. To journey into, through, around and beyond them. To unpack what other possibilities of language exist and might be deployed to imagine alternatives.

In an interdisciplinary setting, making and sharing poems like this can feel daunting. To stand up in front of a big room of representatives from RENEW, as well as its project partners, and reflect back their words as poetry can be a jangly experience. In one respect, I am re-presenting their words, yes. But I also – in a room with statisticians and ecologists and economists – feel like representing Poetry, with a big P. What am I even doing here? What can poetry do in our polycrisis of ecological collapse, biodiversity decline, and their attendant political bafflements?

Photo: Caleb writing a summative poem at the November 2023 Biodiversity Parliament, Credit: Kelly Stevens

Poetry is a way of reflecting back.

It’s a gift I can offer my colleagues and peers from neighbouring disciplines. During my four years as a PhD researcher in RENEW, I’ve offered poems at most of the Biodiversity Parliaments, with some interactive opportunities for attendees. I also documented our Early Career Researcher (ECR) retreat in a poem too (all of which are below). In some respects, each is ‘of the moment’: a means of distilling the most vivid instances of communication and connection which took place, when we all got together in a room, or in a meadow.

What I pay attention to and note down might be different to the notes others are taking. As a poet in this context, I’m after spontaneous utterances; prevailing (often unnoticed) metaphors; the curious organizational or institutional lingo that crops up, unnoticed. To me, these are the moments we are most live and lively, most present. Or the moments we’re accidentally speaking in poems. It’s always interesting how – when you share the poem back – people remember the asides, exclamations, the ‘mistakes’, as much or more than the official messages and takeaway statistics.

Language itself is a living part of our culture and cultures.

Recently, I’ve been reading James Bridle’s Ways of Being. Plants, Animals, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence. One of the assertions he makes is that since language in the Latinate script became self-referential and not pictographic, it has lost its connection to the world around us. (My favourite reference here is that the letter ‘Q’ is from the Phoenician ‘qoph’ meaning and depicting ‘monkey’: Q’s tail is vestigial.) Instead, language can become inert, inward-looking, commodified and corporatized, pointing back at itself – and to humanity – rather than out to a living planet full of lively subjects. In contexts like the Parliament, I see my role as pointing out and reflecting back this liveliness. I want to offer the possibility of a language reinvigorated with an energy to carry back into the vital work and research to which everyone there is attending.

Civic or public poetry, as well as ‘poetry takeaways’ or on-demand poem-making, occupy a fascinating, but under-researched, space in poetry culture and public life. For me, alongside my PhD research, this auxiliary work as a ‘civic poet’ has been a continuation of my commissions for organisations before, including as Bristol City Poet from 2020 – 2022. In 2024, I joined the National Biodiversity Network conference in Liverpool as their ‘field poet’. I reflected back their vital work of gathering data – so often done by volunteers and, as such, done with huge love for the critters they’re counting. That poem concludes:

a life where we recall that Darwin wrote Love
too and he meant it as much as Evolution

We cannot remove the love from scientific language, for doing so means turning the subjects of our research into inert ‘natural resources’. How can we speak between disciplines, across political leanings – perhaps, even, across species? It’s going to take more than a few poems to fix all this. But a lively language that reflects this planet’s abundance, which mirrors back the bumptious biodiversity we must strive to save, is far more likely to succeed.

Often, writing a poem of this kind involves finding the write container to hold it all. That was certainly the case for ‘On the Wing’: it ended up crashing scales together, by placing a landscape and all the details I had heard that day, on the wings of a Marsh fritillary butterfly. Poems are perhaps uniquely placed to articulate what Scott Slovic calls the ‘trans-scalar imaginary’ and I hope this poem enacts relationships across the butterflies’ habitat in an expansive-yet-intimate way.

On the Wing
Challacombe Farm (RENEW ECR Retreat, May 2025)

Naomi gazes over the tin pits, hidden
in the heather. This landscape written,
overwritten, peatbog topography smudged
across moochy swamps. How Tarmac
bisects what could be the blueprint
for a beaver’s home: conifer road,
redline, constraint. A road which sinks
into the marshes, where the stained-
glass fritillary wings are shattered visions
of landscape. A valley, viewed from above.

Look closer into that yellowing mosaic
and you can see the microscopic cattle,
Naomi’s giant pets; the no-bother magic
mushroomers, gathering in visions;
the lines on these wings, miniscule dry-
wall shiners, the odd dropped corner
still standing, centuries later; all the obvious
tessellations of time: tin-mine time,
chrysalis time, farm time. Don’t be a
marsh fritillary, says Naomi, they are rubbish

at having sex. But they do inspire affection,
competition: a golf cup repurposed as
award for shares of metapopulation. So much
heavy lifting on such slight wings: of loneliness,
connection, delivered door-to-door along lanes,
re-storying figures in this landscape, on the wing.
The hillside weeps water, light green through
inorganic bracken. And hillside recalls when
wolves trod within the pawprints of bears; time
scribed by more than just toes, cloven hoofs.

Walls remember warrens they once hemmed
in for tin-miner protein. How humans move
through the open works of ourselves, camp
on the mosses and lichens in our temporary
lives, lighting sparks of blame and leaving
embers of truth. We are a bluebell blip
on the grazed glaze of this meadow. We
are aggy, spitty, spongey alpacas, peering
over fences – out of place, settled in.
How do you get a signal up here?

On the wing of one of nine fritillaries,
in a meadow slowly dusking into shadow.
How do you get a signal? Here, us flecks
between stone walls, flimsy as pigment.
How do you? One of ten now. How?
One of twelve, hard to spot: so small
and adrift in this brief beam of sun.

Photo: Marsh Fritillary butterfly sighted near Shallowford Farm, Dartmoor during an ECR training retreat. Credit: Kelly Stevens.

Find out more about Caleb’s PhD on RENEW on our case study pages: Investigating the biosphere as a ‘hyperobject’ through contemporary poetry practice, reading and writing.

You can view a version of Caleb’s essay complete with more poetry and photographs in our creative practice resource section: RENEW > Creative Practice