Through poetry, Living Methods writers created “porous” maps of the Kinney Center as a physical and textual site: not just a place-to-write, but a place formed and reformed by writing. Each writer documented their ongoing relationship with a location of their choosing on the Center’s grounds, a place they felt drawn to investigate through poetry.
Renaissance of the Earth in Verse: Living Methods (Summer 2024) is a Renaissance of the Earth workshop composed of western Massachusetts community members who wrote, read, and collaborated at the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies. Together, by examining early modern literature alongside contemporary poetry, Living Methods writers began to develop a collective philosophy, one interested in mapping the porous relationship between place and self across time in poetry. These categorical distinctions are malleable, and revealed themselves to be so through our work with poetry’s dexterous form and history: the separation between our exterior world’s organization and each writer’s interior life became increasingly blurry.
The Kinney Center’s gardens, meadows, orchard, and built environment were investigated by Living Methods writers as evidence of not only how the world appears ecologically — during the contemporary historical moment — in Amherst, Massachusetts, but also, of how consciousness might shift and form in conversation with the planet. And vice versa: interactions with this particular world in writing shaped our daily interpretations of it. Our approach was guided by critical engagement with the Kinney Center’s Rare Book Library & Research Collections, which includes early modern almanacs, botanical works, and agricultural books. These texts highlight the intersection of science and anecdote, information and meter. Poetic devices and gestures appear across 16th-18th century scientific and “practical” books (shepherds’ calendars, day books, husbandry manuals), positioning poetry as a tool for the comprehension of reality, as well as the development of archival knowledge about said reality.
The moody interplay between people, place, and text provided an ethos for our collective philosophy. We would write in a way that sustained life, and live in a way that made writing possible. In this way, a “living method” came to mean: writing in pursuit of the blurry texture of life on earth (the soil, the ground, the place writing happens), rather than to seek resolution, clarification, or the settling of its sticking points and anomalies.
Scholar and biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes: "the animacy of the world is something we already know. But, the language of animacy teeters on extinction...”1 In conversation and in poetry, we collected possible answers to Kimmerer’s implicit question. What literary approaches might we learn, develop, and apply to adequately portray the full animacy of the world? What methodologies for living and writing can we engage in grappling with the histories of colonialism, war, and occupation that “environmental writing” necessarily recalls? How might poetry and its attendant language contribute to unfurling this complex history, preserving the heterogeneous, vital, surprising, and persistently political manifestations taken-up by life on Earth? Where do early modern texts instruct us in our readings of contemporary literature and living, and where do we feel inclined to push back and think differently?
Following the findings of our creative research into both text and space, the works produced in Living Methods treat poetry as a non-neutral, legitimate tool of historical record keeping. One able to dream up new ways of encountering the world, highlighting the porosity of our varied, changeable, and reciprocal relationship to the places in which art gets made.
1 Kimmerer, Robin Wall (2017). “Learning the Grammar of Animacy.” Anthropology of Consciousness 28 (2):128-134.