This month is special as I’m continuing to participate in Cath Drakes Climate of Change Challenge and joining the Poets for the Planet COPlet campaign.
What’s a COPlet? You might ask. “A COPlet is a rhyming couplet – two lines of poetry about the environmental issues being covered at COP (or not!) that matter to you. You could write one (or more) for each day and post it on Twitter.”
This kinda thing and find everything else you need to know about COPlets here
November is always a bit of a rollercoaster emotionally with the anniversary of the departure from this world of a couple of dear friends and my dad in 2008 and the highly traumatic events that followed that leaving me with glandular fever.
I had this debilitating illness as I child of ten and when the GP told me, after receiving the blood results, I said, no that’s not possible I’ve had it before. She told me it can come back, news to me! In true yin yang fashion (I guess) November is blessed with a raft of good friends birthdays too.
That said strong emotions like this can be destabilising for someone diagnosed with bipolar. I seem to have avoided this with my “meds;” meditation and medication and a new regime based on what I call old fashioned values; early to bed, early to rise, fresh air and exercise and regular meals.
In fact I’ve found over the past few years no amount of “meds” can achieve any semblance of balance without the “old fashioned values.”
And it occurs to me try to be kind to yourself and to others because you don’t know, at this time in particular, who is just hanging by a thread and in my experience meanness doesn’t just affect peoples mental health but their physical health, I am witness to this and it’s well documented here
The month concludes with a special event from the Climate of Change Challenge in which a selection of poets from across UK & Europe will join feature reader, Craig Santos Perez and read poems generated during the challenge.
About our feature reader, Craig Santos Perez is a Professor in the English Department at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa, where he teaches creative writing, eco-poetry, and Pacific literature. He’s an indigenous Chamoru (Chamorro) from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam), an award winning poet, editor, publisher, essayist, critic, book reviewer, artist, environmentalist and political activist.
Craig has forged new ways to write about the climate crisis and His latest book is ‘Habitat Threshold’.
“Craig Santos Perez is a writer I seriously watch. He includes a variety of environmentally important writing, seamlessly combined with history, politics, and the familial.” –Linda Hogan, Indigenous Writer and Environmentalist
Other readers are Cath Drake, Kate Potts, Patricia Foster McKenley , Karina Fiorini , Bell Selkie Lovelock , Ness Owen , Suzanne Iuppa, Janet Harper, Clementine E Burnley, Linda Goulden, Joe Mishan, Shalini Pattabiraman, Katrina Dybzynska and myself.
Tickets are FREE but you must register to attend here
#amwriting poems about climate all month, even in my sleep I suspect…
#amreading The Hidden Life’s of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
A blog post by Anne Enith Cooper
Find my bio here
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