Hot Poets Ignite
Totnes poet Matt Harvey – the original Empath Man, one-time poet in residence at Wimbledon and a fine stand-up performer, is part of a new movement called Hot Poets Ignite.
Hot Poets is an international project which brings poetry and science together to help children, young people and adults make sense of climate change — not through fear, but through curiosity, creativity and hope. Matt has edited a book of planet power poems – Wonder Thunder Blunder – which includes one of his own.
“It’s my first about whale poo, which I’m told has been seen and heard around the world and at least two COPs (climate conferences, the last has just finished in Brazil),” Matt told me. The green whale’s “vast and voluminous, luminous poo” is life-giving, a “savoury succulent smoothie” for the phytoplankton.
Here’s Matt reading it on the Whale and Dolphin Conservation YouTube page.
The forward to the book has been written by Sir Michael Rosen, a former Childrens’ Laureate who contributes his own poems. Matt added: ”Another local link is Hot Poet co-founder/producer, poet,
designer/illustrator of the book, Liv Torc – a graduate of the late lamented Dartington College of Arts and former Press Officer from the time when the College of Arts seceded to Falmouth.”
Check it out at www.hotpoets.org
I listened intently to Matt’s Whale-poo poem, and felt it didn’t actually capture the essence, the poo never came through! The reading was too poetic and one didn’t get the feel of gooey-ness. I don’t know how the whale felt in relation to the work, or indeed to the description of its properties. Will it be available at all good Totnes ‘natural’ clinics? Perhaps if I listened, covered in its flocculent droppings, or indeed, Matt was to perform the poem in said deposit, it would give the subject more substance. Just a thought.