Humour, says the UK’s Green Poet Martin Kiszko, is one of the most important components of green poetry.
“Although the state of our planet is no laughing matter, I think we can laugh on the way, with a green agenda. This helps us embrace some of the challenges that would otherwise be unpalatable,” says the music composer, poet and screenwriter, who is known for his extensive work with natural history films and series, such as Land of the Eagle . He has composed and orchestrated over 200 scores for film and television. He has also released several albums for orchestras.
He recently conducted his signature green poetry workshop, named after his first book of poems Green Poems for a Blue Planet , at the Neev Literature Festival, for children.
“My environmental campaign is called Green Poems for a Blue Planet: Saving the planet through the power of poetry . I believe that poetry has the power to communicate and to get a message across to people. It can distil an important theme and condense it into something that you can quickly receive and understand. It is a physical, theatrical show that takes performance poetry to its extreme. A lot of energy is required to deliver it, it makes the audience jump up in surprise when they hear poetry being performed this way,” says Martin. The workshop, he says, covers all kinds of environmental issues ranging from alterative types of energy to global warming, pollution, and how we make our choices about the things we consume.
“The show covers all these different subjects, with an eco-chuckle. When I wrote about alternative sources of energy, for instance, I wrote a poem that a lot of children loved, called ‘Poo Power’ which is about the way some communities make their own energy from animal poo or even human poo. In Bristol, where I come from, the number two buses (see what I did there?) run on biogas made from human poo,” he says, adding that he has been writing poems since childhood. “Through ‘Poo Power’, children learn about the process of anaerobic tank digestion, in an entertaining way. The poem is set in a field where I am collecting the poo and the pee of cows to mix into a kind of potion to create methane. Kids get to do a poo-powered salute at the end of the poem. That’s how the humour is conveyed.”
The words ‘Green Poems for a Blue Planet’, recalls Martin, simply popped into his head one day while he was working on a another project. “I was working with natural history for many years. However, I wasn’t totally familiar with the green agenda. The words almost flashed into my head out of nowhere one day and when ideas like that come to us, we often let them disappear. I felt it was somehow relevant, and in a sense, I stopped for a moment and grasped the title. I knew it was going to be important for me, almost like a calling or a mission.”
He believes that it is essential to encourage children to both embrace nature by experiencing it, and to write about it. “In doing that, we are encouraging a generation to engage with nature and help other people reframe their attitudes about nature, thus take care of the planet,” he explains, adding that humour is essential to this process also because otherwise it would place a huge burden on people. “That can put them off quickly,” he points out. “I regard myself as planting seeds in children, allowing them to be entertained and go away thinking about the issues and consider what their own contributions might be.”
His vision, apart from ‘greening’ the next generation in the UK, by covering all the schools, is to take the poems to film, television, and the Internet, through a web series. “I have also written the world’s first eco epic poem, spanning over 10,000 words in rhyming couplets. It has 17 characters and it’s about three nights on an eco-quest facing a range of obstacles from climate change to plastic, and pollution.”
