FISH-NOSED THINKING
This exercise is designed to encourage you to see the river from a river organism’s point of view, a description that suggests a more respectful relationship towards other species and ecosystems.
We may not be able to shape-change into a fish, but the imaginative stretch necessary to attempt it in a piece of writing may open our senses to other perspectives on our actions.
FIRST STEPS
List as many different sources of water that may enter a river or stream as you can. For instance: road water; sewage; farm run-off; a clean tributary etc.
Make a list of at least five words associated with the sounds of rivers and streams.
If fish were humans, what do you think they would they be experts in? Perhaps different flavours of rainwater, the textures of water, pebbles, river weed, dragonflies etc? And what might be the gaps in their knowledge e.g. concepts of sewage, slurry, concrete culverts etc?
LISTENING TO THE RIVER
Suppressing the visual can often freshen up the descriptive power of a poem. Sounds and smells travel very well in water, but lots of things can impair vision.
Listen to these recordings made by Dr Rob Mackay using special equipment to capture the sub-aquatic soundscapes of the Red River. Imagine you are a fish or some other organism swimming from the sea to the source. Make notes about the the things you can hear and what you imagine you might see and smell. (Click or scan the QR codes to access the files).
COMPOSING YOUR POEM
Try writing a poem in five stanzas (or verse paragraphs). To structure your writing, use the words you listed for the sounds of the river as place names for the points at which five different kinds of water enter the river. If you like, adapt the following sentence to use as the first line of each stanza:
At the place of babbling I enter red fog. . . .
Substitute the word ‘babbling’ with a different word from your list for
each stanza.
Then continue into a ‘more-than-human’ description of what is sensed at this site. Do things get better or worse as the poem develops?
Close your piece of writing with a fish-nosed memory of the sea
Red River: Listening to a Polluted River was devised and led by Dr John Wedgwood Clarke, Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
These resources have been developed in collaboration with Field Notes CIC. They may be freely used, reproduced and adapted for the purposes of free education/workshops provided the credits above are included.
