Red River: Listening to a Polluted River is a creative-writing research project set up to explore how poetry can change our relationship to damaged and undervalued landscapes. We have lots of poems about beautiful rivers, but not so many about the kinds of streams and urban rivers that most of us live near. Damaged or ‘ugly’ places often reveal our changing values with regard to our environment. The Red River, with its rich, multi-layered history, has much to tell us about our impact on the ecosystems that sustain us.
introduction
The Red River rises on the moors above Camborne and flows through a post-industrial valley that has been worked for tin since at least the Roman period before emerging into St Ives Bay at Gwithian. As recently as the 1990s the mineral waste in its waters dyed the water and everything it touched a deep shade of red.
Every aspect of this small river has been altered by human activity: it’s as much a river of ideas as a river of water. Which makes it a lively thing through which to think about the turbid boundary between the human and natural, the beautiful and ugly, and what may be considered as rubbish or valuable.
These creative-writing resourses may
be used as the basis for a project about
a river near you, or as a starting point
for an exploration of the Red River in conjunction with other resources on the website. They may also trigger further consideration of the impact of mining on landscapes and cultures around the globe.
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.
