'The purpose of our being here is to fall in love with each other and to fall in love with a world that is ours.' Austin poet Terry Dawson is responding to climate change through poetry. | jenstayton
Austin Poet Terry Dawson says he would bring his mother-in-law to Red Bud Isle Park before her death; he considers it a place of calm. Dawson says his own aging and mortality make him think even more seriously about the planet.
Dawson says he wrote these poems at different times. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below to find out what inspired him and how mortality has influenced his thinking about climate change.KUT: Where did you get the idea to assemble a collection of your poems related to climate change?talk about the environment and global warming. And he was asked the question,"What is the next step?" And he said,"interplanetary travel.
We need to think differently. Take stock of the fact that we are in serious trouble and the way the weather has changed so dramatically, and we can see this change. It's measurable change. There's a lot of resistance to that. But I think that resistance comes out of fear. So I don't think feeding the fear is the way to go.
Well, it's how poetry spoke to me, I guess, as a young person. I had great advantage of being exposed to some really high-powered poets as a young person. My high school brought in these people. I could see how urgent their words were to them, and that was contagious. I started to feel that. That's a good question. You know, as Presbyterians, as ministers, we are trained to be generalists and not experts. So we know a little about a lot of things. So I only have a bit of the story. You have a bit of the story. We're all feeling the same elephant, and we're all blind and we all see different parts of it. So this is just my bit of the elephant that I'm sharing with you.
It's just called “one.“ You mentioned that I'm a Presbyterian minister. And one of the things about our faiths: We are given a view of how all things work — heaven and hell and those kinds of images — that are pretty simple in our church, schools and our synagogues and our mosques. But as adults, we have to grow into an adult understanding of what it is. And this is my response to that in saying that how we would like things to be is not always how they are. So let's grow up.
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