Three winters ago I was commissioned to write a libretto addressing the emerging topic of spiritual ecology. Although at the time I hadn’t heard the term before, it felt fitting, evocative, and wholly necessarily. It is a call for us to look deeper at what is happening to our world, for a spiritual response to our present ecological crisis.
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As I read in preparation to write the libretto, I grew aware of how much more I needed to see. How long in the awakening are those of us born into western culture and industry, even amid the clear and collateral harms of late capitalism. Crucial to my understanding has been a namesake text, Spiritual Ecology, a collection of essays edited by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, that speaks of our enduring relationship to the earth in parallel to our unprecedented dilemma of ecological collapse. The tribal and spiritual leaders, activists, and ecologists behind these essays evidence our profound disconnect from the earth, the roots of this disconnect, and the ways we may begin to heal. Writing and exploring these works gave me an entrance, a way to understand what I have intuitively known for some time, and as we move toward a more connected existence, it dawns continually upon the conscious mind: We are not separate. Healing what is severed between the earth and us begins with a willingness to look. If we feel small in the mystery of things, then looking is our most significant step. The long poems that follow, the first of what is based on the original libretto text, are a reflection of that continued looking. (“Preface”)
Requisite is structured into four extended lyric suites—“Fated,” “Inner River,” “Other Names for the Future” and “The Story”—the first of which, adapted from an earlier existence as a libretto, is also broken up into the quartets of “MOMVEMENTS,” “INTERLUDES,” “TRANSITIONS” and “CODA.” As part of the first section of the first section reads:
An archipelago is a place to practice
sending out and coming back in
and so is a country under siege
This place
of leaping the distance
between boundary
between each other
the less visible
made whole
made clear. (“Fated”)
Holtland’s ecopoetic exists in start contrast to many other examples I’ve seen in the same vein: there is a reverence, but her lyric exists simultaneously at the level of the sequence, the fragment, the word. Even the smallest unit contains the whole in a way that is reminiscent of, say, Fanny Howe or Sylvia Legris. Her poems fragment and fractal, and accumulate in a singular direction. “If the impulse to expand comes to fight a hard rain,” she writes, as part of “Fated,” “remember // the curve of the earth / comes to meet you, / to the smallest / portion of the soul.”
There is such a wonderful, careful complexity to Holtland’s lyric meditations, setting pause against pause. She holds, she halts, she slowly pieces together. For Holtland, place is not simply being or landscape but an all-encompassing entity of which we are an important part, and even moreso, given the incredible amount of damage we have inflicted upon it. Holtland holds her distances against ours, and our distances against the ether. As the section-sequence “The Story,” opens:
From down here
every day shines
no matter the weight
of constant distance,
of not knowing personally the mountain
travelling with you against entropy.
Holy is the purest
comedy
and were I able, I would hedge
all of this sorrow
on joy: make it so
there is no place you can’t be kind.