Inspiration
Shakespeare Golden Shovels
The setting: The Bridge Theatre, London, 2019. The play: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A fabulously camp romp with a Beyoncé soundtrack and incredible acrobatics. Shakespeare so successfully updated, the same Nicholas Hytner production is revived in 2025. But of all the contemporary resonances, one of the play’s main preoccupations stood out for me as I sat in the audience swaying along to Love on top at the end: climate change.
Rewind to Titania’s speech in Act II, Scene 1:
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazèd world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension.
We are their parents and original.
The summer of 1594, shortly before the play was written, was famously cold and wet, with crops rotting in the fields and floods that wrecked bridges. But mark the last three lines of Titania’s speech – who or what is responsible for the progeny of evils described above but we the audience because of our dissension. The dictionary definition of dissension? A formal term for when a group of people who should be cooperating cannot agree on something. Sounds familiar?
I also latched onto the fabulous neologism distemperature which surely deserves a revival, with its dual nods to political distemper and an out-of-sorts temperature – is there a better word to encapsulate our global predicament? Accordingly, I’ve used the word in several poems, including one of those you can read below.
Titania’s speech led me to explore Shakespeare’s eco credentials further and sure enough there’s ample evidence throughout the folio to demonstrate that he was aware of issues such as deforestation and the impact of expanding cities on the natural world. By his time, the forest of Arden was more patchy woodland thanks to the booming timber industry, thanks not just to house-building but England’s almost permanent war footing. A fleet to defeat a Spanish Armada demands a vast amount of timber and there’s no evidence of any active attempts to replant what must have been seen as an infinite resource.
The form I’ve chosen for my poetic response is the Golden Shovel, invented by the American poet Terrance Hayes. He responds to Gwendolyn Brooks’s short but classic poem We Real Cool by using a word from it at the end of every line of his own poem – in order too, so you can read her poem down the right-hand margin of the page.
Read more: www.climatecultures.net
Aldeburgh Poetry Festival
I’m delighted to be reading with the collective group Poets For The Planet at this year’s Aldeburgh Poetry Festival as well as taking pat in a panel discussion on poetry and the climate emergency. You can book tickets for the festival here:
https://www.poetryinaldeburgh.org
Read My Reviews
I’m a regular reviewer for poetry magazine The Alchemy Spoon, which is edited by talented trio Roger Bloor, Vanessa Lampert and Mary Mulholland. You can order a copy of the magazine or read older copies here: https://www.alchemyspoon.org
My Caravaggio Project – Blog for Guts Publishing
I guess if you’ve read my unlikely poem about a lobster in the fabulous Transformative Power of Tattoo anthology, you won’t be surprised to know that my first collection was about climate change and its impact on the natural world. What might be more surprising is the subject of my second collection which is very different in both theme and register.
The poems look at the life, works and my response to the work of the Italian painter Caravaggio. If there’s a common trope between climate change and Caravaggio, it might be the sense of impending calamity underlying both. As you might know, it didn’t end well for Caravaggio, dying on a remote beach after years on the run for killing a man in Rome. Most of the facts about his life come from police records – he was a notorious brawler.
Set against this, those sublime paintings – ground-breaking, constantly pushing boundaries which one critic describes as “sadistic ballets”. And it’s this polarity that attracts me as a poet – the coexistence of the sacred and profane, tender and violent, all of which find echoes in his own character and behaviour.
And the paintings are wonderfully transgressive, many commissioned by a Church lamentably opposed to same-sex relationships yet containing a blatant homo-erotic charge. I’d suggest some of them come close to depicting male rape – put that in your cassock and smoke it.
So plenty to go for. And here’s the great bit – I write this at the end of an art tour called Caravaggio On The Run which takes in Malta and Sicily (I’ve already done the Rome/Naples leg). It’s 20 degrees in March and the Vino Rosso here is thick as blood. Whatever the subject of Julianne’s next anthology – nudes, smut, penises, anyone? – there’ll be a poem for that.
How and Why I Wrote We Saw It All Happen
I’ve written a blog for ClimateCultures about the creative process behind my book and my efforts to turn dull data into something resembling poetry – read it by going here: https://climatecultures.net/challenges-of-creative-engagement/we-saw-it-all-happen/
My First Poetry Collection Out Now
I’m so pleased to be working with Fly On The Wall Press on my first book of eco-poetry called We Saw It All Happen which was published in January 2023 and you can order it here:
https://www.flyonthewallpress.co.uk/product-page/we-saw-it-all-happen-by-julian-bishop
I’ve spent the last five years writing responses to the climate crisis and have been working with editor Isabelle Kenyon and her fabulous team at Fly On The Wall in selecting poems, among them being Little Whirlpool Ramshorn Snail which you can read here:
https://julianbishoppoet.com/poem-in-magma-magazine/