Beautiful poetry lies within beautiful souls; poetry that transcends normal traditions and creates art has the potential to impact what’s happening in the world, splashing alongside the drought in California or the degradation of species.

With the help of coordinator and professor Joshua McKinney, for this year’s Festival of the Arts at Sacramento State, poet Brenda Hillman visited the campus on April 9 with readings from a variety of her nine books and experiences advocating for ecological crises.

Hillman’s book, “Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire,” won the 2014 International Griffin Poetry Prize. She has also won awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bay Area’s Book Reviewer’s Award, a Pushcart Prize and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award.

“I’ve read Brenda’s work for a quarter of a century at least, and I know her fairly well, she’s marvelous, a marvelous poet, she’s marvelous with students and she’s arguably the leading eco-poet in the United States right now,” McKinney said.

Hillman read her poetry, making her visit more personal and intimate experience for the audience. A Sac State student taking McKinney’s eco-poetics class this semester, Stuart L. Canton, enjoyed her Q&A at the end of her reading and talking to her afterward.

“It was really interesting, it was a great opportunity,” Canton said. “She’s prominent both as a poet and somebody who practices eco-poetry […] it’s the kind of thing that you want to see at the Festival of the Arts, that exposure.”

The ecological crisis the world has found itself slowly developing should not come as a surprise. Hillman continually talks about the problems and policies that plague our world through her poetry and through her activism, picketing and protesting, something McKinney says he deeply respects about her.

“The thing that sets Brenda apart, for me, is that Brenda probably does do some good through her writing, but she doesn’t trust twhat I think, she goes out and protests and she pickets and she reads poems at protests and she gets knocked down by the cops, she puts her money where her mouth is you might say,” McKinney said.

Hillman is considered an eco-poet, a specialized type of genre in poetry that explores the fine line of language related to our environment, pondering questions like: “How can poetry engage with a global ecosystem under duress?” and “How do poetic languages, forms, structures, syntaxes and grammars contend or comply with the forces of environmental disasters?”

McKinney’s eco-poetics syllabus asks students these questions in the class he is teaching this semester.

“My interest was sparked by my own interest in nature, and also the question of, ‘can someone use writing to somehow make better or ameliorate this problem that we have,’ you know our ecological crisis that we’re in now,” McKinney said. “Can writing do anything at all to help that, this is a big question and the answer to it may be no, but I think it’s something that a writer has to think about if they’re going to continue writing in the face of that disaster.”

Hillman described how she knows that eco-poetics is not the factor that will change the crisis the world is in or change laws that can help the ecological factors, but that the genre can bring awareness and promote the actions that are needed.

“I don’t know if poetry itself has a real effect on public policy or law or anything like that,” Hillman said. “[…] But I think it still matters that poets speak to public issues and to things that are going along with the world and that they keep their imaginations out there, and I think surprisingly enough some public figures actually care about poetry, it doesn’t mean it’s going to change laws […] but poetry and art belong alongside of those processes.”

She said going to congress with information of what should be changed and why- especially in a group of young people- can scare them, posing a threat and working for change.

“Hopefully she’ll [Hillman] make them [students] want to read poetry and write poetry, and I would imagine that she would probably feel more successful if she could get people to write their congressman,” McKinney said.

Both Hillman and McKinney stress the place that we’re in globally and environmentally, and how the best way to start to fixing the problem is to get people to open their eyes and notice what is going on around them; just because we might not be as directly affected as other countries doesn’t mean we don’t have a problem.

“I do think we are in a really serious place environmentally and globally, and all you need to do is take the temperature in California to understand that we’re about to run out of water,” McKinney said. “I think people need to be mindful of that and think about ways, if you’re a writer you can find ways to work that every day reality into your work […] if nothing else will open your own eyes into the situation that we’re in, which is a start I suppose to fixing it.”

Hillman ended her reading with dedicating a poem to the audience, “After a Long Beautiful Day” and took the time to sign everybody’s books and talk with students, alumni and anybody else who attended.

“Remember, you can do anything you want in your poems,” Hillman said.