{"id":4583,"date":"2019-11-04T09:03:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-04T14:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/commencement\/?p=4583"},"modified":"2021-02-19T11:58:18","modified_gmt":"2021-02-19T16:58:18","slug":"voices-of-2020-jesse-saffeir-and-lines-of-poetry-sparked-by-lines-through-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/commencement\/2019\/11\/04\/voices-of-2020-jesse-saffeir-and-lines-of-poetry-sparked-by-lines-through-nature\/","title":{"rendered":"Voices of 2020: Jesse Saffeir and Lines of Poetry Sparked by Lines Through Nature"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the most important lessons Jesse Saffeir \u201920 of Pownal, Maine, has learned at Bates is the importance of applying what she learns in class to her own life in the world.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat impact do we have on other people, and how can we move through spaces in ways that make people feel comfortable and included?\u201d she says.<\/p>\n<p>An environmental studies major, Saffeir began to think about how she moves through one type of space in particular: Maine&#8217;s power line corridors. The corridors, cut through fields and forests to make way for tall towers and wires, are juxtapositions of what we think of as manmade and natural \u2014 if we think about power lines at all.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe all, for the most part, rely on electricity to live, and we never really encounter the spaces where that energy is produced and transported,\u201d Saffeir says.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><span style=\"color: #009779;\"><em>Video by Theophil Syslo.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Jesse Saffeir | Voices from the Class of 2020\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/XyIYY_bXVjc?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>So last summer, Saffeir walked along the corridors, funded by a Bates Otis Fellowship, which supports students investigating relationships between humans and nature. She defined the experience more as bushwhacking than hiking \u2014 since there are no trails, she had to make her own maps and plan where to get her food.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think we often forget just how much we rely on the spaces around us for our well-being and our sanity,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n<p>Saffeir wrote a poem each day as she walked, later collecting them into a book called <em>Transmission: Poems from Maine\u2019s Powerline Corridors<\/em>.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_129070\" style=\"width: 1929px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-129070\" class=\"wp-image-129070 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2019\/11\/190904_Jane_Costlow_Otis_Fellow_0045.jpg\" alt=\"Jesse Bull Saffeir '20 of Pownal, Maine, displays her book of original poetry about Maine's power line corridors, written during an Otis Fellowship sojourn. \" width=\"1919\" height=\"1279\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/174\/files\/2019\/11\/190904_Jane_Costlow_Otis_Fellow_0045.jpg 1919w, https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/174\/files\/2019\/11\/190904_Jane_Costlow_Otis_Fellow_0045-400x267.jpg 400w, https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/174\/files\/2019\/11\/190904_Jane_Costlow_Otis_Fellow_0045-900x600.jpg 900w, https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/174\/files\/2019\/11\/190904_Jane_Costlow_Otis_Fellow_0045-200x133.jpg 200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1919px) 100vw, 1919px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-129070\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jesse Bull Saffeir &#8217;20 of Pownal, Maine, displays her book of original poetry about Maine&#8217;s power line corridors, written during an Otis Fellowship sojourn. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Walking the lines, Saffeir says, has reinforced and given deeper meaning to what she has learned in her classes: that the environment isn&#8217;t just the wilderness, that there\u2019s no clear binary between \u201chuman\u201d and \u201cnature.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI want to think a little bit broadly about our environments as being the places where we live, where we work, where we play, and also the environments that we rely on but don\u2019t really spent a lot of time in,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBeing able to apply the things that we&#8217;re learning about in a very direct way to our own lives is so important to just becoming humans in this world.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Here is one of the poems from\u00a0<em>Transmission<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u201cTransmission\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I step into the lake to fill<br \/>\nan empty jug with cool clear water.<br \/>\nI cannot trust my senses<br \/>\nso I heat it to a boil.<\/p>\n<p>I am learning to shelter<br \/>\nmy body<br \/>\nto only drink upstream<br \/>\nof the runoff \u2014<\/p>\n<p>pass by the green water<br \/>\nthe brown water<br \/>\nthe turquoise water pooling<br \/>\nnear the mines<\/p>\n<p>sooner or later everyone<br \/>\ngets thirsty<\/p>\n<p>the world is not a disease<br \/>\nthat I know of.<br \/>\nit is an inheritance beyond<br \/>\nmy wildest dreams.<\/p>\n<p>at night the space between my eyes crawls<br \/>\nwith deer ticks, vectors that will burrow<br \/>\ntheir bodies into me transmitting<br \/>\na fear I cannot see.<\/p>\n<p>I walk along transmission<br \/>\nlines. the air grows charged<br \/>\ncondenses to a static spark<br \/>\neach time I touch a finger to metal<\/p>\n<p>and what that spark contains<br \/>\nhas travelled a long way to get here<br \/>\nand will keep traveling<br \/>\nlong after it passes<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An Otis Fellowship summer of hiking alongside power lines produced a new understanding of our place in the world \u2014 and a book of poems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":104,"featured_media":4577,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[13,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commencement-2020","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/commencement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/commencement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/commencement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/commencement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/104"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/commencement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4583"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/commencement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4591,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/commencement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4583\/revisions\/4591"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/commencement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/commencement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/commencement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/commencement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}