This March, Elektra presents Unsung: If the Earth Could Sing, featuring poetry by Lauren Peat. In her responses to our questions, Lauren reflects with real care on what it means to write “from” the natural world, the ethical limits of that imaginative act, and the way a cyclical, landscape-by-landscape structure creates space for breath, presence, and attention. Tickets available here.
Unsung unfolds across five movements shaped by distinct landscapes and weather systems. What drew you to a cyclical structure, and what does that progression allow you to explore that a single text might not?
Katerina and I wanted the overall piece to showcase a diversity of landscapes, and I knew it would be important to give each landscape its due—to present an emotional arc that not only aligned with its characteristics, but could also be heard in the music’s crescendos and decrescendos, its ebbs and flows. I felt I could attend to this more fully by treating the landscapes one by one. And a cyclical structure offers crucial breathing room—both literal and figurative—for the choir and audience.
In your notes, you describe writing from the perspective of the natural world as an “imperfect imaginative experiment. What felt possible in that experiment, and where did you feel clear ethical or artistic limits?
The Potawatomi writer and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer has suggested that being in better
relationship to the land requires that we “learn to speak its language.” In this spirit, I wanted to explore how much I could surrender my own poetic impulses in favour of the landscapes I was trying to evoke. How might a melting glacier hold a syllable, for example? And if a grassland spoke a monologue, how might the lines ripple, like stalks, as far as the eye can see? But as a guest on these lands, my language has limitations. I have a responsibility to acknowledge this, while also seeking out the words of Indigenous stewards, writers, and thinkers. I highly recommend the work of Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, as well as the book Hungry Listening by Stó:lō writer Dylan Robinson.
You’ve written about how Unsung evolved during the pandemic and in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the 2020 racial justice protests. How did that period reshape your relationship to the text, or sharpen what you felt it needed to say and what it needed to avoid?
Yes, I wrote the text in Ontario, during the earliest phase of the COVID-19 lockdown, and completed it just before George Floyd’s murder. What I remember most about those months is the strange sensation of being both out of time and enmeshed deeply within it. On the one hand, I was unmoored from my everyday routines and responsibilities; on the other hand, I felt implicated in a powerful moment of social history. I’ve come to hear this tension in Unsung, as well. On an environmental level, it’s exactly this feeling of being “out of sync” — bracing for wildfire season as early as May, for instance— that reveals the urgent need to act, to make good on our moment’s potential for change.
When audiences hear Unsung now, what do you most want them to sit with: about landscape, responsibility, or our relationship to destruction?
What I want most is for audiences to have an experience, intellectual, emotional, and physical, as they sit with the words and music. Any attempt to meaningfully reckon with our responsibilities depends on presence and embodiment, at a time when our attention is becoming increasingly fractured and disembodied. I hope that Unsung offers an opportunity to reflect, as well as an opportunity to breathe. To be with each other right now, right here.