Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival

“…the snowmelt will have trickled into Dead Man’s Creek and the / creek spilled into the Stanislaus and the Stanislaus into the San Joaquin / and the San Joaquin into the slow salt marshes of the bay.” – Spring Rain, Robert Hass 1981. Hass, a U.S. Poet Laureate and UC Berkeley professor, read this poem at the first annual Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival in 1995 at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

This event evolved from Hass's Watershed initiative during his two-year term as Poet Laureate, which celebrated the connection between American rhetoric and natural history. As a self-described ecopoet, Hass urges environmentalists to utilize the power of poetry in activism. Since its inception, the October festival moved bases and expanded to include a leisurely walk along Strawberry Creek on campus organized by Nevada County Poet Laureate Chris Olander, often with special tour content from Wholly H2O!