This article was supported by Viva La Book Review.
“Poetry has the power to drive ethics and construct shared values. It is through poetry that paradigms shift, culture transforms, and even scientific hypotheses are formed,” writes artist, author, geographer, and naturalist Obi Kaufmann in his new book, "California Inside Out." In his book, "Songs My Mother Taught Me," filmmaker, musician, poet, and author Saul Williams explores a similar conviction but in a different though equally powerful way. Williams addresses injustice, oppression, genocide, and imperialist violence far more directly than the ecologist Kaufmann, but both books are valuable manifestos that urge us to create a new world by transforming how we live and what we create.
Though these two titles initially seem very different, both use similar strategies to enlist readers in their causes. Williams and Kaufmann draw on personal stories, ecological insights, and sociopolitical analysis to map the front lines of our changing times—and demand that readers help reshape them.
“New thoughts mean new reality,” Kaufmann declares in his book. “Language, in this context, is either a perpetrator of the status quo or, in the hands of the poet, the driver of dynamic cultural succession.”
Williams, meanwhile, has built an international reputation on the power of poetry to envisage a more just and diversity-friendly world.
“I am not defining a poet solely as someone engaged in the heady work of composing written verse. Let’s discuss poetry as the vanguard of language,” writes Kaufmann.
“In this view, the poet becomes someone who invents creative landscapes for new languages to thrive. The job of the poet becomes the sharing of those creative spaces with their community, and the effect is the inevitable birth of culture,” he concludes.
"California Inside Out" is Kaufmann’s seventh book in nine years. 2017’s "The California Field Atlas" established his single-minded focus on nature; this Renaissance polymath has been charting and describing California’s forests, deserts, waterways and mountains ever since. Merging science and art as deftly as any author around, Kaufmann knows California’s geography intimately, from Mount Shasta to the Salton Sea, from the Sierra Nevada to the Mojave.
Kaufmann’s newest book draws on his previous work as a means of developing a cohesive theoretical framework, which means incorporating hand-painted maps and watercolor depictions of monarch butterflies, beavers, red-tailed hawks, grizzly bears, elk, and salmon in the Sisquoc River. The volume’s subtitle underlines its ambition: "Mapping an Ecology of Mind."
One of Kaufmann’s central concerns is geographic literacy. We protect what we love, he argues, and a deeper knowledge of local landscapes—their native plants, rivers, foothills and wildlife—can inspire the kind of affection that will compel us to be their stewards. He wants us to love the redwoods, the poppies and the watersheds, but such attachments can transform us, he warns: “Beware! You may fall in love with the land and the trees, the animals will become family, and you may encounter and relate to a kind of terrestrial immortality.”
Kaufmann rejects the conventional “man versus nature” paradigm, arguing for a radical interconnectedness between humans and the natural world. Echoing the Buddhist concept of “interbeing,” he urges us to discard the self-destructive notion that humans exist apart from the environment. He honors California’s Indigenous peoples as stewards of its landscapes since time immemorial, contrasting their traditions of reciprocity with the extractive mindset of today.
“One constant in Indigenous cosmological stories is the absence of any human alienation from the more-than-human world,” Kaufmann writes. “There are no examples of something like an expulsion from the garden of Eden. There is no original sin. Settler culture, or Euro-American culture, on the other hand, is arguably built on such devices of symbolic alienation.”
This separation, he argues, gave rise to the “man-versus-nature worldview” that remains so pervasive. Chapters such as “California is Fire” and “Thinking Like a Watershed” reinforce his call to become more attuned to the world around us. “Attunement,” he declares, “is a process of harmonic feedback, the application of subtle correction over time.”
For all its intellectual reach, Kaufmann’s work speaks to the heart. He encourages us to move beyond fear and panic toward an encouraging ethic that is grounded in nurturing relationships: an understanding rooted in a belief that humanity and nature are inseparable. His discussions of “the mind of the forest” ask us to consider nature as a form of consciousness that must be preserved. That ethic, he argues, can heal California and the wider natural world.
Williams calls for a new world with the same urgency, but his approach is far more politically confrontational. He believes artists must take sides. “We need songs that crumble empires,” he writes, “films that teach, remind, and inspire, poems that would make a despot revoke your citizenship.”
Invoking such Black predecessors as Paul Robeson and Amiri Baraka, Williams argues that artists cannot remain neutral in the face of imperialist violence, oppression, and genocide. In his formulation, artists either advance social change or produce work that legitimizes the ruling class.
"Songs My Mother Taught Me" is equal parts manifesto and memoir. Its insights emerge through stories grounded in Williams’s education as an activist and his coming of age as a poet, musician, and filmmaker. One of the most distinctive spoken-word poets of the past three decades, he limns his creative development, which he sees as intertwined with the evolution of performance poetry and the struggles taken up by such movements as Black Lives Matter and Free Palestine. Reading, taking notes, and writing about what he has learned about social inequities remain central to his practice, as does sharing what he learns online.
Writing as both participant and observer in social actions, Williams recounts how he became an “investigative poet.” He describes a year studying in Brazil during college, his early days in Brooklyn’s poetry-slam scene, and his upbringing in Newburgh, NY, which was shaped by the church and hip-hop. These experiences dramatize his poetry’s growing political engagement.
“A deep-seated love of humanity lies in the heart of every revolutionary,” Williams writes. “Those who are willing to put their love and their lives on the line at the risk of sounding stupid, being laughed at, hitting the wrong note, being rejected or even martyred are not acting merely as functionaries of a system.”
For Williams, art’s political force begins with its capacity to alter individual perception. He believes “that art can provide a touchpoint of inspiration and provoke the subtle transformations that bring new breath to old ideas.” Those shifts—in how we think, what we notice, and how we act—can accumulate into resistance to systems that reduce people to pawns and consumers.
Both books see world-building as a poetic practice: beneficial actions include caring for the natural world, challenging political violence, and imagining forms of life that discard capitalist exploitation. Urgency gives each book its momentum, while their brevity—Kaufmann’s is just under 100 pages, Williams’s is close to 200—gives them concentrated punch. Neither author treats poetry as a retreat from the world—it is a means to rejuvenate it.
