So, every other weekday since April, I’ve posted an entry in verse summarizing some of the more notably cataclysmic weather events of the previous 48 hours or so. The reasons for my doing this are complex, from making a few more people more aware of the daily effects of the climate emergency to just keeping my hands busy.
The title, “Poem of Our Climate,” is a play on the title of Wallace Stevens’ “The Poems of Our Climate,” which is not exactly about climate per se. Indeed, it’s more about the imagination (and, by implication, the human being’s dissatisfaction with even the most comfortable surroundings). When Stevens wrote that “the imperfect is so hot in us,” he had no idea how literal that statement would become. But, aside from the title, I refer to “Poem of Our Climate” as a “verse chronicle.” The word “poem” just carries too much weight, particularly after the New Critics, with their fetishization of the well-wrought urn of a poem and their desire to sequester poetry from politics and history. What I’m doing is on deadline, in response to things I’ve just read. It is necessarily (for both logistical and thematic reasons) going to be more loose-limbed and occasional than a poem by Elizabeth Bishop or Willie Yeats. “Poem of Our Climate” happens in real time: it is a memorial for the present. And it is a chronicle of unravelling, so tying everything up in a finely-crafted sonnet sequence would seem a little strange anyway. But I didn’t come up with this idea. Poetry used to do most anything prose could do, including commentary on current events. As late as the mid-twentieth century, it was the norm for newspapers to print poetry – sometimes as a commentary on the news, sometimes as a break from it. One newspaper poet who particularly inspires me is Anise (Anna Louise Strong), whose poems ran in the Seattle Union-Record newspaper (the nation’s first labor daily) from 1918-1921.* Strong was a radical labor reporter, and her Anise poems reflected that point of view. They typically take off from a news item in the very paper in which the poem appeared – “I read in the paper that . . . .” The poem might be about a strike or a foreign revolution, or a local election. Often Anise relates these events to events in her own life. The poems are written in columns, in short lines, in a colloquial voice, often incorporating humor, and always addressed to the paper’s very broad readership. I also take inspiration from the historical poems of Ed Sanders – ephemeral, mercurial, jokey, musical, dispersed, and always information-packed. News that stays news? More like history that stays poetry (and vice versa). It’s epic, but not exactly Homer. It is a chronicle, in concentrated poetical (and political) form. And Sanders was heavily influenced by Charles Olson, whose very skinny historical poems about Gloucester, Mass. thread through his opus, The Maximus Poems. Both Anise and Sanders make ample use of the visual aspect of print. Anise interleaves her lines of verse with lines of typographical symbols, such as asterisks or dollar-signs; she makes ample use of CAPITALIZED words for emphasis or defamiliarization. Sanders uses the “open field” of the page (i.e., variable indents, dropped lines, etc.), as well as the occasional hand-drawn sketch. If translated into Chinese and written by hand, they would be in “running script.” Both poets are trying to keep up – with history, that which has already transpired or that which is unfolding before the poet. The lineation is largely a function of the medium. I wanted the lines to appear as written, line-breaks intact, on a mobile device. My mobile device is an iPod touch, which has a very small, skinny screen. In order to get the lines to fit, I decreased the font size and shortened the lines. That, in turn, meant getting over my superstition about beginning and ending lines with prepositions. However, in the process, it forced me to try to compress narration and telescope many events into a small space without (hopefully) losing the sense. It also meant thinking about the rhythmic qualities of mundane phrases; the element of surprise (and upset expectations) that a line break can produce; and the way enjambment can produce both a sense of torrential forward movement and a sense of fractured-ness, at once. And I love numbers, symbols, abbreviations, misspellings, and all such practical rough-and-ready signs, in a poem – esp. since they save space. But why not prose? Well, there’s lots and lots of prose out there about the climate crisis, fiction and non-fiction. Poetry has been a little slow on the uptake, as far as I can tell. Also, there are so many human beings dying every day from events that are directly related to climate chaos; they aren’t kings and queens and generals, so nobody is singing their praises in song and verse. I wanted to do something that would at least honor the fact of their having existed – of our having existed. That’s why I try to avoid caps: we are all being swept away, or dried up and blown away, by global heating. The griot or the bard served the royal court. Who serves the world? Nobody, that’s who. And that’s our problem. _____________________________________________ * For more on the Anise poems, see my Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |