Joseph Harrington
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Writing Out of Time
creative writing & climate chaos

Poem of Our Climate

2/28/2020

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no arctic, no animals,
esp. no arctic animals — so
no news about how
“polar bears in russia’s arctic
increasingly resort
to ----------- as growing
human activity & development
shrinks their hunting grounds”

while

“climate coverage in 2019
still made up only 0.6%
of overall corporate broadcast
t.v. news & talk shows” [u.s.]

while

“medical schools focus more
& more on treating patients
affected by the impacts of
extreme weather &
changing climate patterns –
like asthma attacks from
wildfire smoke, heat exhaustion
from sweltering temps &
diseases carried by insects
moving into new locations . . .
   ‘the sense that we’re at
    an emergency level of
    this crisis has finally started
    to sink in’”
        (so to speak)

        but

“for a modern american audience,
it is hard to convey just how
devastating swarms of locusts
can be: they can move up to 100
miles in a day. they eat as much as
35k people do. you really have to
go back decades in the u.s.,
to dust bowl days, to understand
just how devastating this can be”

even as

“the rains began in december in
burundi, where roads, bridges &
crops have been destroyed,
livestock killed &
vital water access points
washed away. houses built of
mud bricks have literally melted
in the rain . . .
                                 ‘i am desperate,’
she says. ‘i have no idea
where i am going to sleep tonight.
we have lost everything’"

not to mention

“climate change-driven
global warming is a factor
behind repeated instances of
severe flooding across
greater jakarta since early jan.”

and

“another downpour or two
could push many communities in
madagascar past their annual
rainfall amount before mid-march”

meanwhile, in australia,
southernmost outpost of the
global north:

“when you're lined up
at the supermarket, green grocer or
deli getting your grocery shopping
sorted, the people who actually
grew and produced your food
are the last thing on your mind.
but this bushfire disaster,
which hit our most
productive areas
brought primary producers to
the front of our national psyche”

while,
back where you are,
what’s at the front of
your psyche,
dear reader? . . .

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Finding (More) CliPo

2/27/2020

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I finally got around to reading Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué’s poetry collection Losing Miami (The Accomplices, 2019). The title has a double meaning: the author/speaker has moved away from their hometown (and you can’t go home again), and in the meantime, the hometown is being lost to the waves. The book begins:

start with sinking:

I was raised in a city
that could be swallowed
by the sea within
the next century

start there


It’s not a book about climate change — at least not in any simple or straightforward sense. But the poems are about a city where you can never get away from the issue of sea-level rise (hence the City of Miami has a Climate Resilience Committee). In the prose poem “I Do Not,” the speaker is

told by a gorgeous straight man that it is all about taxes. That we can make money differently. That the gentrifiers are buying higher altitude property and pushing the poor to lower altitude neighborhoods where houses will be lost first.

It’s funny to think of “altitude” in a place as flat as Miami — but that’s the very reason Miamians have to think about altitude. And it’s not like storm surge is the only Miami problem the book presents: there’s overloaded sewer lines and leaking septic tanks, for instance. There’s being gay and cubano in a culture that doesn’t like either. And there’s all the ordinary bullshit of life that poets write about. Still, weaving between the traffic jams and personal insecurities, climate chaos keeps showing up: “Don’t tell me that it’s literally all my actions causing this, even if it is. I can’t figure that one. Instead, be honest and tell me it is ones with larger influence. Ribcages of corporations. Day to day in a government.”

This is a bilingual mixed-genre book. It splices prose and verse, lyric meditation and nonfiction thinking, as in this section of the serial poem “Losing Miami”:

                                                If I could prove you wrong
                              phoenix of sand
                        “vertical living”
                  I aspire to joystick control
                                                                     of a crab walking
                                                 forwards

                     drowning on
                     the turnpike
                      leaping off
                      the turnpike

Is this the miracle of the inventing mind? Really? Island nations and coastal cities close to drowning in the ocean? As a species we can invent anything and have, do anything and have, but the whole time, the thousands of years we’ve done it, this is its byproduct? I am trying not to show it but I am enraged. I feel cheated by consequences I cannot fully comprehend. I feel guilty enough in causation but unequipped to remedy my/our actions. This is a deep and slow rage, one that I can’t fully feel at the precise moment, but one that flatly spreads across the present and possibility.


The prose bit doesn’t necessarily say anything that hasn’t been said before, but it says it well — and it’s so rare to hear a poet say as much, in as many words, that reading the book is very refreshing, if depressing. The poems’ mercurial zigs and zags from image to thought, along with the word play — in both Spanish and English and between Spanish and English — never let the poems become overly saturnine. They feel like what I feel like Miami is like. Indeed, Ojeda-Sagué can get pretty funny:

I hum, a category 1 is not
enough to lift the ocean
and pour it into my pants
at least not here, but it
can evaluate a coast, and set it
aside, or it can destroy New
York, but even I can destroy
New York


The sang-froid of the hurricane veteran can quickly devolve to ennui — and ennui masks a certain restlessness:

I wish a hurricane were
more dramatic, came with
sandbags seething in
spin, hit citizens with sandbags
to displace them . . .
                                                          . . . the
Godzilla we always wanted, thought would
come sooner


If the Big One is always coming, will you even notice when it comes? This is the tension that swirls over the book. Things get worse, little by little; whole generations grow up with climate crisis and don’t know anything else. And we can’t read what’s right in front of our faces, because we can’t imagine what it portends:               

                         water is rising
that’s the obvious
       but the hardest is to concede treasures
to an imaginary coastline


Those are fake pearls that were his eyes? Or real pearls and fake eyes. The Big Take-Home from Losing Miami is that the issues we have with climate change are not that far removed with the issues we have with everything else — indeed, proceed from and are enmeshed in the “everything else” of our lives. And that’s a valuable insight, even if you don’t know what elevation you’re at.


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Poem of Our Climate

2/26/2020

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another democrat debate,
another evening free of
climate questions --
at least the billionaire
hedge-fund manager brought
it up . . . & i read where
the seed vault stashed away
indigenous american corn,
beans, squash, along w/
60k other new old samples

another day, another flood
barrier busts along the river
severn, another u.k. town
inundated; u.s. corps of
engineers just engineered
a fix for levees breached
in the last flood season, just
in time for the next one

another day of devastation
farther south: the desert
locusts have made
it to the d.r. congo; the price
of tomatoes in kenya 7x ↑
in last few weeks: few weeks
of rainy season w/sudden
heavy downpours destroyed
the crop; even rice paddies
under too much water in
karnataka (only 16% of
normal crop this year); &
“jakarta is submerged,” too--
again; w. australia pummeled
by cyclones; and 20% of
the country’s forests reduced
to cinders; & drought hitting
new zealand now

“we can’t say climate change
caused any weather event.
what we can say is that the
probability of such events
increases due to c.c.” --
which is why i bring you
so many of the probable
effects . . . the “bats in dec.,
bluebonnets in jan., butter-
flies in feb.,” the day after
the day after day . . .

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"MEDITATION 6 (1/3/2020)," by Susan M. Schultz

2/25/2020

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The war to prevent war has re-begun. It’s hard to be a saintly nation, certain of its virtues, its kindness, the generosity of its violence. They are bad men because they kill us, but we are good men because we remove them from this earth, by bomb or by drone. It’s done. No matter if we call the play from the office that lacks corners (he was astonished!) or from the golf course. Its faux slice of nature does include traps, though they’re easily evaded with a mulligan or two. Just like the convoy of death, several wars ago; beside the trucks you might find family photos or IDs, but inside there was only ash. Ash falls on the eastern shores of Australia. He walked through Sydney and “smelt of smoke.” I was surprised by the “smelt,” though that is what men do to metal to make it. When it’s hot, it bends, but earth is more like a paper straw that’s been bent so many times it’s wilted, like flowers, like travelers in the heat. But back to the actual war, not the one we poured gasoline on before hiding out on a bleached reef or simmering roof, we’re left in an attending position. I waited for signs of life on the screen, but the tech refused to tell me what it meant. The phone calls came later. Like secret messages from your enemy, wishing you the worst as you try to balance hope and cynicism, finally binding them with ribbon, then putting on a prefabricated bow for good measure. The festive time of year comes crashing to a halt with the news cycle, which is one. No more are linear histories possible; it’s all circulation, traffic circles without exit, an Irish refrigeration truck bearing down on you from what only seems the wrong side of the road. When you get to the turn, you have to calculate desire against circumstance, habit against this new frontier of obeying the local laws, shifting with your left hand, steering on the right. Tasman forests burn, the outskirts of Sydney burn, a woman collapses in Canberra from the smoke. Earth dies by our suicide. The writing that’s intended to go abstract, intended to avoid the knife in the back that stays in the back, the never healing from this damage, the PTSD that is no laughing matter, the bending over weeping in the kitchen not knowing how a man could do that to a boy, or a nation, or a koala. State flags fly upside down from legions of pick-up trucks. Pam has lost her fight, she writes, but wants to kill every politician in Australia. Grieving her partner’s daughter’s father and the bush, which is expansive but hardly abstract. The reason Australian irony is so strong, Tranter said, is that if you’re in trouble and you leave the city for the bush, you’re dead.

_____________________________________________________  

Susan M. Schultz lives and works on O`ahu near coastal roads that erode into the Pacific Ocean. She is author of two volumes of Dementia Blog and more volumes of Memory Cards. Her most recent book is I Want to Write an Honest Sentence, from Talisman. As publisher of Tinfish Press from 1995-2019, she published a great deal of work from Australia, including the recent anthology, Ashbery Mode, edited by Michael Farrell. On one visit to Australia, Ann Vickery took her to see penguins, koalas, platypuses and emus, all of them now in danger.

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TOMORROW: Susan M. Schultz!

2/24/2020

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Tune in tomorrow for a brand-new Meditation by Susan M. Schultz. What does political assassination have to do with wildfire ? Find out -- Don't miss it!

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Poem of Our Climate

2/24/2020

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last week’s city
commission meeting: 3 ½
hrs. on air b&b --
to regulate or not to regulate --
45 minutes on climate crisis:
my livelihood, my peace
& quiet next year trumps
(if i may) the risk of house-
lessness in 10. i mean, who
knows what will happen 10
years from now? nobody,
that’s who. but we do have a
pretty good idea: a whole
lot of people from the coasts
are going to need air b&b’s,
regular b&b’s, apartments,
section 8 housing, home-
less shelters or free tents
in these parts if things
keep going like they’re
going

& the paper didn’t report it,
but the commish committed
the city to 100% re-
newables by 2035 (the sun-
risers talked them down
from 2050). i’ll report back
in 2035 . . .
                               meanwhile,
back in 2020,
here’s what was happening:
              
a 37 mi. x 25 mi. cloud of
locusts in kenya (one of many
in e. africa & arabian pen.);
& a sq. mi. patch can eat as
much as 90 k people would
in a day (meaning the 90 k
will have to look for food
elsewhere . . .); “bible
coming to life?”
(jerusalem post headline)

“breeding fast . . . changes in
global climate patterns . . .
major cyclones, heavy rains
. . . india has managed to
prevent a swarm of biblical
proportions from spilling over
into bangladesh, burma, & then
china—where the coronavirus
has already paralyzed
much of the country’s activity.
but it’s not clear how long
that line will hold,” what with
them being active all winter, &
when one locust lays 300 eggs
in 3 mo. (in saudi, march will
see them hatch, for round 2);
o — plus which — they emit
a foul-smelling secretion that
deters birds from eating them

(climate “change”: it’s not
just for sea-level rise
anymore)

flash floods, land-
slides in s. peru &
flash floods, land-
slides in java (buy hey only
14 people killed — not
disasters, right?) &
"some people are getting
enormous rain &
their next-door neighbours
are getting virtually nothing,"
sez the rancher in w. central
n.s.w., whose 30 dams
are dried up, while the coast
is getting pummeled; while
in lituania, this early feb.,
“trees and plants bud, forget-
me-nots sprout, butterflies
flicker on a sunny day”:
lovely weather! (for june);

weather is news but weather
is not climate, therefore
climate is not news

but in 2018, “61% (17.2
million) of the newly-displaced
were by natural disasters;
39% (10.8 m) by conflict
and violence” — rethinking
“front line” --
which will be great for the air
b&b’s, if any of these folks
salvage anything
before they fled

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Time and Tides (3 of 3)

2/21/2020

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Finally, a third text: an interesting little treatise, written by a Dane, Morten Swenstrup, called Towards a New Time Culture. Swenstrup begins from “Michael Serres’ insight that the principal component of the ecological crisis is time.” Sure, there have been moments in the natural history of the earth when there was as much CO2 in the atmosphere as there is now, but it took millions of years to build up – species had time to adapt. And climate change happened slowly enough to allow for the emergence of new species (e.g., homo sapiens). But if a giant asteroid hits . . . well, it’s just extinction of most and hope for the rest.

In this case, we are the asteroid. Swenstrup’s thesis is that “the mechanistic temporalities that exist in society” (i.e., clock time) can be countered by art, which “has a ‘knowledge’ of time” – a knowledge that is a bit more organic and phenomenological than Mr. Taylor’s stop-watch – “living rhythms, rather than goal-oriented production.” This might remind one of Henri Bergson’s distinction between clock-time and durée, time as experienced by the individual. Swenstrup cites Henri Lefebvre’s notion that “the body proportions the rhythms we sense.” Abstract temporalities become tangible in an actual “physical place, namely a human body . . .” In other words, the demand – need – for economic growth runs up against what the human body can take, a limit that is “an anchor value” for evaluating time. And, by extension, the biosphere becomes a kind of physical meta-body. The implication of all this is that art has a power to counter the ecological crisis by introducing a different temporality.

This is all very nice, except in those cases where there are only two choices: speed-up or starvation. Human bodily limits are met and exceeded, one could argue, in chattel slavery and sweatshop labor. Taylorization is a kinder, gentler version of this drive. A striking might slow speed-up to zero, but it can also get you fired (or killed). None of that vitiates Swenstrup’s or Lefebvre’s point; quite the contrary. Or Ivan Illich’s observation that a “linear sense of time progression inherent in the idea of development implies that there is always a better and a more.” There aren’t. And what constitutes more-and-better depends on your subject position. In any event, clock-time turns the future into something abstract, a fungible resource, like money, composed of empty and equivalent units. Linear time and a disembodied future inevitably lead to acceleration – e.g., in the number of work hours necessary to earn a wage. This process is made to seem inevitable. Time is, in effect, an ideology.

And work is not the only thing accelerated – so is information. The amount increases at a rate faster than the capability of the human nervous system to assimilate it. So everyone shouts louder to be heard, and soon all is noise. One no longer lives “in the world of things,” but in a semiosphere that spins faster and faster.

One way that art can counter all this is by introducing and valuing cyclical, as opposed to linear, time. Some have argued that this move is feminist, insofar as cyclical tasks traditionally have been assigned to women and girls (think changing diapers), though that strikes me as a bit essentialist. In any case, in cyclical time, things change, to be sure, but at a much slower rate (cloth vs. Pampers). Having recently taught some Gertrude Stein, this idea makes some sense to me, in formal as well as thematic terms. But a thoroughgoing shift to cyclical time, it seems to me, would entail making art far more slowly and de-emphasizing innovation/originality. Many would see this move as regressive. But I think that’s Swenstrup’s point.

“Art is a sphere in which many societal demands can partly be suspended,” he writes. This statement brings out my inner Situationist. For the French Situationists in the 1960s, the only possible context for free art, in the sense Swenstrup envisions, was that of a general strike (they made & performed a lot of art in Mai 1968). In other words, art and social organizing cannot be divorced, if one wishes to make changes to either. So the Situationists created “art” interventions that disrupted the ordinary economic flow of things (I think of the work of artists and writers in Extinction Rebellion as a kind of latter-day echo of this tactic).

But then Swenstrup modifies his claim: “In any case, art offers the possibility of being less affected by acceleration. It may therefore be possible to encounter rhythms and temporalities in art that do not exist in very many other areas of society.”* Those are indeed possible possibilities – certainly the latter.

The art work has “something to teach about time” if its “temporality takes the form of bodily experienced rhythms.” Can an art work self-consciously bring the other’s bodily rhythms into itself? Such a non-accelerative, cyclical temporality in literature might mean valorizing certain forms over others. The realist novel, with its linear chronology (even regressively linear “flashbacks”) would have to go. And cyclical forms in poetry (e.g., villanelle, sestina, Steinian “insistence”) might be more highly prized. Montage, as a form of narration, would embody this ideal more than plot, and perhaps more cyclical or recursive forms of narrative would do so as well. Concrete poetry (words, phonemes, characters as “things”) would be “in.” The avant-garde (qua avant-garde, anyway) would be “out,” insofar as it has to constantly come up with the New — constantly have something to be avant of (cf. Peter Bürger). Recycling of traditional forms & themes (pastoral, love poems, praise-songs, etc.) would be “in.” Both Futurism and Tennyson would be way, way “out.”

But more than the textual form of the work, Swenstrup has in mind the social form of the work: its manner of production & consumption, distribution context, the audience’s use of it. All of these need to slow down: “[A] work of art takes all the time it needs,” he asserts. He doesn’t simply mean a long novel takes a long time to write – or the multi-century musical works composed by John Cage and others. “Even a poem can be said to have its own reading pace.” That is, if one isn’t skim-reading it to get to the next poem and the next, in order to be a more productive writer/teacher/reviewer. “Turning toward the work allows the artwork to lead an audience into its ‘drama,’ to become participants”: I think Swenstrup has in mind a somewhat  passive attitude towards the work (Wordsworth’s “wise passivity”); a more active version of this sentiment might be found in Brecht’s epic theater (or Situationist situations).

Finally, Swenstrup asserts, “Beauty means to eliminate ownership.” He doesn’t just mean eliminating ownership of artistic and intellectual work (though he did publish his treatise under a Creative Commons license). I think he means eliminating ownership period. And there’s the rub: ownership is pretty entrenched. But maybe subverting or sharing property, slowing down the labor-hours the bosses buy, the accidental sabot dropped into the gears, a transit strike, a general strike – these could be art forms, too. Maybe the most beautiful the world has ever known.

____________________________  

* He calls an encounter with such art “the peaceful gaze,” indicating he is thinking primarily of visual art. We all want a peaceful gaze – or a peaceful anything. But capitalism and imperialism just won’t leave some people alone. I can’t help but think of the Clash’s song “Safe European Home.”

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Poem of Our Climate

2/20/2020

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“what’s happening at the south
pole is really terrifying,” the
anchor sez; “it really is,”
the co-anchor agrees.
“now, in headline news . . .”

they’d just shown time-lapse
nasa footage of the pine island
glacier “calving” (awww –
that sounds so cute,
but isn’t) sending ice the
size of manhattan, naples,
1/3 of paris (+ a few
small nations thrown
in for good measure) out
into the sea to melt away --

shifts in the arctic oscillation --

(news that’s gonna
stay news . . .)

yesterday, we were right
on the money for normal
hi
         unlike anchorage,
which hit a record hi tues
(44 f) at midnight, but had
record snow (8.9”) 24 hrs
later . . .

& hibernating animals at
zoos in n. europe are
waking up . . .

        “according to
        global averages, january
        was the hottest
                month
         in recorded history”

[. . . pause . . .]

& in “a village near to
lyme regis” (u.k.), an alleged
tornado — power lines,
trees down --
“my neighbour’s boat
weighed 300 to 400 lbs &
moved about 14 ft across
his garden, swivelled around
a number of times & the keel
made indentations in
his lawns where the wind
picked it up and moved it” --
which sounds like a twister
to me (guardian: “flooded
britain: a new normal?”)

record hi’s in florida (“like
summer”); last yr hottest
ever on is. of oahu;

“sprawling fields turned into
large lakes throughout
west tennessee,” including
halls tn., near my dad’s
hometown — brings it closer
to home somehow — even
though i don’t live in the
flooded trailer park (always
the poor folk live in lowlands);

& in n.s.w., first fires, now
floods (17” of rain last week)
& inevitable mudslides:
"i just saw this massive piece
of earth coming at me, it was
absolutely horrific … the feeling
that you're going to be
buried alive”         . . . but
99% of the state still in drought:
they’re trucking in water out
in the bush, where “the river
hasn’t run since 2017,” where
“the farmer shot all the cattle,
then shot himself”

& the locusts arrived
in s. sudan, forming swarms
the size of cities

(has any of this been
  on the news
  where you are?)

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Time and Tides (2 of 3)

2/19/2020

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VICE magazine recently ran an article entitled “Four Ways the Climate Crisis Could Trigger a 2008-Style Economic Crash.” The four ways are:

1. “A devastating Florida hurricane bankrupts a major insurer,” which would have major ripple effects in the banking and financial sectors

2. “Insurers flee California wildfire zones and mortgages crater”: no property insurance = no new mortgages = banks cratering, too – not to mention reduced property values (& taxes)

3. “Massive declines in oil demand make investors panic,” which would be a paradoxical effect of the rush to zero emissions

4. “The housing market goes literally and figuratively underwater” – self-explanatory, but worth noting that “$100 billion in coastal mortgages are issued every year”

Needless to say, these are not the only four ways. 5.) Water shortages, heat waves, and increased pest populations send food prices soaring; 6.) A hurricane ploughs right into lower Manhattan. And so on. Nor are they mutually exclusive: had hurricane Harvey made landfall a few miles to the northeast, it would have made a direct hit on the Houston ship channel, home to the second-largest petrochemical complex in the world. That scenario would have panicked at least a few oil investors and probably driven more than one major insurer into bankruptcy — and the rise in oil prices would have a significant negative economic effect. A lot of the paper money in the financial system would turn to ash overnight. Multiply this disaster by two in one year . . . well, you can see where this is going. And given the science, it’s hard to believe it won’t go there – probably sooner than we think (just ask the Australians).

But what does it have to do with creative writing? Well, insofar as books are commodities, they are part of the capitalist system – a rather volatile, vulnerable part, whose role in the economy is less secure than that of oil. When there are major shocks to the system, publishing feels it hard. People have to pay rent; they don’t have to buy books. Commercial houses will publish fewer titles; independent presses will go under. There will be even more good books that go unpublished.

Moreover, writers in the academy will face a double whammy. First, it will become harder for them to get their books published. Will the published book remain the status symbol it is now – the sine qua non for getting an interview, let alone tenure? “Why, I had six published books before I got tenure! We can’t tenure somebody with just four!” the old folks will intone; but of course, that will be because they could get books published at all. Secondly, such a severe downturn to the economy means a severe downturn in tax revenues. To the extent that most academics are employed by institutions dependent on public funds, that will mean hiring freezes, furloughs, financial exigency, layoffs. The slow-down of the creative-writing industry will become a free-fall, as programs shrink or close.

So: what is to be done? Well, first, as I’ve argued on more than one occasion, our conception of publishing – esp. book publishing – has to change. Publishing means “making-public,” and that can happen on any scale. I would expect more books published in micro quantities, perhaps by hand press methods. A return of the Mimeograph Revolution. Circulation of manuscripts by hand. And a de-emphasis on the book as the primary vehicle for literature: more one-off stories and poems; serialized novels; orature and performance.

Second, to the extent that there are any academic writers left, their colleagues should not obsess about the quantity of their work, but should evaluate the quality of their work — rather than shunt that task off to an editor or publisher by making publication a proxy for value. Perhaps publication should be one of the rewards of tenure and promotion, rather than a prerequisite – that is, maybe tenure and promotion should function like contests do today. Invitations to job interviews could be based on blind MS submissions – colleges could just tack on a surcharge for applying for CW jobs, just like presses do now with entry fees.

Finally, and most importantly: PRODUCE LESS. Nobody is reading most of the books produced today because nobody can possibly read them all – there’s a market glut. Produce fewer of them. Or de-commodify them by making them by hand and giving them away; or memorizing them and performing them. This will take a lot more time; that’s a good thing. This is what Dale Smith refers to as “Slow Poetry.” I’d also argue for the flip side: slow reading & re-reading. Why burn through 20 books a month & forget what you’ve read? Why not spend a month on really getting to know one book? Or even one poem?

All of this will mean that there will be fewer professional writers, in or out of the academy. But if things get bad enough (which they probably will, later if not sooner), there will be fewer professional anything, because there will be less of an official cash economy. So, if you’re a writer, you won’t be able to write as much as you might today. You’ll be improving your community’s resilience to climate buffeting; turning your lawn into a food garden with hardy crops; rigging up a solar array to run whatever appliances you have left; or forming a barter system or cooperative work-groups with your neighbors. Counter-intuitively, writing and reading (perhaps out loud?) might seem more integral to life than it does now — more (dare I say it?) life-affirming. Pro-social. Anti-bullshit.

In other words, it’s about time, it’s about place. Place, in this context, means finding one where you can stay for an extended period of time. Getting to know it, which means getting to know the people in it. But that takes time. Everything takes time. And time is money. Being in a hurry = speed-up = commodification = “productivity.”


[To be continued . . .]
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Poem of Our Climate

2/18/2020

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action-accu-weather data:
hi 2/17 65˚ f in
lawrence, ks.; normal hi 44.
can’t beat this weather,
huh?! . . . well, actually,

warmer winters bring more
mosquitoes and ticks
in the spring and summer &
more skeet- and tick-borne
illnesses; + more pests
that eat food crops; & no
freeze = microbes eat up
soil nutrients all winter,
depleting farmland; also
cali produce $↑
(less snow = less water);
bark beetles never
die back = dead pines; &
skiing? foggedaboutit!
they’re skiing indoors in
norway . . .

in response to all this,
the protesters dig up
the lawn at trinity college
cambridge (big fossil fuel
portfolio) & get
a mention in newsweek . . .

almost no snow in s. korea;
or ice in the moscow river;
the sylvan wye hits
highest level on record (u.k.
flood warnings at record 594)
66 f in belgium on 2/16
(a record); 107 mph winds
in germany

the locusts continue spreading
in e. africa and middle east,
destroying crops — worst in
70 yrs.: “there is a link
between climate change and
the unprecedented locust crisis
plaguing east africa,” the u.n.
secretary sez. “warmer seas
mean more cyclones
generating the perfect
breeding ground for locusts”

        & in the ee.uu.,
rivers already rising:
2 houses slid into the tenn. r.
over the weekend (“it ab-
solutely kills you, knowing that”)
rains 400% of normal; pick-
wick dam, where i fished as
a kid is flooded; & the pearl
river in mississippi passes
major flood stage; sez the gov.:
“while we did get two beautiful
days of sunshine, do not
let that lull you
into a false sense of hope”

ok. but i’m going to shut down
the computer, leave all this, &
go enjoy the beautiful sun-
shine where i am, this
funny weather we’ve
been having,
huh?

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    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.

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