Poets are always writing about the seasons; musicians, too; and, of course, painters paint them. But what if the seasons aren’t the seasons anymore? Nowadays, it seems like it’s freezing one day and balmy the next; a baking drought one week, and flash floods the next. All the conventional seasonal references that have accreted from the days of ancient pastoral will have to be explained to the young uns. And changed, going forward. To call a day “springlike” already feels like nostalgia. What was spring like, grandpa?
Maybe this state of affairs will focus our mind more on the present and force us to describe that present more precisely. What season is today? Or this morning? We should adopt an inductive seasonality, to deal with the unpredictable and uncertain contingencies of the present. Perhaps in the meantime an entirely new set of conventions will emerge to describe the increasingly unconventional climate. Or to live in it. Indeed, those abrupt changes and reversals could become the material for a lot of literature, in their own right. Maybe the distinction between poem sequence and journal will collapse, since “timeless truths” are looking a lot more time-bound than they ever have, in the current climate (physical and political). Or the seasons will be replaced by the weather, as theme. Instead of The Four Seasons, maybe someone will write a musical composition called The Twenty-Seven Types of Day.
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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. |