You may have heard of “climate fiction,” sometimes shortened to “cli-fi.” Put is there a counterpart for poetry? “Cli-Po”?
I haven’t found very many poetry books that directly address the climate crisis. There is one anthology I’m aware of that attempts to bring such a sub-genre into focus: Big Energy Poets: Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change (BlazeVOX 2017), edited by Heidi Lynn Staples and Amy King. The book is filled with a wealth of amazing, moving, inventive poems, poetics statements, & pedagogical ideas, revolving around and related to ecopoetics. What strikes me, though, is how indirectly most of these ecopoets address global heating and climate chaos, if they do so at all. Stephen Collis’ “Hockey Night in the Anthropocene” is a clear exception (the title refers to the “hockey-stick” graph showing projected runaway global heating); and there are some pieces that reference an amorphously threatening future, like Suzi F. Garcia’s meditations and the excerpt from Brenda Iijima’s speculative poem Untimely Death Is Driven Out Beyond the Horizon. As for the rest – well, there are poems that address fracking, pollution, violence, imperialism, toxic waste, and more. Or, as Brenda Hillman puts it, in “Crypto-Animist Introvert Activism: a Haibun”: “to protest drones, racism, state killing, the death of species & so on.” Many poems protest aspects of environmental destruction in specific places. And that’s swell. But I have to wonder in what sense these poems are really “thinking climate change” – envisioning it, thinking it through, understanding how it diverges from environmental “issues,” how massive and preemptive it is becoming, or even trying to figure out what “it” is in the first place. Maybe there are plenty of poets facing climate chaos head-on but the editors just weren’t aware of them – there’s a LOT of ecopoetry and protest poetry out there, nowadays – or weren’t the ones they wanted to include in the anthology. Certainly they’re aware of the shelf-full of poetry books about Katrina (which focus primarily on the effects of the disaster on the ground). But I wonder if the issue is really what it means to “think climate change,” and how – and whether – poetry can do that. To my mind, this problem has to do with the difference between weather and climate, between local and global, and the difficulty of linking the former to the latter term. It’s easy to say “think globally, act locally,” if you think you know what it means to “think globally” and can do so. Perhaps the one piece in Big Energy Poets that comes closest is Eric Magrane’s “Biosphere 2, Poetry, and the Anthropocene.”* The title references the famous early 90s experiment, funded by an eccentric millionaire, that attempted to recreate earth’s ecosystems within a huge glass bubble in the Arizona desert. The project was both risible and serious, as Magrane suggests; hubristic and wacky, but at the same time a reminder or admission that we live in the biosphere, not on it – it’s a closed system. Everything is hitched up to everything else, so one could argue that poems about any topic – particularly any environmental or political topic – inevitably eventually relates to climate change, one way or another. Everything’s hitched to everything else, as John Muir said. But that’s why, it seems to me, an ecopoetry that would think – and confront – climate chaos and global heating needs to show how things are hitched up to climate shift – lots of things. It needs to depict the earth as a whole, while at the same time making it apprehensible and palpable to an individual reader in a particular point on the earth. It needs to do that most difficult of tasks: cinching the general to the particular. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * Look for Magrane’s guest post here, in May 2020.
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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. |