There is SO much climate fiction (“cli-fi”) these days that I keep thinking there will be a similar surge of climate poetry (“cli-po”?). I’m searching, as I browse journals, websites, the Small Press Distribution new releases. There are some promising new titles I haven’t read yet. And I expect there will be a fair amount of Australian poetry in the next couple-three years that deal with climate catastrophe, in one way or another. But aside from some notable exceptions, there doesn’t seem to be much out there yet.
Take, for instance, the Academy of American Poets page “Poems About Climate Change.” There are indeed some poems that really are about climate change: Mikko Harvey’s “The Poem Grace Interrupted”; Eunsong Kim’s “Romance #1”; or Jay Parini’s “Some Effects of Global Warming in Lackawanna County.” Craig Santos Perez’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier (after Wallace Stevens)” is a satirical gem: its send-up of Stevens is simultaneously a critique of aesthetic “disinterestedness” – a reminder that, while many writers in the 1930s could not ignore the Depression, some actively sought to do so and had the money to pull it off. And the same is true today, mutatis mutandis, w/global heating. As for the rest of the poems on the site . . . well, there are poems that allude to climate chaos; there are poems that take climate change as an implicit backdrop; there are eco-poems that deal with issues that are related to climate change, e.g., extinction of animal and plant species, but without drawing explicit connections. Only a few face head-on the reality of global heating and atmospheric whipsawing. Likewise, there are books of poems that take on a variety of contemporary ills, in which global meltdown is, in effect, one of a list of “issues” (just like in U.S. political discourse) – a lot of poets have their one global-warming poem, mixed in with all the rest. Or it is kinda sorta in the background. “Eco-poetry” deals with oil spills, waste dumps, erosion, habitat degradation – and o yeah the transformation of planet earth into planet Venus. Well, at least the writers aren’t oblivious. But are they (we) looking at the situation squarely? I mean, living with it, understanding the crisis in on a gut-level, seeing oneself in it? Perhaps Perez’ forthcoming book Habitat Threshold (Omnidawn, March 2020) will be the breakthrough that prompts poets to grapple with the biggest ecological, social, economic, and existential threat in human history. Or maybe not. Nature poets are a big part of the problem. There’s a tendency for those who have the means and the time to enjoy open space and to appreciate other species apart from cities to use those natural spaces as emotional or spiritual refugia – or, worse yet, metaphors. We lament the extinction of plants and animals we may or may not have seen – indeed they become the unconscious scapegoats for our repressed guilt and grief (it’s easier to deal with dying polar bears than dying humans – esp. a dying me). But ah, today the bees are buzzing, the tall grass is sussurussing, the trees are tall and mighty, and for this one moment, all’s right with the world. Just don’t think about Zambia or Australia or the near future. [Now, this is the part of the blog post where you go to the comments section at the bottom and write, “But, Joe – what about Jane Norshenberger’s Climate Crisis Has Ruined My Life??” – or whatever (actual) titles and poets you can think of who directly reference the climate emergency. Esp. poets from the global south. Thanks in advance!] But I suspect a large part of it is that we North-American poets are each so trapped in our own personal traumas that it’s difficult to take on the biggest trauma of all. What we do to each other in our own communities is immediate and immediately painful, and so that’s what we focus on. What Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, & Exxon-Mobil are doing to our collective host organism (the biosphere) seems more distant, much slower, less visible, less dangerous. Day-to-day violence – esp. when you’re the victim – trumps one-day-sooner-or-later apocalypse. As a result, we can’t confront the probability that our kids’ future will be nasty, brutish, and not so short. We understandably want to work through the psychological hurt our daily lives cause. We want belonging, not more alienation. Ultimately, what we really want is a happy ending. But there isn’t going to be a happy ending, because there isn’t going to be an ending. How will poetry address this unprecedented situation? Will it? Will we?
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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. |