Opinion: Poetry and climate instability

go through Pramod Nayar

Often, real and imagined disasters often come in the form of prose works. Dystopian fiction has always flourished with images of post-apocalyptic Earth, survivor humans, and strange weather. Octavia Butler, JG Ballard, Maggie Gee, Margaret Atwood, Stephen Baxter… The list of novels by literary and popular authors is long. But what about other genres seeking to convey the same sense of planetary instability? Can minimalist language, like poetry, capture the sublime of planetary destruction?

We know that the British Romantics spent considerable time and words describing nature, mostly idealizing it. Critics like Jonathan Bate and Lawrence Beal point out that the tradition of this poetry goes back to the early modern period in many cultures. But climate change itself came very late, both in reality and in poetry, so 20^th and 21^stone The poet of the century has learned to address this crisis.

Poetry and Uncertain Culture

In Matthew Hollis’ poem “Causeway,” he describes the sea as “unprepared but hunting,” although he doesn’t specify what it’s hunting. On the next line, Hollis wrote: “Introduction to our license, renewal unlikely”. As the oceans prepare to hunt us humans, we begin to realize that we are short-term residents of the planet, that our sojourn permits are time-stamped and we are unlikely to be granted an extension.

A certain sense of proximity pervades Alice Oswald’s Vertigo. The poem is ostensibly about rain, but Oswald assigns it heavy symbolic value:

when something hasn’t changed my mind like me
and start to fall
early morning

Every drop is a hasty decision
Suicide from the towers of heaven

When the poem ends, the ominous feeling is amplified:

I feel them in my bones these dead straight lines
Getting closer to my core

In Seamus Heaney’s “Höfn”, the locals watch the glaciers melt and ask:

What do we do when the boulders grind, they ask
Roll on the delta plain

Has the miles of thick ice started to move?

This is a textual anticipation of an impending catastrophe and a common poetic thread about the climate crisis (this poetic prophecy recalls William Stafford’s minimalist poem “At the Bomb Proving Ground” from an entirely different context, There’s a “breathing lizard” waiting for something to happen).

extinct by another name

Critic Ursula Hayes proposes in her book imagine extinction “Biodiversity, endangered species and extinction are primarily a cultural issue, a matter of what we value and what stories we tell, and a scientific issue second.” So when we have discussions around specific species that are “endangered”, we are creating a hierarchy of value. It is this hierarchy that Jackie Kay in Extinction thinks about.

Kay’s poetry reads like a catalog of disappearing life forms. Starting with “We closed our borders, folks, we did it,” Kay described the current situation:

No trees, no plants, no immigrants.
No foreign nurses, no doctors; we broke it.

No birds, no bees, no HIV, no Poles, no pollen.
No pandas, no polar bears, no ice, no dice.

But this is not a list of species that are about to go extinct. It also lists those whom the state wishes to control or even eliminate:

No Greens, no Brussels, no vegetarians, no lesbians.
No carbon suppression emissions, no CO2 issues.

Please don’t be crazy lefties. There is no politically correct class.
no class. No Guardian readers. There are no readers.

Kay isn’t talking about rising waters, he’s talking about waves of totalitarianism. The poem ends with:

We turned it off! No immigration, no immigration.
No runny nose recycling global warming lunatics.
Little men, little women, the world is a dangerous place.
Now, pour me a pint, honey. Get out of my fracking face.

The world is clearly in danger because of the “crazy” of crazy lefties, immigrants and environmentalists.

Occasionally there is extinction that is not a surplus but a scarcity. In Imtiaz Dharker’s “X,” a woman tries to find a bucket of water. She told herself:

Family.
Not a drop is lost.

When the police whistled to stop her, she now tells herself:

run. Don’t stop. Don’t slip.

This scarcity arises because we don’t bother to be careful about how we use these resources. Peter Fallon’s Late Sentinel puts it bluntly:

There seems to be no end
We plundered the earth.

Lachlan McKinnon’s “California Dream” echoes Fallon:

waste is ours

McKinnon hinted that another ice age may come, but humanity is still looking for hope:

when the last cloud
The train is leaving,
The loincloth and the summons will be

last hope
woman and last man found
She is pregnant.

Human continuity, above all else, is what we care about, McKinnon suggests.

The Poetics of Climate Change

As we have seen from the examples above, focusing on the natural world by describing birds and bees allows the poet to convey a sense of crisis.Poetic form and its conventions, language is at the heart of how we deal with it imagine Extinction. This is why, as seen in the work of Irish poets James Hewitt and Maya Cannon, the pastoral form informs the poem a lot and becomes a vehicle for pointing to a vanishing grassland (or forest or glacier).

Poetry emphasizes the physical world, the connection between species, which is material, and the irreparable or the loss that has occurred. Cannon wrote about the so-called routine of bees:

like their quest for sweetness
or their accidental work that makes the world
The flowers are fragrant and colorful
to bear fruit for all air creatures on earth,
It’s part of their lives…

Here, Cannon talks about interspecies connections, interdependence, and what critic Stacy Alaimo calls “the hyperphysical.” Even poets not known for tackling climate change have noted how humans are connected to other species and the world. This is John Ashbury:

But can’t escape the screen
My little self in the flowers:

My head is in fiery phlox
It appeared to be a pale and huge fungus.

Ashberry highlights the insignificance, even awkwardness, of human beings on the surface of Earth’s plants.

Poetry gives climate change a name and a form, allowing us to assimilate the crisis, see its contours, and even help us understand it in more accessible language, science climate change.

As the dark ages of dramatic climate change approach, poetry is the song of the dark ages, as playwright Brecht said.Except this song will be of The Dark Ages themselves. As Craig Santos Perez concluded on “Thirteen Ways to Look at Glaciers”:

All winter is summer.
it’s melting
It will melt.
Glacier fit
in our warm hands.