#228: The Poetry of Climate Change

Apr 04, 2023

Dear reader,

Today’s newsletter comes from a home surrounded by flowers. Amidst this fragrance, I sit writing poems on mangoes and coffee for #thealiporepostpoetrymonth. 4 days done, 26 to go!

I’ve been thinking about the co-existence of nature and beauty, and how bland my life would be without trees, living creatures. Annie Dillard’s words came to mind:

“Were the earth as smooth as a ball bearing, it might be beautiful seen from another planet, as the rings of Saturn are. But here we live and move; we wander up and down the banks of the creek, we ride a railway through the Alps, and the landscape shifts and changes. Were the earth smooth, our brains would be smooth as well; we would wake, blink, walk two steps to get the whole picture and lapse into dreamless sleep. Because we are living people, and because we are on the receiving end of beauty, another element necessarily enters the question. The texture of space is a condition of time. Time is the warp and matter the weft of woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurtling shuttle… What I want to do, then, is add time to the texture, paint the landscape on an unrolling scroll, and set the giant relief globe spinning on it stand.”
-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Last week, I attended a show by Seasonal Affected Beats with Parizad on the visuals. Music and art as a way to deal with the climate anxiety. It reminded me of Agam Agenda, a shape-shifting initiative for reimagining and widening storytelling circles on climate change.

As Maya Angelou put it in her poem When Great Trees Fall,

“When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.”

This month in particular, I strive to express, to write poems that translate universal feelings of loss and reality. I will not recoil into silence. I’ll keep my eyes and ears open wide.

Poetry Corner

1. For a Coming Extinction by W.S. Merwin

Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours

When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices

Join your word to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important

2. Toxic Assets by Sam Witt

Vast forests have already been sacrificed
In the marble halls of the bad bank for this:
Now that portions of the glacial ice have calved to real stone
That hasn’t been exposed for thousands of years,
In the secret history of my left eye, (which, incidentally,
Turns, empty & black, like the xeroxed surface of a brook)
Coastal cities simply vanish into the sea.
The planet’s been knocked off its orbit by half a kilometer,
In here, behind this tiny terraqueous globe, under great pressure,
Where I have stored away the tiny pearl of your face.
If I were the death of ice, I’d calve.
If I were deep waters, the birth of flesh
Would be whispered in overtones of fire.
If I were Corpus Christi, I’d simply vanish into the sea.

4. The Solace of Artemis by Paula Meehan

I read that every polar bear alive has mitochondrial DNA
from a common mother, an Irish brown bear who once
roved out across the last ice age, and I am comforted.
It has been a long hot morning with the children of the machine,

their talk of memory, of buying it, of buying it cheap, but I,
memory keeper by trade, scan time coded in the golden hive mind
of eternity. I burn my books, I burn my whole archive:
a blaze that sears, synapses flaring cell to cell where

memory sleeps in the wax hexagonals of my doomed and melting comb.
I see him loping towards me across the vast ice field
to where I wait in the cave mouth, dreaming my cubs about the den,
my honied ones, smelling of snow and sweet oblivion.

5. This Beautiful Planet by Dorothea Lasky

Please tell me that I was a good child
And that I did everything right
And that the atmosphere was exactly certain
I want you to love me
In ways that you never have
So that I become a forgotten world
With rainbow sunrises over dark green trees
And the cooling of the day
Becomes normal again
We will sit and watch the body of water
That we once called a sort of death
You know even in my dreams
You say I’ll never get it right
This is not a dream
We are burning here with no escape
But no matter how many times
They talk about the moon
It does not take a poet
To know that the moon
Is still only an illusion
Only an illusion
The moon calls out to all of us
Come back, it says
But we don’t hear it
Already on our way
To somewhere

Recommended Listening

Links of the Week

I love you Daniel Kwan.

Excerpt from his interview in Salon about ADHD and Everything Everywhere All At Once:

Kwan: So I started doing some research. And then I stayed up until like, four in the morning, just reading everything I could find about it, just crying, just realizing that, "Oh, my God, I think I have ADHD." So this movie is the reason why I got diagnosed. I got diagnosed, I went to therapy for a year and then went to a psychiatrist. And I'm now on meds, and it's such a beautiful, cathartic experience to realize why your life has been so hard.

This movie, obviously, when you look at it now, was made by someone with ADHD. And it's just funny how many people have come up to me after screenings and said, "This feels like you're in my brain." And some of them are people like yourself who suspect that they have ADHD and then other people who recently got diagnosed because I think during the pandemic, a lot of people have been struggling in this new version of life, where there is less structure because ADHD people need structure, otherwise we fall apart. And so, I love the fact that this movie can become a cathartic expression of me realizing this but then also can be a way for people to talk about it in their own lives.