Archive for the ‘climate change’ Tag
Avant le deluge…Rising up against that sinking feeling
Filed under: Ecology, poems | Tags: climate change, ecopoetry, global warming, Pacific Island Forum, poems, poetry, Smaller Island States, Tuilaepa Sailele, Tuvalu Declaration
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A bitter example of how vested interests (William Burroughs named them “the Nova Mob”) pervert reason, choke compassion, and stymie sane responses to global warming played itself out at this year’s Pacific Island Forum. Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, refused to endorse the Tuvalu Declaration proposed by the Smaller Island States group, “which acknowledges a climate change crisis, encourages countries to revise the emissions reductions targets and calls for a rapid phase out of coal use.”
“I am accountable to the Australian people, that’s who I’m accountable for,” Mr Morrison said.
Tuilaepa Sailelethe
Not a year ago, Tuilaepa Sailelethe prime minister of Samoa, delivered a speech in Sydney, Australia, 30 August 2018, wherein he said that “Any leader … who believes that there is no climate change I think he ought to be taken to mental confinement, he is utter[ly] stupid and I say the same thing for any leader here who says there is no climate change.”
By serendipity (if not synchronicity), the year the world was supposed to end (2012), I composed a chance, fourteen-line poem in harmony with Sailelethe’s sentiments. I’m not sure it’s much of a poem per se, unless a linguistic expression that fuses topical pertinence, heart, and complex irony is enough.
“BE IT RESOLVED…”
BE IT RESOLVED that
whereas public officials
who deny the reality
of Anthropogenic Climate Change
and hinder efforts to mitigate
its destructive effects present
a clear and present danger
to themselves and others,
said public officials should be
removed from office forthwith
and placed under a physician’s care
until such time as their suicidal
and/or homicidal and/or ecocidal
tendencies cease to present.
Doom porn: What would Martin Luther do?
Filed under: Ecology, poems | Tags: climate change, doom porn, ecopoetics, ecopoetry, Gerard Manley Hopkins, global warming, poems, poetry
Comments (1) Again, as happens, acquaintances I believe should know better, being educated, intelligent, and reflective, let the doomporn clickbait get the better of their sincere, best intentions and share distressing articles, such as this one about a report by two (2) Australians this spring positing that there is a “‘High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End’ Starting in 2050”.
Nearly, already, three decades back, a similar despair, coupled with Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur” I had by heart and the offhand remark by a friend visiting the lush, extinct volcano near his birthplace, inspired a poem in answer (the second of seven Budapest Suites in Grand Gnostic Central).
Budapest Suites II
for Laszlo Gefin
“There is a god here!”
In wild strawberry entangling thistle,
In maple saplings, a shroud on loam,
In chestnut and cherry blossoms over tree-line,
In goldenrod and grass, every green stalk, bowed with seed.
And there is a god who
Quarries slate for imperial highways,
Mines iron-ore out of greed,
Who would have Mount Ság again
Ash and rock.
And there is a god
In the seared, scarred, spent, still,
For lichen, poppies and song
Here rise from the bared
And broken rock to the air!
Just last year, some widely-publicized remarks by Mayer Hillman (“We’re doomed!”) inspired a number of responses, an early version of one I posted here the last time a friend disseminated some other bleak pessimism…
I’m hardly a Bjorn Lomborg playing down the gravity of the situation and the urgent, concerted, radical action it calls for, including the need for no less focussed, lively and creative reflection and critique to articulate a post-anthropocentric, if not post-humanist, biocentric ecosophy. But nor am I a latter-day Jeremiah confusing his insight into the woes and flaws of the present with visions of imminent, righteous catastrophe. (It’s high time I address at greater length this newly-arisen apocalyptic tone in cultural criticism…).
To wit, and not for the last time, I’m sure, I share here two unpublished (…because editors [eye-roll emoji][facepalm emoji]…) sections of the sequence “Made in Germany”, composed in 2012.
Waiting on a train to what was
the East, the summer of the year
the New Age believed the World
would end, wildfires smoke
from Colorado to Croatia,
floodwaters deeper than memory
drown southern Russia and Thailand,
tornadoes plough the Midwest,
hurricanes blow past records
on the Eastern Seaboard.
∞
http:// arctic-news.blogspot.de/p/global-extinction-within-one-human.html?spref=fb (21.07.2012)
Asked what he would do were the world to end
next day, Luther replied, “Plant an apple tree.”
RE: Itō Jetnil-Kijiner Niviana Pato
Filed under: Poetry, The Brouillon | Tags: Aka Niviana, Chus Pato, climate change, Galician poetry, Hiromi Ito, Japanese poetry, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, poetry, women's writing
Leave a comment A lot of poetry stories get conveyed down my newsfeed. Here’re three of special 
significance from this week.
First is a short film of Hiromi Itō reading her poem “The Moon”. Itō is (in)famous in Japan, often credited with opening the space for a frank, fresh, new women’s writing. I discovered her in Rothenberg’s and Joris’ Poems for the Millenium, then her Killing Kanoko, a selection of poems translated by Jeffrey Angles, whose title poem recounts the common but no less hair-raising homicidal resentment mothers feel for their newborns. I still owe Action Books a review of her Wild Grass of the Riverbank—watch for it here….
Next is a short article by Bill McKibben concerning the poets Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and Aka Niviana, two young women, one from the Marshall Islands, the other from Greenland, who grapple with the realities of climate change poetically, a topic often ventured here. I already knew of Jetnil-Kijiner: I teach her poem “Dear Matafele Peinam” every year to my introductory English students.
Finally is an interview with a poet not too well known in Anglophone poetry circles (or so it seems to me), Chus Pato, arguably one of the most important poets writing in Galician.
Replies to Mayer Hillman
Filed under: poems | Tags: climate change, Mayer Hillman, poems
Comments (2) 
At the end of April, The Guardian published a dour interview with social scientist Mayer Hillman, wherein he pronounces “We’re doomed.”
Said interview resulted in some tangled discussion threads that, in turn, resulted in some poems (here, here, and here), and some friends’ sharing the interview on-line—again!—prompted the following intervention.
Replies to Mayer Hillman
“We’re doomed.”
Your therapist would guide you
gently to see you’re fortune telling.
The dialectician would unfold the thought
that determination does not
foreclose unforeseen developments
being the condition of its own negation.
A happy chance slip of memory recalls
“What is real now was only once imagined”.
One for Tuilaepa Sailele, avant la lettre
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: climate change, poems, Tuilaepa Sailele
Leave a comment Sailele, the prime minister of Samoa, delivered a speech in Sydney, Australia, 30 August 2018, wherein he said that “Any leader … who believes that there is no climate change I think he ought to be taken to mental confinement, he is utter[ly] stupid and I say the same thing for any leader here who says there is no climate change.”
2012, the year the world was supposed to end, I had a similar sentiment, except, of course, expressed poetically. You can read it here.
NaPoMo (n+3): a clarification
Filed under: poems, The Brouillon | Tags: climate change, National Poetry Month, poetry
Comments (2) The two or three poems inspired yesterday by a Guardian interview with social scientist Mayer Hillman (see the two previous posts), also prompted one reader to comment on the poems, two of which use Mayer’s own words expressing the sentiment that, given civilization is doomed, we’d be better to attend other, more pleasant matters, such as music, love, education, and happiness.
The comment inadvertently touched on the issue of the truth of poetry and the poet’s relation to the thoughts expressed by the words of the poem, that yesterday’s three, impromptu poems might suggest some agreement with Hillman’s gloom and prescriptions.
Five years back mulling over the same matter I composed an ironic indictment, which, 
after some little fiddling this morning, turned out, spontaneously, to be the fourteen-line poem that follows. Whether it provides any clarification as to my own stance on the issue, I leave to the reader.
Chance Sonnet:
“BE IT RESOLVED…”
BE IT RESOLVED that
whereas public officials
who deny the reality
of Anthropogenic Climate Change
and hinder efforts to mitigate
its destructive effects present
a clear and present danger
to themselves and others,
said public officials should be
removed from office forthwith
and placed under a physician’s care
until such time as their suicidal
and/or homocidal and/or ecocidal
tendencies cease to present.
NaPoMo (n+2): Two for Mayer Hillman
Filed under: poems, The Brouillon | Tags: climate change, Mayer Hillman, National Poetry Month, poetry
Comments (6) Two for Mayer Hillman
1.
So much depends
upon
fossil fuels except
music,
love, education, and
happiness.
Focus on these
things.
2.
Asked what he would do were the world to end
next day, Luther replied, “Plant an apple tree.”
NaPoMo (n): a serendipitous poem
Filed under: poems, The Brouillon | Tags: climate change, Mayer Hillman, National Poetry Month, poetry, Shawn Bell
Comments (2) Combing through with no small pleasure the Seculum trilogy of Peter Dale Scott, 
preparing a talk I’m to give at a humanities conference at the end of May, I wound up at the same time in a short Facebook thread back and forth with a teaching colleague, which inspires the improvised poem, dedicated to him, below:
So many aspects of life
For Shawn Bell, composer
We read the same Guardian article
this morning, though you chose to share it.
Mayer Hillman, 86: We’re doomed
…making a case for [re?]cycling…
is almost irrelevant. We’ve got to stop
burning fossil fuels. I commented
you’d forgotten his most important words:
Standing in the way is capitalism
Your reply in its current form
and though I am not unacquainted
with Isaiah’s singing the lion shall lie down
with the lamb and I’m the first
to remark the confusion of first
and second nature in Adorno’s
If the lion had a consciousness
his rage at the antelope he wants
to eat would be ideology
I answered The dream of postwar
social democracy that capitalism
could be tamed by the rule of law
is as realistic as thinking
a lion can be trained to be vegan
And though we continued twisting into
that thread strands of current models
of socio-economic organization
in particular capitalism and socialism
big data and AI
The Communist Hypothesis
and the Enlightenment’s faith
in its overcoming its own
fateful dialectic Hillman’s words
free of the snarl
of our disagreement
need here be repeated
So many aspects of life
depend on fossil fuels
except for music
and love and education
and happiness. These things
we must focus on.
On the end of the Doha Climate Change Conference: a poem and commentary
Filed under: poems | Tags: climate change, Doha Climate Change Conference, ecology, ecopoetics, ecopoetry, global warming, poetry
Leave a comment Brushfires from Colorado
to Croatia; floodwaters
deeper than memory
drown southern Russia
and Thailand; tornadoes
plough the Midwest;
record hurricanes on
the Eastern Seaboard.
Humanity betrays all
the collective intelligence
of a bacterium
in a petri dish.
Although the poem above was composed in Berlin this past summer, today its sentiment seems prescient of what many of those of us who care about the fate of civilization feel. A lone voice speaks to the issue in Canada’s parliament, and in the face of suicidal official denial and incapacity, it would be barbaric not to lend a poetic voice in support. Posting a poem, of all things, must seem a futile gesture, but its impulse takes inspiration from Luther, who, asked what he would do if he knew the world were to end tomorrow answered, “Plant an apple tree.”
Poeta Doctus 