Editor-in-Residence
Ecopoetics in the Era of Climate Crisis (essays)
Featured in The Ex-Puritan’s Town Crier.
Description
Ecopoetry is an old form. As it continues to expand beyond the traditional definitions of “nature poetry” and opens to encompass new meaning, it can help us make sense of a world in crisis. It is a tool through which we envision a different future—one of possibility.
If we can build something better, why shouldn’t we?
Excerpts
In the ecopoetics of climate crisis, there is also the duality of witness and speculation: what is happening at present, and what can we do to mitigate, predict, or negotiate with the future? Apocalypse ecopoetics deals with this crisis of world-ending and collapse, and the urgency of climate crisis is central to that mode. But there is, if nothing else, room to imagine a new world where an old one ends: one of healing, decolonization, and futurity.
—Tiffany Morris, “Decolonizing the Apocalypse through Etuaptmumk”
I was thinking about the permission that certain categories (human/non-human; resource/waste; civilization/wilderness) seem to grant us to exploit, ignore, and devalue. I wanted to show readers the destructiveness and absurdity of these binaries—and the value, wonder, and interconnectedness of so many different forms of life on this planet.
—Claire Caldwell, “Writing Isn’t Enough: Working Toward Climate Justice”
At a meeting of the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators (FPSE) ad hoc climatic action committee, Eduardo sits across from me at a long table strewn with teacups and papers. He says, “We need the poets and the artists to reach the people, to get the message out. As scientists, we have failed.”
—Kim Trainor, “Poetry & Resilience: Lung, Muscle, Archive, Beautiful Cell”
I want to be reminded again and again of the current and future state of the earth through poetry, and I want to see new ideas, approaches, and attitudes toward climate actions and activism.
Poetry is a means of documentation, a reminder, a tool, and a symbol. It is a beginning, and not a means to an end.
—Farah Ghafoor, “A Failure of Words: Climate Anxiety, Poetry, and the Internet”
Through our words, we must voice support for new methods of energy, new ways to sustain a global economy. We must protest against governments stripping away our environmental rights. We must convince those with deeper pockets to donate funds to Indigenous advocacy groups and environmental non-profits. We must vote. As writers and artists, it is our responsibility to call attention to issues that others are unable or unwilling to acknowledge.
—Ellen Chang-Richardson, “Poetry & Protest: On Looking and Moving Forward”
This wound pulses against the irregular conditions of the world, of how we choose to see any kind of quintessential poetry. It pulses against our systems of standardization, against their classification as fair or unbiased, as if the conditions of our cultural imaginary were not borne from a devastating whiteness. As if they are not still stratifying, categorizing, and establishing hierarchies of who makes poetry—or what kind—or who is worthy at all.
—Sanna Wani, “Situating Racialized Ecopoetics: Memory, Geography & Community”