Opinion: Poetry and climate precarity

November 10, 2022

Bharat Times

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By Pramod K Nayar

It is often the case that disasters, real and imagined, often appear as extended prose works. Dystopian fiction has always thrived on this 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 writers is very long. But what about other genres seeking to communicate the same sense of planetary precarity? Can very minimalist language, as in poetry, capture the sublimity of planetary destruction?

We know the English Romantics spent considerable time — and words — describing Nature, mainly idealising it. The tradition of such poetry, critics like Jonathan Bate and Lawrence Buell have noted, can be traced to the early modern period in many cultures. But climate change itself has crept in much later, in actuality and in poetry, and so the 20^th and 21^st century poet has learnt to address this crisis.

Poetry and Uncertain Cultures

In Matthew Hollis’ poem, ‘Causeway’, he describes the sea as ‘off-guarded but hunting’, although he does not specify what it is hunting. In the next line Hollis writes: ‘our licence brief, unlikely to be renewed’. As the sea prepares to hunt us humans, we begin to recognise that we are short-stay residents on earth, our licence to linger is time-stamped and we are not likely to get an extension.

The sense of something approaching permeates Alice Oswald’s ‘Vertigo’. The poem is ostensibly about rain, but Oswald gives it heavy symbolic value:

When something not yet anything changes its mind like me
And begins to fall
In the small hours

each drop is a snap decision
A suicide from the tower-block of heaven

When the poem ends, the sense of foreboding is amplified:

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

In Seamus Heaney’s ‘Höfn’ locals watching the glaciers melt ask:

What will we do, they ask, when boulder-milt
Comes wallowing across the delta flats

And the miles-deep shag-ice makes its move?

This is the textual anticipation of coming disaster, and is a common strand of poetry about climate crisis (such poetic prophecies recall from an entirely different context, William Stafford’s minimalist poem, ‘At the Bomb Testing Site’ where a ‘panting lizard’ waits for something to happen).

Extinction by Other Names

The critic Ursula Heise argues in her book Imagining Extinction that ‘biodiversity, endangered species, and extinction are primarily cultural issues, questions of what we value and what stories we tell, and only secondarily issues of science’. So when we create a discourse around specific species — who are ‘endangered’ — we are creating a hierarchy of values. It is this hierarchy that Jackie Kay in ‘Extinction’ ponders over.

Kay’s poem reads like a catalogue of disappearing life forms. Beginning with ‘We closed the borders, folks, we nailed it’, Kay describes the current scenario:

No trees, no plants, no immigrants.
No foreign nurses, no Doctors; we smashed 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 to-be-extinct species. It is a list also of those over whom the state wishes to assert control, or even extinguish:

No Greens, no Brussels, no vegetarians, no lesbians.
No carbon curbed emissions, no Co2 questions.

No loony lefties, please. No politically correct classes.
No classes. No Guardian readers. No readers.’

Kay is speaking not of the rising oceanic waters but the rising tides of totalitarianism. The poem concludes with:

We shut it down! No immigrants, no immigrants.
No sniveling-recycling-global-warming nutters.
Little man, little woman, the world is a dangerous place.
Now, pour me a pint, dear. Get out of my fracking face.

The world is apparently dangerous because of the loony lefties, the immigrants and the environmentalist ‘nutters’.

Occasionally, there is the extinction by not excess but scarcity. In Imtiaz Dharker’s ‘X’, a woman seeks to find one bucket of water. She tells herself:

Home.
Don’t lose a drop.

As the cops whistle at her to stop, she now tells herself:

Run. Don’t stop. Don’t slip.

Such scarcity came about because we did not bother to be careful how we used the resources. Peter Fallon’s ‘Late Sentinels’ states baldly:

As if there were no end to plenty
we plundered earth.

Lachlan Mackinnon’s ‘California Dreaming’ echoes Fallon:

The wastefulness was all ours

Another ice-age may come, implies Mackinnon, and yet humans seek hope:

When the last clouds
wagon-train off,
loincloth and invocation will be

the one hope for last
woman and last man discovering
she’s pregnant.

The continuity of the human race, above all else, is our concern, implies MacKinnon.

Climate Change Poetics

A focus on the natural world by describing the birds and the bees as we have seen from the examples above, enables the poet to communicate a sense of what is at stake. The poetic form and its conventions, its language, are central to how we imagine extinction. This is why pastoral forms inform much of this poetry, as can be seen from the work of the Irish poets, James Hewitt and Maya Cannon, and become a device to point to the slowly disappearing grasslands (or forests or glaciers).

Poetry underscores the material world, the connections across species, which are material and the losses incurrable or already incurred. Cannon writes about the supposedly routine lives of bees:

As much as their hunt for sweetness
or their incidental work, fertilising the world’s
scented, myriad-coloured flowers
to bear fruit for all earthbound, airborne creatures,
this is part of their lives…

Here Cannon is speaking of interspecies connections, mutual dependency and what the critic Stacy Alaimo terms ‘transcorporeality’. Even poets not known for addressing climate change have noted how humanity is linked to other species and worlds. Here is John Ashberry:

Yet I cannot escape the picture
Of my small self in that bank of flowers:

My head among the blazing phlox
Seemed a pale and gigantic fungus.

Ashberry is foregrounding human insignificance, even awkward presence, on earth’s vegetal surface.

Poetry gives climate change a name and a form to enable us to assimilate the crisis, recognise its contours, even helps us understand, in more acceptable language, the science of climate change.

As the dark times of drastic climate change approach, poetry is, as playwright Brecht famously put it, the singing in the dark times. Except that the song will be of the dark times itself. Like Craig Santos Perez’s conclusion to ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier’:

It was summer all winter.
It was melting
And it was going to melt.
The glacier fits
In our warm-hands.