Graphology
Kaleidoscope 31: ‘poets’ & climate change
Poets have mined the seasons through core-samples —
their own cores,
of course, and the
seasons’ drills, performances
Poets from some places have imposed their models of
seasons on other places
they visit — dragging
six seasons into four, four seasons into two
Poets so easily iron out the specificity of
rainfall, temperature, duration, into
metaphor, that great
equaliser of creative manifest destiny
Poets monitor the weather because it is as reliable
and unreliable as well, metaphor
Poets fixate on extreme weather events and also the
predictability of the cyclical
nature of seasons,
though practice increasingly wavers with meltdown
Poets preserve the status quo using the machinery of
communication
Poets take the poetry of community and make it their
own, catching call & response
in their nets of
self-affirmation
Poets reduce the particularities of tree — the truth
of its growth rings, the habitat
it has sustained, it is
— to ‘tree’, the symbolic extension of themselves
Poets watch the rain gauge, caught up in the effect
of light through meniscus, and
fail to note down the
declining average — a dry rain-gauge is of limited appeal
Poets broadcast the word, which is their word even
when smoke-screened behind
collaborative gestures,
spoken out of community, embedded in rituals,
any way they can — they
believe it is best to be heard
Poets believe they are heard by silence and time, a
commodity
Poets blur their denials and are, taken en masse, not deniers (with stunning
exceptions) but rely on
prosody to scaffold their preference
for playing with words
rather than getting outside and protesting
Poets have LOVED the worldwide web and computers —
in the end,
even the deniers (of a
certain ilk) come across to word processors
Poets make carbon dioxide, methane, and some glow
with their exchanges
fed by a grid
underwritten by the nuclear industry and/or coal
Poets love writing about birds as extensions of
the(ir) psyche while noting
behaviours and habits —
generic and in aberration — to say something
about the human world
to say something about birds to say something
about aspiration to say
something about language to say something
about culture/s to say
something about personal subjectivity
and community to say
something about history to say something
about time to say
something about space to say something
about migratory
patterns to say something about locality
to say something about
a vagrant blown off-course a rare
sighting to say
something about feathers to say something
about hollow bones to
say something about pollution (oil
on the albatross’s
wings) to say something about presence
to say something about
loss to say something about trees of life
to say something about
insects to say something about being
on the hindquarters of
mammals to say something about heat
and shifts in frequency
to say something to say something to say
Poets write about (being) human
Poets write about inducing
Poets write about climate
Poets write about change
Poets are wary of over-writing
Poets are wary about being filed into a category
Poets are cautious to keep a wide range of
experience on tap
Poets are quick to avoid fads like the dissolution
of the biosphere
Poets are there for one protest and not there for
another, having filled their quotas
Poets selectively listen to the music of the
spheres, especially the sphere that’s
underwriting their
imagery
Poets envision the landscape of their denials as the
denial of others — being
so attuned to the
nuances of dirt, and stone, and air, and flesh, and cellulose
Poets are scientists in their own way though they privilege
language over data which
has advantages and
disadvantages though they generally cope well with
contradictions maybe gloating
over this a little too much but even
when writing in
air-conditioned rooms know it’s bloody hot outside
and hotter than the
childhoods they reconstruct in lines rhythmic
with heat waves and
mirages and humidity and freak snow events
making the weird out of
the wonderful and cranking language
into an event —
scientists in their own way or maybe scientists per se
Poets are architects designing poems to be read
under the new conditions
accepted as default
adjusting to suit their audience’s compliance
to the changed
conditions; architectural elegists celebrating
adaptability of and to
the human condition — lament lament
Poets write relationships — between themselves and
what’s outside
their ideas of poets
and poems and the word (written/spoken),
so you’d think
human-induced (they are often but not exclusively
human, they are often
though not exclusively ‘alive’ — haunting
and haunted is the
shadow of the poet) climate change would be
the pivotal array of
relationship/s they’d write out of, to, too
Poets acquire and reprocess and even neologise
words, so here are a few
for the condition we’ve
made figuratively and literally and in thought
and voice and all
shades of a colouring grey — seeraturate, oilboil,
dessicane — compounds,
exploitation of suffixes and prefixes,
locked into the
colonial Latinate, conquest lexicons, culpabilities
Poets will also perish, illuminating their last
breath, and ours, all of ours, too.
Don’t hand it to them
on a plate, stop feeding the loose change
to the meter. Give language
a cooling-off period. Unmake
linguistic economics.
Don’t sing a song of sixpence. See
the bird without
capturing it. Don’t play while determiners
and pronouns burn
together.
John Kinsella
