Poets and Climate Change

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