Chant de la Sirène

ISSUE 4, 2023\24

Climate & Poetics

Featured Artist Giacomo Cuttone has offered us his color-rich, large-scale acrylic canvases for the second issue of CDLS in a row. In Issue 4, five new images of Cuttone’s paintings are reproduced, revealing his complex spiritual and also sensual visual insights into issues of ecology and climate change. Based in Italy, Cuttone has enjoyed a full career as a multimedia artist and art educator. He can be found painting in his art studio in his beloved native Sicily.

Laura Hinton

Introduction—An Inconvenient Catastrophe

Or, What’s Poetics Got to Do with Climate Change?

Some of us sat in the darkened theaters when the film was first released in 2006. It was the documentary of the year, An Inconvenient Truth. While Bush II wars raged along with a War on Terror against everyone, this documentary film starred the failed presidential candidate who had lost the election because of the US Supreme Court and Florida’s hanging chads. Perhaps lacking in the machismo charisma an American electorate demands, considered a little bit “boring,” Al Gore was now thrust upon the luminous screen, wonkiness and all, reborn a movie star. His Oscar-winning doc would highlight close-ups of a manly chin-jutting profile. His sedate blue suit suddenly gave him a diva-like charm.

The failed President Gore was resurrected as a man on a mission.

Recently re-watching An Inconvenient Truth through an Amazon Prime membership with “add-on channel” (free for 7 days!), I was stunned by the “truth” it foretold almost two decades ago when I first saw it in that theater. I am filled with nostalgia for those years before and after its release, in an era when “global warming” was a term bantered about but not too much to worry about, not yet a narrative for the End of the World. An era of innocence, perhaps—or, rather more accurately, of Western social stupidity. Politicians and citizens in America argued vehemently back then about the role of fossil fuel emissions—whether or not the undisputed average rise in global temperatures could be attributed to these. The science was still “out”—sort of. Or, we deluded ourselves that we didn’t know what we knew.

In the United States, and shortly before this doc made it into theaters, Hurricane Katrina blew through New Orleans, flooding its low-lying wards and other southern towns, killing almost 2,000 people and displacing many thousands more. Katrina was still considered a 100-year-weather event in 2005, rather than a rehearsal for the Atlantic-brewed hurricanes-on-steroids to come. The American West hadn’t yet caught on fire in nearly every state from California to Montana to New Mexico during summer months. Canadian forests hadn’t yet burned so collectively large that huge clouds of smoke swallowed up North American cities from Chicago to New York last year. Seattle and the Northwest hadn’t yet experienced long periods of dangerous summer heatwaves. And the great global ice meltdown happening underneath the cryosphere of Greenland and West Antarctica did not yet ring the American civic alarm bells it should have, especially in the coastal cities of Miami and New York City and Oakland—although a sinister watery progress was well underway, causing the cryosphere’s huge protective ice sheets over oceanic bays to crumble.

I am nostalgic for my own ignorance. In An Inconvenient Truth, through the mouth of Gore, the script can sound like a lesson in climate science but also of morality:

“If we allow that to happen [a rise in global temperatures by approximately 4 degrees centigrade over pre-Industrial levels], it would be deeply unethical.”

And we are still on course for that 3-4 C-degree point rise by century’s end, according to some of the research. An Inconvenient Truth was a masterpiece of sublimation as well as truth, perhaps leavening the sense of urgent disaster with Gore’s cheerful “good guy” humor. The remaking of Gore from the fall of that sordid presidential campaign to “good guy” hero—call him the new Important Man—was good for Hollywood sales but perhaps not so much for the global meltdown already starting to displace millions of people living in low-lying and major metropolitan areas. In his calm lecture style, Gore predicted the rise of carbon; therefore, the rise of heat; therefore, the rise of seas from the city of Bejing to the entire country of Bangladesh, using fancy Power Point graphs and charts to prove the numbers. His live-filmed audiences tittered over self-deprecating Gore jokes or his subtle slams at the US Congress. Flashbacks to Gore’s idyllic rural-Tennessee childhood home, where his tobacco-growing father nevertheless found time to play US Senator spending half the year in Washington, D.C., saturated the story of Earth’s climate debacle with the Important Man’s Americana memoir.

Relax—the film educated. But did not quite ask us to act.

But—don’t relax. The inconvenient truth is, in fact—an inconvenient catastrophe.

*

Let me go back to some early moments of Gore’s film. In both the film and book version, he tells another story in narrative flashback, this one about the remarkable engagement of his undergraduate college professor, oceanographer Roger Revelle, and the professor’s studies in global warming as a relatively new scientific inquiry. By the late 1950s, Revelle had discovered the crucial connection between rising carbon levels in the Earth’s atmosphere and overall ascending annual global temperatures. Professor Revelle taught students like the young Gore what consequences might come of this correlation. An Inconvenient Truth credits Gore’s professor for inspiring Gore’s own later political career. One Important Man bequeaths another. The political autobiography that underscores Gore’s climate-change tale rewrites failure into success, when he then recounts how he helped initiate the first Congressional hearings on global warming in 1978, then by the 1980s, in the US Senate, then by representing the Clinton administration in co-creating the Kyoto Treaty of 1997, which he proudly states the United States signed in 1998.

But—Congress did not ratify the Kyoto Treaty.

“I thought Congress would be startled…and they weren’t.”

Gore, the movie star, admits to failure on screen.

Congress, in fact, did nothing to tackle or ward-off climate change.

*

Again, in his film, and with the help of a slide show he “must have given over 1000 times,” Gore demonstrated one of the severe effects of rising atmospheric temperatures and a chain of disasters leading to an oceanic circulation breakdown. Gore told us that this “conveyor belt” system—which redistributes global temperatures by bringing ice water from the poles to circulate in and around equatorial zones, then pushing warmed water back northward to form a stabilizing loop controlling temperatures of the continental landmasses—will stall and ultimately collapse. Did we have any idea in 2006 that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), also known as the Gulf Stream, would actually do so—collapse—as early as (according to a recent study) 2025? Next year? Last summer, a report by the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen predicted a plausibly early AMOC failure between 2025-2095. Citing an article in Nature Communications, the journal Oceanus as well as countless other periodicals suggested in August 2023 that the halting of AMOC would (ironically) trigger an abrupt cooling not just in Europe but across large parts of the northern hemisphere.

Other disasters Gore ticked off and foresaw in An Inconvenient Truth:

• coral bleaching and the eventual death of ocean reefs that form breeding grounds for many of our oceans’ fish;

•  a species loss, in general, that by 2006 was already happening at “1000 times the ‘background loss’ rate” based on evolutionary statistics;

• the popping “corks” of Antarctica’s glaciers, which explode when their protective rims of floating ice shelves break up and dissolve (mentioned above), leading to the predicted sea-level rise that today seems unstoppable.

[Note: This Issue 4 “Introduction” continues below on mobile platforms.]

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Laura Hinton, editor, “An Inconvenient Catastrophe”

Giacomo Cuttone, featured artist

Part 1

CLIMATE THEORY

Steve Benson, “The World” / Giacomo Cuttone, paintings

Anne Waldman, “Ancestors Step Forward with Your Activist Terror” / Giacomo Cuttone, painting

James Sherry, “A Life in Poetry” & other lyrics / Giacomo Cuttone, painting

Carla Harryman, excerpts from “Scales for the Living” / Alan Sondheim & Azure Carter, video

Andrew Levy, excerpts from “On Being Incomplete—An Essay on Climate & Poetics”/ Meri Karako, art

Abigail Child, “Ethnography’s Excess,” with “An Environmental Preface” & multimedia collages

Prageeta Sharma, “On Our Way to Seattle” / Alan Sondheim & Azure Carter, video

Part 2

EARTH / WATER / AIR / FIRE

Linda Russo, “Rituals of Manageable Caring,” other poems & video

Michael Ruby, “Four Poems” with photos

Stephen Ratcliffe,”10 Poems from TODAY” with photos

Jonathan Skinner, “Extinction Songs” with archival images and recordings

Alexis Krasilovsky, “On Letting Nature Lie” & “Look Who’s Dreaming Now” with photo-collages

Anna Reckin, “England: April 2019-May 2023” / Susan Bee, excerpts from “Rabbit Hole” leporello

Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “Mixed Weather Sestina” & other poems / Jesper Dalmose, videos

Hank Lazer, “Please” & “Pivot”

"Adeena Karasick, “The Book of Lamentations V",” video / Alan Sondheim & Azure Carter, video

Shira Dentz, “Returning” / Karen Brennan, excerpts from “An Album” with photos

Susan M. Schultz, “Eucalyptus 1, 2 & 20” with photos

Norman Fischer, from “Through a Window” / Susan M. Schultz, photos

Nicole Peyrafitte, “Antediluvian Sympoiesis—An Installation,” mixed media

Mary Newell, “Scoping the Haze with Rarely Ravens” / Cara Erdheim Kilgallen, “Feminism, Freud, & Mother Earth,” tribute art review with multimedia images by Jane McAdams Freud

Chris Barras, Emma Bolland, Madeleine Campbell & Jennifer Spector, “sand susurran shadow stone cros (sings): a video reflection on places of dwelling,” video / Gillian Parrish & Gene Pfeiffer, “Some of Us Burn,” renga

James McCorkle, “by way of the valley to Trivet Rd…” & “The Ongoing,” with images

H.E. Fisher, “Drive-thru Teller” & “Absolute Magnitude” / Maria Damon, photography slideshow “Songs in the Key of Compost,” compost photos & fabric art video

Eileen R. Tabios, “The Glass Fire Hay(na)kus” & other poems, with photo

Part 3

CLIMATE (IN-)JUSTICE

Rae Armantrout, “Choices” / Toni Simon, art

Tony Medina, “Broke Escape from New York” & “Crucible” / Sadie Shein-Levy, photo

Pam Ward, “Water Rights” / Cynthia Hogue, “the calculation” & other poems

Pina Piccolo, “Not that a conversation could be had” / Susan M. Schultz, photos

Joseph Harrington, excerpt from “The Poem of Our Climate”

Dan Eltringham, excerpt from “Off/Set” / Andrea Carter Brown, “In Praise of Natural Disaster” & other poems / Stephen Ratcliffe, photos

Kevin T. McEneaney, “Round Up Catalogue”and other poems, with found images

Laura Hinton, “In a Nightmare Returning to Earth; or, the Burning Bush of Australia” & “Afterword—Escape to Planet B”

IN MEMORIAM  

This issue is dedicated to CDLS contributors, beloved poets & colleagues in the arts

Lyn Hejinian (1941-2024)

Lennox Raphael (1939-2023)

Rest in poetry, our dear friends.

Additionally, Gore criticized climate-change politics in the millennium’s first decade. He condemns "the manufacture of doubt about the origins of climate change” by a US political establishment “controlled by the oil and gas lobby,” with its “persecution of scientists because facts they discovered lead to an inconvenient truth.”

Still softspoken, the president-who-never-was turned road-show salesman, basic-science lecturer, and leading man in his own starring role, painted this rather grim future for baby-boomers’ children’s children. His theme was: the “inconvenient truth” could be still be recognized and the course of climate change changed.

Yet, today, catastrophe is the truth. The truth is real.

*

So many competing threads spin in and around the mega-topic of climate change. It is difficult to grab one thread of this topic at a time, or to figure out the multiple connecting subtopics of on-going climate catastrophe. The threads at issue are not so much delicately woven together as rather stuck together in globs, as if with children’s Play-doh or Elmer’s glue. The threads are intertwined—and also overwhelming to contemplate. We must try to understand the synergy in and amidst these threads. How is one thread implicated in another?

Along with rising sea levels and disturbed ocean current systems, we are in an era they are calling the “sixth extinction.” Diverse flora and fauna—the millions of species birthed, nurtured, developed, spawned and cohabitating with humans on the planet since homo sapiens evolved—are dying. The Earth’s last great extinction catastrophe occurred long before our human arrival, with the demise of the dinosaurs approximately 45 million years ago due to that now infamous giant rock hurdling towards Earth from some frosty region in outer-space. The gigantic asteroid hit the Chicyulab coastal area of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, ending what geologists call the Mesozoic Era.

“The Crater of Doom” site thus was named by the father-and-son team who had argued that such a rock actually was, in fact, recorded in the fossil record. The naming act was a kind of  compensation for having received horrible reviews for their asteroid theory, both among the scientific community and within US mass-media culture. Their theory of a catastrophic extra-terrestrial event vied against the mainstream “uniformitarian” view and popular understanding, since Victorians Charles Darwin and his mentor, Charles Lyell (1797-1875), developed their evolutionary ideas. The experts continued to believe that species disappear from Earth just as they evolve: in a gradual rhythm, not in a catastrophic moment. Even The New York Times, that great scientific journal, chimed in with ridicule towards geologist Walter Alvarez and his pop, physicist Luis Alvarez, who developed the new theory that mass extinctions could occur dramatically and quickly, and had done so. The Alvarez men would live to see the uniformists eat crow (tons and tons of dirt?) when a Mexican oil-company survey revealed early in the 1990’s that a gigantic chasm lay underground its drilling site. The Doom Crater that the Alvarezes had suspected existed was revealed to be fact.

Elisabeth Kolbert tells this story in her stunning book on the topic, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. With brave diligence, she shows in this book that, indeed, we are now experiencing a major extinction period, triggered not this time by an asteroid but by our human burning of fossil fuels once long buried under Earth’s soils. As it turns out, according to journalist-naturalist David Attenborough, all other mass extinctions in Earth’s four-billion year history have been instigated by rising carbon levels and climate change, if not human-generated. In his 2020 documentary, A Life On Our Planet, Attenborough reports that the Earth is fast becoming “a place in which we cannot live,” and that this is occurring because “the natural world is fading.” He calls our Holocene Paradise “the most stable period” in Earth time, a epoch in which a “living world” could be “relied upon to produce what we [humans] needed.” The Holocene, however, is a paradise lost, nearing its end. Attenborough calls climate change “this, our greatest mistake.”

Death is all around us.

For example, and hosting one-half of Earth’s land species, the rainforests were half gone by the release of Attenborough’s documentary four years ago. He cites forest clearing for timber and as well as for planting commercial monocultures, like oil palms, as the cause for rainforest loss. The groves of planted palm forests in some equatorial regions replacing rainforests are sites of the living dead. These cultivated commercial groves producing palm oil, which exists in products around the world, provide almost no habitat for the hundreds of thousands of species that rainforests do provide. The balance is not just tipped. It is destroyed—for thousands of species who require a rainforest habitat and its bounty to thrive.

Attenborough goes on in this documentary. Oceans are now depleted by 90 percent of their large fish. With the advent of industrial-level global fishing from the 1980s on, huge fishing nets “have become empty.” He adds that when these large hunted fish die or become scarce, it changes the entire ecosystem. And—“the ocean starts to die.” 

The ocean, itself—dies.

Coral reefs, as well, are turning white. When filming an earlier documentary in 1998 about the oceans, The Blue Planet, one of Attenborough’s photographers caught on camera a coral reef that was “bleaching.” Attenborough claims this process had never been documented on camera before. This “bleaching” phenomenon among coral reefs around the world is actually the process of a reef expelling the colorful algae that lives symbiotically upon the reef and gives it its actual “reef life.” Studies in recent decades have shown a correlation between these dying “bleaching” coral reefs, which once provided spawning shelters and food for fish and other marine life, and the fact of increasing ocean acidification. Kolbert writes about this product of climate change, too. The alkaline nature of global oceans has been disturbed by the atmosphere’s rising carbon levels, she writes. In Attenborough’s 2020 account, the oceans had been absorbing most of the industrial carbon levels in the air—until they no longer could do so by the 1990’s. He claims that this is why the carbon-related global temperature rise was less dramatic before the 1990s: “The ocean has stopped absorbing the excess carbon dioxide in the air.” Meanwhile, concurrently, the warming of the oceans is the chief cause of our current global ice meltdown. The Earth’s cryosphere has been “reduced by 40 percent in 40 years.”

If we allow this to happen, it is deeply unethical… I thought Congress would be startled…  It is so overwhelming. —Al Gore

*

We now know that the human burning of fossil fuels released into Earth’s atmosphere in our post-Industrial centuries is the chief cause of global warming and all these “threads” spinning out of climate change. Last fall’s COP28, or, the Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, held in Dubai, produced some odd headlines, however, on this topic. Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, president of the COP28, announced there that “there is no science indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global heating to 1-degree centigrade.” (The Guardian, Dec. 3, 2023)

…no science indicating…

His statement necessarily infuriated what is now a rather large, global, climate-change community: the scientists, activists, and general citizens aware of the science in fossil fuel’s role in planetary warming. Held in the petrol-state of the UAE, headed by one of its oil barons, COP28 “played right into the hands of the fossil fuels.”

These are the words of a young charismatic climate scientist who styles herself as “Dr. Gilbz” on episodes for her YouTube channel devoted to the climate-change epidemic. Communicator extraordinaire, London-based “Dr. Gilbz” has a real name, and a real doctorate. She is Dr. Ella Gilbert with a Ph.D. in Antarctic climate change. “Dr. Gilbz” has style. And she uses her communicative flair and humor to complain, to chastise in frank and blatant terms, our climate-change foibles. “We are on track to go up 2.5 C from pre-industrial levels,” she stated in a recent broadcast during the COP28 nightmare. To preserve global glacier systems, she insists, the goal should be 1.5 degrees centigrade maximum. Predictions, in fact, sometimes go beyond the 2 .5 levels she cites, with many factors unknown. Dr. Gilbz is right to warn us. Her predictive-temp numbers may even error on the conservative side. (I also have read of temp numbers that might rise 3- to 4-degrees C beyond pre-Industrial levels by our century’s end.)

Dr. Gilbz doesn’t seem to think we are doing enough, fast enough, to prevent serious levels of climate erosion.

Decrying the certain loss of Earth’s cryosphere, the ice mantle in Greenland and the poles, and the failure of the COPs to do anything truly authentic to halt the massive ice meltdown Earth has in store for us, Dr. Gilbz/Gilbert attacks the “toothless language” presented at the recent COP28. And she condemns the bickering about the reason for rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The COP honchos still act as if fossil-fuel consumption is still a theory about the cause of climate change—not a known cause based in climate-science facts.

COP28 seems to have been a cop-out, according to Dr. Gilbz.

*

Stay tuned to Dr. Gilbz—for the next cop-out at COP29. Scheduled to take place in yet another petrol-state, Azerbaijan. And COP29’s president-designee is Mukhtar Babayev, who, according to recent media reports, had previously spent 26 years working for the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (Socar),” which “plans to increase its fossil fuel production by a third over the next decade.” (The Guardian, Jan 5, 2024).

Dr. Gilbz/Gilbert must already be livid about the upcoming COP. We should all be. As a matter of concern for those who care about gender parity at these major, all-important global climate summits—which are supposedly charged with saving the habitability of Earth for all living species—no women have been appointed to the CPO29 28-member committee.

Let me say this again: the next COP conference will be run by and organized by an all-man community. The Important Man Syndrome rises again. Multiplied by 28.

The organization She Changes Climate put out a statement about the “regressive” nature of appointing an all-male committee in this petrol-state controlled climate-change clubhouse. Such a choice to exclude women’s voices is “a regressive step in the journey towards gender parity in climate… climate change affects the whole world, not half of it.”  I’m sure Dr. Gilbz/Gilbert is not pleased with her own exclusion as a woman climate scientist, and that of her many female colleagues in today’s atmospheric and crytosphere science fields are not pleased either.

*

Poetics. Where we enter

            doubt

What does

art

or language

            matter

mattering that we write

            or write about

matter over

poetry               art

moving material                      matters

this nightmare

trajectory

reel /ing / real at the end of the world— 

In personal conversations with environmental poets like James Sherry, I have been discussing ways in which the structures of language seem foundational to the urgency of questioning what can be done to arrest climate change. The way we speak, and the structures we bring to bear on what we have to say, do matter, like the dynamic matter of physics itself. Language generates its own universe of matter. In her own fine book on environmental poetics and climate change, Recomposing Ecopoetics, literary critic Lynn Keller cites Canadian Adam Dickinson’s experimental poetry book, The Polymers, which, according to Keller, calls attention to the language-based materiality of science discourses. It does so in order to provide a kind of resistance to contemporary science rhetoric, she suggests. I would emphasize that scientific rhetoric often engages in authoritarian discourses without acknowledging them.

Keller quotes Dickinson in an interview as he observes that “’pollution is fundamentally a matter of experimental writing—we are creating chemicals that affect the endocrine system in our bodies, interfering with how hormonal messages are sent and received.’” So why not experiment with language in a referential way to this connection? Keller herself describes the “huge unethical and uncontrollable scientific experiment” of climate change as calling for “a responding, ethical literary experiment” (Keller 67—Dickinson quoted in Keller). Literary experiment, Keller seems to suggest, goes with the Earth turf of climate change, and all the ways in which we have materially transformed the planet. Keller notes that Dickinson’s essays offer a “postmodern ecocriticism” that, in fact, critique ecocriticism’s own “emphasis on scientifically established realism.” She is telling us it is time that poets can and will do something different.

So what is this difference? If I am to make the turn towards poetry and poetics—after stating the “scientific realism” of numbers and facts in all the above paragraphs—I might do so by beginning to imagine an alternative discursive landscape, a kind of a watery zone for discussion initiated by the logic not of scientific numbers and facts viewed as telos and “truth” but of the different logic of poetics, poetry and art. We need a new discursive starting point. I think we should float there, mentally, emotionally, linguistically—at least for a while. I imagine us involved in this fluid discursive zone, one in which language functions both as scathing critique but also as an arena of porous and transformational flux. If poet Dickinson advocates for “’the playful poetics of metaphysics,’” which can “’represent a serious attempt to think of art as an alternative form of science,’” we might take his cue (quoted in Keller). We can get serious about the ways our language informs thought, and the way in which we produce new structural-thought alternatives by paying attention to linguistic irony, language’s internal ruptures, and its subversive multi-layered “ways of communicating.” Poets, for example, communicate through sonic devices as well as verbal imagery. They also destroy the authority of bureaucratic speech and institutionally grounded “ideas.” Poetry and poets work to break down assumptions about “communication” and art.

Poetry is an inquiry into language(s), or, as Lyn Hejinian once framed her book collection of language-centered, brilliant poetry essays, poetry is the “language of inquiry.” Different than a rhetoric of science or “truth,” poetry up-ends the rules of discourse, “misbehaving” against orthodoxy in linguistically marginal borderline zones that it generates (without stiff and rigid “borders” of well-worn metaphors and themes). Poetry and poetics cleaves away at solo impressions of “the speaker,” and at that centralizing authority “authorizing” versions of “realist” scientific / academic / institutional texts. Poetry does so, as Hejinian always suggested, through a poetics of analysis, questioning the singularity of the speaker and the telos trajectory, turning these figures back into figures that “play.” Poetry and poetics offers a kind of structural “in play”—unresolved by metaphoric condensation or linear logic. The very notions about singularity, telos, and identity/voice in poetry are concepts attached, of course, to sentimental views of the lyric. But we need not use poetry to indulge in that nostalgia. It is my argument that we can change the language about climate change in order to change how we approach and talk about climate change.

Poetry, poetics, and multiple forms of art develop new forms of perception and understanding, from multiple potential viewpoints. In poetry as literature, we experience not only irony, but the reality of change and fluidity embedded in its own linguistic play and inquiry. We might imagine putting our scientific “realist” information like bits of change into a piggy slot, or bills into an ATM. We deposit these bits into a metaphoric account that we don’t think of as metaphor or symbol but as Truth. We must engage in a more open system of exchange, a more flexible form of “making sense” and using information and data—what Min Hyoung Song identifies as “an active mode of making … and an active mode of attending” that he calls “climate lyricism.” The title of Song’s book, Climate Lyricism, advocates for “a revived lyric” that is “not concerned with the spotlight of an individual ‘I.’” Rather, the climate-lyrical “speaker” is not focused on sovereign identity, but “on the space between a first-person speaker and a second-person addressee,” a space which can embrace “commonality” and be so much more than either “I” or “you,” but both and all.

We need this “climate lyricism” as poetic-linguistic experiment—and of “commonality” engaging our rhetorics and conversations. Otherwise, climate change is sure to doom a massive number of individuals, human and non-human, just like that ancient flying asteroid from deep space destroyed all dinosaurs and its co-habitating species, re-setting the evolutionary dial for millions of years. The rhetoric of science sometimes fails to really remind us of our common human and non-human bonds. We need to re-member our connections, one to the other and to the non-human—the world’s multiple material life forms that Attenborough among so many others show us we humans depend upon for sustenance. The figure of the individual, and of authoritarian institutional rhetorics, is hampering our chances of changing the facts. The fact is, a single solitary “speaker” will not expire from climate change. We are all marching together towards that Chasm of Doom, leaving us without a collective future. So we had better reframe how we conceive of our human identities through speech, through art & writing.

Climate change demands such shifts in our perspectives. It demands creative ways of reporting, telling, making recordings and transcribings of “inconvenient truth(s).” We can no longer rely upon The Important Man to save us. And we cannot rely on singular forms of rhetoric that do not analyze their own cultural foundations. Through poetry and poetics, and other radical forms of other arts, we ask previously unimaginable questions; can we survive climate change? Can we change the path we are on? Can we challenge the fossil fuel industries that have long been the engine of capitalism in favor of transforming human sources of energy? Poetry demands we ask questions—within and about a language aware of its own ironic double structures. Poets and artists interpret the numbers of science and its “truths.” I believe humans have an instinct not to believe in “truth.” And our conventions of scientific rhetorics have not allowed for the particular truths of impending catastrophe to register in us, this reluctant human population. We note our historical resistance to sudden doomsday theories. It’s all words and numbers, but no “realist” in the Real. Poetry, poetics and art conveying climate-change information and insights might help us to re-imagine the very alterity of climate change. And what could be more of an “alterity” than a world without life?

No wonder the Alvarez son-father team was ridiculed until evidence appeared before oil-greedy eyes and the Yucatan chasm visibly “opened up.” No wonder Darwin and his descendants refused any notion of catastrophe in surmising the pattern of species deaths as part of a theory of evolution. Truth in science is made into a definitive one. But the material world doesn’t actually work this way. It doesn’t function through an x=x logic. The so-called “realist nature” of our material world works in leaps and starts and failures and non-linearity. Evolutionary theory itself isn’t predictable. Perhaps the quantum leap and quantum theory comes closer to expressing these very real impasses and logical quagmires in observing a physical universe—in which the perceiver actually participates in its construction. While the theoretical physicists play with math sequences, we, the poets and artists, play with our materials, resolved to never close them off to transformation.

*

David Wallace-Wells writes in The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming that “climate change … is not just the biggest threat human life on the planet has ever faced but a threat of an entirely different category and scale. That is, the scale of human life itself.” He cites Timothy Morton, who calls climate change a “’hyper-object,’ [that is] a conceptual fact so large and complex” (writes Wallace-Wells) “that … it can never be properly comprehended…[its] size, its scope, its brutality…”

In the early pages of her book on ecopoetics, Keller also reflects upon this problem of “scale.” She suggests that the incomprehensible “scale” is a major factor underscoring the identity of the so-called Anthropocene. So how do we deal with “scale”? How to we talk about it?

I don’t think the term “Anthropocene” has yet been officially adopted by the geologists—those folks who study what rocks have to tell us about the history of Earth, and give Earth its periodic epochal names (like our own Holocene, or the Pleistocene before it). If we are in an “Anthropocene,” controlled by devastating humans, its recent naming is perhaps an act of disobedience that is also one of poetics—emerging out of a frustrating reckoning. Keller writes of the “cognitive and affective dissonance between minute individual agency and enormous collective impact” in her study. Realistically, only major institutional change will abate further catastrophic climate disruption—no matter how much money corporations spend on campaigns suggesting that our little individual acts alone are what matter, thereby skirting corporate responsibility, or at least changing the topic. Poets and poetics and artists trying to deal with climate change as part of their lives and creative work must also deal with this frustration of “scale,” which is so hard to grapple with. But an authentic discussion of climate change must overcome our fear of “scale.” As part of her own discussion about this issue of “scale,” Keller cites another poet, American Juliana Spahr, who emphasizes the concept of “’scalar dissonance.’” Keller interprets Spahr’s concept thus:

As we collectively lunge toward one tipping point after another, each of which has cascading consequences we can barely comprehend, the individual feels tiny and helpless… (38)

That helplessness is embedded in our institutional-authoritarian language about climate change. Citing another eco-poet, Evelyn Reilley, Keller writes that what is needed is that “paradigm shift”— here Keller and Song and other come together again, embracing multiplicity, a language of perception, and perception in language. Only through a radical “paradigm shift” might we find

…fresh ways of deploying traditional resources of the literary imagination… along with the human gifts of attention and sensory perception, to foster thinking that might straddle divergent Anthropocene scales… (Keller).

This re-situating of how we perceive the crisis of “scale” is something we can do by reworking the language. If we are to consider “the agency of the non-human,” we must stop relying upon old paradigms of society that have worked very hard to close off such agency.

Another related question Keller engages in her study is how we consider the “scale” of time. How can we contemplate the concept of “deep time” as described by paleontologist/evolutionary biologist Henry Gee, in tandem with our own “everyday lives”? Keller seems to think that a climate poetics can allow us to explore this binary—or to achieve a sense both of “deep time” and “every day” time all at once? We need the language of paradox at the heart of poetic language to begin having these conversations.

The problem of “scale” need not be overwhelming—if we shift our models of conceptualization to that of opening and contradiction / paradox rather than certainty and “fact.” This is a native language “space,” where that “dissonance” of “scale” is a necessary part of our “realist” materialisms.

*

Let’s focus back on Dr. Gilbz, who I admit I am very fond of, and her stellar Youtube programming on climate change. I am watching and hearing her smart, informed candor as she interviews her colleague, Dr. Caitlin Norton, another accomplished woman on the climate-disaster science scene and who is into the Earth’s forecasting business. Like Dr. G, Dr. N is articulate and very up on the latest, quite disastrous “realist” facts about climate change. Dr. N’s specialty concerns the meltdown of Antarctica’s ice shelves and the loss of our global cryosphere. In a Dr. G program from last fall, Dr. N states that the “quite rapid loss of ice” from West Antarctica will “accelerate,” and there is “nothing we can do about it.” Dr. N adds: all implications are just “devastating.”

Wow! This is, indeed, a catastrophic truth, or an inconvenient catastrophe—that “five meters of sea level rise” will definitively occur “over the next 300-500 years.” Dr. N goes on to say that “one or two” meters of this rise in sea levels globally is “happening within the lifetime of kids today.”

A meter, a reminder to those of us culturally on the British-American system, is about three feet—so Dr. Norton is describing the potential (the probability?) for a 6-foot sea-level rise by the time Tommy, today a third grader, becomes an older guy in his 60s. That’s about my age. It’s not even the end of the century!

Dr. Norton is scaring me. But Dr. N’s “hard fact” approach is mitigated by Dr. G’s “glib” humor and, dare I say, artsy style, as she sits in her London flat next to house plants bantering and making puns as well as horrifying us with the most recent numbers on climate change. Dr. N concludes that the ice-sheet meltdown in the Amundson Sea of South Antarctica, with its predicted dissolution of glaciers like that of the completely misnamed Pine Island glacier (she mentions there are no pines and it is not an island) is not only a foregone conclusion as we approach a minimum rise of 2.5 to 3-degrees Celsius (even a possibly 4 increase) of pre-Industrial temperature levels by this century’s end. And she mentions that little refugee crisis that Al Gore only briefly alludes to in his 2006 doc may be a spin-off to the topic of climate change but that, too, is yet another impending, already unfolding global disaster for all of humankind.

On the refugee issue, we already see the crisis underway as Central and South Americans flee to the U.S. southern border—not just because of political disorder and economic poverty and perhaps bad US policy towards its southern neighbors, but also because weather conditions have gotten meaner and more destructive to impoverished villagers and farmers especially in the tropics. According to Wallace-Wells, the UN projects that at least 200 million refugees will have flown global areas under assault of climate change by the year 2050. And he adds that “the high end” projections are much worse—“’a billion or more vulnerable poor people with little choice but to fight or flee.’” Julie Sze, in her book Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger, suggests that major environmental losses have thus far mostly affected indigenous people, minorities, and the poor, that “race, indigeneity, poverty and environmental issues are locked in a toxic brew.” She blames the “brew” on the idealization of markets under neoliberalism, and the way in which “capitalism depends on control, specifically, control of nature”—in the same way capitalism relies upon “the control and abuse of people of color.”

There will be no safe space from climate change. Tell that to the Republican leaders in Congress who are already trying to pull up the castle walls in D.C. along the US southern borders. Tell that to the rich folks who think they can buy protection from climate-change travesties. In conversation together, Dr. G and Dr. N remind us that refugee crises are part of those climate-change threads. They remind us that “climate change isn’t one thing,” but “a set of interconnected systems.” But if this very scale of multiple life catastrophes is increasing, they remind us we must use our grit if not our humor in making a plan for these events. We must face climate change. An intellectual examination of climate change may be only for the brave. These two women seem to be that. But is it possible through art, not just science, or science as art, that human communities might better engage both fact and futuristic predictions? Is there a language about climate change that can help us to move away from the “sea-rise-is-a-‘slow-burner’” concept, or that silence of pure climate deniers, the politicians and the elite invested in fossil fuels—and perhaps start to face our deepest fears and failure? We can recognize our fears, that of “scale” and some end point. But maybe we need to immerse ourselves in a literary logic, one that kind of “enjoys” a more disruptive, dissonant approach, one that teaches us how to embraces rather than assuages our fears.

Or, we can continue failing—on the grand-political-economic institutional levels we are failing today—to collectively recognize the material consequences of our uses of the planet. We can pretend climate change doesn’t exist. Or we can simply resist the urgency to act.

Can one write poetry after climate change?

Can one write within it?

Can one write under the auspices of the Anthropocene and make a new kind of epochal “sense”?

*

In this issue of Chant de la Sirène, approximately 50 writers as well as artists and photographers, video makers and conceptual artists, consider the many threads, ironies, sadnesses and debates surrounding and entangled in climate-change. They do this in complex and multiple ways. “Climate change” becomes not necessarily a “topic,” per se, as in the tradition of “nature” imagery. Instead, it opens up a movement towards discovery, that “inquiry” into and through language that heightens the ironic, or satiric, or the elegiac—expressing while refusing to master loss. Writers, artists, photographers, video-makers, and conceptual artists, sound artists (I think of contributor Alan Sondheim, with his unique image videos layered upon a sonic adventureland that include the vocals of his partner Azure Carter) are figuring / figuring-out highly creative ways to address and/or reflect upon climate catastrophe, without annoying lyric cliches or false nostalgic imprints about nature-as-ideal (a Romantic mode that is still employed). Our poetry and art may shock. And we might ask ourselves: it really “climate work”? The poetry and art in Issue 4 of Chant de la Sirène may not image Earth or “climate” as imagistic field. But all of it here inaugurate in the reader / viewer / audience new patterns of describing this discourse, new ways of thinking about the climate and, in general, the Earth as our only home. The creative and various forms of literature and the visual arts reproduced on these pages (think of Maria Damon making color canvases for her fabric art out of compost bins) offer a visible materiality that remind us to drop our desire to control. They release us from a language that echoes the need for human control that has caused the climate and ecological crises to begin with.

On every page in this issue of our CDLS issue, core beliefs are disturbed, worn-out language and expected images are discarded or satirized. So let us read, hear, watch, a story of our world’s end. We nevertheless refuse to know the end of this story—yet.

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With gratitude to all contributors to this issue. Special thanks goes to Susan M. Schultz for help with proof-reading, and to Linda Russo and Andrea Augé for reading drafts of this introduction.