In “Poets on the Beat,” a collaboration between Capital & Main and the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, distinguished California poets provide new perspectives on such topics as climate change, inequality, the immigrant experience and police violence.
…and the next extinction on every wing—
David Baker, “As a Portent”
When I was appointed Los Angeles poet laureate in 2021, I wanted to help make literature relevant to the lives of young people, to show them that poems could elevate the issues they care about. After giving a reading at California State University, Channel Islands, last spring, I discovered a group of budding poets who were already steps ahead of me.
The poet Marsha de la O tasked her students with writing “eco-poetics,” poetry that responded to threats to the natural world. After the reading, Marsha sent me an email with their poems attached. I sat down at my piled-high desk, ignoring other tasks, and read them with a mixture of admiration and despair. They had leaned into this assignment with eloquence and passion. Their anxiety about the Earth’s plight had given them something powerful, an oracular and authoritative poetic voice. One student, Andrea Villagomez, wrote as an advocate for Earth’s beleaguered creatures:
I speak for the innocent
turtles with their heads
stuck in plastic rings
….
I speak for the voiceless
the bees who participate
in the pollination of flowers
while her classmate, Melissa Mendez-Conchas, mourned:
I was there when
oceans were rich in water and life
and trees were so sturdy and tall
but I was also there
when oceans begged for a cup of water
and buckles of trees weakened
to death.
………………………………………………..
Their laments have a special power, as they will inherit a hotter and diminished planet, especially in the absence of urgent action in the next decade. But the student poets are hardly alone. Across generations, poets are addressing the damage done to the ecosystem and to communities wracked by floods and wildfires. Poets who write about the climate emergency often use a prophetic voice. Like Mendez-Conchas, they speak from an imagined, depleted future: “I was also there when/oceans were rich in water and life.”
Like these students, I have written about how human activity harms wildlife, about thousands of snow geese “no longer flying. / Gone quiet, their honks, their high-pitched quacks / lost over the toxic Berkeley Pit waters.” The poem, “Snow Geese in Butte,” was inspired by a news account of geese that had landed in the contaminated waters of a pit mine in Montana. (In a landmark trial, a judge recently sided with young environmentalists who took Montana’s leaders to court for failing to protect them from polluters.)
Not all eco-poetry is a poetry of lament and catastrophe foretold.
Even as poets grieve, we affirm our connection to the world that sustains us. “We are a large part of the biosphere,” Craig Santos Perez says in his poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier”; “Humans and animals / Are kin. / Humans and animals and glaciers / Are kin.”
The poet Rigoberto González barely disguises his anguish about the impending crisis in his poem “5. Signs of the End of the World.” But he also urges action and warns against catastrophizing:
… . When the animals began to flee
and the birds headed east, we should have guessed
the doom had come upon us then. But the right path
was not to panic but to study these changes, discuss
policy, hold town meetings—negotiate. Catastrophe
was just another balloon to deflate
Some environmental poetry points fingers. Tracy K. Smith’s “Watershed” gives voice to the ways corporations are culpable in degrading the environment. This poem is not about a warming planet, but one that is being poisoned. This poem was inspired by a New York Times Magazine investigation of DuPont, the chemical manufacturer, which for years concealed the fact that the company had dumped toxic sludge in a landfill that drained into the property of West Virginia cattle farmers. Smith zeroes in on the impact of the poisoning of animals in vivid detail:
a skinny red cow
hair missing back humped
a dead black calf in snow its eye
a brilliant chemical blue
No doubt we will continue to see more climate poetry. Many literary organizations are launching programs to add to the diverse chorus of voices addressing the climate crisis. The Academy of American Poets, for example, has established an award, the Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize, to honor exceptional poems that speak to the gravity of the vulnerable state of our environment, recognizing “we are foot soldiers in the war against climate change, and we are losing” and hoping “that poets will lend us their voices, to find allies and inspire change.” And shouldn’t we do everything we can to prevent the arrival of a world like the one imagined by Matthew Olzman in his poem “Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years From Now”:
It must seem like we sought to leave you nothing
but benzene, mercury, the stomachs
of seagulls rippled with jet fuel and plastic.
You probably doubt that we were capable of joy,
but I assure you we were.
Copyright Capital & Main 2023
