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peaamlipoetrydoctor · 2 years

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Stepping through my post-doc archive: May 2021

I flicked back to the start of this (my second ever) Tumblr blog expecting to see the poems from NaPoWriMo 2021, only to find that my first posts were from May 2021...

I'd somehow erased that last time through, I'd recorded the poems and posted them as voice pieces, rather than running a blog. Strange choice, I suppose, though since I came back to poetry through the experience of spoken poetry, well maybe not so odd, really. A little out of step with the NaPoWriMo norm - perhaps I'll say it like that.

So instead I found that in May 2021, having completed NaPoWriMo for the first time, and well into my first term on CityLit's Advanced Poetry Workshop - the first thing I posted here was a pre-edit early draft version of what became my second Poetry & Climate Crisis pamphlet, which I'd now describe as a Deep Time crown of sonnets.

I may well have posted this before, but bears revisiting - this is what I said about the reworked set of sonnets that I eventually published:

Climate crisis; extinction threats; systemic ecological and social injustices... These are huge-scale issues which I cannot and do not pretend to be able to solve – impossible to tackle decisively across an entire individual human lifetime, let alone a single poetry pamphlet.

Nonetheless, these issues are, I believe, topics that we should be discussing, that we should be (with some urgency!) learning how to think and speak about, how to respond to and plan for. The problems associated with climate breakdown may seem, may be, unmanageably massive and existentially terrifying, but they are relevant and rapidly approaching.

These issues should be things we are capable of contemplating and discussing; in our homes, our communities, our social and educational institutions, and our political assemblies; and in our commercial organisations, in our places of work. Also, in our poetry…

This is not because I have delusions of “solving” the climate crisis, but because I believe that it is urgent for individuals, organisations and societies on Earth today to learn how to deal with being alive at a time in history when climate breakdown is rapidly emerging, and has not yet been “solved”, and may possibly prove to be unresolvable.

I am a poet, not a scientist, and my contribution lies in scrutinising the minutiae of reactions, moods, emotions, sensations, expressions.

I do this in the belief that poetry can capture and make visible aspects of our emotional and psychological make-up differently from, and in certain respects, better than we can express these things through the supposedly dispassionate tones in which we tend to give voice to those perceptions generated through logical reasoning.

I understand poetry as effective for “holding discourse” with our own lurking sub-conscious, and for offering a gesture of empathy and connection towards others.

I believe there are clear applications for poetic modes of expression and connection in the face of the terror, rage, or in my case, primarily denial and then grief, that may manifest in response to an existential threat – as the threat of climate breakdown surely is.

And this is what I had to say about the pamphlet series generally...

This pamphlet forms part of my “Poetry & Climate Crisis” series:

A Lockdown London Life (Poetry & Climate Crisis #1)

The Future is Post-Human (Poetry & Climate Crisis #2)

Post-Human Mythologies (Poetry & Climate Crisis #3)

A Year of Walking (Poetry & Climate Crisis #4)

Lost Connections (Poetry & Climate Crisis #5)

The “Poetry & Climate Crisis” series is formed of sets of poems I created during and following my doctoral research, which explored individual and institutional responses to the emerging threat/s of climate breakdown. My doctoral thesis, “Working Through Climate Grief: A Poetic Inquiry”, can be accessed via the British Library repository, EThOS (e-theses online service).

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