Climate geopoetics (the earth is a composted poem)

Introduction

The opening poem excerpt is from a series of climate poems on which I am currently at work. Each poem in the series takes as its title a quote on climate change. The first poem in the project begins with an acknowledgment that climate change affects all aspects of our world by taking a Margaret Atwood quote for its title: ‘I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change’ (Finn, 2015: para. 13). This is both terrifying and filled with radical possibility. If the current socio-environmental moment is indeed a point where everything is changing, much of that change may be catastrophic and apocalyptic; on the other hand, everything changing opens up the possibility of re-thinking how individuals, societies, and cultures relate with each other and with the nonhumans and materials with whom humans share the planet. Perhaps it is a chance for re-imagining and re-situating much of the world in a more socially and environmentally just arrangement. In fact, climate change might be considered a crisis of the imagination (Ghosh, 2016; Yusoff and Gabrys, 2011).

The quotes/titles in the series represent a variety of voices—for example, one poem is titled with a quote from social theorist Donna Haraway, another by Pope Francis, another by Donald Trump, another by Indigenous poet and scholar Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, another by geographer and climate scientist Mike Hulme. The poems then respond to the quotes/titles. Responding to these quotes in poetic form allows me a certain freedom of movement and juxtaposition within each poem. It also gives me the opportunity to offer responses in a variety of tones, from satirical to meditative to combative to despairing to hopeful to outraged. While emotional and affective responses to climate change are often understood in a dichotomy of hope/despair or in some imagining of a future ecotopia, utopia, or dystopia, it is my contention that a relevant climate geopoetics must endeavor to strike at all of these tones and emotional registers. While this climate geopoetics project addresses climate ‘narratives’ or ‘frames’, the poems also offer lyric or experimental spaces, by which I mean space not always beholden to story and narrative, but space that rather approaches time through image, association, and juxtaposition.

To situate this project as a climate geopoetics, the first section of this article addresses recent literary work that engages with climate change and the Anthropocene, with a particular focus on poetry. Here I will also briefly outline what I call the ‘geopoetic field’ as it is currently emerging as a subfield of the geohumanities. The second section of the article then turns to climate narratives and frames. Following the lead of many human geographers and environmental humanities scholars, I read climate change through a relational approach, and as primarily a social and cultural issue. This section also addresses the multiple and contested narratives of the Anthropocene, as the terms climate change and the Anthropocene are often intertwined in their use as terms and in how they are mobilized.

As cultural and critical geographers as well as geohumanities practitioners increasingly engage in artistic, literary, and creative approaches to geography’s core concerns of place, space, nature, landscape, and human–environment relationships, and as humanities and arts disciplines increasingly turn to the spatial, I also offer this climate geopoetics project as an example of how to do and present critical–creative work. The third section of the article, then, will address how I conceptualize this particular climate geopoetics project, and in doing so will tease out some of the possibilities of a geopoetics practice. I will dig into some of the poems and my process in writing them. The poetry included in this article is just as much an expression and practice of human geography (geopoetics) as is the more traditionally oriented prose/scholarly writing that is interweaved. To that end, poetry from the aforementioned climate poems will be woven throughout, and in the process section, I will also address some of the tensions of form that arise out of this geopoetics project.

Climate change and the geopoetic field

Amitav Ghosh (2016), in his book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, writes that climate change events are:

peculiarly resistant to the customary frames that literature has applied to ‘Nature’: they are too powerful, too grotesque, too dangerous, and too accusatory to be written about in a lyrical, or elegiac, or romantic vein. Indeed, in that these events are not entirely of Nature (whatever that might be), they confound the very idea of ‘Nature writing’ or ecological writing: they are instances, rather, of the uncanny intimacy of our relationship with the nonhuman. (pp. 32–33)

In fact, writers across genres have more and more addressed climate change in their recent work. Here, my goal is not to repeat an inventory/review of the growing body of work on climate literature (for that, see Johns-Putra, 2016; Trexler and Johns-Putra, 2011) but to give a general overview before focusing on the geopoetic field. The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), as an interdisciplinary scholarly organization, has also precipitated literary work on climate change, including a full issue of their journal, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE), devoted to global warming (Moore and Slovic, 2014). Also witness the term ‘cli-fi’, which takes the ‘sci-fi’ moniker and shifts it to describe a new subgenre of fiction focused on climate change. For instance, a recent anthology of cli-fi is titled ‘Everything Change’ (Milkoreit et al., 2016), riffing off of the same Atwood quote that titles the opening poem in this article. In addition to works of literature and creative writing, a growing body of work in literary and critical theory also addresses climate change (Johns-Putra, 2016). As the body of work in both climate literature and literary and critical theory that does climate change criticism grows, Ghosh (2016) contends that ‘new hybrid forms will emerge and the act of reading itself will change once again’ (p. 84). As a poet as well as a geographer, I propose here that a geopoetics practice, one that blends the forms of poetry and critical geography, is one of these new hybrid forms.

Geopoetics can be considered ‘earth-making’ (Magrane, 2015) while geography is ‘earth-writing’ (Springer, 2017). As the discipline of geography has recently (re)engaged with its own humanities traditions (Daniels et al., 2011; Dear et al., 2011), and as geographers increasingly experiment with creative and artistic methods (Cresswell, 2014; Hawkins, 2013, 2016; Marston and de Leeuw, 2013), geopoetics has emerged as a subfield of the geohumanities that puts creative–critical geographic inquiry into practice.

Geopoetics can take multiple forms or modes (Magrane, 2015) including poetry (either on the page or in performance); literary–geographic criticism, in which a combination of literary and geographic theory is used to interpret and analyze the poetics of literary texts; and geophilosophy, which considers earth-making as a poetic and philosophical endeavor. Kenneth White (1992), who has been credited with first using the term, proposed that in geopoetics, ‘what we’re concerned with is a new world-sensation’ (p. 165).

One of the promises of geopoetics—as well as the broader geohumanities—is the possibility of reaching different and multiple audiences by expanding the kinds of work that geographers produce and present (Hawkins et al., 2015; Magrane, 2019b). Simply put, a poem or an art installation does different work than a scholarly essay, and as geographers increasingly produce creative work and/or collaborate with creative writers or artists, works in creative–critical forms may help re-enliven the discipline and reach new audiences. It is in this context that the geopoetic field is handily expanding within geography (for a few examples in the last few years, see Acker, 2018; Angeles, 2017; Cresswell, 2019; de Leeuw and Hawkins, 2017; de Leeuw and Magrane, 2019; Eshun and Madge, 2016; Griffiths et al., 2017; Magrane et al., 2020a; Rose et al., 2018).

The geopoetic field as such includes the following characteristics: a focus on embodied engagements with place and materiality expressed through poetries of multiple forms; a critical awareness of the social and cultural constructions of—and expressions through—place, space, landscape, nature, and scale; a relational perspective to human–environment interactions that often attempts to dislodge and blur said categories; a reflexive consideration of how places are represented and, in turn, made; attention to difference and the situatedness of the cultural and social position from which a poet writes and/or makes; an engagement with speculative futures and the world-making possibilities of language; and an epistemological attention to the tensions of creative and critical methodologies and practices. While not all geopoetics projects will include all of these characteristics, and while this list is not exhaustive, I list these characteristics to outline some of the current contours of the emerging field.

Geopoetics is often aligned with ecopoetics, a term which Rigby (2016) has described as ‘an ecocritical neologism referring to the incorporation of an ecological or environmental perspective into the study of poetics, and into the reading and writing of (mainly) literary works’ (p. 79). A fairly large body of work has been produced under the banner of ecopoetics since the turning of the 21st century, such as the dedication of an experimental journal (Skinner, 2001), anthologized collections (Fisher-Wirth and Street, 2013), and collections of critical essays (Hume and Osborne, 2018), for just a few examples. While ecopoetics incorporates Rigby’s ‘ecological or environmental perspective’, ecopoetics is generally not aligned with the epistemological practices of ecology as a scientific discipline. On the other hand, I propose that geopoetics, particularly as practiced by the small but growing community of poet-geographers/geographer-poets, may more fluidly interweave the epistemologies and methodologies of human geography and of poetry than ecopoetics does of ecology (here as a disciplinary epistemology rather than as a cultural idea) and poetry. Elsewhere, I have proposed that some of what goes under the banner of ecopoetics might actually be considered geopoetics because of its place-based, spatial, or social theory aspects (Magrane, 2019c; Magrane et al., 2020b). These distinctions, though, however interesting in relation to disciplinary and epistemological questions, might be of limited utility outside of scholarly debates. Whether considered ecopoetics, geopoetics, or, for that matter, Anthropocene poetics or climate poetics, which I’ll turn to next, likely what matters most is what this work may do in the world.

Climate change has explicitly been the subject of a number of recent poetry anthologies (Delanty, 2014; Staples and King, 2017), while other anthologies, such as Russo and Reed’s (2018) Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing in the Anthropocene, which experiments with the poetics of the glossary entry form, have implicitly dealt with climate change. A series of 20 climate change poems curated by UK’s poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy ran in The Guardian in 2015. Books by individual poets likewise both implicitly and explicitly address climate change, including Allison Cobb’s (2016) After We All Died, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s (2017) Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter, and Scott T Starbuck’s (2017) Hawk on Wire. Recent work in literary geography has analyzed contemporary poetry in relation to climate narratives, such as a reading of poetry by Jetñil-Kijiner, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, and Craig Santos Perez with a particular eye toward how the poems’ expression of Indigenous ecopoetics offer alternative ontologies in the face of climate change (Magrane, 2018). However, critical work within geography that explicitly brings together geographic theory and criticism with literary analysis of climate poetry has been very limited, though literary scholars increasingly draw partly on the work of critical geographers for this purpose. For example, Farrier (2019) draws on geographers Yusoff and Clark in reading ‘Anthropocene poetics’, and Bristow (2015) looks to Marxist geography as well as to geographers such as Kay Anderson, Susan Smith, and Sarah Whatmore for emotional geographies or more-than-human geographies, respectively, to read the poetry of Alice Oswald, John Kinsella, and John Burnside.

Literary geographic analysis and interpretation of climate poetries is not, however, the ultimate focus of this article; rather, I am interested in how to do climate geopoetics as a geographer-poet. While geopoetics in an expanded field does not always take the form of something easily recognizable as ‘poetry’ on the page, and indeed engages performative practice, site-based installation or field research, community practice, and other forms of artistic product and/or literary essay and multi-genre writing (such as Bringhurst and Zwicky, 2018; Cresswell, 2019; Magrane and Cokinos, 2016; Magrane and Johnson, 2017; Prior and Walton, 2017), in this article I am focusing on the aforementioned specific poem series that responds to climate quotes as a kind of geopoetic constraint. It is my hope that this project may offer a fresh and unconventional geohumanities approach to examining the multiple ways that climate change is framed, engaged, and contested. To that end, the next section—after closing this section with the ending of the ‘everything change’ poem—will turn to a brief overview of climate narratives and representation.

Climate narratives and frames, climate representation

Climate is an idea; it is neither a thing to be tasted nor a quality of light to be described. It is an abstraction, like love or anger or peace. It is everywhere and nowhere at once: It is in a board room on the 30th floor, in the aisle seat of a flight from New York to Dubai, in the ocean tides below, in your morning coffee, behind the wheel of a car, tucked into the bark of a tree in the mountains where Piñon Pines are infested by bark beetles. In his book Weathered: Cultures of Climate, Mike Hulme (2017) makes a distinction between this abstract climate and a specific and embodied weather. He writes, ‘even though we live in climates I cannot show you climate’ (p. 1; original emphasis). Later, Hulme continues: ‘Since there can be no unmediated access to climate, all representations of climate are in the end political acts; that is, they are engaged in constructing different and selective climatic realities: material, ideological, imaginative, normative’ (p. 9). Here Hulme is writing specifically of the challenges of representing climate in art.

In the context of poetry, the abstract idea of climate goes against the adage that image should come over abstraction, perhaps best articulated in the canonical line from William Carlos Williams’ (1995 [1963]) mid-20th-century epic poem Paterson: ‘no ideas but in things’. The accepted wisdom from this line (at least within much of American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and onward) was that concrete image should be the matter of poetry, rather than abstract idea. This has been one of the difficulties in representing climate change across the arts: the representation of events and images come to stand in for representation of a concept that is an abstraction over time (weather averaged).

Following the lead of many human geographers and environmental humanities scholars (including Bulkeley, 2019; Castree et al., 2014; Daniels and Enfield, 2009; Hackmann et al., 2014; Liverman, 2009; Lövbrand et al., 2015; O’Brien, 2011), I read climate change as a social and cultural issue—or ‘condition’, to use Bulkeley’s (2019) framing—rather than as simply a physical Earth systems condition. By this I mean that the social and cultural realms (these categories overlap, and I here include the economic and political within them) are the primary realms through which action to address climate change has haltingly and insufficiently progressed. When approaching climate change as a social and cultural issue, one encounters multiple narratives or framings of climate change. For example, following Hulme (2009) and Manzo (2012), here are just a few ways that climate change is understood or portrayed: as an apocalyptic threat to humanity; as a national security issue; as an engineering problem; as a social and environmental justice issue; as a hoax; as a business opportunity; as a crisis of capitalism, patriarchy, settler colonialism, racism, and/or neoliberalism; or as an opportunity for radical transformation.

How climate change is framed then has reverberations for how it is approached or addressed (or ignored). These framings also often map onto deeper ideologies about human–environment relationships, expressed through social, political, and economic systems.

Bulkeley (2019) argues that ‘we need to revisit both our imaginaries and our practices of climate change human geographies’ (p. 4) and that the way that climate change has been situated within the discipline of geography—within particular environment and society framings—‘serves to perpetuate a conception of climate-as-problem that elicits particular kinds of knowledge and response’ (p. 4). Bulkeley proposes that if climate change is framed instead as a relational ‘condition’, human geography may offer ‘different kinds of interdisciplinarity that might be based on different terms of engagement and practices of knowledge production’ (2019: 5). This is both an ontological and epistemological critique, as it attempts to resituate both what climate change is and the methodologies of understanding and approaching climate change. While Bulkeley’s primary argument focuses on human geography as a social science, Lovell (2019), in response, points to the role that the arts and humanities can play in imagining climate futures and suggests that doing so may be more useful than ‘analyzing and fretting about disciplinary boundaries’ (p. 27).

When I think about climate change from a geopoetics standpoint, climate change is about time and materiality. Time: the scales of time in which we must think to understand climate. Materiality: minerals, fossils, plastic bags, the decayed remains of marine life powering our machines. In short, organizations of matter.

And one way to understand a poem is as a re-organization of matter. A poem is made by the fleeting materiality of language: things represented and evoked; shapes and sounds of words; rhythms and patterns repeated, rhythms and patterns fragmented, splintered. The world of a poem can be a place to play and experiment with different ideas of the subject. As I have outlined above, climate is an abstract idea, and climate change contains a multitude of contestable narratives or frames. One of the other arising narratives—to paraphrase Ghosh (2016)—is that climate change is paradoxically a collective condition arising at a time in history marked by a hegemonic (Western) insistence on the individual liberal humanist subject as the primary organizing body and principle of society. In response, a poem can be a sphere in which to critically–creatively engage with concepts emanating from new materialist and posthumanist trends in the humanities and social sciences that work to de-center said subject.

Process reflection: Doing climate geopoetics

This particular climate geopoetics project began with a simple concept: gather quotes on climate change by a variety of voices and respond to each of those quotes in poems. As I have shared in this article, this basic form allows for each poem to engage in a kind of conversation with particular representations of climate change and for—hopefully—the series of poems together to build a more complicated or nuanced engagement with the multiplicities of climate narratives and representation. In thinking about future directions in geopoetics—and in the broader geohumanities and practice-based creative geographies and arts-based research—formal decisions or constraints such as this can be a useful approach for formulating critical–creative projects and methods. Constraints are both limiting and freeing, as they put boundaries around a project and also focus content into a form.

The poem I wrote in response to Margaret Atwood’s ‘everything change’ quote takes the form of a list poem. I have performed this poem at a number of events and conferences. I think of it as a talkative poem, one that wants to be read out loud. Vocally, it accrues speed as it barrels through its one long sentence. It’s not quite stream-of-consciousness; however, the list poem form allows me to juxtapose images and allusions very quickly one after the other without explaining them. This is one of the reasons that I go to poetry: it can make jumps, allusions, and references without necessarily belaboring them. My hope is that the list poem expresses ‘everything change’ in both its content and its form, which are inextricably linked.

For just a few examples of referents in the poem: shifting phenology; Standing Rock Water Protectors and Dakota Access Pipeline protests; Trump’s speech announcing his intention to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord and a response to Trump jointly written by the mayors of Pittsburgh and Paris (Hidalgo and Peduto, 2017); Rob Nixon’s (2011) concept of ‘slow violence’; the multiple critiques of the Anthropocene noted in the previous section of this article; allusions to the works of poets Claudia Rankine (2014), Ross Gay (2015), and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner (2017), artists Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing (2015), and geographer and cellist Daniel Crawford (2013).

The juxtapositions that can happen in a poem may dislocate routinized patterns of categorization or thought. This is resonant with one of the arguments for the role of practice-led methodologies and creative arts research across different artistic genres, where the ‘interplay of ideas from disparate areas of knowledge in creative arts research creates conditions for the emergence of new analogies, metaphors and models for understanding objects of inquiry’ (Barrett, 2010: 7). A poem is a ‘meeting-place’ (Rukeyser, 1996 [1949]) and if geographers are to approach climate change as a condition (Bulkeley, 2019), these geopoetic juxtapositions may aid in human geography’s task to re-situate how climate change is framed. Poet Marcella Durand (2010), discussing the capacity of poetry to think and present multidimensionality, writes:

Association, juxtaposition, and metaphor are tools that the poet can use to address larger systems. The poet can legitimately juxtapose kelp beds with junkyards, or to get more intricate, she or he can reflect on the water reservoir system of a large city by utilizing the linguistic structure of repetitive water-associated words in a poem. Most other disciplines…are usually obliged to separate their data and observations into discrete topics…poets work in a medium that not only is in itself an art, but an art that interacts with the exterior world—with things, events, systems—and through this multidimensional aspect of poetry, poets can be an essential catalyst for increased perception, and increased change. (pp. 123–124)

I do not mean to argue in this article that climate geopoetics will help ‘solve’ climate change. It’s unlikely that a poem can effect the change that would keep net global warming under 1.5°C (although how could one trace this?). Rather, a climate geopoetics may help re-situate some of the ways that climate change is approached. This is a modest claim. Retallack (2018) suggests that poetry ‘is the linguistic laboratory and playground of the improbable’ (p. 242). I like this alliance of laboratory and playground. While the laboratory may be a site for a more formal or methodical approach, the playground can be a site that is less teleological, more open. Put in another methodological and epistemological frame, poetry is often as much about clarifying the questions as it is about posing answers. Both the lab and the playground are places for experimentation. While the form and conventions of a scholarly article can often prefigure a certain logic and organization of thought, the space of a poem offers—and asks—something different: a more open form, in which writer or maker or reader are encouraged to reorganize the world. In the context of this climate geopoetics project, it seems to me that reorganization of the world is one of the primary challenges of the Anthropocene and its discontents.

To be clear, I approach both the poetry and the prose sections of this article as forms in which to present geographic thought. While I consider the prose sections to tend toward the exegetical or explanatory, and the interlaced poems to tend toward the affective or expressive, neither is wholly one or the other. This is a key tension of geopoetic work: in pushing and building a geopoetics practice, there is something of a deformation of existing forms of written representation, and, in turn, a deformation of and challenge to what a reader might expect of a text. What does a geopoetics product like this ask of its reader(s)? What does it ask of you? I propose that in a geopoetics text such as this, the reader/audience is a key part of the meaning-making of the text. This is part of what poetry brings to a geographic practice. Poems do not necessarily work by making linear arguments. Geopoetics, in turn, might be best approached as a compressed energy construct, one that leaves room for the reader to bring their own interpretation and response to the text. In other words, the text may be approached as an aesthetic object that is continually being re-formed by its interactions with readers, rather than as a transparent transmission of idea/argument from a writer to a reader.

Geopoetics is also a way to do embodied theory. The second poem in this article, in which I respond to a quote from Donna Haraway (2016: 30), is an example. The poem tries to playfully illustrate some of the ‘unthinkability’ of ‘human exceptionalism and bounded individualism’, using a moment of a bird shitting on an open page of Haraway’s book as a hinge. The poem goes on to playfully mark a specific date and time both on the page of the book and within the poem. (The place noted, Playa Pond, is the pond at Playa Art + Science residency site at the edge of the Great Basin Desert in southern Oregon, where I began this poem series while a resident in summer 2017.)

I end the Haraway poem with ‘the earth is a composted poem/art interspecies material practice’. While literary scholars may catch allusions to Whitman (1867) and Rasula (2002) in ‘the earth is a composted poem’, this line is also an articulation of geopoetics as earth-making. What might the earth look like—relationally, and in practice—in an ontology that conceives of the earth as a poem?

Conclusion

The geohumanities, in their incorporation and application of artistic and literary methods, can look to multiple objects of inquiry. As I’ve outlined in this article, climate change is more of an abstraction than an object per se; however, climate change can be considered one of the primary—and certainly one of the most pressing—areas of inquiry for human geography in the first quarter of the 21st century. This will likely be even more so in the coming decades. If the geohumanities and aligned creative geographies are to offer new insights and practices for human geography, finding new and creative ways to approach, understand, represent, and to trouble climate change and its multiplicities should be one of their goals. Indeed, this has been one of my goals in this article, in which I have woven excerpts from a series of climate poems together with the more traditional scholarly focus on the geopoetic field in relation to climate narratives and representation.

To return to Ghosh’s (2016) The Great Derangement, one of his arguments is that contemporary literary fiction as a genre has not been able to engage with climate change because it has internalized and taken the individual liberal humanist subject as its primary focus. He writes, ‘at exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike’ (p. 80).

Poetry as a genre has many ways of experimenting with subjectivity; in the compression of the space of a poem, a subject is often fluid and resists the solidification of a liberal humanist individuality. Time in a poem also often resists a linear movement, in contrast to the linearity of modernity that understands time, to quote Ghosh (2016: 79) quoting Latour (1993), as ‘an irreversible arrow, as capitalization, as progress’. A geopoetics practice that infuses a critical approach to the geo with a creative approach of poetics can help enliven both the geo and the poetic, in turn opening up human geography to alternative modes of conceptualizing and presenting form and content—in other words, alternative ways of making worlds.

I write this shortly after having a child. There are decent odds that he will live to see the year 2100. Born in the summer of 2018, he will be in his early 80s at the turning of the next century. I have no idea what the world will look like then, whether looking back over the 21st century will be littered with catastrophes and extinctions, wars and famines, or whether it will be a time of turning and positive socio-ecological transformation. Likely it will be both and all. I’ve largely given up on monolithic imaginations of some future ecotopia, just as I have given up on some future apocalyptic dystopia. While ecotopian, utopian, and dystopian narratives may be useful framing conceits—and perhaps sometimes useful for inciting action—they don’t ultimately get at the ongoing multiple trajectories of history.

This climate geopoetics project isn’t ultimately about hope or despair, two of the ways that orientations toward climate change and environmental catastrophe/renewal are often framed. Rather, I’d like to think that it is about play and experimentation in addressing climate change at our current moment in time. And put mildly, it’s an extraordinary time that we’re living in and through.

Someone still calling, ‘Saving the Earth is not a competition, but an essential collaboration’.

—Allison Adelle Hedge Coke (2014: 57)