Part of my current writing project involves a future with flooding on the eastern seaboard of the United States. I’m no climate scientist, though of course I have observed, as we all have, that extreme weather is rapidly becoming more normal than extreme. So to shore up my fictional world, I’ve been reading the U.N. Climate Report.
There are so many things I love about this massive bureaucratic document. I love that each chapter begins with an overview of what’s going to be covered. I love that it states how much the authors agree about, and have confidence in, their statements. What I love the most: how they’re valiant efforts to be neutral in their vocabulary and syntax reveals the breadth and depth of destruction caused by our systemic objectification and subjugation of the natural world.
For example: “Anthropogenic warming has resulted in shifts of climate zones, primarily as an increase in dry climates and decrease of polar climates (high confidence). Ongoing warming is projected to result in new, hot climates in tropical regions and to shift climate zones poleward in the mid- to high latitudes and upward in regions of higher elevation (high confidence).
These sentences make me twitchy for poetry, which so often functions as the great unmasker of the naked emperor. (And when poets turn to essays, as Ross Gay does in Incitement to Joy, they continue to unmask.) I’m no poet, but I can count syllables and I’ve gone a little nuts playing with the ways some of the UN report’s language could be shaped into semi-found haikus/tangas. This is pure play, and I do not intend disrespect to these forms with my amateur frolicking (in particular, I realize haikus are usually untitled, but titles here were my launchpads…). Thinking in syllables served as a refreshing break from my longer work, allowing me to return to prose with a slightly-more-finely-tuned ear.
1. Technical Summary, page 49
Local trees dampen amplitude of extreme heat. Still they welcome us.
2. Climate-related extremes on land: risks are amplified
I’m thinking this means trailer parks, shacks, shanty towns, human well-being, nevermind ecosystems. Knowledge gap! See update in two-point-two.
3. Introduction to the chapter structure
optimize across the lands’ sectors stakeholders sustain policy -relevant best management assess for mitigation
May it be that poetry alights upon your eye and ear whensoever you are in need of it.
I’m down on the mat wrestling with my larger piece of fiction which is several smaller pieces of related fictions, and have been reading widely for organizational inspiration. Here are tidbits that I’ve found memorable for the ideas they express, for their musicality, for their perspective, for their humor.
[P]erception is then language with which we attempt to grapple with the idea, the concept, the phenomenon [of time]. List any ten speeds for time: summer morning, winter dusk, boring lecture, first time making love with woman you actually really love, drunkenness, moment of death, car crash, heart attack, any and all meetings of more than seven people, childhood, and not one happens at the same speed as the others, some are blindingly fast and over instantly and others drone and moan on until you contemplate removing your spleen with a pepper shaker just for entertainment’s sake.
— Brian Doyle, Mink River
* * *
“Every greedy man-made thing dangling with a price tag
Has sunk into the darkness to be properly cleaned up by the starlight.”
–Nikki Finney, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry
* * *
She looked at Philomena’s orange hair and smoke-colored eyeliner and at Justin’s mangy beard and demonic stare. She could see nothing of what her children had once been. Bradford lifted his nose from the wineglass. Did it occur to you that your mother and I actually worked to pay for this chicken? he asked. Philomena shrugged. Justin said: The chicken worked harder.
–Thasia Frank, “Enchantment” in Enchantment: New and Selected Stories
* * *
He had never experienced such a sky. In England, where heaven is a low-hung, personal affair, thoroughly identified with the King James Version, a sky such as this would not have been tolerated for a moment. It was a high, pagan explosion of a sky, promising indulgence for all kinds of offenses to which he had not the slightest inclination.
— Shirley Hazzard, “The Worst Moment of the Day” in Collected Stories.
* * *
One morning before dawn it got very cold in the guest room. Grandmother dragged the rag rug up on the bed and pulled some raincoats down from the wall, but they didn’t help much. She supposed it was due to the bog. It’s a funny thing about bogs. you can fill them with rocks and sand and old logs and make a little fenced-in yard on top with a woodpile and a chopping block–but bogs go right on behaving like bogs. Early in the spring they breathe ice and make their own mist, in remembrance of the time when they had black water and their own sedge blossoming untouched.
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