Rebecca Stoner Reviews Poems for the Planet

The anthology Here: Poems for the Planet includes a variety of responses to climate change written by poets. In her assessment, Rebecca Stoner writes, "direct prose seems like the natural medium for an urgent message like, 'We have 11 years to avert climate catastrophe'" yet, she continues, "the struggle over climate change is also, in part, a struggle over how we imagine the future." More: 

Will our world continue to be devastated by our dependence on cheap energy, cheap labor, and cheap stuff; and by increasingly destructive "natural" disasters? Or will it look radically different? And if so, how do we imagine the world we hope to bring into being?

The new anthology Here: Poems for the Planet demonstrates how poems can help us do that imaginative work. Poems can "collapse time and space," to quote the poet Solmaz Sharif. They can reintroduce readers to value systems outside of capitalism's deadly focus on short-term profits. 

Their rhythms, beauty, and joyfulness bring us back to a world beyond "this lightbox and its scroll of dread," writes poet Nickole Brown.

Bob Hicok's "Hold your breath: a song of climate change" emphasizes how frighteningly narrow the gap is between tomorrow's climate disasters and our failure to take action today. The poem opens with a decent summary of the attitude of many Americans toward the climate question: "The water's rising / but we're not drowning yet." Hicok lets the reader linger in this feeling of temporary security only a beat longer: "We'll do something. / When we're on our roofs. / When we're deciding between saving / the cute baby or the smart baby."

Hicok brings home the futility of our last-ditch plans to escape climate chaos in his final lines: "We'll grow wings, we'll go / to the moon. Soon," he writes. Climate chaos is coming fast, Hicok's poem reminds us. If we don't stretch our imagination toward just, attractive solutions now, we won't be left with much at all.

In the public sphere, American political imagination is hamstrung by the dominance of short-term economic thinking. We talk about how expensive climate change will be and how it hurts gross domestic product. We talk about the price of the oil that must be left in the ground and about a carbon tax. But the natural world has value beyond what we've measured with dollars. Eradicating a species can't just be written off as the price of progress. In "To the World's Most Abundant Bird, Once," Silke Scheuermann describes how Martha, the world's last passenger pigeon, carried in her "notions / of narrowness and expanse so at odds / with the senior suite at Cincinnati Zoo." She had once been part of a flock "Thousands of meters wide" that kept Americans "standing for hours in the dark" as the pigeons flew by. If we extended our imaginations as wide as that flock, what kind of human community could we imagine?

Continue at Pacific Standard.