Poets who want to respond to the climate crisis need to find ways to acknowledge its variously manifest and yet overwhelming realities. Climate change is not just another new topic; it demands new ways of thinking about and writing poetry. A climate-changed poetry and poetics is less a matter of choice than of adaptation. In “Why Ecopoetry?”, I argued that what defines an ecopoem (a term I prefer to “ecopoetics,” which I reserve for theoretical and programmatic reflections) is not its form or style but its relation to its environment. Part of my goal at the time was to establish what counts as an ecopoem and what doesn’t. Since I published that essay, in 2016, climate change has made me doubt whether this “either/or” distinction is helpful. Instead, I’ve been finding the adjective ecopoetic useful in describing how poems might be relatively and variously environmental and environmentalist. In this essay, I will use the terms climate poem and climate poetry and climate poetics (such as this essay) to describe a subset of nature poems that one way or another address climate change itself. Poets need not think of their poems as climate poems or of themselves as participating in an ecopoetics movement. They may have little interest in what these words mean. But poets who let global warming enter and alter their poems are writing what I call climate poetry.
CLIMATE AND WEATHER
To imagine what a climate-changed poetry might be, compare our experience of seasonal weather with our experience of climate. “Without the Snow’s Tableau / Winter, were lie – to me –”, Dickinson wrote, “Because I see – New Englandly –” (Franklin, #256). By her wonderful adverb Dickinson meant not what but how she experienced her New England seasons: expected and familiar. When I first moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, I mistook the morning fog for a sign of rain, and I expected rainstorms to be announced by lightning and thunder. After I gradually acclimated myself to our gloomy wet winters, I was again caught off guard by the extreme drought that meant snow-packing rain storms became scarcer, and I was faced with a new kind of fall, a “fire season” with blaze complexes more frequent and intense. (As I type, an “atmospheric river” has brought back the usual winter weather with unusual ferocity.) With the new abnormal, as Jerry Brown called it, we keep buckets in the shower and by the kitchen sink, and air purifiers in the livingroom and bedroom. My experience of climate-changed extreme weather events in recent years has hovered somewhere between the surreal and the unreal.
Beyond its unnerving changes, the climate itself operates above and beyond the weather. We live among other plant and animal lives in a climate, but each of us knows our climate only indirectly through our seasonal weathers. Though it may disrupt us, climate change “itself” lies beyond our direct apprehension. It’s happening everywhere, including places we’ll never inhabit or see; it’s happening on a scale we can’t experience (weakened global ocean circulations, bipolar ice cracks and melts, positive feedback loops, path-breaking species migrations); and it’s not happening yet in ways it might. Modifying Nicholas of Cusa’s simile for God, I think of climate change as a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. We see it now—and will only ever see it—in part, never face to face. Consider a 2022 finding from NASA that the earth has warmed around 1.2° Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. We can’t feel such a small rise in temperature—first because it’s not a local reading but a global average over continents and oceans, and second because none of us has lived since the invention of the steam engine. Even the spike in the earth’s average heat over the past thirty years is something we may have lived through but can’t immediately and commonly feel. Climate change is something only weather instruments and climate models, along with redwood rings and ice cores, can reliably measure
