Ecopoetry can be a place for documenting and memorializing all that is lost to climate change. It can also be a place to process emotions tied to loss and catastrophe. Four poets read and comment on their poems about wildfire and coral bleaching.
“Imagine you must survive without running,” Ada Limón writes in one of
The Carrying’s (Milkweed) early poems, and for a while I can imagine nothing but that. But then, a few pages later, she writes, “Perhaps we are always hurtling our bodies toward/ the thing that will obliterate us . . .” and I think, yes, I imagine that is also true. On and on this book goes, making me imagine the world in one way and then another. Consider her poem “American Pharoah,” in which the speaker is quite literally sick and tired but is forced to leave the house to see some horse “not even race, but/ work.” She’s a grump, the poem’s speaker, just like I am so often grumpy and tired and sick of it all. And so too is “some horse racing bigwig” who is certain this horse must be overrated. Isn’t so much of what this world sells us overrated? The blooming trees and the dogs and the dandelions and the tomatoes and the dreams we have of the people we love or the people we hope to l
Craig Santos Perez
Craig Santos Perez is an indigenous CHamoru poet from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is the author of five books of poetry and the coeditor of five anthologies. He teaches at the University of Hawaii–Manoa. His poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Virus” can be found here. It appears in the Mar/Apr 2021 issue of the
What was your original impetus for writing “Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Virus?”
I have always enjoyed Wallace Stevens’s poem for the way it envisions a subject from multiple perspectives. Viruses are such complex beings who cause complicated effects on bodies, societies, economies, etc. As the coronavirus began to spread across the globe, I started reading more about viruses, as well as watching documentaries and news reports. I turned to Stevens’s poem to help me grasp this multifaceted topic.