So. Another Farm Bill comes out of committee. But this time with the very worst provisions in decades allowing corporations to use and add poisonous additives to the pesticides and herbicides poured and sprayed on our foods and soils around the nation.
Democrats in committee verbally excoriate these provisions and then...vote to pass the bill out of committee.*
Why? No Farm Bill means no Food Stamps. The GOP stranglehold on everything the lobbyists desire.
Just one more way, hidden from view, that our environment—and the most important aspects of it at times—is twisted and taken from us. It is public knowledge in theory. But so many people who take the time to “inform” the public don’t take the time to inform them of this.
Let’s see. Which living American poets and fiction authors focus upon the environment and climate change? The single most important factor in the world today. In someone’s opinion.
There’s Barbara Kingsolver. Check.
There’s Wendell Berry. Check.
Juan Felipe Herrera. Check.
There’s…
Well, that does seem to be very much the end of the list. Unless you include science fiction writers and that’s another realm, no pun intended.
If we turn to the world of plastic arts we find some wider representation, indeed much more empathy for the subject.
But, still, the public there has even less exposure to theater, dance and painting, etc. (and yet less again to abstractions).
Part of the problem has been, and I don’t mind saying it, that art, especially writing, has been dominated for ever so long by self-indulgence, and this is especially true of poetry.
Self-indulgence is a reflection of the society which has caused the ecological crisis.
And now, a bit too late, but the time has come for a swift reversal. Art, as always, must play its role.
Several of my good friends here are always recommending their friends here who write poetry.
I used to be a published poet. But I stopped. What’s the use? My poetry didn’t do any good, and if it didn’t do any good what good is it? I’m just another old white guy whose poetry doesn’t work to solve problems.
The arts have been dominated lately by other than old white men and the call for this reversal has been coming from old white men.
However, recently this call came from an older Black man, Ben Okri, Nigerian poet and novelist, winner of the Man Booker prize a few years back. His key sentiments expressed thus:
“We need a new philosophy for these times, for this near-terminal moment in the history of the human.
“It is out of this I want to propose an existential creativity. How do I define it? It is the creativity wherein nothing should be wasted. As a writer, it means everything I write should be directed to the immediate end of drawing attention to the dire position we are in as a species. It means that the writing must have no frills. It should speak only truth. In it, the truth must be also beauty. It calls for the highest economy. It means that everything I do must have a singular purpose.
“It also means that I must write now as if these are the last things I will write, that any of us will write. If you knew you were at the last days of the human story, what would you write? How would you write? What would your aesthetics be? Would you use more words than necessary? What form would poetry truly take? And what would happen to humour? Would we be able to laugh, with the sense of the last days on us?
“Sometimes I think we must be able to imagine the end of things, so that we can imagine how we will come through that which we imagine. Of the things that trouble me most, the human inability to imagine its end ranks very high. It means that there is something in the human makeup resistant to terminal contemplation. How else can one explain the refusal of ordinary, good-hearted citizens to face the realities of climate change? If we don’t face them, we won’t change them. And if we don’t change them, we will not put things in motion that would prevent them. And so our refusal to face them will make happen the very thing we don’t want to happen.
“We have to find a new art and a new psychology to penetrate the apathy and the denial that are preventing us making the changes that are inevitable if our world is to survive. We need a new art to waken people both to the enormity of what is looming and the fact that we can still do something about it.”
[The highlights mine. his full statement here:]
The idea that we can, possibly, end this, turn this damnable thing around through our art, as a form of collective activism.
Wendell Berry, another old white man, sticks in the mind, however.
I wonder how many so-called poets on this platform read and admire Berry? And yet continue to write the trash they do incessantly?
“How dare you call my work trash you son of a bitch!!!”
How dare YOU read and claim to admire Berry, if you do, if you even know his name, while sitting on your fucking pedestal dreamily writing blather out of your journal every day, and “posting” it—that’s right, “posting” it—about your “inner consciousness” as if that mattered to anyone.
As if.
Here’s a man, Wendell Berry, whose very life is a model for why someone is an actual poet while you are a mere piece of dust floating around the internet like so many others, whining about “Why can’t I get published like everyone else, whaaaaaa!!!!” Then counting syllables for a haiku and calling it poetry.
“Who are you to talk to me this way, you cocksucking bastard?!?!?”
Oh, dear!!! Are you upset yet? Take a look outside your window. See anything that doesn’t look like a computer screen? Do you have a window? Open your door. Walk outside. If necessary, pick up that precious iPad you depend upon to do half your “poetry work” for you on a calculator and a dictionary of rhyming words and bring it along with your Chat GPT. You might need it.
Take a walk you genius, and see what the real world is like today. The world outside your head and your AI.
Back in the 1970s, possibly before you were born, Ms and Mr Trendy, women used to meet in these small rooms, sometimes bigger rooms, to “raise consciousness” about themselves. This was very important because back in the 1970s most women didn’t know anything about themselves. Neither did men, although the patriarchy was that strong back then.
Bet you didn’t know that. Bet you thought the PATRIARCHY was some big fucking deal TODAY.
But fifty years ago, back in the 1970s, was also when the environmental movement was getting going.
That required some consciousness raising, too. People like
and
were doing that consciousness raising about people and the environment in their poetry and in groups.
We were just starting to find out how screwed we were. Very few people were devoting as much energy to that, unfortunately. If that had happened, if we had all gathered around and met in consciousness-raising groups back then and kept it up, GOOD LORD, I wonder where we might be today.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t have done the women’s consciousness-raising. No, not saying that at all. Just saying…you know. Fifty years of energy. Look what it produced. And look what it didn’t.
And now look what little time we have left. No time for crying. There’s no crying in wildfires. Not unless you want to use those tears to save the chipmunks burning to cinders. No crying in droughts.
Not unless you’re wearing a stillsuit and can slurp those suckers up later for tea.
And no time to listen to all the asshole doomsayers around HERE who are just trying to make a buck out of the doomsaying in their lousy poetry. And out of YOUR navel-gazing. Which, if you really were the poets and artists you CLAIMED TO BE you
WOULD NOT BE DOING!!!
Like Wendell Berry you would be (check his resume) an environmental activist.
Think he’s been sitting there in Kentucky (OF ALL PLACES) for 89 years voting for people like Mitch McConnell? No. He’s been there like a walking monument for the people who hate what people like McConnell represents and a living target for the Trumpies.
That’s the difference between you and him. That’s why he’s an award-winning, internationally recognized poet and you are that piece of dust.
Because he’s out there living a life of meaning while you sit on your duff moaning over yourself because some chickenshit online rag won’t publish your navel gazing.
There’s no more time for art that is mere moaning over yourself. It’s bullshit.
Okri asks us to write now as if we were writing our last words. Those are not my last words. But those are written as if they were.
NO MORE BULLSHIT.
No more time for “WAAAAA!!! Why can’t I get my poem published???”
You can’t get your poem published because your work is weak and self-centered. Get off your ass and do some good for the world.
Maybe then someone will notice.
*https://civileats.com/2024/05/29/pesticide-industry-could-win-big-in-latest-farm-bill-proposal/
Among SF authors concerned with the environment, I would nominate the late Ursula K. Le Guin. Particularly her novella "The Word For World Is Forest".