That was really humbling.
And it feels like more than I deserve.
I hope I live up to it.
I wanted to begin just by thanking Tyler and Hannah
and all the staff here.
It is really, truly humbling to be a part of this series,
particularly at this moment in time, for all sorts of reasons.
But before the blackout of the EPA and USDA sites
and the gag rule on their public presence,
this still is a very challenging invitation for me
because it ups the ante for my work.
Those of you who don't know The Poetry Center, they basically
invite you a year and a half in advance.
So I had a lot of time to think about poetry and climate
change, which I was already doing.
But it made me--
well, it gave me room in which to move and to move forward
into as an invitation to think with these thoughts,
and to think with the work of the other poets
like Alice, like Brenda, like Camille, Bob,
all of these writers, Ross, who I admire so much
and who have been doing so much work around these issues.
So I spent the past year and a half thinking and reading
through climate science, Anthropocene theory, et cetera.
And it helped me to write in a new direction.
So I'm going to read from entirely new work
this evening, including a poem I wrote to read here.
But Hannah encouraged me to speak a little bit
to contextualize the work that I am going to read,
and also to contextualize it in relationship, maybe,
to ecopoetics and the work that I've already done
in ecopoetics, which you could see exemplified in Companion
Grasses .
And so I'm just going to give a brief spiel
that will lead into the poems and which
builds so beautifully on what you said, Eric.
I think you set me up well.
So I wanted to begin with the notion of poetry
as a form of field work.
I'm not a trained natural scientist by any means.
But one of the ways in which I entered
writing toward ecopoetics was by beginning to draft poems
on foot in specific sites.
And to me, walking while writing did a few things.
It posited a physical relation between the site
and the human subject, one that often gets
maybe buried in a poem about a place, but that also--
and this is exactly what you just
said-- that writing is derived from a lived relation,
and that writing itself, the rhythm
and the forms of the work, emerge from encounters,
from literal lived encounters between species,
between human modalities and non-human modalities.
And for me, the reason that that's important
is that it reminds me and reminds readers
that all humans are mammals, and are embodied subjects
that navigate their surroundings like animals
do, though also in ways that animals don't, obviously.
And that for me, one of the challenges of writing
in relation to a site is the inclusion of other senses
and a relational embodiment, what some feminist writers call
intercorporeality, a kind of phenomenological way of being
in relation to other bodies, and that the environmental
or ecopoetic work of that is to extend most feminist
thinkers'--
traditional feminist thinkers-- are
thinking about that as two human subjects.
But I am also interested in what that
means to extend intercorporeality
into non-human relations.
And so one thing that that does for me,
that emphasis, paying attention to one's body
in relation to the environment, is
that it also dethrones the eye as the center of knowledge.
As you guys know from transcendentalism
that the eye is a hugely important
like a vehicle for our knowing of the natural world.
And it's sort of the seat of empiricism, in a way.
It's sort of the way that the rational mind knows the world.
But I think it's really hard to think of sound or touch
as imperial in exactly the same way as the eye.
Does that make sense?
And I feel like there are more mammalian senses, you know?
Like they alert other parts of the brain and
activate other parts of their brain in ways.
So I'm interested in including an embodied subject that
isn't just all eye and mind, but also a touching, listening,
sensate creature that also, again, the rhythms of the poem
and the structures of the poem are
derived from the sonic landscape around the listener.
But it's hard to be an embodied subject in a place that's
paying that close of attention without also acquiring
some bioregional knowledge of the space
that the body is moving through.
And so for me, one of the commitments
I made to the sites, the many sites that I've walked through,
is learning their natural history,
learning their geographical history,
learning some of the layers of empirical knowledge
that got laid down on top of places,
but also to always square that more empirical sense of a place
with the lived intimacy, and to try and always
filter or triangulate fact through experience.
To me, one of the reasons that's important
is because no system is single.
And that's one of the things that
biospheric and environmental thinking teach us,
is that there is no such thing as a single system
operating on its own.
And that's really hard for us to remember
with our iOS, our operating systems with which we're
so deeply intricated.
And so I feel like the lived, again,
intimacy that isn't ocular only really begins to help
embody oneself next to a bioregion or a watershed that,
again, flows through one as water.
You know, it's where I often think,
when I'm walking next to the river,
I'm like, you're in me because in Philly we
drink the river, which my students are always like,
gross, what you do.
Disgusting.
There are dead bodies in there.
And they haven't even taken river ecology.
They have no clue.
So the idea that all biospheric processes are intertwined
is one of the things that one learns,
or I should say I remind myself, by triangulating
my own experience and lived intimacy
with places with empirical systems of knowledge.
And now I'm going to get to the climate change part, which
is the thing that you--
again, I'm saying you and one.
I mean me.
You guys have a different--
I don't want to be prescriptive here.
It's hard to remember, on a local level,
when you're thinking of bioregion
and you're thinking of very specific bioregional
and species details, that all biospheric processes
are intertwined.
Hard to remember that.
But it's really important to remember
that in the Anthropocene.
That, in particular, means that all human systems and industry
are intertwined with biospheric processes,
that they are actually concurrent.
And again, it can be hard to remember that.
I think of-- because I live in Philly,
and you'll hear this in some of the poems--
water, for me, is a really good example
of the way in which human industries
and natural processes are completely
indistinguishable from one another,
partially because we do literally drink the water that
runs through our watershed, but that we also
use that water for multiple industries
that are also exposed.
We have the largest oil refinery in the country--
or no, on the east coast in Philly.
And we have been refining oil in Philly since the 19th century.
Oil was first discovered in Western Pennsylvania
and shipped by rail to Philadelphia
because it has access to the Delaware, which
has access to the Atlantic, which has access
to the Atlantic trade routes.
So it was an incredibly important city.
And oil was already globalized through Philly
from the very start of its industry.
But the Schuylkill River, which flows into the Delaware,
I'm not even sure how many times it's been on fire,
actually, because the refinery has blown up
or had so many spills over its several centuries of existence.
And that's only one use the Schuylkill been made of.
It's also been a sewage system.
It's also been filled with coal silt because of the mining
industry.
Pennsylvania is great for fossil fuels.
We have them all.
We have oil, we have coal, we have natural gas.
And all of that flows into our rivers.
And so the very watershed that we're in actually
conducts all of the effluents from those industries
into our water system.
And so the amount of pollution that each of us carries
is pretty high.
I actually had, as an experiment,
had my blood analyzed.
And they couldn't test for everything,
but in terms of heavy metals, certain kinds
of industrial toxins, they're higher
than the national average, which actually, just so you know,
there are already in you.
It's just I have a little more than you.
And so it makes me think about how
the flow of capital through bodies
always leaves a wake of toxins, and that for me, the flow
of water through my body is a really good example of that
through all bodies.
To me, the lesson there is multiple in terms
of its relationship to the Anthropocene
and to climate change.
Because I count myself as an ecofeminist.
I think we look at Trump and we look
at the simultaneous attempt to control
women's reproductive rights, and doing that
at the same time of trying to control discourse
around the environment and climate change.
So to deny climate change in order
to seize the resources of the Earth
in an unlimited and unpunishable and unregulated way,
in the same way that deregulating-- or actually,
yeah, isn't it deregulating?
Access to reproductive health care, all of that,
imposing limits on the choices women can make,
and therefore seizing women's reproductive capacities
for the state, essentially, is creepy, to say the least.
But also, for someone who's says oh, I can grab 'em by the--
that's the same attitude that he has toward the natural world.
And ecofeminists would point out that that's always been true,
that the analogy between the reproductivity of the Earth
and women's reproductivity is a fundamental analogy
in patriarchal cultures.
And for me, as I've said it before,
that climate change is misogynist inherently.
It wouldn't be here if we didn't have a misogynist attitude
toward the natural world.
And so to me, also to insist again and again
on our embodied status in relationship
to the natural world is to foreground, again,
our vulnerability as bodies, our vulnerability as mammals,
but also to put our bodies back into relation
to the natural world, as opposed to, again,
having the empirical mind and eye be
the supreme leaders in terms of relation to thinking
through environmental problems.
So did that make sense?
OK.
All right.
So there will be questions afterward
for whatever didn't make sense.
And that's basically kind of like my associative cloud
of things, my wordle.
Is that what they're called in the digital thing?
So this is sort of that cloud of ideas
from which these poems draw, and which I've learned,
as I'm working on this book, that
shuffle through them in various ways
and get re-aggregated in multiple ways
as I try and think through the relationships in these issues.