About the Project
As you can guess from the title of this site, I've decided to focus on poetry in the age of climate change for my final project, which has taken the form of a curation of poems, accompanied by an essay.
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I knew climate change would play some sort of role in my final project since the beginning of the semester. Why? It is the thing I hate the most. It scares me. It makes me more anxious, more upset than nearly anything else. Because of this, it is always on my mind. And I figure channeling all of this bottled-up anxiety into something constructive, something that might actually be of use to someone, is better than doing nothing, better than letting it sit inside of me.
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I also knew from the start that art, specifically art in the form of poetry and prose, needed to be a part of my project. Why? It is the thing I love the most. Watching movies, listening to music, and especially reading books and poems have been a remedy for my eco-anxiety, a challenge to my despair. Art hasn't exactly taken away my fear, but it has reminded me that I am not alone in what I feel, that there are so many things worth protecting.
So, my final project. The question that has guided me from the start is: how to writers tackle the climate crisis in their work? My first answer to this question came in the form of an informational essay about climate fiction, or cli-fi, which then led to a book review comparing critical responses to the novels The Overstory and Station Eleven. My final experiment, a curation of poems about climate change, is the one I've decided to turn into a final project.
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The poems I've compiled are sometimes cynical, often angry, but always, in my opinion, beautiful. I hope you think so too.
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EXPERIMENT 1: Informational Article
The gist: An article called "A Brief History of Cli-fi", which very briefly goes over the timeline of climate fiction, from its advent in the mid-20th century to its general acceptance in mainstream literary circles in the 21st century.
What I liked about it: I think this was a great place to start from, since it forced me to do some valuable research into a literary genre I had virtually no familiarity with previously. And though the information I cover is overly general, and occasionally even inaccurate, I think it does a fairly decent job of covering the history in a very small limited of words.
What I didn't like about it: The research I did simply wasn't thorough enough, which resulted in some factual inaccuracies. And, though I do believe this experiment was ultimately valuable for me, its subject matter simply wasn't the thing I really wanted to write about.
EXPERIMENT 2: Book Review
The gist: An New York Book Review-style analysis of how the genre debate over realism versus science fiction manifests itself in critical reactions to the novels The Overstory and Station Eleven
What I liked about it: The topic was super interesting! It was fascinating to write about a literary phenomenon that's taking place before our eyes.
What I didn't like about it: At the time I hadn't actually read either of these novels, so I didn't have a deep enough understanding of the subject matter to write something actually meaningful. For this reason, I chose to transfer my focus from novels to poems, which are significantly shorter and thus better suited to the time demands of this project.
EXPERIMENT 3: Poetry Curation
The gist: A curation of poetry centered around climate change and ecological disaster, categorized by the poets' identities (race, nationality, gender, etc.) and overall tone of the poems (hopeless or hopeful).
What I liked about it: This was the first experiment I conducted that I actually believed could be truly interesting to someone other than myself. This belief became even stronger when I realized that, as far as I know, no other resource like this exists on the internet.
What I didn't like about it: After some reflection, I decided that there were better, more useful ways to categorize the poems. I also believe that the experiment could have used more of my own writing. I believe I've more or less resolved both of these concerns in my final product.