Panel 6: Art and Poetry

Thanks Ken. That’s kind of you to say. And yikes! ‘articulate the value of poetry and its study in a few sentences’: better academics have spent books trying and failing to do that. But am happy to set out where I am coming from in this paper and hopefully it might serve as a springboard for discussion about the importance of poetry and, more broadly, the arts on this panel.

Short answer:
I guess that in the video’s conclusion I am riffing on Auden’s famous statement that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ but rather that it is a ‘way of happening’. For the most part I am dubious about a cause/effect model where reading a poem somehow inspires someone to fly less, recycle more, save the earth (or in Auden’s example, take up arms against the English). That’s a fairly simplistic and instrumentalist argument about what art does. It is much more interesting to think of poetry as facilitating different sorts of engagement with our world in its manifold complexities: as enabling different types of interaction, focus, critical examination (and yes…of course poems can inspire or provoke outrage too.) In fact, instead of ‘way of happening’ we might say ‘ways of experiencing’ or ‘ways of exploring’ or ‘a different form of cognition’. It is not about ‘sending a message’ but about the process of being forced to work through, for example, philosophical concepts, unexamined clichés, everyday experience, political discourses, scientific metaphors, and ephemeral desires in a quite focused and concentrated way. Seeing how they interact and how they inform and deform each other. Or to put it another way: thinking in, or with, or through poetry as well as ‘about poetry’.

Slightly longer answer:

Thinking about climate change and its impacts involves thinking about data, scale, despair, nutrition and food distribution, methane, responsibility, disease, the unborn, cynicism, the stock market, one’s own emissions, etc etc. There are multiple ways of addressing these issues. Poetry remains a powerful, if perennially marginal, means of engagement. That might mean (going back to my paper) poetry like Spahr/Clover’s or Tiplady’s which questions how digital technology (mis)shapes our engagement with environmental issues, or someone like Jorie Graham who tries to find a formal way of rendering that ‘tipping point’ between hope and despair in the face of the future; or – and Ken, this is where I am sure you as a Renaissance scholar have much more to say than me – it might entail thinking about the architecture and evolution of our concepts of ‘nature’ or ecology via older texts (texts which are always being reinvented and revisited in new and exiting ways by poets and critics alike). It might involve poetry about something wholly unconnected to climate change.

I am not signalling out poetry for special status. In much of what I have written above you could replace the word ‘poetry’ with ‘literature’ or ‘the arts’. That being said, there is something about the density of poetry, the way it brings both thought and affect into play in a concentrated way, that makes it such an interesting and significant way of exploring concepts and consciousness. It provides a space in which to test and contest our key concepts because the interaction between reader and poem is undetermined and unpredictable. I suppose lots of us are used to the process of resisting the Sparknotes tyranny of students asking ‘yes but what does it mean?’ I sometimes tell them that ‘how does it mean?’ is a better question. When we have different ways of happening (and different types of poetry work in very diverse ways) different stuff happens.

The depressing and dangerous denial/avoidance/downplaying of climate change requires (demands?) us to engage with the quantitative: with algorithms, parts-per-million calculations, ‘predicted costs’ and beyond that, with the way politicians count votes, campaign managers court retweets and so on. Nevertheless, an important dimension of engaging with the impacts of climate change also involves negotiating the incalculable, the qualitative (including justice, complicity, compassion, the feeling of paralysed uncertainty one gets when one realises the limits of one’s knowledge or agency, guilt, apathy, outrage). This is one area where ‘the arts’ come in (to their own).

I’ve typed more than I intended. And I certainly don’t mean the above to sound prescriptive – it’s really me ruminating on where I am coming from in the paper. It’d be great to hear how the other panellists (or, given the nature of this conference, anyone in the digital audience) engage with this persistent, niggling question about ‘demonstrable effect’ of the arts in the face of an issue as large and all-subsuming as climate change. For example: Brogan, Lucas, and Kim, would you say that, for you, walking the creeks functions as a means to disrupt/interrupt the everyday experience of space and therefore is approaching similar issues from a different angle? Laura, do you think there can be some useful comparisons between the representation visual time you were talking about in graphic novels and what happens in lyric poetry?