AR6 IPCC Climate Report: The Physical Science Basics Poetry
Round-Up Of Writing Reflecting On Our Code Red for Humanity
Here’s some climate poetry I’ve been reading lately. First you get poetry specifically inspired by the recent IPCC “Code Red for Humanity” 6th Assessment Climate Change Report: The Physical Science Basis— and the second half of this post is poetry (to my knowledge) not specifically created about the Climate Report, but have helped me feel, reflect, and cope with it all.
Poetry Inspired by AR6 IPCC Climate Report: The Physical Science Basis
Andy Reisinger, IPCC Summary Haikus
This is cool. Andy Reisinger is the Vice-Chair of the IPCC and Deputy Director (International) of the New Zealand Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre. He has been writing haikus to translate the details of the IPCC reports he’s contributed on into poetry. You can click here for the full doc with all of the haikus for this latest Climate Report (Copyright @ReisingerAndy, shared under a Global Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license). Here are some of my favorites:
Dr. Daisy Lekharu, “WHAT HAPPENED TO MY WORLD”
Adam Powers, “CODE RED FOR HUMANITY”
Some recent poems of mine you may have seen
CODE RED FOR HUMANITY (like a rose) Inevitable. Irreversible. Irrevocable—
CODE RED FOR HUMANITY (as a rose) Unequivocal, Direct Changes, Cumulative Emissions —
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Poetry Not Actually About the Latest IPCC — But I Find Help
Saeed Jones, “Against Progeny”
WHEW, this one hits. It’s from Saeed Jones’ forthcoming poetry collection “ALIVE AT THE END OF THE WORLD” which I couldn’t be more hyped for. His previous— both his poetry— “Prelude to a Bruise” —and his memoir “How We Fight For Our Lives” are FANTASTIC. Give this a read:
Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”
In my quest to catch-up days behind on #TheSealyChallenge (the challenge: read a chapbook a day every day in August), I finally finished Robert Frost’s classic collection “New Hampshire.” This is from that, one of my all-time faves:
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.— Robert Frost
Alex Dimitrov, “Love”
An endless poem called Love. If you haven’t heard of this one yet, well you’re in for a treat. Part of Alex Dimitrov’s collection “Love and Other Poems” I think this tweet explains it best, as the poem is technically ongoing, continuing every single day on Alex’s Twitter feed
Here’s where you can read the portion published in the American Poetry Review. For even more background, here’s a generous explainer Alex wrote on how the project started at Craft Capsule: A Poem Called Love by Alex Dimitrov. I’ll just pull out a part of the poem here:
Love
I love you early in the morning and it’s difficult to love you.
I love the January sky and knowing it will change although unlike us.
I love watching people read.
I love photo booths.
I love midnight.
I love writing letters and this is my letter. To the world that never wrote to me.
I love snow and briefly.
I love the first minutes in a warm room after stepping out of the cold.
I love my twenties and want them back every day.
I love time.
I love people.
I love people and my time away from them the most.
I love the part of my desk that’s darkened by my elbows.
I love feeling nothing but relief during the chorus of a song.
I love space.
I love every planet.
I love the big unknowns but need to know who called or wrote, who’s coming—if they want the same things I do, if they want much less.
I love not loving Valentine’s Day.
I love how February is the shortest month.
I love that Barack Obama was president.
I love the quick, charged time between two people smoking a cigarette outside a bar.
I love everyone on Friday night.
I love New York City.
I love New York City a lot.
I love that day in childhood when I thought I was someone else.
I love wondering how animals perceive our daily failures.
I love the lines in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof when Brick’s father says “Life is important. There’s nothing else to hold onto.”
I love Brick.
I love that we can fail at love and continue to live.
I love writing this and not knowing what I’ll love next.
I love looking at paintings and being reminded I am alive.
I love Turner’s paintings and the sublime.
I love the coming of spring even in the most withholding March.
I love skipping anything casual—“hi, how are you, it’s been forever”—and getting straight to the center of pain. Or happiness.
I love opening a window in a room.
I love the feeling of possibility by the end of the first cup of coffee.
If you’re coming across climate poetry, any writing on the latest climate report, or pieces that help you process, feel free to share. That’s it for now.
Stay inspired,
— Adam Powers