looping climate
is a series of hybrid poems that takes bits of text from The Uninhabitable
Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells and loops and manipulates
them along with some superimposed b&w illustrations. Quite simply, you will
not be the same after you read this book about the consequences of global
warming. Specific to environmental apocalypse, the literary critic Del Ivan
Janik goes to D. H. Lawrence and says that he “saw man as part of an organic
universe, living best by acknowledging its wonder and rejecting the temptation
to force his will upon it. In this sense he stands at the beginning of the
modern post-humanist tradition and of the literature of environmental
consciousness” (107). These ideas are manifested abundantly today, and any text
that focuses on ecocritical theory gives several contemporary examples,
including: Anne Carson’s Silent Spring, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population
Bomb, and Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance. The notion of
environmental crisis implies an end game, and we can now hypothesize what this
complete and final destruction will look like. In tracing this view of the end
of the world in his book Ecocriticism, Greg Garrard goes to what he
considers the beginning: “The most influential forerunner to the modern
environmental apocalypse is the “Essay on the Principle of Population”
[published in 1798] by Thomas Malthus, which set out to contradict the utopian
predictions of endless material and moral progress made by political
philosopher William Godwin” (93). In this very long essay, two of the arguments
that Malthus puts forth is that a continual increase in population cannot be
sustained by limited natural resources and that economic growth does not
necessarily mean human growth. So here we are in year 2021. The first section
of Wallace-Wells’s book, called “Cascades,” brings up the idea of feedback
loops. If x happens, then y happens. If y happens, then z
happens. If z happens, that makes x worse, which in turn makes
y worse, which in turn makes z worse. Etc., etc. These looping poems
reflect this idea of through repetition rather than cause and effect. The
superimposed b&w illustrations represent the changing environment,
sometimes overtly, usually abstractly, (meaning, they probably represent
nothing at all). Text is lost, incomplete, must be guessed at, must be
surmised.
Matthew Gwathmey
lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, on Wolastoqey Territory, with his partner
Lily and their five children. He studied creative writing at the University of
Virginia and just completed his PhD at UNB. His first poetry collection, Our
Latest in Folktales, was published by Brick Books in the spring of 2019.
