#EnvironmentalObjectives

[ecopoeticsatchicago]

Environmental Object Text (Week 3)

(By Chiang, Yan Li)

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06:28 A DRIFT OF STARS

Nestled in the hammock of the now-silent Moon —

High-intensity discharge lights (HID) are

the opium of the masses!

The history of all hitherto

is the history of dark struggles!

twinkling in synchronized rebellion.

For the first time since the world became stricken with people, New York City looked away from itself to the celestial city.

06:27

The Southern Hemisphere is balmy this time of year, but a countercurrent of magnetic field energy wrestles for a place to be in the tropics. The Northern Lights are not mawkish today, appearing across a checkerboard of city grids.

What a time to be alive!

06:26

Somewhere, my mother still wakes our family up by drawing back the curtains so they may be roused, unobtrusively.

My father would be the first to wake for Toil, positioned closest to the heating of the love nest by my mother’s molten warmth. My sister ought still be fervent in her sleep, fitfully protesting the dust on the tepid edge of her pillow. She has been uncooperative of late, leaving in her wake a callousness of emotional emission.

The temperature

at home          

               drops by several

degrees Centigrade.

06:25

I have my first fight with my SO. How could you have left me in the dark? Love is a deciduous thing, and not all conifers are evergreen.

My water pipes burst. Reason unfurls; as communication quivers in the dearth of breathing space 

I face an outage of power.

06:24

It took 25 years for wilderness to be subjugated. Every day, we are the ones who drive the chariot across the sky.

06:23

Yeats on The Second Coming—

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”

Gravity ceases to hold; planets and asteroids spin out of orbit;

“The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.”

06:22

There is widespread agreement that thought experiments play a critical role in philosophical discourse. If, and I mean just if, we are faced by blazing explosion then with insipid coldness—

How many couple billion years

before the Pale is dwarfed into an Other?

White supremacy does not like such suspension.

It growls: stupid girl,

Do not preach to me alternative facts.

06:21 THE LAST SURFACE PARTICLES

make a geese-like flight towards the Earth in a ‘v’ across the sky—

Mere decades before, the human race had decided upon a sublimation by Renaissance.

8 minutes earlier    sublimation

Snuffed out the mothball of her already-limp cadaver

leaving a desire for dawn that will not arrive.

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WORKING NOTES:

I wanted to experiment with constructing a falsely positive introduction such as what Rachel Carson depicted briefly in her first chapter of Silent Spring, but without launching into full prose and instead moving through certain ideas with a structure that is as fluid as possible. Paterson was obviously an aspiration but not the goal: I found it incredibly challenging to break the mold of meter or poetic form. How does one bend the rules of writing in poetry without it being an altogether contrived means of writing? I definitely do not hit on as many different thematic ways of stringing words together like Paterson intelligently succeeds at doing, but I tried to move between prose and poetry (prose poetry?), even quotations of other poem at some places and parodies of the manifesto of Communism at others. 

This week, I chose to keep the main subject matter vague, opting to talk about the sun while never really making it out as such. I wanted the ambiguity to exist in the subject matter and while I don’t think it was that obscure a subject matter to guess, I chose to approach the importance of the sun to our immediate environments and ecologies by imagining a world where there is suddenly, without warning, no sun. I found it surprising that along the way this attempt to be as ambiguously particular as possible allowed me to explore some unexpected terrain: for example, I placed a short exposition of what appeared to be a discussion of love in the middle of the poem. This was hopefully balanced with a sense of care and concern of our planet, and also helped me to represent certain scientific consequences of the death of our star (power outages, water shortages, darkness, and lack of photosynthetic organisms for the most part) in a reading that could suggest other meanings. I mean this similarly for 06:26 with the imagery of my family. I did not mean for this to happen as I wrote the poem, but it seems like the mother in the image could possibly be Mother Nature, and that phenomena related to the earth continuing to subsist on its internal molten core’s warmth, while peripheral cities and regions start to experience drastic cold, also could be personified in some sense.

Lastly, I wanted to work on the presentation of the stages of an absence of a sun in a way that is not strictly chronological. I put some timestamps to mark paragraphs since it does take precisely 8 to 9 minutes for the sun’s absence to be noticed on Earth, but I still wanted to maintain a fluidity of form and poetry by having the content within each timestamp minute somewhat achronological. While I don’t imagine that this prose poem is in any sense fully polished, as a result of last week’s discussion, I was able to not just read our readings but read as a writer seeking to learn from certain specific utilised techniques. Hence, via this writing exercise, I found that I had more time to focus on the craft instead of complicating the message, so that there would be a better sense of intentionality in the poetry.