Poets Play the Carbon Game

Unstable dream, according to the place,

Be steadfast once or else at least be true.

—Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)

Poets were once known for being critics of the reigning cultural paradigms of their day. One thinks of major poetic figures throughout the ages — Archilocus, Horace, Juvenal, Dante, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Shelley, Byron, Arnold, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, and Canada’s own Irving Layton, among a prestigious roster. Fiercely independent minds and judges of the prevailing temper, many, at least for a time, were considered outriders, eccentrics, and mavericks and occasionally ostracized. Recording their insights and critiques in memorable verse, they did not hesitate to skewer the clichés and political assumptions that their fellow citizens embraced. 

The same cannot be said for the poets of the current literary milieu. Our acclaimed versifiers now tend to embrace the norms and trends of the social landscape. They no longer challenge the fashions and superstitions of the day but defer to them. Our poetic culture has for the most part descended into the politically correct dementia of our historical moment. Like politicians, journalists, and academics who have rejected reason and common sense, they support the feminist agenda, affect the notion of gender fluidity and pronominal promiscuity, believe in global warming or “climate change,” and of course have gone breakneck Green, lobbying for renewable energy and the abolition of the oil and gas industry. 

Having enlisted in the ideology of Green and boarded the climate train to nowhere, these poets place polemical advocacy and formulaic address above fidelity to craft and informed conscience. Indeed, ecopoetry is now a thriving genre lazily piggybacking on current fashion. Its most influential source stems from the theories of Norwegian philosopher and founder of the Deep Ecology movement Arne Naess, whose words, “the equal right to live and blossom” alluding to the interconnectedness of all organisms, could serve as the rallying cry for the school of contemporary redemptionist poets. The sentiment has gone viral, ramifying across the Western poetic canon.   

One thinks of the much-lionized (if somewhat overrated) Australian poet Les Murray, who in his "New and Selected Poems" praises nature and even the body as “know[ing] the meaning of existence,” but derogates “the ignorant freedom/of my talking mind” — an antihumanistic utterance candied over by the pretension of pastoral virtue. Notable American poet Hayden Carruth confided, “I consider myself and I consider the whole human race fundamentally alien. By evolving into a state of self-consciousness, we have separated ourselves from the other animals and the plants and from the very earth itself, from the whole universe.” The fact that only the “alien” has the capacity to write poetry or to engage in such preposterous self-loathing as a thinking human does not give him pause.

Then there is Robert Hass, former U.S. Poet Laureate and self-proclaimed environmental activist, whose "Time and Materials" is chockful of textbook ecopoetry, prompting The New Criterion poetry critic William Logan to respond, “By the time he’s done preaching about the destruction of the ozone layer” [and] droning on about chlorofluorocarbons, you’re counting the tiles on the floor.” Fellow American Sam Hamill in his poem “Mythologos” from "Habitation" apologizes fulsomely to earth-goddess Gaia, asking her to “be benevolent/if you can; forgive us,” and then proceeds to “beg for mercy” in the name of those who are “plunderers in the temple” and “the dinosaurs of our age.” But there is one appropriate line in the poem — “Reason perishes with the habitat of its days” — of which the poem itself and the mindset it expresses are prime illustrations. 

My own country is no exception. Canada has become an Arcadian haven of versifying redeemers. Some of our best-known contemporary poets, like Dionne Brand, Michael Ondaatje, and George Elliott Clarke, among whose voluminous work scarcely a lapidary line or original thought can be found, are signatories to an ecological movement known as "The Leap Manifesto: A Call for a Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another" — shades of Mao’s "Great Leap Forward." According to its mission statement, “the Manifesto aims to gather tens of thousands of signatures and build pressure on the next federal government to transition Canada off fossil fuels while also making it a more livable, fair and just society.”    

Among the farrago of transformative recommendations made without a thought to their real-world consequences, the Manifesto focuses on investing “in the low-carbon social programs and infrastructure we need” and “leaping into a new carbon-free economy.” The signatories believe that “science is demanding that we get serious about the climate,” without understanding what serious, non-partisan science is actually telling us: Look before you leap. The science is not “settled,” and the reliable data and indicators collected by thousands of reputable scientists and authors strongly point to the fact that climate alarmists and those invested in the global boondoggle have set us on a wrong and deviant track. 

George Elliott Clarke, for example, who campaigned for Canada’s socialist party (the NDP), a former Parliamentary Poet Laureate and currently among Canada’s most celebrated poets, is a proponent of everything Green. His pastoral meditations in praise of an unsullied environment and of environment-conscience poets bespeak his passion for bucolic purity. Clarke’s over-the-top rhetorical fulmination in his closing speech at the inaugural reading of the Manifesto, calling for social justice and climate action, was nothing if not embarrassing, making up in decibels what it lacked in sobriety. It furnishes an instance of stentorian rodomontade founded on the analytical vacuity typical of the movement. 

Furious self-assertion is no substitute for understanding. The eventual result, writes Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, will be “a landscape degraded by rusting wind farms and decaying solar panels.” But our poetic elites pay no heed to the vast store of countervailing evidence regarding so-called “climate change.” 31,000 leading scientists including Nobel Laureates have cast doubt on what they call “an implausible conjecture backed by false evidence” to form a damaging consensus and “a record of unfathomable silliness.”

Poets are not paying attention. Canadian poets in particular have plunged headlong into the brave new world of unfathomable silliness. We now observe in the Canadian poetry scene a kind of rolling blackout of inspiration, insight, and luminous language, the poster boy for an increasingly weather-beaten community of pedestrian rhapsodists. The prospect does not augur well. The marriage with the virgin bride of ecological purity has led to a visibly stunted progeny.