Anthropocene Poetry – AHRC Leadership Fellowship
Human beings have created environmental damage on a global scale. Some geologists think that humans have created a new epoch: the 'Anthropocene.’ How are poets responding to profound environmental change?
Climate change, extinction, plastics in the sea, nuclear waste: our planet is facing unprecedented risks. How can poetry help us to make sense of what is happening to the Earth?
The Anthropocene is an idea that originated in geological sciences, and is now having a wide impact on culture. This project brings together poets, geologists and environmental scientists to create new literary works, which are published in October 2021 in Magma Poetry’s Anthropocene Issue.
Contributors include USA Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, Friends of the Earth International founder Nnimmo Bassey and Writing the Climate project lead Linda France. Here, you can read about Climate Change visiting her therapist, see the Green Man leaving acorns in the bathroom and follow the tracks of a rare desert jaguar. A key objective of the Anthropocene Issue was to help more poets to write about the impacts of the oil industry; poetry from Nigeria and North America was included to encourage more poets from the UK to explore this important theme. The Anthropocene Issue appeared in time for COP-26, and is printed on recycled paper, with vegetable ink.
The scholarly book from this project reveals that Seamus Heaney used poems to support conservation causes, and shows that Ted Hughes started researching climate change as early as the 1960s. It includes the first scholarly work on Pascale Petit’s private archive and explores new work by Kei Miller and Karen McCarthy Woolf. It ends by analysing poems created for Magma’s Anthropocene Issue. Yvonne Reddick’s poetry book Burning Season will be published in 2023. The poems show how a humble plastic pen has its origins in the global oil industry, follow the progress of eight tiny oak trees planted during lockdown, and imagine life in an underwater city submerged by climate change. The poetry was written alongside other outputs for the project. An oil-poem from the project was highly commended in the 2020 Forward Prizes, and can be read below.
Poems from this project have been broadcast by the BBC on the following programmes:
- A broadcast for BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking, Green Thinking series
- A broadcast for COP-26 on BBC North West Tonight
Impacts include:
- New, sustainable production methods for a literary magazine
- New methods for writing about the oil industry and climate change
- Sharing of ideas between international poets
from STORM PETREL
He departed to raise the Jurassic.
The hill-wind on my father’s face, before weeks
aboard the rig. North of the peak
where the road would end, he spent Sunday
trudging to the Nevis cairn.
The pilot made him walk a line.
‘Drysuit? Lifejacket?’
– ‘Check.’
‘Reddick?’
– ‘Ready!’
He watched cities shrinking:
Stonehaven, Peterhead,
Aberdeenshire’s rain-grey granites.
Over the waves, the blade of Shetland.
They named the oil-platforms
for birds: Merlin, Osprey, Brent.
He stepped onto the platform, for
the two-week static voyage.
Storm petrel, Cape Verde coast
So seabound, she stumbled on land –
tough light approaching, though
days were no longer.
Dust hazing the air, dust
in the petrel’s throat and feathers;
sand clouding the sea where she dived.
By the rock-caves, fishermen with their catch
of conches sat on hot stones,
cracking the chambers of shells.
The Sahara had flown to
sea on the Harmattan –
the conch-fishers scarved
their eyes to watch the petrels
patter wings and feet on waves,
stepping north on water.
Dunlin A platform
The rig-lights fiery on choppy breakers.
In his bunk, sardine-canned
with four dorm-mates,
my father lay restive under a thin blanket.
Noise jackhammered everyone’s eardrums –
drilled through cabins,
girders. Dad felt the weather turn.
The men perched
over an ocean above
a deeper ocean of sweet, black oil.
The rig boomed like a petrol tanker,
its hull pitching over the North Atlantic.
‘Storm Petrel’ is forthcoming in Burning Season. It was first published in Ambit and was highly commended in the 2020 Forward Prizes.
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