It’s been a summer of flooding close to home and of fires and droughts elsewhere—but also a summer of forgetting all that, of mowing the wet grass, picking tomatoes, and walking back and forth over the same streets, even when portions of them have been temporarily closed due to flood damage. Two essays I’ve read lately about literature, the lyric, and imaginative writing have been following me around during this time, in part because I think they have something to do with the New England Review, which is a project of literature and imagination and is also a project of now, of our present age and its difficulties, of which the floods and fires are just the beginning.

One is “A Poem Is a Walk” by A. R. Ammons, first published in the literary magazine Epoch in 1968, a year of severe disruption and violence, and the other Min Hyoung Song’s introduction to his book Climate Lyricism, published in 2022 by Duke University Press. They may seem to stand in opposition to each other, especially in ascribing any usefulness to literature, but both, to me, articulate something about how to think and act in small, individual-scale ways in the face of the terrifyingly large forces that are beyond our power of comprehension. Song focuses on the “colossus” of climate change, which has been on my mind both too much and too little, and Ammons refers to the “large, vague, unlimited, unknown,” which could describe climate change but could also describe god or death or what Annie Dillard calls the Absolute. Both of these essays have something to say about how a poem—or imagination, or the lyric—can encompass both the tangible and intangible at once. And to me they suggest that attentiveness to the small and immediate can offer crucial, even life-saving, access to that which eludes rational thinking and the reach of any single individual’s actions or powers of description. 

“For though we often need to be restored to the small, concrete, limited, and certain, we as often need to be reminded of the large, vague, unlimited, unknown,” Ammons says. And Song writes that literary works, especially those written by writers who are “minor” in some way, “demand attunement to the everyday in original, and often-estranging, ways that made me . . . more aware of the extraordinary that is all around me.” 

Often the writing we publish in the New England Review is difficult, requires energy and attention, and is not immediately graspable. But there’s a chance that this writing, which is sometimes “estranging” and slips past rational thinking, might activate a new kind of attentiveness to the ordinary. And in turn this activation might make it more possible for readers to locate themselves within something larger rather than simply feeling powerless in the face of it, or even numb to it entirely. Among other things, it might allow a reader to imagine a bridge between what humans can know and explain and act upon and that which is beyond us. 

In the pages that follow we become very intimate with a bee in a prison, with flies in a priory garden, with a snake that slides beneath the siding of a house. We encounter a field that was a meadow and a two-thousand-year-old marble sculpture that still creates the illusion of rippling cloth. Stories about shame, and of the failure of familial love and past selves, invite the reader into a “you and I” relationship with a stranger. And then there’s the transformation of an umbrella into an object of wonder and amusement. There is weeping, and rage, and a poem that is a walk. And sometimes there’s the surprise of laughter, a disruption of another kind. Research, structure, and craft come together here with the “unstructured sources of our beings.” 

Despite all my recent reading about estrangement, attention, and the colossus of climate change, what I was more likely thinking about while walking home one evening in late July was what to make for dinner. I paid little attention to the light rain as it followed its usual path from sky to gutter to gully, and on to the river that flows past my house. But just two hours of torrential rain later, that same sidewalk was dangerously impassable. The rainwater had leapt over the street, rushing like a river on a completely new course, carrying off everything in its path. Neighbors I’d never spoken to before came outside, and we stood together watching the water sweep past the structures built to divert it and wash the driveways on either side of us into the river. We stood powerless, terrified, and in awe. 

Within days most of the damage was repaired, the sidewalk replaced, the water back to business as usual—all that magnificent power gone back into hiding. But now that I know how flimsy and temporary the sidewalk is, and how powerful the water that trickles beneath it can be, I will never look at it the same way again. Or will I? Will one real-world instance be enough to sustain my attention to something I’d rather not see?

Song evokes the concept of “climate lyricism” in part to ask, “What kinds of shared futures can you and I imagine and bring into the realm of the possible, despite a highly organized investment in business as usual?” And Ammons says, “Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life.” And nonhuman life, I might add. All of it, of which humans are only one small perceiving part.

—CK

with thanks to Jennifer Chang and Jennifer Grotz for the suggested reading

Subscribe to Read More