All Elegy: What Are Poems for in a Destitute Time?
“Only what we thus retain in our heart (par coeur),
only that do we truly know by heart.”
— Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?”
There are so many good books of poetry being published now, and most of them will receive very little attention. It may come as no surprise, many, most?, of these books are, in one way or another, elegies, or certainly elegiac. Really, how could it be otherwise?
The books that I have been reading lately and which I see directly or indirectly as part of this elegiac writing include Patrick Pritchett’s Sunderland, Paul Naylor’s Mingling Among, Susan Schultz’s Meditations, Jorie Graham’s To 2040, Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy, and Joseph Lease’s FIRE SEASON. No doubt there are quite a few others that I have not noticed or read. These elegy-books tend to be at once personal and planetary in scope.
*
Heidegger’s question and title of one of his best essays – “What Are Poets For?” (delivered initially as a lecture for the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Rainer Maria Rilke) – modulates (by means of Hölderlin) into the question “what are poets for in a destitute time?” The question remains, sadly, pertinent, even as the nature and scope of the destitution changes, once again including the rise of fascism, as well as climate catastrophe and large-scale warfare on several fronts, as well as mass starvation and ever-increasing income (and opportunity) inequality.
We think that ours are the worst of times. My own Zen readings though remind me that between 755 C.E. and 764 C.E. fighting, famine, and disease killed two out of three Chinese. In nine years, 53 million became 17 million.
In referring to Heidegger’s question, might we instead ask “what are POEMS for in a destitute time?” When the question is what are POETS for, it is too easy to fall back into a romantic, exaggerated, masculinist version of the poet-hero, poet-priest, rather than attending to what the poems do and offer. I want to redirect attention, by way of Joseph Lease’s remarkable FIRE SEASON, to some functions and values of poems in a destitute or perilous time.
That question and possible answers exist within the shadow of Auden’s remark: “poetry makes nothing happen.” Within the lengthening shadow of the climate crisis, I find myself asking, what can a poem possibly do to confront or alleviate or expose that crisis? How can the poem possibly avoid the hazard of merely “making us aware,” an increasingly helpless and self-indulgent realization.
Joseph Lease’s FIRE SEASON is one crucial answer and multi-faceted instance in a season of outstanding books of poetry that are, in part or completely, a writing into this time when aspects of life on earth, for our own species and far too many others, is becoming less and less tenable.
*
Auden’s remark misses the mark so badly (unless the statement itself is intended principally to provoke and is made somewhat tongue in cheek). Or, in an unlikely reading, “nothing” is considered, from a Daoist perspective, as a generative source. In my response to Auden, I am discounting that Daoist possibility.
Alan Watts spoke about the need for us to turn from an obsession with productivity to presence. Isn’t presence too a state of mind/being that IS something happening? If we think of making something happening as the development of a political movement, a series of demonstrations, a piece of legislation (and the lobbying and fund-raising that goes along with legislative action), a protest against businesses that are environmentally harmful, gluing oneself to a treasured painting in a museum, and the like, we succumb to a too narrow definition of the full range of possibilities for something happening.
For example, I think that writing itself is already making something happen, particularly the writing of poetry not enmeshed within a financially rewarding network of jobs and prizes. The reading of a poem also makes something happen. Each, reading and writing, are states of mind, potentially, that provide an opening for change – of heart, of mind, of behavior. Always in the back of my mind is Keats’ notion of poetry as “soul-making.” In a letter to John Hamilton Reynolds written on May 3, 1818, Keats asks, “Do you not see how necessary a world of pain and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?” Similarly, Joan Sutherland, cofounder of the Pacific Zen School, remarks (in a koan-apt statement) that “Practice is about making us fetchable” (p. 33, Through Forests of Every Color: Awakening with the Koans). Though she is writing more directly about koan practice and meditation, I would add poetry – reading and writing – have the prospect of making us fetchable.
Fetchable to what? That is where FIRE SEASON becomes so instructive. Though FIRE SEASON is not exactly a narrative-driven book, it is nonetheless the story of the schooling of an intelligence, through pain and loss, becoming a soul.
*
To read FIRE SEASON (or most essential poetry of our time), we must eschew the school-classroom hangover of habituated theme-searching. Sure, FIRE SEASON can be spoken of in terms of theme. But where presence, or a potentially consciousness altering state of mind, involves other aesthetic dimensions, specifically sound/musicality and layout of the page. These are momentary instances of perception that I would also, in reply to Auden, call happenings.
Poems, like those in FIRE SEASON (and the entire book can be read – most productively aloud – in a brief span of time) intensify and affirm a kind of emotional intelligence. They re-enforce an acute awareness of relatedness or connectivity (Indra’s web). Our own interiority is, in fact, inseparable from and part of the world we inhabit. And that is part of what makes the present era so profoundly tragic, as the planet itself is in pain, a situation mainly due to our own actions and inactions.
*
Once one has done the reading and research (and Joseph Lease has been thorough in this regard), once one has attained a reasoned and clear-headed sense of what climate crisis means and is, then what? FIRE SEASON goes far beyond the more customary initial response of documentation and bringing to others an awareness of our situation.
*
FIRE SEASON is a profound song of sorrow, shame, guilt, remembrance, and vision.
*
It is best to read this book in its entirety, from beginning to end. It does not take long because there are often only a few words on each page. (Compliments to Charles Alexander’s superb book design. The large font size works beautifully with Lease’s precise visual sense of the page.) What becomes apparent through such a reading is the symphonic organization of the book. Not based on melody (which, for poetry, usually means theme), Lease employs key words and phrases which become enigmatic, compelling notes in the overall movement of the book. As Dodie Bellamy points out in her blurb for the book, “Words reappear like recurring dreams, brilliantly embodying Jack Spicer’s dictum: ‘A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.” FIRE SEASON is a musical composition; the entire book might best be read as one long poem.
The book is truly a page turner, in part, because Lease breaks lines and pages where we cannot stop. Consider, for example, the sequence of pages 46-48:
(you said
(cream light
cream thick
purple
clouds
(the end
of the
world
maybe
(fire clouds
(we
killed the
animals
(fire clouds,
extinction
*
Hints and traces, concentrated in a few words, appear scattered unobtrusively throughout the book. Take, for example, page 70, in its entirety:
the Puritan diaries (“American” self
A strength of this book is that every word and phrase counts. In this case, the Puritan diaries as a process of self-accounting, a spiritual self-examination, is one description of Lease’s book. FIRE SEASON is also an accounting for his own origins, especially in the poems that focus on the death of his father and his mother. Bear in mind too that Lease studied at Harvard with Sacvan Bercovitch, one of the great scholars of American Puritan writing, author of The Puritan Origins of the American Self.
Via Wikipedia, a quick summary of Bercovitch’s controversial perspective (which is a helpful lens through which to read FIRE SEASON):
“He saw the Puritan ‘errand’ as a proto-capitalist venture that offered a singularly compelling rationale for a modern community expanding into a major modern nation. What made it compelling from the start was not just its religious emphasis; it was the rhetoric through which that persistent (because remarkably adaptable, flexible) religious influence shaped Puritans’ secular concept of their New World mission. Whereas other colonists — in New France, New Spain, New Amsterdam — understood themselves to be emissaries of European empire, the New England Puritans repudiated the “Old World.” Instead, they centered their imperial enterprise on the meaning that they read into their ‘New World’: ‘America’ as the new promised land—which is to say, the promised land of the new modern world.”
For Lease’s book, and remember that all we get by way of reference is the brief phrase on page 70, it is the updated version of where our optimistic, city-upon-a-hill capitalist-democracy has landed us, or, more horrifically, what that self-justified, self-glorifying mission has done to this land and the planet itself.
As Lease puts it, he tried and we tried …“(mom,/ you read the books to me/ and I tried”. The American experiment, “our” alleged New World, has not created a promised land and, as it is absorbed within the greed of capitalism/s ravenous obsession with profit, is on the verge of a catastrophic failure which also lays bare the hypocrisy of the hopeful American quasi-religious rhetoric. If the Puritan diaries are part of the story of the making of an American self, Lease’s FIRE SEASON examines and critiques the development of that American self into the egocentric, individualistic, exploitative self that produces the mess we are in.
*
Lease’s world is one begging for tikkun, seeking the healing that might reassemble a broken world (title of an earlier Lease book):
(and the world fell (I walked in the
trees (in the shadows of the trees (the
world flew (the world flew away (like
light
It is an enigmatic world almost comprehensible though exceeding our grasp, for who can grasp a world that is like light?
*
The central moral figure of the book is Lease’s mother, Mariam Dubovik Lease, to whom the book is dedicated. Her death, his memory of her, his address to her fuse the ecocatastrophe with personal loss and with a child/adult’s sense of responsibility:
(mom
(the animals
are dead,
are dying
(mom, did
I try
For how can one try (effectively) in the current state of climate crisis? Reusing bags at the grocery store? Recycling cardboard and glass? Our gestures all feel too little and too late. Too easily self-congratulatory.
*
The book begins with “Riding Death,” addressing the death of Lease’s father. In a key page (20) –
(riding death
(the book will save the book
(oil will kill the world (he’s just
trying to see, pay attention (he
said
the father calls us to attention. But attention to what, and will that attention be enough? Is attention akin to love? And what does it mean to be “riding death”? Are we all, in being alive, riding death, and riding upon a planet in which the balanced nature of our dwelling is being ridden into death? Or perhaps death rides us, not the other way around?
And Lease’s father’s voice sometimes takes us to places of joy and earthly beauty (21):
(he said joy
(he said feel this (blue green
voice (he said violet, blue
wind
pushes river light, birches
as well as the poet’s own acknowledgement (self-address?), “(you tried/ to be/ joy” (44).
Elegy’s principal hazard is sentimentality, and Lease’s father – “(he hates sentimental slop” (23) – offers a check on emotional excess. Lease has us wondering is joy even possible now if one sees and attends to what is happening globally, and is momentary joy plausible without a tinge of guilt and a sense of impending tragedy?
*
It is worth studying the idiosyncratic nature of Lease’s use of the half-parenthesis (and open parenthesis) – at once an opening and a typographical barrier (a typographical speed bump) or pause. A kind of typographical stutter, though perhaps more fully linked to a precise visualization of the page (as visual art, as much or more so than a music). While Lease’s use of the open parenthesis is not original – we can find it, for example, in the poetry of Charles Olson, Susan Howe, Robert Creeley, Charles Bernstein, and others – his employment of it within a condensed lyrical context and the frequency of its importance in Lease’s poetry constituted a sustained exploration of it. For example (30):
(riding death (joy could (blue fire
(torn blue (you (dear one (dear
smart, shining you (dear you (my
father’s what (my father’s rain
becoming rain (riding death
*
Lease attunes us to an unusual metric: that of the changing appearance of the page. At once jarring and a kind of awakening, Lease may shift from words dispersed throughout the page to a more conventional flush left location for the lines. Or, from the visually dispersed few words on the page to, at another extreme of density, a page that is a chock-full prose block (the entire Part Two / “In a Field,” 37):
(I changed the distant language of
the rain (the brown and red leaves in
the autumn gray (I wrote the splin-
tered aspect in the wind (I wrote the
splintered aspect in my mind (I wore
the rain that rose and fell like light (I
wore the snow that piled up by the
gate (I wrote the secret number on
my hand (I write the secret number
in my eye (I thought the thought of
every thought but one (I dreamed the
dream that dropped me in the sun
I would suggest that these changing appearances are at once visually and emotionally and musically at play, intentional, and significant. The more typically dispersed musical field, in the example above, now concentrates that musicality (which usually extends over several pages) into one compressed, intense page.
*
Inevitably and inexorably, the book moves toward the question and title for Part Four: NOW WHAT
Which is the question of and for our age. Literally and figuratively, it is a fallen world, a world breaking apart, a world on fire.
*
As you may see in the sections/pages I have been quoting, it is hard to excerpt Lease’s poetry because it is so precisely a visual and musical experience accumulated over pages and time.
Emotional insight – soul-making, emotional intelligence – occurs for the poet through the writing itself. It is not a permanent state of wisdom, though the writing is and offers a door-way for readers, sometimes, to engage with those insights. But reading, like writing, is inconstant and unpredictable, always fresh (including frequent spells of inattentiveness). One must rise to the occasion of the emotional pitch of the poem. Even the poet must do so upon re-reading, in public readings, and in the many acts of revision along the way.
*
In “Cracked Actor,” the concluding section of FIRE SEASON, the apocalypse and fire are omnipresent (84-85):
(the new warning is fire in
your
face
system collapse
I
thought I
had a
future (I
Fire is our present and our future. All is dissolving, all is burned away including that precious human invention: I. The only remaining nourishment is pain (88):
(and walls of flame (and walls of flame
(you spin the spin, you go insane, you
eat the light, you eat the pain
It is seemingly a post-apocalyptic poetry, inevitably so if we can stand to see what is happening (86):
(I want joy
(I taste poison
(I am the ghost of I, etc. (I was a fool,
I had a plan, and water was my dirty
name, I’m writing inside death, I’m in
the room
In its engaging musicality, FIRE SEASON offers us a courageous writing that resists easy hope and consolation.
*
If it is a fire season, what are succeeding seasons going to be? Will there even be a season after this fire season? We have choices, though far more circumscribed choices due to denial, greed, and bureaucratic/political gridlock.
*
Emotional intelligence might be seen as in keeping with Zen training: one learns to turn toward (rather than away from) pain and difficulty. What do we mean by emotional intelligence, and why does the term sound so odd to us? In Chinese, the same character is used for heart and mind. It is our bias, perhaps baked into our American English, to think of emotional intelligence as somehow not-mind.
*
Though I have read FIRE SEASON many times, it is only recently that I became attuned to something missing (or burned away, or cooked away as in a reduction sauce). The nouns of the book are rarely accompanied by adjectives or adverbs. The world of FIRE SEASON present a musical and emotional landscape in its barest essentials. The intelligence beckoned by the poem – or, more accurately, the emotional experience of the poem – immerses us in its totality without the distracting niceties of conventional realist description (which would have turned FIRE SEASON in a more image-driven visual experience). The incantatory nature of FIRE SEASON stays true to its essential nouns.
*
Elegy / Apocalypse / Prolepsis. FIRE SEASON is, in part, an elegy for future events arising from the destitute present. A tragic time. Lease’s vision – more a painful song – is proleptic to the point of immolation: a world, a vision, selfhood on the verge of becoming cinders.
In thinking of our time as destitute, the etymology of the word may get lost in the cinders. It has to do with being forsaken and abandoned, which leads Heidegger to think toward and about God and the gods. But destitute also suggests the undoing of a place to stand, the undoing of our very place of being. That is the scope of the tragedy delineated in FIRE SEASON.
*
Near the beginning of Heidegger’s famous essay “What Are Poets For?,” God’s abandonment and the depth of our destitution are addressed:
“The default of God means that no god any longer gathers men and things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering disposes the world’s history and man’s sojourn in it. The default of God forebodes something even grimmer, however. Not only have the gods and the god fled, but the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’s history. The time of the world’s night is the destitute time, because it becomes ever more destitute.” (91)
This, though, is not the same lens now through which we and Lease understand the present. We are well past that initial disappearance of the divine radiance and interaction. The default experienced in FIRE SEASON is the default of man in world exited by the god(s).
Heidegger develops an understanding of a poet’s role (he primarily has Rilke in mind, the Rilke of the Duino Elegies) in these dark times: “In the age of the world’s night, the abyss of the world must be experienced and endured. But for this it is necessary that there be those who reach into the abyss” (92). Lease’s FIRE SEASON is exactly such a reaching into the abyss, and an experiencing of that abyss.
For Heidegger, the challenges of a destitute time call into question the nature and value of the poet: “It is a necessary part of the poet’s nature that, before he can be truly a poet in such an age, the time’s destitution must have made the whole being and vocation of the poet a poetic question for him. Hence, ‘poets in a destitute time’ must especially gather in poetry the nature of poetry” (94).
Part of what I value about Lease’s poetry, in FIRE SEASON and all his other poetry, is that he absolutely is committed to the seriousness of the activity and its ethical and spiritual demands. He has had the kinds of exemplars that taught and fostered that seriousness of purpose, poets such as Robert Creeley, Michael Harper, and David Shapiro. Yet, as Heidegger asks (about Rilke), even with that transcendent commitment to poetry’s essential human endeavor, “How deeply does it [the poetry] reach into the abyss? Where does the poet get to, assuming he goes where he can go?” (96). One might say that for Lease, one can, at this point in this time of crisis, reach deeply into the abyss, but solutions, hope, and redemption remain beyond the body of work. FIRE SEASON does not take place within Heidegger’s vocabulary of the venturing of beings and Being; FIRE SEASON resides firmly and precisely dwelling in and upon this world where the crisis is taking place. There is not, for Lease, a metaphysical dimension or perspective that might somehow lessen the terror and pain of this searing human era.
Whereas Heidegger’s essay turns to Rilke’s Elegies, hope may be found in Rilke’s poems in a hint of something from which might “emerge a surpassing of the technical – a surpassing that would be primordially formative” (112). We, in FIRE SEASON, remain mired within the technological and its tragic consequences for us and our planet. Lease’s book, while it reaches into the abyss and the fire season of our apocalyptic time, it is more the story and experience of our pain and guilt, without yet seeing where a turning might take place. That is at once the book’s (and our age’s?) heroism and limitation. If the term heroism applies, it would be linked to endurance and desire – desire for salvific change. Or, in Heidegger’s language, “The menace which assails man’s nature arises from that nature itself” (115).
To be clear: though I have been thinking about FIRE SEASON in a Heideggerian context, Lease’s ideology is not Christian, nationalistic, fascistic, and totalizing. Though not reducible to a belief or an ideology, Lease’s book might be seen beneficially within a Jewish quest for tikkun, for a way toward the repair and healing of our world.
Whereas Heidegger’s heroes are the most venturesome poets — “these poets sing the healing whole in the midst of the unholy” (140) – the dualism of holy/unholy is not central to Lease’s vision. FIRE SEASON shows us that we – willful humankind – have not yet arrived at a time (if we might so arrive?) wherein a credible healing song might emerge. And the broader issues I am addressing are indicative of the range of thinking that FIRE SEASON provokes.
In spite of these obvious differences between Lease’s thinking and Heidegger’s, I invoke the Heideggerian framework because when I became a poet 50+ years ago, I cut my teeth on Heidegger (beginning with the essays collected in Poetry, Language, Thought) and that frame of reference and some of the key questions (with their gravity and scope) remain, for me anyway, useful and pertinent.
*
So that the notion of “emotional intelligence” does not become simply a hazy or merely sweet gesture without much context, let me offer a few points of reference, in hopes that the broader context of my reading of Lease’s FIRE SEASON will be apparent.
In Joan Sutherland’s Through Forests of Every Color: Awakening with Koans, she points out that “the Chinese and Japanese word xīn or shin is translated as both ‘mind’ and ‘heart’” (16). Sutherland, in a Chapter entitled “The One Who Asks,” tells a story from long ago of a Japanese woman lost in mourning after the death of her husband. The woman asks “what is Zen?”, meaning what does Zen have to say about her sorrow. Her teacher replies that “the heart-mind of the one who asks is Zen”, and Sutherland goes on to observe:
“In its Latin roots, grieving is related to being pregnant. Grief is a buddha.Not something to learn lessons from, but the way it is sometimes, the spirit and body of a season in the world, a season in an individual heart-mind … You’re not meant to cure the grief buddha, nor it you. You’re meant to find out what it is to be part of a season of your heart-mind, a season in the world, that has been stained and dyed by grief, made holy by grief.” (43-44)
Indeed, I find that to be the particular pedagogy of Lease’s FIRE SEASON: a deeply articulated residence in this season of human grief, a season for Lease deeply steeped in the mourning for the death of his parents as well as our planetary disaster. Perhaps it is our over reliance on the English language that has us believing that mind and heart are separated, that intellectual cognition and emotional intelligence are not deeply one (through a shared residence in the body).
*
David Hinton makes a similar point about a different sense of the relationship between mind and heart: “Mind, for instance, is simply a picture of the heart in classical Chinese because the thinking mind is not distinguished from the feeling heart” (Hunger Mountain, 58).
*
The issue, or an issue, is how can these perspectives, learned from classical Chinese, Zen, Daoist, and Indigenous writings, bring about the kinds of changes required in this era of ecological tragedy. James Sherry, himself a superb and thoughtful writer on environmental issues, in a review (published in Plume) of Rae Armantrout’s Notice, begins:
“I notice that most writing called ecopoetry turns out to be little other than pastoral description of the kind that has been around for 2000+ years. If we hope to change our current behavior toward our surroundings in an effort to slow climate change, poetry needs multiple new ways to frame humanity’s relationship to nature, multiple because humans have more than one relationship to our habitats.
If poets insist on continuing to write about nature as other than human, then poetry will continue to incorrectly identify and define the channels that connect us. In truth there is no part of humanity that is not natural; we are only somewhat different. Our bodies and minds, our constructions and societies all emanate from the same set of phenomena that creates and sustains cats and oaks.”
Even within a great essay such as Emerson’s “Nature” (1836), where the transparent eyeball passage begins with “In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life – no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair” – such writing fails to frame humanity’s relationship to nature in the ways that Sherry is suggesting. In Emerson’s writing, the balance pans still tilt too heavily toward the human and individualistic selfhood, in spite of Emerson’s reverence for uplifting, symbolic experiences of nature. Perhaps for Emerson nature remains a teacher and an inspiration for human beings, but the reciprocal caring for and protecting of nature has not yet developed fully. (Thoreau does much better in this regard.)
*
Lease’s FIRE SEASON is not another transcendentally pleasing set of nature-based sweetly descriptive pastoral epiphanies. Though painfully beautiful, FIRE SEASON is not intended to be a consoling book.
For Hinton, the plausible (though perhaps not likely) rescue might occur along the lines implied in Sherry’s review:
“At bottom, rescuing this planet from its sixth great mass-extinction event is a spiritual/philosophical problem, for it is the unthought assumptions defining us and our relation to the earth that are driving the destruction: the sound that insists we are radically different and qualitatively more valuable than the rest of existence.” (Wild Mind, Wild Earth: Our Place in the Sixth Extinction, 6)
*
Or, coming at this topic from the perspective of an important revolution in psychological research, i.e., the turning from an entrenchment in cognitive studies to a broader research agenda into human emotions. In psychologist Dacher Keltner’s latest book, which focuses on studies of awe, the ecological and spiritual dimensions of his research are profound, and quite similar to conclusions I have found in David Hinton’s work and Joan Sutherland’s. In addition to the ancient Chinese sources so important to the thinking that Hinton and Sutherland present, Keltner’s focuses as well on Indigenous perspectives:
“TEK [traditional ecological knowledge] is an Indigenous science of our relationship to the natural world, taking varying and local forms in the five thousand or so Indigenous cultures around the world. It has evolved into a cultural belief system, or way of knowing, or science, through tens of thousands of hours of observing flora and fauna, weather systems, the power of plants, migration patterns of animals, and life cycles; compiling the data; testing hypotheses with empirical evidence and cultural input from elders; and the transmission of knowledge through oral, religious, and pictorial traditions.” (Awe, 137)
These mutually re-enforcing perspectives – ancient Chinese, Daoist, Zen, and Indigenous – begin to provide answers to James Sherry’s critique of ecopoetry and his pointing toward what will be necessary for the mutual survival of humankind and our interwoven relationship to the natural world that we are a part of. Perhaps the primordially formative change and turning that Heidegger’s reading of Rilke highlights will come from a reaffirmation of humankind’s interdependent and reverential relationship to the planet that we once again are finding in Chinese, Daoist, and Indigenous heart-mind. At present, though, we are still reciting facts and predictions and singing the registers of our grief.
*
To sing the registers of our grief is a peculiar mode of meaning-making that we find in music and in the less obvious musicality of poetry, when said aloud or listened to internally in the quiet singing that we attune to in our reading of poetry such as FIRE SEASON. What happens physiologically when we engage with music, an engagement that I find to be crucial to our emotional intelligence:
Sound waves are transformed into a pattern of neurochemical activation that moves from the auditory cortex to the anterior insular cortex, which directly influences and receives input from your heart, lungs, vagus nerve, sexual organs, and gut. It is in this moment of musical-meaning making in the brain that we do indeed listen to music with our bodies, and where musical feeling begins. (Keltner, Awe, 151)
Keltner concludes that “the awe that music moves us to does seem beyond speech, a new kind of thought, and, for many, more powerful than religion (and for many who are religious, a pathway to the Divine).”
I have staked my 50+ years of reading and writing poetry on the hope that philosophically and ecologically informed poems, when merged with a heuristic musicality, provide one kind of answer to the question “what are poems for in a destitute time.”
*
To return, though, to the specifics of Lease’s FIRE SEASON, which is not a poem-cycle in search of a proposed solution to our ecological crisis. Lease is very well read in the writing and research of our time on climate crisis, though his book is not a presentation of facts about this perilous moment. FIRE SEASON is an intense song or symphonic composition that gives voice to the pain and shame of this present moment. It is an extended song of grief. And how might that be beneficial? As a most honest and necessary prelude to a profound change in our thinking, in the human heart-mind learning once again to see, think, and feel ourselves as part of the natural world that we have failed to sustain, and thus failed to sustain our own fullness of existence.