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Can we describe the disastrous effects of climate change with the forces of love, beauty and awe?   

We are on calling on artists, activists, and all humans and nonhumans who feel the multiple tragedies of the changing climate to join us in articulating the poetics of disaster.  

 

Sometimes the scientific and didactic understandings of our conditions overwhelm the heart space where feelings, actions and agency might be born; we succumb to powerlessness or fatalism, impossibility overclouding possibility, singularity divesting from collectivity.   

 

What would be the language for the experience of lacking water to wash, cook, drink after a deluge of rain? The sound of a bobcat wandering city streets after its den was washed away? How to say how our interiors feel as forests burn and skies turn orange?  Do we hear a seashell whisper the pain and beauty of the ocean?

 

Maybe through poetics we can speak to our conditions through a different type of voice, perhaps slightly shifting how we live into the transcendent and terrible challenges of this moment. We are imagining actions that might spring from this well to build, resist and fuse into the radical regenerative forms we need. 

 

Please explore our daily poetic.  Take what we have, expand on it and share it everywhere: social media, write it on a sign and place in your window, write on a wall, post in a public place, text it to your loved ones, pass it along...speak it to others and write your own. Please share your poetics with us at poeticsofdisaster@gmail.com

 

Overtime we will gather in meditation, artful installations and actions.   We are building a physical site for seeing, listening, feeling and digesting the poetics of disaster and cultivating the rhizomatic suggestion of other actions. Stay tuned!