Writing Problems: Not Centering the Human

Anonymous, Clare, Oswald, Césaire, Wilson

Human-centeredness is common in poems because they’re made by humans. But what if we could contemplate the climate emergency through poems where humans are not centered? Using language to approach non-human sentience would mean radically altering perspective and relationships.

Animals and plants have different awarenesses than we do, and interpret different wavelengths of light and sound through instinct that is different from choice-making. If the starting position is that poetry is about possibility, (what Adrienne Rich called “What If?”) then the possibilities to imagine poetry of non-human centeredness are limitless.

Poems that don’t center humans are important steps to thinking through climate emergency. Climate emergency in some ways exists because of a failure of imagination, or at least compassionate imagination.

These poems are about orientation—toward the self, or toward some other kind of awareness and sensitivity? Even if the future of the climate and ecology won’t turn out the way we expect it, such poems give us some hope that we at least made an attempt to understand it.