An Ecology of Creativity (III)

Editor's Note:
This is the final installment in a three-part essay. Read Part II here.

Here we have something for you folks, we hope
You enjoy it as we enter our social section, thank you.
                                                                     – Marvin Gaye

Marvin Gaye’s brilliantly mournful environmental elegy, “The Ecology,” pleaded for mercy in our world, called out the detrimental impact of toxic pollutants like fossil fuels and radiation, as well as overpopulation. Included on his album “What’s Going On,” Gaye’s revolutionary call for love, understanding, and peace remains massively relevant. The song was released while Gaye was at the top of his game, producing the sociopolitical concept album himself, yet none of the dangers he called out was any closer to being solved 13 years later, by the time he succumbed to depression-led self-sabotage and was killed by the abusive father he’d armed himself. Half a century later, despite the fact millions have held space for his words, have increasingly expanded on and insisted upon his calls for change, despite millions of records sold, and Gaye’s being voted the best album of all time (NME, 1985), these issues are no closer to being solved.

What’s Going On

By May of 2022, the U.S. had surpassed one million COVD-19 deaths. This year alone, we’ve already experienced 200 mass shootings. As this is being written, the worst air quality in recorded history is affecting New York, the result of Canadian wildfires, with 9.4 millions acres burning due to Global Warming. Incredible loss of drinkable water. We are on the brink of, or have already surpassed, so many measures of climate catastrophe, with contributing factors including the same risk factors Gaye spoke to all those years ago. We’ve known about the impending damage for a very long time now. We’ve had ample time to change, to correct, to preserve and protect, to intervene and radically reclaim sustainable living, thus saving the planet that gives us life. The State and a vast majority of people who populate the State have made some very bad choices. 

The Sixth Extinction is present. We stand to lose everything unless we make the necessary changes that will keep viability plausible. We’ve been here before, in many ways. London Fog, the mid-continent Tilling Dust of the late 1800s, early 1900s Glacial Melt, 1917 Halifax Explosion Tidal Wave, Carbon Black disasters, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, fracking in the mid-late 1940s, the Centralia Mine Fire. This isn’t the first assassination of the planet and its various peoples in many forms. It isn’t the first act of hatred, or self-hatred. It isn’t the first one-upmanship by mankind on planet. It’s only the first we have been warned about in mass media and by science, art, song, and word. It is the direst that we are conscious of and know can be prevented. Yet we seem to be curiously entertaining ourselves, eking out a diasporic dreamlife in a thoroughly colonized and largely destroyed ecology while expecting our time to contain a future, regardless. 

For poets, writers focusing on bettering our own creative ecologies, we must walk our talk, divest from dangers of climate change/global warming whenever possible, as concern for the planet and all its people must outweigh publication in fossil fueled entities, no matter how cool the list and its nomenclature seem (Soft Skull, Catapult, Counterpoint—all Koch family/oil monied-backed), a portion of the title list is petroleum-ignited and carries the deep burn. In the wake of capitalist effort, these workers (editorial staff and more) are cut at a whim of will. We have witnessed these presses suddenly streamlined, with loss of mission/vision, and people in service to getting books on the shelves sidelined, pushed away from what they signed on to do. 

Woah, ah, mercy mercy me

As poets, we must recognize that none of us live in complete isolation if we are reading one another. We must intentionally welcome and celebrate one another—welcome the expansiveness, abundance in what each of us brings.

Remember, Entertainment—including music, film, television, publishing—relies on writers and poets, to deliver everything we experience and dream in life, and celebrates the genre handfuls while curating fame, glamor, en vogue. An artistic field thick with cutthroat competition and one-upmanship, lessens those with less, the unseen, banishing them to remote spaces far from peer embrace and making weary those who just want to write poems, suffer their own genius, while they live their lives, whatever that life is. 

Wouldn’t it be kinder to seek out the Marvins of the world and help heal the pain there, preserve and encourage the lyric, the song, the words and sustain the life force, the person, the poet, that writes them at the time they have something to say? 

Oh, you know we've got to find a way
 To bring some understanding here today

Though What’s Going On was his 11th studio album, Marvin Gaye noted that it felt like it was the first time he had something to say. Gaye’s incredible genre-bending work, speaking to so much of the matters of this world in such exquisite phrasing, anthems wrapped up in such exemplary sound, with full delivery, everything, exemplifies the divination a poet bears and brings to light when considering a planet, life, love, and all that threatens experience, existence. Poets are, have always been, the troubadours, the callers. Those who divine as they compose, record what passes, make known, call to presence, offer remedy, offer challenge, twist fate, offer healing.

Please join me in sampling this baker’s dozen from the field and a bit of a prompt to begin something new, visionary, too. Please join me in thinking differently and changing what we entered, whenever it was we arrived in this scene. Join me in catching an escalating thermal rise, spreading wing, soaring, elevating thought, principle, activeness, until we begin each hour supporting the ability to jointly thrive, relish the day, this moment.

All love–

Poem Prompt: Liminal Spaces

liminal
lim·i·nal | ˈlimənl |
adjective: technical
1. relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process.
2. occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.
                                                        (Oxford American Dictionary)

What was and next. Here/there. Now/Later. All of us, at some point, and maybe nearly always, tread the line of liminality, intermediary, threshold, portal, maybes. This is the place to define the space we hold in this momentum shift, pause, position … like the pandemic shift we are experiencing at this moment of time. Write your experience in this, add memories of similarities, crossings in time, crossroads, intersections, junctures of pondering. Play them up with some ordering to cause a bit of the actual feeling of this and maybe give one of them deeper perspective or meaning. To close, open.
#poempromptsforthepandemic

Some opportunities to re-envision the road ahead: 

• Maps to the Next World a literary arts initiative & Deep Medicine Circle
• A guest exchange conservancy where you work/reside, such as Kuuy nahwá’a in Los Angeles.
• Help is available, call 988.
• Emergency funds for poets/writers: Pen Emergency Fund & Authors League Fund.

Poetry Selections:

“The Debt” by Tim Seibles

from Deaf Republic: 1 by Ilya Kaminsky

“Three white Ole Miss students use guns to vandalize a memorial to lynching
victim Emmett Till” by January Gill O’Neil

“QUATRAINS FOR ISHI” by Yusef Komunyakaa

“Six Months after Contemplating Suicide” by Erika L. Sánchez

“Casa” by Rigoberto González

“What You Mourn” by Sheila Black

“Wing to Root” by Jack Myers

“About Standing (in Kinship)” by Kimberly Blaeser

“Requiem” by Camille T. Dungy

“Death” by Crisosto Apache

“After All Have Gone” by Mai Der Vang

“Wi’-gi-e” by Elise Paschen