future flora: introduction
all our names are kin: a field guide to future flora is my manuscript-in-progress that explores the Midwest American landscape some three hundred years into the future. this date is somewhat arbitrary — I don’t think it matters if the setting of the collection is three hundred or three thousand years hence. my point is to conceptualise a future, a time, and a space that exceeds my capacity to recognise the ecosystem and its many agents. the collection thus assumes a sandbox world where edges are undefined, colours are fuzzy, and life forms are emergent and preposterous without discounting other alternative proposals for this world-to-come. I hope to shape this collection into a series of cli-fi prose poems to highlight the possibilities of what a world-with-us-estranged might look like.
here’s what I know so far.
first, the future is exceptionally odd, and crisis is unexceptional. either humans are plantlike, or conversely plants are human. this world, this urf, has not rejected human nature, but instead has adopted new mobilities and modes of communication. I imagine that that this urf is sticky, slimy, and hot with abstraction but also cool with concrete images. after all, climate change is a constant projection of evolving potentialities, and I find it hard to settle on a singular conceptualisation of what a future might entail. here I think of Renee Gladman’s Ravicka novels or Keri Hulme’s short story “Floating Words”, where spaces feel buoyant and disconnected, the surfaces are spongey, and the characters struggle to find a ledge on which to grab. I also want to capture that ecological buoyancy although I’m still not quite sure how to achieve the fluvial, slippery, slimy hotness in my poems. cli-fi is a projection-in-progress.
second, images generated by artificial intelligence accompany each prose poem. on the one hand, I feel it is important to use images to balance the ambiguity of the poems. this is a field guide, after all, and I am interested in exploring the evolution of this genre in a future more-than-human context. (more on this form in a future post.) on another, I’m also interested in interrogating the artificiality of these AI-generate images: to what extent they can used as a means to examine “nature” and the unnaturalness of ecopoetry. (again more about these ideas in a later blog post.)
part of the difficulty of engaging with climate change is that it seems too unreal, even as it unfolds in the present. I’m reminded of Amitav Ghosh’s argument about the failures of climate fiction to respond effectively to the present ecological crisis. “Let us make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture,” Ghosh notes, “and thus of the imagination” (9). Later he argues,
“When future generations look back upon the Great Derangement they will certainly blame the leaders and politicians of this time for their failure to address the climate crisis. But they may well hold artists and writers equally culpable — for the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job of politicians and bureaucrats.” (135)
maybe we are in the midst of an imagination breakdown, and maybe creatives are not doing enough to produce alternative representations of the future. (although Indigenous writers like Keri Hulme would prove otherwise.) while Ghosh excludes poetry from this crisis, I find myself frequently frustrated by many climate change poems. their sense of doom is overwhelming. their occasional sentimentality or nostalgic inclinations for some environmentally pure past seem to embed us firmly in a settler colonial imaginary. however, I don’t think there is anything wrong per se about poetry that focuses on anthropogenic damage — I’ve certainly written plenty myself — but I worry how aesthetic defeatism becomes another branch of climate denialism. everything is bad, so why bother? why bother indeed. this leads me to my third knowledge vector: what does climate hope look like? how is it expressed? what is optimism in a world of extinction? (again, I’ll touch upon climate hope in a future blog post.)
my plan is to document, here, my thought processes about this series, about futures of hope, guidance, and unnatural ecopoetry as an experiment in making, unfolding, building, and staging alternative modes of inquiry. my goals: to struggle, to think, to explore of poetic form as an environment for generative difference.
for now, here’s a list of poems published in this series. this project is very much under development, and I’m open to critical suggestions and challenges. feel free to email me: o (at) orchidtierney (dot) com.
Four poems. Swifts and Slows. December, 2022. (forthcoming)
Two poems. Remake3. May 2022.
One poem. Marsh Hawk Review, spring 2022.
One poem. 2021 Featured Poets Anthology. Moonstone Center. February 2022. (print sorry)
Three poems. Tagvverk, August. 2021.
Two poems. Plant-Human Quarterly. 21 December. 2021. A reading of these poems: around 2:41:42.
Five poems. Harpy Hybrid Review, no. 6.5. Winter 2021.
