“Bir şehri bir mevsime dönüştürmek”: İklim Felaketine Üç Şiirsel Müdahale

Abstract

For the last twenty years, climate change—or what may be more properly described as “climate catastrophe”—has been at the forefront of much social and scientific thinking. Given the science, nowadays we accept it as a fact of life on earth, or perhaps an existential force of doom, and are slowly growing used to the fact that we must drastically change the way we live. This paper argues that artistic expression had been addressing such environmental issues years before they had reached the general public’s awareness. Poets always seem to be ahead of their time, and such is the case with three writers associated with the Language School, Barrett Watten, Kit Robinson, and Harryette Mullen, whose work analyzed herein offers interventions—of different ways of approaching—the burgeoning climate catastrophe. Poets associated with the Language School, as the umbrella term suggests, made it their mission to interrogate language (and traditional poetic language) to produce dynamic and experimental writing. They began doing so in the 1970s against the backdrop of 1960s poststructuralist literary theory, especially the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Here it is argued that they were not only avant-garde practitioners of language, but also avant-garde thinkers when it came to the issue of the environment. The poems analyzed here provide readers unique perspectives on an issue that interests so many people today.