Poets and the Planet

We turned a spotlight on this marriage in July 2023 as our latest edition of Poetry International drew on the themes of Planet Summer, our season of climate care, hope and activism, which in turn is inspired by our Hayward Gallery exhibition, Dear Earth. 

With the effects and consequences of climate change more prescient than ever we caught up with a number of poets appearing at this year’s festival to get their thoughts on poetry and the planet. How has poetry helped them find their place in our natural environment and can poetry help us in the fight against the climate crisis?

Born in Jakarta, Khairani Barokka, also known as Okka, is a London-based writer, poet and artist. A former pushcart Prize nominee, she has presented work in fifteen countries and has been published internationally in anthologies and journals. Her latest book, the poetry collection Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches Press) was published in March 2021, and shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize.

Lidija Dimkovska is a poet, novelist and translator from North Macedonia who has published six books of poetry and three novels in her native language. She has also written an American diary and edited three anthologies. President of the jury for Slovenia’s Vilenica International Literary prize since 2017, her books have been translated into over 15 languages.

Currently based in Wales, Aaron Kent is a poet and publisher from Cornwall who runs the poetry press Broken Sleep Books. His work has been published in, among others, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Prototype, The North and Prelude. He has recently finished his debut novel.

As a poet, what's the first thing that comes to mind for you when you think of 'our planet'? 

Khairani Barokka: A collective of collectives – of indigenous, biome-based stewards of the environment, fighting against land theft for colonial capitalism, which is the root of the climate crisis.

Lidija Dimkovska: It’s the picture on the cover of a slim book from the 1950s which I found in my grandparents’ home when I was ten years old; our planet like a ball, in pale colours of blue and brown. I was astonished that we live on a ball, a circle, like a soap bubble so present in the childhood of my generation. I’ve long held the impression that our planet will one day burst like a soap bubble, and us together with her, as both executioners and victims. Outside the soap bubble is nothing. And outside our planet?

Aaron Kent: Possibility. The possibilities available to us if we can overcome the myriad divisions that have been stoked by hatred, fear, and anger. Nobody chooses the life they get thrust into, it's chance that I'm typing this as opposed to fleeing a war, but we do choose the life we allow for others. By allowing systems and structures that privilege certain people at the expense of others we create a divide, and that divide is solidified by people who fear losing the powers they hold. I try to keep in mind that you shouldn't look at your neighbour's meal to see if they have more than you, instead look to see if they have enough. I think this planet would be a lot better if we all looked to see if our comrades have enough, rather than vying to see if they have more.

In establishing Poetry International in 1967 Ted Hughes spoke of the ‘absolute necessity for global unity’; how close to that point would you say we are in regard to the climate crisis? 

Khairani Barokka: Sadly, not close at all – but the resistance to harmful ways of being is strong, and persistent. We need faith in possibility.

Lidija Dimkovska: I think more and more people now, especially younger people, are aware of the ‘absolute necessity for global unity’ in protecting our planet not from a fictive enemy, but from ourselves. The task of every individual, and of our community, is to be aware of the consequences of our personal and common life. If we are aware of them, we can react and change, we can realise the political program of saving the world. But we are also prevented from reaching this global unity by alienation, by wars, by nationalism, and by other social, political and historical deviations and differences in our century; a century which hasn’t learnt anything from those before it and not only repeats the same mistakes, it creates new ones.

Aaron Kent: Further than ever, with greater scientific knowledge and social awareness of climate change, we also seem to have exacerbated the platform conspiracy theorists hold. Paranoia is running rife and there are sections of people who are so scared of what they don't know that they're happy to conjure up imaginary things that they want to know. I think of that American idea, from some, that an armed society is a polite society – but that's not true, an armed society is a paranoid society, and we've armed people with the power to disseminate knowledge with little to no evidence, and it's created a deep-seated paranoia about so many things. Until we learn to trust each other, we're going to find it increasingly difficult to progress.

How central is the climate crisis to your creative work, and has this changed over time? 

Khairani Barokka: I grew up in a world of indigenous environmental activism, and awareness of environmental crises has always been central to my creative work. From my first book, Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis), to my latest, Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches Press), I try to foreground histories of environmental violence, and continued resistance to it, the latter of which can be deeply intimate.

Lidija Dimkovska: I’ve just finished my new novel in which one of the characters is a green activist who decides not to travel anymore anywhere, not even to their partner, because of the carbon footprint created by his trip. So I approached the topic of the climate crisis most particularly in this work, but I’ve also spoken of it in my other prose and poetry; the social issues, the geopolitical problems, questions of migration and identity in this neoliberal time we live in. Though you may not find nature in my poetry, you will find a lot of quotidian life that influences the nature around us; in particular I criticise the ugly materialistic way of contemporary life in my poetry, which is directly connected with our current climate crisis.

Aaron Kent: I don't know that it's central, but I do think it exists in my work due to it being a lived concern. During lockdown Broken Sleep Books had a lot of submissions of poetry about lockdown, but I felt the poems that weren't actively writing about it were saying it better because those poems were influenced and modified by the environment without it being explicitly stated. Everything is being written in a world where the climate crisis is ever-present, and as such our writing exists as writing undertaken in that environment.

How has poetry helped you to understand your own place in our natural environment?

Khairani Barokka: Poetry has always been a way to discover one's relationship to the environment, and the practice of it continues to aid and surprise, and ground me.

Lidija Dimkovska: Poetry always makes me conscious about some problem, question or issue around me, around us. I need poetry as a remedy, as an advisor, to help me to understand, to accept or refuse, to find peace, to find strength, to cope with something, to identify, and to be myself. I get the impression that I always open the right page in a poetry book from a good poet; in this sense, the poetry is our common richness, one without borders in space and time.

Aaron Kent: When I read Yousif M. Qasmiyeh write so brilliantly about his life inside and outside of Baddawi refugee camp I am reminded that nature is not just a forest in Middle England or a roving hill in the highlands of Scotland, but instead a living, breathing thing that we all experience regardless of the colour green. Yousif writing about the pomegranate tree growing in Baddawi refugee camp is as much about the natural world as Wordsworth writing about daffodils. In one of my own poems I write about how nature poetry for me, a working-class bloke from the second most deprived area of Northern Europe, was writing about breezeblocks on the sides of the A30. I'd like to see more poets and writers write about their natural environment without believing that natural environment has to be flora and fauna.

How important do you feel poetry is, or can be, in the fight against the climate crisis? 

Khairani Barokka: Around the world, at this very moment, thousands of indigenous languages are under threat, each with their own poetries, in song and story, each with ancestral, vital ways of understanding the environment, and being stewards of it. Poetry is and has always been integral to the stewardship of the environment.

Lidija Dimkovska: I think that poetry is most effective when it speaks about the most problematic things we face. This is when poetry is strong, it’s radical, a nonconformist combination of mimesis and poiesis, of criticism and understanding of our life, our environment, and our world. In this I think it can make the reader more conscious about the climate crisis. 

I remember when, in 1994, Ted Hughes read his poems about the wolf at the Struga Poetry Evenings, on Struga’s Bridge of Poetry. His verses mixed with the water of the river Drim below, and the river suddenly transformed, and Hughes’ verses sounded like an echo from the future, not from the present or the past. It is in this natural coming together of the poet’s words and the reader or listener’s environment that poetry offers its truest fight against the climate crisis.

Aaron Kent: It can only be as important as the response of the person reading it. Barnett Newman's paintings made me believe in the complexity of something that appears so simple, Black Country New Road's music made me believe in the rhythm and beauty of mixing genre, and Ross Gay's poetry made me believe in the glory of life from the tiniest flower growing to the passing of family members. This is why art exists, to inspire people into seeing the world anew, and poetry along with other creative arts can do that work and inspire that change in people, but only if people believe poetry is worth their time. As long as poetry doesn't believe in its own accessibility to people then people won't believe in it.