Poets Address Climate Change at University of Arizona Poetry Center

The Poetry Center in Tucson, Arizona has posted a recap of their 2016 poetry series that featured a lineup of remarkable poets engaging with ideas and concerns around the topic of climate change, with all the unique insight and brilliance a poet can bring. The Poetry Center invited Aracelis Girmay, Brenda Hillman, Brian Teare, Camille Dungy, Joy Harjo, Robert Hass, Alison Hawthorne Deming, and Ross Gay to give what the Center has called "investigative readings," which are part poetry reading and part talk. A little more about this fantastic idea from Hannah Ensor:

To all of the presenters, we asked the same pair of core questions: What role does poetry have in envisioning, articulating, and/or challenging, our ecological present? And what role does poetry have in anticipating our future, in imagining otherwise?

At the end of each night, I left with my jaw on the floor at the beauty, the magnitude, the generosity, and the fierce intelligence of the eight poets who joined us. Each brought crucial approaches from their own personal curiosities, quandaries, struggles, entry points. Poets, in general, are a group of people who practice dedication and imagination as their way of being whole. These poets, in addition to that, have spent the greater part of their lives burrowing their ways into these questions, and finding a way to burst out the other side into communication, heart, potential. We got exactly what we were hoping for, in inviting Brenda and Bob, Camille, Aracelis, Joy, Ross, Brian, and Alison: commitment to the question, to breaking it open and seeing what’s inside. Within each of the eight presentations, hundreds of angles.

Head to the Poetry Center to listen to the reading/talks by Teare, Dungy, Harjo, Gay, and with a bonus cut of Alison Hawthorne Deming, who wrapped up the series. Unfortunately, you have to be onsite to listen to Girmay, Hillman, and Hass—but that's an excuse to visit, no?