Farah Marklevits on “The Hottest Year on Record: 1997”

To write from what we call the present about the present or the past often carries the authority and weight of realism. To write from what we call the present about the future, however, is often seen as attached to the real world only by the pinprick end of a dreamer’s slender string, easily snipped.

And yet we make resolutions, raise children the way we were or wish we were raised, sketch plans, plot goals, save. We make these everyday contracts with the future in ways that don’t feel fictional. That is, not for the we who can assume the present to be relatively stable.

The global climate crisis, however, throws us all into a firsthand experience of the anxiety of a provisional future. It’s a cliché to lament that there is no one definitive manual for parenting. But the quality of future we now face seems to make the work and care of raising children even more uncertain. Into what, exactly, are we raising them? How do we raise people into a dire we-don’t-know-what?

This all hit home a few years ago, when I realized the science underlying the greenhouse effect had been well established since I was old enough to start learning to think for myself. Not only did scientists know, but the political representatives my parents could have had a hand in electing understood the science and many of its implications for our planet’s climate.

From the vantage point of 2020, that’s over 30 years of knowledge without meaningful action. That’s over 30 years of growing up and living a life, much of it myself oblivious to the crisis looming. This realization made me wonder how many years of my life have been designated “the hottest on record.” What was I doing and thinking in those years?

This wondering turned my poem-making to the past. And because poetry often begins in wonder that quickly spills over into obsession, I found myself reading and pulling from texts and history to investigate ways of seeing one life within the larger contexts of a warming world. The result of these investigations is a multi-sectioned poem I’m calling “The Hottest Year on Record.”

In 1997, as in many sections, a central interest is the speaker’s shortsightedness within a complex situation. Over 20 years ago, as an undergraduate student who had never traveled by plane before, I found myself in the middle of the swollen streams and endless mud created in Costa Rica by the most powerful El Niño event ever recorded, an event that turned out to be only one sign of what would come.

The heart of this section is the speaker’s physical experience of the intersections of weather, geography, and culture. That physical immersion in what was then happening and was yet to come is one part of the story of how humans are quickly changing the Earth’s climate and yet are still fundamentally animals. The means and mechanisms that brought a white, female American liberal arts college student from a family that had recently pulled itself into the middle class to a study abroad trip in Costa Rica tell another part of that story.

I do not intend the poem’s representations of this moment to replace the understanding of experts in Costa Rican culture, history, and ecology or to obscure the work of Tico artists and writers. This is further suggested by my audio recording, made clumsy and self-conscious by my lack of facility with Spanish.

Perhaps the poem fails that intention. But the point I want to make is that I don’t claim mastery. If we, and by ‘we’ I mean especially middle-class white Americans, need to learn anything in this moment, it’s that none of us can or should step into the future thinking of ourselves as masters.

Poetry, for me, has become a wrestling match between the power poetry grants to give voice to thought and the responsibility to divest myself of powers that oppress other living things. To un-master. To struggle for just worship.