Oops! Environmental Poetics by James Sherry

Oops! Environmental Poetics proposes that the cause of global warming is desire. We already have the technology to arrest climate change. We have the political systems to implement social transformation. But we lack the will to adopt a more sustainable future. In a linked series of essays and poems, Oops! shows how changing our perspective on the biosphere links human thought to the actions we need to survive. Oops! engages an activist poetics that is both in our interest and within our grasp.  

For all of the talk of globalism by the chattering classes, it is worth keeping in mind that there are just two global systems: capital and the biosphere. Every response to either is inescapably particularized by its location. The stresses of such imbalance are what move the world, that locomotive sans engineer heading straight for the chasm.

Ten years before September 11, James Sherry’s Our Nuclear Heritage foresaw – with stunning clarity – the interactions between world politics & human culture in the 21^st Century. Now Oops! extends that vision perhaps even to the end of the human experiment. Far more than a Cassandra for the new millennium, Sherry’s vision has deepened over the decades, offering analysis & strategies we would be wise to heed. Poetry is risk – or else! How ironic that the closest thing we have now to a Benjamin or Adorno should be someone who has worked at the intersection of computing & finance just across the street from the late, lamented CBGBs all these years.

—Ron Silliman, author of The Alphabet

James Sherry takes Nature as his subject and finds Natures.   He pulls us from the corny green landscape and awakens the savannah.

–Jesse Ausubel, Director, Program for the Human Environment, The Rockefeller University

What poetry can change is the will to change. James Sherry finds “real correspondence” between poetry’s conditional truths and the great out there, and he definitively places poetry at the center of our being-in-ecology. For a beautifully detailed understanding of poetry’s possibilities in apprehending the deep bonds, niches and connections of us-we-there-them-where-here, read Oops!. 

–Marcella Durand, author of Traffic & Weather

The issues raised by the collision of humans, our tools, and the natural world are wicked problems that require every means of responding at our disposal. James Sherry wields language skillfully as a tool and poetry movingly as a technology of the sacred to illuminate the complexly intertwingled issues our species has created for ourselves and the ecosystem of which we are both a part and a threat.

–Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community, Smart Mobs, and Net Smart

Can we find models for environmental writing in “language” poetry? What do poetry and risk management have in common? Can hierarchy be inclusive? Why are cross-disciplinary thinking and formal innovation core, non-mutually exclusive tasks for environmental writing today? Sherry’s thoughtful, resourceful, playful poetics, as methodical as they are experimental, will challenge you to rethink many of your assumptions about writing, the environment, poetry. This is a substantial, and key, addition to the conversation.

–Jonathan Skinner, editor ecopoetic

James Sherry is the author of 11 books of poetry and prose. His work has been translated and published in 9 languages. Several of his other books are available on the Electronic Poetry Center (http://epc.buffalo.edu/). He is the publisher of Roof Books (http://roofbooks.com) and founder of The Segue Foundation, Inc., a multi-arts publisher and arts producer. Mr. Sherry is currently working to create a sustainable pension project in conjunction with 350.org and the fossil fuel divestment movement. He lives in New York City.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 254 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-136-8

$18

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