I've spent a good chunk of the weekend working on some final touches for Wednesday's reading at the Field Museum, the extinction event series, which has turned out a little darker. But then, how else do your write a series of poems about climate change and extinction without them being just a little dark. It's apocalyptic, but a different kind of apocalypse than my previous book--which was definitely imagining the end of the world in a more nuclear, or in some cases, zombified, way. This is definitely more about humans, and our tendencies to try to love the landscape by destroying it. To try to catalog and preserve the endings of other species and our own. The very last segments that were written take place, like my series apocalypse theory: a reader, in a post-everything world, but these are more animal, and definitely bleaker. They, and other reappearing threads are braided through, poems on dioramas, on taxonomy on the idea of museums as a place to preserve artifacts. The seeds were sewn as I walked around the museum that first time, and have come together much more smoothly than I imagined they would. I'll be sharing them and a discussion of their conception on Wednesday @ noon (I'm reading in the Hall of Birds, but we'll start in the main hall and then walk to the reading space. )
Poets in the Field: Kristy Bowen
Field Museum of Natural History
Weds. October 9th, 12pm
co-sponsored by the Poetry Foundation
(meet in Stanley Field Hall)
