Days of Smoke: Poets on the Climate Crisis
A. Savin, “View from Little Adam’s Peak in Ella, Sri Lanka,” 2020. Licensed under the Free Art License 1.3.
Days of Smoke Window Exhibition: Poets on the Climate Crisis
As we near the completion of our repairs and in coordination with NY climate week, we offer a window exhibition of ten poems from our library paired with images of our changing world, installed on the Poets House windows at 10 River Terrace. Days of Smoke: Poets on the Climate Crisis responds to the natural world with love and mourning—celebrating its beauty and grieving the destruction caused by global warming and other threats to the environment.
“Days of smoke” is a repeated phrase in Arthur Sze’s poem “Downwind.” The poem’s core theme is how people immediately respond to a collapsing environment and the missed opportunities for a solution. This poem and the nine others in the exhibit are reminders that we must be caretakers of our shared environment.
Featuring work by Wendell Berry, Tamiko Beyer, Victoria Chang, Lucille Clifton, Joy Harjo, Roberta Hill, Jorie Graham, Keetje Kuipers, Brandy Nālani McDougall, and Arthur Sze; on view now!
Days of Smoke: Poets on the Climate Crisis is made possible in part through a partnership with Battery Park City Authority and in collaboration with the Poetry Coalition’s 2023 program theme, “And so much lost you’d think / beauty had left a lesson”: Poetry and Grief. Special thanks to curator Ryan Mita; Abby Ehrlich and JP Diaz at the Battery Park City Authority; Fred Courtright at The Permissions Company and Robert Shatzkin at W.W. Norton.
