Thank you to poet Ti Kendrick Hall for tagging me in the Next Big Thing! I realize now as I’m writing this that I was tagged once before, a year ago, but at that time I wrote about the story behind founding the Red Sofa Salon & Poetry Workshop. This time I could probably talk forever about my current poetry book project, and I’m excited to share!

1) What are you working on?

The short answer is that I am working on a book of poems that addresses climate change. The poems respond to recent news reports, speak in the voice of the Inuit goddess Sedna, imagine how humans might evolve to respond climate change, sound out a cry of grief and anger, and even occasionally engage in satire as a way of processing the psychological effects of knowledge of climate change. It’s a large, ambitious obsession of a project. It’s the first time I’ve ever written poems that actually have an identifiable theme.

2) How does your work differ from others’ in the same genre?

Since starting this project I became aware of the existence of the “ecopoetry” sub-genre. I started reading as much as I could find that fell into that category, and discovered amazing books, like Redstart: An Ecological Poetics, by Forrest Gander, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille Dungy, and Eco Language Reader, edited by Brenda Ijima, among many others. Much work that is considered “ecopoetry” is experimental in style and form. I was inspired to experiment formally in a few poems, but I know that much of the poems in the manuscript are fairly straightforward in terms of their shape and style. So my poems differ from other forms of ecopoetry in that they are not incredibly formally inventive. However, the use of Inuit mythology in this manuscript, specifically the story of Sedna the Arctic sea goddess, is different than other poetry I’ve come across. Sedna has taken on a life of her own in these poems, showing up all over the world, like a superhero, taking revenge on us humans for our folly in destroying the planet. I’m proud of that and excited to see where she will lead me next.

3) Why do you write what you do?

Hurricane Sandy broke open this well of poems for me. At the time I didn’t realize that’s what was happening, but as months passed after the hurricane, I realized my poems were taking on a strange and anxious tenor. It was also the first time in a long time that I was really writing a lot of poems and feeling motivated in my writing. I’ve always cared about the environment, but for some reason it was only after Hurricane Sandy (perhaps because it was so close to home, here in Philly and my hometown Queens, New York) that I really felt terrified about the imminence of climate change.

4) How does your process work?

It’s very interesting to me to be writing into a book of a poems that has a clear theme, as I’ve never done this before. Having a theme is quite helpful, because even when I’m stuck I have material to fall back on in which to go deeper. I’ve been collecting lots of sources for reading––books, articles, etc.––to educate myself about climate change. I scan news articles, follow climate change news on Twitter, and I look for stories that pique my interest. I’ve been reading all kinds of indigenous mythology and have been weaving that into the poetry. My goal as I continue is to push myself in terms of how poetic form can lead me to deeper psychological investigations of the topic and to more profound explorations of my own and our society’s fear of what is happening right now to our planet.

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Passing along the torch to the next few “Next Big Things”… Look out for Yasmin Belkhyr next week!

Yasmin Belkhyr is a writer in NYC. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in PANK, Word Riot, the Adroit Journal and SOFTBLOW. She is also the Founder/Editor-in-Chief of Winter Tangerine Review. She will soon move to South Africa and write poems about honeydew and heat. You can see more of her work at yasminbelkhyr.com and her blog is wildflowerveins.tumblr.com.