Earth Day 2025: A Manifesto by Özge Lena

Catapoetics

There lived a majestic bird-like creature with a golden aura named Phoenix in the land of paradise somewhere beyond the sun. That place was unimaginably beautiful and deserted. One day, the immortal Phoenix, bored with beauty, decided to land on the chaos of the earth. It flew and flew until it found a nest in a forest; it sang beautiful songs there to human beings, but the time passed differently on this planet. After a hundred years, Phoenix became old. It begged the sun to take it back to paradise; it sang endlessly, but the sun couldn’t hear its old and weak songs because of the disastrous noise of the world.

Then Phoenix decided to get closer to the sun; it flew and flew until it reached Heliopolis, the land of the sun. It kept singing there until its feathers caught fire, until it was surrounded by flames, until it turned into a handful of silver ash. Then the ash started to tremble and rise upward as a vortex. From the middle, a young bird’s head emerged. It was small and vulnerable, yet as the minutes passed, it grew, and the Phoenix morphed back into its golden self again. It had risen from its ashes. It spread out its glorious wings, soared high by singing new songs. It is said that the phoenix still lives in that land of sun, but every one hundred years, it catches fire, turns into silver ash, then rises from its own ashes to sing brand new songs each time.

This is a version of the story of the Phoenix that was told on the cold winter nights where I was born, and yes, we still had those long Balkan winters then, with an abundance of snow and time to tell stories. Years later, as the climate moves towards the land of the sun and the weather breaks record heat levels, we become closer to a point where we must rise from our own ashes.

We can think of the poet as the Phoenix. Like that magical bird, we live in a land of words that is unimaginably beautiful and deserted. We need chaos; we need to write about the unknown, of the perilous; and of course, we need strange skies. We leave ourselves, our safe lands, to come back. We sing until our songs get old, we sing beautifully, and we sing to be heard. We fly too close to the sun; the sun is our passion. We burn our wings to this end; we catch fire, turn into ash to be reborn again and again. We live in fire, in desire; we live passionately under the enchanted skies of the language. What can be more dangerous than a person who lives like this in an age of collapse, of fall, and of catastrophe?

A poet may need to write about the sun—yes, about oranges, cicadas, blossoms, sparrows—all yes, but what about the wildfires that burn these down? What about the chemicals that poison, the plastics that choke, the smog, the dust, soaring carbon dioxide levels, floods, droughts, scarcity, epidemics, and war? What about the pure cruelty of war, then? What about the bombardments, rockets, missiles, endless sirens, shattered schools, destroyed hospitals, killed civilians, dictators, and colonialism? What about patriarchy, white supremacy, otherisation, and discrimination? What about humanitarian, governmental, financial, and climate crises? What about mass shootings, mass extinctions, mass consumerism, and mass killings? What about justice?

This is the point that we, the poets, should ask ourselves: will the art of poetry keep singing good old songs? Is the poetry all about the beautiful land of paradise? What if a poet, like Phoenix, gets tired of all these and decides to land on the chaos of the world and write about what is killing us, our now, and our future?

A poet may need to write about things beyond the sun. A poet may need to find a new song, a new way of saying, or even a new self. A poet may need to look straight in the eye of the chaos. A poet may need to be brave. It is too late to turn back to paradise now; comfort and rest are not what we need. The sun is not going to hear our song. Our feathers are burning; we are slowly turning into a handful of ash to be reborn again, to sing a new song, a new kind of poetry. What is more passionate than writing poems in a falling world?

Yes, we are living in a falling world. We are living through the gradual process of things falling apart, such as the age, countries, regimes, governments, political and financial systems, as well as the body, the psyche, the air and the water, the climate, and good old earth with its interconnected flora and fauna. A collapse is coming, science warns us. Our daily lives are about to change. We are living in an age of catastrophe that I call the catastrocene as a substage of the anthropocene, the current geological age.

The prefix cata from the Greek word kata means ‘down, downwards, against, during, back’ appropriate to define the collapse of today’s world. We are all falling down, all together. This prefix of words such as catacomb, catatonic, cataclysm, catalepsy, etc., is also part of the word catastrophe. I propose to name this new song, this new kind of poetry as catapoetry.

Catapoetry is the poetry of the catastrophe that all things, living and non-living, including the plants, animals, rocks, clouds, water, soil, soul have been suffering.
Catapoetry is about the chaos of today’s collapsing world.
Catapoetry rejects human privilege over other presences coexisting on the planet.
Catapoetry is opposed to pointless anthropomorphism, acknowledging that the human is not the centre of the world.
Catapoetry is not apart from the ecology but only a small part of it: a destructive and a constructive part both at the same time as well as being highly suffusive and invasive.
Catapoetry can encapsulate an array of fields such as ecological poetry, war poetry, indigenous poetry, the poetry of immigrants, refugees, those individuals traditionally discriminated against, and the sufferers of catatonic ideologies like racism, fascism, colonialism, capitalism, as well as the things and beings that have long been or will soon be affected by any kind of chaos and/or disaster.

Ecopoetry is not enough to portray the global crises because it is restricted almost exclusively to the ecological crisis. However, in the flawless ecology of the planet, where we are all connected, we cannot distinguish and categorise disasters as environmental or not. Besides, the prefix eco- has long been tamed and spoilt by the systems, especially by capitalism printing it on any product to create an ‘ecoconscious’ image and/or to greenwash a random brand. The ideas and the products are tagged and bagged in green ‘eco-friendly’ plastics as part of a marketing strategy. So, the prefix ‘eco-’ has constantly been reproducing the concept of consumerism by nudging us to buy and/or sell with a clean or green conscience. Today, we need more than ecopoetry—a bigger and wider idea, a more inclusive one—we need another kind of poetry not preoccupied with the blueness of the sky, the greenness of the forest, or romanticising the death of the planet. What we need today is a new theory of poetics—an alarming one, a wake-up call. Today we need catapoetry.

At this point, here arises the main question: what is a ‘catapoem’?

A catapoem is of/on/after/about a catastrophe; a catastrophic, a disastrous event or series of such events, either real, imagined, or predicted, that causes great suffering, devastation, and destruction for the beings, things, our worlds, or for the world itself.
A catapoem rises from the ruins of a war-stroke city, from the choking dust of the heatstroke lands, from the loneliness of pandemics, the mud of the floods, the spray of the pesticides, from the mushrooms of bombs, the neon colours of toxic wastes.
A catapoem even rises from space debris, the tongues of wildfires, the lead of bullets, the smog of fossil fuels, from the abattoirs, the chimneys of the factories, the chemical leaks, the rifles of the hunters, the rebellion of otherised beings, the colonised lands of indigenous communities, from the dying oceans, poisoned rivers, shaved rainforests, sirens of the air raids, the despair of shelters, the dimness of bunkers, the fire of missiles, shells of gunfire, smoke of wildfires, cries of burning animals, sunk boats of immigrants, from the hope in hopelessness.
A catapoem rises from a falling planet, from a world that is going to fall completely apart if all those catastrophes are persist in being ignored and disregarded.
A catapoem has a thousand non-human eyes, speaking both human and more-than-human languages of things and beings, yet it never cries out slogans, does not make propaganda, does not blame, and does not endorse this or that, never romanticises the pastoral aura of the world or doesn’t become sentimental with the good-old-days nostalgia from a sick human perspective.
A catapoem looks straight into the eyes of the catastrophe, sees the naked truth of it, unravels it to reveal it, unfurls, then spreads its wings to sing a new song of the catastrophe.
A catapoem sings the catastrophe to be heard by other human beings.
A catapoem is not well-behaved; it may seem feral and wild, a rebel on the page, chaotic, untamed, and uncanny, with an alarming end-of-time feeling.
A catapoem might carry the strange, distorted, repressed, and choking aura of the catastrocene, sometimes as dark as our future, sometimes with a single drop of hope injected into it.

Now it is of vital importance to emphasise that the art of poetry can well act as a means of calling out people to show them what is going on in the world and what can or is going to happen in the near and far future, to record how or why we are ending, although it has no such mission. As stated by Ursula K. Le Guin in her speech at the National Book Foundation (2014):

Hard times are coming when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society (…) We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality. (…) Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

Hard times are already here. Yet through an alarmingly beautiful or beautifully alarming language, through a non-critical, unsentimental, and blame-free voice, through its own unique and wild tongue, and through its eerily wonderful or wonderfully eerie atmosphere, catapoetry can say: Look, we are living in a catastrophic world; in a sad age of mass catastrophe; we are all in this together; we are falling together. We are neither guilty nor innocent. Now look deep into the eye of the catastrophe; see the bright heart of a poem, pulsing for you, calling. Wake up. Before it is too late. Open your eyes wide to see. Then to write. But first, you have to wake up. To be reborn from your ashes. To sing a new song. To tell the truth about this age. Wake up.

Özge Lena is a worldwide published poet who appears in The London Magazine, The International Times, and numerous magazines across continents. Her ecological themed poetry earned Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations and was shortlisted for Oxford Brookes and Plough Poetry Prize. Özge’s poetry appears in many anthologies and was showcased at Barnes & Noble for Poetry Month.

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