The Brooklyn Rail

In 2008, I went to a book fair in a gallery in Chelsea, and a man I didn’t know pulled me aside to sell me an anthology he felt that I desperately needed called The Consequence of Innovation: 21^st Century Poetics. He was like an old-fashioned vacuum salesman with his foot-in-the-door of my attention. He said he was the publisher of Roof Books and would give me a deal on this Roof title by throwing in another one. Delighted by his rather aggressive tactics, I bought it. He showed me that he had a piece in the anthology too, called “Tagmosis,” and as I scanned the page I was intrigued. Who is this “James Sherry” guy, I thought.

Sherry tells us who he is in his book Selfie: Poetry, Social Change, and Ecological Connection (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022): “I’m a poet, publisher, contributor of a variety of social activities, voter, father, husband, friend, neighbor, shopper, retired computer jockey, old man with a short future.” I can’t say much about him as a voter or shopper, but as a poet and publisher he was a key figure in the Language Writing movement, especially the NYC contingent of the group formation, and continues to write and publish innovative poetry. Selfie lays out an environmental model of poetry that is both an extension of the Language movement as well as a critique. Sherry first sketched out aspects of the model in Oops!: Environmental Poetics (BlazeVOX, 2013); articulated the conditions under which this model was being developed—basically a condition of oligarchy, despite the perceived governance structure (democratic or socialist/communist)—in a witty book modeled on Machiavelli’s The Prince called The Oligarch (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); and finally an individual collection of poems called The Entangled Bank (Chax, 2016), which enacts by other means the poetics in these books. Selfie is his hardest sell yet of the environmental model of poetry and probably the most complete description of how poetry can tackle climate change.

Selfie is not easy to read because it really is a model, reading at times more like a computer program or a mathematical equation. Scientists will be intrigued and suspicious of it; poets may chafe at the subjective nature of the model and its claims toward universality. However, I would argue those mis-readings are intended. His environmental model does not fall into a pat essentialism. Sherry writes in a way that keeps readers on their back heels, a little off-kilter and uncertain of what he is getting at, not unlike our experience of climate change. The brilliance and excitement of reading a model is that it is multi-directional, eschews narrative and allows complex structures to remain complex. “You” are in the book: first, as someone addressed by the author; second, because your mind and body are needed to “see” the model; and finally, because you are living in the condition of climate change. Selfie continues in the materialistic tradition of language writing with the addition of the environment or, to use Sherry’s word, “surroundings.” In his analysis, language writing evolves into environmental writing, “to avoid inhibiting change by modeling permanence.”

Sherry presents the current poetry world: how a poet is like an organism in its surroundings, and is often caught up in binaries of self and other, related to survival. Identity is paramount in this conception and allows for group formations around identities, a kind of social syntax that connects individuals. Finally, those group identities can scale up to broader institutions and movements, like the Beats or Umbra. Even with this elaboration of the model, a reader could be forgiven for thinking like Auden that “poetry makes nothing happen.” It is when Sherry introduces the mathematical concept of “isomorphism” that he has a structure to push out from poetry into other analogous fields. Omni-directionally, poets have the potential to affect the climate as much as being affected by it, a hopeful message in these times.

To better address climate change as a threat, Sherry encourages more movement through the model. He challenges the traditional poetic stance that relies on the binary of reflection and refraction, and posits diffraction, which includes reflection and refraction, as a tool: advocating multi-faceted performative roles, rather than binary static identities; explorations of parataxis and hypotaxis in social syntax depending on conditions, and scaling from the organism down or up with metaphor. This movement is not simply conceptual; metaphor as experienced in the brain and in surroundings is physical and material. With isomorphism, a cultural change at the level of poetry has the chance to shape the culture at large. An example from recent memory of an idea that moved from the local margins to the center was the day after Hurricane Sandy when Mayor Michael Bloomberg used the expression “climate change” after many years of it being a forbidden term among mainstream elected officials; within hours, Governor Andrew Cuomo and President Barack Obama uttered it as well, and it has not fallen out of the political discourse since.

In another role, this time as anthologist, Sherry with Sun Dong released The Reciprocal Translation Project (Roof, 2017) a collection that dramatizes the environmental model in microcosm, (which, as we know, through the concept of isomorphism has resonance at greater and lesser scales). In the book, individual poets from America and China translate each other’s poems, taking on the roles of poets and translators and showing the potential in each poem for a myriad of translations. Little feels stable in the book, while nevertheless there is coherence over the whole of the project. In this book the operational environmental model becomes a dynamic reality as various translations emerge from a single text, activating an enlivening experience for the reader.

The form of Selfie also mirrors the environmental model within it. It doesn’t look like a poetry book, and is not published by a traditional or alternative poetry press; instead with its color palette and generic cover image of leaves it reads as if it is an environmental engineering textbook. Diagrams, lists, and bullet points resists the usual surface of poems and poetics texts, and poetry and prose collide in the pages, his own and others, a kind of authorial ecosystem. As Sherry’s poetics evolves from Oops! to Selfie, more science and scholarship enters the text and there is a similar reaching out from the book to other disciplines. Using mimicry the way he does may snare new readers and interlocutors in addition to poets. Every chapter starts with an abstract and has a copyright. Although the book can be read from beginning to end (as this reader read it), it is also modular and could be read in numerous directions or as a single chapter passed out in a class. Although Sherry is the author of the book, there is not one author alone: there are other pieces penned by other writers within the book, including short texts by Rae Armantrout and Lyn Hejinian, as well as ample samplings from poets salutary of the environmental model, many of them from the Roof catalog. (Sherry takes on the role again of salesman, and now I want to read two Roof titles, Trish Salah’s Lyric Sexology and Holly Melgard’s Fetal Position.) The most perplexing aspect of the infrastructure of the book is its price of $149.49 (on bookshop.org as of this writing). Selfie is priced beyond most poets’ budgets and it is hard to discern whether that is a tactic to implement the model or a concession to reaching non-traditional poetry audiences. To use isomorphs again, it may be a gesture to the true costs of making a livable climate.

The question that dogged me as I read the book and now as I write this review is: can Selfie scale in the ways that it proposes? I believe it can, and one of the reasons I am writing about it is because I am convinced that it will be useful for poetry to have a model to impact the climate crisis, and for others working to slow global warming to see the value that poets bring to the challenge. I would like to bring new readers to Sherry’s work so they can critique it and contribute to its growth and improvement. If Sherry returns to the subject, I would raise the question as to whether the book, because of its reliance on isomorphism, has placed too much emphasis on hierarchy as the avenue to scale. He is not alone. Many of the large environmental NGOs and corporate ESG shops have similar hierarchical views of scale that seem related to their proximity to the oligarch class. Sherry mentions examples of multi-local scaling like the “sneaker net” of book distribution, and I might offer mycorrhizal networks, but there is more to learn about this as a scaling mechanism possibly more dependent on horizontal syntax rather than vertical q-analysis. One need only look at Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass for an example; originally published in 2013, the book became a bestseller in 2020 during the pandemic via word of mouth.

I hope this model gets picked up and passed by word of mouth. It is a very hopeful book that emphasizes the connections within and between oneself, others, and shared surroundings, and that a poet can influence other aspects of life but particularly climate “inter-intra-action.” After reading it, it is easier to think “Your self is not a unit of one.” A book can be picked up, put down and placed back on a virtual or literal shelf, but we get the most out of a model when we test it and play with it. I have enjoyed engaging with the thinking in the book and, if others can afford the book (or steal it), they might too.