#22 Extinctual Thinking
ASSIGNMENT PURPOSE
The purpose of this assignment is to invite poets to explore “extinctual thinking,”
Extinctual thinking focuses on the causes, effects, and objects of extinction.
Common objects of focus include the extinction of species, language, homeland, memory, ability, environment, history, identity, and culture, as well as any effort to intentionally extinguish, purge, renew, or protect those.
Given this focus and its objects, extinctual thinking will include attention to the six additional concepts of causality, impermanence, interbeing, suffering, equanimity, and freedom.
Causality: the cause and effects of extinction and its remedies.
Impermanence: aspects of change that characterize the arising, growth, and passing away of all things, including time, birth, transformation, evolution, and death.
Interbeing: the inherent worthiness, interdependent relationship, ecology, inheritance, influence, and shared material of all beings.
Suffering: the physical and psychological injuries caused by extinction and threats of the same. Extinction and related suffering may be caused by human ignorance of cause and effect, fear of change, and selfish craving in rejection of interbeing.
Equanimity: the rebalancing acts of community, consciousness, and compassion.
Freedom: the healing acts of education, friendship, activism, and protection made in response to extinction and related suffering.
Other concepts related to extinctual thinking include death, absence, loss, decline, extermination, cancel, extinguish, elimination, disappearance, cleansing, annihilation, destruction, end, termination, and decay.
Resources to consider include work by Bill McKibben, ecopsychology, the Holocene or sixth extinction, Richard Rohr on our relationship with Earth, and Buddhist responses from Joanna Macy and Tara Brach.
EXAMPLES
See the poems published so far here.
See examples from the Poetry Foundation on “poetry and the environment” here.
FORMAL INTERESTS
We are specifically interested in poems that demonstrate careful attention to the elements of shape, line, music, comparison, and balance, and especially how those choices contribute to the cooperative harmony of structure and sentiment in the poem.
Poems that do not meet these interests may be declined. For more on this perspective, see the five formal causes of beauty in poetry.
We also challenge you to consider new choices you might take in audience and poetic form as it pertains to aspects of narrative perspective, shape, sound, repetition, and enjambment.
HOW TO SUBMIT
Poetry submissions should be saved in Microsoft Word document format and composed in Times New Roman, 12 point font. They should be attached to an email to editor@texaspoetryassignment.org and include within the body of the email a brief cover letter and a 50-word biography.
ACCEPTANCE AND PUBLICATION
This call is open through June 1, 2022. Accepted poems will be published beginning April 22, 2022, on Earth Day.
PUBLICATION RIGHTS
Writers will retain all rights to their work published on this site.
