Poet Willa Carroll finds beauty in ecological tragedy 

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Warnings of impending environmental collapse are nothing new. But rarely is the language used to invoke humanity’s devastating impact on the world so vivid and beautiful as in Rochester poet and multimedia artist Willa Carroll’s chapbook of 31 short poems, “Demolition Suite,” published November 1 via Split Rock Press.

“Save us from cold moons / lakes of liquid methane / sunless planets / balls with no spin / no high noon / no big crimson / behind clouds seeded with benzene,” Carroll wrote in the poem “Score for the Body with Bioaccumulation.”

With concise, dense sentence fragments, Carroll conjures a world that is simultaneously cerebral and visceral. “I always try to think of the writing process as an embodied process,” she said. “We’re not just talking heads, existing up here. We’re embodied human beings. That’s something that’s very important in my ... work.”

Local poet Albert Abonado, an adjunct lecturer and editor-in-chief of Bare Hill Review at Finger Lakes Community College, met Carroll while they were both students at the Bennington Writing Seminars, and Abonado was immediately impressed. “Her poems immediately drew me in with their inventiveness and their precision,” he said. “They made these spectacular leaps that were buoyed by these sparkling sounds. Her poems showed control but still made space for these wonderful improvisational gestures.”

In her 2021 film “Project Hazmatic: Score for Body as Cautionary Tale,” Carroll’s words salvage moments of bizarre beauty from stark depictions of ecological degradation; the visuals depict figures wearing HAZMAT suits and gas masks, adorned with caution tape and red tulle on desolate shorelines and other seemingly remote locations. Carroll articulates the dystopia with both emotional investment and resignation.

“The interplay that I was working with is ‘Can I engage these environmental issues, climate change, environmental degradation, hazardous exposures, but also find moments of beauty in language, in images of the natural world?’” Carroll said.

Beyond her roots — she went to School of the Arts in Rochester, majoring in visual arts there before attending Bennington College for dance and poetry and living in New York City for more than 25 years — her work’s local connection extends to the locations where she and von Scheele made the films. Highland Park, the Chimney Bluffs, Henrietta’s Breese Park, Keuka Lake and other regional spots are featured in the “Project Hazmatic” footage.

“A fun thing about some of these locations is it felt like a public art performance or a guerilla art performance,” Carroll said, “because there are people walking by in these parks (who) see us dressed in these HAZMAT suits and filming, and it's been fun to hear people's responses.”

If the purpose of art is to ask big questions, Carroll’s “Project Hazmatic” and "Demolition Suite” projects live up to that billing. “We are facing an existential threat here, and then we’re also impinging that on countless species through a mass extinction that’s underway,” said Carroll. “So what is our moral responsibility, and what is the role of art in the midst of that?”

Daniel J. Kushner is an arts writer at CITY. He can be reached at [email protected].