The title for my poetry collection, Moving to Climate Change Hours, was suggested by my wonderful publisher Noelle Allen of Wolsak and Wynn. It’s a modification of one of the poem titles in the book, Today We Move to Climate Change Hours. Noelle suggested it as an alternative to my admittedly much weaker suggestions and I immediately realized it was perfect. I had a discussion with my friend Linda on why it made sense to use this instead of the actual title of the poem it comes from, which also I think could have been a good but not as good title. I said I liked Noelle’s better for the book because of the ongoingness of the word moving. And also how that relates to the idea of climate, not only evoking the climate catastrophe, but also how it also relates to the poet speaker’s own internal climate which is changing through the book. I said I loved how “Moving” worked in those contexts.
So in this little essay I’m interested in moving or move in both the motion type sense as well as the internal world. When researching ahead of the video on the etymology of the word move it was interesting to discover “move’ showed up in the 1300 and 1400’s in Middle English with it’s motion type meaning but over that time also came to have the emotional meaning like “I found that very moving”. So early on the word was understood for it’s physical meaning as well as an internal world movement too.
