Ecopoetics - Essays in The Field - Angela Hume
Ecopoetics - Essays in The Field - Angela Hume
Ecopoetics - Essays in The Field - Angela Hume
u n i v e r s i t y o f i owa p r e s s ,
i owa c i t y
University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242
Copyright © 2018 by the University of Iowa Press
www.uipress.uiowa.edu
Printed in the United States of America
Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Ecopoetics as Expanded Critical Practice: An Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne
Notes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
Permissions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
Acknowledgments
Without the support of many people, this book would not have been possible. We
are grateful to all those who participated in the Conference on Ecopoetics at the
University of California, Berkeley, in February 2013. Their energy, imagination,
and passion for ecopoetics inspired this book in the first place. We are especially
indebted to our conference co-organizer, Margaret Ronda, and to Brenda Hill-
man, both of whose brilliance and guidance have enriched our understanding
of ecopoetics.
In addition to this volume’s individual essay contributors, we wish to thank a
number of scholars and poets who have been especially important to our thinking
about ecopoetics: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Joshua Corey, Adam Dickinson, Camille
Dungy, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Anne-Lise François, Forrest Gander, Cecil Giscombe,
Robert Hass, Brenda Iijima, Myung Mi Kim, Rusty Morrison, Craig Santos Perez,
Sonya Posmentier, Claudia Rankine, Jed Rasula, Evelyn Reilly, Frances Richard,
Evie Shockley, Juliana Spahr, Heidi Lynn Staples, Laura-Gray Street, G. C. Waldrep,
Tyrone Williams, Laura Woltag, and Michael Ziser. Our gratitude goes also to the
two anonymous readers who provided generous, encouraging feedback on our
manuscript in its early stages. We thank James McCoy and Susan Hill Newton at
the University Iowa Press and series editors Adalaide Morris, Lynn Keller, and Alan
Golding for their enthusiastic commitment to our project. An additional thank-you
to Lynn Keller, whose informal advising was indispensable.
Finally, we wish to thank our families and friends for their support and encour-
agement in all our endeavors.
Ecopoetics
•
Ecopoetics as Expanded Critical Practice
An Introduction
Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne
This book began with an event. In February 2013, scholars, poets, artists, activists,
and educators gathered at the University of California, Berkeley, for the first-ever
Conference on Ecopoetics. Along with Margaret Ronda, we organized this con-
ference in order to open up a conversation around a term that had been circulating
in both academic and poetry circles with increasing frequency. We could not have
anticipated how the conference would inspire a weekend-long performance of
ecopoetics itself. There were traditional academic panels but also creative, partic-
ipatory, and lab-based sessions. There were two marathon poetry readings along
with snacks made with locally foraged plants and fungi by a food activist. There
were educational excursions and installations throughout the Bay Area. Conference
participants visited Treasure Island, a former navy base where some areas are still
contaminated by radioactive waste; Arrowhead Marsh, one of the East Bay’s last
remaining wetlands and a restored wildlife habitat; Point Reyes National Seashore;
and an urban farm. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass led participants on a
tour of campus trees. The conference concluded with a service project at Strawberry
Creek, an ongoing restoration site that runs through the main campus area.1
Leading up to the conference, we were inundated with registrations. When
we ran out of slots and closed registration due to resource constraints, people
showed up anyway. They drew pictures and wrote poems on our registration forms.
They sat cross-legged on the floors of packed classrooms. They organized off-site
events—reflections on the concept of ecology in a Berkeley backyard garden beside
a “pond of unlimited facilities” and a poetry reading in downtown Oakland in a
musty old building that housed the radical, autonomous Bay Area Public School.2
The conference was quickly transformed through its interactions with the social
and material ecologies of the Bay Area. Ecopoetics flourished and abounded.
Ecopoetics might be defined as “the incorporation of an ecological or environ-
mental perspective into the study of poetics,” as Kate Rigby has suggested.3 One
thing the Conference on Ecopoetics illustrated is how capaciously poets and critics
understand the concepts both of an ecological perspective and of poetics. Partic-
ipants demonstrated that ecopoetics can encompass experiments in community
making, ranging from poetry and visual art, literary criticism, and performance
to walking, foraging, farming, cooking, and being alongside each other, whether
human or other than human, in space and place.4 The fullness of these practices
reflects the Greek etymological roots of ecopoetics: “eco” from oikos, meaning
“family,” “property,” and “house,” and “poetics” from poiesis, meaning “to make,”
in a broad sense.
When we started envisioning the Conference on Ecopoetics in early 2012, it was
clear that for many poets from different schools, scenes, and places, ecology and
nature were not only important themes for poetry, as they have always been, but
urgent points of contention. Poets were and are continuing to actively investigate
enduring assumptions about what nature has been, might be, or will be and about
which objects, bodies, people, and experiences count as natural. Along these lines,
Brenda Hillman argues that “a term like ‘ecopoetics’ is not meant to narrow but to
open the conversation about poetry’s relationship to the environments.”5 We see this
sentiment evidenced by several widely inclusive poetry anthologies from the past
decade, all of which are edited by poets: Camille Dungy’s Black Nature, a volume that
reexamines African American voices within ecological poetry; Joshua Corey and G. C.
2 Introduction
Waldrep’s The Arcadia Project, which emphasizes experimental poetic traditions and
techniques; and Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street’s The Ecopoetry Anthology,
which showcases a range of formal techniques, suggesting connections among and
across various periods, schools, and traditions. These anthologies demonstrate an
expansive engagement with the concept of nature by poets, some of whom have
been among the most commonly anthologized and others whom had previously
been left out of nature poetry canons.
Until recently, this growing interest in poetry, poetics, and ecology among
both poets and scholars was not fully reflected in literary criticism. Now articles
on ecopoetry and ecopoetics appear in academic journals with greater frequency.
Scholarly work in and on ecopoetics has gained visibility in realms outside of eco-
criticism as well, with critics starting to make connections between ecopoetics and
debates within gender and sexuality, critical race, and disability studies, among
others.6 That said, intersectional scholarship on ecopoetics is still just beginning
to emerge.7 And while scholars have begun to take seriously the phenomenon of
ecologically oriented poetry and poetics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,
they have yet to articulate how, arguably, ecopoetics is not so much a subcategory
or a school within but rather a coextension of post-1945 poetry and poetics. We
think that any scholar of post-1945 literature, not just scholars working on poetry
and the environment, should attend to the influence of ecopoetics—an approach
to both writing and reading—on contemporary poetry and theory more broadly.
It is this view that inspired Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field, and it is this narrower sense
of ecopoetics as critical practice with which our book is primarily concerned.
With the advent of the atomic bomb, the development of systems theory and
quantum physics, and the escalation of fossil fuel and other natural resource ex-
traction and exhaustion by humans—precisely the types of historical phenomena
that are often used to periodize postmodern or contemporary literature in the first
place—came new forms of ecological consciousness. Fredric Jameson, for exam-
ple, defined postmodernism as “what you have when the modernization process
is complete and nature is gone for good” and dated the beginning of this era to
1973, the year of the first oil crisis, making late capitalism synonymous with late
oil culture.8 With these new material realities and forms of consciousness came
new forms and practices for poetry. In the years preceding the first oil crisis, var-
Introduction 3
ious experimental poetries—objectivism, composition by field, projective verse,
and other modernist-influenced renovations of form—anticipated postmodern
environmental consciousness and registered poetry’s evolved sense of the ma-
terial interconnection of all life, anxieties about annihilation and extinction, and
humanity’s impact on and place in geologic time and history.
Many of these midcentury practices have been particularly influential for con-
temporary ecopoetry and ecopoetics, as several of the essays in this volume demon-
strate. In fact, we could have easily organized Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field into two
sections: the first focusing on the ecopoetics of objectivism, Black Mountain poetry,
and the New American Poetry, and the second on contemporary ecopoetic practices
that, arguably, inherit and adapt these traditions. Such an organization would have
implied a different literary history for ecopoetics than has been often assumed,
displacing the preservationist triumvirate of Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder, and
Wendell Berry, who have often been discussed as the harbingers of contemporary
ecopoetry, and foregrounding instead the influence of the midcentury avant-garde.9
It would have simultaneously decentered a perceived lyric tradition practiced by
such poets as Berry and Snyder, elevating instead the influence of modernist and
innovative free-verse forms like collage and projective verse practiced by such poets
as Robert Duncan and Charles Olson.10
Our title and subtitle—Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field—give a nod to these midcen-
tury traditions, invoking Olson’s notion of field composition and Duncan’s related
ideas about composition by field and suggesting the influence of twentieth-century
experimental practices like Olson’s and Duncan’s on environmental thinking and
ecopoetics today. For Duncan, the poem is “a field of ratios in which events appear in
language” and in which language’s parts—its sounds, stresses, images—contribute
to a greater dynamic design of complex meaning.11 While poetry composed in a
field is not organic material or life itself, it gets as close to the organic as possible
without actually becoming it: “a word has the weight of an actual stone [and the]
tone of a vowel has the color of a wing,” Duncan writes.12 The content of the field
poem “arises as the living body or form,” a body conditioned by its organs and
systems.13 Thus, the field poem is “a practicing of our life in language”—and that
“life” is “the life-story not only of man, but of animals, not only of animals, but
of the DNA code-language, not only of the DNA code-language, but of elements
4 Introduction
themselves.”14 Duncan’s field metaphor is an ecological one that reflects how the
scientific principles of ecology had, by midcentury, begun to enter mainstream
environmental and avant-garde poetic imaginations.
But while a number of the essays in Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field do suggest that
contemporary ecopoetics might be understood as arising from an ecologically ori-
ented midcentury avant-garde, mapping this trajectory is not our only interest. In
addition, we aim to highlight the changing and intersectional nature of ecopoetics
as both poetry and critical practice today. In recognition of the range of writing
types to which the term “ecopoetics” might be applied, we intend our title to invoke
a diversity of field-writing practices. While the field persists as a metaphor today,
and while American poetry continues to be framed as flourishing within the open
fields of American space, our subtitle might also point toward recent postpastoral
and postgeorgic reimaginations of the field: Cecily Parks’s Field Folly Snow, for
example, or C. S. Giscombe’s Prairie Style.15 To this end, we have organized this
book into four parts, each of which articulates a prominent line of thinking in the
current critical study of ecopoetics. We think that this organization also helps clarify
the fact that the primary contribution of this volume is not so much a rewriting of
literary history—that is to say, a single, sustained argument about poetry—as it is
a demonstration of where ecopoetics as critical practice seems to be heading. The
foremost aim of this book is to perform much-needed work on a rapidly developing
critical field—or, alternatively, as our subtitle suggests, to explore the dynamic
potential of the essay within that evolving field.
We have collected essays that draw from and contribute to a range of fields and
subfields and that foreground experimental work by women and queer poets, poets
of color, and poets with disabilities, work that continues to be underrepresented
not only in ecocriticism but in literature studies more broadly. Part 1, “The Apoc-
alyptic Imagination,” features essays that examine poetry’s history of attempting
to think the end of nature, the end of the human, and the end of the world, capi-
talizing on or, alternatively, undermining what Lawrence Buell describes as “the
single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary imagination has at
its disposal.”16 In part 2, “Embodiment and Animality,” we draw together essays
that focus on ecopoetics as embodied practice as well as a literary archive. These
essays examine legacies of Romantic organicism, projective verse, Beat poetics,
Introduction 5
and the black radical tradition and bring ecopoetics into conversation with science,
animal and plant, queer, disability, and critical race studies. Part 3, “Environmental
Justice,” explores how poetry articulates the uneven distribution of environmental
risk. These essays illuminate how poetry can lend form to material, embodied ex-
periences of environmental racism and toxic burden. The essays gathered in part
4, “Beyond Sustainability,” consider possibilities for ecopoetics as an imaginary
and ethical counterpoint to environmental management and sustainable devel-
opment paradigms. In some of these readings, ecopoetics is modulated by a kind
of recessive action: while poetry may not transform human systems, the practice
of ecopoetics can constitute an openness to what exists or what might exist.17 In
others, ecopoetics constructs playful geometries of attention (to borrow Joan Re-
tallack’s phrase) that have the power to bridge theory with pedagogy and praxis.
Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field is one of the first consolidated efforts to bring a
range of critical approaches to ecopoetics and to treat the scholarly essay, too, as
ecopoetics.18 At the same time, there are schools, methods, voices, and environ-
mental interests not represented here, adequately or at all. We would have liked,
for example, to include writing on ecopoetics in relation to Language poetry, Lati-
no/a/x poetry, and the Asian American avant-garde, among others. The gaps here
are due in part to space restrictions. They are also due to the fact that ecopoetics is
still in the process of establishing a foundational body of scholarly work. We lay
no claim to comprehensiveness; however, we do hope that Ecopoetics: Essays in the
Field will inspire other scholars to imagine ecopoetics with attention to methods
and poetries beyond those addressed here.
6 Introduction
on nonhuman experiences and conditions. A third category, ecological poetry,
extends the antilyric experimentalism of avant-garde poetics in the direction of
the ecological. As helpful as these categories may be, they raise almost as many
questions as they answer. If nature poems and ecological poems resemble other
kinds of poetry—lyrics or avant-garde antilyrics, respectively—is it their content
alone that ultimately tips them toward nature or ecology?21 Is a beast or a moun-
tain all it takes to turn a poem into an ecopoem? If this is the case, one becomes
hard-pressed to find poems within the Western tradition that couldn’t be counted
as ecopoems.
Although ecopoetics as critical practice has been, as one critic puts it, a “tributary
of ecocriticism,” it has also had a distinct critical trajectory.22 While ecocriticism
builds on certain predecessors—seminal works by critics like Norman Foerst-
er, Roderick Nash, and Leo Marx, who investigated the significance of nature,
wilderness, and the pastoral in American literature and culture—it had its real
beginnings in the 1980s, with its first significant publications arriving mostly in
the 1990s. While several recent anthologies trace the phases through which eco-
criticism has already passed, these phases were largely anticipated two decades ago
by Cheryll Glotfelty in her introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader. Glotfelty identifies
three stages for ecocriticism: a period in which critics trace representations of nature
in literature, followed by efforts to recover or establish a canon of nature writing,
and finally a theoretical phase, in which critics investigate concepts informing the
division between nature and culture as well as new ways of thinking informed by
ecological models.
Glotfelty presciently predicts that ecocriticism will become “ever more inter-
disciplinary, multicultural, and international,” committed to social justice. 23 We
see a comparable trajectory in ecopoetics as well. But while ecocriticism tended
to favor the representative capabilities of prose in works by writers such as Henry
David Thoreau, John Muir, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez—Lawrence Buell’s 1995
The Environmental Imagination is an exemplary study—ecopoetics has forwarded
forms of environmental imagination that do not necessarily require mimetic ac-
curacy. Critics have become more explicit about this difference. In 2012, Scott
Knickerbocker questioned whether “ecocentrism should be limited to realism.”24
In an essay published the same year, Lynn Keller called for critics to look beyond
Introduction 7
“straightforwardly representational writing” and to consider the ecopoetics of
more recent and experimental poetry.25
Although Glotfelty includes ecopoetics in the theoretical phase of ecocriticism,
Knickerbocker’s and Keller’s comments reveal that ecopoetics as both poetry and
critical practice continues to wrestle with some of ecocriticism’s earliest concerns:
the question of representation and the establishment of a canon. Indeed, in their
early attempts, critics chose poets based largely on how well they represented the
natural world. John Elder, in his 1996 Imagining the Earth, for example, sought to
draw new attention to poets like Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, and A. R. Ammons
by connecting them to such predecessors as Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot, while
Guy Rotella and Gyorgyi Voros reread established modernist poets—Marianne
Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens—through the lens of ecology.26 A few
years later, Leonard Scigaj and Bernard Quetchenbach identified additional poets
whom they argued were worthy of attention as ecopoets: Susan Howe, Adrienne
Rich, and Kenneth Rexroth, among others.27 These studies culminated in J. Scott
Bryson’s 2002 Ecopoetry, the first edited collection of essays on the topic. Bryson
contextualized contemporary ecopoetry within longer traditions, including essays
on ancient poetry, transcendentalism, and modernism, and further expanded the
canon of contemporary ecopoetry with essays focused on writers such as Chicka-
saw poet Linda Hogan and lesbian poet Daphne Marlatt. He continued to survey
a more diverse ecopoetry canon in a study of his own published a few years later,
with discussions of Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz, and Leslie Marmon Silko.28
While these projects established a more inclusive archive in terms of the cultures,
ethnicities, and sexualities of the poets included, they continued to favor poets work-
ing largely in a traditionally lyric or narrative vein. But in 2001, ecopoetics entered
a new era with the emergence of Jonathan Skinner’s journal ecopoetics. Skinner’s
journal was founded on the belief that innovative poetic form might constitute
an environmental ethics. In his editor’s preface, he criticized the environmental
movement for protecting “a fairly received notion of ‘eco’ from the proddings and
complications, and enrichments, of an investigative poetics” and members of the
poetic avant-garde for “their overall silence on . . . environmental questions.”29
Skinner drew attention to poets entirely different from those of Bryson and his
predecessors, turning to overtly political or experimental poets such as Juliana
8 Introduction
Spahr, Will Alexander, and Cecelia Vicuña. He also reinterpreted the ecopoetics
tradition, suggesting its indebtedness not only to writers like Gary Snyder but to
midcentury poets like Larry Eigner and Lorine Niedecker, who had been left out
of earlier attempts to paint modernism green.
Skinner’s interest in reclaiming experimental midcentury American poetry for
the ecopoetics canon was shared by two other critics. In This Compost, Jed Rasula
charted a new tradition as well, linking Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman to Black
Mountain poetics and the advent and influence of cybernetics and systems theory,
while Angus Fletcher in A New Theory for American Poetry connected Whitman and
John Clare to John Ashbery.30 While building on these studies and responding to
Keller’s call for more critical attention to experimental and contemporary ecopo-
etics, the contributors to Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field analyze how poetic form, in
addition or in contrast to content and in both past and present poetry, enacts what
Rasula calls a “stance toward the living planet.”31
Theorizing Ecopoetics
Despite interventions by critics such as Skinner, Keller, and Rasula, a methodolog-
ical reticence has persisted in scholarly writing in and on ecopoetics. This writing
has lagged behind some recent interdisciplinary and intersectional environmental
humanities scholarship. To return to Glotfelty’s terminology, we might say that
as ecopoetics as critical practice has shifted its focus away from representations
of nature in poetry and the establishment of a canon, entering its own more the-
oretical phase, its first point of order has been to establish how poetry fosters an
ethos or ethical relation. In the process, some studies have tended to reproduce
what Lawrence Buell has named ecocriticism’s preferred model, characterized by
what he calls an ecological holism.32 In Buell’s words, these critical approaches are
motivated primarily by “ethico-political commitments” to the imagination of the
protection, recuperation, and reconnection of humans with the natural world.33
It is not our intention to disparage the ethical commitments of ecopoetics. Rather,
we wish to chart the emergence of the idea of the ethical relation as a sine qua non
for ecopoetics and a first critical focus. Of particular import to this theoretical phase
has been Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth. Building on a tradition that locates
Introduction 9
modern environmental consciousness in Romantic poetry, Bate defines ecopoetics
“not as a set of assumptions or proposals about particular environmental issues,
but as a way of reflecting upon what it might mean to dwell with the earth.”34 He
relates experiential and political Romantic poetry—Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “poetry
in the general sense”—to Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological poetics, partic-
ularly the philosopher’s ethics of dwelling or being with.35 At the same time, Bate
distances himself from Heidegger’s politics by insisting that ecopoetics itself is
always prepolitical; its primary task is to help readers imagine, not enact, different
ways of living on the earth. Bate’s emphasis on poetics as a recuperative imaginative
act might be said to exemplify the preferred model that Buell describes.
Bate’s turn to phenomenology in the process of arguing that ecopoetics can
foster an ethos of “respecting the earth” is echoed elsewhere.36 Leonard Scigaj wrote
that “environmental poetry is capable of much subtlety, rich and complex states
of feeling and participation in nature, if one finds the right theoretical approach
to elucidate that complexity,” ultimately calling for a more ethically oriented ap-
proach.37 David Gilcrest and John Felstiner also made the ethical orientation central
to their studies of environmental poetics.38 The title of Felstiner’s book—Can Poetry
Save the Earth?—summarizes the hope and perhaps some of the hyperbole involved
in such arguments. If one of poetry’s greatest strengths is raising awareness and
heightening attention, he argues, “poetry could prompt new ventures, anything
from a thrifty household, frugal vehicle, recycling drive, communal garden, or lo-
cal business going green, to an active concern for global warming.”39 (Ross Gay’s
poems of praise to plants growing in the community garden he helped start in
Bloomington, Indiana, would seem to effusively uphold Felstiner’s claims.)40
Arguments for more ethically oriented forms of attention, consciousness, and
dwelling have been central to ecocriticism more broadly. Timothy Morton has argued
for “an ethical attitude we might call ‘coexistentialism’” based on our acknowl-
edgment of our “ethical entanglement with the other.”41 Notably, some ecocritics
have begun to vary their approaches by decentering, building on, or complicating
emphases on the ethical relation. Such work might be summarized as an effort to
move beyond: beyond greenness, beyond nature, beyond nature writing, or beyond
wilderness in terms that can be traced back to William Cronon’s influential essay
“The Trouble with Wilderness: Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.”42 Glotfelty’s
10 Introduction
prediction that ecocriticism would become more “interdisciplinary, multicultural,
and international” and more explicitly involved with social justice has been borne
out in critical work investigating the problem of environmental racism and exclu-
sion.43 This work has brought ecocriticism into conversation with postcolonialism
and global cosmopolitanism; drawn attention to the importance of environmental
thought in the African American literary tradition; and explored how people of
color, women, queer people, and disabled or chronically ill people negotiate their
environments differently from white cis men or able-bodied people.44 This work
also asks what environmental justice might mean when we broaden our definition
of who or what counts as an environmental subject.45
We see Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field as taking a step toward expanding the critical
methods and questions available to critics working on poetry, poetics, and the
environment. The sections of this book frame ecopoetics through concepts and
ideas that critics have begun to reconsider: from apocalypticism to embodiment
and from notions of environmental holism or purity to the concept of sustainability.
In order to critique these and other ideas, the essayists draw from an eclectic crit-
ical tool kit, mobilizing, extending, and challenging the insights of a diversity of
discourses, including speculative realism (Rob Halpern), black studies and black
radicalism (Joshua Bennett), decolonization theory (Matt Hooley), “queer crip”
feminism (Petra Kuppers), and resilience theory (Samia Rahimtoola), among others.
In the process of bringing a range of critical approaches to ecopoetics, they in turn
illuminate new directions for the methods that inform their readings.
In part 1, “The Apocalyptic Imagination,” the contributors draw on the work of
environmental historians and theorists in order to interrogate apocalyptic discourse,
given that, as yet, crisis rhetoric—which has been wielded in its modern form since
the advent of the nuclear age—has had little effect in terms of prompting humans
to prevent ecological collapse. Building on scholarship by such critics as Margaret
Ronda, who has theorized the “negative elegiac modes” of poets faced with rep-
resenting a nature that is no longer available to them, the contributors examine
the effects of apocalyptic rhetoric on human thought and the imagination.46 In her
essay on the poetry of Jorie Graham and Evelyn Reilly, “Making Art ‘Under These
Apo-Calypso Rays,’” Lynn Keller suggests that today the pervasiveness of crisis
rhetoric can result in “profound emotional and cognitive exhaustion” that prevents
Introduction 11
the kinds of attitudes or actions required to effectively respond to ecological crisis.
Going back to midcentury, Rob Halpern considers how poetry registered the difficulty
of imagining the end of the human in his essay “‘The Idiot Stone.’” Challenging
recent object-oriented ontologies and philosophies of extinction consciousness,
Halpern argues that for George Oppen the recurring figure of the stone allegorizes
what will have been here all along, even after humanity’s total destruction.
Halpern’s essay brings the dialectics of historical materialism to affect theory
in order to articulate how Oppen’s poetry registers human desires for consolation
in times threatened by ecological collapse, while exposing the impossibility of
catharsis. Under the conditions of modern capitalism, in which nature has been
supplanted by the commodity, and faced with the “seemingly suspended human
capacity to remake the world,” as Halpern puts it, what poetry has the capacity to
reveal more than anything is what it feels like to live the contradictions that define
the post-1945 environmental imagination. Keller, whose method is historical as
opposed to historical materialist, also develops an affect-oriented account of the
apocalyptic imagination, arguing that amid the grief and despair of apocalypticism,
poetry is notable for its turn to cultivating experiential and perceptual pleasures,
even humor.
Part 2, “Embodiment and Animality,” brings together four essays that focus on
ecopoetics and embodiment, drawing on and furthering critical plant and animal
studies. Three of these—Jonathan Skinner’s “Visceral Ecopoetics in Charles Olson
and Michael McClure,” Michelle Niemann’s “Playing in the Planetary Field,” and
Joshua Bennett’s “‘Beyond the Vomiting Dark’”—continue to extend a midcentury
archive. Petra Kuppers’s essay, “Writing with the Salamander,” brings ecopoetics
into the present, documenting a community performance project. Alfred North
Whitehead’s process philosophy and Charles Olson’s process-based proprioceptive
poetics—poetry originating in and experienced through the body—offer important
groundwork for Skinner’s and Niemann’s studies. Working through a different
tradition of embodied poetics, Bennett’s essay connects contemporary black rad-
ical and critical race theory to animal studies in order to show how cross-species
encounters can become sites for black resistance.
Skinner demonstrates how Beat poet Michael McClure draws from Olson and
scientific systems theory to develop a poetics of “spiritmeat,” in which composi-
12 Introduction
tion is an energetic process of connecting with animal being. Niemann also em-
phasizes the influence of science on midcentury poetics but suggests that Robert
Duncan fuses science with myth in order to revise Olson’s objectivism. She argues
that Duncan introduces the values of vulnerability and extravagance to open field
poetics—qualities that Duncan understood to be feminized, queer, and Romantic
and that Niemann reads as environmental categories. Both Skinner and Niemann
connect their readings to contemporary new materialisms, which reimagine the
agency and affect of and between materials and beings.
Bennett’s and Kuppers’s essays also reconceive of relations among animality,
agency, and affect—in both cases, by taking ecopoetics offshore. Bennett inves-
tigates how Melvin Tolson and Robert Hayden deploy sharks to simultaneously
articulate antiblack systems, such as the slave ship traversing the Atlantic Ocean,
alongside radical black resistance to those same systems. Kuppers chronicles the
Salamander performance project, which brought together people with disabilities
and their allies in pools, rivers, and oceans around the world. A participant herself,
Kuppers weaves voices and images to show how bodies that are often seen as the
result of ecological disaster—people with cognitive and physical differences—can
reclaim and remediate shared spaces. While immersed in different archives, both
Bennett and Kuppers show how poetry, in the words of Bennett, can explore the
freedom of the water, making “hazy the division between person and nonperson.”
Kuppers also navigates the open water among critical, personal, and art historical
writing. She demonstrates how ecopoetics might challenge conventions of literary
criticism in order to include other art forms—visual, sonic, and somatic.
In part 3, “Environmental Justice,” the contributors draw on the insights of
decolonial and critical race theory along with toxic discourse to show how poetry
confronts the unequal distribution of risk and harm in indigenous and African
American communities. Toxic discourse, as Lawrence Buell originally termed it,
has been central to environmental justice theory. As Giovanna Di Chiro writes,
“In contrast to the legacy of Anglo-American environmentalist concerns stem-
ming from nineteenth- and twentieth-century aspirations to protect an external,
nonhuman, and endangered ‘nature’ from ‘humanity’s’ excesses, environmental
justice . . . advocates focus on the everyday, embodied realities of people living in
polluted ‘sacrifice zones.’”47 However important toxic discourse continues to be
Introduction 13
for environmental justice theory, though, it remains vulnerable to cooptation by
an alarmist politics (to borrow Matt Hooley’s language) that retreats from or con-
demns who or what is perceived as other. Sarah Jaquette Ray argues that this type
of politics produces ecological others, groups of people whom the dominant white
society, through settler and white supremacist logics, deems a health risk that must
be managed and mitigated. In light of these complexities, Hooley’s and Angela
Hume’s essays simultaneously activate and interrogate toxic discourse through
readings of Diné poet Sherwin Bitsui and African American poet Claudia Rankine.
Hooley’s essay, “Toxic Recognition,” shows how the concept of toxicity as a shared
social vulnerability fails to recognize how differences of race and class determine
to what degree individuals and groups are exposed to environmental threats. He
argues that Bitsui enacts a fugitive ecopoetics that reveals how the collapse of all
publics into one is itself a toxic act. In her essay, “Toward an Antiracist Ecopoetics,”
Hume draws on critical race theory to develop an environmental justice approach
to Rankine’s twenty-year poetic investigation of the wasting body. Hume argues
that through practices of duration—by critically inhabiting states of what Fred
Moten calls exhaustion as a way of life—Rankine’s poetry exposes the debilitating
conditions for writing and life under white-dominant social, governmental, and
economic structures.
The final three essays in part 4, “Beyond Sustainability,” explore how poetry and
poetics might expose or even undermine problematic ideologies of environmental
management in neoliberal culture. Samia Rahimtoola’s essay, “Hung Up in the
Flood,” returns again to the ecopoetics of the mid-twentieth-century open form,
reconsidering the flexible, provisional practice of Lorine Niedecker’s poetry in con-
trast to the paradoxical rigidity of contemporary plans for landscape resilience and
urban sustainability. While resilience planning aims to make built environments
adaptable to a changing environment, much of it can end up preserving the status
quo rather than investigating “the very state of affairs that got us into trouble in the
first place,” as Stephanie LeMenager and Stephanie Foote have put it.48 By way of
contrast, Rahimtoola shows how Niedecker bases her poetics on the flux of both
the nonhuman and the built environments of her watery midland Wisconsin home.
Niedecker’s responsiveness to the interdependence of humans and nonhu-
mans resonates with what Margaret Ronda has elsewhere theorized as the “re-
14 Introduction
dundancy” of anthropogenic poetics in the Anthropocene, or what others have
called the Misanthropocene.49 Although artists and critics might be committed
to imagining the outsides of the human, these accounts remind us that both the
horror and the radical potential of our current geological era lie in the fact that
there is no outside. Where earlier generations of poets could settle themselves
beneath a linden tree and apostrophize its boughs, in a time of the “post-modern
pastoral” poets see not only greenery but the red of the slaughterhouse dripping
through.50 In this context, Joshua Schuster’s “Reading the Environs,” a study
of contemporary conceptual ecopoetics, challenges our sense of possibility for
ecological form, including its anthropogenic redundancies.
Schuster surveys surface reading, recycling, and mining big data in conceptual
poetry as ways of exploring the concept of ecology from outside the perspective of
sustainable development. In the process, he pushes back against conceptual poet
Kenneth Goldsmith’s likening of textual ecologies and the recycling of language
to living ecologies and the recycling of actual materials. As Schuster points out,
biological ecosystems are more than just models for systems dynamics; they are
living, fragile, and highly contingent. Moreover, recycling in literature can tell us
only so much about the actual chemical processes for the recycling of objects like
cars or batteries. Schuster then offers a reading of Canadian poet Adam Dickinson’s
The Polymers, a conceptual project with a more fraught understanding of language’s
relationship to the materials that make it, one that ultimately tarries with the reality
of our “polymerized world.”
Finally, we include Joan Retallack’s “Hard Days Nights in the Anthropocene,”
a prosimetric essay incorporating both prose and poetry in the spirit of the Ro-
man philosopher-poet Boethius. Constellating Boethius, American pragmatism,
social theory and ecotheory, civilization and etymological histories, poetry, and
more, Retallack enacts her own definition of ecopoetics: the embrace of alteri-
ties at a time when “anthropocenities” abound. For Retallack, the imagination
of “constructive alterities” via language experiments or wagers can help humans
grasp complex, agonistic nature-culture intrarelationships. Importantly, her essay
stages a pedagogical intervention, suggesting ways for teachers and students to
grapple with ecological and political crises through swerving, subversive, and
playful language practices.
Introduction 15
Environmental ethics remains at the heart of Retallack’s essay—the enduring
critical question of what to do, how to live, and how poetry might aid praxis. Yet
the restless form of her investigation exemplifies the ways in which both creative
and critical experiments in poetics can lead not only to new formal understandings
of complex problems but to new ways of thinking, responding to, and being with
those problems. Retallack’s work reminds us that literary theory must remain in
vibrant, dynamic relation with its histories, methods, and texts and that the po-
ethical wager has always also been an ecological one.51
16 Introduction
part one
The Apocalyptic Imagination
1 •
Making Art “Under These
Apo-Calypso Rays”
Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics
Lynn Keller
I belong to a generation born after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but
raised in their shadow. We grew up in the Cold War era of aboveground nuclear
testing and bomb shelters, with the constant threat of nuclear war, and in the time
of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, with its dire warnings of environmental poisoning.
The end of the world loomed over us. Just as John Ashbery, born in 1927, could
claim that his generation “grew up surreal,” I would venture that my own grew up
apocalyptic.1 No doubt my personal experience with the anxiety of such awareness
was partly responsible for my asserting in a published forum on sustainability
that apocalyptic literature was likely to be of limited usefulness to what I termed a
“literature toward sustainability.”2 My sense has been that apocalypticism can as
readily lead to paralysis as to action or if not to paralysis, then to a falsely placat-
ing sense of having already done something about the danger simply by fearfully
recognizing it. I’m not alone in having doubts about the current usefulness of
apocalyptic discourse. There’s a widespread sense that too much doom talk tends
to produce a kind of deafness in those addressed. The telling phrase “apocalypse
fatigue” appeared in the headline of a November 2009 article in the Guardian by
environmental strategists Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, where they
claim that apocalyptic rhetoric has only polarized the politics surrounding climate
change and undermined public faith in climate science.3
Yet apocalyptic thinking is so much a part of the Judeo-Christian inheritance
that in these times of increasing awareness of global warming, mass extinction,
and pervasive toxic pollution, apocalyptic rhetoric continues to attract poets, even
those who are skeptical of its power or conscious of its limitations. This essay
will examine how two such poets, Jorie Graham and Evelyn Reilly, have adapted
this rhetoric to the particular pressures posed by contemporary environmental
crisis awareness, even as they critique the mode or attempt to self-consciously
avoid its pitfalls. Jorie Graham, in the earnestly apocalyptic poems of Sea Change,
and Evelyn Reilly, in the mockingly metapoetic and self-consciously ambivalent
exploration of apocalyptic discourse in Apocalypso, employ differing poetics as well
as contrasting tones, yet both offer distinct modes of pleasure as counterpoint to
the potentially overwhelming darkness of apocalyptic thinking. Those pleasures,
moreover, are connected to a shared awareness of embodied embeddedness in
threatened ecosystems. In Graham’s poetry, such embeddedness puts into sharp
relief the aesthetic pleasures of the pastoral, which has often provided a literary
foil to apocalyptic destruction. In Reilly’s apocalyptic writing, embeddedness is
registered most through human connection to nonhuman animal species and their
destinies. For Reilly, paying attention to oncoming disaster in a context of ongoing
crisis requires especially the pleasures of humor—even if, as in the blues, the plea-
sure of laughter may be mixed with pain. As in Graham’s work, this double burden
of ongoing crisis and threatening apocalypse encourages renewed appreciation of
presently available sensory delights.
Lawrence Buell has argued that “apocalypse is the single most powerful master
metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal.”
He continues:
Such writing, in which “the imagination is being used to anticipate and, if possible,
forestall actual apocalypse,” may be justified by the hope of practical efficacy; for
Buell, “even the slimmest of possibilities is enough to justify the nightmare.”5 Yet
the potential pitfalls are many. The most commonly cited risk is that of seeming
to cry wolf; the public learns to dismiss claims of impending catastrophe as dire
predictions fail to prove true—even when the predicted scenarios may not have
materialized because people recognized and averted the danger. Other acknowl-
edged problems with apocalyptic environmental literature include its extreme moral
dualism (noted by Greg Garrard, among others) and the genre’s implicit reliance
on the “pastoral as the template for alternative scenarios.”6 When explaining “The
Trouble with Apocalypse,” Garrard notes that the rhetoric of catastrophe tends
to produce the crisis it purportedly describes, generates polarized responses, and
tends to simplify scientific findings and compromise scientific caution because
of millennial panic.7
However, the problems that most concern me in relation to poetry arise from
the issue with which I opened: how apocalypticism shapes politically consequential
individual and social affects. The onslaught of dire news concerning an endless
stream of seemingly irreversible anthropogenic environmental changes can produce
profound emotional and cognitive exhaustion and even a kind of shutdown that
discourages acts that might help avert catastrophe. The predictions of doom feel
too convincing, while the awareness of environmental transformation on scales
vast enough to warrant the new epochal designation of the Anthropocene only
reinforces feelings of hopeless disempowerment. Those emotions may weaken the
will toward collective action. What I’m describing may be the inverse of Garrard’s
assertion that “only if we imagine that the planet has a future, after all, are we likely
to take responsibility for it.”8
In considering ways around or through this state of apocalyptic emotional
exhaustion, I have found useful some ideas that Frederick Buell presents in From
Apocalypse to Way of Life. His central claim that “environmental crisis seems in-
abandon apocalypse for a sadder realism that looks closely at social and environmen-
tal changes in process and recognizes crisis as a place where people dwell, both in
their commonalities and in their differences from each other. Seen thus, problems will
have both gone beyond and become too intimate to suggest authoritarian solutions or
escape—for dwelling in crisis means facing the fact that one dwells in a body and in
ecosystems, both of which are already subject to considerable degradation, modification,
and pressure. No credible refuge from damage to these is at hand.10
The response to dwelling in crisis that Buell advocates is an initially individual act of
“coming to one’s senses in a damaged world.” A “persistent awareness of ‘embod-
iment’ and ‘embeddedness’ in ecosystems,” he argues, can teach one to “[dwell]
actively within rather than accommodating oneself to environmental crisis.” Such
awareness “makes people experience in their senses the full impact of dwelling in
environmental and ecosocial deterioration and rising risk,” which in turn, he op-
timistically claims, prompts more focus on ecological and social health and more
caring behavior toward the environment with which people recognize themselves
to be intimately involved.11 Happily for environmental poets with similar views,
among poetry’s long-celebrated powers is its ability to help us come to our senses in
literal as well as figurative ways. Moreover, “coming to one’s senses” can bring joy
as well as knowledge of damage or vulnerability. Buell’s “sadder realism” therefore
seems an inadequate term for the environmentally grounded vision of these poets.
While Buell urges abandonment of apocalyptic discourse in favor of writing
that emphasizes ongoing crisis, I contend that actively “dwelling in crisis” in the
way he outlines does not preclude anticipation of dramatic catastrophe on top of
the creeping degradations one already inhabits. Although Buell regards such ac-
tive dwelling as generating a commitment to care for the environment, that mode
of thinking and behaving does not necessarily increase one’s empowerment or
The line break between “Un” and “natural” conveys at once the wrenching, hitherto
abnormal changes taking place and how they yield a new normal that we must now face
as natural. Capturing the near inconceivability of this sea change, Graham oxymoroni-
cally observes, “The permanent is ebbing”—neatly conveying the sense of living in dire,
almost unimaginable crisis that Frederick Buell points to as the contemporary condition.
Then, in a single sentence, whose unspooling over two pages itself suggests the cascad-
ing consequences of changes in our ecosystems, Graham records some of the ways that
global warming is affecting our ecologically interdependent world, for instance,
. . . & quicken
me further says this new wind, &
according to thy
judgment, &
I am inclining my heart towards the end,
I cannot fail, this Saturday, early pm, hurling myself,
wiry furies riding my many backs, against your foundations and your
best young
tree, which you have come outside to stake again, & the loose stones in the sill.17
That the civilization or the species may well be doomed is suggested by the word “foun-
dations,” which denotes not just the substructure of the speaker’s home but the things
fundamental to her or her society’s life, while the line breaks temporarily isolating “best
young” speak to the precarious position of the younger generations whose future is
jeopardized. Using biblical phrasing that suggests that its work enacts divine judgment,
the voice—at once the poet’s and the wind’s—becomes that of an apocalyptic prophet.
This is writing of crisis and of apocalypse; the immediate experience of Graham’s
speakers is shadowed by consciousness both of present ecological degradation and risk
and of a devastating future. The present is a transitional moment in which seasons still
move in normal succession, but we notice their normalcy (“summer will be here / soon,
which is normal, which we notice is normal”) because incipient deviations tell us that
soon there won’t be seasons as we currently know them; once tediously reliable, the
“normal” now appears intensely precious, experienced on the verge of its dissolution.18
Looking toward that transformation, the speaker of “Positive Feedback Loop” positions
herself “in this silence that precedes,” from which she invites her reader to try to hold
The poem ends with a warning followed by a sensory celebration of the wondrous or-
dinary we now take for granted:
. . . & the day which comes when there are to be no more harvests from now on,
irrigation returns only as history, a thing made of text,
& yet, listen,
there was
rain, then the swift interval before evaporation, & the stillness
of brimming, & the
wet rainbowing where oil from exhaust picks up light, sheds glow, then
echoes in the drains where
deep inside the
drops fall individually, plink,
& the places where birds
interject, & the coming-on of heat, & the girl looking sideways carrying the large
bouquet of blue hydrangeas, shaking the water off, &
the wondering if this is it, or are we in for another round, a glance up, a quick step
over the puddle
The onward momentum of Graham’s rarely end-stopped lines effectively conveys the
density of the material joys of embodied life. Although her announcement about the
harvestless “day which comes” avoids the language of fable, the contrast between present
and future may still function partly as did Rachel Carson’s admonitory fable that opened
Silent Spring. At the same time, the particularization of Graham’s appreciative catalog
encourages readers to use their eyes and ears, to take notice.
The pleasures of sensory experience on which Graham focuses generally fall within
the realm of the literary pastoral. The perhaps suburban world in which her speakers take
pleasure functions as the pastoral’s green world traditionally has: as a precious oasis that
offers an escape from a diminished or corrupted world and that is the object of nostalgic
longing. Because Graham keeps in her readers’ view the backward-looking perspective
from a drastically degraded future in which our current world will look paradisal, her
speaker’s present time becomes an already nostalgically viewed past.
Invoking a pastoral realm as a foil—what Ursula Heise calls the “ideal socioecolog-
ical countermodel”—to the horrors of the apocalypse is a common move in apocalyptic
writing.26 Lawrence Buell has observed that “the pastoral logic . . . rests on the appeal to
the moral superiority of an antecedent state of existence when humankind was not at war
with nature in the way that prevails now.”27 Apocalyptic texts that invoke the pastoral are,
he notes, “activist appeals to nostalgia, accomplishing their interventions by invocations
of actual green worlds about to be lost.”28 Such uses of the pastoral generate discomfort
in some ecocritics, including Heise and sometimes Buell as well, because the mode sets
nature in opposition to culture and can serve as a retreat from environmental problems.
Graham seems aware of the ethical and political risks posed by her attraction to the
pastoral and to an associated aestheticization. “Futures” reflexively critiques her own
pastoral impulse as it explores how seeing the world can become a form of ownership.
The poem is set in “Midwinter. Dead of,” in a scene of environmental devastation: “the
crop destroyed / water everywhere not / drinkable, & radioactive waste in it, & human
bodily / waste.”29 Yet in the poem’s closing passages, the speaker finds herself turning
The burning river is an apocalyptic image, recalling the many destructive fires in
Revelation; to begin the action of beauty in these circumstances seems gruesomely
inappropriate, and the speaker’s sense of guilty transgression is evident in her plea.
Lawrence Buell astutely observes that “in pastoral, beauty never functions only as
critique. At some level there is always the chance that the text will tempt the reader
to see all sugar and no pill and that even hard thrusts will get deflected into quaint
excursions.”31 If this is a risk in Graham’s Sea Change, “Futures” might be read as
a combination of confession and warning to readers to resist such deflections.
“Positive Feedback Loop” also exposes the escapist potential in the pastoral, but
here Graham avoids potential criticism by making it clear that this refuge is only
temporary. The speaker ends a divagating inward meditation by relocating herself
first “in the Great Dying again”—dwelling in a crisis of extinctions—but then also
in “a / lovely evening” when, after a bit of food and drink, “we / shall walk / out
onto the porch and the evening shall come on around us, unconcealed, / blinking,
abundant, as if catching sight of us, / everything in and out under the eaves, even
the grass seeming to push up into this our / world as if out of / homesickness for
it, / gleaming.”32 This moment is one of pastoral pleasure: of inhabiting a simpler
“Plu” suggests not only the French for “rain” and the past participle of being pleased
but also the current internet abbreviation for “people like us.” At least two of the
three meanings—pleasure and community—have to be artificially generated here,
in “this sober landscape // littered with so much / dreamware wreckage” where the
speaker is “so lonely / [she’s] been talking to [her] software / for three years.”38
The darkness of this dystopian series arises in part from the way in which tech-
nical vocabularies are superposed on emotional ones, conveying half-successful
attempts to repress emotion, particularly a nearly disabling grief. Here, for instance,
is a report sent from what is identified as one of the original build sites:
kneeling
yrs39
linked to revelation—the vision of an escape from history into ahistorical bliss, pref-
aced however by an era of extreme violence and devastation. And it’s the descriptions
While every sequence in Apocalypso reflects an apocalyptic or dystopic vision of the fu-
ture, each also engages in some form of play that brings pleasure. The time stamps for
“Dreamquest Malware,” for instance, make an allusive joke, since ZMT, with which
they all begin, is a drug for migraines. Drawing sometimes upon the linguistic inven-
tiveness of the French architect François Blanciak, who in his book Siteless has drawn
1,001 imagined siteless “building forms” to which he gives names, Reilly produces
some grimly hilarious documents.42 Here’s the beginning of one, addressed to a Ms. T,
where the speaker’s righteous tone in the context of the faux-techno vocabulary produc-
es a comic effect:
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
Here Reilly’s speaker addresses John of Patmos “as we are just about to cross / the
George Washington Bridge”:
Excuse me,
a question while we are driving
I sd., John, I sd
what do you have anyway
against historical time?55
Even as the lack of apparent urgency in her question with its stalling “anyway”
resonates comically against Creeley’s hard-hitting conclusion, the question none-
theless carries a good deal of force. For while Reilly invites an awareness of human
insignificance in geological time, historical time is what matters immediately to
her—and, she implies, is what should matter to us all. If historical time is only
something to be transcended en route to a blessed eternity where all is made new,
then we’ve little reason to watch where we’re going.
This is how
what would will have been
being a diversion
merged instead
into a vision
of preliminary descent
The passage brings together much that the poem values in this moment of environ-
mental crisis and incipient apocalypse: concern for the well-being of nonhuman
life, embrace of technology as an aid (though not a sole solution), recognition of
the needs of the weak and oppressed (recalling the Afro-Caribbeans who invented
calypso), and appreciation of the very real pleasures of inhabiting a body on this
planet—of singing and dancing and enjoying the sunshine.
At one point in her apocalyptic comedy, Reilly contemplates the section of
Bruegel’s Fall of the Rebel Angels that appears on her book’s cover and remarks, “So
many pretty revels / in these devastation pictures.”67 There’s a critique of aesthet-
icization there—and a reflexive acknowledgment that artists like herself may be
tempted to play with apocalypse just because it offers such an amazing array of
powerful images: “A big artistic impetus this endtime vision.”68 Reilly is wary of
the prettiness that is Graham’s forte, just as her sharp ironicism contrasts with the
earnest self-examination that Graham offers. By staying with the book of Revelation
throughout “Apocalypso: A Comedy,” Reilly remains more consistently focused
on apocalyptic discourse than Graham does in the poems of Sea Change. Yet Reilly’s
poetry also acknowledges, as Graham’s demonstrates, the psychological difficulties
of dwelling unrelentingly in preapocalyptic crisis. Their poetics differ significantly,
yet both poets’ works highlight the precarious dynamics and unsteady purposes
of apocalyptic writing in the context of ongoing environmental crisis.
The poets combine an awareness of living in crisis with a belief that we are
either poised on the cusp of environmental apocalypse or already tipped into it.
Rather than following Frederick Buell’s advice to leave aside apocalyptic prediction,
At the center of George Oppen’s effort to think and feel the present tense of disaster
at midcentury there is a stone. From a professed “hatred of the ‘Stone universe’” to
“The pure joy / Of the mineral fact,” Oppen’s geological imagination moves from
metaphysical rage against the seeming imminence of nuclear annihilation—born
of what he refers to in a 1962 poem called “Time of the Missile” as the atom’s “stone
chain reaction”—to a paradoxical affirmation of factual clarity in the stone’s im-
penetrable opacity.1 The stone emerges in his work as an ecopoetical figure avant
la lettre accentuating a seemingly insoluble tension between the human and the
inhuman while marking the site where the logic of that tension breaks down: “I
would go home o go home to the rough // stone.”2
Oppen isn’t alone in summoning the mineral in relation to a specter of anni-
hilation at midcentury.3 Muriel Rukeyser’s great poem “Waterlily Fire,” also from
1962, offers another elemental illustration of similar thematic material organized
around a stony image of disaster. “I go to the stone street turning to fire,” the poem
begins, going on to sustain an apocalyptic scene wherein stone metaphorizes what
will have always been here, connecting our postholocaust remains with what exists
here, now.
The universe is stone but we are not. The universe’s time is some kind of elapsed time,
whatever that may be, but our time is historical time, and the difference between one
generation and a next, and we make that time. . . .
. . . the poem is a poem of hatred of the ‘Stone universe’ and of love for ourselves
and Linda—and all we have made of the universe by looking at it. I’m afraid that goes
to real metaphysics in the Missile. Says among other things that we didn’t make the
atom we are made of, but all the rest is subjective. I believe it—and it matters to me.
Have to say it. That’s why it opens with the lyric of praise for vision . . .
You suggest it isn’t really the missile—that it could have been said at any time that
‘This is the way the world ends’ etc. Sure you’re right. I didn’t really mean to disguise
it as a political or topical poem—I just meant that I thought these things must be in
everyone’s mind with the threat of the missile right there. . . .
. . . I don’t understand . . . You think it unmanly to admit? Or braver to pretend that
it doesn’t exist—the stone universe and its own stone chain reaction that might really—
(And come to think of it, that’s why I have to keep the name of the missile—the poem
describes something like despair because destruction by the missile would indeed be
total defeat and meaninglessness in the future perfect.)
I’m protesting at length because all of the poems are about this same thing. As
whose are not? The shorter lyrics are simply what the opening of the Missile is—‘The
—a place a place at least to begin. But place in another sense: place without the words,
the wordless sphere in the mind—Or rather the wordless sphere with things including
a word or so in it. . . . That I still believe to be, as they say, Poem: the thing in the
mind before the words to be able to hold it even against the language11
In my effort to throw the realism of this place into relief, I will turn to Quentin
Meillassoux’s After Finitude, whose speculative realism, I wish to show, can only fail
ecopoetics because, like the various object-oriented ontologies it accompanies, it
can’t account for its own historical motivations to think the “beyond” of history
itself. For Meillassoux, this “beyond” manifests in a radically exterior world that
exists independent of our language and consciousness and whose figures, what he
refers to as the “ancestral trace” or “arche-fossil,” echo Oppen’s “stone universe”
and “mineral fact” with an uncanny correspondence.12 Yet Oppen’s writing cuts a
distinct ecopoetical figure whose objectivist realism mustn’t be confused with its
speculative doubles. In short, while speculative realism defaults to an ahistorical
metaphysics, Oppen’s realist poetics registers the historical conditions that mo-
tivate that encounter.
Oppen returned to writing poetry in 1959 after a period of self-imposed exile and
a concomitant poetic silence coextensive with his political commitments. These
commitments included participation in Communist Party organizing during the years
of the Popular Front, as well as service during World War II. This was followed by a
decade in Mexico beyond the reach of the House Un-American Activities Committee,
under whose power it was as if language itself had contracted a terminal illness
Width.
The hand for holding,
Legs for walking,
The eye sees! It floods in on us from here to Jersey tangled
in the grey bright air!
My love, my love,
We are endangered
Totally at last. Look
Anywhere to the sight’s limit: space
Which is viviparous:
This is a poem about vision, about looking, and about the complicated relations
among seeing, creating, and destroying. The poem’s two parts hang on a frag-
Obj e c t i v i s t R e a l i s m , o r T h e D i a l e c t i c
of Clarity in the Age of the Bomb
Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful
thing in the world,
A limited, limiting clarity
In From Apocalypse to Way of Life, Frederick Buell argues that it’s time to “aban-
don apocalypse for a sadder realism,” a realism that registers the insufficiency of
apocalyptic rhetoric to organize an adequate political response to ecocidal crisis.22
Oppen may have well anticipated Buell’s “sadder realism.” “It is true,” he writes
in a letter from 1966, “I speak of a realist poetry: Realist in that it is concerned
with a fact which it did not create.”23 This would be “the mineral fact,” as he will
come to call it, a figure whose genealogy stretches back to another figure in his
ecopoetical imagination, that of “the idiot stone,” at once luminously clear and
impenetrably opaque. “I like cars and such,” he writes in the 1959 letter to Zimet,
“I like them when they’re handled beautifully. I like the things that people have
wrested out of the idiot stone. The universe—it should excuse me, but I don’t like
it.”24 Despite his avowed preference for the things people make over the things
we will never make—a preference, that is, for cars over rocks—Oppen’s poetics
at midcentury grants an ontological privilege to the stone itself but not to the
things wrested from it.
Twenty-five years after his first collection, 1934’s Discrete Series, where “Nothing
can equal in polish and obscured / origin that dark instrument / A car,” Oppen’s
I believe
in the world
because it is
impossible.31
According to the terms of Oppen’s realism, the stone inclines toward a place of
maximum distance, an autonomous “outside.” His realist desire to encounter some-
thing that the mind did not make anticipates the speculative realist’s endeavor to
think the radical autonomy of the object independent of human cognition. Indeed,
Quentin Meillassoux’s various figures of “fossil matter” offer compelling analogues
for Oppen’s “mineral fact” and “idiot stone,” while also suggesting a placeholder
for Francis Ponge’s “farther back than the Flood.”41 Just to be clear, Meillassoux’s
speculative realism aims “to think what there can be when there is no thought”—
“From Disaster” historicizes catastrophe, whose referent here could be the crisis
of European Jewry, the immigrants’ figural “shipwreck” on the shores of America,
or the metaphysics of economic value itself. Moreover, the poem suggests its own
historical imperative to find meaning—“lyric valuables”—against the ground of
“bare sunlight” where it cuts its figure. One might also hear, in the word “ultimate-
ly,” an echo of Oppen’s “Totally at last” in the final lines of “Time of the Missile,”
as if the opening lines of “From Disaster” were situated in the immediate wake of
that “stone chain reaction” as the dust clears. If one reads “ultimately” as “finally”
or “in the end,” Oppen can be read as arousing the future perfect tense, folding
time on itself so that what will have been here after the human history of meaning
ends will be nothing but air and light. But the bareness that will have been here
cohabits with what is already with us, here, now, however imperceptible that bare-
ness has become. Its temporality haunts the present tense separated from itself
by some discontinuity or crisis that we must learn how to think if only in order to
save ourselves. “Small lawns of home”—where the “morality of hope” converges
with democracy’s midcentury promise of wealth whose “valuables” suggest a very
different realization and betrayal of the poem’s desire for historical meaning—have
come not only to occupy the bare place of air and light but to foreclose even the
possibility of perceiving it.47 One thing Oppen’s poems model, then, is the work
of ecopoetics to render that discontinuity—say, the space between ontological and
‘1875’
For Oppen, then, a poem’s ontological status—what the poem is in its essence, a
linguistic trace of an encounter with what will still be here when we stop believing
in it—emerges in opposition to the poem’s ideological status—what the poem
means, re-presents, or communicates. It’s the disjunction between the ontological
and the ideological that opens the space of his vertigo. Arguably, this is part of a
structure of feeling that betrays, at the physiological level, an acute anxiety at a
historically specific moment when ontological being coincides with the specter of
its own annihilation. By extension, even the poem’s ontological autonomy appears
threatened. In other words, the autonomy at stake in a poem like “Time of the Mis-
sile,” the radical autonomy of the atom after having been harnessed by the bomb,
has implications for the status of the poem itself. This is so because, for Oppen,
“the poem replaces the thing, the poem destroys—its meaning—I would like the
poem to be transparent, to be inaudible, not to be.”50 Just as the autonomy of the
atom has been captured by the missile, so too has the stony thing been captured
by the poem. Similarly, one might say that ontological being has been captured by
ideology much in the way that a thing’s use value has been captured by the com-
modity form. The poem can thus only fail to achieve the strange autonomy that
Oppen desires for it, and this is characteristic of his realism. “The poem destroys,”
he writes, and the poet is implicated. He would prefer for the poem “not to be,” as
the poem’s persistent being contains a reminder that historical action, for him,
has ended in failure, and this incites despair.
Against the grain of modernism’s insistence on the finite entanglement of being
and thought—an entanglement that renders it difficult to conceive of subjectivity
and objectivity independent of one another—Oppen’s figure of the stone offers a
placeholder for a speculative site beyond the terms of this entanglement, a nonsite
of autonomy and the equivalent of his “nothing place [that] reclaims our atomic
structure.” And yet, by contradictorily desiring the poem to be the equivalent of the
autonomous stone to which it is obliged to subordinate itself, Oppen reinstates
Feedback
McClure’s correspondence with Olson, in which he developed his own response
to Olson’s influential “Projective Verse” and associated poems such as “The King-
fishers,” occurred at the same time that he was writing the texts of poetic revolt
Unlike the projective poetry line that comes “from the breath,” McClure’s lines
suck breath into their twisting vortices (“swirls,” as he likes to call them) of ex-
clamation, observation, invocation, assertion, confession.29 The poems hunger
for breath as they chastise, challenge, goad, and question their own vitality. The
opening and closing stanzas of “Rant Block” include the lines:
Over the next decade, Olson will reforge topos/typos/tropos in the crucible of
proprioception to relocate theme (topos) as placement in the cavity of the body, con-
cept (typos) as working with one’s given bent, the disposition of one’s organs, and
metaphor (tropos) as twisting of phrases and imagery through visceral engagement
with language. In Proprioception, he directs us to “the cavity of the body, in which
the organs are slung,” to “place” the unconscious.56
The “Mother Earth Alone” of “the Place of it All” is less deep ecological
fantasy of union with a primordial earth mother (Earth Day would not be found-
ed for another four months, in the spring following Olson’s death) than it is an
appeal to the unknown of “self ’s insides,” to the dark condition of self as “an
impediment of creation”57—what in Proprioception he calls “the intervening thing,
the interruptor, the resistor.”58 Rather, the emerging ecopoetics of The Maximus
Poems, as explored in Proprioception and enacted in the Dogtown poems, places what
Olson calls logography with physical ritual, guided by an extension of writing into
mapping, pursuing energy pathways back to the body. For McClure, impediment
enables creation; with beast language, he attempts to connect to an environment
(the field) precisely where the body interrupts.
Beast Language
Emerging from his own “dark night of the soul,” McClure also wrote from darkness
of self but differed in his vector of attention: “The use of writing is not to lead out
but to enact and create appendages of the body, of personal physiology. Making a
radiance or darkness into an actual morphological part, an extension even.”59 The
poem is not a negotiation of physiology, not a placing of psychic energies, but is
itself physiological, an appendage of the body. The most direct expression of this
“gestural biography,” McClure’s beast language, including the ninety-nine poems
of Ghost Tantras, emerged from this period.60 “SILENCE THE EYES! BECALM THE
SENSES!” begins Ghost Tantra 49—made famous in 1964 when McClure roared it to
lions at the San Francisco Zoo—commanding an ascetic (or religious) turn inward.61
51
!The Feast! processes the same “dark night of the soul” recounted in the fuck
manifesto of Meat Science, a response to McClure’s animist vision of life moving
through a “chain of meat”—a monist vision in tension with his postpeyote identifi-
cation with Olson’s admission in “Human Universe” that “the individual who peers
out from that flesh is precisely himself, is a curious wandering animal like me.”71
Practically an ars poetica, this is a poem about energy. The sequence talisman,
song, predation, collection, evapotranspiration links multiple systems. Hunting
humans leave talismans and songs; the atmosphere collects these songs. Song hunts
energy, and human culture is enmeshed in fog and flesh. The second sentence of
the poem reverses temporality, as the footprint of present human culture, set on the
future, appears in the emerging light of the Anthropocene. What we do now sets
its footprint on the future. Is the affective play of song, the poem seems to ask, on
the side of sentiment or of hard peering forward? Can song be as negentropic as
bodies? The attempt to answer entangles one in the paradoxes of thermodynam-
ics: is entropy undergone or produced? It’s impossible to tell at the boundary. The
poem sings ambivalence with visceral affirmation.
McClure’s is a poetry of paradox and uncertainties, in the sense in which quantum
physics makes uncertainty integral to knowledge, and in which it differs markedly
from the certainties (if not pieties) by which science is known in so much of the
work that has come to characterize ecopoetics: “so that it may accommodate,” as he
puts it in Scratching the Beat Surface, “both Negative Capability and agnosia—knowing
through not knowing.”86 For McClure, ecopoetics does not begin with a known fact
(such as anthropogenic climate change) but with felt “primate nature”—with a love
It is not obvious that Robert Duncan wrote ecopoetry as that term is still most often
defined: his poems do not warn or mourn, and they are not devoted to describing a
particular place.1 Duncan’s work is, however, central to the projectivist ecopoetics
that Black Mountain poets developed in the 1950s and ’60s, a poetics that would
later thoroughly inform the contemporary, linguistically experimental poetries
represented in Jonathan Skinner’s journal, ecopoetics.2 Like Charles Olson and other
Black Mountain poets, Duncan was taken with systems thinking and process phi-
losophy, but he added an essential focus on psychology, asking how an individual
can participate in complex systems. If we are to participate in such systems without
trying to control them, he realized, we have to allow ourselves to be vulnerable.
Duncan often figures this vulnerability as queer, feminized, and Romantic.3 In
part through his reading of H.D.’s work, he came to see that an unending dialec-
tic between limit and emergence, discipline and spontaneity, fosters this saving
vulnerability—not only in the poet but also in the mollusk whose shell allows
it to both open and close to the tides. In his essays, Duncan crafted a myth that
knits religion and science together to trace the rhythms of this unending dialectic
through which matter, life, consciousness, and poetry emerge. At the same time,
he rejected the thermodynamic concept of entropy—the idea that the universe is
inevitably running down to a state in which matter is uniformly dispersed—and the
nihilism that linked entropy with Cold War atomic threat, conventional biopolitics,
and thanatopolitics. Duncan’s rejection of doom, belatedness, and apocalyptic
thinking not only inspired the counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s but also makes
his ecopoetics an important resource for our current moment.
Duncan’s ecopoetics of possibility starts with admitting that humans are vul-
nerable. In his essay “Ideas of the Meaning of Form,” he contends that reason
itself is a “tribal magic” invented to ward off unreason, heterodox religion, and the
imagination, which threaten to upset our control of self and world.4 His critique
of reason thus resonates with ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood’s critique
of rationalism, which for her is to reason as scientism is to science. That is, both
Duncan and Plumwood criticize not the act of reasoning but cultural convictions
that rationalism is the only legitimate way of knowing. Plumwood argues that
rationalism obscures how human subjects depend on functioning ecosystems
and even on our own bodies; while we humans assume that we can transcend the
nonhuman environment at will, through technology or science, we in fact rely on
it for our very existence.5 Like Plumwood, Duncan sees reason as a way to avoid the
knowledge that we depend on a world we cannot control—a world, in his words,
“where information and intelligence invade us, where . . . we become creatures,
not rulers, of what is.”6
Duncan’s vulnerable receptivity and participatory play are crucial for an ecopo-
etics that does not position the poet as Jeremiah crying that the people must reform
to avert apocalypse. By the time Duncan began his mature work in the mid-1950s,
environmental decline was a well-established theme in American poetry, from
Robert Frost wondering “what to make of a diminished thing” to Robinson Jeffers
elaborating his “inhumanism.” Duncan refuses the tone of tragedy or jeremiad;
instead, the poet’s role is to practice and model a participation that respects the
agency of others, human or more than human, in the compositional field. Also,
unlike much contemporary nature poetry, Duncan’s work does not describe partic-
ular places. Rather, in his essays, he crafts an origin story that syncretizes scientific
the shell-fish:
The shell is itself a protective spell, guarding the “flabby, amorphous hermit /
within” against “the sea thrust.” In comparing the shellfish to a “craftsman,” H.D.
not only indicates that we can read it as a figure for the poet but also suggests that
art or poetry itself should protect the poet-hermit’s hidden life: “my shell-jaws
snap shut // at invasion of the limitless, / ocean-weight; infinite water // can not
crack me.”27 In this poem, Duncan writes, “the individual life begets itself from
and must also hold itself against the enormous resources of life, against the too-
much”; it must “take heart in what would take over the heart in its greater power.”28
He constantly moves among varied registers of life in The H.D. Book and his essays,
using each to interpret the others: here the biological life of the shellfish, which
lives in the sea by shutting the sea out, echoes the sociopolitical and cultural life
of oppressed sects that survive both within and against the dominant order and
the hermetic life of poets who dissent from conventional values. Eric Keenaghan’s
interpretation of Duncan recognizes this: his use of life to encompass vitalism,
biography, life writing, and biopolitics picks up on the mobility of life in Duncan’s
own work.29 Duncan reads H.D.’s poem in biological, political, and imaginative
registers at once; for him, “the Trilogy is the story of survival” in all those senses.30
The passage in which the shellfish opens to the tide lends Duncan not only
this conceptual structure but also key images for his myth of ecopoetic origins.
H.D. writes:
prompted by hunger,
it opens to the tide-flow:
While H.D. emphasizes limit and the poet’s self-protection, she acknowledges
the need for interchange between the shellfish and its environment. “Hunger”
requires the shellfish to open “to the tide-flow”; it must make itself vulnerable in
order to survive.
Duncan underscores this necessary vulnerability; for him, boundaries and other
always-provisional closures ultimately protect and allow for receptivity.32 For him,
the shell “sustains ‘that flabby, amorphous hermit / within’—the possibility for
the living organism to keep its tenderness to experience, its vital weakness.” This
vitality is not a Bergsonian élan vital, a vital force or strength, but a “vital weakness”;
Duncan does not endorse the vitalism of the strong but recognizes that “tender-
ness to experience” enables life.33 To participate in cocreating the world, living
creatures must receive as well as give; the shellfish has to open “to the tide-flow”
as much as it has to protect itself against it. For Duncan, the poet also must foster
receptivity: “We speak of the poet as ‘gifted’ . . . and we obscure in this the fact that
the willingness of the poet to receive, his acceptance of what is given is initial to
the gift. The poet must be a host to Poetry, ‘open to the tide flow.’”34
In The H.D. Book, Duncan begins drafting the astounding passage in “Towards
an Open Universe” in which he crafts a myth of origins for planet, life, self, and
poetry. I will turn to that passage in a moment, but first I want to note how he draws
an essential analogy between the individual human body and the planet from his
reading of H.D.: “A correspondence is felt between the tide of the sea and the tide
of the blood, between ebb and flow and the systole and diastole, between the valves
We are, all the many expressions of living matter, grandchildren of Gaia, Earth and
Uranus, the Heavens. Late born, for the moon and ocean came before. The sea was our
first mother and the sun our father, so our sciences picture the chemistry of the living
as beginning in the alembic of the primal sea quickened by rays of the sun and even,
beyond, by radiations of the cosmos at large. Tide-flow under the sun and moon of the
sea, systole and diastole of the heart, these rhythms lie deep in our experience and when
we let them take over our speech there is a monotonous rapture of persistent regular
stresses and waves of lines breaking rhyme after rhyme. There have been poets for
whom this rise and fall, the mothering swell and ebb, was all. Amoebic intelligences,
dwelling in the memorial of tidal voice, they arouse in our awake minds a spell, so that
we let our awareness go in the urgent wave of the verse. The rhyming lines and the re-
peating meters persuade us. To evoke night and day or the ancient hypnosis of the sea
is to evoke our powerful longing to fall back into periodic structure, into the inertia of
uncomplicated matter. Each of us, hungry with life, rises from the cast of seed, having
Here Duncan’s sonorous invocations of a primordial scene echo through his refer-
ences to periodic structure and chromosomes to create an ecopoetic origin myth out
of scientific realism. I suspect that part of the broad appeal of “Towards an Open
Universe”—including for other poets, such as Lorine Niedecker—lies precisely
in his ability to evoke the mythic through secular forms of scientific knowledge.40
He uses poetry to syncretically join science with religion and myth, stitching them
together in a way that honors the differences, tensions, and contradictions among
them. As in practices of religious syncretism that involve merging two traditions
without treating either as more true than the other, Duncan blends scientific, re-
ligious, mythic, and psychological discourses without making any of them the
primary way of knowing.
By putting an essentially scientific origin story in both mythic and embodied
terms, Duncan’s “Towards an Open Universe” transvalues scientific language,
taking it back from a culturally dominant rationalism and making it available for
poets and environmentalists to use in constructing alternative ways to live. To
overcome the fatalism associated with the military-industrial complex’s version of
technoscience, his myth incorporates both the thermodynamic concept of entropy
and Freud’s death drive as stages within an endless dialectic.41 His poetics is thus
ecological; he does not privilege biological life as ordered while matter is chaotic
but instead represents life and death, organic beings and inanimate matter, as
different kinds of emergent order, both essential to planetary rhythms.
The rhythm of the sea, in the passage quoted above, is double-hinged: it informs
the lively rhythm of the heart and calls up a longing for death, gesturing toward
the repetitive patterns of inorganic matter. This sea is both what Duncan calls a
“mothering swell and ebb” and Walt Whitman’s sea that seethes “Death, Death,
Death, Death, Death” in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”42 By contending
that a “powerful longing to fall back into periodic structure” defines the living,
Duncan recalls Freud’s death drive.43 In Duncan’s myth, the death drive corresponds
to living beings’ physical return to matter in “the chemistry of death”; it is the
psychological aspect of patterns that are also biochemical. He does not mention
Phases of meaning in the soul may be like phases of the moon, and, though rationalists
may contend against the imagination, all men may be one, for they have their source
out of the same earth, mothered in one ocean and fathered in the light and heat of one
sun that is not tranquil but rages between its energy that is a disorder seeking higher
intensities and its fate or dream of perfection that is an order where all light, heat,
being, movement, meaning and form, are consumed toward the cold. The which men
have imagined in the laws of thermodynamics.44
Duncan rewrites entropy in part by reversing its terms: the sun’s “energy” is not an
order but a “disorder seeking higher intensities,” while the stasis of final entropic
dispersal is not only an “order” but even a “dream of perfection.” He pictures the
sun as raging between energetic disorder and the order of death, anticipating the
endless dialectic he elaborates in “Towards an Open Universe.”
In an echo of the way he reverses “order” and “disorder” here, Duncan frustrates
a simple opposition between life and matter, animacy and inanimacy, by using
paradoxical pairs of terms for them in “Towards an Open Universe.” The first of
these appears in the long passage from that essay that I quoted earlier, where he
refers to the periodic structure of matter. He borrows its counterpart—life as an
aperiodic structure—from Schrödinger’s What Is Life? Even more important is the
other pair of terms that Duncan uses: equilibrium and disequilibrium. Schrödinger
defines life as that which “evades the decay to equilibrium.”45 In Duncan’s words,
life is a disequilibrium that resists the equilibrium of death.
This paradoxical view of life as an aperiodic structure, a disequilibrium, that
emerges from and holds out against the periodic structure of matter and the equi-
librium of death transforms the conventional opposition between life as order and
death as disorder into a contrast between two different kinds of order. By speaking
of the periodic structure of matter and the equilibrium of death, Duncan insists
that the inanimate has its own order—in fact, a more regular order than that of
She compares the soul’s objectification with ‘the stone marvel’ of the mollusc, ‘hewn
from within,’ but it may represent a spiritual force of the cosmos beyond the biological.
This ‘life’-will towards objective form is ultimately related to an animal crystallization,
and the images of jewel, crystal, ‘as every snowflake / has its particular star, coral or
prism shape’ suggest that there is—not an inertia but a calling thruout the universe
toward concretion. The poet in the imminence of a poem (what now after Olson we
may see as the projection) answering such a calling as a saint has his calling or a hero
his fate. ‘Inexorably.’47
Here Duncan repositions both Olson’s projective verse and the traditional idea of
inspiration—that a poet does not write by choice but takes dictation from gods
or muses—in a wider field: the imperative that the poem emerge no longer dis-
tinguishes poetry but, rather, links it with biological growth and the formation of
snowflakes.
In its “sense of planet,” “Towards an Open Universe” arguably anticipates the
environmental imagination sparked by the photographs of Earth from space that
Stewart Brand put on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog in the late 1960s and early
’70s.48 But while those photographs of Earth were obtained through the techno-
scientific might of the state and the military-industrial complex, Duncan does not
pretend to possess a masterful view from nowhere. His myth imagines the planetary
The poem
feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse,
to breed itself,
a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping.
In Fred’s speech, the brook becomes a vast analogy for “the stream of everything
that runs away”: “Some say existence,” he continues, “Stands still and dances, but it
runs away, / It seriously, sadly, runs away / To fill the abyss’ void with emptiness.” In
doing so, “It flows between us, over us, and with us.” Fred paints a gloomy picture of
The universe’s entropic current flows with the speakers, carrying them along.
Fred explains resistance—all that seems to run counter to this entropic pull—as
a fleeting, paradoxical phenomenon that entropy itself generates. While Duncan
suggests that “striving against” the current is possible, Frost’s speaker insists that
entropy is in fact “unresisted.” Everything results from “the universal cataract of
death” and its self-resistance. Thus the brook sends up living beings, and they in
turn send up their creations, like the mechanical clock.
Fred’s elaborate analogy arguably stands as the point of Frost’s poem, though
the poem’s dialogic structure implies a different epistemology than its content. The
poem memorializes Fred’s pronouncement despite its avowed dissolution of history
into entropy. Its gender politics are also fascinatingly problematic: Fred ridicules
his unnamed wife, who says that the brook is waving to her “in an annunciation,”
for taking it “off to lady-land.” She responds by coaxing him out of his pout so
that he gives the speech quoted above, and she concludes the poem with another
compromise: “‘To-day will be the day of what we both said.’”53
In “Poetry, A Natural Thing,” Duncan responds to Frost, but as in his essays
he also takes on the third law of thermodynamics and Freud’s death drive; against
these assertions of death’s victory, he celebrates what strives against it. He not only
invokes the image of the river and the notion of going back “toward the source,” but
he also transmutes Frost’s “white wave,” passively thrown up by the stream, into the
salmon that swims against the current under its own power. While Frost’s wave is
created by the brook and only apparently resists its current, Duncan’s salmon has
the agency to actually resist and even make it back up the falls, though a quote that
The line in quotes is from a rejection letter that John Crowe Ransom wrote to Dun-
can.55 By calling Duncan’s work contrived, Ransom implies that his poems should
seem more natural. This kind of naturalness, though, does not involve conceiving
of a poem as a salmon (let alone a moose); instead, it draws on the New Critical
idea that poems should be written in a natural diction, defined through the work
of a poet like Frost.
In celebrating the moose, Duncan embraces both extravagant nature and ex-
travagant contrivance, showing them to be one. Ransom, in calling Duncan’s lines
“a little heavy, a little contrived,” takes for granted not only that all poems should
aim for an appearance of naturalness rather than contrivance but also that “con-
trived” and “natural” are opposites. Duncan’s perverse image of the moose rebuts
just this assumption: the moose’s “extravagant antlers” may look like they were
constructed by an inept artisan, but they are natural. Just as the new antlers that
Those African persons in ‘Middle Passage’ were literally suspended in the ‘oceanic,’ if we
think of the latter in its Freudian orientation as an analogy for undifferentiated identity:
removed from the indigenous land and culture, and not-yet ‘American’ either, these
captive persons, without names that their captors would recognize, were in movement
across the Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all. Inasmuch as, on any given day,
we might imagine, the captive did not know where s/he was, we could say that they
were culturally ‘unmade,’ thrown in the midst of a figurative darkness that ‘exposed’
their destinies to an unknown course.
—H o r t e n s e S p i l l e r s, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American
Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 72
In the darkest recesses of the deep sea, altogether impractical colors take hold.
Purples, greens, and yellows exist for no discernible reason, shades and hues that
serve no known evolutionary purpose, given the utter lack of light, the absence
of photons that might make such traits beneficial to a given creature’s duration.
I would like to suggest that the capacious, irreducible blackness found at the
bottom of the ocean as well as the myriad forms of uncanny life we observe there
once we dare to look—dragonfish with appendages that end in the shimmer of
a bright green bulb, Vampyroteuthis infernalis with its twin rows of teeth like razor
wire—serve as an occasion for thinking about blackness as a means of organizing
both human and nonhuman life. That is to say, they are a means of thinking about
the color line as the human-animal divide by another name—and the social lives
of the nonhuman animal entities that dwell within the oceanic realm. For even if
we turn away from the very depths of the water and train our gaze on its surface,
we will find a history of violent proximity between the people who are called black
and the nonhuman animals who roam the waves. Though this proximity does
not begin with the institution of chattel slavery in the Americas, it is from that
nodal point in the ever-expanding archive of African diasporic letters—as well
as that foundational moment in the development of the modern world economy
and ecology—that this particular study takes flight. We will begin in the hold of
the ship and move from there to consider what the sea and its animal lifeworlds
make possible for the black literary imagination and what they potentially, or
necessarily, foreclose.
How does the ever-present specter of the transatlantic slave trade—what we
might think of, following Saidiya Hartman and other critics, as the afterlife of slav-
ery—propel us to theorize black ecopoetics not as a matter of ground but as an
occasion to think at the intersection of terra firma and open sea, surface and benthos,
the observable ocean and the uncharted blackness of its very bottom?1 Given recent
critical attention paid to African American nature writing in works such as Camille
Dungy’s Black Nature as well as academic monographs including Ian Finseth’s Shades
of Green, Dianne Glave’s Rooted in the Earth, and Paul Outka’s Race and Nature from
Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance, among others, I am interested in how we
might think alongside black writers who have historically taken up oceanic ecolo-
gy—and their necessarily strained relationship to it—as a central concern. In this
essay, I will concentrate on the writings of two major twentieth-century African
American poets, Robert Hayden and Melvin Tolson, in order to elaborate a theory
of black ecopoetics gone offshore. I will undertake this project primarily through
investigating the ways that both poets deploy sharks in their writings about the
From its opening lines, Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage” creates a world in which
the boundaries between human and nonhuman, living and dead, are thrown into
crisis. The poem itself, which is composed of three sections, each containing stanzas
of varying structure and line length, is primarily set on a manned ship at sea, the Amis-
tad—or, from another angle, what we might also read as many ships operating under
the metonymic reach of a single dreamscape, indistinguishable from one another
against the haze of the speaker’s memory—which famously bore human chattel as its
primary cargo:4
10 April 1800—
Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says
their moaning is a prayer for death,
ours and their own. Some try to starve themselves.
Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter
to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under.
The reader is presented with an image of the slave ship as not only a site of un-
relenting violence but one in which species boundaries are crossed as a direct
by-product of such brutality. The migratory patterns of the sharks in this passage
are transformed in the wake of blood spilled from the decks of the seaborne vessel,
their every movement altered by the scenes taking place above the surface of the
water. The ineluctable irony of each ship’s name lands like a scythe: Jesús, Estrella,
Esperanza, Mercy, all transcendent principles or celestial beings, gods and stars and
holy affect, all of which belie the muck and grime of the hold. The sharks in this
opening scene are merely one component of a much larger network of hypervio-
lent actors that Hayden draws our attention to from the outset. Even the sails are
instruments of war, “flashing . . . like weapons” as sharks dart through the current
below. The compass rose is fear itself. Everywhere in Hayden’s landscape terror
reigns, and human beings are not the only ones who serve as its enacting agents.
The entire ship, as well as the broader environment surrounding it, comes alive
and works in tandem to create what we might envision, to riff on Stephanie Small-
Some jumped in the hope of escape while docked in an African port, while others chose
drowning over starvation as a means to terminate the life of the body meant to slave
away on New World Plantations. The kind of resistance was widely practiced and just as
widely feared by the organizers of the trade. Merchants warned captains about it in their
instructions, formal and informal. Captains in turn made sure their ships had nettings
all around. They also had the male captives chained to a ring bolt whenever they were
on the main deck, and at the same time made sure that vigilant watches were always
kept. . . . One of the most illuminating aspects of these suicidal escapes was the joy
Not unlike Hayden’s vision of the affective economies and exchanges that charac-
terized the Middle Passage for the enslaved, what Rediker describes here is a social
world in which any and all approaches to opposition are at play, including those
that leverage the presence of nonhuman animal actors toward the end of stealing
oneself away, refusing to become the property of another even if that choice ends
in death. Sharks, which are described in the above section of “Middle Passage” as
simultaneously waiting and following, thus function as a kind of specter, both an
ever-looming threat to the flourishing of black life and a release valve, a guaranteed
exit. This is especially important given all the precautions taken by slavers—the
aforementioned netting around ships, for example—to ensure that the black hu-
man beings onboard lived long enough to be appraised and sold. Of critical import
here also is the role of West African cosmologies and spiritual practices as they
pertain to the enslaved and their vision of what it might mean to steal away—the
numberless captives who saw biological death not as an absolute conclusion but
as a way to return to their native land.10
Stealing oneself away was a refusal of objectification, an unmooring of the re-
lentless, necromantic machinations of a global order that demanded human beings
be transformed into salable commodities. Over and against the lethal pressures of
global white supremacy, the men and women Hayden describes dared to imagine
a second home beyond the sea: life and death by other names. The afterlife of such
thinking can be found, it bears mentioning, within the realm of twentieth- and
twenty-first-century black expressive cultures. The Detroit-based electronic band
Drexciya, for instance, constructed an entire mythology around just such a vision
of black social life beneath the sea. In the liner notes of their 1997 album, The Quest,
the electronic music duo of James Stinson and Gerald Donald first began to fashion
an origin story wherein the band’s name is that of an entire underwater country,
one founded by the children of enslaved women thrown overboard, women whose
children developed the ability to breathe water in utero, survived, and went on to
create something akin to a black Atlantis, an underwater utopia far more advanced
in terms of its technology and its ethics than any civilization on land.11
Misfortune
follows in our wake like sharks (our grinning
tutelary gods). Which one of us
has killed an albatross? A plague among
our blacks—Ophthalmia: blindness—& we
have jettisoned the blind to no avail.
It spreads, the terrifying sickness spreads.
Its claws have scratched sight from the Capt.’s eyes
& there is blindness in the fo’c’sle
& we must sail 3 weeks before we come to port.
Poet and critic Melvin Tolson’s “The Sea-Turtle and the Shark” is an altogether
brief yet striking meditation on the shape and tenor of black social life in moder-
nity, a harrowing account of how it feels to navigate a world in which one is forced
to live daily under the threat of violence that is not aberrational but algorithmic,
built into the code of the contemporary social order. Tolson’s poem intervenes as
an alternative cartography of the present, a set of survival instructions for those
who are, to use George Jackson’s turn of phrase, born in jail.18 From the outset of
the poem, readers are forced to look outward from the confines of an enclosure:
We are introduced to the sea turtle as a character that serves as the embodiment
of “the weak,” a broader network of actors whose survival is marked throughout
the poem by unceasing labor, an ongoing refusal of the normative order of things.
Indeed, readers are forewarned that what they are about to read is a “strange but
true” story that demands attention. We might understand this strangeness as a
particular set of inversions deployed by Tolson in order to use the sea turtle as a
metonym for black experience. Swallowed by the shark, the sea turtle turns the
The story of Jonah and the giant fish thus becomes an allegory put to revolutionary
use, a black radical operation with a nonhuman actor at its center. Here the forms
of life trapped in the blackening depths of the leviathan’s belly are not rescued by
the workings of a watchful sovereign. They suffer and are not saved. Instead, the
sea turtle uses all that it has at its disposal, its very flesh, to tear a pathway through
the body of the shark that, for Tolson, stands in for the interlocking systems of
domination that serve as civil society’s architecture. The sea turtle does not and
cannot wait to be rescued. It takes its freedom back through a gradual cutting away
at the material foundations of its cage. Held firmly within the belly of the shark and
nonetheless alive, Tolson’s sea turtle provides us with a theory of black fugitivity in
the flesh of the animal, its persistent burrowing a model for how we might enact
our freedom dreams though we might be hunted, hamstrung, surrounded on all
sides. Notice too how Tolson invokes an entire bestiary full of larger creatures in
order to emphasize the sheer power of the sea turtle’s bite, its largely unheralded
capacity for destruction. Crocodiles and rhinoceroses alike are cited as no real
match for the sea turtle’s unsung power; both make a certain argument against
appearance, against the utility of possessing brute strength alone.
Rather, it is precisely the size and otherwise advantageous attributes of the
crocodile, the rhinoceros, and the shark that bar them from the sort of lifeworlds
available to the sea turtle, who is underestimated, demeaned, seen as little more
Xandria Phillips’s “For a Burial Free of Sharks” attends as its central objects of in-
quiry to people who, to use Mariame Kaba’s phrase, had no selves to defend, those
whose very living served as a critique of selfhood.22 The poem’s first lines provide
a critical language for the experience of utter fungibility, which is also always to
say black life within the confines of the hold:
in the hull we worked we wormed at earth’s lack in we lives and in those deaths / and
I say we / not collective not tongued the same and not kin and not in love / but in all of
The figures Phillips invokes have no access to any legible form of individualized
personhood. What takes its place, at least within the world of this poem, is an
echoing we, a refrain that doubles as a critique of humanity, an unmooring of any
singular, autonomous speaker. Over and against a dominant, Lockean vision of
personhood in which a given body, as Monique Allewaert reminds us, is imagined
as a “single, self-identical and particular consciousness that persists despite the
diverse materials, things, temporalities, and places that press upon it and pass
through it,” the speaker of “For a Burial Free of Sharks” enacts a vision of person-
hood that is inherently multiple.24 That is, a vision of human becoming akin to what
Frantz Fanon describes in “The Fact of Blackness” as inner kinship, the sense that
blacks are not unitary beings but multitudinous, always already representing not
only themselves as individual actors but a larger, diasporic conglomerate, as well
as one’s deceased ancestors, during any given moment of racialized encounter.25
One hears echoes of Fanon in the speaker’s invocation of a people who are “not
kin” but “reduced to sameness.” The lived experience of this reduction—the social
practices and protocols, the black operations—that emerges from such brutality is
a central focus of the poem. This emphasis is expressed most poignantly perhaps
in the speaker’s claim that those forced to live in the hold were willing to sacrifice
their very lives in order to honor the dead. On the funereal practices of the enslaved,
Vincent Brown writes:
The death rite thus enabled them to express and enact their social values, to articulate
their visions of what it was that bound them together, made individuals among them
unique, and separated this group of people from others. The scene . . . typifies the way
that people who have been pronounced socially dead, that is, utterly alienated and with
no social ties recognized as legitimate or binding, have often made a social world out
Following Brown then, we can imagine the space of the hold in “For a Burial Free
of Sharks” as one in which the enslaved came to bend and blur the division that
demarcates life and death as such. The world of the poem offers a space of inde-
terminacy in which there is no need for earth in order to bury the deceased, no
ground to dig up or stand on, ontological or otherwise. One might argue, in fact,
as Jonathan Howard does, that “slaves in the hold may be understood to have
constituted the ground upon which whiteness could originally stand and purport
to be.”27 For both Brown and Howard, there is a kind of life beyond life, a form of
being without borders, that finds expression in the hold. From within the irrep-
arable break engendered by the instantiation of the transatlantic slave trade, the
ever-expanding caesura that has many names but no sufficient description, there
emerges a critique of Western civilization that extends far beyond the slave ship.
In the absence of ground, the enslaved imagine and enact a modality that operates
under radically divergent principles: a grammar of the flesh, of that which, following
Hortense Spillers’s work on the unmooring and unmaking of gender under chattel
slavery, provides us with a line of flight away from the self-contained, individuated
body of Man and invites us to study life as it exists at that “zero degree of social
conceptualization” instead.28 For Spillers, flesh marks the critical distance between
“captive and liberated subject positions” and thus operates, I think, as a singular
site of gathering for the enslaved on Hayden’s ship, Tolson’s sea turtle, and the
denizens of the hold in Phillips’s “For a Burial Free of Sharks.”
The question of groundlessness or, rather, another sort of ground altogether
is central and reappears explicitly in the poem’s final movement:
but tides did rise and sharks plowed what we hands put over we / found we bodies to
devour / failure to send we home was not without punishment / one of we / not I was
tethered / ankle to hull / and we saw this one we disappear by limb until there was only
a pair of feet trailing the ship / I still haven’t a want for death / and I know my burial
At long last, in these closing lines, the eponymous sharks swerve into the frame. In
the first instance, they seem to operate in a vein not unlike those of Hayden’s “Middle
Passage,” that is, as a persistent, existential threat to the lives of the captives. The
second time they appear, however, the sharks are more or less immaterial, more an
abstract illustration of the continuous threat to black life that modernity represents
than any discrete danger. The speaker claims that something like a natural death—one
without the spectacular violence that so often attends black mortality—is possible
only through placing “the mind on a high shelf,” one far higher, we might imagine,
than even the topmost corners of the hold. Higher than the walls of any cage in the
world. Thus, the dream of a burial free of sharks is not just the dream of black life
lived beyond the reach of the bull’s-eye. Rather, it is enacted in the everyday social
practices and the mentation of those who know that sharks are everywhere and
always in relentless pursuit—those who nonetheless look to the blackness of the
deep and dare to proclaim that they are likewise unfathomable, untamable, endless.
Nature writing as it has developed from traditions of the pastoral contributes valuably
to readers’ appreciation of the given world and can instill reverence or respect that
prompts a desire to preserve the earth’s resources, yet this genre may play a relatively
minor role in the conversation around sustainability. Received ideas of nature codified
in such writing tend, as many have noted, to position nature as something apart from
the human, making it difficult to conceptualize ways for large populations to live ap-
propriately in and with nature. The elegiac or nostalgic cast of much nature writing is
likely to be of little use to clearheaded envisioning of an attainable, sustainable future.10
Keller writes from a perspective as a critic of experimental poetry, and she sees
value in a fostering of aesthetic diversity:
I believe the demanding projects that must be undertaken by a literature toward sus-
tainability will require the literary and imaginative equivalent of biodiversity: different
contributions will come from a variety of generic, formal, structural, rhetorical, and
thematic approaches, many of them deliberately resisting inherited conventions, and
from varied critical and social perspectives. Independently and in interaction with one
another, the diverse species in this literary ecology may open up our perceptions and
with them our understanding of our options.11
Works of art called ugly ignite public furor. Unaesthetic designs or dilapidated buildings
are viewed as eyesores. Deformed bodies appear as public nuisances. Not only do these
phenomena confront the public with images of the disabled body, they expose the fact
that the public’s idea of health is itself based on unconscious operations designed to
defend against the pain of disability.13
Disability studies could benefit from the work of environmental scholars and theorists
who describe how “social arrangements” have been mapped onto “natural environ-
ments.” Many campgrounds in the United States, for example, have been designed to
resemble suburban neighborhoods, with single campgrounds for each family, clearly
demarcated private and public spaces, and layouts built for cars. Each individual camp-
site faces onto the road or common area so that rangers (and other campers) can easily
monitor others’ behaviors. Such spacing likely discourages, or at least pushes into the
cover of darkness, outwardly queer acts and practices.16
Cripping this terrain, then, entails a more collaborative approach to nature. Kuppers
depicts human-nonhuman nature interactions not in terms of solo ascents or individ-
ual feats of achievement, but in terms of community action and ritual. Describing a
gathering of disabled writers, artists, and community members, she writes,
We create our own rhythms and rock ourselves into the world of nature, lose our-
selves in a moment of sharing: hummed songs in the round, shared breath, leanings,
rocks against wood, leaves falling gentle against skin, bodies braced against others
gently lowering toes into waves, touch of bark against finger, cheek, from warm
hand to cold snow and back again.
In this resolutely embodied description, the human and nonhuman are brought into
direct contact, connecting the fallen leaf to the tree, or the breath to the wind. What
entices me about this description is that it acknowledges loss or inability—she goes
on to describe the borders of parking lots and the edges of pathways as the featured
terrain, not cliff tops and crevices—and suggests alternative ways of interacting with
the worlds around us. Rather than conquering or overcoming nature, Kuppers and her
comrades describe caressing it, gazing upon it, breathing with it.17
Light, Shadow
Water, Body
Liquid, Solid
Flowing, Stasis
Roaring, Silence
Moving, Stillness
Let’s float together
You and I in the egg of
This world, protected,
Within from the reality of what they/we have done to our nest.
—S h a r o n S i s k i n, Berkeley-based visual artist, EcoArt Matters teacher at
Laney College
Who can feel comfortable in a bathing suit, in a swimming pool, in what is considered
a healthful space in our shared culture? These are questions that come into focus as
Salamander gets underway, and our workshops proliferate. Barriers emerge: the chlo-
rine in many public pools is a barrier to our chemically injured participants. For many
black children, learning how to swim is an act of defiance of white norms, something
beset with historic and contemporary racial tension. Gender images are also an issue
for many people in pool settings. Some Olimpias collaborators who identify as trans,
either pre- or post-transitioning, are uncomfortable with sharing themselves in public
pools, acknowledging the danger of ‘male’/‘female’ changing areas.
The slides between experiences of hate, shame, and reclamation are complex, and
with each e-mail or conversation in these first weeks of Salamander, I feel again and
again the power of disclosure, exposure, the toxicity of the public sphere, the sadness
of feeling excluded. The privilege of fitting in, or of having assembled enough cultural
capital to own one’s visible difference as a place of pride, comes sharply into focus for
me as I see and read of people being attracted and yet unable(d) to join us.
it is hard to get to the pool. I mean . . . it has been over the years.
but lately its been easier. its art. its performance. its . . . Showtime. . . .
water has always been my comfort. I fall into i.e. jump into it . . . totally. it’s the only place.
I can . . . fall. my body be itself. just who I am. me Spastic . . . falling.
turning, twisting, writhing. its o.k. water. in water face down. holding breath like an
alligator/log. first thrashing as Tarzan gets me in his grip. I thrash in resistance
grappling with him. then I am subdued . . . appearing lifeless. though not lifeless at all.
this leads me to theater. the stage. the fourth wall.
I feel also very at home in this world.
There is a mermaid clan among the local Ojibwe, and my conduit to that knowledge is slim,
and personal: Jasmine, one of our Anishinaabe Salamander swimmers, told me about this
clan, and their relationship to sleep. They sleep, and see deeply, in dreams. I dream with the
salamander, my mythical companion in the water lands, in my childhood, in my maternal
line, in my new homes, in Michigan, in Berkeley. Another participant, Agnieszka, speaks of
the difference between her Poland and the Bay Area, and of water and mountains, close and
accessible. The difference for me is one of age, and of freshness, of layered ancient water,
of accreting skins of moss and lichen and fungi, of losing myself in story and membrane.
Salamander falls into the fairy tales. My grandmother walked with me the stations of the
cross, strewn across miles of farmland and woods. Near one of these stations was a small
wood with a lake, and a ruined boat. This, my grandmother told me, was Sleeping
Beauty’s castle. I believed this, and I still remember the ruined castle, one of many in
the German countryside. Weeds wound through the stones, and the lake was calm,
full of water roses. I bet a salamander or two made their home in it, too. Black and
gold. In the dark green. Water I do not wish to swim in, scum on my arms and legs,
the green sludge accumulating under my breasts. Fertile creatures, half soil, half wa-
ter, plant animals, clinging to me. I am hugged by these sticky German waters, by the
Michigan lakes in their own placid greenness, the sign of overfertilization, the mark
of terraforming upon them.
If I were to find the salamander, he might speak of survivance in a colonized land,
of habitat loss and of shrinking gene pools. But he is here, a web search assures me:
farmers and urban dwellers have not yet succeeded in excavating each dark nook, the
crevasses are still hidden, there is still a dark fetid smell of fecundity and of weeds
wrapping themselves over stones and breaking their backs.
—P e t r a K u p p e r s
The last salamander I saw in San Diego was not at the body of water I was speaking of
when walking in the water there and here with the sense of mom in both places now
that she is gone. It was not in the ocean. It was not in the uncanny valley. It was in the
mountains. It was black with red spots. Or maybe I’m making up that it was black with
red spots because I want to be inside the myth of all things wet. Landed, I think of all
things wet. In the ocean, you don’t think of wet/dry, hot/cold, alive/dead . . . you think
of ocean. I think of not just the sentient being, “a salamander” but just the word too.
Salamander. They show up in my poems. I’m not sure why. It doesn’t matter. There they
are. I am now in a circle of salamanders. We write and write. They do not look like us.
I am grateful that demarcations of wet/dry, land/water, beginning/end do not matter.
They are both things at once as are we.
Later I dream: of a phosphorescent salamander singing.
Later still I dream: my friend who is dying sits cross-legged on the floor with a blanket
wrapped around her but then the blanket is not a blanket it is an octopus.
This essay is interested in what makes environmental harm discernible and what
makes it actionable. A basic premise, therefore, is that there is a link between
how we encounter environments as healthy or harmful and how human and
other-than-human populations are produced through the rubrics of health and
harm by U.S. settler colonialism and racial capitalism.1 In this essay I bookmark
this link—a zone of epistemic encounter, political invention, and inestimable vi-
olence—with the term “looking.”
Looking—and what Rob Nixon calls ecologies of looking—references our par-
ticipation in “the racial dynamics of sanctuary and trespass, visibility and invisibility,
looking and looking away.”2 Looking is a cooperation of states and subjects, a syncing
of infrastructural attention to the management of life and the impromptu postures
of attention that choreograph lives staged by empire. I want to explore the moments
that we invest in this cooperation, in the coloniality of the aesthetics of ecological
well-being and harm: how the look that empire gives to a landscape is reflected
in how we approach it as beautiful or ugly, useful or expendable, healthy or toxic.
Looking is an imperative of American ecocriticism, one of the ways it conceives
and mobilizes itself as a political enterprise. In response to perceived public apathy
about environmental damage, critics like Frederick Buell advocate a politics of
“facing and understanding” disaster, a “direct eye-to-eye encounter with crisis.”3
And insofar as Buell and others are interested in intensifying public attention to
industrial toxification, their emphasis on the explanatory power of looking also
operates as a theory of art’s role in an age of environmental crisis. Art, for Buell,
is useful insofar as it “asks that people gaze on and on without being able to avert
their eyes or seize upon easy remedies or prescriptions for change.”4 On its own
terms, this is a cultural politics that assumes the transparency and autonomy of the
look and that does not consider the collapse of the subjects and state power that it
underwrites. For Buell, activists and writers intensify the public’s power to see. As
such, he describes their work as gathering attention and building consensus toward
policy interventions that ultimately look like expanded state control: “legislative
initiatives, regulatory activities, and court action.”5 I argue that this account of the
politics of looking narrows our understanding of how environmental well-being is
perceived and who or what has the power to redress environmental harm. It also,
therefore, delimits what environmental perception itself is: what it means and
what can happen in the moments when we consider the vast and ornate systems
of living that are always beyond and constitutive of ourselves.
One aim of this essay is to show that ecocriticism does not have to be so delimited in
its ability to theorize how state power is extended in the ways we discern environments
or in its ability to think outside of social formations—those positions from and by way
of which we are given to look, such as the individual, the family, the neighborhood
enclave, and the nation—that make the discernibility of health and harm possible
and actionable to the state. In a sense, this is to consider in an ecocritical context
what Audra Simpson and Glen Coulthard call the colonial politics of recognition.6
Coulthard and Simpson show how settler colonial states manage and constrain the
claims made by indigenous communities by sanctioning models of indigenous polit-
ical organizing that comport with settler sovereignty. As Coulthard points out, while
acts of state recognition are billed as “ushering in an era of peaceful coexistence . . .
the politics of recognition . . . reproduce the very configurations of colonial power that
Indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend.”7
Spectacular Enclosure
Undercurrent anxieties about communicability and vulnerability are instantiated
at the scene of the domestic and the insulatory aesthetics of enclosure. For settler
social economies, there is nothing more precious than enclosure, not only because
it insulates but because its insulation produces the rationale and the political cover
for relentless expansion.13 Bitsui’s Shapeshift examines institutional or cartographic
enclosures reproduced by aesthetic and epistemic enclosures of environmental
narrative. The volume not only turns away from conventionally recuperative lyric
technologies of voice, witnessing, or revelatory encounters with alterity but asks
what happens when ecopolitics begins by throwing the structures of settler enclosure
into relief. For instance, the opening poem, “Asterisk,” resists visualizing a single
or local site of environmental harm. Rather, the poem traces three interlocking
histories of colonial incursion into Dinétah that depend on the reproduction of
material and epistemic enclosures.14 First, coal and oil development, whose im-
pacts are measured in eroded mesas, appropriated water resources, and devastated
social economies:
Second, uranium mining, which directly affects Navajo miners as well as families whose
hooghans were inadvertently constructed from illegally dumped radioactive tailings:
But look—
something lurking in the mineshaft—
.....................................
Twigs from their family tree flank the glove’s aura
and asterisk water towers invisible,
while fragrant rocks in the snout remain
unnoticed in the bedroom,
because the bridegroom wanted in,
Pioneers wanted in,
and the ends of our feet yellowed to uranium at the edge of fear.16
Third, colonial histories from the boarding schools to the Long Walk whose ecopolitics
lives in language and knowledge suffocated (sewn shut, asphyxiated) into silence:
Something
can’t loop this needle into it,
occurs and writes over their lips with thread;
barnacles on their swings;
fleas hyphened between their noses;
eels asphyxiating in the fruit salad.
As a whole, the poem tracks material and social enclosures that secure the enclosure
of settler history. “Asterisk” points this out by bookending itself between “Fourteen
ninety-something” (the first line) and “1868” (the last line), a date that marks the
Fourteen ninety-something,
something happened
and no one can pick it out of the lineup,19
The shift away from visualizing a colonial perpetrator aligns Bitsui’s poem with
Alan Freeman’s analysis of antidiscrimination law in which he differentiates be-
tween two perspectives on the problem of discrimination. First, “the perpetrator
perspective sees racial discrimination not as conditions but as actions, or series
of actions, inflicted on the victim by the perpetrator. The focus is more on what
particular perpetrators have done or are doing to some victims than on the overall
life situation of the victim class.”20 Second, the “victim . . . conception . . . sug-
gests that the problem will not be solved until the conditions associated with it
have been eliminated.”21 Freeman’s analytic helps demonstrate how fixating on
supposedly aberrant individual acts of violence—including environmental vio-
lence—collaborates with totalizing collectivities imagined by toxic discourse to
disguise the structural preconditions for that violence. The work of “Asterisk”
links settler ecological damage to precisely this circuitry of attention: to the ways
arguably the most famous passage from [Black Skin, White Masks is] where Fanon shares
an alienating encounter on the streets of Paris with a little white girl. “Look, a Negro!”
Fanon recalled the girl saying. . . . At that moment the imposition of the child’s racist
gaze “sealed” Fanon into “crushing objecthood” (1967, 109), fixing him like “a chemical
solution is fixed by a dye.”22
He adds: “Far from assuring Fanon’s humanity, the other’s recognition impris-
oned him in an externally determined and devalued conception of himself.”23 In an
ecopolitical context, the sensible enclosures of ecological violence are also always
social. The politics of recognition creates toxic vectors of aesthetic and affective
attachment between humans and ecologies. Bitsui explores this in a poem about
nuclear weapons testing committed during the mid-twentieth century on indigenous
lands in New Mexico, Nevada, the Marshall Islands, and elsewhere.
The poem, titled “Apparition,” wrestles with the spectacular weapons tests
whose expansive colonial logic is inseparable from the social and ecological pol-
itics of settler belonging:
Mention ————,
and a thickening lump in the ozone layer
will appear as a house with its lights turned off—
radio waves tangled like antlers inside its oven,
because somewhere
in the hallway nearest thirst,
the water coursing through our clans
begins to evaporate
as it slides down our backseats—
its wilderness boiled out of our bodies.25
The chrysalis is the rejection of enclosure. It is a casing fashioned against the logic
of security: supposed never to enclose but only to open. At the same time, against
the racializing threat of “passing” (a passing over, a making past), this opening
also resonates as an illicit escape, a stealing away predicted by the unlawful cas-
ing of enclosure. In this way, Bitsui’s poem imagines the incipient epistemic and
political potential that erupts at the occasion of anticolonial noncompliance, an
ecology and a belonging measured by the urgent unsealing of subjects from the
threat of recognition:
Unveiling Drought
Thus far, I have argued that the spectacle of enclosure executes a politics of the limit,
the boundary line that marks off the secure from the surround. Thinking about
toxicity as a spatial and political limit joins my reading of Bitsui with biopolitical
analyses of how environmental damage participates in the larger drama of scarcity
and expansion that animates U.S. empire. For instance, Melinda Cooper asserts
I take for granted that the periodic re-creation of the capitalist world is always and nec-
essarily accompanied by the reimposition of capitalist limits; that capitalist promise is
counterbalanced by willful deprivation, its plentitude of possible futures counteractualized
as an impoverished, devastated present, always poisoned on the verge of depletion.33
For Cooper, late capitalist expansion generates appropriable value at “the limits
of life on earth and the regeneration of living futures—beyond the limits.”34 This
“delirium of contemporary capitalism” is animated by an ecologically conditioned
debt relation:
The promise of capital in its present form—which after all is still irresistibly tied to
oil—now so far outweighs the earth’s geological reserves that we are already living
on borrowed time, beyond the limits. U.S. debt imperialism is currently reproducing
itself with an utter obliviousness to the imminent depletion of oil reserves. Fueling
this apparently precarious situation is the delirium of the debt form, which in effect
enables capital to reproduce itself in a realm of pure promise, in excess of the earth’s
actual limits.35
“U.S. debt imperialism” is an effect of limits that are measured in terms of both
space and capital. And debt, in particular, might be understood as a kind of en-
closure, a fantasy of insulation against harm that is also always the precondition
for the advancement of that harm.
The toxicity of empire requires us to conceive of the limit not only as a space
but also as an absorptive membrane, a structure of commerce or exchange that
displaces vulnerability and overrides minority claims to resources. In this sec-
tion, I argue that the spectacle of the resource limit enables the misrecognition of
ecopolitical stakes and subjects such that responses to ecological harm advance
an imperialism in which resources are figured as forms of debt. It is important
to examine this relational action of toxicity (not a site but a threshold) because
resource conflicts and the apocalyptic attention they inspire often do not obey
The text polarizes any discussion of land use practices and concepts. . . . Reinforced by
the irrefutable photographic evidence of a desolate landscape, this construction proves
the failure of Navajo land management practices and negates any complex consideration
of indigenous knowledge. The text, as a pedagogic tool, teaches Navajo people that
they are ‘stupid’ and unequipped for the management of lands they have occupied since
time immemorial. The technical expertise and government superiority in managing
the Navajo homeland are proven through the negation of Navajo knowledge and a
simple camera trick.38
U n va l i n g D r o u g h t
If the valence of drought is the frictionless and coordinated exchange of security-
granting recognition for resources, Flood Song is a holding out, a holding open, a
denial of exchange, and a recourse to the friction of lives that do not depend on the
promise of security. What Anne McClintock describes as the oscillation that links
“deliriums of grandeur and nightmares of perpetual threat” is the same political
momentum that Flood Song drags out, distends, and at certain moments breaks
open.43 For instance, the poem frustrates the colonial absorption of ecology into
cartography—the transmission of heterogeneous and layered systems of social
and biological attachment into quantifying coordinates of property, arability, and
waste. Sometimes such interventions are funny, gestures of emotional and carto-
graphic antigravity:
Sometimes they intercede through a stripping away. For example, Flood Song distills
the already simplifying coordinates of colonial maps even further, down to the
basic apertures of their acquisitive attention:
What land have you cast from the blotted-out region of your face?
What nation stung by watermarks was filmed out of extinction and brought forth resembling
frost?
.....................................................................
What makes this song a string of beads seized by cement cracks when the camera climbs
through the basement window—winter clouds coiling through its speckled lens?
And at other times Flood Song loosens the sutures that fasten living landscapes to
the resource maps they are remeasured as:
Coyote howls canyons into windows painted on the floor with crushed turquoise;
captured cranes secrete radon in the epoxied toolshed;
leopard spots, ripe for drilling, ooze white gas when hung on a copper wire.
I pull electricity from their softened bellies with loom yarn.
I map a shrinking map.46
The intersection
of absorption & impermeability is precisely
flesh,
....
. . . Yet writing re-
verses the dynamic [Merleau-Ponty] out-
lines for the visible & the invisible:
..............................
. . . The visibility of words
as a precondition of reading
necessitates that words obtrude impermeably into
the world . . .
............
. . . Writing . . .
.............
. . . is
the intrusion
of words into the visible
that marks
writing’s own absorption into the world.49
I wanted to swallow the song’s flowers, swim diagonally its arched back, its shadow
stinging my hands with black pollen.
We were on the surgical table waiting for the surgeons to carve us back into shape.
The drum pulsed somewhere in the dark and I heard a woman unbraiding her hair.
I felt morning songs leap from the hooghan’s smoke-hole and curl outward from the
roof of the sky, gliding through us like rain.
This is no retreat into a precolonial past but an opening into the depth of a native
present. As a poetics, the gap that the poem enters between ecological security
and the colonial state is what Mackey calls a “discrepant” articulation of social and
environmental health that “worries resolute boundary lines, resolute definitions,
obeying a vibrational rather than a corpuscular sense of being.”52
To Be Unrecognizable
In its final pages, Flood Song turns to the discomposure of the scene of environ-
mental harm, not in a gathering of political consensus but in an opening out of
sensible politics:
A cloud became a skull and crashed to the earth above Black Mesa.
The cloud wanted to slip through the coal mines and unleash its horses.
It wanted to crack open bulldozers and spray their yolk over the hills so that a new
birth cry would awaken the people who had fallen asleep.
A city dragged its bridges behind it and finally collapsed in a supermarket asking for
the first apple that was ever bitten.
No one untucked themselves from their bodies and wandered the streets without
knowing their clans.
Everyone planted corn in their bellies and became sunlight washing down plateaus
with deer running out of them.
While critics have published review essays about Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An
American Lyric, literary scholars have just begun to consider the poet’s latest book
as it relates to her earlier poetry, a task this essay undertakes. Drawing on critical
race and environmental justice theories, I read Citizen as the latest installment of
Rankine’s twenty-year meditation on the “wasting body”—a figure that, in her
poetry, accounts for how certain bodies are attenuated or made sick under capital-
ism and the state, while simultaneously being regarded as surplus by these same
structures. While Citizen is not ostensibly a work of ecological poetry or environ-
mental criticism, one of its most pointed critiques—a critique Rankine makes in
her earlier books, too—concerns the difficulty of relating to or identifying with
one’s environment when one has been othered by the dominant white society and,
consequently, forced to live with greater amounts of environmental risk. In the
pages that follow, I track Rankine’s engagement with embodied experiences of
racism and environmental risk in her 2014 Citizen, 2004 Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An
American Lyric, and 1994 Nothing in Nature Is Private.
Citizen opens by asking readers to imagine themselves “alone and too tired
even to turn on any of your devices.”1 Paralyzed in bed, “you let yourself linger in
a past stacked among your pillows . . . nestled under blankets.”2 The exhaustion
of the body and mind by a racist society is a central focus of Citizen. In Rankine’s
previous book, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, the poet asks, “Why do people waste away?”3
Between the most daily of discriminatory microaggressions and the entrenched
forms of structural racism that facilitate them in the first place, Rankine sug-
gests, black bodies are rendered increasingly deindividuated and expendable.
In the process, life comes to be defined at and by a limit—between near death
and actual death, living life and maintaining life—and by its state of wasting,
the condition of and for life at this precarious threshold. Rankine’s work figures
not only the wasting of the body and the self but also the wasting of the envi-
ronments in which they are placed. Through an examination of figures of waste
and wasting, I will argue that her poetry, in its duration of a vexed lyric mode,
registers the structural forces and forms of power that both racialize and subject
raced bodies and environments to forms of degradation and violence. In using
the term “duration,” I refer to Rankine’s continuance or persistence within, as
opposed to outright rejection of, lyric. In the process of this duration, her poetry
exposes the attenuating conditions for both writing and life under racist social,
political, and economic structures. For Rankine, it is in critically inhabiting these
states of wasting—what Fred Moten has called exhaustion as a way of life—that
one becomes capable of realizing alternative modes for thinking and enacting
ecological emplacement and sociality—what Moten calls a “social biopoetics of
and in the experiment.”4
Drawing from modernist collage, the Black Arts Movement, and the lyric and
Language traditions, Rankine’s work is not always overtly ecopoetic. Even so, the
concept of an ecopoetics is one that she has cited as being important to her. In a
2009 interview, she asserted that ecopoetics is an “engagement with the landscape
as it exists rather than in a romantic way.”5 Presumably, “as it exists” means in all
its contamination and degradation; ecopoetics refuses to idealize nature. Rankine
argued, moreover, that the engagement of ecopoetics has to do with the body; eco-
poetics is, in fact, “a bodily thing.”6 Tracing representations of the wasting body
in her work—both in her earlier poetry, which tarries with more conventional lyric
Hours later, still in the difficulty of what it is to be, just like that, inside it, standing there,
maybe wading, maybe waving, standing where the deep waters of everything backed
up, one said, climbing over bodies, one said, stranded on a roof, one said, trapped in
the building, and in the difficulty, nobody coming and still someone saying, who could
see it coming, the difficulty of that.11
Then each house was a mumbling structure, all that water, buildings peeling apart, the
yellow foam, the contaminated drawl of mildew, mold.
The missing limbs, he said, the bodies lodged in piles of rubble, dangling from
rafters, lying facedown, arms outstretched on parlor floors.14
These descriptions (again, quotes from CNN) demand that readers experience the
horror of firsthand accounts of the storm’s aftermath. Rankine’s juxtaposition of
observations of destroyed homes with descriptions of destroyed bodies reveals how
what was horrifying to some people was not only the large-scale loss of black life
The lump was misdiagnosed a year earlier. Can we say she might have lived had her
doctor not screwed up? If yes—when does her death actually occur?
..........................................................
During the mastectomy she has muscle mass and some fatty something or other re-
moved from her abdominal area and used in the reconstruction of her left breast. The
plastic surgeon argued she could do a far better job with natural versus artificial tissue.
It added an extra day to her hospital stay.18
Cancer slowly settled in her body and lived off it until it, her body, became useless to
itself. . . . We watch a lot of television the four days I sit at her bedside. We talk. She
grows tired. She is sad. She grows tired. She becomes angry. She grows tired. She is
accepting. She grows tired. She grows tired.19
“A Life in Homelessness”:
T h e Wa s t i n g o f P l a c e
Rankine’s meditation on the wasting body dates back to her early work. In Nothing
in Nature Is Private, her first book, natural spaces become disorienting, and the
threat of racial violence suffuses almost every landscape. In her poem “The Birth,”
for example, an allegorical account of the interpolation of the black male subject,
Rankine evokes the difficulty of occupying a raced subject position in an alienating
natural world. She writes, “where / nothing, no one should / have lived. He enters.”24
Over the course of the poem, nature is repeatedly depicted as being hostile toward a
In humanity—
into its strange house,
he enters . . .
The last line emphasizes the man’s vulnerability, reiterating the idea that he is always
at risk of not making it home, of being annihilated by a nature that is inextricable
from culture or from humanity.
Ambivalence about the environment in black writing is nothing new, as Camille
Dungy points out in her introduction to Black Nature, an anthology of African American
poetry that spans four centuries. In her words, the poems in the anthology “point to
the collusion between nature and man, the manner in which the natural world has
been used to destroy, damage, or subjugate African Americans. . . . Given the active
history of betrayal and dangers in the outdoors, it is no wonder that many African
Americans link their fears directly to the land that witnessed or abetted centuries
of subjugation.”27 Kimberly Smith makes a similar point, arguing that histories of
slavery and oppression have conditioned black Americans’ relationships to nature. 28
Slavery, for example, forced its victims into a close relation with the environment
while at the same time alienating them from it.29 As a result, the African American
tradition of environmental writing often veers away from the focus of mainstream
environmentalism, which tends to be on humility and preservation.30 In the words
of Smith, the black tradition conceptualizes “the American landscape not as pristine
and innocent wilderness but as a corrupted land in need of redemption.”31
Cardinals land
on a branch, female and male.
The sky shivers
in puddles created of night rain.34
Here the poem is descriptive, its lines compressed and its images precise. One
might almost overlook an irony: the way the poem references the sky but then di-
rects the reader’s attention downward toward the ground, into shivering puddles.
This moment of disorientation and subsequent reorientation serves as a harbinger
for what follows: “Then the shadow of a black oak / leans forward like a wounded
man.”35 In being likened to the figure of a wounded man, the silhouette of an oak’s
shadow becomes frightening. The tree, a pastoral archetype, becomes a figure for
danger and violence, bringing to mind the relationship between trees and lynching.
In this way, Rankine explicitly realigns her pastoral inheritance from the Romantic
tradition to that of what we might call a black pastoral tradition—one according
to which nature is implicated in histories of racialized violence.
In the next stanza, Rankine writes,
Here the tree’s shadow is personified again, this time as the exhausted face of one
whose attention is fixed on the past (“what had come before”). The next stanza
suggests that this shadow, or backward-turned gaze, encompasses everything
from the Atlantic slave trade to chattel slavery in America to the constitution of
African American identity in the present—an identity that is “colored by strokes
of red” or past acts of violence against the “blue-white light.” The invocation of
red, white, and blue brings to mind the American flag, suggesting that America as
we know it is constructed out of the instrumentalization of and violence against
black bodies. It also brings to mind the flashing lights of a police car, which, in
the context of the poem, point toward the racial profiling of and police violence
against African Americans. And here, in the image of a corrupted, policed nature,
the poet recognizes herself.
In the penultimate stanza, Rankine writes, “I step into my shadow / as if not to
take it anymore, / and wonder where I am going.”38 Paradoxically, for the speaker
to step into the shadow of historical violence—ostensibly to succumb to it—con-
stitutes a refusal. At the poem’s conclusion, Rankine asks, “when the sun / goes
down on this aged, / dirt road, will I end / in dark woods, or make it home?”39 Here
readers can hear the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno: “Midway on our life’s journey,
I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost.”40 Rankine pits the dark woods
of historical experience against home. Only in escaping—even repudiating—the
punishing dark woods does one become capable of reaching home.
It is notable that “make it home” appears in “American Light” as well as in “The
Birth.”41 Rankine’s repeated references to a journey home also echo the African
American spiritual tradition. Spirituals often invoked home, a promised land at the
end of suffering. In this context, the lines might be read as hopeful ones. Alterna-
Those years of and before me and my brothers, the years of passage, plantation, mi-
gration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty, inner cities, profiling, of one in three,
two jobs, boy, hey boy, each a felony, accumulate into the hours inside our lives where
we are all caught hanging, the rope inside us, the tree inside us, its roots our limbs, a
throat sliced through and when we open our mouth to speak, blossoms, o blossoms,
no place coming out, brother, dear brother, that kind of blue.43
“ C a l l O u t A n y w a y ” : L y r i c Ex h a u s t i o n
How does Rankine’s language itself perform acts of exhaustion? How do the con-
tradictions in her language model exhaustion as a way of life? One might begin
to answer these questions by considering the subtitles of her most recent books.
By subtitling them An American Lyric, Rankine invokes a contested genre history.62
While both adapting and resisting ideas of what a lyric is and has been, she ges-
tures toward the amorphousness of the term (“lyric”) and also that of its modifier
(“American”). The subtitle invites the questions, “What is it to be lyric?” and “What
is it to be an American citizen?” The latter question is one that both books overtly
take up. Their answer is definitive: to be a citizen is, for black Americans, to be
exposed to the risk of death by a capitalist state whose right to kill is implied and
reproduced by its constitutive racism.63 The former question is one that the books
take up only obliquely, and they offer no definitive answer—aware, I would argue,
that in fact none actually exists. However, by yoking the two questions together,
Rankine suggests that acknowledging the conjectural nature of the first becomes
key to recognizing the answerability of the second; through experimental, even
failed “lyric” practices, one becomes capable of exposing the interrelation and
coconstitution of race and environment.
By this point, readers can infer that “they” are African American survivors of the
storm. In response to the imperative “Call out to them,” an unnamed speaker, one
whom we might assume to be white, replies, “I don’t see them.” Here Rankine
invokes the recognition problem that Fanon articulates: because the black subject
is relegated to always being the white subject’s production, the black subject will
never be recognized by the white subject. As if to refuse these conditions for black
lives—as if to assert the intolerability of racialized nonrecognition—Rankine’s
speaker risks the imperative “Call out anyway.” But what the speaker hears in re-
sponse—“Did you see their faces?”—is only an echo of a line that appears earlier in
the poem. Midway through the poem, the line “Have you seen their faces?” follows
“You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals, so many of these
people almost all of them that we see, are so poor, someone else said, and they
are so black.”67 This quote exemplifies the othering of black bodies by the media
that occurred in the wake of the storm. In this context, “Have you seen their fac-
es?” is inflected with the language of spectacle. What might initially seem like an
expression of empathy is revealed to be a racist utterance of horror, pity, even fear.
These two nonrecognition moments, exacerbated by each other, give way to the
white of the page. In this way, the poem has performed, endured, the exhaustion of
the language of resistance.
Even while living in his cabin at Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau could not re-
treat from the extractive logics of nineteenth-century industrial modernity. Walden,
it might be said, catalogs the unavoidable evidence of environmental degradation
just as diligently as it advocates for the simplicity of a life lived in nature. The
felling of forests, the planned piping of the pond’s waters for household use, the
neighboring railroad’s cacophony and pollution, even the ice cutters’ poaching
of the pond’s top layer: all enter the text as testaments to modernity’s ravaging
of the Concord woods. Ever the attentive observer, Thoreau not only tracks the
encroachment of the resource-hungry town deeper and deeper into the woods,
he also attends to nature’s own possibilities of responsiveness, challenging us to
consider the limits of its capacity to self-repair. How much change, he asks, can
an environment accommodate and still be considered the same thing? How much
difference, in the end, makes any difference at all?
Such questions, of course, cannot be separated from the formal one of delineating
identity and difference in a provisionally unfolding world. Walden has long served
as a touchstone for ecocritical practices, and I return to it here to point to the ways
in which Thoreau opens up connections between contemporary environmental
discourse and the aesthetic tradition. Thoreau, that is, allows us to see the formal
questions that animate and occasionally obstruct contemporary environmental
practices, particularly in the growing field of resilience studies. For him, it is the
surface of Walden Pond that best figures nature’s capacity to absorb and attenu-
ate human activity. Both “a perfect forest mirror” that registers every movement
of the surrounding woods and a self-repairing tabula rasa that unfailingly erases
every arriving trace, the pond becomes the site at which Thoreau negotiates two
apparently contradictory responses to the transformation of nature.1
On the one hand, the pond offers a seductive image of nature’s endless capacity
for self-renewal, in which the extraction of resources only partially and temporarily
depletes its profligate riches:
Of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its
purity. Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and
the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and
the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my
youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me. It has not acquired one permanent wrinkle
after all its ripples.2
Walden Pond’s capacity to absorb human disturbances without losing its basic
character—its resilience—allows Thoreau to imagine an unchanging, unsullied
natural landscape that “preserves its purity” by fending off the approach of even
“one permanent wrinkle.” 3 Because such a wrinkle would evidence an irreversible
change of the pond’s surface, Thoreau links the pond’s preservation to its ability
to absorb difference. To be Walden Pond means to be “the same water,” forever
caught up in the timelessness of nature.
Just a few pages later in the same chapter of Walden, on the other hand, Thoreau
tries on another attitude toward environmental degradation. Now, the changes
to Walden can no longer be ignored, and Thoreau responds by withdrawing his
affections from the pond and attaching them to its more perfect neighbor: “Since
the woodcutters, and the railroad, and I myself have profaned Walden, perhaps the
At first glance, the poem appears to place social coercion somewhat uneasily within
the frame of natural attention. The poem begins and ends with lines that are near
copies of Linnaeus’s eighteenth-century journals of his explorations of Lapland, in
which he wrote, “Nothing occurred particularly worth noticing by the way, except an
Andromeda (tetragona) with quadrangular shoots, and flowers from the bosoms of
the leaves.”24 Yet while the poem begins with the naturalist’s attention to botanical
objects, it immediately troubles the politics of such attention by moving from the
poverty of flooded nature to the poverty of an exploited underclass.
Picking up on the etymology of andromeda, which comes from the Greek for
“ruler of men,” the poem’s concerns circle around the enforcement of regulatory
order under unpredictably changing conditions. It exposes the coerciveness of
a ruling power that dictates that whatever the conditions, the Laplanders must
appear in church or be taxed. Such concerns with regulatory order were central to
the mid-twentieth-century practice of open form poetry, which emphasized im-
manent modes of organization rather than the transcendent, regulatory structures
of traditional poetic forms with their set prosody and stanzaic structure. Initiated
by Charles Olson in his 1950 essay “Projective Verse,” open form poetry sought to
restore responsive immediacy to poetic composition by breaking with scripted,
prepatterned forms. For Olson, the capacity to respond to changing circumstances
defined the role of the poet, who “has to behave, and be, instant by instant, aware
of some several forces just now beginning to be examined.”25 Only through intense
My life is hung up
in the flood
The poem opens with the temporary suspension of the speaker’s life—she is “hung
up,” delayed or worried by the flood. Niedecker draws on the language of do-
mesticity to suggest an interval or a respite necessary to the work of repair. Like
laundry hung out to dry, such a pause operates as a temporary caesura that is part
of the everyday rhythms of household affairs. A series of dissolutions follows—the
portrait is “wave-blurred,” a face dissolves into nothingness, and even the usual
routines associated with water, like fishing, must be discontinued in the newly
transformed environment. While such intervals allow for the temporary stoppage
of everyday affairs that the Laplanders are denied, they can hardly be claimed as
pleasurable occasions.
While Niedecker’s speakers navigate the uncomfortable, uncertain conditions
that follow natural disaster, theories of resilience frequently evacuate just such an
undergoing of disaster’s present tense. As Stephanie LeMenager and Stephanie Foote
point out in the inaugural issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities,
resilience’s “focus on precarity and the limits of our ability to predict and insure
against the future oddly protects it from all emergency, insofar as resilience theory . . .
promises that unforeseeable systemic disruptions are natural and survivable.”32
In this analysis, the emergency that resilience foretells is one that it never has to
endure. If resilience’s efforts are successful, the crisis will pass unmarked by its
survivors, who will either fail to register disruption entirely or will do so only in
the most minimal fashion. Despite a proclaimed desire to admit disturbance as a
crucial force that shapes and transforms ecosystems, practices of resilience tend
to anticipate crisis only to better contain and attenuate its effects. By prioritizing
a flexible urban environment that can seamlessly adapt to meet systemic needs,
Those who willingly surrender to the flood are the indulgent and the intoxi-
cated—floating off on chocolate bars and drink. Against this position of radical
passivity, which is also one of intense license and enjoyment, the speaker tightens
her hold on both property and self. Reiterating personal identity three times in a
single line (“myself,” “I,” and “my”), the poem suggests that however desultory
the flood might be, it risks dissolving the speaker’s identity. Such a fear is espe-
Springtime’s wide
water—
yield
but the field
will return39
Some of the classics of conceptual poetry are ecopoems hiding in plain sight.
Conceptual poetry names a group of avant-garde poets who for the last decade
and a half have been producing poems that are based on an idea or a procedure
that minimizes or eliminates traditionally styled creative or personally cogitated
writing. These poems have garnered much attention for their canny use of new
media, evasion of well-worn lyric stereotypes, and refreshing gusto for treating
language as a material object and database that can be manipulated to deliver
new aesthetic and intellectual highs. What has been rarely remarked, however,
by the poets and their readers is how distinctly such work is embedded in the
ecological dilemmas of the day. Consider these examples: Christian Bök’s The
Xenotext is an ongoing project to inject poetry transcribed at the level of DNA into
an extremophile bacterium, which raises issues of scientific control, postdisaster
biological durability, and the means to send messages beyond Earth. Kenneth
Goldsmith’s Traffic, a transcript of twenty-four hours of traffic reports from a
New York radio station, shows the link between everyday non-nutritious speech
and fossil fuel dependency. Vanessa Place’s use of factorylike assembly methods
for writing, even when the language inside these works is scorchingly intimate,
treats the poem like any other commodity in a packaging-saturated planet. Tan
Lin’s application of ambience as a soothing, impersonal aesthetic device to all
kinds of texts seeks to immerse us in ubiquitous artificial environs made of ev-
eryday data and junkspace.1
Conceptual poetry views language more as matter than content, data than se-
mantics, and it emphasizes the execution of ideas rather than expression. These
poems may present ideas impossible to realize, are often positioned as ethically
neutral, welcome the role of machines as substitutes for handcrafted writing, and
celebrate fetishizing language rather than critically examining it. Perhaps what
distinguishes conceptual poetry most from previous avant-garde poetries is its
rejection of the hermeneutics of suspicion, the assumption that the real message
of a text is behind what is being said and needs to be teased out by a trained, skep-
tical, politicized reader. Instead, conceptual poetry embraces what has been called
reading with the grain, reading the surface or literal meaning rather than probing
the depths, inviting ambient reading rather than ideology critique, and applauding
directly the formal and mediated properties of poems rather than debunking them.2
Conceptual poems wear their sources and procedures on their sleeves; usually
without explaining their social usefulness in advance, they beckon the reader to
become immersed in each text by pondering its structuring idea.3
What do these tropes have to do with ecopoetry or environmental consciousness?
What might conceptual poetry be able to learn from environmentally oriented
poetics and vice versa? These questions necessitate thinking the intersection of
conceptual poetry and ecopoetry in ways that have rarely been explored. None
of the poets listed above claims any particular affinity for ecological thought,
perhaps for good reason, as there is a strong anti-avant-garde and anti-urban
strain among some critics of environmental humanities. A significant portion
of writing done under the sign of ecopoetics since the 1990s tends to root itself
in values of no-nonsense discourse and effusiveness toward rustic nature, can-
onizing poetry that is self-reflexive, but not too much, about the way words and
world are interlaced according to an avowed land ethic. Here, for example, is
J. Scott Bryson’s definition:
Many tropes that conceptual poetry harnesses particularly well, such as “hyperra-
tionality” or “overtechnologized” writing, are aesthetic purviews that would seem
to hold little promise for those interested in such ecopoetics.
However, more recent definitions of ecopoetics have been more inclusive of a
wider variety of themes and forms, including the technophilic. Jonathan Skinner’s
panoramic description of ecopoetics begins with an accretive outlook:
Definitions of ecopoetics can range from the making and study of pastoral and wilderness
poetry to the intersection of poetry and animal studies, or from the poetics of urban
environments to poets’ responses to disasters and matters of environmental justice.
It might mean the study and deployment of formal strategies modeling ecological
processes like complexity, nonlinearity, feedback loops, and recycling, or even a ‘slow
poetry’ that joins in a push for sustainable, regional economies.5
It might make sense then to describe this trend as critical ecopoetics, where there
is no clear normative assumption about what the good standard is for ecology or
poetry. Instead, a critical environmentalist poetics is an ongoing and open-ended
engagement with all kinds of poems and environs, technological ones included.
Critical ecopoetics assesses how the world of the poem interacts with the world
outside the poem, and how poetic forms are part of and made out of other envi-
ronmental forms.
A different kind of critical pressure on ecopoetics arises from the growing
recognition that there is no such thing as a stable ecological referent: a concept
or an activity that is always ecological all the time. There are no signifiers that are
3. Excessive formalism. Conceptual poems are typically too long, too much, too
empty, too full, too flat, too monochromatic, or too forced. Yet the pursuit of any
of these categories to extremes can reveal a unique experience of beauty and in-
tellectual frisson that appears at the edges of aesthetic phenomena. Poetry itself
is one long tradition of excessive formalism. In this grappling with the extremes
of form, conceptual poetry moves far away from typical human subjective states
and approaches some aspects of the formal conditions of what it is like to be a
machine or a mountain or a star, where too much of one material condition or
process has remarkable generative properties. Hence, one of the means by which
to understand nonhuman actors in an ecosystem would be to pursue these overly
done formalizations into new aesthetic territories.
Ink on a 6 by 9 inch substrate of 60 pound offset matte white paper. Composed of: varnish
(soy bean oil [C57H98O6], used as a plasticizer: 52%. Phenolic modified rosin resin [Tall
oil rosin: 66.2%. Nonylphenol [C15H24O]: 16.6%. Formaldehyde [CH2O]: 4.8%. Maleic
anhydride [C4H2O3]: 2.6%. Glycerol [C3H8O3]: 9.6%. Traces of alkali catalyst: .2%] . . .9
Some fifty ingredients follow. An epic chemical concoction exists in each sheaf of
paper. If one is inquiring about the ecosystem implications of a poem, one could
very well start with the natural and chemical materials used to make the paper and
ink it is printed on. Many of these chemicals listed are vicious pollutants, which are
fine in small doses for the pages of poetry but dangerous when they escape from
the page into the water—suggesting a similar potency for the contained danger
of the poem. This vocabulary of paper and ink in its chemical state is linguistically
rich with compound formulations that add up like portmanteaus. “Nonylphenol”
seems a made-up word to name a nonexistent phenol, until Wikipedia tells us it
is an organic compound that can be found naturally and is used in detergents and
emulsifiers. It is toxic in larger doses and commonly found in wastewater. Whether
expressionist or against expression, poetry relies on these nasty, lethal, but also
ingeniously synthesized physical substrates.
Another classic of conceptual poetry, Christian Bök’s The Xenotext, is a multimedia
bio-art project that involves ultimately injecting nucleotide material that enciphers
code for a short poem into the DNA of the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans. The
poem that Bök has managed to encode within DNA base pairs—so far only in
12:01 Well, in conjunction with the big holiday weekend, we start out with the Hudson
River horror show right now. Big delays in the Holland Tunnel either way with
roadwork, only one lane will be getting by. You’re talking about, at least, twenty
to thirty minutes worth of traffic either way, possibly even more than that.
Meanwhile the Lincoln Tunnel, not great back to Jersey but still your best option.
And the GW Bridge your worst possible option.12
12:01 We’re over the hump and into the official holiday weekend. I want to wish
everybody out there a safe and happy holiday, especially when traveling on the
road this weekend. If you’re trying to get out of town now, you’re in for an easy
time of it. No reported delays around the metropolitan area as I see it live on the
Panasonic Jam Cam.13
This conceptual poem works especially well because the content and form of the poem
create a feeling for the material conditions the poem is set in, namely, the tedious world
of traffic and the radio reporter’s information flow. In Unoriginal Genius, Marjorie Perloff
features a reading of this poem, locating classical poetic categories in Traffic such as
Aristotelian unities of time, space, and action. She finds upon close reading that these
conventions operate in surprising ways in a work that ostensibly has no surprises. Perloff
concludes with a flourish of definitions on what traffic is as both text and experience:
“messy, unbearable, infuriating, debilitating, but also challenging, invigorating, and
unpredictable. Traffic is both an existential and a linguistic challenge.”14
Perloff ’s list of the aesthetic effects of both Traffic and traffic limits her mention of
the poem’s challenge to the assumption that the poem reflects only two subject posi-
tions, driver and reader, who become superimposed. Her argument actually reinstates
expressivism as the primary logic of the work, turning the poem into a theatrical piece
that performatively conveys the inner feelings of reader and driver. This view relies on
holding a vial
enwrapped
Enter: 8,9,13,14,17-ethynyl-13-methyl-
7,8,9,11,12,14,15,16-octahydro-cyclopenta-diol
Plasticine Poetry
As I have argued so far, there are reasons to welcome but also to question the asso-
ciation of the media ecology of conceptual poetry with global ecologies. Conceptual
poetry mobilizes writing procedures that allow concept and matter to read and write
through each other but also to expose each other’s dependencies on planetary-scale
material infrastructures and ecosystems. Adam Dickinson, in his conceptually and
ecologically driven The Polymers, takes plastics as his base material and concept and
creates a series of poems using procedures that imaginatively adapt the polymer
form, a repeating chain of macromolecules, to generate lines that in turn reflect
on the materials that make the text. Plastic is antithetical to composting and is not
thematically subsumed to concepts of recycling in this series of poems.
Dickinson’s procedures vary from poem to poem and are not always strictly
conceptual, but he does employ frequently the practice of excessive formalization
and seeks to pluralize concept/matter interfaces. Some of his poetic instructions
generate the whole text, while others involve selection from a specific database
(internet search, industrial products list, words overheard while standing in line).
Some poems riff on loosely formed conceptual conceits, and Dickinson does not
This basic defamiliarizing gesture pauses the tropes of refreshment on the bottle
that cover for the industrializing of natural resources. The inelegant repeating
“a” cedes to the airy “alps,” which then gives way to the bureaucratic language
of “applicable” and the chemical language of “bicarbonates.” The clear liquid
is written on by many different discourses. Indexing the language of the plastic
water bottle provides a cross section of how natural resource capitalism works at
a polymorphic and polysemic crossroads. The procedural aspect of the poem, its
composition by index, displays a reorganization of language according to rules of
alphabetical order. This procedure splices organizational reason with resin, just
as the water bottle does. Once water is trademarked, the cool liquid shows what it
is made of when it is spread out in the cool medium of the poem: reason is made
plastic, matter is made plastic, capital is plastic, language is plastic, and our ways
of becoming self-aware about this condition are probably plastic, too. Dickinson
does not sweepingly dismiss all plasticity, and in this sense his philosophical dou-
ble is Catherine Malabou, who has long written on plasticity in philosophy and
biology (but strangely not on the synthetic object of plastics). Rather, his poems
begin to parse the specific plastic properties of different media and their effects
on our minds and bodies.
Form, concept, and content all demonstrate plastification in varying degrees in
Dickinson’s book. Plastic is not a matière noble, a nonsynthetic material like silver
or leather, nor is it a substance that enriches any ecosystem by restoring nutrients
to the soil, so it has little traditional Romantic or lyric value attached, but the
aesthetic potential of the material is still vast. When Dickinson turns to poetry
motivated more by lyric than by conceptual traditions, the reader then must ask
what we are to learn about the composition of lyric poetry in this age of plastic.
Are poems in the age of plastic then written differently, and how does conceptual
It is hard to tell what degree of meaningfulness is offered in the title, but suffice
it to say now that if Jung entered a plane today, he would have to submit to a full
body check and be profiled like anyone else. The poem then opens with images of
1
ANTHROPOSCENES ANTHROPOSCENITIES
The Anthropocene enters our vocabulary to denote the time interval during which
humans have profoundly altered Earth’s biosphere. Coined by chemist Paul Crutzen
and biologist Eugene Stoermer, the term has attained wide currency among climate
scientists and others concerned with the human impact on the fate of Earth’s species.
A working group of geological stratigraphers is debating whether the Anthropo-
cene warrants official status as an entirely new epoch and, if so, when it began.1
The “Anthroposcene” is a word I’ve coined for the period in which human culture
has thrived on earth—for better and for worse—as defined by humans. The essay
form is just one of our cultural inventions. This essay explores poetics, poethics,
and epistemology of the Anthropocene.
If the wager that is an essay in the exploratory tradition of that genre can have an
ecopoetic microsystem, this one is an experiment in prosimetrum. A twelfth-century
mongrel term coupling Greek and Latin, prosimetrum refers to a dialogic genre
alternating prose and poetry. As I use it, neither form is subordinate to the other.
The practice precedes its medieval label by at least a millennium and is found in
non-European cultures worldwide. But my model is the remarkable Anicius Manlius
Severinus Boethius, philosopher-poet, theologian, musician, orator, and Roman
official. In 524 CE, four decades after the fall of Rome to the Ostrogoths, Boethius
fell out of favor with King Theodoric. Exiled and imprisoned for dubious charges
of treason, execution looming, he composed a lively—mostly grave, sometimes
humorous—conversation that begins with an exchange between the frank authority
of “Lady Philosophy” and the moral pathos of the “Muses of Poetry.”
Philosophy almost immediately commandeers poetry for her own use, imbuing
pathos with increasingly reflective wisdom. The translator H. R. James saw the text
as “skillfully fitted together like dialogue and chorus in a Greek play.” 2 Every bit
of it was designed to muster imaginative and intellectual courage and, no doubt,
elusive equanimity. It’s clear that Boethius needed poetry as much as philosophy
(perhaps even more) to engage the deeply felt values of his highly cultured humanity,
to sustain a robust life of the mind in extremis. The Consolation of Philosophy, post-
humously published, continuously available to date, was revered and enormously
influential all over Europe until the eighteenth century, when disciplinary divisions
more strictly separated philosophy from theology and other genres. In our own
time, the complexities of life may require conversations among disciplines and
genres, but academia—and commerce—finds them awkward. To read summaries
without mention of Boethius’s prose poetic form in encyclopedias of philosophy
2
The Reinvention of Truth
I’ve admired the form of The Consolation for decades but until now never used it,
except in interdisciplinary classroom experiments where it is always revelatory. Despite
working on every difficult question that interests me by means of poetry, philosophy,
essay, and prose poetic hybrids in a conversational manner, I’ve tended—except for
hybrid forms of prose poetry—to publish the genres separately. The prosimetric con-
versation in Boethius’s text and other well-known examples (Bashoˉ’s The Narrow Road
to the Deep North and Dante’s La Vita Nuova) are most importantly not hybrids. Each genre
retains its own identity, its own effective logics. Prosimetrum presents a challenge of
reciprocal alterity in its writing and reading poesis that our world might benefit from
in other areas. Constructive reciprocal alterity is the opposite of neoliberal colonial-
ism. True conversation—turning (verse) toward and with (con) one another—is just
that. Although what happens on pages is removed in kind and magnitude from what
happens across cultures, ethnicities, races, genders, at borders, and on city streets, so-
ciopoetic models can affect the pragmatic and visionary imagination. When I recently
revisited The Consolation, I saw that for all its moral and theological gravitas (“For the
wicked to overcome the innocent in the sight of God—that is monstrous”) Boethius
derives hope (if not optimism) from the improbable conversation he constructs among
poetry, philosophy, and theology.8 In less conclusively fatal circumstances, like (one
hopes) our current climate crisis, imaginative swerves may lead to new paradigms
that generate ethical energy from constructive optimism.
Jedediah Purdy in After Nature points out that the “American environmental
imagination” has undergone major shifts since the colonial period. From provi-
dential to Romantic to utilitarian views of our landscape, we have recently arrived
at an ecological understanding of the environment. But we are foundering in what
Purdy sees as the dystopia of the neoliberal Anthropocene. This is both what we
have made of our environment and what its transformations make of us. Purdy is
calling for us “as citizens” to “deliberately and collectively shift our autopoesis,
3
“Anthropocene” is the first ethically charged name for a geological epoch. Not
surprising, since it’s the first to designate the ascendancy of planet-wide human
meddling in things geophysical. Some of that meddling has been beautiful, some
tragic, some constructive, some brutally despoiling of human life and (intercon-
nectedly) that of other species. There is much debate about just when the Anthro-
pocene ascendancy began. Was it the ancient turn from nomadism to agriculture?
Was it the industrial age? Was it the explosive start of the nuclear age? From an
ecohumanist point of view, we can say all of the above and more. The problems
we now face have emerged with contributions from every aspect of human life on
earth. But in my view, having been affected by living for ten years in the pre–civil
rights South, the large-scale Anthroposcenities began in full force with the geoethical
disaster that was plantation agribusiness: deforestations, crop monoculture, and
most horrendously millions of women, men, and children wrenched into brutal
lives and deaths as commodities on the international slave market.
The plantation economy remains a template for the succession of megascale
ethical and moral compromises that have exploited human and material resources
for capitalist wealth accumulation.12 Plantations in the U.S. and Euro-American
colonies can be seen as prototypes of what are currently being called sacrifice zones
in the corporate world—a term for lands and waters, communities and popula-
tions devastated by the upheaval and contamination that are matters of course in
industrialized and extractive sites. An if-then exercise: if the entire planet is coming
to be understood as a sacrifice zone, if there is increasing scientific legitimation
of climate apocalypse, if thoughts of colonizing other planets to escape a ruined
earth are gaining credence beyond sci-fi literature and films—even if indirectly,
even if only in our largely phantom space program—then what?
4
None Too Soon
To grasp the sources of the esthetic experience it is, therefore, necessary to have re-
course to animal life . . . The live animal is fully present, all there, in all of its actions . . .
To be pedantic and academic (in the pejorative sense of that word) is to have lost one
of our most vital senses—humor; to have lost, as Winnicott put it, the ability to enjoy
the play of those who haven’t heard of games—games of the sort that have nothing
to do with embodied pleasures or imaginative escapades. Winnicott advocates the
life-long necessity of the kind of play that explores and invents ways to converse
with the material reality that is our world. Play is thus a vital form of poesis, though
he doesn’t name it as such. Both Winnicott and Dewey think of imaginative play
as importantly distinct from the passivity and inwardness of fantasy and dream
states. In a chapter called “The Challenge to Philosophy,” Dewey says this:
The theory that art is play is akin to the dream theory of art. But it goes one step nearer
the actuality of esthetic experience by recognizing the necessity of action, of doing
something. Children are often said to make-believe when they play. But children at
play are at least engaged in actions that give their imagery an outward manifestation;
in their play, idea and act are completely fused.19
What the admittedly marvelous dog—a model of freedom from pedantic crab-
bedness along with elephants, pigs, rabbits, mice, spiders, flies, and everything
else save us humans—might do with language has been beguilingly explored in
children’s literature, but with more anthropomorphizing than alternatives to human
modes of being. Anthropomorphizing in the Anthropocene sounds like an amusing
redundancy. In truth, it seems most often to foster feelings of connectedness to
other species (good thing) while bypassing radical curiosity and respect for their
alterity (dangerous thing). At the same time, Homo linguistica—sometimes sapi-
ent—has for millennia been developing a sensually intelligent poetics with which
we have (consciously and unconsciously) explored forms of sensual intelligence
in the extralinguistic world. (Onomatopoeia and rhythmic structures are only the
most obvious examples.) An intuitive collaboration of visual and sonic semiotics
with cognitive apperception may be what is most significantly meant by the poetic
5
The Magic Rule of 9
Whether the agon of what has been heroically called Man and Nature continues
to the death knell of millions more species, including our own, is partly a matter
of chance—a reliably significant factor in complex dynamic systems like Earth’s
biosphere—partly a matter of our choices. What we call choice is actually the pattern
of wagers we sometimes initiate but are always participating in wittingly or not.
Whatever else we think we’re doing, our careless or considered presence is at any
moment setting off countless butterfly effects. Indeterminacy has to do with the fact
that consequences always outdistance intentions. Which is another way of saying
Given the charge that the term “Anthropocene” implies—opening new territory
beyond scientific and ethical neutrality—what kinds of poethical wagers are worth
making? Or is the question a different one: Does our planetary emergency demand
rhetoric more than poetry? Persuasion more than acts of playful investigation? Might
not the crux be to convince the “we” who live in opulence, the “we” who live reason-
ably above subsistence level, to rethink the difference between need and desire, to
review what the privileged must give up for the survival of a thriving multispecies
habitat on earth? Much of the language of an environmental movement under threat
of climate catastrophe has been rhetorical rather than poetic, relying on ancient
Greek and Roman modes of persuasion—ethos, logos, pathos. Hoping to argue
Poetry, I’d like to suggest, is the linguistic laboratory and playground of the
improbable. Suppose, a poet might parry, after reading Bourdieu very carefully,
that the most improbably significant practices (and their consequences) materi-
alize only on the edges of discernment. Unthinkable because unseen in the lenses
of current categories. Silent, in John Cage’s sense, not because there is nothing
present but because it goes unnoticed. Once noticed, via swerves in geometries of
attention brought on by accident or speculative design—aesthetic devices, thought
experiments, paradigm shifts—the revelation must endure (and improbably sur-
vive) a period of unintelligibility, even scorn. If it does survive, it is because it is
probed and argued with and celebrated with logics, thought processes, imaginative
perspectives that are critically divergent from the official thought of the habitus.
There can be nothing instant about this process. It is appreciated for the most part
retrospectively. But it is enjoyed from the outset—from merest glimmer to clear
realization. The source of pleasure and exhilaration for those who create generative
conditions that change improbability to possibility is in the act, in the poesis. And
that, in the broadest of terms, is the work of experimental poethics.
Bourdieu developed the notion of habitus while studying the Kabyle, ethnic
Berbers in northern Algeria, but quickly saw it to be equally applicable to Euro-
pean society. Can it be scaled up further to throw light on global culture? Despite
overwhelming odds for the uneasy equilibrium that perpetuates habitus, Bourdieu
tosses this in: “Without violence, art, or argument, [habitus] tends to exclude all
extravagances (not for the likes of us), that is, all the behaviours that would be neg-
atively sanctioned because they are incompatible with the objective conditions.”23
Objective conditions are everything that has prior legitimation in the official thought
rationalizing the nature of the habitus—what comes to be considered the objective
conditions of nature and culture. (Circular reasoning is essential in maintaining
habitus.) I reject violence as a means of resisting habitus. At this point, it could
be seriously defended as an agent of progress only by a pre-post-historical Marx-
ist, whose critiques might be invaluable but whose solutions would be quixotic.
Look Up
Dick said, Look, look.
Look up.
Look up, up, up.
Jane said, Run, run.
Run, Keisha, Jabhar, Juan, Miguela, Ashraf, Intesar,
Run. Run, said Jabhar, run and see.
Keisha said, Look, look.
Look over there.
Run, shouted Ashraf, run away.
Run, cried Intesar, run.
_________________________________________________
the body of Christ is riddled with holes
the body of Christ has no thing but holes
the body of Christ is darkest matter
the body of Christ is the mystery of dark
matter blasted into starry nights
____________________________________
Look, cried Miguela, see.
See shiny yellow police tape
replace the horizon in our romantic
landscape at the end of the block.
See the empty cracks, said Juan, the cracks
where Chicory and Lamb’s Quarters used to grow.
See, they said in unison, see those ancient clouds
drifting by, most delicately formed. See how
beautiful they are, how pink and puffy they are
scattering star dust on that prison roof, on
the border fences, the walls, the occupied territories,
the blood stained sidewalks, the plantation heritage sites.
Coda
The angle of attention is the
most beautiful act of free will.
If there is a God than which nothing greater
can be conceived that tragedy is inconceivable.25
counterfactuals
the world is full and doesn’t ask for more
I’d like to know better than to claim
a song of songs or the illumination
E c o p o e t i c s a s Ex p a n d e d C r i t i c a l P r a c t i c e
1. The conference program as well as links to postconference reflections,
collaborations, and essays are available at http://ecopoeticsconference.blogspot
.com/.
2. “The pond of unlimited facilities” off-site event was organized by Laura
Woltag. “The Pond of Unlimited Facilities: Let’s Do This!” February 1, 2013,
e-mail invitation.
3. Kate Rigby, “Ecopoetics,” in Key Words for Environmental Studies, ed. Joni
Adamson, William A. Gleason, and David N. Pellow (New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 2016), 79.
4. For more on the poetics of nonhuman animals, see Aaron M. Moe, Zoopoet-
ics: Animals and the Making of Poetry (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2014).
5. Brenda Hillman, interview, “Red, White, and Blue: Poets on Politics,”
Poetry Society of America, 2012. See https://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry
/crossroads/red_white_blue_poets_on_politics/brenda_hillman/.
6. See, for example, George Hart, “‘Enough Defined’: Disability, Ecopoetics,
and Larry Eigner,” Contemporary Literature 51, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 152–179, and
Peter Jaeger, “Ethnicity, Ecopoetics, and Fred Wah’s Biotext,” Journal of Postcolo-
nial Writing 46, no. 2 (May 2010): 199–208.
7. By using the phrase “intersectional scholarship,” we gesture toward
intersectionality theory, an antiracist, feminist project. See Kimberlé Crenshaw,
“Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of
Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University
of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, no. 1, Article 8.
8. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), iv, xviii–xxi.
9. For more on the Jeffers-Snyder-Berry triumvirate, see Lynn Keller, “Green
Reading: Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and Environmental Crit-
icism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 608.
10. For more on a perceived lyric tradition, see Virginia Jackson and Yopie
Prins, “General Introduction,” in The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed.
Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2014), 1–8.
11. Robert Duncan, “Introduction,” in Bending the Bow (New York: New Direc-
tions, 1963), v–vi.
12. Ibid, vi.
13. Robert Duncan, “From Notes on the Structure of Rime,” in Collected Essays
and Other Prose, ed. James Maynard (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2014), 295.
14. Ibid., 299.
15. For a discussion of the field as a space for poetry, see John Felstiner, Can
Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2000); Bernard W. Quetchenbach, Back from the Far Field: American
Nature Poetry in the Late Twentieth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 2000); and Stephen Yenser, A Boundless Field: American Poetry at Large
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). For examples of poets who
investigate the field’s poetic legacy, see Cecily Parks, Field Folly Snow: Poems (Ath-
ens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), and C. S. Giscombe, Prairie Style (Cham-
paign, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008).
16. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and
the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1995), 285. Regarding the locution “to think the end of nature,” here and else-
where we omit the preposition “about” in order to emphasize that thinking is
7. Toxic Recognition
1. Cedric J. Robinson, “Racial Capitalism: The Nonobjective Character of
Capitalist Development,” in his Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tra-
dition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 9–28.
2. Rob Nixon, “Stranger in the Eco-Village: Environmental Time, Race, and
Ecologies of Looking,” in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, ed.
Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), 160.
3. Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the
American Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), xiv.
4. Ibid., 294.
5. Ibid., 8.
6. Audra Simpson, “Indigenous Interruptions: Mohawk Nationhood,
Citizenship, and the State,” in Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders
of Settler States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 1–36, and Glen
Coulthard, “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recog-
nition’ in Canada,” Contemporary Political Theory 6 (2007): 437–460.
7. Coulthard, “Subjects of Empire,” 438–439.
8. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit
from Identity Politics (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1998).
9. Sherwin Bitsui, Shapeshift (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003), and
Flood Song (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2009).
10. Lawrence Buell, “Toxic Discourse,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 3 (Spring 1998):
646. The quotation “poverty is hierarchic, smog is democratic,” cited by Buell,
8 . T owa r d a n A n t i r a c i s t E c o p o e t i c s
1. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis, Minn.: Graywolf
Press, 2014), 5.
2. Ibid.
3. Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (Minneapolis,
Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2004), 11.
4. Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” South
Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (2013): 738, 769.
5. Claudia Rankine, “Claudia Rankine in Conversation,” Academy of Ameri-
can Poets, September 15, 2009, https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text
/claudia-rankine-conversation.
6. Ibid.
We would like to thank the following for permission to print or reprint these ma-
terials.
Robert Creeley: “I Know a Man,” first published in For Love: Poems 1950–1960
and reprinted in The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975, by permis-
sion of the University of California Press.
Michael McClure: Ghost Tantra 51 from Ghost Tantras, copyright 1964, 2013
by Michael McClure, by permission of the Permissions Company on
behalf of City Lights Books.
Michael McClure: “Raven’s Feather, Eagle’s Claw, Every Song Ever Chanted”
from Three Poems: Dolphin Skull, Rare Angel, and Dark Brown, by permission
of Penguin Books.
Michael McClure: “Written after Finding a Dolphin’s Skull on the Gulf of
California” from September Blackberries, copyright 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971,
1972, 1973, 1974 by Michael McClure, by permission of New Directions.
George Oppen: “Time of the Missile” from New Collected Poems, copyright
1962 by George Oppen, by permission of New Directions.
George Oppen: “From Disaster” from Collected Poems, copyright 1975 by
George Oppen, by permission of New Directions.
Previously unpublished writing and images by participants in the Salaman-
der project included in Petra Kuppers’s essay, “Writing with the Sala-
mander: An Ecopoetic Community Performance Project”: Andy Jackson,
Susan Nordmark, Chris Smit, Denise Leto, Petra Kuppers, Neil Marcus,
Nor ’Ain Muhamad Nor, Sharon Siskin, and Xavier Duacastilla Soler, by
permission of the authors and artists.
Toyin Ojih Odutola: Uncertain, Yet Reserved (Adeola, Abuja Airport, Nigeria),
copyright 2012 by Toyin Ojih Odutola, by permission of the artist and the
Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
The mammogram image in Angela Hume’s essay, “Toward an Antiracist
Ecopoetics: Waste and Wasting in the Poetry of Claudia Rankine,” was
originally published in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia
Rankine, reprinted by permission of Claudia Rankine.
Angela Hume’s “Toward an Antiracist Ecopoetics: Waste and Wasting in the
Poetry of Claudia Rankine” appeared as a longer essay in Contemporary
Literature 57, no. 1 (2016): 79–110, copyright 2016 by the Board of Regents
of the University of Wisconsin System, by permission of the University of
Wisconsin Press.
Joan Retallack: “The Ventriloquist’s Dilemma” and “The Magic Rule of 9,”
originally published in Jacket2, by permission of the author.
Xandria Phillips: “For a Burial Free of Sharks” from Reasons for Smoking, by
permission of the Seattle Review.
Index
294 Index
Coulthard, Glen, 146, 152 Duacastilla Soler, Xavier, 138
Crane, Heart: “A Name for All,” 77 Duncan, Robert, 4–5, 13, 72, 84–101;
Creeley, Robert, 66, 70, 71, 88, 198; “I “Apprehensions,” 93; “The Dance,”
Know a Man,” 36–37 88; dialectic and, 84–85, 94, 95,
Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 167 270n41; The H.D. Book, 87, 90–93, 96,
Crick, Francis, 67, 68 98, 270n33; “Ideas of the Meaning of
critical race theory, 13, 14, 167, 169 Form,” 85, 95; “Often I Am Permitted
Cronon, William, 10, 173 to Return to a Meadow,” 86, 87–88;
Crutzen, Paul, 228 Olson and, 84, 86–89, 90, 93, 96, 101;
cybernetics, 9, 69, 71–72, 78, 79, 81, 88, The Opening of the Field, 86, 88, 89, 97;
267n84 play principle in, 86–89; “Poetry, A
Natural Thing,” 86, 97–101; “Towards
dams, 195, 196, 198 an Open Universe,” 90, 92–97, 101;
Dante Alighieri, 179, 231 vulnerability in, 84–90, 101
Davidson, Michael, 123 Dungy, Camille, 2, 103, 177
decolonization theory, 11, 13, 167 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 283n13
Deleuze, Gilles, 72 Dworkin, Craig: “Fact,” 214, 217
Derrida, Jacques, 160
Dewey, John, 237–239 Earth, photographs of, 96; Earth Day, 75,
Di Chiro, Giovanna, 13 97
dialectics, 12, 259n26; Duncan and, 84–85, ecocriticism, 6, 7–8, 11, 146–147; limita-
94, 95; Oppen and, 51, 52–53, 61 tions of, 146, 167. See also the body and
Dickinson, Adam, 15; “Carl Jung Steps environmental writing
onto a Plane,” 225–226; “Coca-Cola ecological harm. See environmental deg-
Dasani,” 223–224; The Polymers, 213, radation
221–227 ecological others, 14, 173–174
Different Light Theatre Company, 128 ecology, 2–3, 5, 7, 8, 15, 211; early uses of
digital technology, 31, 35, 39–40, 218 term, 65–66, 67, 78, 218, 266n76. See
Dillard, Annie, 7 also resilience
Dimock, Wai Chee, 195, 283n16 ecopoetics: antiracist, 167–168, 171; black,
Dinétah, 149, 157, 159, 276n14 103; definitions of, 2, 10, 120, 170, 210;
disability, experience of, 5, 11, 13, 118–141 development of, 3–5, 7–10, 66, 72–73,
Doolittle, Hilda. See H.D. 209; different terms for, 6, 7; etymol-
Drexciya, 108 ogy of, 2; expansion of, 124, 141, 207,
drought, 148, 157–165 287n4; McClure on, 79, 80–81; Ran-
Index 295
kine on, 170; scholarship on, 3, 9, 194; Fanon, Frantz, 115, 152, 182, 184
Skinner on, 8–9, 124, 207, 210 Felstiner, John, 10
ecopoetics (journal), 8 field composition. See composition by field
ecopoetry: anthologies of, 2–3; canon Finseth, Ian, 103
of, 7–9, 209; definitions of, 84, 209; Fisher-Wirth, Ann, 3, 6
development of, 3–4, 85; kinds of, 6–7 Fletcher, Angus, 9
Eigner, Larry, 9 Foerster, Norman, 7
ekphrasis, 127, 140–141 Foote, Stephanie, 200
Elder, John, 8 Foucault, Michel, 279n23
Eliot, T. S., 8, 44, 269n26 François, Anne-Lise, 6, 205
embodiment (and embeddedness), 12–13, Fredman, Stephen, 87
Freeman, Alan, 151
22; in Graham, 20, 26, 28, 30; in
Freud, Sigmund, 87, 99, 102
Reilly, 20, 33, 34, 40; in Salamander
Frost, Robert: “The Oven Bird,” 85; “The
workshops, 140. See also the body and
Road Not Taken,” 180; “West-Running
environmental writing
Brook,” 86, 97–100, 101
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 9, 65
enactivist poetics, 83
Garrard, Greg, 21
enclosure, politics of, 147, 148, 149–155, Gay, Ross, 10
156–157, 167 Gery, John, 257n3, 258n6
entropology, 81, 83 Gibbs, Lois, 148
entropy, 80, 83, 85, 86, 94–95, 96, 97–99, Gilcrest, David, 10
101 Ginsberg, Allen, 67, 72–73
environmental degradation (harm, vio- Giscombe, C. S., 5
lence), 22, 25, 38, 145–149, 151–155, Glave, Diane, 103
160, 165, 167, 170, 193, 231; Nixon on, global warming. See climate change
205–206; Thoreau and, 189–191. See Glotfelty, Cheryll, 7, 8, 9, 10–11
also “slow death” Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 71
environmental ethics, 8, 16 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 15, 208–209; Traffic,
environmental justice, 11, 13–14, 169, 171, 208–209, 216–217; Uncreative Writing,
195 218, 287n7
environmental management, 6, 14. See also Graham, Jorie, 11, 20, 23–31, 40–41;
sustainability “Embodies,” 26; “Futures,” 28–29;
environmental racism, 6, 11, 169, 170, 173, “Loan,” 27–28; “Long Way Round,”
186 30; “Positive Feedback Loop,” 25–26,
environmental risk, 6, 169, 172, 174 29–30; “Sea Change,” 23–25
Epicurus, 289n5 Guattari, Félix, 72
296 Index
habitus, 242–243 Jackson, Andy, 129
Haraway, Donna, 215 Jackson, George, 111
Hardy, Thomas, 236 James, H. R., 229
Harjo, Jo, 8, 147 Jameson, Fredric, 3
Harney, Stefano, 149, 154, 168 Jeffers, Robinson, 4, 67, 85
Harris, Cheryl, 160 Jones, Donna, 270n33
Hartman, Saidiya, 103, 114 Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka), 73; literary
Hass, Robert, 1–2, 207 journals of, 74
Hayden, Robert, 13, 102–104; “Middle Joseph, Jonathan, 193–194
Passage,” 104, 105–111, 116–117 Jung, Carl G., 225
H.D., 83, 86, 90–93, 96, 101, 269n26;
Trilogy, 90–92 Kaba, Mariame, 114, 273n22
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 242 Kafer, Alison, 125, 126–127
Heidegger, Martin, 10, 252n36 Keenaghan, Eric, 91
Heise, Ursula, 28 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 215
Hejinian, Lyn, 154 Keller, Lynn, 7–8, 9, 122, 140, 141
Heraclitus, 93 Kerouac, Jack, 70, 78
Hillman, Brenda, 2, 207 Killingsworth, Jimmie, 23
historical materialism, 12 Knickerbocker, Scott, 7–8
Hogan, Linda, 8
Howard, Jonathan, 116 Lamantia, Philip, 67
Howe, Susan, 8 Latour, Bruno, 211
Hume, Angela, 207 Lawrence, D. H., 67, 269n26
Hurricane Katrina, 195; Rankine on, Leary, Timothy, 68
171–173, 176, 184–186 LeMenager, Stephanie, 195, 200, 283n16
Hurricane Sandy, 192–193, 199 Leto, Denise, 135–136
hydropoetics: black, 105; Niedecker and, Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 81
194, 200, 201–203; Salamander project Liao, Kuei Hsien, 285n33
and, 120–121, 124, 139 Lin, Tan, 209
Linnaeus, Carl, 194, 196–197
Iijima, Brenda, 120–121 Lippard, Lucy, 213
internet culture, 218 Lipsit, George, 148
intersectionality, 3, 5, 9, 105, 209, 210, looking (and politics of recognition),
249n7 145–147
Lopez, Barry, 7
Index 297
Lucretius, 194, 254n1 McLuhan, Marshall, 218; media as mes-
Luhmann, Niklas, 81 sage, 213–214
lyric genre, 4, 6, 8; antilyric experimental- media ecology, 218–219, 221
ism, 7; Oppen and, 44, 48, 56; Ran- Medovoi, Leerom, 279n23
kine and, 170–171, 174, 178, 182–184 Meillassoux, Quentin, 46, 54–55, 57, 60–61
Melancholia (film), 61
Mackey, Nathaniel, 162, 165, 270n41 Meltzer, David, 67
Malabou, Catherine, 224 Mesch, Harald, 81
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 259n18 Middle Passage. See slave trade
Mancuso, Katherine, 138–139 Milton, John, 48
Marcus, Neil, 121, 131–132 modernism, 4, 9, 58–59, 90, 203. See also
Margalef, Ramón, 79, 81, 267n84 collage
Marlatt, Daphne, 8 Moore, Marianne, 8
Marx, Karl, 261n54 Morton, Timothy, 10, 223, 260n38
Marx, Leo, 7 Moten, Fred, 14, 114, 149, 154, 168, 170,
materialism, 13, 83, 89 181–183, 186
Maturana, Humberto, 79, 83 Muir, John, 7
Maud, Ralph, 73 Murray, Elwyn, 135
McClintock, Anne, 160, 161, 162
McClure, Michael, 12, 66–83; “The Nash, Roderick, 7
Chamber,” 74; “Dark Brown,” 69, nature writing, 6–7, 85, 122, 139, 148,
74; !The Feast!, 74, 77; “For the Death 173–174; black authors and, 103,
of 100 Whales,” 67; Ghost Tantras, 69, 176–180; ecological attentiveness and,
72, 75–78, 79, 265n67; “LISTEN, 283n14; Niedecker and, 194
LAWRENCE, THERE ARE CERTAIN Navajo Nation. See Dinétah
OF US,” 78; Meat Science, 69, 77; Olson neoliberalism, 121–122, 194, 199, 206,
and, 68, 69–74, 76, 77–78, 83; “Peyote 232, 289n9
Poem,” 68; “Phi Upsilon Kappa,” New American Poetry, 4, 66, 78
69, 74; “Poem,” 67; “Point Lobos: Niedecker, Lorine, 9, 14, 94, 192, 194–207,
Animism,” 67; “Rant Block,” 70–72; 283n13, 2831n17, 286n47; “Fog-thick
Rare Angel, 76, 79–80, 83; “Revolt,” 69; morning—,” 285n36; “Linnaeus in
Scratching the Beat Surface, 66, 67, 68, 78, Lapland,” 196–198; “My life is hung
80, 81; “Written after Finding a Dol- up,” 199–200; “Paean to Place,”
phin Skull on the Gulf of California,” 270n40; “Some float off on chocolate
81–83. See also animals bars,” 201–202; “Springtime’s wide,”
298 Index
204–205 Missile,” 42, 44–45, 47–50, 55–56, 57,
Nixon, Rob, 145, 205–206 58; “Two Romance Poems,” 53. See also
Nor, Nor ’Ain Muhamad, 132–133 objectivist realism
Nordhaus, Ted, 20 Ortiz, Simon, 8, 147
Nordmark, Susan, 136–138 Otolith Group, 109
Outka, Paul, 103
objectivism (and objectism), 4, 13, 86–87,
198 Palmer, Jacqueline, 23
objectivist realism, 46, 50–53, 57, 59–61 Parks, Cecily, 5
object-oriented ontology, 54, 55, 61 pastoral, 28, 30, 39, 122, 171, 178
Odutola, Toyin Ojih, 185, 186 pathetic fallacy, 236
Olimpias, 121, 125, 126–127, 130, 138, 140 patiency, 60, 261n55
Olson, Charles, 4, 12, 66, 68, 69–79, 197– Pawlicki, Jasmine, 134
198; “Against Wisdom as Such,” 87; Perloff, Marjorie, 216–217
autonomy and, 48–49, 53, 54, 58–59, peyote, 68
263n19; Duncan and, 84, 86–89, 90, phenomenology, 10
93, 96, 101; “Human Universe,” 68, Phillips, Xandria: “For a Burial Free of
77–78, 88–89, 90; “The Kingfishers,” Sharks,” 104–105, 114–117
69, 71; “Letter to Elaine Feinstein,” philosophy and poetry, 229
74; “The Librarian,” 74; McClure and, physicalism, 68–69, 75–76
68, 69–74, 76, 77–78, 83; The Maximus Place, Vanessa, 209
Poems, 68, 71, 73, 74–75; Muthologos, plastic, 139, 214, 218–219, 221–226
68; “Place; & Names,” 73; “Projective Plumwood, Val, 85
Verse,” 66, 69, 71, 74, 86, 88, 197; poethics, 229, 242–243
Proprioception, 66, 73, 74–75, 83; “Rose Pollock, Jackson, 72
of the World,” 73; “The Secret of the Ponge, Francis: “The Pebble,” 43, 45, 54
Black Chrysanthemum,” 68; “Under postcolonialism, 11, 118, 120
the Mushroom,” 73–74 postmodernism, 3–4
open form poetics. See composition by field Pound, Ezra, 269n26, 287n7
Oppen, George, 12, 42–61; “All This preservationist poetry, 4, 173, 177
Strangeness,” 259n18; “From Disas- projective verse, 4, 5, 71; Duncan and, 84,
ter,” 55–56, 57; “The Mind’s Own 86, 88; Olson’s essay on, 66, 69, 71,
Place,” 48; “Myth of the Blaze,” 52; 74, 86, 88, 89
“Of Being Numerous,” 51, 52–53, 54, proprioception, 74–75, 78, 83, 264n51;
57; “Route,” 50, 51, 58; “Time of the Olson’s essay on, 66, 73, 74–75, 83
Index 299
prosimetrum form, 229, 231 “Dreamquest Malware,” 31–33, 34;
Public Works Administration, 195, 283n17 “The Grief of Ecopoetics,” 33–34;
Purdy, Jedediah, 232, 289n9 Styrofoam, 220–221
representational writing, 7–8, 9
queerness, 5, 11; Duncan and, 13, 84, 86, resilience, 11, 190–194, 196, 198–199,
87, 101 200–201, 203–204, 206–207, 284n33;
Quetchenbach, Bernard, 8 defined, 282n3
Rexroth, Kenneth, 8
racism, 152, 160, 169–171; Foucault on, Rich, Adrienne, 8
279n23. See also ecopoetics: antiracist; Rigby, Kate, 2
environmental racism; slave trade Romanticism, 5, 10, 13, 87, 101, 173, 178,
Rankine, Claudia, 14, 169–186; “American 236–238; Duncan on, 269n26
Light,” 178–179; “August 29, 2005 Ronda, Margaret, 1, 11, 14–15
/ Hurricane Katrina,” 171–173, 176, Rosenberg, Jordana, 55
184–186; “The Birth,” 176–177, 179; Rotella, Guy, 8
Citizen, 169–174, 180, 183; Don’t Let Me Rukeyser, Muriel, 266n2; “Waterlily Fire,”
Be Lonely, 169–170, 174–176, 182, 183, 42–43, 45
184; “February 26, 2012 / In Memory of
Trayvon Martin,” 180, 182; home trope Salamander (performance project), 13,
in, 179–180; lyric mode in, 170–171, 121–127, 140; writings and photo-
174, 178, 182–184; Nothing in Nature Is graphs of, 127–138
Private, 169, 176–180; Plot, 184; wasting Sartre, Jean-Paul, 69
and exhaustion in, 169–172, 176, 179, Schrödinger, Erwin, 93, 95
181–183, 185–186 Scigaj, Leonard, 8, 10
Ransom, John Crowe, 86, 100–101, 271n55 Seetoo, Chia-Yi, 132
Rasula, Jed, 9, 219–220, 266n80 Shakespeare, William, 106
Ray, Sarah Jaquette, 14, 173 Shellenberger, Michael, 20
Rebel Roar: The Sound of Michael McClure Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 10, 173, 206
(film), 77 Shepard, Paul, 120
recycling, 15, 218–221, 226 Shockley, Evie, 171
Rediker, Marcus, 107–108, 109, 114 Siebers, Tobin, 124
Reed, Anthony, 184 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 8
Reich, Wilhelm, 69 Simpson, Audra, 146
Reilly, Evelyn, 11, 20, 23, 31–41, 207; Siskin, Sharon, 128
“Apocalypso: A Comedy,” 31, 35–40; Skinner, Jonathan, 8–9, 124, 207, 210; on
300 Index
Niedecker, 284n23, 285n34 Tolson, Melvin, 13, 103; “The Sea-Turtle
slave trade, 102, 103–110, 114–116, 179, 181 and the Shark,” 104, 111–114, 116
“slow death,” 176 toxicity, 6, 14, 20, 121, 130, 139, 145–156,
“slow violence,” 118, 205, 206 160, 166–168; “toxic discourse,” 13–14,
Smallwood, Stephanie, 106–107 148–149, 151, 153, 160, 163–164
Smit, Chris, 136
Smith, Andrea, 167–168 Varela, Francisco, 79, 83
Smith, Kimberly, 177 variability, 192, 196, 198, 203, 205, 207
Snyder, Gary, 4, 8, 9, 66, 67, 77, 78 Vicuña, Cecilia, 9
Spade, Dean, 166–167 visceral poetics, 66
Spahr, Juliana, 8–9 vitalism, 91, 92, 270n33
speculative realism, 11, 46, 54–55, 57, 60–61 Voros, Gyorgyi, 8
Spillers, Hortense, 102, 116, 181
Wakefield, Stephanie, 191–192
spiritmeat, 12–13, 69
Waldrep, G. C., 2–3
spirituals, 179
Warhol, Andy, 286n3
Stein, Gertrude, 237
Watson, James, 67
Steingraber, Sandra, 65–66
Watts, Alan, 266n76
Stevens, Wallace, 8, 26, 34
Whalen, Philip, 73
Stoermer, Eugene, 229
white supremacy, 108, 168
Street, Laura-Gray, 3, 6
Whitehead, Alfred North, 12, 69, 79, 83, 88
Stubbs, George, 100
Whitman, Walt, 9, 123, 162, 223, 235;
Sun Ra, 109
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,”
surface reading, 15 94; “This Compost,” 219
“surround, the,” 149, 154, 155, 168 Williams, Raymond, 258n10
sustainability, 6, 14; apocalypticism vs., Williams, William Carlos, 203, 269n26
19; literature and, 122, 140 Wilson, Will, 159
systems theory, 3, 9, 12, 72, 73, 79, 81, 84 Winnicott, D. W., 238–239
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 79, 259n32
Tallique, Genre (Joan Retallack), 233 Wordsworth, William, 8, 173
terracentrism, 105, 109, 271n3
Thomson, Melissa, 130 Zimet, Julian, 44, 48–49, 50, 52
Thoreau, Henry David, 7, 9, 189–192, 194, Zukofsky, Louis, 202
223
Index 301
Contemporary North American Poetry Series