Recomposing Ecopoetics Read online

  Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism

  Michael P. Branch, Kate Rigby, John Tallmadge, Editors

  Recomposing Ecopoetics

  NORTH AMERICAN POETRY OF THE SELF-CONSCIOUS ANTHROPOCENE

  Lynn Keller

  UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS

  CHARLOTTESVILLE AND LONDON

  University of Virginia Press

  © 2017 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  First published 2017

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Keller, Lynn, [date] author.

  Title: Recomposing ecopoetics : North American poetry of the self-conscious anthropocene / Lynn Keller.

  Other titles: North American poetry of the self-conscious anthropocene

  Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2017. | Series: Under the sign of nature : explorations in ecocriticism | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017025188 | ISBN 9780813940618 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813940625 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813940632 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Ecocriticism. | Philosophy of nature in literature. | Place (Philosophy) in literature. | Ecology in literature. | Human-animal relationships in literature. | Environmentalism in literature. | American poetry—21st century—History and criticism. | Canadian poetry—21st century—History and criticism.

  Classification: LCC PN98.E36 K45 2017 | DDC 809/.9336—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025188

  Cover art: Cut-Bank (Kikait), Jeremy Herndl, 2013. (Collection of the Surrey Art Gallery; photo by Scott Massey)

  For Caroline and Joe

  A poetics that can operate in the interrogative, with epistemological curiosity and ethical concern, is not so much language as instrument to peer through as instrument of investigative engagement. As such it takes part in the recomposing of contemporary consciousness, contemporary sensibilities.

  —Joan Retallack, “What Is Experimental Poetry & Why Do We Need It?”

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: Beyond Nature Poetry

  1. “In Deep Time into Deepsong”: Writing the Scalar Challenges of the Anthropocene

  2. Toxicity, Nets, and Polymeric Chains: The Ecopoetics of Plastic

  3. “Under These Apo-calypso Rays”: Crisis, Pleasure, and Eco-Apocalyptic Poetry

  4. Understanding Nonhumans: Interspecies Communication in Poetry

  5. Global Rearrangements: Sense of Place in Twenty-First-Century Ecopoetics

  6. Environmental Justice Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene

  Coda: Writing the Self-Conscious Anthropocene

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Illustrations

  1. Boot prints in Styrofoam

  2. A polar bear’s footprints in the snow

  3. Text in butterfly pattern from a.rawlings’s Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists

  4. Curled text from Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists

  5. Text uncurling from Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists

  6. Pages with digitally altered photographs of a butterfly and a butterfly in a bottle from Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists

  7. Page with digitally altered photograph of a moth from Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists

  8. Bark beetle rubbing and poem from Jody Gladding’s Translations from Bark Beetle

  9. Spectrogram of birdsong

  10. People living off the grid in the United States

  11. Burmese miners

  12. Billboard image of green mountains in front of landscape of Chinese mining region

  Acknowledgments

  Two communities have been crucial to the development of this book. The first is the Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE) in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. When I turned my scholarship toward environmental inquiry, I started attending the regular CHE colloquia in order to learn how scholars in multiple disciplines were discussing environmental issues. I gained a great deal more—most rewardingly, an extraordinarily interesting and caring group of faculty and graduate student colleagues outside my home department of English. My particular thanks to Bill Cronon and Gregg Mitman, founding leaders of CHE, who pulled me in and have continued to support me.

  The second is the English Department at Stockholm University, where I was a visiting professor in the first half of 2014. Claudia Egerer, then department chair, generously invited me to give a series of lectures for graduate students and faculty in lieu of one of my courses. Those lectures, which enabled me to gather the thinking I had been doing in recent years, provided the backbone for this book. I am grateful for the warm welcome I received from all the members of that department through Sweden’s dark winter months, and especially to Claudia, Bo Ekeland, and Paul Schreiber for their valuable feedback in response to my lectures.

  Without composing the Stockholm lectures, I could never have written a proposal that would have convinced the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to award me a fellowship. I am honored and grateful for the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015–2016 that enabled me to write this book with the speed its timely subject warrants. Also formative was the interdisciplinary fall 2013 Faculty Development Seminar “Environmental Studies in the Time of the Anthropocene,” organized by Rob Nixon and sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, the Institute for Research in the Humanities, and the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I am grateful to Rob for his thoughtful leadership and to the other participants: Samer Alatout, Monique Allewaert, Anna Andrzejewski, Joshua Calhoun, Kata Beilin, Will Brockliss, Mark Johnson, Rick Keller, Gregg Mitman, Larry Nesper, Sai Suryanarayanan, Alberto Vargas, and Lydia Zepeda.

  Many other wonderful friends and colleagues have also provided valuable assistance, among them Stephen Brick, Michael Davidson, Alan Golding, Caroline Levine, Angela Hume, Dee Morris, Jed Rasula, Joan Retallack, Jack W. Williams, and David Zimmerman. By inviting me to give talks in the spring of 2014, Marco Armiero, Evy Varsamopoulou, and Caitlin DeSilvey—all generous hosts—enabled me to get additional responses to ideas I was developing. Special thanks to the members of the stimulating ACLA seminar that Angela Hume and I organized in 2015, “The Opening of the Field: New Approaches to Ecopoetics”: Angie and Joan again, Rob Halpern, Matt Hooley, Michelle Niemann, Gillian Osborne, Sonya Posmentier, Margaret Ronda, Joshua Schuster, and Jonathan Skinner. I am deeply thankful for the powerful and courageous writing of all the poets discussed here; several of them deserve additional thanks for answering questions or providing resources. The person who has most helped me bring this book into the world is my former doctoral student Michelle Niemann, whom I hired initially so that I could have an informed and insightful reader responding to my chapters as I produced them during my fellowship year. Her comments prompted revisions that have significantly sharpened the arguments in this book. As she began to establish a business in academic editing, her responsibilities expanded: she commented on the revised chapters; helped me trim the manuscript; shifted the style to suit the press’s stipulations; and properly formatted the notes along with the rest of the manuscript. Always prompt, efficient, and careful, as well as marvelously intelligent and sensible, she relieved me of a huge amount of labor and stress. A thousand thanks to Michelle.

  I wish to acknowledge the poets, photographers, and presses who generously granted permission to reprint images from the bo
oks discussed here: Ian Teh and Coffee House Press; Jonathan Skinner and BlazeVOX; Evelyn Reilly, James Sherry, and Roof Books; Forrest Gander, Raymond Meeks, Lucas Foglia, and New Directions; Angela Rawlings, Matt Ceolin, and Coach House Books; Jody Gladding and Milkweed Editions. I am also grateful to the editors who published articles that overlap with material published here: “21st-Century Ecopoetry and the Scalar Challenges of the Anthropocene,” in The News from Poems: Essays on the 21st-Century American Poetry of Engagement, edited by Jeffrey Gray and Ann Keniston; “The Ecopoetics of Hyperobjects: Evelyn Reilly’s Styrofoam,” in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment; and “a.rawlings: Ecopoetic Intersubjectivity,” in Jacket2. “Making Art ‘under these apo-calypso rays’: Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics,” an abbreviated version of chapter 3, is forthcoming in a collection currently titled Ecopoetics: A Critical Anthology, edited by Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne.

  My thanks to Boyd Zenner at the University of Virginia Press, to the manuscript’s anonymous readers, and to the editors of the series Under the Sign of Nature, Michael Branch, SueEllen Campbell, Kate Rigby, and John Tallmadge, for their faith in this book. Thanks to the press staff, and especially to Ellen Satrom and Cecilia Sorochin, and to freelance editor Sue Breckenridge, for their skillful work on its production.

  Finally, endless thanks to my amazing children, Caroline and Joe Carlsmith, whose love and energy support all that I do. However dark our time, they ground the hope that sustains me.

  Introduction

  Beyond Nature Poetry

  The Anthropocene. Dozens of books published in the last few years include the word in their titles: from The Birth of the Anthropocene to Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, from Art in the Anthropocene to Geomorphology in the Anthropocene, from Eating Anthropocene to Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene. Artists and museums in multiple nations are using the term to name their exhibits; for instance, Placing the Golden Spike: Landscapes of the Anthropocene (Milwaukee Art Museum), Earth Works: Mapping the Anthropocene (Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach), Ark of the Anthropocene (Weisman Art Museum, Duluth), and Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands (Deutsches Museum, Munich). Academic conferences concerning the Anthropocene involving diverse disciplines, such as “Big History Anthropocene” and “Democracy and Resilience in the Anthropocene,” have recently been organized in Canberra, Santa Barbara, Milwaukee, Stockholm, Paris, and Sydney, among other cities. There’s now even a magazine titled Anthropocene: Innovation in the Human Age as well as a transdisciplinary journal, The Anthropocene Review. Although the term may or may not be formally adopted by the International Commission on Stratigraphy to designate the current geological epoch, the awareness that humans have come to be the dominant force affecting planetary systems now pervades our culture; it is registered in the most recent Papal encyclical, in a range of academic fields as well as in public discourses, and by artists working in all kinds of media.1

  I have coined the phrase “self-conscious Anthropocene” to provide a term, distinct from the label for the geological era that may have begun centuries ago, that foregrounds this very recent awareness. It identifies the period since the term Anthropocene was introduced when, whether or not people use that word, there is extensive “recognition that human actions are driving far-reaching changes to the life-supporting infrastructure of Earth.”2 The phrase acknowledges that, whatever the status of the Anthropocene as a geological category and regardless of whether that epoch is deemed to have begun half a century or many centuries ago, the broad appeal of the term Anthropocene signals a powerful cultural phenomenon tied to reflexive, critical, and often anxious awareness of the scale and severity of human effects on the planet. Although recognition of human planetary impact on the atmosphere, oceans, land, and ecosystems has been developing for at least a century, only very recently has this awareness become truly widespread.

  It was in the year 2000 that Nobel Prize–winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer proposed that humankind has so transformed the planet that we have entered a new geological epoch they named after humans, the Anthropocene. Momentarily I will outline the debates surrounding the term and its dating that have taken place primarily among geologists and other natural scientists, but those debates are only background for this study, which concerns poetry that responds to contemporary environmental changes and challenges—that is, poetry of the self-conscious Anthropocene. As Tobias Boes and Kate Marshall observe, “Regardless of when the Anthropocene is agreed to have begun, what is different now is that it is being recognized or named as such.” Going further, Nigel Clark asserts, “The awareness that humankind has grown into a preeminent force in planetary nature—and all the associated questions about how to deal with this situation—is undoubtedly one of the most momentous events our species has ever had to cope with.”3 The designation “self-conscious Anthropocene” enables us to name this period of changed recognition when the responsibility humans bear for the condition of the planet and for the fates of Holocene species is widely understood. While “the Anthropocene” is a term of geological reference that may reach back centuries, “the self-conscious Anthropocene” identifies a cultural reality more than a scientific one. I date it from the year of Crutzen and Stoermer’s publication, since that registers transformations not simply in the environment but also in awareness, though that awareness is not tied only to the term’s dissemination. Conveniently, the date corresponds with the turn of a century and the beginning of a new millennium.

  Boes and Marshall also note that “knowing and articulating species-being within a reflexively produced era of geologic time requires . . . novel modes of articulation that are appropriate to these complex forms of mediation.”4 The literature examined in this book is North American writing produced in the twenty-first century whose often experimental or novel “modes of articulation” push the bounds of literary convention as the poets seek forms and language adequate to respond to the complex and varied environmental issues of our time. Some of this poetry addresses conceptual challenges of the Anthropocene, such as the difficulty of grasping the scale of humankind’s planetary impact in relation to deep time, while some confronts material problems, such as the damage toxic anthropogenic chemicals and materials such as plastic do to human and environmental health. The ecopoetry examined here responds to environments that have undergone radical anthropogenic transformation and takes “nature” to be a far more inclusive and culturally imbricated category than has been the case in our traditions of nature writing.5

  THE ANTHROPOCENE AND THE SELF-CONSCIOUS ANTHROPOCENE

  To some who invoke the term, the Anthropocene signals looming or currently unfolding catastrophe; for others it points to opportunity for utopian social and technological transformation;6 to all it marks a consequential set of human-induced planetary changes that demand human attention and, most would say, concerted response. The term is a site of contention. Introduced in print in 2000, its popularization began in January of 2002 with a short essay in Nature by Crutzen titled “Geology of Mankind,” which announced,

  Because of . . . anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide, global climate may depart significantly from natural behaviour for many millennia to come. It seems appropriate to assign the term “Anthropocene” to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch, supplementing the Holocene—the warm [interglacial] period of the past 10–12 millennia.

  Pioneering a practice that would subsequently be followed by other scientists interested in clarifying the concept for wider audiences, Crutzen went on to list some of the changes wrought by humankind’s vastly expanding numbers over the last three centuries. In 2002 that list read:

  The methane-producing cattle population has risen to 1.4 billion. About 30–50% of the planet’s land surface is exploited by humans. Tropical rainforests disappear at a fast pace, releasing carbon dioxide and strongly increasing species extinction. Dam building and river div
ersion have become commonplace. More than half of all accessible fresh water is used by mankind. Fisheries remove more than 25% of the primary production in upwelling ocean regions and 35% in the temperate continental shelf. Energy use has grown 16-fold during the twentieth century, causing 160 million tonnes of atmospheric sulphur dioxide emissions per year, more than twice the sum of its natural emissions. . . . Fossil-fuel burning and agriculture have caused substantial increases in the concentrations of “greenhouse” gases—carbon dioxide by 30% and methane by more than 100%—reaching their highest levels over the past 400 millennia, with more to follow.

  His aim in introducing the term was to focus an explicit call, particularly to “scientists and engineers,” to come together across disciplines and nations in the “daunting task” of “guid[ing] society toward environmentally sustainable management” in this era when humans play such a large but often insufficiently intentional role in shaping their own future and environment.7

  Crutzen proposed that the Anthropocene “started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane. This date also happens to coincide with James Watt’s design of the steam engine in 1784.” Five years later, Crutzen, climate chemist Will Steffen, and environmental historian John R. McNeill offered a more thorough argument for that dating, acknowledging earlier human modifications of the environment but distinguishing those since the Industrial Revolution by virtue of global reach and scale. They also divided the Anthropocene into stages. The first stage, the “Industrial Era,” lasted from about 1800 to 1945. With the dawning of the nuclear age, a second stage within this “unintended experiment of humankind on its own life support system” began: “Since then the human enterprise has experienced a remarkable explosion, the Great Acceleration, with significant consequences for Earth System functioning.” This second stage they date from 1945 to approximately 2015, and they note, “The Great Acceleration took place in an intellectual, cultural, political, and legal context in which the growing impacts upon the Earth System counted for very little in the calculations and decisions made in the world’s ministries, boardrooms, laboratories, farmhouses, village huts, and, for that matter, bedrooms.” They propose a third stage beginning around 2015, in which humans become “Stewards of the Earth System,” a stage in which “the recognition that human activities are indeed affecting the structure and function of the Earth System as a whole (as opposed to local-and regional-scale environmental issues) is filtering through to decision-making at many levels.” Their sense of urgency is clear: “The Great Acceleration is reaching criticality. Enormous, immediate challenges confront humanity over the next few decades as it attempts to pass through a bottleneck of continued population growth, excessive resource use, and environmental deterioration. . . .Whatever unfolds, the next few decades will surely be a tipping point in the evolution of the Anthropocene.”8