Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field (Contemp North American Poetry) [1 ed.] 1609385594, 9781609385590

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Ecopoetics

contemporary north american poetry series Series Editors Alan Golding, Lynn Keller, and Adalaide Morris

ecopoetics • Essays in the Field Edited by Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne

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 Design by Ashley Muehlbauer No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources. Printed on acid-free paper Cataloging-in-Publication data for Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field, edited by Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne, is on file at the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-60938-559-0 (pbk) ISBN 978-1-60938-560-6 (ebk)

Contents

Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Ecopoetics as Expanded Critical Practice: An Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne part 1. The Apocalyptic Imagination

1. Making Art “Under These Apo-Calypso Rays”: Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Lynn Keller 2. “The Idiot Stone”: George Oppen’s Geological Imagination; Or, Objectivist Realism as Ecopoetics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Rob Halpern Part 2. Embodiment and Animality 3. Visceral Ecopoetics in Charles Olson and Michael McClure: Proprioception, Biology, and the Writing Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Jonathan Skinner 4. Playing in the Planetary Field: Vulnerability and Syncretic Myth Making in Robert Duncan’s Ecopoetics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Michelle Niemann

5. “Beyond the Vomiting Dark”: Toward a Black Hydropoetics. . . . . . . . . . 102 Joshua Bennett 6. Writing with the Salamander: An Ecopoetic Community Performance Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 Petra Kuppers Part 3. Environmental Justice

7. Toxic Recognition: Coloniality and Ecocritical Attention. . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

Matt Hooley 8. Toward an Antiracist Ecopoetics: Waste and Wasting in the Poetry of Claudia Rankine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Angela Hume Part 4. Beyond Sustainability 9. “Hung Up in the Flood”: Resilience, Variability, and the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 Samia Rahimtoola 10. Reading the Environs: Toward a Conceptual Ecopoetics. . . . . . . . . . . . . 208 Joshua Schuster 11. Hard Days Nights in the Anthropocene. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228 Joan Retallack 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 Hillman, 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 encouragement 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 conference 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, participatory, 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 environmental 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. Participants 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 ecocriticism 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 extraction 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 example, 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, varIntroduction 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 material 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 contemporary ecopoetry and ecopoetics, as several of the essays in this volume demonstrate. 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 midcentury 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 oriented 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 Apocalyptic 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, capitalizing 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 experiences 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 development 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 Retallack’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 environmental interests not represented here, adequately or at all. We would have liked, for example, to include writing on ecopoetics in relation to Language poetry, Latino/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. Ecopoetics Then and Now Like ecocriticism—environmental criticism, green cultural studies, ecocritique— ecopoetics has gone by different names. Sometimes it is used interchangeably with the term “ecopoetry,” and at times we, too, use these terms nearly synonymously.19 In The Ecopoetry Anthology, Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street name three kinds of ecopoetry: nature poetry, environmental poetry, and ecological poetry.20 According to their taxonomy, nature poetry, inspired by a lyric tradition, takes the experience of the poet as its starting place, while environmental poetry focuses 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 mountain 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 Foerster, 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 ecocriticism 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 interdisciplinary, 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 accuracy. 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 Chickasaw 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 working 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 ecopoetics, 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 methodological 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 theoretical 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, particularly 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 approach.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 local 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 acknowledgment 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 exclusion.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 critical 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 representing 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 radical 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 composi12 Introduction

tion is an energetic process of connecting with animal being. Niemann also emphasizes 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 investigates 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 stemming 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 condemns 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 contrast 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 nonhumans resonates with what Margaret Ronda has elsewhere theorized as the “re14 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 Roman 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 alterities 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 poethical 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 placating 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 pleasure 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: Of no other dimension of contemporary environmentalism, furthermore, can it be so unequivocally said that the role of the imagination is central to the project; for the rhetoric of apocalypticism implies that the fate of the world hinges on the arousal of the 20  The Apocalyptic Imagination

imagination to a sense of crisis. It presupposes that “the most dangerous threat to our global environment may not be the strategic threats themselves but rather our perception of them, for most people do not yet accept the fact that this crisis is extremely grave.”4

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 acknowledged 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 inCrisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics  21

creasingly a feature of present normality, not an imminent, radical rupture of it” amounts to a less generation-specific version of my assertion about growing up apocalyptic—an assertion also anticipated by Ulrich Beck’s influential conception of our “risk society,” which, he says, has “come to take for granted . . . the impending ‘suicide of the species.’”9 Frederick Buell proposes that we abandon apocalypse for a sadder realism that looks closely at social and environmental 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 ‘embodiment’ 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 optimistically 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 active dwelling as generating a commitment to care for the environment, that mode of thinking and behaving does not necessarily increase one’s empowerment or 22  The Apocalyptic Imagination

ensure such strong social change that the sense of impending doom disappears. This may well be more evident currently than it was in 2004, when his book was published. Poets like Reilly and Graham write with an awareness of inhabiting a world already in crisis even as they also anticipate or prophesy more devastating changes to come. In the readings that follow, I will analyze the differing ways in which Graham and Reilly convey awareness of embodiedness and embeddedness in increasingly vulnerable ecosystems. Their work counterbalances cataclysmic vision with kinds of perception that make it more bearable and less emotionally exhausting. Hoped-for consequences include freeing politically and existentially useful energy and inspiring its devotion to (re)opening the search for meaningful courses of environmental action. There has previously been consensus among those who analyze apocalyptic discourse that, as a rhetoric, apocalypticism is “a strategy of persuasion or coercion that interrupts routine and acquiescence with a call of alarm” whose usual function is to persuade the audience to change course.12 Environmentalist apocalyptic writings, as Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline Palmer noted in the mid-1990s, “are not to be taken literally. Their aim is not to predict the future but to change it.”13 When one writes from the already hazardous position of dwelling in crisis, however, this function of apocalyptic rhetoric may be destabilized if not undone. Graham’s and Reilly’s engagement with apocalyptic discourse acknowledges that the destruction of life as we know it is well under way; at the same time, it reflects at least an intermittent hope that humans might have the will and the ability to change course with sufficient speed. Graham writes of the “obligatory / hope” that the artist must take up, despite inner resistance, in order to continue creating: “hope forced upon oneself by one’s self ” “before the next catastrophe.”14 That precariously hopeful perspective proves difficult to maintain, however, as the consequentiality of anthropogenic environmental changes becomes ever more evident. For Graham and Reilly, the impulse to warn becomes entangled with the desire for escape, with grief, with despair. From the opening moments of Sea Change, Graham conveys a clear awareness that once-dreaded changes have already begun. The first poem, “Sea Change,” opens onto an extreme weather event perceived as part of an ongoing “unnegotiable / drama” of environmental dissolution: Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics  23

One day: stronger wind than anyone expected. Stronger than ever before in the recording of such. Unnatural says the news. Also the body says it. Which part of the body—I look down, can feel it, yes, don’t know where. Also submerging us, making of the fields, the trees, a cast of characters in an unnegotiable drama, ordained, iron-gloom of low light, everything at once undoing itself.15

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 oxymoronically 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 cascading consequences of changes in our ecosystems, Graham records some of the ways that global warming is affecting our ecologically interdependent world, for instance, . . . at the very bottom of the food chain, sprung from undercurrents, warming by 1 degree, the indispensable plankton is forced north now, & yet farther north, spawning too late for the cod larvae hatch, such that the hatch will not survive, nor the species in the end, in the right-now forever uninterruptible slowing of the gulf 16 stream 24  The Apocalyptic Imagination

Again, the line breaks separating “in” from “dispensable” and “un” from “interruptible” convey how what had seemed impossible is now not just possible but inescapably taking place. Feeling in this context the uselessness of the poems she has written, Graham moves from speaking “in this wind today, out loud in it, to no one” to speaking for the wind. This wind, which urges listeners to “consider your affliction . . . do not plead ignorance,” recalls the destructive winds in Job or Jeremiah, two touchstones of apocalyptic writing: . . . & 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 “foundations,” 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 Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics  25

in mind “a / complete collapse, in the North Atlantic Drift, in the / thermohaline circulation, this / will happen, / fish are starving to death in the Great Barrier Reef, the new Age of Extinctions is / now / says the silence-that-precedes.”19 We know some of what is happening and will happen, though much of what is to come remains unknowable and presently “beyond belief.” The poems in Sea Change combine apocalyptic warning with a cultivated awareness of the speaker’s embodied life. However terrible the changes taking place, “I cannot / go somewhere / else than this body,” Graham acknowledges in “Embodies.”20 In an interview, she declares that she wrote the volume “in order to make myself not only understand—we all seem to ‘understand’—but to actually ‘feel’ (and thus physically believe) what we have and what we are losing—and furthermore what devastatingly much more of creation we are going to be losing.”21 Her belief that physical registration of “what we have and what we are losing” might motivate necessary sacrifices aligns with Frederick Buell’s call for “living in one’s senses while one dwells within environmental crisis.”22 Thus, the poems examine her thoughts and feelings as she registers evidence of environmental deterioration through her senses as well as through her intellect and her sensory imagination. Perhaps curiously, the volume does not exhibit much sense of the threat of environmental changes to her own body or to other humans; Graham focuses instead on the threats posed to other animal and plant species by global climate change. Consequently, the poems in Sea Change reflect not so much Frederick Buell’s awareness of human bodily vulnerability within compromised ecosystems as an intense appreciation of the sensory experience of still relatively “normal” surroundings, along with a desire to record for the future the precious traits of what is currently taken for granted as normal. Anticipating dramatic changes, including the extinction of many nonhuman species and possibly the human species itself, Graham experiences an intensified appreciation of her surroundings. Adapting to present environmental circumstances Wallace Stevens’s understanding that “death is the mother of beauty,” she details, in often synesthetic terms, and savors the precious sensory experience of an environment that still has a progression of seasons, impressive biodiversity, and air one can inhale with pleasure.23 In several poems, Graham addresses or assumes the postapocalyptic perspective of someone looking back from a future in which lifestyles that we in the developed 26  The Apocalyptic Imagination

world now consider ordinary will appear unimaginably luxurious. Parts of “Loan,” for instance, address an audience in the future, asking whether its members can remember when clean water was abundant, when . . . the faucet flared like a glare of open speech, a cry, you could say what you pleased, you could turn it off, then on again—at will—and how it fell, teeming, too much, all over your hands, much as you please—from where you are now try to feel it—what was it this thick/thin blurry coil 24 flowing into the sink

The poem ends with a warning followed by a sensory celebration of the wondrous ordinary 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

Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics  27

carrying speedy clouds, birdcall now confident again, heat drying, suddenly no evidence of its having been wet—but no, you didn’t even notice it—it rained.25

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 socioecological 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 28  The Apocalyptic Imagination

this painfully degraded version of the pastoral into one she can take pleasure in visually owning through an act of enumeration that is also an aestheticization: one day a swan appeared out of nowhere on the drying river, it was sick, but it floated, and the eye felt the pain of rising to take it in—I own you said the old feeling, I want to begin counting again, I will count what is mine, it is moving quickly now, I will begin this message “I”—I feel the smile, put my hand up to be sure, yes on my lips—the yes—I touch it again, I begin counting, I say one to the swan, one, do not be angry with me o my god, I have begun the action of beauty again, on the burning river I have started the catalogue, your world.30

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 Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics  29

green world of abundance where swallows or bats fly near the eaves, the stars become visible, the grass gleams. The incongruity of such a moment in juxtaposition to the Great Dying may well be disturbing to readers, particularly since the experience reflects social privilege. If this turn to the pastoral is redeemed, it is so through its implicitly acknowledged brevity. This lovely moment is tied to the coming on of evanescent evening, sure to be followed by night’s darkness. The imagined homesickness of the grass projects the speaker’s longing for a world she precariously inhabits and treasures but also feels she is both losing and has already lost. While some of Graham’s catalogs record the anthropogenic ills of the ecosystems in which we are embedded, she is repeatedly drawn back to naming what is wondrous in what is still, precariously, “normal.” This iterative reminder that we are not yet at the end of the world, so that it’s possible to sustain moments of embodied appreciation that “we have it all, now, & all / there ever was is / us, now,” makes both living in crisis and the poet’s own apocalyptic perspective bearable.33 There is no doubt a risk of escapism and nostalgia dulling environmentalist zeal. But Graham marks the temporariness of this respite to both criticize and limit the pastoral’s escapism. The pastoral in all its beauty assumes great value in Sea Change as a mode for registering the transitory sensory pleasures available even in endangered and damaged environments. It helps Graham hold out to readers the hope implicit in avertive apocalyptic writing: all is not yet lost. Capturing nature’s beauties and the sensory world’s pleasures may bring into focus something worth fighting to sustain while implying condemnation of all that threatens it. The poem with which Graham ends her volume, “No Long Way Round,” records, as the opening poem does, a moment of seemingly unnatural weather—“High winds again”—when, with symbolic significance, evening advances. Two successive sentences record the tension that animates Sea Change and, I suspect, much eco-apocalyptic writing today: “One has to believe / furthermore in the voyage of others. The dark / gathers.”34 On the one hand, the writer remains invested in the future. At the same time, that future possibility seems to be disappearing. Unable to either resolve this tension or simply sustain it, the book’s final lines move toward the consolation of a deep ecological perspective: “there are sounds the planet will always make, even / if there is no one to hear them.”35 The volume’s combination 30  The Apocalyptic Imagination

of dire scientific information about global warming and personal meditations on the beauty of life embedded in damaged ecosystems seems to enact the kind of wake-up call we expect of eco-apocalyptic writing. But the pressures of living in crisis make this particularly difficult to sustain. When Graham in closing looks with a kind of Zen acceptance to a world without humans or other sentient life forms, she nearly abandons much of what has made apocalyptic writing a motivator for change. Nearly, but not quite completely: she still says “if,” not “when.” In contrast to Sea Change, Evelyn Reilly’s Apocalypso offers few if any pastoral pleasures. Thus the immediate pleasures with which she lightens the gloom of apocalyptic awareness are less tainted by nostalgia, while her foregrounding of apocalyptic rhetoric as an ancient practice—one she mocks even as she seriously deploys it—distances her volume from declensionist perspectives. Instead of representing a beautiful nature, the poems of Apocalypso emphasize the dominance of technology in contemporary existence—especially digital technology, which Reilly, with an ambivalence like Graham’s toward the pastoral, both enjoys and critiques. Reilly’s approach to apocalyptic discourse reflects her curiosity “as to whether our moment was uniquely marked by a kind of catastrophic end-time imagination or if this was just an amping up of something always part of the human psyche.”36 She seems to have landed on the “amping up” side of things, which might align with Frederick Buell’s sense of dwelling in crisis. Her reliance in the volume’s title poem on the book of Revelation as well as her references to works like Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Fall of the Rebel Angels underscore the fact that apocalyptic thinking is nothing new. However, the volume’s dystopian poems, which set the stage for “Apocalypso: A Comedy,” emphasize that our current technologies promise a very different version of postapocalyptic conditions than any imaginable in previous eras. The first section of the opening sequence, “Dreamquest Malware,” for instance, presents a series of epistles sent from variously numbered “build sites” at various time stamps (for example, ZMT 96927); these report on the circumstances and difficulties that an engineer encounters in a future world where technology is used to try to replace and mimic what nature once provided. (Here Reilly may be playing upon the epistles concerning the future that are directed to different cities early in Revelation.) Thus, in an unusual moment of celebrating successful technological improvements, the speaker notes: Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics  31

Brighter dimmers replaced the blighted meters and the blinded windows were given decorative grills Even the situation drive restarted which had exhausted us for weeks So today the sun is ambulatory! the planet ambulatory! The surplus bark in spite of snow peels in permeable tentacles of façade plu!37

“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 technical 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: The signal is so sticky with procedure dreck we grow desperate for dislocation lubricant Yet today we completed 2 fulfillment interstices and 6 perfusion upsinks after which it took hours to adjust the nose cone of rampant grief 32  The Apocalyptic Imagination

We have now pried countless tender chordate features from the slab encasement 105 translation blockages 79 embedded snares kneeling yrs39

Talk of “dislocation lubricant” and “fulfillment interstices” may suggest technological management of dislocation and unfulfillment, but ultimately neither the jargon nor the inventions it denotes can keep the speaker from assuming a position of supplication or defeat. “Chordate” refers to the vast phylum Chordata, which includes all vertebrates (and more). It may function here as a euphemism, enabling the speaker to avoid naming the species whose remains she has been handling; whatever the species involved, confronting the horror of a mass die-off may be part of what brings the speaker to her knees. Many nonhuman animals are mentioned in Apocalypso, often referred to via scientific taxonomies. Reilly positions her work within contemporary ecopoetics’ larger project of “radically reforming language as part of coming to understand ourselves as animals, and as such, revisiting the notion of the human subject within a trans-species context.”40 “Chordate” positions humans as animals among other animals and points toward Frederick Buell’s recommended awareness of ecological embeddedness. Reilly’s vision of the future is grim but, like Graham, she offers present pleasures that the reader can savor, including bodily pleasures that remain available now even if largely vanished from the imagined future and, notably, the pleasures of humor. Here is Reilly’s description, from her essay “The Grief of Ecopoetics,” of how she found a way to counter her gloom while working on a piece about the apocalyptic imagination. The Western notion of apocalypse, she notes, is linked to revelation—the vision of an escape from history into ahistorical bliss, prefaced however by an era of extreme violence and devastation. And it’s the descriptions Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics  33

of devastation that tend to dominate the literature of apocalypse. . . . Thus, the more I worked on this project, the more I began to be subsumed by despair. I was struggling with this for quite a while and getting gloomier and gloomier until one day I changed my working title from Apocalypse to Apocalypso, on one level just a tinkering with language, but on another level thinking of [Wallace] Stevens’ “It must give pleasure,” and needing to dig myself out of an emotional and creative hole. And then I started reading about calypso, . . . the Afro-Caribbean music with roots in both underground communication systems used by slaves and French troubadour poetry. . . . Putting these two ideas together—apocalypse and calypso—began to solve something for me about the role of poetry and the joy of the aesthetic impulse, about how to bring that back into our notion of ourselves as animals, and perhaps how to love ourselves again as animals, and maybe find a base of action and of language in that love.41

While every sequence in Apocalypso reflects an apocalyptic or dystopic vision of the future, 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 inventiveness 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 produces a comic effect: It was a shock that you would send this ignition system instead of the slogan-infestation compress we had so explicitly requested What exactly was your intent?43

The irritated entitlement communicated in the manner of a formal business letter collides amusingly with the speaker’s degraded circumstances and with the absurd idea of a bandage that would alleviate an infestation of slogans. 34  The Apocalyptic Imagination

Having noted how Reilly’s representation of embodied embeddedness involves environments severely damaged by industrial and digital technologies, where human and nonhuman species remain nonetheless interdependent, and having identified the pleasures that enable her apocalyptic rhetoric to produce responses other than paralysis and despair, I turn now to “Apocalypso: A Comedy” to observe these traits in action in a work that self-consciously scrutinizes the apocalyptic imagination. This disjunctive poem is a kind of quest journey through the book of Revelation, filled with quotations from the “revised standard / sedition edition” of that text, as the speaker, equipped with glue gun and accompanied by the one animal humans claim unabashedly to love, her dog, measures the apocalyptic vision of John of Patmos against what is happening in her own apparently doomed world and critiques his underlying values. “Come,” the work begins, calling attention to the tortuous temporality of apocalyptic discourse, “and I’ll show you what once / shall have taken place after this.”44 Far from being awed by John, the spunky speaker is angry and defiant. John’s having “abandoned the love / he had at first” (in Rev. 2:4), which the speaker seems to understand to be love for life forms other than the human, has “unleashed the dog / of [her] darkest humor / to devour the chapters / that verseth.”45 Here, while playing with puns on “leashes,” Reilly announces her most serious critique of Christian apocalyptic traditions: their anthropocentrism. At every opportunity—in the midst of “kicking against the pricks / of wholesale legislative / abandonment”—Reilly’s speaker, who is in several senses “down with the animals,” gestures lovingly toward them.46 She lists in her “sting-ray version / of the beatitudes” species often disparaged by Western culture—sea slugs, bottom dwellers, predators, and “those who stridulate” (crickets and grasshoppers)—expanding her appreciation well beyond the charismatic megafauna championed by conservation organizations.47 Playing on the anagrammatic presence of the word “rats” within “stars,” she declares, “and I mean to vindicate the innocent / and address vermin love words // to the seven rats of the seven stars.”48 At the same time, Reilly’s speaker is ironically complicit in her culture’s disparaging of animals. She apologizes to Canis familiaris for that phrase about the dog of her darkest humor: she admits, in connection to rats, to having hired an exterminator, and at another point she has to take back a derogatory use of the word “cockroach.” In this way, she reveals “how much our notion of our ‘species Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics  35

position’ is embedded in our language.”49 Other passages nonetheless suggest a hope like Frederick Buell’s that awareness of our interdependence with other species might yield better environmental stewardship and even some forms of environmental recovery. Positioning the dog as her lover as well as her partner is essential to the speaker’s imagination of environmental healing, yet because her language is inescapably tainted by the human-animal dichotomy and the ideology of animal inferiority operative in our culture, her invitation to her companion animal invokes the language of the children’s game in which those on one team shout a challenge to their opponents to “come over, red rover.” “Come over lover rover,” Reilly pleads, conveying devotion but also an edge of enmity as she introduces a poignant invitation, “help spread some phoenix ashes / in this bit of ravaged woods.”50 In addition to criticizing the focus of traditional apocalyptic discourse on exclusively human salvation, Reilly challenges what she conveys as the irresponsibility of its absurd temporality. By definition, the future apocalypse can be imagined only in the present, even though apocalyptic writing depicts what is believed to be already determined and even though the apocalyptic chain of events will, if realized, have proved unstoppable. As one of her epigraphs puts it, “strange verb tenses must be enacted: these are those things that will have had to have been, that will have had to yet occur.”51 The enaction of “strange verb tenses” produces lines like the following: “For we have stepped into the sacred areas / and wept over our waste procedures // which is will have been being our transcendence.”52 Here we tumble from present perfect, designating an action that has happened, to the present tense “is,” to the future perfect, used for an action that will have been completed in the future, and back to the continuousness of the present participle, “being,” entwined in the future perfect as “will have been being.” The lines’ landing on “transcendence” points to the aspect of apocalyptic temporality that is most problematic for Reilly: its “escape from history into ahistorical bliss,” which allows people to look beyond this world and detach themselves from the challenges of problem solving within the conditions of historical time (here, the environmental problems caused by humans’ waste).53 Reilly’s speaker directly challenges John of Patmos on this score in a passage that humorously rewrites Robert Creeley’s poem “I Know a Man”—a minimalist masterpiece capturing first the tendency to stew anxiously and self-consciously in a 36  The Apocalyptic Imagination

crisis situation, then an emphatic rejoinder that urges taking immediate preventive action when disaster threatens: As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking,—John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness surrounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for christ’s sake, look out where yr going.54

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 nonetheless 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. Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics  37

For all its lighthearted mockery of its ethically inconsistent protagonist and its playful invocations of the absurd temporality of apocalyptic writing, “Apocalypso: A Comedy” keeps readers aware of the grim realities of the present. Where we’re going—indeed, where we already are—matches all too closely John’s prophecies in the book of Revelation, in which seas fill with blood, multitudes of creatures die, and waters become lethally bitter. These connections are evident through Reilly’s extensive quotation and paraphrase of the Bible. The speaker’s context is one of constantly increasing environmental degradation—“Every morning reveals another crevice / of this denatured nature canvas”—and she uses language that echoes the book of Revelation to capture this damage.56 Modifying the biblical phrasing about mountains moving (6:14), for instance, she points to mountaintop removal mining: “the mountains were removed from their places.”57 Where John of Patmos was shown the pure river of the water of life flowing from the throne of God, she is shown “the river / of the waste water of life,” with its suggestions of deadly pollution.58 She combines, compresses, and modifies biblical images in ways that make the envisioned cataclysmic future difficult to distinguish from the present, as she refers to “tainted soil,” “the sea thick with apo-oceanic scum,” or “the flowers / of the apocalypse— // stalky ashen broken caked / with coral reef skeletal remnants / and the dust of lichen,” which are particularly sensitive to air pollution.59 Mention of clock hands suggests the Doomsday Clock, managed by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board, now registering multiple forms of environmental disaster that the disempowered inequitably suffer from most: “But we are getting rather out of order / still holding the bomb in our clock hands / I mean the tsunami I mean the flood / I mean the hurricane that pummels / the poor and the weak.”60 Near the work’s close, Reilly confesses, This is how what would will have been being a diversion merged instead into a vision of preliminary descent 38  The Apocalyptic Imagination

while sleeping on your carbon cushion Flight 267 New York from Kiev61

Presenting the poem’s contents as a dream vision experienced in a traveler’s fitful sleep, she admits not only to an all-too-comfortable recourse to airplane travel despite its terrible carbon footprint but also to an increasing pessimism about the future; “preliminary descent” is the early stage of a downward course soon to become more precipitous. Because she thinks of humans as technology-using animals, Reilly manages to pull apocalyptic discourse away from its dependence on pastoral narratives by locating one crucial alternative to the threatened biosphere in the digital environment that so many Americans regularly inhabit. The digital is not presented as necessarily a productive alternative; its substitutions for destroyed nature are inadequate, and it can be as much an escape as the sublime wilderness or the pastoral garden has ever been. Indeed, today the digital is perhaps more dangerously seductive than the pastoral precisely because digital reality is not disappearing and because, while we hide there, we can avoid seeing all that is being lost. Acknowledging this risk, Reilly depicts people, including her speaker, as seeking in the “usual enclosures” of “Word, Facebook, Linked-in, Google” escape from the discomforts of confronting environmental catastrophe.62 She doesn’t condemn technology, and this helps her avoid the pastoral’s temptation to focus nostalgically on the past. Her poems are unapologetically full of information lifted from the internet. She probably means it when (on a page that plays with Rev. 2:7) she exclaims “how I love my Apple” after speaking of “passing through security / carrying as much fruit of the tree / of knowledge as possible.”63 But she offers no visions of techno-engineering as a means of salvation from environmental disaster. Rather, recognizing that the not-here of the digital realm offers its own version of escape and that it, like the pastoral, is more readily available to those with social and economic privilege, she admits to being “Disturbed just a bit today / by my own privilege screen / comfort mechanisms.”64 Wanting to make a change, she determines to find her “home page”—figuratively, her fundamental orientation— in a perspective that connects her to even the most disparaged of animal species Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics  39

such as cockroaches. It’s a perspective, moreover, that draws on the pleasures of embodiment—that is, on coming to one’s senses—and on what she calls “the joy of the aesthetic impulse.”65 That section of the poem ends, compellingly: singing loving my vermin singing sunniest day dancing my aptest app-dance under these apo-calypso rays66

The passage brings together much that the poem values in this moment of environmental 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 aestheticization 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, 40  The Apocalyptic Imagination

they have brought such warning together with an ecologically grounded vision that recognizes dwelling in crisis. Their poetry concurs with Buell’s sense that acknowledging that “one dwells in a body and in ecosystems” initiates the most environmentally and socially responsible stance available. But in order to bear their double awareness of crisis and apocalypse, the poets, unlike Buell, have brought into focus the pleasures available within that awareness. They regard narratives of unmitigated sadness or unmitigated doom as unproductive. Reilly and Graham, who have not entirely abandoned the hope that apocalyptic warning might produce action as well as attention, believe that eco-apocalyptic art must offer some kind of revelry or pleasure if it is to help people immersed in ongoing crisis muster the will to avert devastation.

Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics  41

2 • “The Idiot Stone” George Oppen’s Geological Imagination; Or, Objectivist Realism as Ecopoetics Rob Halpern

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 impenetrable 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 annihilation 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. An arm of flame reaches from water-green glass, Behind the wall I know waterlilies Drinking their light, transforming light and our eyes Skythrown under water, clouds under those flowers, Walls standing on all things stand in a city noon Who will not believe a waterlily fire. Whatever can happen in a city of stone, Whatever can come to a wall can come to this wall. I walk in the river of crisis toward the real, I pass guards, finding the center of my fear4

Writing through a series of dreams whose images depict a civilization seemingly destroyed by nuclear catastrophe, Rukeyser arouses a desire to renew one’s relation to the world by negotiating its disastrous material as we “walk in the river of crisis toward the real.” By rendering the stuff of consciousness as “the river of crisis,” “Waterlily Fire” makes a relation to “the real” perceptible and cognizable through sensory impression. “Crisis” becomes accessible, in other words, by way of what Rukeyser refers to later in the poem as a “procession of images” whose concatenation manifests through a form of dreamwork capable of transforming our imagined relations to real conditions. Relatedly, Francis Ponge’s earlier meditation on “The Pebble” and “the notion of stone” it implies, in Le Parti Pris des Choses, becomes the poet’s occasion to implore the reader: “On this subject let me not be reproached for going even farther back than the Flood . . . And it is only the infinite number of [human] corpses, having succeeded from that time in imitating the consistency of stone with what is called organic soil, that permits them of late to reproduce without owing anything to the rock.”5 All three figurations of stone connote a radical temporality that counters the destructiveness of human history, what John Ashbery would later refer to as “an anterior form of time / Given once and for all” in “The Lament upon the Waters.”6 But only Oppen invests the stone George Oppen’s Geological Imagination  43

with a passionate—and passionately ambivalent—attachment. Indeed, “Prosody // Sings // In the stones.”7 For Oppen, the affective vicissitudes of stone run from hatred to joy, between which he professes to suffer “something like despair because destruction by the missile would indeed be total defeat and meaninglessness in the future perfect.”8 His invocation of the future perfect—the grammatical tense denoting what will have been—suggests how the very substance of that defeat cohabits with the present. This sentence appears in a 1959 letter to Julian Zimet devoted to his lengthy reflections on “Time of the Missile.” Oppen’s letter reads like a virtual ars poetica and includes a catalog of the metaphysical concerns that will dominate his practice throughout the 1960s. It is worth quoting at length because it thematizes the convergence of geological, geopolitical, and poetical imaginaries that will occupy me throughout this essay: 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 44  The Apocalyptic Imagination

eye sees’ Poems about the human vision which creates the human universe and the blue eyes, and Man’s Time and the living historical rowboat on the sea, and all the rest of it. And the opening of the Missile—about the ship at the pier (you like it, and acknowledge it as accurate evocation) but it is—O, I do blush, me da peña—talking about ‘being.’ . . . I said the rest of it is just stone, and the enemy. And death, which is a victory of stone. And the mud, and the terrible ground. The half-life ground.9

As in both Rukeyser’s and Ponge’s poems, stone responds to the question of what will have been here from the horizon of a time outside human history, allowing incompatible temporalities to coexist. For Oppen, this coexistence assumes the shape of total defeat and meaninglessness, which it then becomes the poet’s vocation to witness and protest, just as it is the work of the poem to hold at bay whatever despair such meaninglessness portends. I’m interested in how Oppen’s eco-logical approach to the poem—wherein “home” and “stone” converge in tension with the poet’s anxiety about that convergence—manifests a way of feeling the present tense with which that crisis coincides, while sensing a contradictory relation to time that characterizes the radical specificity of a historical predicament.10 Under the sign of ecopoetics, Oppen’s writing at midcentury feels its historical present in a way that exceeds what any “I” might feel about it. In doing so, prosody becomes a theoretician of its own disaster, sounding its terms in its very practice, allowing us to hear the music of concatenated social crises as if for the first time. One distinction I’m keen on making here, a distinction that Oppen’s invocation of the future perfect anticipates, obtains between a disaster already isomorphic with the present and a speculative disaster whose specter looms from an uncertain future like a catastrophe to come, which like other figures of things to come—be it a community, a democracy, or an insurrection—harbors an eschatology perfectly compatible with conservative logics protective of the status quo. It’s also important to distinguish Oppen’s grammar of disaster from a notion that the apocalypse has already occurred, that we are already living in its aftermath, thereby naturalizing catastrophe as a foundational substratum of dominant life-forms under capitalism, as the title of Frederick Buell’s From Apocalypse to Way of Life suggests. These are distinctions that I will deepen later in the essay as I consider how Oppen’s George Oppen’s Geological Imagination  45

commitment to realism—what I’ll call objectivist realism—offers a prophylactic against the metaphysics of speculative realism in our own present tense. And so I ask, how might a poem enable our capacity to feel the present, that is, to encounter the present in a way not already determined by representations whose logic at once arouses and neutralizes our ability to respond? In what follows, I will argue that Oppen’s poems offer ecopoetics a model of a compositional practice committed to an encounter with the material world, a world irreducible to representation and language while still radically there to be witnessed in a context penetrated by history. Oppen’s realist practice moves him to “a place without words”: —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 motivate 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 46  The Apocalyptic Imagination

whereby public speech, political speech, became inseparable from its ideological function, becoming part of the very spectacle—“The constant singing / Of the radios and the art // Of the colored lights”—with which poetry, Oppen believed, could have nothing to do if it were to maintain its integrity.13 “Time of the Missile” was published in The Materials in 1962. Here’s the poem in its entirety: I remember a square of New York’s Hudson River glinting between warehouses. Difficult to approach the water below the pier Swirling, covered with oil the ship at the pier A steel wall: tons in the water, 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! Become the realm of nations. My love, my love, We are endangered Totally at last. Look Anywhere to the sight’s limit: space Which is viviparous: Place of the mind And eye. Which can destroy us, Re-arrange itself, assert Its own stone chain reaction.14

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 fragGeorge Oppen’s Geological Imagination  47

ment—“Become the realm of nations”—that explicitly thematizes geopolitics. Indeed, one might say that “Time of the Missile” feels the conditions of ecocidal danger during the Cold War, and Oppen’s letter to Zimet offers a sustained reflection on a poetics that would respond adequately to those conditions. At stake in Oppen’s comments, as well as in the poem itself, is the status of history and time, more precisely the difference between geological time, whose scale is beyond our grasp, and human time, which is something we make or are made by. These distinctions are salient; just as history is something we make, what we’ve made appears in place of what we’ve failed to make. And in 1959, the thing that occupies the place of a history we failed to make is the missile. Much of the wonder and perplexity of the poem depends on Oppen’s prosody and on the uncertain antecedent that attaches syntactically to “which.” The second “which” could share the first’s referent—“space / which is viviparous”—whose syntax suggests that space contains and encloses us the way a mammal contains and encloses her young; at the same time, however, space can destroy us. Between the two possibilities, another noun phrase intervenes and complicates this reading further—“Place of the mind / And eye”—that place being space, on the one hand, but also the mind’s own place, which in its delusion of autonomy becomes a site of destruction, and the eye becomes destruction’s agent. This vision, too, possesses the potential to assert a devastating autonomy—absolute contingency, indeterminacy, unpredictability— which could also be that “place of the mind,” and the poem’s grammar allows for this place to “assert / Its own stone chain reaction.” Together with the placement of “own” in this one line, “place of the mind” echoes the title of Oppen’s 1963 essay on poetry and politics, “The Mind’s Own Place,” which includes his assessment of the global crisis at midcentury and the inability of politics to address it adequately. It is here that Oppen calls for the poet’s “political nonavailability.”15 Thus the essay’s title also suggests the notion that any equal and opposite autonomy of the human mind risks a kind of satanic delusion associated with mastery over the autonomous atom itself, for as Stephen Cope notes in his preface to “The Mind’s Own Place,” the phrase comes from Milton’s Paradise Lost, where it is attributed to Satan himself: “The mind is its own place and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell and Hell of Heaven.”16 Returning to the poem’s punning eyes, we can read the first-person singular “I” of Oppen’s lyricism as an agent of disaster, suggesting the historical respon48  The Apocalyptic Imagination

sibility that he describes in his letter to Zimet. Indeed, “Time of the Missile” objects to “all we have made of the universe by looking at it” as well as “the nothing place [that] reclaims our atomic structure,” understood as the imminent effect of nuclear catastrophe.17 But Oppen’s syntax is notoriously labile and exceeds the clarity of any such propositional statement; it performs affectively and gesturally the disorientation and instability of an encounter with the nothing place as it converges with the place of the mind.18 Further, his prosody posits the eye’s autonomous agency as the antecedent of “which” in the subordinate clause “which can destroy us.”19 But when read as part of a larger, more comprehensive movement of thought, the eye, like the first person it homophonically courts, becomes conjoined with “place of the mind,” and this can be read as an appositive phrase modifying “space” or “sight’s limit.” And so the “I” that sees is at the same time a horizon of finitude. What, finally, are we to make of love and danger? “My love, my love, / We are endangered / Totally at last.” With that strange “at last,” it’s as if something—if not the poet himself—had been expectantly awaiting the totality of imminent peril. We are totally endangered for having asserted our will to truth, our delusion of mastery over the radically contingent, the atom, “the idiot stone,” “the mineral fact,” “the naked rock,” a trace of something outside historical time, harnessed by historical time.20 We have harnessed stone nature and drawn it into history as if we could see it without being seen by it, and by seeing it—or by asserting our mastery over that vision—we have only brought the radicality of its contingency into deadly contact with ourselves, whereby it will “Re-arrange itself, assert / Its own stone chain reaction.” This is what Oppen calls the “fatal rock // Which is the world —,” and it exists entirely independent of us, a kind of absolute indifference.21 But far from being cause for resignation, in which case the poem would not have been written, one might speculate that once “endangered / Totally at last,” Oppen can return to poetry in good conscience, if only because the totality of that danger renders politics—“the realm of nations”—incapable of responding adequately to a situation where what’s at stake is human survival itself. Politics as we know it has failed, and in the place of that failure, seemingly incompatible emotions—affection and fear—find themselves strangely reconciled, suggesting a situated structure of feeling whose specificity, at once social and historical, informs and organizes the George Oppen’s Geological Imagination  49

poem. “Time of the Missile” concludes with an expression of love and longing whose repetition (“My love, my love”) communicates both alarm and relief, the sense of having at last arrived at a point of patient determination where pathos and eros—suffering and desire—correspond in poiesis. 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 I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity —o p p e n, “Route”

In From Apocalypse to Way of Life, Frederick Buell argues that it’s time to “abandon 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 50  The Apocalyptic Imagination

professed realism upon returning to poetry in the 1960s is less concerned with the commodity, whose “obscured origin” is arguably an effect of effaced social relations (wage labor), and more concerned with a species of geological obscurity inseparable from—if not nearly synonymous with—the kind of clarity he will claim for his poems, “a limited, limiting clarity”—a clarity opposed to every notion of linguistic transparency associated with so-called naive realism.25 And while a stone might boast such clarity, it is also obscured given its prehistoric origin and inhuman temporality. This convergence of the obscured and the clear will find its realization in “The pure joy / Of the mineral fact.” While the atom and the missile animate seemingly opposed categories—the atom as natural element, the missile as human power—like the stone and the commodity, they are both at once clear and opaque, transparent and impenetrable, undeniable and mystified. By extension, one might say that things wrested away from “the idiot stone”—like a car or a bomb—bear a more intimate relation to it than superficial oppositions otherwise admit. In other words, Oppen’s poetics arouses a whole dialectic of natural history.26 This may be what he has most to offer ecopoetics: the means by which to grasp how the newest and most archaic things interpenetrate. This concerns the way human time—“and we make that time,” Oppen argues, by making things in it—becomes inhuman in the commodity, just as the inhuman time of the stone becomes anthropomorphic on contact with language and desire. Indeed, Oppen’s seemingly contradictory elaboration of “clear” and “obscured” maps readily onto a more familiar dialectic that obtains between “concrete” and “abstract,” drawing his poetics into the orbit of a commodity logic whereby a thing’s most concrete materiality harbors the most abstract social relations. Oppen’s realism emerges with his insistence that the poet has “to write one’s perceptions, not argue one’s beliefs.”27 This is how poetry becomes his avenue of egress from a world of ideology and commodity alike, a world wherein every public speech act can only be compromised in the long shadow cast by the House Un-American Activities Committee and amid “The constant singing / Of the radios.”28 By contrast, “There is . . . the simple intuition of existence. Of one’s own existence, and in the same instant the intuition, the pure intuition of the existence of things, absolutely independent of oneself, and, in some form, permanent.”29 For Oppen, the words of the poem “must represent the truth of things out there George Oppen’s Geological Imagination  51

where i have never been and can never be.”30 This further underscores a tension at the crux of his realism: words bear the burden of impossibly coinciding with phenomena one can never immediately apprehend. Viewed from the inverse and complementary position: I believe in the world because it is impossible.31

Oppen’s longing to encounter something “absolutely independent of oneself ” intimates a strained desire for something outside of history at a specific moment when the world he had inherited as “history” was nothing but history’s failure to make a humane world. This collective failure informs his sense of personal failure. Exiled from the world he failed to make—the world that was the promise of the Communist Party, the Popular Front, and perhaps even World War II—Oppen wants to encounter something with no part in human history. “We didn’t make the atom we are made of,” he writes to Zimet, “but all the rest is subjective.” Oppen’s deep ambivalence when it comes to subjectivity is totally entangled with “the atom,” which he can’t discretely segregate. This is “the mineral fact” whose allegorical realization in Oppen’s natural history of the 1960s precipitates the impenetrable world of “the idiot stone,” whose telling modifier, “idiot,” communicates more subjectivity than he is willing to avow, perhaps a whole structure of feeling—one whose range moves through anger, remorse, guilt, disgust, hostility—for it is the dialectic of the stone that frustrates his desire for clarity even as it unwittingly fulfills it. The promise of clarity in Oppen’s realism is the promise to delimit the sayable and the unsayable or what can be written and what cannot be written, “to say what one knows and to / limit oneself to this.”32 For Oppen, clarity is a liminal quality that predicates precisely such limits—if not the threshold of intelligibility itself— and thus attracts seemingly antithetical connotations: “Clarity / In the sense of 52  The Apocalyptic Imagination

transparence, / I don’t mean that much can be explained. / Clarity in the sense of silence”; “The great mineral silence”; “Clarity plain glass ray / of darkness ray of light.”33 At once transparent and opaque, light and dark, clarion and quiet, concrete and abstract, Oppen’s notion of clarity is not just equivocal but dialectical. Insofar as silence becomes a figure of clarity for him, one can say that both “mineral fact” and “idiot stone” are “clear” precisely by virtue of their lack of communicability: “I don’t know how to say it / needing a word with no sound // but the pebbles shifting on the beach the sense / of the thing.”34 Despite these lines and against the grain of its own desire for autonomy, Oppen’s objectivist realism can only ever acknowledge that the linguistic autonomy of the poem will never adequately represent whatever ontological autonomy the poet might wish to ascribe to the stone—or the pebbles—if simply for the obvious reason: a poem is not a stone and never will be. The linguistic artifact of one’s encounter with the world can only ever betray a radical difference from both the missile and the atom, commodity and mineral, while nevertheless bearing witness to an encounter with a world in the place of whose irreducible materiality the poem emerges.35 For Oppen, the poem suffers an obligation to subordinate its linguistic autonomy to “the mineral fact,” while the truth of the factual thing in the face of the factitious world elicits the pathos of his poetics. In a proposition that only appears to deepen these contradictions, Oppen states that the impenetrability of matter alone guarantees its intelligibility. “If the world is matter, it is impenetrable absolutely,” he writes in a daybook, and he immediately continues, “The recognition of impenetrability houses the hope of intelligibility.”36 Keeping in mind that “things explain each other, not themselves” a mantra for ecopoetics if ever there was one—how are we to understand this species of intelligibility?37 To be impenetrable is to be opaque, and opacity is commonly understood to be the opposite of clarity. Similarly, the appearance of the concrete commodity can be explained only by the abstract social relations that condition its possibility. The logic of Oppen’s poetics, however, betrays the work of a closet dialectician for whom the opacity of the thing is inseparable from the promise of its clarity. This is how Oppen’s objectivist realism inverts commonsense assumptions about its own primary categories. George Oppen’s Geological Imagination  53

In short, one might say that there can be no stone relation, or that the stone is always a gravestone. But if the stone marks the figural site where human relations “withdraw,” the way object-oriented ontologists argue that objects themselves “withdraw” and become impenetrable, the commodity marks the materialization of such a withdrawal in terms of real socioeconomic practice—that is, wage labor—whereby dynamic social relations between people are subsumed by the opaque relations between things.38 In other words, it’s not that the object withdraws into “the world of dynamic relatedness that grounds our being”; it is rather that human labor withdraws in the object.39 “We know that lives / Are single / And cannot defend / The metaphysic / On which rest / The boundaries / Of our distances.”40 This “metaphysic” may well be capitalism’s alibi for a world in which human relations withdraw in things, an alibi arguably shared by speculative realism and repeated by object-oriented ontology’s notion that objects naturally withdraw into a dense network of inaccessible relations. To arrive at clarity, then, would be to arrive at an encounter with an opacity that is inseparable from the commodity logic of things, a logic mystified in these boundaries, these distances. The Problem of Annihilation We are the beginning of a radical depopulation of the earth Cataclysm . . . cataclysm of the plains, jungles, the cities Something in the soil exposed between oceans —O p p e n, “Of Being Numerous”

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 something 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”— 54  The Apocalyptic Imagination

that is, to think what there is when there is no thinking subject—something “not relative to us” and “existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking of it or not”—in other words, to think a world independent of our representation of it.42 Like Meillassoux, Oppen is committed to moving beyond the finitude of textuality to encounter something irreducible to language. But whereas Meillassoux contradictorily wants to think the stone when there is no one there to think it, Oppen wants to encounter the stone, and while the thing encountered may speculatively exist outside of history, the encounter itself does not. As compelling as Meillassoux’s speculative realism might be, we should remain circumspect. In “The Molecularization of Sexuality,” Jordana Rosenberg draws attention to how philosophies like Meillassoux’s reinscribe “an old paradigm, a primitivist fantasy that hinges on the violent erasure of the social: the conjuring of a realm—an ‘ancestral realm’—that exists in the present, but in parallax to historical time.”43And in “‘Those Obscure Objects of Desire,’” Andrew Cole refers to object-oriented ontology—and its related speculative realism—as “the metaphysics of capitalism” or “commodity fetishism in academic form.”44 As if anticipating this tendency only to preempt it in advance, Oppen’s stone offers ecopoetics an alternative to the asocial primitivism of speculative realism and its related object-oriented ontologies, whose recourse to a presocial or extralinguistic “real” fails to register those social forces that are its own conditions of possibility. While Meillassoux does take up the problem of imminent catastrophe in After Finitude, he does not historicize that imminence. “Everything could actually collapse,” he writes, “from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing.”45 Meillassoux’s vision of imminent catastrophe here is entirely speculative and leads to an ahistorical notion of dis-aster—the becoming unmoored from a meaning-making system traditionally associated with the stars—which for him is the necessity of there being no necessity, rendering annihilation totally irrational, rather than the outcome of excessively rationalized systems—an event that could happen at any moment without historical explanation. To resist speculative realism’s ahistorical propositions, one need only recall Oppen’s “Time of the Missile” together with its companion poem, “From Disaster”: George Oppen’s Geological Imagination  55

Ultimately the air Is bare sunlight where must be found The lyric valuables. From disaster Shipwreck, whole families crawled To the tenements, and there Survived by what morality Of hope Which for the sons Ends its metaphysic In small lawns of home.46

“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 “ultimately,” 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 bareness 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 56  The Apocalyptic Imagination

historical disaster—perceptible. This is the distance between “the idiot stone” and its pedestrian counterpart that will appear in section 5 of “Of Being Numerous”: The great stone Above the river In the pylon of the bridge ‘1875’ Frozen in the moon light In the frozen air over the footpath, consciousness Which has nothing to gain, which awaits nothing Which loves itself 48

Whereas Meillassoux’s speculative realism emphasizes the “ancestral” dimension of the autonomous thing whose inhuman temporality is unmotivated by history, Oppen’s obsession with “the idiot stone” can only admit its historical incentive. Rather than the epistemological conundrum presented by scientific discourse— whereby what’s at stake is the value of statements about the earth 4.56 billion years ago—Oppen’s realism is committed to an encounter with the thing in the present, whose temporality bears within itself human and inhuman material that can’t be neatly disaggregated. In short, it is the dissonance between “the atom” and “the missile” —like that between “the idiot stone” and “The great stone / Above the river”—that informs the prosody of poems like “Time of the Missile” and “From Disaster,” and this disjunction at the kernel of the thing itself arouses what Oppen famously refers to as “metaphysical vertigo.” “It may be a lack of clarity in the poems, lack of basic clarity. Or you suffer less than I do from a type of metaphysical vertigo. I cannot know,” he writes, then continues, “My concern with the things, the materials in the poems are that they are.” 49And while this formulation transposes “the things” and “the materials in the poems” as if they were equivalents, Oppen’s concern—a cornerstone of his poetics—can’t support its own desire for a flush equation between the two, yielding a seemingly inevitable “lack of clarity” and, as we’ll see, a contrary longing for the poem “not to be.” George Oppen’s Geological Imagination  57

“Not to Be,” A Provisional Conclusion Not to reduce the thing to nothing— —O p p e n, “Route”

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 Missile,” 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 commodity 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 58  The Apocalyptic Imagination

the modernist affirmation of the poem’s autonomy, its radical independence from the very heteronomous language without which it would be nothing. Thus the stone remains the asymptotic horizon of his poetics, the thing-place with which he wants the poem to coincide. For Oppen, then, it is only by “not being” that the poem might achieve the quality of “the idiot stone” whose ontology does not lend itself even to the category of “being” without being compromised or contaminated. The effects of such a poem might resemble Roger Caillois’s description in his exquisite monograph, The Writing of Stones: “To decipher such writing, if writing it is, would not mean trying to unravel an inextricable mass of lines and loops, but rather endeavoring to interpret anew some oft-repeated signs so turned inward upon themselves that they refer only to their own form . . . and which fill an unfathomable mineral grief.”51 For Oppen, this “mineral grief ” finds a kindred allegorical emblem in “the idiot stone,” to which his poems long to bear witness. But his desire for the poem to replace the stone at the limit of his poetics can only end in contradiction as the poem negates the thing it wants to be. This is Oppen’s limit case, where his need for reconciliation with “the stone universe” arrives at an impasse. This may be the site of his ontological anguish. For Oppen, the desired encounter is with “the-thing-before-the-words,” in a “place without words, the wordless sphere in the mind.”52 “It is that intuition first of all which is assuredly a thought and which does not occur in words.”53 One might say that he desires the poetic statement to be the phenomenon of which it speaks, but his realism obtains in the recognition that poem and thing are not equivalents. While cast in the terms of metaphysics, Oppen’s ontological vertigo can be diagnosed in historical materialist terms as an effect of his desire to get outside of a history that has rendered him impotent as its agent of change. This is neither speculative nor ontological but profoundly historical. Oppen’s mourning of a humane world he—or we—failed to make corresponds to a loss or lack of historical agency, and it results in his refusal to privilege human creation, human making, or even poiesis. “We didn’t make the atom we are made of, but all the rest is subjective.” This is how Oppen formally resolves the contradictions that attend his return to poetry in the shadow of the missile: he replaces the annihilation of the world with an imaginary form of self-annihilation, as if his own subject position could simply George Oppen’s Geological Imagination  59

be willed away. But in underscoring a desire to negate precisely those qualities that make the poem a poem—the poet’s subjectivity, for example—he calls for a willful suspension of agency that alone would allow the poem “to be inaudible, not to be.” Mineral silence, “word with no sound.” So what, in the end, does Oppen’s objectivist realism have to offer ecopoetics? First, his poetics arouses the tension between the reality of a world on the verge of disappearing and the ideality of the poetic statement about that world, an ideality that he longs to render as linguistic material so that the poem might be an index of an encounter with something in the world otherwise unacknowledged or imperceptible. Second, in his effort to make a human thing the equal of something inhuman—in his desire, that is, to ascribe to the poem the ontological status of a stone—Oppen experiences an anguish or anxiety, an effect of contradictory impulses that the poem itself perceives as if it were a sensory organ capable of theorizing its own conditions in its very praxis.54 Moreover, his objectivist realism shows us that poetical values have a materialist substratum, not only in the elemental world where impenetrable things might be encountered with clarity but in the social and historical worlds. While the recent turn toward object-oriented ontologies in the humanities ascribes an inhuman agency to matter itself, Oppen’s poetics unwittingly poses the question: what does the agency of things matter when human agency for social transformation has been so terribly compromised? Is the philosophy of abrogated agency, insofar as it finds its elaboration at the level of ontology itself, just a symptom of our need for consolation? While no doubt registering a crisis for social action, Oppen’s poems at midcentury refuse to console; they can at best make perceptible a structure of feeling that arouses the need for consolation together with its impossible gratification. In doing so, Oppen’s poetics enacts a patient ethics of a seemingly suspended human capacity to remake the world, a suspension to which he perhaps too willingly resigned himself. This is an ethics that is radically self-scrutinizing in the face of an arrested human agency for which it too assumes responsibility, an arrest that is itself the effect of historically specific events. What I’ve referred to elsewhere as Oppen’s “patiency” is in part a function of a world-historical failure for which he feels accountable.55 Speculative realism, by contrast, can only hypostatize disaster as such—be it Quentin Meillassoux’s annihilation or Ray 60  The Apocalyptic Imagination

Brassier’s own theorization of “the truth of extinction”—just as object-oriented ontology can only hypostatize the agency of things without reflexive attention to its conditions—that is, capitalism—and with no explicit relation to history: in short, a nondialectical theorization.56 As a salient countermodel, Oppen’s objectivist realism endeavors to encounter the unthinkable, the outside of history marked by the stone or the atom, and in doing so it can be understood only dialectically, specifically in relation to its historical conditions, which for Oppen organize themselves around the seeming imminence of nuclear destruction: “the acceptance of the inevitable final death of mankind—an actual acceptance, a dealing with it,” he writes in a 1966 note to himself.57 “A dealing” with what, exactly? Perhaps “the mineral fact” that what will have been here after the destruction of life as we know it is in fact here with us now. Indeed, what will have been here haunts the heart of things in the present. The question remains: how are we to feel the historically specific conditions of the disaster we are living so that we might act responsibly to change to those conditions? This is a critical question that ecopoetics can make its own, taking Oppen’s objectivist realism as one of many possible models. By contrast, speculative realism can offer only an ahistorical notion of the disaster’s “menacing power,” which then appears as “something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities.”58 In other words, speculative realism provides the philosophical means by which to think the disaster in its most general form, which like the global catastrophe at the heart of Lars von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia could be replete with any content whatever. In the shadow of such a catastrophe, “the world in itself would subsist despite the abolition of every relation-to-the-world,” and this is the world that Meillassoux’s realism endeavors to think.59 It’s in this context, then, that the “arche-fossil” holds the place for what he refers to as “a world unwitnessed by any human subject.”60 As an antidote to this metaphysics, Oppen’s objectivist realism demands a witness to reckon the “stone chain reaction” of both the elemental atom and the historical missile if only because “the eye sees!” and the conditions of our own destruction are what “we have made of the universe by looking at it.” “The idiot stone” thus becomes a nonsite where the subject can position itself: the impossible place from which the poem is obliged to sense and perceive the conditions of our radically specific historical disaster as if for the first time. George Oppen’s Geological Imagination  61

part two Embodiment and Animality

3 • Visceral Ecopoetics in Charles Olson and Michael McClure Proprioception, Biology, and the Writing Body J o n a t h a n Sk i n n e r

Environmental writing today, between the abstractions of ecology it engages and its many experiential precipitates and barring some ecofeminist instances, can be as disembodied as Emerson’s transparent eyeball. When not entirely scopic, the environmental body prefers phenomenological surfaces, an exchange at the skin that leaves the viscera untouched. The principal mode of environmental writing has been descriptive, where traces of the writing body are nearly always effaced, and where reading happens politely, in silence. Yet the book that brought the word “ecology” into the mainstream, Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring, focuses not so much on the environment, on nature or wilderness—even if ecologies of natural terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems play a strong role—but on the body, the cell, the viscera: “there is also an ecology of the world within our bodies. In this unseen world minute causes produce mighty effects,” she writes.1 In her study of the migration and induction of embryonic cells, Sandra Steingraber refers to the body itself as a “wetlands”: “Organogenesis begins with three flat layers and, one week later, produces a

coiled, segmented object that looks like an architectural detail on the end of a stair banister. Three weeks and a few more folds later, a ‘grossly recognizable’ human being resides in the wetlands of the uterus.”2 According to some of our most environmental texts, then, ecology and the environment begin with the body, at the depth of its viscera. Ecology also can efface the body by withholding an observer from participation in the first-order systems of ecology. Able bodies that diagnose the health or imbalance of ecological systems rarely appear within those systems. Like their expressionist counterparts in the arts, certain of the New American poets wanted to return writing to the body for a more immediate access to its energies, whether they be libidinal, athletic, choreographed, dramatized, or even ventriloquized: the poem as direct extension or projection of energy. The following essay attempts to fill in some of the missing history of the development of ecopoetics by highlighting the relevance of projectivist process-based poetics, at the forefront of the New American Poetry, to poets seeking direct access to physiological energy in their writings to outline the basis of what might be called a visceral poetics. Gary Snyder’s 1990 book of essays, The Practice of the Wild, may be the most influential title in the early development of ecopoetics. Yet eight years before, Michael McClure published Scratching the Beat Surface, a Gray Chair Charles Olson Memorial Lecture delivered at SUNY Buffalo in 1980 at the invitation of Robert Creeley. Whereas Snyder grounds his essays on environmental literary praxis in Poundian poetics, Asian sources, and the “deep image” school of ethnographic translation, McClure asks us to “step outside of the disaster that we have wreaked upon the environment and upon our phylogenetic selves” with findings based in fieldwork, biogenetics, and a thorough engagement with Olson’s so-called projective poetics.3 Part of tracing energy pathways between poetry and the body in what I am calling a visceral ecopoetics entails uncovering what has been an overlooked exchange between Michael McClure and Charles Olson. The collection of Olson texts gathered as Proprioception, rather than “Projective Verse,” sits at the heart of this exchange.4 Olson’s Proprioception informed ecopoetics-related practices by McClure and others but, as I suggest here, McClure’s early ecopoetics-related thinking and practices also influenced Proprioception. Thus this essay also recenters Olson’s work for our understanding of ecopoetics. 66  Embodiment and Animality

Undersoul The “Beat surface” for McClure takes shape with the famous 1955 Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, where Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen read their poetry to an audience of about 150 Cold War refugees. McClure read biological poems that gesture toward a plant-based ecology, “the soul like a clambering / Water vascular system” (in “Point Lobos: Animism”), only to end with killer whales seen as “GIANT TADPOLES / (Meat their algae).”5 He notes, “I did not want to join Nature by my mind but by my viscera.”6 He also describes how Antonin Artaud’s poetry, via Philip Lamantia, offered “a way into the open field of poetry and into the open shape of verse and into the physicality of thought.”7 These poems already deploy McClure’s trademark centered lineation—a shape that, he suggests, resonated with scientists James Watson and Francis Crick’s work developing the double-helix model of DNA structure, well before it entered popular culture: “There was a surprising broadening of the field into substrates that were not earlier imagined to be there for the viable creation of poetry, and, strangely enough, into areas that did not seem to exist before poems were written about them. The poems defined new areas.”8 Although McClure was already shaping his poetry in relation to science, in a 1971 interview with David Meltzer he notes that he was not yet using the term “ecology”: “I met Sterling Bunnell in 1957 and before that I thought in terms of biology or natural history or physiology or morphology. Sterling introduced the concept of ecology to me.”9 McClure’s Six Gallery set emphasizes predatory behavior. In “Point Lobos: Animism,” he writes, “It is possible my friend, / If I have had a fat belly / That the wolf lives on fat”; and “Poem” notes, “The smell of the hunt’s / A stench”; while “For the Death of 100 Whales” depicts a massacre of “sleek wolves / Mowers and reapers of sea kine.”10 In an eversion of the garden, nonhuman animals enact human agricultural exploitation. The poem, alluding to D. H. Lawrence’s “Whales Weep Not,” cancels Lawrentian immanence: “Oh Lawrence / No angels dance on those bridges. . . . / No passages or crossings / From the beasts’ wet shore.”11 The sentiment seems straight from Robinson Jeffers. Artaud’s “open shape” is ambivalent here—McClure will take to theater for a less inhibited “physicality of thought.”12 But not without first consulting a powerful plant ally. Proprioception, Biology, and the Writing Body  67

Scratching the Beat Surface opens with an account of McClure’s first ingestion of peyote (Lophophora williamsii) in 1958, thanks to a gift from artist Wallace Berman, his “peyote father.” It also includes a section of his “Peyote Poem” (published first as a broadside issue of Berman’s assemblage magazine Semina): “My belly and I are two individuals / joined together / in life.” The poem continues, “THIS IS THE POWERFUL KNOWLEDGE / we smile with it.”13 McClure notes how Francis Crick, who purchased the broadside at City Lights Books, used the above two lines as the epigraph to his 1966 book, Of Molecules and Men.14 For McClure, whose childhood career fantasy was that of naturalist, Crick’s shout-out affirmed his own early interest in biology and his sense that Beat literature was marked by a “reaching out from science to poetry and from poetry to science.”15 McClure’s own work explores and reveals unexpected alignments and tensions between poetic and scientific inquiry. Toward the end of the first part of Scratching the Beat Surface, McClure includes a letter he wrote to Charles Olson “in 1957 or 1958,” curious about the latter’s mention of the “peyote bean” in The Maximus Poems (in “The Song and Dance of ”). In the letter, he responds to Olson’s sense of animal individuality as set forth in the essay “Human Universe” and describes his own experience of the peyote high: “I have taken Peyote now and your Human Universe is more true. . . . Peyote puts you back within your own skin into the Human Universe. Into your own personal, animal, individual universe. And you look out into the physical universe and see it as only the physical universe.”16 McClure’s obsession with physicalism—“The room is empty of all but visible things. / THERE ARE NO CATEGORIES OR JUSTIFICATIONS!”—would resonate with the Olson who would seek to restore soul to a depth poetics of literal physical being and its “morphological elements” (or Jungian archetypes) located as physical organs: “The ‘soul’ then is equally ‘physical.’ Is the self. Is such, ‘corpus.’”17 Olson would go on to experiment with hallucinogens himself, sampling psilocybin with Timothy Leary in December 1960 and February 1961.18 McClure’s letter foreshadows Olson’s own lesson from the psilocybin mushroom, as recounted in Muthologos and in his cryptic deathbed text, “The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum,” that it “makes you exactly what you are” and “that which exists through itself / is what is called Meaning.”19 For McClure, however, the peyote-induced conviction that “meat, spirit, and gene are one and there is no time or size,” when 68  Embodiment and Animality

combined with unguided yogic kundalini exercises and Reichian orgone therapy, led (as he phrases it in his “fuck manifesto,” “Phi Upsilon Kappa”) to a “dark night of the soul.”20 “I was overwhelmed by the sense of animism,” he writes, “and how everything (breath, spot, rock, ripple in the tidepool, cloud, and stone) was alive and spirited. It was a frightening and joyous awareness of my undersoul. I say undersoul because I did not want to join Nature by my mind but by my viscera—my belly. The German language has two words, Geist for the soul of man and Odem for the spirit of beasts. Odem is the undersoul. I was becoming sharply aware of it.”21 Jean-Paul Sartre details a similar experience in his novel Nausea, a crisis-inducing wave of animism, among other unpleasant psychic states, following an injection of mescaline he received in 1935.22 In his quest for the spirit of beasts, McClure encountered “a fear that arose when I saw light radiating from the inorganic universe—the light that gleams from a plaster wall, or a brick, or chair, or old stool of dark wood. Constantly I saw all lights that flare and glisten stilly from objects.” The mute nausea of this “light-from-objects” along with the “knowledge that we have no minds and are only spiritmeat,” led to paralysis and a final epiphany: “I saw my soul and found that I lived once before and that I had been a killer whale. I have had but one life before. At the end of this one I shall be free of the chain of meat.”23 The word “meat” first appears in the texts working through this crisis, the 1961 poem sequence “Dark Brown” and the essays such as “Revolt” and “Phi Upsilon Kappa” that would be published as Meat Science, with the disavowal, “I no longer believe these things as I say them here.”24 While McClure never moves far from the “religious experience” he cites in his introduction to the first edition of Ghost Tantras, “meat science” is both a further step toward science (biology, ecology, cybernetics) and an opening to the process-based thinking at work, via Alfred North Whitehead, in the writings of Charles Olson.25 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 Kingfishers,” occurred at the same time that he was writing the texts of poetic revolt Proprioception, Biology, and the Writing Body  69

for which he would be better known. Noting his difficulty with the word “form” in Robert Creeley’s maxim that “form is never more than an extension of content,” he confronted a “writhing multidimensionality of thought” as he studied and wrote his way through Olson’s poetry: “a poem grew in my notebooks . . . a line would occur—I’d try it with other lines—more would accrue to it. . . . At the end, rather than a tortured and studied poem, it felt like my most sudden thought.”26 Elsewhere he describes this method, discovered while writing the poem “Rant Block,” as “alluvials,” something he had picked up from Jack Kerouac’s “spontaneous bop prosody”: whenever you get stuck, you reread your draft from the top down and write the first line that comes into your head as you reach the end.27 WILD ANGER MORE THAN CULTIVATED LOVE! Wolf and salmon shapes free to kill for food love and hatred. Life twists its head from side to side to test the elements and seek for breath and meat to feed on. I AM A FIRE AND I MOVE IN AN INFERNO sick I smolder and do not burn clear.28

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 exclamation, 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: THERE IS NO FORM BUT SHAPE! NO LOGIC BUT SEQUENCE! SHAPE the cloak and being of love, desire, hatred, hunger. . . . .......... These are the dull words from an animal of real flesh. Why? Where is the fire in them? 70  Embodiment and Animality

Never let them stop until they are moving things. Until they stir the fire!30

Revising Robert Creeley’s form as “extension of content” dictum, McClure suggests that shape is the process of finding stability in an accretive, line-by-line composition, one that does not take top-down instructions but locates its organism via energy pathways in a recursive process of deep listening.31 In this way, the poem’s growth and morphology resemble Goethe’s “The Metamorphosis of Animals” (as described in an epigraph to one section of Scratching the Beat Surface): “the animal’s shape is determined by its way of life, and the way of life, in its turn, exerts in all cases a powerful influence upon the shape.”32 The energy invoked in Olson’s “Projective Verse” is reactivated at every break and line, drawn in as core impulse, moving the poem down and up its central column. Stability comes from “obsessive complication of meanings”—as in Olson’s Maximus Poems, where George Butterick’s “semistochastic, monumental collage” of the last volume was possible only, according to McClure, due to the stability of Olson’s “systemless system”: “It is not a bouncing, wild-eyed jitterbug full of undirectable, diffuse energy that writes the projective poem. The projective poem must come from a powerful, complex, informed—ultimately stable substrate; from a mind/body in physiological training, in resonance with an evolving systemless system.”33 The poetics of “Rant Block” are very much those pursued in Olson’s landmark “The Kingfishers” (which Scratching the Beat Surface reprints in full): “On these rejectamenta [bones thrown up in pellets by the birds] / (as they accumulate they form a cup-shaped structure) the young are born. / And, as they are fed and grow, this nest of excrement and decayed fish becomes / a dripping, fetid mass.”34 Waste feeds life, creating more waste, and so on. While Olson emphasizes change more than stability (“not accumulation but change”), McClure emphasizes the “systemless” nature of the system; it does not necessarily advance according to ecological truisms such as balance or recycling.35 This emphasis can be read as a nod to the reflexivity of second-order cybernetics, embedding the observer in the system observed, which is partially constituted by the observer’s own blind spots. Ecology had made the move to complex systems by midcentury, while literary ecology has Proprioception, Biology, and the Writing Body  71

until recently remained fixated on the first-order model of self-contained ecosystems.36 Ecopoetics is still catching up with what McClure proposed more than three decades ago and, by extension, with what Olson enacted two decades before that. What both McClure and Olson share is the emphasis on building energy loops through feedback, a concept from cybernetics (“the feed-back proves, the feedback is / the law”). From this process comes what systems theorists might call the “emergent order” of an “action poem,” one that McClure compares to Clyfford Still’s gestural canvases or Jackson Pollock’s action paintings.37 He goes so far as to suggest that his poem “could even become a living bio-alchemical organism”: “I believed that Rant Block began to tug and pull and move like an organism—that like a wolf or salmon it could turn its head from side to side to test the elements and seek for breath.”38 McClure’s simile belies the extent to which his pursuit of balance assembles a becoming-animal located in affect rather than semblance, an emphasis more fully explored in the beast language of Ghost Tantras. Acting on his conviction that “poetry was about, by, and from, the meat, that poetry was the product of flesh brushing itself against experience,” McClure writes Olson another letter, objecting to what he calls the “anagogic” in Olson’s poetics: “I distinguish between an enacted tradition (mantic), and a concept (anagogic); the anagogic denies the objects of surroundings and intends to lead out to beauty that does not exist. . . . Not mimicry, but each writing a morphological existence independent except of myself. I do not duplicate the outside world but match my desires against it from my body.”39 McClure’s experience of primal immanence grounds poetics for him, rather, in sensual perception and an affective response (working from “pre-anagogic desire centers” or from what he will call “meat”), so that “the field on which poetry grows is the feeled . . . the felt. The veldt.”40 His pursuit of the “undersoul” or “the spirit of beasts” leads him toward something more like the sense of affect as assemblage explored in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “Becoming-Animal.”41 McClure’s own sense of field is anything but immanent. Just as he considers Snyder, Duncan, and Ginsberg to be workers in fields (of Zen, pedagogy, and consciousness), his own “Rant Block” “went through the crust of the verbal universe for a sea lion swim in the world of physiology. . . . Rant Block was floating on the field of studies. It came from field work.”42 Some of this fieldwork is in natural history, 72  Embodiment and Animality

some in states of consciousness. From Ginsberg’s “Howl” to Olson’s Proprioception to McClure’s beast language, a changed consciousness convulses writing practices from 1955 to 1961. If, as I am suggesting, an ecopoetics emerges directly from McClure’s engagement with Olson’s process-based composition by field, one that finds guidance from theories at the nexus of the developing biological sciences of the cell and genetics—general systems theory, thermodynamics, and information theory—rather than from tropes based on closed ecosystems, it should be noted that a plant ally catalyzes this “powerful knowledge.” Logocentric poetics cannot account for the visceral assemblage (more “gastric” than “gnostic,” according to Ralph Maud) of belly and consciousness forged by the ingestion of a psychoactive plant.43 The undersoul at work here may be more plant than beast. That said, the work of historicizing and detailing the role of plant allies in the emergence of ecopoetics, integral to a posthumanist history of visceral poetics, lies beyond the scope of this essay.44 Proprioception: Placing Logography McClure wrote Olson nearly twenty letters between 1957 and 1960. In November 1959, along with Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Donald Allen, and Philip Whalen, he paid a visit to Olson in Gloucester. Olson treated the group to a tour of Dogtown, prompting an on-site version of the tale of “Merry and the bull” and his composition of the first, breakthrough “Maximus from Dogtown” poems following his guests’ departure.45 “Maximus from Dogtown—II,” written two weeks later, represents a notable break in style. These poems helped launch a turn in Olson’s work (“turn yr Back on / the Sea, go inland, to / Dogtown”), a search for a new center visually invoked in his spiraling “Rose of the World” poem.46 Olson would spend the next three years literally pacing the ground of Dogtown, a terminal moraine that was the site of what he surmised was an experiment in community ended by the American Revolution.47 In the 1962 verse essay “Place; & Names,” he makes it clear that this site is coterminous with the body itself: “the crucialness being that these places or names / be as parts of the body, common, & capable / therefore of having cells, which can decant / total experience.”48 In his 1963 “Under the Mushroom” discussion, he clarifies what he means by cells decanting “total experience”: “what Proprioception, Biology, and the Writing Body  73

seems to happen, for example, with the hallucinogens: they go directly to the cells involved. . . . there’s a physiological unit in the cell similar or parallel to adrenaline, which . . . comes alive, light goes on and it comes out or it gets affected. And the cell then suddenly is both receiving and transmitting.”49 The mushroom experience confirmed the proprioceptive philosophy of immediacy, if not immanence, that Olson sought to articulate as early as 1959.50 Without going so far as to proclaim unity of word and sense (pictographic or otherwise), he would have words speak directly to and from the body.51 If there is a strange attractor to identify, a kernel to this emergent ecopoetics, it would have to be the Floating Bear pamphlets issued by Leroi Jones, with the help of various collaborators (including his wife at the time, Hettie Jones), between 1960 and 1962.52 Jones’s magazine Yugen and the better-funded magazine Kulchur also played a role. In those years, following the 1959 reissue of “Projective Verse” from Jones’s Totem Press, Kulchur and Floating Bear put out, in installments, Olson’s Proprioception writings and provided a forum for McClure’s developing theater practice: !The Feast!—his first play and extended exploration of beast language performed in 1960—was published as a Floating Bear pamphlet in 1961. Kulchur also ran McClure’s “sexual ode,” “Dark Brown,” in 1961 and his fuck manifesto, “Phi Upsilon Kappa,” in its Winter 1962 issue.53 McClure’s “The Chamber” and Olson’s “The Librarian” shared the pages of the same 1959 issue of Yugen. All this activity would cement, however incoherently at the time, a proprioceptive (visceral, embodied) ecopoetics to provoke and help McClure theorize the beast language that would dominate his writing and performances for the better part of a decade. Jones’s 1959 reissue of “Projective Verse” appended a recent “Letter to Elaine Feinstein,” in which Olson proposes a scheme that would also govern the last decade of his poetics: “The basic trio wd seem to be: topos/typos/tropos, 3 in 1. The ‘blow’ hits here, and me, ‘bent’ as born and of sd one’s own decisions for better or worse.”54 The penultimate deathbed poem of The Maximus Poems, as edited posthumously by George Butterick, restates this trio as: the Blow is Creation & the Twist  the Nasturtium is any one of Ourselves 74  Embodiment and Animality

And the Place of it All? Mother Earth Alone55

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, concept (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 founded 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 Proprioception, Biology, and the Writing Body  75

McClure works with a proprioceptive concept of image, of image as muscular activity, if not cellular in the sense of Olson’s cells decanting “total experience”: “I wanted to make poetry that didn’t have images in the sense that Shelley calls mimetic images, where the image describes something in the real world, but in the sense where the sound of the poetry itself creates an image in the mind, in the body, in the muscles in the body, and it created a melody that was also an image that imprinted itself in the body physically.”62 McClure’s poetry is rooted in “muscular music coming from the body and organs.”63 In Rare Angel, “THOUGHT / is / a / muscular / sensation / pouring outward like / pseudopods with feathered hoofs.”64 While most of the Ghost Tantras are almost entirely beast language, some also thematize the emergence of human from beast language that they enact, like the stanza halfway through the sequence that McClure highlights in his introduction: “Look at stanza 51. It begins in English and turns into beast language—star becomes stahr. Body becomes boody. Nose becomes noze.”65 51 I LOVE TO THINK OF THE RED PURPLE ROSE IN THE DARKNESS COOLED BY THE NIGHT. We are served by machines making satins of sounds. Each blot of sound is a bud or a stahr. Body eats bouquets of the ear’s vista. Gahhhrrr boody eers noze eyes deem thou. NOH. NAH-OHH hrooor. VOOOR-NAH! GAHROOOOO ME. Nah droooooh seerch. NAH THEE! The machines are too dull when we are lion-poems that move & breathe. WHAN WE GROOOOOOOOOOOOOOR hann dree myketoth sharoo sreee thah noh deeeeeemed ez. Whan eeeethoooze hrohh.66 76  Embodiment and Animality

Ghost Tantra 51 digs below machinery (of language and senses) for the moving, breathing, cooling “RED PURPLE ROSE,” addressed at the outset by an impulse to thought, invoked in a synesthetic blend of sound and vision (“ear’s vista”), shading to a phonetic transcription of meaning (“eers noze eyes”), and finally eaten up by sounds (“body eats bouquets”) of negation, expression, and desire with sighs, invocations, lingering strings of letters inviting “individual pronunciations and vibrations”— moving, breathing “lion-poems” whose all-caps “GROOOOOOOOOOOOOOR” would pierce the dull machinery of language.67 “To dim the senses and to listen to inner energies a-roar is sometimes called the religious experience,” McClure writes in his introduction to the first edition of Ghost Tantras. The turn inward is also a turn toward the viscera and cells of the poet’s own body. In his introduction to Ghost Tantras, McClure says that the poems “come from a swirling ball of silence that melds with outer sounds and thought.”68 He discovered this “ball of silence” in the course of self-directed kundalini yoga exercises. Like Snyder’s work, McClure’s beast language poems look to the East, to Asian spiritual practices, and thus away from a European tradition of sound poetry.69 In the documentary film Rebel Roar, he amplifies, “I discovered a ball of silence within myself. And in that ball of silence were roars, and human vocalizations and noises.” Later on in the same film, he notes that the rudiments of the beast language existed in his 1960 play !The Feast! The play enacts his search for the “mammal-personal,” as invoked in Hart Crane’s “A Name for All,” a poem McClure prints in Scratching the Beat Surface: I dreamed that all men dropped their names, and sang As only they can praise, who build their days With fin and hoof, with wing and sweetened fang Struck free and holy in one Name always.70

!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 identification 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 Proprioception, Biology, and the Writing Body  77

Organism McClure’s and Olson’s desire for a kind of universal individual presents a limit state for the New American (and abstract expressionist) gestural poetics. McClure later restates his emphasis on the “biological self ” and on his sense “THAT POLITICS IS DEAD / and / BIOLOGY / IS HERE!” and his call to “come out of the closet— / OUT OF THE CLOSET OF POLITICS / and into the light of . . . flesh and bodies!”72 Both stances are equally problematic: Olson’s in regard to the objectification of Mayan “flesh,” McClure’s in regard to the ideology of a science that transcends politics. But in McClure’s version, “flesh and bodies” have become “light” rather than “darkness.”73 What has intervened is his turn toward biology and the information of systems thinking and its offshoot, the ecological sciences: “NOW / is / THE TIME / to learn to see / with the systemless system.”74 This essay has focused on the exchange between Olson and McClure to outline the emergence of a visceral poetics around 1960, arguably a point of emergence for ecopoetics. While McClure’s poetics is ecological in its focus, it is not necessarily social; a properly social theory of the viscera remains to be articulated.75 The period of McClure’s Ghost Tantras, 1964, would overlap with the emergence of “ecology” as a mainstream cultural term and an explicit concept for poetics, a term associated most visibly with the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.76 While Snyder, off in Japan studying Buddhism, would by 1967 take up the ethical and moral dimensions of ecology in “Poetry and the Primitive,” as early as 1960 McClure was turning to Olson as a way to theorize his poetics of meat and “muscular music.”77 The proprioceptive Floating Bear nexus would energize his nascent ecopoetics and prepare it for the concepts that ecological science brought him in the early 1970s. Scratching the Beat Surface outlines McClure’s turn from proprioception to cybernetics. He notes how Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues makes the poem a “channel for great energy. . . . The energy moving through the systemless system [acting] to organize the system with its own self-invented rules. . . . a much more stable system than sheer, shapeless automatic writing.”78 McClure’s paraphrase of the systems-based understanding of the organic runs as follows: “the organism is, in itself, a tissue or veil between itself and the environment—it is also simultaneously 78  Embodiment and Animality

the environment itself. The organism is what Whitehead and Olson would think of as a point of novelty comprehending itself or experiencing itself both proprioceptively and at its tissue’s edges and at any of its conceivable surfaces. There is, in fact, a central force in the organism and it IS the environment.”79 Biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela call this adaptive relationship between organism and environment autopoesis and emphasize the importance of “operational closure” for the autonomy of the organism: organisms are “closed and self-referential in terms of what constitutes their specific mode of existence, even as they are open to the environment on the level of their material structure.”80 It is the very closure (“the veil”) of the organism that enables it to multiply points of contact with its environment and to alter its own structural states. In other words, it is only through our disconnection that we are connected to the environment. In response to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous observation, “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him,” the systems theorist notes that it is precisely the muteness of the beast and the human inability to understand the talk of the lion that make communication not only possible but necessary.81 Most relevant to McClure’s gestural poetics is systems theory’s break with the representational model. His reading of Ghost Tantra 49 to caged lions at the San Francisco Zoo, as captured on film by Bruce Conner, offers a case study for the darkness at the heart of crossspecies communication—in terms of both meaning and cross-species inequality.82 McClure proposes an organic poetry, but one in tune with the emerging life sciences, focused at the time on cellular biology, that in their embrace of radical contingency dispense with the continuity and physical unity implied by “form” as “extension of content.”83 Rather, biologist Ramón Margalef ’s cybernetic exploration of boundaries between systems, boundaries that can be arbitrarily drawn, “frees us from the need to define ecosystems that are more or less closed.”84 For McClure, ecopoetics does not begin with an idealized picture of nature but with affective work at the boundary that the poem itself declares. Here is a section of a poem from the 1975 sequence, Rare Angel. RAVEN’S FEATHER, EAGLE’S CLAW, EVERY SONG EVER CHANTED by the whale hunter Proprioception, Biology, and the Writing Body  79

is a collector’s item and wafts like mountain fog from node to node before becoming clouds. EVERY BACKWARD LOOK puts us in touch with sentiment, and hurts less than peering forward, for tomorrow is the shadow of today. Even the blue jay gloats over his stash of brass buttons. See the octopus play with the exoskeleton of his prey.85

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 thermodynamics: 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 80  Embodiment and Animality

of killing big animals, the desire behind what he calls the slow-motion explosion of ecological catastrophe. “If we acknowledge that this is our nature,” he asks in an interview printed in Three Poems, “what other possibilities does our nature have? What else could we do that is natural?”87 Possibility does not emerge through a positive knowing so much as through a communication of felt ignorance. McClure might be reaching toward the kind of ecological communication that sociologist Niklas Luhmann calls “shared knowledge of ignorance”—social networks linked in the blind spots our seeing constitutes.88 For McClure, understanding the ecosystem as a cybernetic system (ecologist Ramón Margalef ’s phrase) lays bare the structural basis both of predation and of the ecological concept of trophic levels in the food chain. According to a passage he quotes from Margalef, in Scratching the Beat Surface, “any exchange between two systems of different information content does not result in a partition or equalizing of the information, but increases the difference. The system with more accumulated information becomes still richer from the exchange.”89 This kind of exchange that “increases to a greater extent the information of the party already better informed” is negentropic, the opposite of the process of cultural disintegration that Claude Lévi-Strauss proposes (in his punning entropology), where, as he puts it at the end of Tristes Tropiques, “Every verbal exchange, every line printed, establishes communication between people, thus creating an evenness of level, where before there was an information gap and consequently a greater degree of organization.”90 For Lévi-Strauss, there is no assumed hierarchy of information—it is the gaps between cultural systems that shore up their organization. For McClure, whose focus is on biology rather than culture, mammals are the most stable, highly ordered organism, a form of life whose predatory ecology must be embraced rather than ignored: “Meat is the only known negentropic system.”91 Ignoring such ecology is the most dangerous thing we can do, he suggests. In an interview with Harald Mesch, McClure discusses “being on the edge of the explosion” of the ecological catastrophe: “We’re looking at an explosion happening in slow motion.” Nevertheless, “it is our primate nature to enjoy what we’re doing.”92 McClure’s poem “Written after Finding a Dolphin Skull on the Gulf of California” works hard at this self-realization, turning a kind of memento mori into what he calls a remembrance of life. Here is the first section of the poem: Proprioception, Biology, and the Writing Body  81

YEAH, OR MAYBE LIVE IN FANTASIES / WITHIN A DOLPHIN’S SKULL! I can hold it in my hand! I can look in through the foramen magnum. SEE the huge chamber where the lovely creature lived (in part at least—where information organized). SEE THE BLOWHOLES WHERE THE BREATH passed through and made a faint cloud above warm / waves. OR IT IS POSSIBLE to cast around the Pleistocene and see real mammal creatures in the last nooks and crannies. THE EXPLOSION IS ALREADY HAPPENING! WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE of it! It is different! It is not a flare of three seconds that envelops all and leaves cinders. It expands exponentially—in the use of energy. And we / can’t see it. BUT LIFE IS BEING ROLLED 82  Embodiment and Animality

BACK WITH A ROAR and it is best to think the war IS LOST and we are survivors of the Future.93

The poem thematizes more than it enacts entropology, a contemplation of materials in process over time. Nevertheless, its prosody is not contemplative but enactivist. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela frame enactivist poetics in terms of “the need for a nonrepresentationist view of knowledge based on the sense-making capacity of an autonomous living system.”94 Such poetics reaches for a materialism not focused exclusively on the entropic side of the energy exchange, not limited to what I have elsewhere described as entropology.95 McClure’s affirmation of human (mammal) biology calls for a more comprehensive embrace of thermodynamics than the study of disintegrating frameworks can account for. This includes a consideration of negentropy, of what Alfred North Whitehead calls a “mysterious impulse” in biological matter for “its energy to run upwards.”96 If entropology represents poetry’s closest dealing with matter approached objectively, from without, visceral poetics aims to activate matter from within: in the title sequence from Rare Angel, “power remains / in the frame / of new shapes.”97 McClure turns proprioception toward genetics as his version of the typos that for Olson hearkened back to Jung—the powerful knowledge of molecular biology being for McClure a negentropic approach to typology. “Written after Finding a Dolphin Skull on the Gulf of California” moves through the double temporality of the Anthropocene, caught between the instantaneous flash of the atom bomb and the less visible burn of an exponentially expanding human population: “It is not a flare / in three seconds that envelops all / and leaves cinders.”98 At the same time, the poem exploits the very limitations of human imagination to solicit imagination of disaster: the posthuman thought that the world has “already ended” casts attention on an untimely moment. Can we, “lit,” as the last line of the poem puts it, “like flying turquoises driving through the flesh of time,” kill the future that is now our shadow awaiting us?99 Such a throw requires visceral force. Proprioception, Biology, and the Writing Body  83

4 • Playing in the Planetary Field Vulnerability and Syncretic Myth Making in Robert Duncan’s Ecopoetics Michelle Niemann

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 philosophy, 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 dialectic 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 vulnerable. 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 ecopoetics 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 particular places. Rather, in his essays, he crafts an origin story that syncretizes scientific Playing in the Planetary Field  85

realism with myth to link the rhythms of inanimate matter with those of the tides, life, the individual human body, and poetry. In its insistence that what happens on Earth cannot be separated from the broader cosmos, Duncan’s ecopoetics imagines a planetary environmentalism. This essay traces how Duncan theorized and practiced an avowedly queer, Romantic, and vulnerable ecopoetics of emergent form. In the first section, I show how his poem “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” revises Olson’s projectivist field, insisting that the poet does not oversee the field of composition but enters it only by invitation of its own lively orders. The second section focuses on Duncan’s prose; I argue that through his reading of H.D.’s work, he developed his concept of vulnerability and the syncretic myth of ecopoetic origins that he elaborates in his essays. In the final section, I read “Poetry, A Natural Thing,” a poem in which Duncan rewrites Robert Frost’s “West-Running Brook” and responds to John Crowe Ransom’s rejection of his work, countering both entropic fatalism and conventional definitions of poetic naturalness. Duncan’s ecopoetics decouples nature from convention, wedding it instead to extravagant emergent forms, and invites us not to seek technoscientific mastery of Earth and cosmos but to participate in them playfully by cultivating vulnerability and a “vital weakness.” At a time when pervasive apocalyptic thinking pushes us toward unwise technofixes to global environmental problems, Duncan’s work offers contemporary ecopoetics an alternative way of imagining and practicing hope. Olson’s Field and Duncan’s Queer Play Principle Charles Olson’s 1950 essay “Projective Verse,” with its concept of composition by field, catalyzed a group of poets loosely associated with Black Mountain College, where he was rector, around a new, projectivist poetics. Both in his 1960 The Opening of the Field and in his essays, Duncan playfully revises Olson’s field: while Olson analyzes and enacts the field as system, Duncan emphasizes the vulnerability that is required to enter such a field as a participant. Duncan underscores the queer, feminized, and Romantic aspects—that is, the disavowed aspects—of vulnerability, drawing out the psychological consequences of Olson’s ecological “objectism” 86  Embodiment and Animality

in which “man” participates not as reigning subject but as one of many objects in a “field” of objects.7 Vulnerable receptivity is key to what Duncan calls the play principle—the imaginative “as if,” the “fictive certainty”—that allows us to enter the field as participants in, not masters of, what is. Duncan acknowledges the sense of permission that Olson’s composition by field gave him even as he teases Olson for his machismo, which does indeed sit oddly alongside the “humilitas” Olson claims his “objectism” involves.8 As Stephen Fredman notes, Duncan often “acted the playful heretic” to Olson’s tyrantgenius.9 The difference between Olson’s masculinist assertion and Duncan’s queer playfulness is especially marked in their exchange about “wisdom as such.” In his response to Olson’s essay “Against Wisdom as Such,” which argued that Duncan courted religion in his poetry, Duncan pokes fun at Olson’s tough-guy penchant for “rigor” and “clarity”: “I like rigor and even clarity as a quality of a work—that is, as I like muddle and floating vagaries. It is the intensity of the conception that moves me. This intensity may be that it is all of a fervent marshmallow dandy lion fluff.”10 This “fervent marshmallow dandy lion fluff,” complete with a “dandy,” could hardly be more camp. Its avowed queerness seems designed to provoke Olson, as does the essay’s celebration of the “Romantic spirit.” But Duncan also takes play seriously: “I have shaken off the insistent hounds of the critical posse . . . and find that if I am my own judge I will allow the full play.”11 In The H.D. Book, Duncan elevates play into a psychological principle. Contra Freud, with his reality principle of the father and pleasure principle of the mother, he proposes the child as a figure for “the principle of play or enacting what is.” In fact, he replaces the death drive, which Freud outlined in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, with the play principle: “Beyond the pleasure principle, beyond the reality principle, is the play principle seeking its passionate formal fulfillment.” For Duncan, play compels us more than reality, pleasure, or death. Play involves both attention and pretending and thus epitomizes participation: “the play of the child is his very being where alone he is completely engrossed. It is the ‘As If ’ world. And it is, where the child has survived in the life of the adult, the creative fiction of man’s religion and arts.”12 The “‘As If ’ world” of play and pretending enters in the first line of Duncan’s perhaps most well-known poem, “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”— Playing in the Planetary Field  87

“as if it were a scene made-up by the mind”—and is crucial to the way the poem renders the systemic field of projective verse both visionary and actual. “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” inaugurates Duncan’s mature work as the first poem in The Opening of the Field, which Duncan wrote while listening as Olson lectured on Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy in San Francisco in 1957.13 The field in Olson’s “Projective Verse” is not only systemic and thereby consonant with Whitehead, cybernetics, and the science of ecology but also schematic: it doesn’t look much like an actual, embodied field.14 Throughout The Opening of the Field, Duncan revises Olson’s field, rendering it paradoxically both more actual and more ideal, more natural and more visionary. For Duncan, the compositional field is at once an embodied meadow, the “green solid meadow” of “The Dance,” a meadow in the mind, and the poem itself as constructed object.15 For Duncan, the poet is not in control, putting words in order in the field, but instead must be granted permission to enter by the field itself or its mythic spirits and, once there, must interact with the other “objects” in the field as an equal. In thus revising Olson’s field, Duncan plays out the psychological consequences of Olson’s theories, showing how a willingness to be vulnerable and indeed to obey is necessary if “man” is truly to be just another “object” in a field of “those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects,” as Olson proposes.16 In one of his recurrent puns on order as organization and order as command, Duncan characterizes this receptive collaboration: “In writing I do not organize words but follow my consciousness of—but it is also a desire that goes towards—orders in the play of forms.”17 The poet’s receptivity is both passive and active: it is not just that he follows emergent orders but also that he desires and goes toward them. Duncan endorses the dictum that “form is never more than an extension of content” but enacts it differently than Olson does. Attending to perception, sound, and thought is important to both, but the accent is different: for Olson it is on the “40 hours a day” labor of making sure that each “perception . . . MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER,” while for Duncan it is on relinquishing control and opening up to emergent forms.18 Olson emphasizes aggressive pursuit, while Duncan underscores vulnerable receptivity. In articulating this key element of his ecopoetics, Duncan gestures toward Olson’s central insight in the essay “Human Universe”: 88  Embodiment and Animality

“Our engagement with knowing, with craft and lore, our demand for truth is not to reach a conclusion but to keep our exposure to what we do not know, to confront our wish and our need beyond habit and capability, beyond what we can take for granted, at the borderline, the light finger-tip or thought-tip where impulse and novelty spring.”19 This “borderline” and “finger-tip” echo Olson’s contention that people’s most vital activity, their ability to perceive and select from chaos, happens not in the hidden depths but at “the skin itself,” at the meeting point where they interact with their world. To support this, he cites the scientific finding that “the fingertips” are “knowing knots in their own rights, little brains.” He makes an ecological point based on this insight—“man and external reality are so involved with one another that, for man’s purposes, they had better be taken as one”—and Duncan articulates its psychological upshot, that we must push ourselves beyond reassuring “habit and capability” to the vulnerable edge of our knowledge.20 This stance is essential to ecopoetics and ecopolitics. If Olson’s projectivist poetics repositions the human as another object in a field of objects, thus dismantling human exceptionalism and imagining a more environmentally humble culture, Duncan playfully enacts the psychological consequences of entering the real and compositional field as “creatures, not rulers, of what is.”21 His playful vulnerability is key to any ecopoetics that aims to transform consciousness rather than warn against disaster or mourn loss, as well as essential for any environmentally viable social and cultural forms we aim to construct. Olson’s systems thinking connects projectivist composition by field with contemporary new materialisms, but Duncan cautions that how we participate in systems is at least as important as our understanding of them. While The Opening of the Field imagines and enacts vulnerable participation in complex ecologies, in his prose Duncan crafted a myth that syncretizes science and psychology to link poetry with our embodied vulnerability and earthly origins. “Vital Weakness” and Duncan’s Myth of Ecopoetic Origins Though Duncan valued spontaneity in composition and saw poetic form as an emergent rather than an imposed order, one of his key interlocutors in the developPlaying in the Planetary Field  89

ment of his poetics was H.D., master of imagist compression. Despite—or because of—her disciplined practice of a poetics of limit, H.D.’s work early on gave Duncan the sense that “the poem had something to do with keeping open and unfulfilled the urgencies of life.”22 In The H.D. Book, he uses a particular image from H.D.’s Trilogy, that of a mollusk in its shell, to develop his concept of a vulnerability or a “vital weakness” that must be protected from the surrounding sea to which it also must open. For Duncan, this pattern—where a vulnerable life must be protected from the overwhelming force of that which gives it life—repeats on all levels, from the physiochemical to the biological, sociopolitical, and imaginative. In his 1964 “Towards an Open Universe,” perhaps the most influential of his essays, he builds on his reading of H.D. to craft an ecopoetic myth about how the rhythms of limit and emergence link matter, life, consciousness, and poetry. This essay even in its title rewrites Olson’s “Human Universe”: Duncan opens the human to the universe and rejects Olson’s misogynist closing myth in which the “moon is as difficult to understand as any bitch is” in favor of the way H.D. allies the poet with the rhythms of tide and moon.23 Because he imagines beyond life to matter and beyond human timescales to the origins of the planet, Duncan’s ecopoetics is planetary—which is to say, earthly but also cosmic.24 The embodied planetarity of his myth is key to the ecopoetics, ecopolitics, and environmental ethics we are still trying to develop. The play between limit and opening defines Duncan’s ecopoetics. H.D.’s Trilogy helped him develop his concept of emergent form in The H.D. Book: “The poem, H.D. would say, is generated just here, between the hunger—the opening of the organism to take in the world around it—and the sense of limits.”25 The H.D. Book, written in the early 1960s, is a sprawling meditation on poetry, poetics, art, psychoanalysis, and heterodox religion; Duncan’s alternative genealogy of modernism is perhaps its most frequently recurring theme.26 His extended, recurring rumination on a particular poem in Trilogy—the fourth poem in the first book, The Walls Do Not Fall—shows how he developed his ecopoetics through H.D.’s figure of the shellfish. She writes: There is a spell, for instance, in every sea-shell: 90  Embodiment and Animality

continuous, the sea thrust is powerless against coral, bone, stone, marble hewn from within by that craftsman, 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 toomuch”; 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: yet that flabby, amorphous hermit within, like the planet senses the finite, it limits its orbit Playing in the Planetary Field  91

of being, its house, temple, fane, shrine: it unlocks the portals at stated intervals: prompted by hunger, it opens to the tide-flow: but infinity? no, of nothing-too-much:31

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 “tenderness 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 92  Embodiment and Animality

of the heart and the valves of the shell-fish who lives in the tidal rhythm, as the brain lives in the tidal flow of the heart, fed by charges of blood in the capillaries.”35 In this passage and others, Duncan develops the language and images he will use in his myth of ecopoetic origins in “Towards an Open Universe.”36 Here he plays not only on H.D.’s image of the shellfish but also on the likeness between self and planet that she sets up: “I know the pull / of the tide, the lull // as well as the moon.” 37 “Towards an Open Universe” characterizes the emergent orders of Duncan’s planetary ecopoetics. Like H.D., Duncan links his own life with that of the planet via images of the sea. He begins the essay with the story of his own birth and a passage from his poem “Apprehensions” that connects his birth with “the birth of life itself in the primal waters,” reaching far back to set up the essay’s lyrical evocation of rhythms: “In the very beginnings of life, in the source of our cadences, with the first pulse of the blood in the egg then, the changes of night and day must have been there.”38 Duncan does not retell classical myth but instead draws on the work of biophysicist Erwin Schrödinger, Heraclitus, Thomas Carlyle, and Olson to write what we might call a syncretic myth that includes science. He tells a story about how poetic order emerges within the rhythms of the body and the planet: 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 repeating 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 Playing in the Planetary Field  93

just this unique identity or experience created in the dance of chromosomes, and having in that identity a time; each lives and falls back at last into the chemistry of death.39

Here Duncan’s sonorous invocations of a primordial scene echo through his references 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, religious, 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 94  Embodiment and Animality

thermodynamics or entropy in “Towards an Open Universe.” But in the opening of “Ideas of the Meaning of Form,” which appears to be another draft for the passage above, he works against entropy’s fatalist contest between order and disorder, in which chaos always wins: 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 equilibrium 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 Playing in the Planetary Field  95

life. Life’s disequilibrium is not disorder but a more complex order: “this picture of an intricately articulated structure, a form that maintains a disequilibrium or lifetime—whatever it means to the biophysicist—to the poet means that life is by its nature orderly and that the poem might follow the primary processes of thought and feeling.”46 In other words, by attending carefully to their own thinking and feeling, poets may have access to the emergent orders—that is, structures and laws—of the planet, which both give rise to lively ecosystems and connect them with the cosmos. In The H.D. Book, Duncan claims that “the imperative of the poem towards its own order” is a “biological instinctual reality” for H.D., but he then immediately broadens beyond the biological to rewrite entropic “inertia” as a material and spiritual “calling . . . toward concretion”: 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 distinguishes 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 technoscientific 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 96  Embodiment and Animality

and the primordial while reminding us of his (and our own) limited embodiment. The essay opens, “I was born January 7, 1919, in the hour before dawn, in the depth of winter at the end of a war.” In crafting a myth adequate to the way poetry “comes in a dancing organization between personal and cosmic identity,” he imagines what it means to think globally and act locally. That persistent slogan came into use around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, but it is still tricky to enact. In part, thinking globally and acting locally must mean understanding our own limits: “I am but part of the whole of what I am, and wherever I seek to understand I fail what I know.”49 Duncan challenges us to imagine planetary systems but to participate in those systems as what we are—limited players who can neither comprehend nor control all the consequences of our actions. “Poetry, A Natural Thing” A poem in The Opening of the Field counters narratives of doom in a less grand, more humorous way than Duncan’s essays, as it also revises the dominant New Critical understanding of poetic naturalness. In “Poetry, A Natural Thing,” Duncan pushes back against the entropic fatalism of Robert Frost’s “West-Running Brook,” throwing into relief the playfulness that informs his own ecopoetics. Duncan represents the poem as a salmon that resists the current and goes back “toward the source”: The poem feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse, to breed  itself, a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping. This beauty is an inner persistence toward the source striving against (within) down-rushet of the river, a call we heard and answer in the lateness of the world primordial bellowings from which the youngest world might spring . . .50 Playing in the Planetary Field  97

The metaphor of the poem as a salmon catches the “inner persistence” they share: both fight backward against the temporal flow that carries them away. Duncan’s poem recalls “West-Running Brook,” which also uses resistance to a river’s current to propose a cosmology. While Frost conveys an overriding sense of entropic pull and the universe’s inevitable winding down, Duncan’s poem puts the accent on possibility, even though, as in The H.D. Book, both salmon and poem are always “within” what they strive “against.” For Frost, resistance is generated by the entropic current itself and can never win. “West-Running Brook” is staged as a conversation between a couple; the unnamed woman notices first that the brook runs west and then that it seems to be waving to them. But her husband, Fred, insists that the wave “wasn’t waved to us”; as the narrator explains, “The black stream, catching on a sunken rock, / Flung backward on itself in one white wave.” The bulk of the poem consists of Fred’s philosophical musings on the wave: . . . Speaking of contraries, see how the brook In that white wave runs counter to itself. It is from that in water we were from Long, long before we were from any creature.51

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 universal cataract of death That spends to nothingness—and unresisted, Save by some strange resistance in itself, Not just a swerving, but a throwing back, As if regret were in it and were sacred. It has this throwing backward on itself So that the fall of most of it is always Raising a little, sending up a little. 98  Embodiment and Animality

Our life runs down in sending up the clock. The brook runs down in sending up our life. The sun runs down in sending up the brook. And there is something sending up the sun. It is this backward motion toward the source, Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in, The tribute of the current to the source. It is from this in nature we are from. It is most us. . . .52

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 Playing in the Planetary Field  99

he embeds near the beginning of the poem suggests that its journey ends with death “‘on the rocks.’” Despite this, Duncan’s poem promises possibility and renewal, rather than the world-weary inevitability of decline. While “West-Running Brook” presents a tragic vision in which regret is sacred, “Poetry, A Natural Thing” hopes that “the youngest world might spring” from strife against the current. Duncan’s poem also does not take itself as seriously as Frost’s. Calling the salmon “one picture apt for the mind,” he concludes with a different metaphor: A second: a moose painted by Stubbs, where last year’s extravagant antlers lie on the ground. The forlorn moosey-faced poem wears new antler-buds, the same, “a little heavy, a little contrived”, his only beauty to be all moose.54

The line in quotes is from a rejection letter that John Crowe Ransom wrote to Duncan.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 extravagant 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 “contrived” 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 100  Embodiment and Animality

grow on the moose’s head will be the same as last year’s, the “moosey-faced poem” will again grow into its own contrived, heavy lines. If the poem or the impulse to poetry is natural, then it has its own imperatives—you can’t tell a moose to grow antlers that look less constructed! But this moose is also a metaphor for the mind: Duncan puns on the fact that antlers grow from the moose’s head, suggesting that the mind continuously generates and sheds contrived contraptions. The idea of poetry as “a natural thing” is such a contraption, one that grows up again just when you think you have shed it. Duncan thus takes Ransom to task for using nature rhetorically to enforce poetic conventions. While Ransom implies that poems should appear natural, Duncan insists that poems are natural—and thus that the “only beauty” of the “moosey-faced poem” is “to be / all moose.” If the poem’s impulse really is a natural one, if the poem’s order indeed emerges like other cosmic orders, then it must be followed as it battles the falls or sheds the extravagant lines it has grown. In invoking nature to criticize poetry that deviates from convention, Ransom belies the naturalness that subtends his poetic values. At the same time, Duncan reappropriates the New Critical organic naturalness of poetry for ecopoetic purposes: just as the moose’s “only beauty” is “to be / all moose,” so the poem can participate in planetary orders only by being itself. For Duncan, the poet participates in planetary orders precisely through the imaginative playfulness of the “as if ” world. As his response to Olson’s projectivist field shows, Duncan offers contemporary ecopoets a way to reimagine science, myth, and Romantic traditions as guides to our participation in systemically understood earthly orders. Through his reading of H.D., he transforms queer vulnerability into a “vital weakness” that fosters the emergence of lively and poetic disorders. In response to Frost and Ransom, his “Poetry, A Natural Thing” takes nature back from conventionality and instead allies it with emergent forms whose liberating extravagance guards against fatalism. Duncan’s ecopoetic myth of origins, articulated in “Towards an Open Universe,” also counteracts the foreclosure of possibilities that entropic fatalism and environmental apocalypticism entail. Pointing beyond prophecies of doom to all that we do not know, reminding us that both scientific knowledge and myth give access to a world that is wider than our knowledge and that far exceeds our alleged mastery, Duncan’s ecopoetics encircles apocalyptic thinking in a universal reality that crucially makes change in this present world more possible. Playing in the Planetary Field  101

5 • “Beyond the Vomiting Dark” Toward a Black Hydropoetics Joshua Bennett

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 slavery—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 ecology—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 Toward a Black Hydropoetics  103

long historical reach of antiblackness as a dominant structure of feeling, as well as the ongoing presence of black persistence and black fugitive possibility. In the first section of the essay, concerned with Hayden’s “Middle Passage,” I investigate a set of scenes in which sharks are invoked as a means through which to illuminate the particular, peculiar horrors of everyday life aboard a slave ship. In the universe that Hayden fashions, sharks function as a central component of a broader network of living and nonliving actors—the boat crew, the chains, the slave ship itself—which make up what we might think of as an entire ecosystem manufactured and maintained in the name of extracting black labor. Sharks represent the constant threat of imminent death for the enslaved during their time at sea. Yet and still, the enslaved characters in “Middle Passage” are able to leverage the threat of being killed by sharks—effectively reimagining a site of great peril as a means of escape—in order to rebel against the slavers and ultimately undermine the terms of their captivity. Thus, by way of examining scholarship concerned with the experiences of enslaved persons forced to live through and make a kind of life in spite of the gratuitous violence endemic to living aboard a slave ship, I argue that the scenes where sharks appear in “Middle Passage” provide us with useful instruments for theorizing black resistance on the open sea. The second section of the essay is an extended meditation on Tolson’s poem “The Sea-Turtle and the Shark.” I am primarily interested in examining the central narrative thread of the poem, wherein a sea turtle is consumed by a shark and subsequently burrows through its stomach to freedom. This operates, I argue, as a metonym for the myriad ways that black persons are made to navigate the interlocking systems of domination that give shape and form to white civil society broadly construed and to the U.S. American nation-state in particular. In Tolson’s vision, blackness is always on the move, always pushing back in ways seen and unseen against a much broader set of operations that seek to curtail life at every turn. In the end, I argue, Tolson offers us a robust, fleshly image of black liberation through the sea turtle, one that honors the power of revolutionary violence and refuses to flatten or romanticize the sheer duration of the black freedom struggle. Finally, I will pivot in the coda by turning toward the contemporary poet Xandria Phillips’s poem “For a Burial Free of Sharks.” I argue that her poem presents a vision of black sociality that works to further complicate the visions we gather from Hayden 104  Embodiment and Animality

and Tolson as it pertains to the potential interplay between black life on the ship and the presence of the sharks in the water below. In Phillips’s hands, the slave ship becomes a space from which we might launch a critique of “the overrepresentation of Man” as the only meaningful genre of human life and, what’s more, the dominant configuration of the human body itself as always already independent and autonomous.2 “For a Burial Free of Sharks” asks us instead to embrace the swarm or the school (in the doubled sense that an aquatic register demands), over and against an individualized subject position or self. It asks that we reckon with the possibility of becoming multiple, that we might better understand how the enslaved survived the hold, what they transformed it into, and what such transformation means for how we imagine sociality as such in the present day. In sum, my goal in analyzing this constellation of texts is to elucidate a divergent approach to the work of thinking at the intersections of black studies, animality studies, and ecocriticism. I turn toward the sea in order to unsettle the sort of historical terracentrism that obscures the social and political possibilities of a wetter archive.3 In doing so, I chart a black hydropoetics that does not require solid ground in order to make its claims or sustain its movement but, rather, relishes the freedom of the open water, dodges death at every turn, and makes hazy the division between person and nonperson so that a more robust ethical lexicon for black life might rise to the air. 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 Amistad—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 Jesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy: Sails flashing to the wind like weapons, sharks following the moans the fever and the dying; horror the corposant and compass rose. Toward a Black Hydropoetics  105

Middle Passage:  voyage through death to life upon these shores. 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.

Later in the poem, we find Hayden deploying a timely allusion to Shakespeare’s The Tempest: Deep in the festering hold thy father lies of his bones New England pews are made, those are altar lights that were his eyes.5

The reader is presented with an image of the slave ship as not only a site of unrelenting 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 hyperviolent 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 Small106  Embodiment and Animality

wood’s work, as a kind of living death for every enslaved person onboard.6 In this sense, the very phrase “Middle Passage” connotes both a literal movement along the routes of the transatlantic slave trade over the course of several centuries and an intermediary category between living and dying. That is, not a space of limbo so much as the fusion of both planes into something like a deathly persistence—a mode of existing outside human boundaries and protections and thus in closer, generative proximity to nonhuman life forms, or what I have described elsewhere as low life. It is during this process, while being forced to move through the countless day-to-day violences endemic to life aboard the ship, that the enslaved Africans who serve as Hayden’s primary points of concern first learn what it will mean to live as black nonpersons, the very objects against which the dream—the utopian vision of a life worth living on the very shores he describes—will come to be oppositionally defined.7 Rather than accepting such a fate with quiet resignation, the enslaved characters in “Middle Passage” rebel from the very first, striking back against their captors in order to take the vessel as their own. As Willem Bosman writes in his 1705 New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, sharks are part and parcel of this collective resistance: “I have sometimes, not without horrour, seen the dismal Rapaciousness of these Animals; four or five of them together shoot to the bottom under the Ship to tear the dead Corps to pieces.”8 The insurgents that Hayden describes leap overboard once it is clear that there is no rebellion that can be waged and won on the decks of the ship. Marcus Rediker writes about this historical practice—that is, of enslaved insurgents deploying suicide as a means of resisting the conditions of their bondage—in his seminal study, Outlaws of the Atlantic: 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 Toward a Black Hydropoetics  107

expressed by people once they had gotten into the water. Seaman Isaac Wilson recalled a captive who jumped into the sea and “went down as if exalting that he got away.”9

Not unlike Hayden’s vision of the affective economies and exchanges that characterized 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 human 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 relentless, 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.11 108  Embodiment and Animality

This notion of an underwater refuge for black people is also reflected in the works of artists such as Sun Ra, the experimental film collective the Otolith Group, and the visual artist Ellen Gallagher.12 In all these works, the haunting presence of the Middle Passage is recalibrated toward imagining an elsewhere, however remote or deeply submerged, where black life can flourish. Conceptualizing black Atlantis is labor that unsettles the terracentrism of our political imaginations, threatens the seeming interminability of the land-borne nation-state, and demands a more dynamic approach to organizing life on earth. Gratuitous violence is alchemized in the light of the black fantastic, allowing for new practices of being together to emerge.13 When we immerse ourselves within this archive, we find both otherworldly despair and fugitive possibility: uncharted, undercommon marronage made possible by the opacity of the oceanic realm.14 In this vein, the outpouring of exuberant affect that both Hayden and Rediker describe in the moments when enslaved persons begin to sink below the surface of the sea also demands our attention. How do we make sense of such unfettered emotion on this occasion? Captives give their very suffering over to the tide and all they can do is exalt, the slavers’ power torn asunder at last by laughter. This refusal to be transmogrified into property without will or imagination, especially as reflected in the act of giving one’s flesh to the water, is a theme of critical import throughout “Middle Passage.” It is most forcefully articulated toward the end of the poem’s first section, where sharks yet again make an appearance, though in a fashion that veers somewhat from their role earlier on: 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. Toward a Black Hydropoetics  109

What port awaits us, Davy Jones’ or home? I’ve heard of slavers drifting, drifting, playthings of wind and storm and chance, their crews gone blind, the jungle hatred/crawling up on deck.15

The aforementioned sharks transition from being invoked as physical threats to human life to serving as the very embodiment of misfortune, as metaphors for the broader set of troubles that pursue the ship and its crew. And though the primary focus of the section above is a wave of ophthalmia that overtakes the boat’s inhabitants, we might also read the invocation of the sharks here as a reversal in polarity, the sharks as a source of fear and imminent danger for the white crewmen much more so than for the enslaved. This shift represents a critical turn in terms of the narrative trajectory of “Middle Passage.” The speaker’s referring to the sharks as grinning gods, for example, works to invert the myth of whiteness as “the ownership of the world forever and ever,” whiteness as immortality.16 No one here evades the grave. The “jungle hatred” described by the speaker reads almost as a plague of some higher origin, the embodiment of the rage of the enslaved, and a harbinger of the destruction to come in the poem’s second section. In these final two movements, the ship is taken over in an act of outright insurrection, and the captain and crew are slain by the insurgents formerly resigned to life in the hold. This portion of the text is meant to reflect and reimagine the most well-known historical accounts of the insurgency aboard the Amistad, and in doing so it grounds us in a historical archive of slave rebellion made legible by the invocation of the names of the rebels themselves, most notably the insurgent leader Joseph Cinquez, whom Hayden describes in the poem’s last lines as the “deathless primaveral image” of human freedom’s “timeless will,” “life that transfigures many lives.” In the poem’s concluding scene, the grinning shark gods—as well as the crew of slavers we might think of as made in their very image or as acolytes of their storied rage, their voracious hunger—are done away with in the name of an alternate eschatology, one in which the spirit of a black radicalism prevails over the unchecked cruelty of the slave system, with its endless tentacles that extend even into the social lives of animals and ultimately produce the sort of gruesome encounters between sharks 110  Embodiment and Animality

and the enslaved that we see throughout “Middle Passage.” As Hayden demonstrates, a rigorous accounting of chattel slavery and its afterlives demands that we engage nonhuman sociality, and that we recognize the work of Afrodiasporic ecopoetics—and black study more broadly—as species thinking, as ecological thought at the end of the world.17 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 modernity, 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: Strange but true is the story of the sea-turtle and the sharkthe instinctive drive of the weak to survive in the oceanic dark. Driven, riven by hunger from abyss to shoal, sometimes the shark swallows the sea-turtle whole.19

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 Toward a Black Hydropoetics  111

inside of the shark’s body into a darkness within darkness, a blackness born of the deep in which normative hierarchies are destabilized. Tolson’s imagery in this portion of the poem can also be read as a gesture toward the biblical narrative of Jonah and the giant fish. Within the context of that particular tale—which merits an abridged retelling if only for the sake of clarifying the extent of Tolson’s rather subtle riff—Jonah’s extended interment in the fish’s body is the consequence of his refusal to follow a direct command from the Almighty: a call to preach the need for repentance to the denizens of the city of Nineveh. Jonah eventually takes flight and boards a ship full of other fugitives in hopes of evading this divine commission. His plan—doomed perhaps from the very start, rooted as it was in evading the will of the sovereign in plain sight—fails spectacularly. An especially vicious squall strikes while he and his fellow crewmen are at sea, a catastrophe which he reads as a sign that he must repent and accept punishment for his attempt at rebellion. He asks that his body be cast overboard, a last-ditch plan to evade the wrath of the divine. This time, his gambit is a successful one, though not in the way he expects; the storm quiets, and everyone on the ship lives. But rather than drowning and in the process giving over his life in an act of penance, Jonah is swallowed by a giant fish, lives in its stomach for several days, and is eventually spit up on land, finally prepared to undertake the evangelical labor to which he had been called days earlier. Tolson reworks this tale toward radical ends. The rest of the poem reads as follows: The sly reptilian marine withdraws, into the shell of his undersea craft, his leathery head and the rapacious claws that can rip a rhinoceros’ hide or strip a crocodile to fare-thee well; now, inside the shark, 112  Embodiment and Animality

the sea-turtle begins the churning seesaws of his descent into pelagic hell; then...then, with ravenous jaws that can cut sheet steel scrap, the sea-turtle gnaws ...and gnaws...and gnaws his way in a way that appallshis way to freedom, beyond the vomiting dark beyond the stomach walls of the shark.20

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 Toward a Black Hydropoetics  113

than raw matter fit for consumption. From its position at the very bottom of the hierarchy, the sea turtle attacks, gains its freedom, and also, the reader is led to believe, mortally wounds that which depends upon its destruction for sustenance. The sea turtle’s work, the speaker tells us, is appalling. It is not quick or pristine. It reminds us, per Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, that fugitive practice is inherently processual, that escape is not an achievement but an activity.21 Such movement is made manifest in the form of the poem itself, primarily in the way that Tolson uses enjambment and short lines, some of which are only a word, to mimic the unceasing, deliberate movement of the sea turtle. The rigorous push toward liberation framed by “The Sea-Turtle and the Shark” is an altogether bloody affair that takes place in a space of what many would call nothingness. These are the conditions from which abolitionist instruments emerge. This is how and where one develops the meditative tenacity needed to slice the machine clean through. Envisioning resistance, for Tolson, begins with those who have been all but completely consumed by the present order, the ones detained, held in suspension, and never allowed to breathe. Rather than begin with the birds of the air or even with the various forms of animal being and becoming that can be found beneath the surface of the earth, Tolson elects to turn toward the sea that he might imagine black flight anew. He transports the hold from the surface of the ocean to its very underbelly. And there, in the absence of light or human life, he sketches a world wherein the shark, the very embodiment of an antiblack social order—and thus, it follows, precisely the sort of exploitative, exorbitantly violent figure that Rediker’s etymology gestures toward—is decimated from within, laid to waste by the least of these, the drowned and yet undead. Xandria Phillips’s “For a Burial Free of Sharks” attends as its central objects of inquiry 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 114  Embodiment and Animality

we pressed up against we heat and doings similar and reduced to sameness / saw the first of we plunging for home / landing into a shiver of them / in not looking towards the carnage saw the moon reflected onto by we water was pink / we may have known / well I did not / that a drop would not take us to the bottom and buried / we had to try to die better / without soil to pollinate pores no soul restoration / some of we / we risked death to put dead in the ground23

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 personhood 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 Toward a Black Hydropoetics  115

of death itself. The funeral was an act of accounting, of reckoning, and therefore one among the multitude of acts that made up the political history of Atlantic slavery. This was politics conceived not as a conventional battle between partisans, but as a struggle to define a social being that connected the past and present.26

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 indeterminacy 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 irreparable 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 116  Embodiment and Animality

impends / we all been too physical / our flesh is the closest ground in sight / putting the mind on a high shelf is a burial without sharks / I double where my joints can and bury self in self 29

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.

Toward a Black Hydropoetics  117

6 • Writing with the Salamander An Ecopoetic Community Performance Project Petra Kuppers

Much of ecopoetics’ emerging frame focuses on language interventions in ecological disaster. This essay offers a different setup. It centers on disabled people in an open engagement with their environment, in immersion, and in contact. Many contemporary perspectives on disability’s presence in our world relate human diversity to ecological change, to war, to the rupture of disaster and the different temporality of slow violence.1 Some public discourses around autism categories, for instance, speak about metal poisoning; asthma becomes linked to changes in public health, sterility, and exposure; attention differences are rhetorically clasped to new communication practices, chemical sensitivities to overexposure to polluted environments, metabolic changes like diabetes to postcolonial food production.2 Industrial aggressions and war actions like those at Bhopal, Fukushima, Hiroshima, and Chernobyl and the chemical exposures of the Vietnam and Iraqi wars have created new ways of being in the world, for both newborns and people who lived or fought in these regions. Radiation and land mines create no-go areas. In the disaster narratives around these sites, people with mental and bodily differ-

ences usually feature as victims, rarely as survivors or as people learning to live in new ways.3 In this essay, disabled people and their allies reclaim and remediate our shared spaces in a field of interdependency. We live engaged with our world, whatever our world is, and we find an equilibrium with our sensoriums, pain thresholds, cognitive differences, and mobility challenges. We live with change. In the project at the heart of this essay, disabled artists and their allies go underwater together in the name of art and press their boundaries. While doing so, we experience edge spaces: humans in nonhuman environments connecting to the biochemical milieu we are part of, realigning words like “wildness” or “animal” as we dive into places that stress our hormonal system and get our adrenaline going. Arguments run through this essay in complex and intersected ways. As its writer, editor, and montage artist, I do not pull up all the strands presented but leave trailing threads for readers to pick up and run with. Academic writing means writing in a field, engaging in citational practice, and weaving. Community work goes against some of the core assumptions of traditional academia, like individual authority, distancing independence, and concepts of mastering. Yet community writing can also fulfill many of academic writing’s functions, as interferences and connections can come to the fore in unusual ways. I do not wish to make my collaborators and community participants into case studies, dissecting their work. Disabled people are too often the object of stares, diagnostic gazes, and analyses. By offering a section of open writing as a methodological intervention into conventional academic discourse, we try to deflect those gazes and to channel their energy into other paths. With this particular method, this essay leans into cultural studies methodologies and away from a literary studies mode that privileges close analysis as its main mode of generating knowledge. As a reader of this work, you are invited to feel your own shifts in perspective. Given this awareness of traditional power relations around disability, this essay works in an open pool of power and its deployment, its invisible pulls and effects, trying to think of humans not as pristine biologic entities but as creatures spun into nets of historic injustice and its ongoing effects. In The Transmission of Affect, feminist philosopher Teresa Brennan offers alternatives to an insistence on individual sovereignty, a view of tightly closed borders and pristine spaces of Writing with the Salamander  119

self-containment. Affect transmits and plays on the openings of bodies. We live among hormone whiffs, touch and substance alignments between sweat glands and nasal passages, the spray of words layering like a veil on someone else’s skin. “We are not self-contained in our energies,” Brennan writes.4 Environmentalist Paul Shepard, positing ecology as a way of understanding relationality, wrote in 1969 that the epidermis of the skin is “ecologically like a pond surface or a forest soil, not a shell so much as a delicate interpenetration.”5 Arguments that stress transmission over boundaries, interpenetration over shells, offer an intervention into how we conceive of individuals and how we are affected by others, by the environment, by nonclosed systems. Words conglomerate within people; they fill us up and color our perception. Words shape and are shaped by the emotional valence with which people make sense of the world. Hence, words are not superseded by hormonal stuff, and the bio contact is not more real than the cultural stuff. Words and hormones, imagination and physiology, work in tandem. They make us permeable. In this essay, I dive downward into the abyss of my bodily envelope’s outer reaches. Water rushes in and makes experiential the space between us. Water rushes in and cuts off the air that so invisibly sustains you and me. Water rushes in, gravities shift, and eddies stroke my limbs. I am intrigued by the way we can align biologic and linguistic influences, narrative lines, and sentence structures. This playful engagement drives our ecopoetic inquiry, too, on the edges of science and art. We are not using artistic methods to elucidate and make experiential scientific data. We offer alternative ways of understanding relationality. Ecopoetics: real effects, in real time, in real alignment between living entities. Ecopoetics: drawing upon the web of sustaining effects that shape how we think of being individual, being social, being connected, being responsible. We are conglomerations with islands of stability, self-aware bounded things who are receiving what there is to be received from a particular angle, a particular web or sieve. To me, this poetics of sedimented instabilities, slightly shifted and rearranged through contact, is an ecopoetic framework. I write in an engagement with the poetics of myth and our own postcolonial terraforming, aware of the histories and presents of settler-native engagements. In the Eco-Language Reader, Brenda Iijima asks, “How can poetry engage with a global ecosystem under duress? . . . In what ways do vectors of geography, race, gender, 120  Embodiment and Animality

class and culture intersect with the development of individual or collective ecopoetic projects?”6 The Olimpias disability culture collective responds: by going swimming. The Salamander Project: Disability Culture In May 2013, a small group of disabled artists in the San Francisco Bay Area began going swimming together as an art project. Initially, Neil Marcus, a spastic performance artist and poet, needed to exercise more, to loosen his stiffening limbs, and he knew that the neoliberal dictates of repetitive docile exercise as self-improvement just did not work for him. What did work for him, though, was performing for a camera, to an audience. Working out what needed to be done, Neil bought a small underwater camera and invited his collaborators to come with him and take photos of him underwater. At the time, I was his main collaborator, and I led the Olimpias, a disability culture artists collective. Soon after starting, we worked out that this project had a lot of juice and created a meaningful experience for many people. So we created a conceptual frame that included but went beyond self-care and called the project Salamander, as many of us had strong mythical associations with artful water play and with the myth valency of creatures like salamanders.7 The salamander is a real-life animal, of course, and in our real and local life it works in ecological frameworks as a marker: the presence or absence of salamanders can help mark the toxic load of environments.8 But the salamander is also a mythical creature, a border creature, one of the original alchemical animals. In alchemy, the salamander is linked to the elements; it connects water and fire and stands as a marker of transformation.9 So as our project progressed, we gathered more and more border creatures, shared childhood stories, remembered myths, and through this garnered new myths, new stories to help us focus on what is going on around and within us. As disabled people, many of us are cut off from the productive mechanisms of work and use value. We are ecosystems under duress, and the treatment of disabled people and elders often offers insights into a particular human ecology, its organizational structures and values. Neoliberal policies seem intent on erasing human diversity, as more and more people experience the snipping away of the welfare safety Writing with the Salamander  121

net. In California, with In-Home Supportive Services and other programs under constant pressure to let people slip through the cracks, many of us find ourselves under assault, under pressure to conform to narrow prescriptions of what being human means. Floating together in the waters, we had many conversations about this. The shift in gravity allowed for an opening to talk about pressures and sorrows. Literary critic Lynn Keller sums up how many see the history of nature writing as a genre. The critique is a bit stinging. There are many examples of nature writing that shift outside these boundaries but, even so, this description resonated with many of us paddling in the pool. Keller writes: 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 appropriately 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 sustainability 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

The Salamander project offers a perspective on how this interdependent, complex, multigenre poetic work may operate on the ground or, rather, in flotation among many different bodyminds. 122  Embodiment and Animality

I want to sharpen the discussion, too, for I also believe that an emphasis on diversity requires actual contact, collaboration, and outreach; it should be orchestrated not only at the level of editorial policy in the assemblage of materials but also at the level of the street, of bringing people not usually in contact with one another into consciousness of the contact that we always already bear. This is pervasive contact at the level of sedimented affect: how we understand ourselves to be bounded as well as imaginative writing’s and art’s ways of undoing and loosening those boundaries. Out there, in public, disability is preferably unseen, politely ignored, a head turner (away). Given the near-instinctive (adult) pull away from disabled people, the politics of Salamander are homeopathic and inoculatory, offering what might be painful so that the pain might lessen over time. Our project needs to be public, because the public finds disability abhorrent and painful to see. So we insert ourselves, if we can, as much as we can, with a difference, modeling our own grace and hope, our careful and loving play with each other. In public water sports, bounds are visible, experiential, and under duress, as many writers have noted (including, of course, Walt Whitman, who hangs out with the bathers). Literary theorist and poet Michael Davidson begins his study Concerto for the Left Hand in his public pool. He comments on the ungainly yet beautiful addenda and movement patterns on display in the pool: there are people of different ages with different health statuses and different relations to whether or not they officially identify themselves with the disability rights movement. These people swim together, lurching about with flippers, goggles, and sun hats.12 In the Salamander project, we make the everyday diversity of the pool into a political field. We acknowledge exclusions and histories, including the racial histories of swimming pools, segregation, and uneven access to swimming opportunities. We consciously insert disability into the pool’s framework. Suddenly, we see a whole bunch of disabled people and their allies in the water, some with extraordinary bodies, some moving in unusual ways, some white, some of color, some marked by various forms of transition. Our being in this world, not just incidentally but en masse, inserts a visibility of biodiversity. We are not just the outcome of catastrophe, the embodiment of environmental assaults, ciphers of victimhood. We are here and we play, aligning ourselves with our worlds. Writing with the Salamander  123

At the pool, lifeguards tend to tense for a while as we collect our wheelchairs and walkers (and strollers for children) or get very stiffly into the pool, an effect that might be partly due to psych meds, autistic embodiment, pain, or other neurodiversity effects. Assuring people that we are safe, both to ourselves and to them, is part of the performance display of Salamander. Here be dragons. Disability theorist Tobin Siebers offers a framework that allows us to rethink these connections between aesthetics and the environment. He writes: 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

So if disability is preferably unseen because it reminds people of projected and repressed pain, let’s offer an alternative: let’s play, joy, splash, push the boundary a bit, and press the horror button, too, in the liminal scary place of the chlorine soup and its hints of contagion. Our engagement with public aesthetics happens in public poetics: out there, in the shared social world. I conceive of ecopoetic work as going beyond the page, of blowing up from the two-dimensional capture of data on white paper, toward engaging audiences in an embodied poetics. If the point is to change the world, do we not need to place our ecopoetic adventures in public view? If interdependency and collaboration are at stake, do we not need to invite others, not yet part of our project, to witness and to shift standpoints incrementally? What is activism for aesthetic politics, and how can it find audiences? Critic Jonathan Skinner points to this impetus to go beyond the page in his expanded sense of ecopoetics: “Landscape artists who write . . . make a compelling case for the extension of writing by other means—as if their landscapes, gardens, and earth works were poems without books, written in the elements and in living matter, merely extended or refracted onto the page of the essay.”14 In the Salamander, we are writing essays with water, without heavy lifting and earth shifting. This is a collaborative poetics of invitation, one that acknowledges with Siebers that there 124  Embodiment and Animality

is always already an aesthetic in space, one that can be tweaked, made conscious, through a gentle and seductive play with difference.15 Our Salamander work has many different invitations, opening outward, inviting engagement. Taking a photo in the pool is such a framing device, a poetic gesture that frames a moment as something set apart from the flow of diving underwater. Many Salamander photos come about when strangers are drawn into our circle. They see the camera, see what we are up to, find out what we are doing, and want to be part of it. Chatting about technologies of underwater cameras can be an opening into poetic play. Many give permission for us to take their photos. And there they are in the photos, dripping wet, skin to skin with Olimpias people, all laughing, all blowing out air, bubbles mixing, all breathless together in the euphoria that comes with depleted oxygen. As the Salamander project continues, we go well beyond cameras in pools. We hover and swim and horseplay and dive in rivers, oceans, and lakes. In all these places, “disability” is an issue, a highly visible unusual presence, not one structured into the aesthetics of the human-nature interface. Our natures are beyond the imagination of nature. Queer crip feminist Alison Kafer pulls the rug out from under any theorizing that somehow sees “natural spaces” as “natural” and disabled people as “naturally” outside of them. Here she describes how the human activity of camping mirrors dominant social arrangements: Disability studies could benefit from the work of environmental scholars and theorists who describe how “social arrangements” have been mapped onto “natural environments.” 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 campsite 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

In the Salamander project, we foreground alternative erotics, social arrangements, and disability culture ways of doing things. The way that “access” has been inscribed into “nature spaces” has specific assumptions about who is doing what in what way. In one pool, lifeguards were troubled because we were not adhering to the Writing with the Salamander  125

lane swimming that was the “normal” mode of working in that particular water. We pointed out that most of us just can’t swim a whole lane, only bits of one, and that we were careful not to inconvenience linear swimmers. But our nodular conglomeration at the edges was just too aesthetically disruptive, and we were (not unkindly) asked to leave. On the plus side, going into nature does not necessarily mean trekking for miles out into a place where no other humans are (and where a sprained ankle would mean a helicopter rescue). Our “naturalness” might be five feet off the path, helping each other over an uncut curb to touch a tree and sing to it. Others, bystanders who also can’t do the whole trekking thing, can observe us from the picnic areas and join us in our near-edge spaces. Alison Kafer uses a different one of our Olimpias projects to point to our emphasis on nearness rather than distance. She picks up on some core themes of Olimpias’s explorations and sharpens the lens: the joys of academic interdependence. For example: Cripping this terrain, then, entails a more collaborative approach to nature. Kuppers depicts human-nonhuman nature interactions not in terms of solo ascents or individual 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 ourselves 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.17 126  Embodiment and Animality

Olimpias participants change over time, and while some of the people in our loose collective have been with us for more than a decade, others come in for just one project. Thus, our aesthetic politics changes, and the temperature of our writings changes. The Salamander project, while retaining many traces of the embodied writing Kafer comments on, offers a slightly different lens, with the caress and the awareness of boundaries and resistance in balance with one another. The Salamander Project: Open Pool Writings In this section, I share a range of Salamander writings, all emerging out of freewrites and ekphrastic work on the photos of our project. Some people wrote after swimming with us, some wrote in response to the images we post in the world pool of Facebook. Ekphrasis is central to our disability culture politics: acknowledging different sensory experiences in a poetics of translation across forms is a cultural convention providing access for blind and visually impaired people, people with different cognitive processes, and others. When we, in our Olimpias workshops, engage in freewrites about an image or an experience and share the diversity of responses, we can clearly understand that there are many different ways of being in the world, responding to stimuli, engaging with thought. The writings below were shared on the Salamander listserv or on Facebook. Many of the themes developed in the first part of this essay return in these writings, unfolded and deepened. In different forms, you will find water and flesh as connective media, thoughts on the pain of disability and the violence it engenders in public, meditations on inclusion and exclusion, the mythic status of disability and its lean into stories, public performances as politics, connection and wildness, and ways of conceiving of ourselves and our relation to the world differently. Presenting these themes in this way, through an assemblage of voices, is an enactment of biodiversity: many styles and choices, different distances to and within language frames. There are many ways to sing and shroud how disabled bodyminds engage in our worlds. See what lines, images, or stories resonate for you. Writing with the Salamander  127

The author swimming with members of A Different Light Theatre Company, Christchurch, New Zealand.

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

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Squint into this, I would have said to myself, knowing the key ingredients and their venom. A public swimming pool. A camera. This body. I don’t need to spell it out. Prose says it’s all there, always fizzing in the marrow. The enjambment between us proves everything blue, all water. This is a series of dances we invent as we go, each the length of a full breath. One body passes over me, another winds around my torso, sinuous, amphibious, tender, muscular, substantial. Deep animal play, human mind turned against itself and for the new human, submerged in the way we move together fluidly, or bump against bone with apologies and laughter, then dive down again into the depths where thresholds blur and the future opens like lungs . . . Clouds move in as I climb out and become singular again, rubbing the towel against my body, but leaving a few drops behind. I know two things— it’s too cold to stay here all day and the world is thirsty for water. —A n d y J a c k s o n , poet, Australia Writing with the Salamander  129

With Melissa Thomson as part of a group Salamander performance at the Association for Theatre Research, Dallas, Texas. 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 chlorine 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. 130  Embodiment and Animality

I am writing this a day after I was spat on, in public, by a drunken woman on a public bus. She was upset before we entered the bus. As the bus waited around for the bus driver to strap us in, to “secure” us according to his regulations, she got more and more enraged, mumbled “bitch” at me, and paced in agitation. When she left the bus, she spat at me, and her spit on my skin and hair smelled of booze. I am a half-time city dweller, full-time public transport user, and though used to abuse and bus drama, the intensity of hate pierced my composure. “Bitch”: I am a large woman, articulate, owning my space. I signal complexly: my skin color, carriage, and German Welsh accent speak of privilege, my wheelchair (strapped in place, unable to move, when someone spits on me) makes me vulnerable and easy prey. My femininity is hidden for many by the bulk of my person—in public, many people call me “sir”: classed and gendered in complex ways, size hides my pendulous breasts. In the water, I am a salamander: I am mobile in ways I cannot be out of the water. Nothing straps me down, and I have the privilege of movement, sidewinder, undulating, rolling in the pleasure of my round strong limbs. In the water, pressure deforms. But even though this is a place of safety for my aching limbs, this is not a place free of the constraints of normativity: race, class, gender, and disability very much inform who has access to my place of freedom. Many people we have swum with so far in Salamander haven’t been in pools for a long time—this is an opening, a tentative step, often hard-won, and we shall understand it to be such. To see ourselves in the pool is a political action in its own right. So we shall swim together this summer, trying to be attentive to who is not in the circle with us, not able to float, deliciously, tenderly regarded. —P e t r a K u p p e r s 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. Writing with the Salamander  131

Neil Marcus and Chia-Yi Seetoo exploring a new medium for their dance.

the fourth wall, to me is like . . . as I am . . . in water another element is the audience. in the pool it is the camera. I know this lens. I can work with it. it is capturing new images. I am egged on. I know what I have to ‘say’ is important. ‘ACTOR’ is such a charged word. I guess it means being seen and knowing how to relate to oneself onstage in front of an audience. STAGES are magic places. —N e i l M a r c u s , artist, Bay Area Did i see you flinch as i danced through the water? The clear blue body embracing every crevice of my skin from the bridge of my nose to the folds of my elbows i am touched, like i have never been touched before. My lover was never like that. As i move my body with the water it’s like a dance routine, those graceful leaves of fire and gold they don’t stand a chance, not even on windy nights. My bones no longer tremble 132  Embodiment and Animality

like they always do, the veins in my arms no longer battle like soldiers, at war. I am not afraid of myself anymore. The Sun is gentle with me. It caresses me through the silence the way mothers caress their sleeping babies on hospital beds, i am illuminated and rebirthed as the air that keeps me afloat escapes my lungs as fast as you turn away. I do not listen to dogs who parade their dirty bones, so do not tell me that i can’t do this. The distance between the surface of the water and the tip of my fingers spreads as I let my body sink into peace. Dark locks of hair liberating upwards, denying the existence of gravity. I am the astronaut, yearning for soft landing, i am the ripples, moving my surrounding, I am water, fluid and enchanting. Finally. I am at the bottom, and my heart beats, slow. Here in the dark where light cannot reach me, and noise cannot come for me, i become my own. The water guards me from the poisons of the norm, I am free. Let me stay here forever. Let me breathe. Let me breathe. —N o r ’ A i n M u h a m a d N o r , student in earth and environmental sciences, University of Michigan 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 Writing with the Salamander  133

Jasmine Pawlicki, Anishinaabe, in a Michigan Salamander.

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 water, 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 134  Embodiment and Animality

Floating with designer Elwyn Murray off the white sands of Jervis Bay, New South Wales, Australia.

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. Writing with the Salamander  135

I dream these in the same night. The family Salamandridae surround. They have something to do with writing in the near-amphibious rain. —D e n i s e L e t o , poet, Bay Area I am terrified by water . . . But I wasn’t once. As a child I loved the water, I loved swimming with my father, I loved the floating and the use of my legs which during the day were not used because they were tucked into my wheelchair. In 1989, surgeons cut open my back and put in a Harrington rod . . . Connected it to my spine. The rod took away my love for the water . . . Simply made me sink. I haven’t been in the water for swimming reasons in over two decades. But the smiles, the bubbles, the movement that I see here in the Salamander images . . . They call to that child who used to love swimming. They awaken a sort of mystery that I have not felt in many years . . . Can I find some sort of rhythm in the water again? Can I pursue movement in a new way? —C h r i s S m i t, director, DisArt, Grand Rapids I cast my eyes around and, seeing no one I knew, slipped in. then i saw them. Neil eased into the pool. Petra said he’d have limited time in the water, as he’d get cold at some point. She cradled his head against her neck, fond. we swam and talked, under and over each other, took turns snapping group photos, surreptitious like children in a forbidden club. i somersaulted forward and backward, and at one point neil threw himself against me, his arms flew around my shoulders, they were muscular and firm, and his head covered with thatchy gray curls rough like weeds, and he laughed and i laughed. . . . denise and i exchanged gazes, questions. we were otters, diving and twirling below the surface, bodies agile and lithe. the familiar unfamiliarity of each person new to another, her specific features, nature, how her body and brain respond. how she is and is not like another person. how i am and am not like another. how she and i have fish skin, seaweed hair, bright eyes, limbs, porpoise lungs. It had been glorious. The next day I woke and my shoulders were hard and strong. They were happy I had let them swim again. I had to think. Do I want to swim once or 136  Embodiment and Animality

Floating in a pool with Neve Be, filmmaker, performance artist, and disability activist, Bay Area.

twice a week there and take a powerful, immunosuppressive, blood-vessel-damaging drug afterward? No. Do I want to search for the perfect goggles that, hypothetically, vacuum-suck out every detergent- and bleach-infused drop of pool water? Not if they crush my skull like a vise, as most goggles I’ve found do. Was this experiment valuable? Yes. Who is “more disabled”? Someone who speaks slowly? Someone who needs a wheelchair to locomote most of the time? Someone who needs assistance feeding himself all the time? Or someone who needs to eschew public swimming pools, long plane flights, “smoke-free” clubs and bars and dance halls and concerts where tobacco smoke washes in from the addicts jonesing just outside the door, sleeping overnight with a boyfriend who lives with beloved cats, eating in most restaurants, eating most foods available in American stores. Someone who must bring her own food and her own bedding in order to travel. Someone who needs to live in a house with a special type of heating system, a certain kind of stove, a certain kind of many other things. Someone who cannot drive, visit, make love with many people because of things they do that they aren’t even aware of. That it is taboo to talk about. That involves a notion Writing with the Salamander  137

of safety that is harder to discuss than it is to negotiate the official concept of “safe” sex. Who is “more disabled” is not. Is not a hierarchy. “More” is not. Hierarchy dissolves. Water dissolved: difference, sexuality and sensuality, adult and child, talk and laughter and breath.  —S u s a n N o r d m a r k, writer, Bay Area Ser Salamandra, ese es la cuestión. En esta vida hay que poder transformarse, mental y corporalmente. Bajo el agua todo se transforma. En el agua el cuerpo recibe impulsos de vida, otra mobilidad, otra manera de danzar la vida. —X a v i e r D u a c a s t i l l a S o l e r, disability activist, Barcelona Being Salamander, that is the question. In this life you have to be able to transform, mental and bodily. Underwater everything changes. In water the body receives life impulses, another mobility, another way of life dancing. —translated by X a v i e r D u a c a s t i l l a S o l e r

Conclusion: Why Writing? When I think of Olimpias’s moments of grace, here is what comes to me: small time bubbles, crip time, blossoming out of time’s usual flow. These grace notes are rarely in performance but are moments like this, suspended in the memory amber of writing. A fellow Salamander swimmer, long-time Olimpias participant, meets me in another niche of the Bay Area’s disability culture ecology, a dance jam. I find myself moving with Katherine Mancuso, and we embrace into contact weight sharing. I do not know about Katherine’s day, and we do not use words. But we sink onto each other’s shoulders, a long-held embrace, a fleeting kiss to each other’s neck. Slowly, we glide over skin, our arms retreating over warm flesh. We find another hold, another point of sharing weight, of counterbalance. We offer anchor points to each other: at one point, my arms are outstretched and Katherine’s hands are hanging off mine, and her body rocks in place beneath our hands, safely anchored between our palms and the ground below, teetering back and forth. 138  Embodiment and Animality

The shape we make feels like an egg in space, limbs tucked in, a rocking. A place of possibility and virtuality: emergence and transformation. There is little dynamic work here; this is not a riveting performance when watched with the judging instruments of audiencing. But it is a delicious place to be in, bones in secure contact, muscles warmly aligning, skins cool and soft against one another. From here, we can each make little starts into movements that might or might not be unfamiliar. We can also rest and prepare for what lies ahead, for the moment when we step out of this time bubble. These are the sites I wish to move from and toward, smooth space, deterritorialized zones, swimming globes to reassemble, to self-stimulate toward recognition and emergent new territorializations. Nonhuman others appear in these pages—and whether they appear as metaphors or as experience remains an open question. How does it feel to be disabled, deemed nonhuman and expendable at many different historical junctions? In the open writing, I shared my experience of being spat upon, and many experiences like this structure the lives of people whose voices, bodies, or minds are deemed other. Drawing upon the textual fields of salamanders or eggs offers new textual riches to a human biodiversity that has been painted into a medical corner. The scope of our politics is shaped by the social field that we have access to, and the lift over the uncut curb can be a step into unknown territory. In nature writing, “nature” has so often stood for “nonhuman,” an other to be penetrated, conquered, awed by, or saved. In this ecopoetics project, the methods of textual creation and critical reflection focus on connectivity and interdependence, on multiple voices in vibrational touch with one another. “We are not self-contained in our energies”: we open up in a field of connection, into a watery realm in which any wave we make can be more consciously felt by others. The waters of pool, lake, river, or sea help us understand what interdependence and connectivity can mean and how we affect and are affected by each other and the world. Who can swim in chlorinated water? What is the toxic load of this river? Where do plastic bags swirl in the surf ? What is safe, for whom, in what contexts? The words that emerge, like this writing, can extend the reach of our ecopoetics, local specificity and nonlocal readerly practice interweaving with each other, overwriting each other, touching in the nonspace between words and skins. Writing with the Salamander  139

To end, I wish to offer three reasons for the creative-writing emphasis of this performance-visual-writing project. The first reason brings me back to Lynn Keller’s perspective on the value of experimental writing in sustainability discourses and to the interdependent web that emerges when multiple genres and forms come into contact. Writing, performance, witnessing, extension: these are all moments of deterritorialization, each pointing in turn to a wider field, each clasping other sensations to itself, always in need of supplementation, in a field that remains always open. The second reason for writing also relates to sustainability and to material practices of making art. Writing can touch. The parameters of the Salamander project are easy to grasp: visit with each other, go swimming, dive under, use an underwater camera to take photos, tweak the colors a bit with Photoshop, enjoy your deformed beauty in alternative gravities, write about your experiences if you want to. There is no proprietary content here, no copyright, no secret. Go and do it. But even though the setup is easy, most won’t engage in the work: engaging physically in art practice is hard, and displaying one’s self in a culture that fears, avoids, and hates disability is even harder. The Olimpias collective provides safety in numbers and shared experiences, fortifying against a harsh and dominant world. Writing functions as an extension, a pushing forward of our politics and our diverse perspectives, sounds, voices, and stories. We can share ourselves beyond the local. And this brings me to the third reason for writing’s presence in the project. When I cannot lead a wet Salamander workshop, we do dry ones, and these contain freewriting or spontaneous audio description in response to the images that emerge from the project: really seeing others (either in visual practice or through the audio ekphrastic translations), sensing them embedded in their environment, describing them and the different waters that surround them, listening to description, witnessing the differences with which we apprehend our world, writing again. These practices allow us to vicariously experience watery suspension and the life-death membrane that we touch when we witness people deformed by water, outside, in elemental engagement. Audio description is a disability culture method of sharing art work, and in disability culture circles many people recognize that this practice of conveying images for people who have complex access to visual images has a lot of juice, a lot of creative potential. It slows down viewing, allowing us to rest 140  Embodiment and Animality

with a visual image and to see what happens with it when we take time. When we engage in audio description in the round, everybody one by one adding a line to the description of an image, we look closely at images of the world and acknowledge the differences in the room with us as well as the differences around us in the world: differences in sensory access but also differences in cognitive processing, differences in memories and stories, differences in how we all process our world. And differences over time: the effect of humans on nonhuman spaces; the growth of trees; the impact of terraforming on environments; the changing color, feel, and translucency of different waters in different seasons. Community writing, audio description, ekphrastic freewrites all engage Lynn Keller’s vision of a diverse field, in real contact, engaged in a project of hope. These particular writing processes might help us shift the cultural pain of disability toward understanding how we all, disabled or not, approach being surrounded, being supported, being in an environment and being the environment, and making sense of these sensations. Amassed writing at the site of sensation allows for shifts, for refeeling one’s own affect toward water, words, and images. We can glimpse that things might be otherwise, that our relations to other bodies and to our shared environment might not be stable. This, to me, is the basis of ecopoetic work: undoing certainty, undoing boundaries, shifting into permeability.

Writing with the Salamander  141

part three Environmental Justice

7 • Toxic Recognition Coloniality and Ecocritical Attention Matt Hooley

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 violence—with the term “looking.” Looking—and what Rob Nixon calls ecologies of looking—references our participation 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 political 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.”7 146  Environmental Justice

Looking is a politics of recognition and not just because it overstabilizes our ability to recognize environments as healthy, harmed, or harmful when we direct attention to them. I want to indicate how ecocriticism that asks us to intensify our visualization of environmental harm also inevitably extends sanctioned frameworks of what harm is and recenters the settler state and its citizens both as beings innocent of responsibility and as the primary agents of reform. The way that the perception of environmental well-being serves as an occasion to refortify settler social and political life is what I will call the politics of enclosure. And because settler colonialism has been and continues to be the greatest cause of environmental violence in (and as) U.S. history, environmental attention that obscures settler colonial responsibility reproduces violence through the ways that we perceive and organize environmental damage. The recognition of toxicity and the toxicity of recognition blur. In the first section, I consider how the ways that environmental violence is measured and measured out reinforce the colonial anxieties about communicability and vulnerability that live on in spatial and political distributions of the material and the ideological, the ordinary and the unusual, the productive and the wasteful, what’s worth sacrificing for and what’s worth sacrificing. A second aim of this essay is to argue that contemporary ecopoetics can challenge the politics of recognition as it inflects the methods and goals of ecocriticism. Building on insights made by critical race and decolonization theorists, I show how indigenous writing intervenes in the politics of recognition as a structure of toxicity and toxic politics. Specifically, I consider two collections by the Diné poet Sherwin Bitsui—Shapeshift, published in 2003, and Flood Song, published in 2009—that thwart and exceed the way American ecocriticism asks us to look at environmental health and harm. Bitsui, who was born in 1974, can be situated among a group of avant-garde native poets including Santee Frazier, Joan Kane, Orlando White, Ofelia Zepeda, Layli Long Soldier, dg nanouk okpik, and others whose work enters a disciplinary space opened by mid-twentieth-century native poets such as Simon Ortiz and Joy Harjo. This is work characterized by an unsettling kinetic imagism that uses ecology as a theater for anticolonial invention. Importantly, the intent of this essay is not to measure out a field of native ecopoetics. This would be an impossible task, given the breadth and variety of contempoColoniality and Ecocritical Attention  147

rary indigenous poetics. It would also risk deploying ecopoetics as an assimilatory framework. What I want to show in this essay is how Bitsui’s work targets fantasies of ontic and epistemic enclosure—the map, the liberal subject, the order of the law—that constitute (to trope George Lipsitz) the possessive investments of settlement.8 The language of Bitsui’s intervention is the remixing of the sensory and what’s sensible in the context of colonialism. In his work, alchemies of sight and sound are not only or primarily perceptual but activate a world that exceeds any politics satisfied with the settler self or with security of settlement. In this sense, the anticoloniality of his writing emerges from its aesthetic innovation. Bitsui’s work is performative in the sense that it stages the disarticulation of colonial power from the aesthetics of ecology and from the social ecologies we access through these aesthetics. In my second and third sections, I dramatize this aspect of his poetics by considering the ways it disassembles and reopens the idea of drought as an aesthetic and an ecological condition and as an occasion to reconceive politics beyond the terms of settlement.9 In the context of ecopoetics, Bitsui’s writing thwarts the remediation of ecological harm into totalizing epistemologies, specifically, those postures of witnessing and rearguard retreat characteristic of canonical twentieth-century nature poetry. Toxicity is an example of this—the hinge between recognized harm and a cultural politics that reinvests in the restorative and insulating power of the settler state, recoded as the public. What Lawrence Buell calls toxic discourse, for instance, is an American populist rhetoric of environmental crisis that originates with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Toxic discourse is distinguished by the imagination of shared social vulnerability (as Ulrich Beck puts it: “poverty is hierarchic, smog is democratic”), positioned toward a fantasy of collective space (for example, Lois Gibbs’s organization’s newsletter, “Everyone’s Backyard”), and characterized by an “awakening” into “a horrified realization that there is no protective environmental blanket, leaving one feeling dreadfully wronged.”10 Toxic discourse is a politics of alarm that raises the visibility of industrial polluters that threaten a vulnerable public, comprised of “ordinary citizens.”11 Toxicity in this sense is never an objective ecological condition but the rehearsal of the scene of settlement: the imposition of political or epistemic enclosure against threatening surroundings. To organize around toxicity is to assert that a 148  Environmental Justice

given community or landscape is recognizable as vulnerable. As such, it is a stance that reinvests in the organizing doxa of the settler state: the ruling schematics of property, the liberal individual as default subjectivity, and politics as self-defense. What toxic discourse does not do is show how settlement is itself the precondition of environmental harm that justifies its political expansion through its own authority to recognize what’s harmful or who’s vulnerable. In this essay, I track cycles of ecological violence rooted in the justificatory logics and structures of settler empire. In this context, Bitsui’s work is useful and exciting in its refusal to rehearse sanctioned postures of artistic intervention into the political, its disavowal of the constrained theatrics of settler ecopolitics—panic or reassurance, apocalypse or Eden, sacrifice or salvation. Instead, Bitsui’s is a ruptural, disarming, and consternating ecopoetics, an opening into social and ecological life—what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call the surround—that is more than empire, more than empire can envision.12 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 impacts are measured in eroded mesas, appropriated water resources, and devastated social economies: Coloniality and Ecocritical Attention  149

It peers over his shoulder at the dirt road dug into the mesa’s skirt, where saguaro blossoms bloom nightfall at the tip of its dark snout, and motor oil seeps through the broken white line of the teacher’s loom.15

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. Remember, every wrist of theirs acclimates to bruises.17

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 150  Environmental Justice

end of the Navajo imprisonment at Fort Sumner. But Bitsui also challenges the neatness of this enclosure by insistently exposing the possessory representational politics of history: its rising action photographed when the sign said: do not look irises planted inside here.18

History appears within constrained and contaminated Navajo domestic scenes, yet it never amounts to a single image of environmental harm. The argument of the poem, then, might be said to refuse to allow such scenes to settle into familiar explanatory political spectacles. The poem does not allow the motion of colonial environmental violence to close down into a set of discrete acts or actors. Bitsui’s opening lines, in fact, explicitly refuse the narratives of criminality so often used to distance settler citizens from settler politics: 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 between 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 . . . suggests 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 violence—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 Coloniality and Ecocritical Attention  151

localizing environmental harm to the past or to particular perpetrators not only protects colonial subjects from culpability but also preserves the insulating and toxifying barriers of race, gender, and class. The figure of the asterisk also points out that the conditions that intend violence are obscured: “no one can pick it out of the lineup.” The ways of looking that sustain such violence are always only sensible in the enclosures they execute on behalf of colonial power. Glen Coulthard writes, 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 imprisoned 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 politics of settler belonging: Strange, how they burrowed into the side of this rock. Strange . . . to think, they “belonged” and stepped through the flowering of a future apparent in the rearview mirror, visible from its orbit .................. when rocks swarmed over and blew as leaves along the knife’s edge 152  Environmental Justice

into summer, without even a harvest between their lies they ignited a fire— it reached sunlight in a matter of seconds.24

Although Bitsui suspends the poet’s or reader’s posture as witness to ecological violence, this poem moves closer to articulating the conditions of that possibility. Specifically, “Apparition” examines structures that organize settler attention around the politics of belonging, including the automobilized progressive present, “the flowering of a future apparent in the rearview mirror”; the ubiquitous globality imagined by toxic discourse, “visible from its orbit”; and the investments and sacrifices that make settlement possible, the cadenced step from “burrowed” to “belonged.” These structures of attention are not sights but ways of seeing. They are the precondition for enclosures that insulate settlers from violence or environmental toxicity and, in the same stroke, the precondition for enclosures of toxic recognition. In the last stanza of the poem, Bitsui turns to subjects recognized by empire only as the yet to be included: native bodies whose exposure to nuclear toxification is coextensive with the idea that nuclear toxification is something that can be seen or exposed: 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 Coloniality and Ecocritical Attention  153

The poem shifts away from sensing ecological violence through the spectacular toxic object toward sensing how toxicity mobilizes settler politics. Recognizable acts of environmental violence—radiation, species loss, water shortage, disease—do not illuminate subjects (“————”) whose lives or lands states need in order to grant security in the first place. Structures of enclosure (the atmosphere, a house, a clan, bodies) are legible not as sites of violence but as technologies of resource delivery whose toxification (metastasis, vaporization) eludes rhetorics of event, victim, loss. Settler looking sustains and distributes toxicity (exhausted or irradiated bodies and landscapes) through the lie of enclosure, the lie that enclosure is insulating at all. In their essay “Politics Surrounded,” Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write that although often “the settler is portrayed as surrounded by ‘natives’ . . . so that colonialism is made to look like self-defense” (which is one trajectory of the lie of enclosure), the sense of “a surrounded fort is not false.” 26 They continue, “the false image is what emerges when a critique of militarised life is predicated on the forgetting of the life that surrounds it. The fort really was surrounded, is besieged by what still surrounds it, the common beyond and beneath—before and before—enclosure.”27 Toxic recognition is the lie that enclosure is the only politics possible—what Moten and Harney call “the false image of enclosure,” the politics whose motion is “claiming to defend what it has not enclosed, enclosing what it cannot defend but only endanger.”28 The last poem in Shapeshift, “Chrysalis,” is an exit into a native surround that corrodes insulating colonial structures: “Antelope are gnawing into the walls of the city. / And those Indians are braiding yucca roots into the skin of their scalps again.”29 The poem is organized around images of and exits from enclosures—at different points in the poem figured as “ash,” “graves,” “cities,” a “policeman,” a “dictionary,” “a fluorescent room,” “fences and crosses and houses,” and a “linguist.” Its argument is not a denial but, at the threshold of enclosure (“where our hair breaks into ash when washed”), a rejection (“a place of birth”). Lyn Hejinian, in “The Rejection of Closure,” points out that in the force of rejecting constrained or monolithic meaning, “words provide for a collaboration and a desertion.”30 For Bitsui, the unsanctioned desertion from the terms of toxic recognition is also the precondition for collaboration beyond the reach of the state. For instance, 154  Environmental Justice

against the genocidal silencing of a boarding school, he traces the irrepressible and unmeasurable resounding of indigenous thought: Bread dipped in gunpowder is to be fed to the first graders in that moment when their hair is cut and a ruler is snapped, and their whispers metamorphose into a new chrysalis of thought. A new wing emerging from the lips of these Indians, who are no longer passing thoughts in the paragraphs of an oil-soaked dictionary but hooves carved into talons, hilltops from which light is transformed into the laughter of crickets.31

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 casing 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: Rattles erupt on the north horizon. The harvester unties her shoelaces. .............................. “It wasn’t like this before,” I tell myself.32

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 Coloniality and Ecocritical Attention  155

that the “space-time . . . of late capitalism” is distinguished by the reproduction and the reproductivity of resource limits: I take for granted that the periodic re-creation of the capitalist world is always and necessarily 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 enclosure, 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 section, 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 156  Environmental Justice

simple spatial coordinates. In what follows I consider drought—a phenomenon produced across colonial infrastructures whose costs are inequitably distributed to minority communities. Drought occurs because of political enclosures determined by ecological value, by what is recognizable as fecund or wasted, irrigable or expendable. As such, drought is a language and a justification for expanding the appropriative capacity of the colonial state. To make this argument, I will read between the complicated history of the colonial visualization of drought on Dinétah and Bitsui’s second collection, Flood Song. Bitsui’s collection does not narrate drought or its effects in a straightforward way, nor is it politically prescriptive. It is a sequence organized by a kinesis of water, moving from the volume’s cover—a painting by Bitsui titled Drought—through its opening poem: tó, the Diné word for “water,” repeated seven times in a vertical line, a choice that is less visual than aural in its effect of producing the sound of slowly dripping water. As the second poem in the collection indicates, Bitsui’s volume might be said to intervene in the ecopolitics of drought by disturbing the coordinates of colonial attention. Against the visually imperializing, revelatory logic of apocalypse—etymologically an uncovering of an ecologically damaged future—he begins: I bite my eyes shut between these songs. They are the sounds of blackened insect husks folded over elk teeth in a tin can, they are gull wings fattening on cold air flapping in a paper sack on the chlorine-stained floor. ..................................................... They speak a double helix, zigzag a tree trunk, bark the tips of its leaves with cracked amber— they plant whispers where shouts incinerate into hisses.36

In these lines, the visual commerce that organizes conventional apprehensions of drought (stillness, emptiness, waste) is interrupted, bitten shut. Instead, the Coloniality and Ecocritical Attention  157

Between Holbrook and Winslow Arizona, photograph by Milton S. Snow, 1938.

poem activates around the rattles and rustles of lives unsubdued—an incipient and uncoordinated stirring, not a promise but a provocation of living. After Dinétah became a site of U.S. settler occupation in the mid-nineteenth century, drought served to make visible a catastrophic water shortage and to justify intensified colonial expropriation of native human and ecological resources. For example, in 1938 the Bureau of Indian Affairs organized an expedition across the Navajo reservation to survey pastureland. A year later, it published a text that sets photographs taken by the team (during an unusually dry year) against narrative descriptions written in 1849 by another U.S. military official, Lieutenant Edward Beale, of roughly the same twenty-five sites. The text’s juxtaposition of a spectacle of aridity and emptiness against Beale’s account—“The soil over which we have passed this evening, is excellent; the grass fully attests that fact”—hardly needs the BIA’s moralizing caption: “81 years later. . . . A graveyard of the range is this hummock-spotted scene. Thousands of cattle once concentrated in this bottom land where there was an abundance of good grass and water.”37 The effect of such depictions of landscapes in crisis was to secure a burgeoning infrastructure of expropriated water management, including the damming of the Colorado River in 1935, the authorization of coal and uranium mines that ran on Diné water, and the evisceration of Diné agricultural economies, including livestock reduction, a policy that destroyed (largely without compensation) half of all Diné livestock. Will Wilson, a contemporary Diné artist, writing about the same report, challenges the BIA’s depiction of drought: 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 Coloniality and Ecocritical Attention  159

Drought is a camera trick: an imaging of a resource limit that actually functions as a membrane through which economic vulnerability is exchanged for resource control. Behind the BIA’s illustration of ecological disaster lives what Anne McClintock calls imperial paranoia—not a psychic condition but “an inherent contradiction with respect to power: a double-sided phantasm that oscillates precariously between deliriums of grandeur and nightmares of perpetual threat, a deep and dangerous doubleness with respect to power that is held in unstable tension . . . [and] can produce pyrotechnic displays of violence.”39 The double-sidedness of imperial paranoia aligns with the politics of eco-apocalypse, whose revelatory force or “un-veiling,” as Jacques Derrida puts it, is also a “technology of delivery,” a mode of “transmission.”40 In the case of settler colonial drought, this transmission, this toxic communication, is both a structure of political discourse and the condition for material access to resources. It is a “hinge phenomenon,” in McClintock’s words, “articulated between the ordinary person and society” and the political precondition for material infrastructures of extraction, like the Black Mesa coal slurry pipeline that once carried Navajo water and coal 273 miles from the Navajo reservation to the Mohave Generating Station, south of Las Vegas.41 The aesthetics of drought—at once a revealing and, as McClintock points out, a concealing or camouflage—is the justificatory scene of an irrigable colonial politics of relief that depends on the delivery of state intervention under manufactured conditions of totalizing ecological threat. Today, the Navajo Nation Council is seeking the allocation of more acre-feet of river water from U.S. states, a political arrangement predicted by the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which granted states the power to recognize or ignore tribal water claims. In almost every case, states that grant tribes water do so only if tribes relinquish underlying sovereign claims to those same resources. The political unveiling of drought, the visualization of threat and reordering of resources, therefore also gathers a political density—a capacity to hold resources and hold them back. We can think of this phenomenon by way of Cheryl Harris’s classic analysis “Whiteness as Property,” in which property is not just a way of holding capital but a racist technology of appropriation in which whiteness is both a boundary line of security against the violence of becoming property and the political promise of freedom materialized as property.42 Whiteness as property, in Harris’s essay, is the corollary to wetness as colonial power under 160  Environmental Justice

drought conditions: an inexhaustible promise of security, guaranteed by the exhaustion of minority political claims and the toxifying attention of state recognition. 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 securitygranting 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 cartographic antigravity: With a gaping mouth, I sought an image to describe the knot in my chest, the car door jammed— the land divided into two new car scents.44

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? Coloniality and Ecocritical Attention  161

What season cannot locate an eye in the dark of the sound of the sun gyrating into red ocher after I thought you noticed my language was half wren, half pigeon and, together, we spoke a wing pattern on the wall that was raised to keep “us” out, there where “calling” became “culling,” “distance” distanced, in a mere scrape of enamel on yellow teeth?45

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

Animals “ooze” out of the Manichaean schematics of environmental vulnerability, in which bodies are visualized only as resources (“ripe for drilling”) or collateral waste, the charismatic ruin of resource extraction. The poem thwarts any Whitmanian fantasy of democratized well-being (“the body electric”) and instead unravels animal bodies (pulling “electricity from their softened bellies”) from the bindings of settler attention. Those bodies are not redeemed, but the condition of their vulnerability (their “softened bellies”) stays a secret, a secretion, an unmappable transmission of political knowledge. Thus, the map’s shrinking is not only or primarily an indication of loss but a warping or reweaving back into the structures through which loss is inflicted. Within the hinging that McClintock identifies between political grandeur and threat, Bitsui introduces a sense of uncertainty to the process of visualizing ecological subjects. This is a different kind of hinging, what Nathaniel Mackey calls a “paracritical hinge,” through which the enclosing circuitry of colonial attention is itself problematized: writing “that wants to be a door . . . permitting flow between statement and metastatement, analysis and expressivity, criticism and performance. . . . It traffics in a mix—a discrepant, collaborative mix . . . haunted by tenuousness and risk.”47 Flood Song orchestrates a smirking, stripping down, and untying against postures of sympathy or witness. In fact, the speaker and the subjects of the poem are insistent162  Environmental Justice

ly obscured such that the reader’s attention can never quite seep in around familiar attitudes of responsibility, solace, or solidarity. Working in and against drought conditions that are both lived and live in the distributions of colonial attention, the untraceability of the poem’s subjects is the unvaling of the absorptive politics of toxic discourse. Flood Song draws out unsettling gaps between its subjects and readers: I sensed the knife in your past, its sharp edge shanked from the canyon stream— a silver trickle between the book jacket, nihízaad peeled open inside a diabetic mouth. The waters of my clans flash-flooded— I fell from the white of its eyes— ............................. that I was reaching for the cornfield inside you, that I was longing to outlive this compass pointing toward my skull gauzed inside this long terrible whisper damp in a desert canyon, whitewashed by the ache of fog lights reaching to unravel   my combed hair.48

Thwarting comfortable postures of exchange or attachment, the poem explores encounters among subjects, readers, and ecosystems that are incomplete, muffled, unfastened. Rather than facilitate the readers’ immersion into an unfamiliar standpoint or cultural economy, the poem unfixes us from ready ecocritical enclosures (the book, the canyon, the body, the field, the compass), dramatizing the straining and ultimate failure of our own appropriative attention: “I fell from the white of its eyes.” Vexing the hinged discourse between spectacles of harm and the politics these produce implies a different relationship between art and environment than is posColoniality and Ecocritical Attention  163

sible within a toxic discourse framework. Written in and against drought, the poem effects what Charles Bernstein calls an anti-absorptiveness. As opposed to works that encourage the ideological or perspectival immersion of reader into text into subject matter, anti-absorptive poetics directs vectors of saturating engagement (absorption) against those of “impermeability” to produce semantic “gaps” among subject, text, and reader. In this sense, anti-absorptive poetics creates politically loaded interventions, as Bernstein notes: The intersection of absorption & impermeability is precisely flesh, .... . . . Yet writing reverses the dynamic [Merleau-Ponty] outlines 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

For Bernstein, anti-absorptive writing generates frictional vectors of spectacle and exchange such that the intrusive surface of the text becomes a threshold of entry into the “material world.”50 The gaps of Flood Song intrude into assumptions that environmental attention is not structured by empire. In one example of this, the 164  Environmental Justice

poem dismantles the idea that recovery from drought originates outside native social or environmental economies. Water is the materialization of working native ecologies and is indistinguishable from what Bitsui calls song: 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. I sang, sang until the sun rose.51

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 environmental 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. Coloniality and Ecocritical Attention  165

It wanted to push their asymmetrical ramblings into the weft of storm blanket, dye it hazel and sink it into the rising waters. A city dragged its bridges behind it and finally collapsed in a supermarket asking for the first apple that was ever bitten. No one questioned the sand anymore. 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. The phone was ringing through it all. The line was busy when I picked the ax and chose the first tree    to chop down.53

It is a conclusion both joyous and unrecuperating. A longed-for cloud does not deliver rain but fractures structures of extraction and apprehension. The poem antagonizes salvational technologies of settlement: systems of transport, commodity exchange, religious or (in the phone’s unanswered ringing) diplomatic redemption. Its last lines are not a prescriptive but a performative ending, a disorientation of agency from attention (a space-clearing ax/acts picked from and waged against its own authoring structure) that is above all generative, the start of something. By refusing apocalyptic and Edenic closures, Flood Song clarifies the fact that because ecological harm is constituted by colonial power, its undoing is unrecognizable. As an ecocritical intervention, the poem shifts away from toxicity as a located site or action to toxicity as a structure that distributes health and harm through coordinates of beauty and ugliness, fecundity or waste. This puts pressure on colonial systems and citizens that justify ecocritical harm: how they perceive its enclosure and how they profit from its distribution. In Dean Spade’s words, this shift in focus means that “rather than understanding administrative systems merely as . . . sorting and managing what ‘naturally’ exists . . . [we need to see how] systems that classify 166  Environmental Justice

people actually invent and produce meaning for the categories they administer, and that those categories manage both the population and the distribution of security and vulnerability.”54 In an era marked by exhausted ecologies and targeted economic and social suffering, the stakes of such an intervention are high. At the same time, Bitsui’s work illustrates that opposition to ecological harm does not aggregate into a narrowly environmentalist political position. Instead, his poetry indicates the ways that ecological harm works in consort with other forms of social and administrative violence symptomatic of colonial occupation. In disciplinary terms, this is what environmental writing is and does. Too often, ecocriticism organizes itself around unjust and unjustified social or spatial enclosures or around the lie that toxicity affects us all to the same degree. Critical race and decolonization perspectives bring to these debates the understanding that, as Kimberlé Crenshaw argues, if we “began with addressing the needs and problems of those who are most disadvantaged and with restructuring and remaking the world where necessary, then others who are singularly disadvantaged would also benefit.”55 In an ecocritical context, this cannot mean that we expand existing recognition-based rubrics to see more through the same administrative lenses. Rather, the first priority should be to rethink the role of state power in environmentalism and emphasize that opposing ecological harm requires dismantling empire. Analyses of ecological harm can become spaces of overlap with anticolonial and antiracist critical discourses. And because damage to human and nonhuman ecologies is executed along the beguiling axes of enclosure and paranoia, environmental damage can be a useful metric by which to track settler power as it shifts across heterogeneous social landscapes. A key challenge, then, is to confront the mobile and multiple coordinates of colonial power without reinforcing the terms of its speculation or expansion. To think of this challenge in aesthetic and epistemic terms—as a problem of looking—is to begin to theorize the interventional capacity of anticolonial and antiracist ecopoetics. Such theorizing should unfold according to two political priorities. First, an anticolonial and antiracist ecopoetics should join critical race theory, women and queer and persons of color criticisms, and decolonization theory in foregrounding experiences of multiply marginalized subjects and communities. Such collaborations could follow what Andrea Smith outlines as a triptych frameColoniality and Ecocritical Attention  167

work through which to invent and evaluate emergent political knowledge, which she calls the three pillars of white supremacy: the logic of slavery as the anchor of capitalism, the logic of genocide as the anchor of colonialism, and the logic of orientalism as the anchor of war. Smith shows that dismantling hegemonic structures requires explaining how these logics shift and interlock in new ways every day.56 As Jeff Corntassel points out, participating in this project means refusing to be guided by sanctioned coordinates of aesthetic and political action. He argues that one of the goals of anticolonial politics is to be ungovernable, to defer positions that further inscribe subjects into the logics of empire: “shape-shifting colonial powers continue to invent new methods of domination in order to erase Indigenous histories and sense of place. Amidst an era of interconnected imperialisms, Indigenous peoples exhibit their ungovernability by withdrawing their support and involvement from the global political economy.”57 This is a commitment that Bitsui’s work shares through the rejection of discourses preconditioned by the perceived disposability of native ecologies. The second priority of an anticolonial and antiracist ecopoetics should be an embrace of what Moten and Harney call the surround—and not just in a narrowly ecological sense. While the surround does refer to a kind of social landscape, what they call actually existing social life, it also indicates any living or thinking outside the terms of harmful compliance. If, for example, biopolitical toxicity is defined by an “imperial debt relation,” Moten and Harney reposition debt beyond the promise of credit (or whiteness or wetness): “debt is social and credit is asocial. Debt is mutual. Credit runs only one way. But debt runs in every direction, scatters, escapes, seeks refuge. . . . The place of refuge is the place to which you can only owe more and more because there is no creditor, no payments possible. This refuge, this place of bad debt, is what we call the fugitive public.”58 Debt is symmetrical with the step from unveiling to unvaling, from toxic recognition to an unforeseeable ecopolitics of mutuality. Poetry like Bitsui’s, which burrows into and corrodes the enclosures of colonial attention, is ideally positioned to advance this work—the animation and the animacy of the unrecognizable.

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8 • Toward an Antiracist Ecopoetics Waste and Wasting in the Poetry of Claudia Rankine Angela Hume

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 capitalism and the state, while simultaneously being regarded as surplus by these same structures. While Citizen is not ostensibly a work of ecological poetry or environmental 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 suggests, 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 environments 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; ecopoetics 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 170  Environmental Justice

and pastoral modes, and in her later poetry, which departs from them—enables us to articulate an expanded sense of what an antiracist ecopoetics might look like today. As Evie Shockley points out, a “false dichotomy that says one has to choose between writing about nature and writing about socio-political subjects” has long informed the way that both poets and critics think about possibilities for poetry.7 This dichotomy poses challenges to African American poets in particular, whose experiences of nature have always been suffused with the political, given America’s history of racism.8 Rankine’s antiracist ecopoetics refuses this binary and posits instead what Shockley describes as “the identity . . . of the natural and political realms,” or what I would call a poetics of environmental justice.9 “In the Difficulty”: The Poetics of Environmental Justice Citizen: An American Lyric intersperses prose poems, essays, and scripts with images. The prose poems are often anecdotes about everyday racism in America. Many of the poems are written in the second person, demanding that the reader relive or imagine what it is like to be on the receiving end of a racist encounter. The images include media photographs and reproductions of visual works by contemporary black artists. Section 6 of Citizen is comprised of what Rankine calls “scripts for Situation videos.” The poet’s website features some of these videos. Notably, no such video exists at the website for one of the scripts in the book, “August 29, 2005 / Hurricane Katrina.” As Rankine explains, “Hurricane Katrina” features quotes from CNN in the wake of the Gulf Coast disaster, one of the deadliest in U.S. history.10 The first paragraph highlights one particularly devastating aspect of Hurricane Katrina: the waiting that many African American residents of New Orleans endured after the storm had passed: 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 Toward an Antiracist Ecopoetics  171

For Rankine, what was and continues to be difficult to accept is twofold: first, the trauma of continuing to be inside the storm, a form of trauma that many people endured for days on end, and second the pervasiveness of statements like “who could see it coming” in the aftermath, when in fact the American government had known that such a disaster in New Orleans was probable due to the faulty design of the city’s federally funded levees.12 In its repetition of the attributive phrase “one said,” the poem emphasizes the fact of so many individual experiences of being forced to wait for aid. The repetition of the phrase within a single long sentence demands endurance of the reader, too—of both the upsetting imagery and the exhausting sentence. As many people now know, the part of New Orleans that was hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina was populated primarily by African Americans. What most people do not know is that this area has long been part of Cancer Alley, an eighty-five-mile stretch along the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans containing numerous petrochemical complexes.13 Even before Katrina, black communities in New Orleans were subject to a greater degree of environmental risk. This moment in Rankine’s poem points toward society’s collective denial of what the facts themselves would seem to lay bare: an entire population was not perceived as valuable enough to warrant preventive measures to ensure its safety in general, including its safety in the case of a major storm along the Gulf Coast. The poem goes on to describe the detritus left in the wake of the storm—ruined homes and objects but also human detritus, bodies in pieces: 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 172  Environmental Justice

but the loss of life in combination with the overwhelming amount of rubbish left behind. As these speakers lament the human casualties, they also struggle to grasp the scale of infrastructural devastation and end up fixating on dehumanized debris. In the process, the black body becomes what Sarah Jaquette Ray calls an ecological other—an environmental problem posing health risks that must be mitigated and contained. As Ray points out, the construction of ecological others is a key aspect of mainstream environmentalism, which often tends toward an environmental purism that uses the construction of “others” in order to justify its politics.15 Near the end of “August 29, 2005 / Hurricane Katrina,” Rankine writes, “He said, I don’t know what the water wanted. It wanted to show you no one would come.”16 Here the Gulf water is cast as an antagonist, posing a threat to an indefinite “you.” The speaker feels disoriented in his relationship to nature; he does not know where he stands. We might read the speaker as a survivor of the storm, speaking about the experience of African Americans who were left to fend for themselves. Here nature (the water) is depicted as incomprehensible and monstrous. It would be inaccurate to call the water sublime in the Romantic or Kantian sense, as it poses an actual, material threat to the safety of human bodies and reveals nothing to the speaker about God or the human imagination. Rather, the water is simply hostile and murderous. In this way, Rankine resists a conception of nature that has informed the dominant transatlantic nature-writing tradition at least since Wordsworth and Shelley, not to mention many of the core values and assumptions of the American environmental movement. As William Cronon points out, American environmentalism, along with its ideology of sacred wilderness, was predicated on this dominant Romantic ideology. It was this “doctrine of the sublime” that informed the decisions of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century preservationists to make national parks of places like Yosemite Valley and the Grand Canyon.17 Landscapes perceived as less sublime were not considered worth protecting. From Cronon’s argument, readers might infer that it is this same American environmentalism that has been responsible, at least in part, for the proliferation of environmental racism—or, to return to Ray, the production of ecological others. Rankine throws into sharp relief the problem of the Romantic ideology that underpins the American environmental imagination by refusing to cast the waters of Hurricane Katrina as reconcilable with it. Consequently, readers find themselves Toward an Antiracist Ecopoetics  173

well outside the realm of nature poetry, instead approaching something more akin to a poetics of environmental justice—one that recognizes precisely those landscapes, along with the people who inhabit them, that do not fit and are therefore excluded from the sublime wilderness ideal. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely—a collage project incorporating drawings, media images, and other cultural documents—similarly investigates how black bodies are ecologically othered by the dominant white society. Through the juxtaposition of private lyric language with documents, Rankine demonstrates how even personal experiences like grief are mediated by the ideologies of capitalism and the state. As in Citizen, she takes up the problem of environmental risk in this earlier book. In particular, she examines the issue of chronic illnesses endemic to African American populations. Breast cancer, depression, liver failure, and heart disease are some of the conditions that Rankine names while suggesting an epidemiological relationship between bodily illness and the hostile environments that many black bodies must navigate—environments in which human bodies are increasingly understood as symptoms to be managed and pacified with the help of medical technologies and prescription drugs. At one point Rankine writes, 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 removed 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

Between these two passages appears a document; lyric prose is interrupted by an X-ray image of a mammogram. The lyric subject is confronted by the medicalized body. From the outset, we know that the woman to whom the lyric speaker refers has died (“Can we say she might have lived,” asks Rankine), a fact that renders the speaker’s subsequent narrative of modern medicine’s work to de- and reconstruct her friend’s sick body that much more difficult to bear. The document serves as evidence of harm done, entombing the wasted body in the poem itself. 174  Environmental Justice

Mammogram image. From Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely.

On the next page, Rankine writes: 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 Toward an Antiracist Ecopoetics  175

The repetition of “she grows tired” points to the condition of wasting that defines the woman’s life with terminal illness. As in “Hurricane Katrina,” here the poem requires readers to endure the tedium of repetition, creating a feeling of weariness not unlike that which both the speaker and her dying friend experience. For the subject of each poem, a life has become a life approaching death, a life in death. Lauren Berlant names this form of life in death “slow death,” which she defines as “the physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence.”20 In Rankine’s poem, the failure of the medical system to identify breast cancer, the most common cancer found in women in the United States, in the speaker’s friend costs her friend her life. The poem’s emphasis on the surgeon’s flip treatment of her patient underscores the way that the privatized medical system treats bodies as objects to be fixed—that is to say, incorporated into the labor process for the purpose of turning a profit. In the end, the care provided by the system—its services (inpatient hospitalization) and the commodities it produces (a reconstructed breast)—furthers the process of capital accumulation. For Berlant, in slow death, what kills is nothing more than “an upsetting scene of living,” in which “dying and the ordinary reproduction of life are coextensive.”21 As Rankine writes: “Can we say she might have lived had her doctor not screwed up? If yes—when does her death actually occur?”22 If the medical system’s original misdiagnosis or negligence is the cause of the woman’s death, the health care itself is also the moment of the killing; in modernity, care for life is, paradoxically, also the slow wasting of life.23 “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 176  Environmental Justice

black male subject: “He enters / to find his will assumed broken, / to find his spirit swollen, / and the climate mean.” Paradoxically, nature simultaneously produces and destroys the man: “Always he was, / is here, is the land’s bruised / utterance.”25 For this reason, his is a life in death: “If I as human / am meant to live this way / then I will die or am dead.” At the end of the poem, Rankine writes, In humanity— into its strange house, he enters . . . And always the hurt is all the same, even if he wouldn’t take it, even if he wouldn’t make it home.26

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 Toward an Antiracist Ecopoetics  177

In her poem “American Light” in Nothing in Nature Is Private, Rankine throws into relief the complexity of environmental relations for African Americans. The poem adheres somewhat to the conventions of a particular lyric tradition, what M. H. Abrams has named the “greater Romantic lyric,” in which a speaker situated outdoors performs a meditation and eventually “achieves an insight.”32 This lyric mode is intertwined with the Romantic pastoral mode, one that emerged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.33 The opening lines of Rankine’s poem call attention to their engagement with this Romantic lyric-pastoral tradition in and through their relative adherence to it: 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 directs 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, The lit landscape conceives a shadow, its face dark, wide-open, its eyes bloodshot from what had come before.36 178  Environmental Justice

And then, two stanzas later: A shadow on ships, in fields for years, for centuries even, in heat colored by strokes of red, against the blue-white light—and in it I realize I recognize myself.37

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—constitutes 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. AlternaToward an Antiracist Ecopoetics  179

tively, one might read the speaker as asking whether she might eventually be able to cultivate a homelike place while remaining in the woods. In other words, is it possible for the natural world to be redeemed for the black subject, when so many aspects of nature have already been disgraced by history? The questions posed by this latter reading cast a less hopeful mood over the poem. In connection with this reading, one might hear an oblique reference to Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” a poem whose speaker enjoys the simple pleasure of choice and luxury of mobility at a light-dappled fork in a wooded road. By contrast, Rankine’s speaker enjoys no such luxury; in her poem, the road is a reminder that for the black subject there can be no promise that one will find one’s way. We can locate Rankine’s struggle with tainted nature in Citizen, too. In a script titled “February 26, 2012 / In Memory of Trayvon Martin,” she asserts: “The hearts of my brothers are broken.”42 She continues, Those years of and before me and my brothers, the years of passage, plantation, migration, 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

In this stream-of-consciousness lament about the mass incarceration of young black men, Rankine suggests that from one generation to the next, the effects of discrimination accumulate in the body. History is like a tumor or a tree with roots and limbs, one that continues to grow and spread. When the black subject opens her mouth to speak, there are only “blossoms, o blossoms,” and “no place” comes out. Rankine’s use of apostrophe adds to the elegiac tone of the poem. We might read the blossoms as a metaphor for black lives lost to white-on-black violence and the criminal justice system, lives too numerous to count. The loss is so overwhelming to the speaker that she becomes incapable of uttering or claiming a place and home for herself. To risk reckoning with one’s black history and life conditions is always to risk becoming destabilized and displaced—imprisoned by the “no place” of one’s history. The “blue” to which Rankine refers perhaps suggests the name 180  Environmental Justice

for this complex grief: the blues. Notably, when she mentions “that kind of blue” in this passage containing trees and blossoms, the image with which she leaves readers is that of the sky. By gesturing toward the sky, she suggests that when African Americans see nature, they often also see a history of incarceration and violence. This idea is reinforced by a photo appearing on the opposite page, taken in 1930 and capturing a public lynching, though in the photo the hanged bodies have been removed.44 The edited photo invites close attention to a crowd of white spectators standing around a tree, which seems to be implicated in the murderous act through its ghostly appearance against the black night sky. How to understand one’s emplacement if one apparently exists no place at all? What is an embrace of the world that is also a refusal of that world? What are the ramifications for the physical body for which these are its conditions of possibility? To begin to navigate the constellation of place, waste, and lyric in Rankine’s poetry, we might turn to the work of Hortense Spillers, who investigates how captivity and enslavement suspended identity and kinship roles for African Americans. In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Spillers argues that Africans who were forcibly transported across the Atlantic Ocean during the Middle Passage were “suspended in the ‘oceanic.’”45 While severed from their indigenous land, they were not yet American either. Therefore, she explains, “captive persons . . . were in movement across the Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all.”46 Black women’s bodies, in particular, took on a “signifying property plus,” a symbolic excess, because under slavery, their offspring did not belong to them and families were “forced into patterns of dispersal.” 47 Rankine’s poetry explores what it might mean to inherit such a fraught, sometimes partial, even absent history of symbolic and material objectification, otherness, and excess. To be both symbolically and materially illegible, an other whose flesh is perceived as a disposable commodity, is to be a kind of waste, and to live under these conditions is to be constituted in and through one’s definitive state of wasting away. Fred Moten, drawing on Spillers’s work, has asked more recently what it might mean to “consider exhaustion as a mode or form or way of life.”48 Moten asks us to consider what it might mean for “blackness” to be “the place that has no place.”49 He imagines this as the “radically dispossessive no-place of the hold”—“the hold,” in one sense, as the hold of Spillers’s slave ship “suspended in the ‘oceanic.’”50 Toward an Antiracist Ecopoetics  181

Moten also works through and modifies Frantz Fanon’s writings, arguing that to inhabit the no place of the hold, or “break,” is to embrace an alternative sociality where sovereign expression and recuperation (that is, self-consciousness and recognition of the other) break down and we begin to encounter the “complete lysis of this morbid body/universe.”51 The latter quotation, which appears in Fanon’s introduction to his Black Skin, White Masks, refers to what he characterizes as the need for “nothing short of the liberation of the man of color from himself.”52 Because “the black man is not a man” (relegated always to being the white man’s production) and will never be recognized as a man by the white man, Fanon argues, the black man must extricate himself from the very universe in which he is rooted.53 Since being in this way is intolerable, less than human, Fanon asserts that the black man must reach instead toward “that zone of nonbeing . . . where an authentic upheaval can be born.”54 Only through this act of destruction—a “descent into a real hell”—can the black man realize the “complete lysis of [his] morbid body.”55 Here the term “lysis” seems to denote decomposition, disintegration, or dissolution. The term can also refer to the termination or resolution of a disease—the opposite of a crisis, or the turning point of a disease for better or worse.56 For Moten, it is in acknowledging and inhabiting the multivalent lysis of which Fanon speaks, or exhaustion (to use Moten’s own term), or wasting of life (to use my term)—occurring always in the no place of the hold or “a life in homelessness”—that alternative, improvisatory forms of relation, a “negative political ontology,” might be realized.57 Rankine explores the lysis of the body and repudiation of the environment in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely through a subject’s rejection of her own sick body: “No. No. No. No. No. She has decided. She’s grown tired. She is finished.”58 One can locate this sentiment again in the “February 26, 2012 / In Memory of Trayvon Martin” script in Citizen when Rankine’s speaker states at the end of the poem, “My brother is completed by sky. The sky is his silence . . . I say good-bye before anyone can hang up, don’t hang up. Wait with me. Wait with me though the waiting might be the call of good-byes.”59 Importantly, repudiation for Rankine or any negative political ontology is something very specific: it is a “no” that is at the same time a continuance. For Moten, as for Rankine, language—even, more specifically, lyric language— plays a particularly important role in the lysis of the body and universe. In his 182  Environmental Justice

view, the “disavowal of self ” that contrasts sovereign expression is “animated by both lyric and lysis, continually driven toward new fields of exhaustion.”60 In other words, through poetic experiments that inhabit a lyric speaker precisely in order to expose the necessity of abjuring that speaker—experiments that are always also acts of lysis or wasting—poets might begin to exhaust dominant orders. One’s biopoetics becomes both a destructive force and a mechanism for survival or life (bio) making (poetics). The paradox, of course, is that with this line of thinking it is only in and through acts of exhaustion and wasting—of one’s own body and world—that one can begin to challenge the power structures that have systematized and perpetuated the wasting of life for centuries. In its contradictions, poetic language—a “social biopoetics” or the “ongoing disturbance of language that is language’s anoriginal condition,” to use Moten’s phrasing—might constitute a kind of experimental sociality.61 “ 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 contradictions 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 gestures 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. Toward an Antiracist Ecopoetics  183

Anthony Reed, in his study of Plot and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, names Rankine’s practice a “postlyric poetics.”64 For Reed, Rankine’s postlyric poetics marks “the unavailability of—and continued desire for—established modes of personal and racial representation and norms of poetic expression in the postsegregation era, understood as a new stage in the struggle against an increasingly globalized antiblackness.”65 I agree with Reed’s interpretation that Rankine’s adaptation of a conventional lyric mode manifests the impossibility of a coherent self for black subjects, who continue to be othered by society. But Rankine’s poetics is not so much post as it is a dwelling within a problematic mode in order to expose how the duration of the wasting of life becomes a way of life. By tarrying with a problematic mode, Rankine reveals various pressures on language: the ways in which reading practices mediated by social space are necessarily exacting and exhausting processes of interpretation and reinterpretation. At the end of “August 29, 2005 / Hurricane Katrina,” she writes, Call out to them. I don’t see them. Call out anyway. Did you see their faces?66

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 response—“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 184  Environmental Justice

Uncertain, Yet Reserved by Toyin Ojih Odutola (Adeola, Abuja Airport, Nigeria). From Claudia Rankine, Citizen.

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 faces?” 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. Toward an Antiracist Ecopoetics  185

What follows the silence of the white page is a reproduction of a pen-and-acrylic-ink drawing by the Nigerian American artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, Uncertain, Yet Reserved. In the drawing, a black face stares intensely ahead, seeming to make eye contact with the viewer. The image constitutes its own form of utterance, demanding of the reader, once again, recognition—a reiteration of the command “Call out anyway”—but via a different medium. While the image is not representative of the poem (that is to say, it is not about Hurricane Katrina per se), it serves as an imperative for readers to dwell in the recognition-nonrecognition moment in an alternative way. In the wake of language’s exhaustion or failure, there is the upheaval of the image. However seemingly impossible its demand, exhausted or failed language constitutes an affirmation in its duration of the time and space of the book. In the end, it is in the interstices or ruptures between text and image that we can locate this duration: Rankine’s social biopoetics or life making. Registering the structural forces that racialize bodies and environments, Rankine’s poetry embodies exhaustion as a way of life and, through its self-conscious duration of states of wasting, models an experimental biopoetics or the imagination of life making as a response. For her, affirming the social and risking existing environmentally involve facing up to a long history of environmental subjugation in which nature is contaminated by racialized violence. For this reason, the envisioning of any negative political ontology (per Moten) entails reckoning with the difficulty of environmental imagination, and thinking beyond the dominant order is predicated on a critical inhabitation of the wasting body. Only in and through language’s realization of this tension, Rankine suggests, might poetry become capable of thinking toward new forms for living on.

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part four Beyond Sustainability

9 • “Hung Up in the Flood” Resilience, Variability, and the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker Samia Rahimtoola

Even while living in his cabin at Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau could not retreat 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 attenuate 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 190  Beyond Sustainability

most attractive, if not the most beautiful of all our lakes, the gem of the woods, is White Pond.”4 This passage uncomfortably echoes the very extractive activities that use up the pond in the first place, always ready to move on to the next resource when the current one is exhausted. Embedded in Thoreau’s abandonment of Walden for White Pond is the fatalistic proposal that once disruption is registered, nothing more can be done to remediate or recover from it. Either, it seems, the pond must fail to register difference completely, or difference must be experienced as calamitous loss. Offering both responses within a few pages of one another, Thoreau suggests that what appear to be two mutually exclusive modes of responding to environmental transformation may depend on the same underlying logic. In his shifting attitude toward Walden Pond, whether we perceive the pond’s absolute identity or its catastrophic, irredeemable difference, we are stripped of the means to imagine less dramatic and less definitive scales of change. I begin with these two scenes of perceiving Walden Pond because together they stage a crucial impasse facing environmental thought today. In our twenty-first century, this impasse is best registered in discourses and practices of resilience, particularly their widespread deployment in fields such as disaster management, urban planning, environmental conservation, and securitization. Theories of resilience argue that disruption should be managed in order to ensure the continuity of existing systems, from urban traffic networks to stock exchanges. By emphasizing functional continuity in an unruly, unpredictable, and uncontrollable world, such theories reveal an environmental imagination that is at once radically open and deeply conservative. Just as they imagine an unstable, foundationless world in which disruption reshapes both built environments and the life forms that inhabit them, they also accept disturbance only to absorb it, attenuating its effects to ensure the persistence of a world whose shape we already know and accept. Like Thoreau’s first description of Walden Pond, resilience imagines a perpetually assailed environment that can withstand repeated episodes of crisis without ever suffering “one permanent wrinkle.” Resilience thinking evacuates historicity and contingency in its pursuit of the reproduction of the ever-same. Stephanie Wakefield and Bruce Braun have critiqued this “indefinite extension of present conditions,” arguing that it undermines the utopian political goal of achieving a world beyond crisis.5 While they describe the historical shift in which governments no longer “Hung Up in the Flood”  191

seek to achieve a world beyond crisis, resilience thinking’s radical extension of the present also masks how crisis is manufactured and reproduced. Thus, disaster preparedness plans assume that historically contingent practices, such as fossil fuel consumption, the encouragement of global trade under multiple free trade agreements, and the legislative failures that surround climate change regulation, are permanent conditions that cannot be subjected to historical change. Under such a view, only the specter of catastrophic change—like that which leads Thoreau to abandon Walden for White Pond—remains conceivable. If Thoreau gives us the conceptual ground for this impasse, it is poetry—with its variable prosody and recursive mediations—that permits us to articulate types and scales of change that can lead us through. In particular, I return to the American mid-twentieth century in order to discover, in the free verse patterning and process-based techniques characteristic of Lorine Niedecker’s open form poetry, a formal practice in which the barely perceptible reconfigurations of the world become apparent. By attending to such minor transformations, Niedecker’s verse helps us make good on the insight that whether we imagine nature as a self-repairing, resilient system or a sensitive, vulnerable one, we make much the same mistake of organizing environmental changes along the lines of stasis or catastrophe. Niedecker, that is, restores possibilities for environmental remediation and recovery that involve the practice of inviting and acknowledging differences—some of them so small they can scarcely be registered as differences at all. More broadly, I contrast the flexible, provisional practice of mid-twentieth-century open form poetry with the significantly more rigid management of life pursued by contemporary practices of resilience. Masquerading as flexible responsiveness, resilience, as we will see, all too often offers the opposite. While the discourse of flexibility adopted by resilience and targeted by critiques of resilience might be said to simply harness flexibility in its reproduction of the ever-same, Niedecker’s processual poetics stages flexibility as the variable—variable because provisional and open to further revision—contingency of both poem and world. Poetry is central to both analyses because it provides a way of thinking about provisionality, variability, and difference that remains foreclosed in the current critical climate of resilience studies. One of the most high-profile efforts to build resilience in recent years is that pursued by New York City in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Initiated by former 192  Beyond Sustainability

mayor Michael Bloomberg, this long-term strategic plan to build “A Stronger, More Resilient New York” intends to help the city withstand a future in which extreme climate events are likely to increase in both frequency and intensity.6 The 438-page report, published in June 2013, offers a series of recommendations to increase the city’s resilience, from environmental restoration to the redesign of urban infrastructure networks. Among its more innovative proposals are initiatives to restore coastal dunes to absorb increased wave intensity, to construct more ferry terminals to create an alternative transportation network that can function during floods, and to increase redundancies within infrastructure networks from the electric grid to water in order to mitigate interruptions. Such practices fit snugly within the general agenda of resilience thinking by prioritizing functional continuity in existing systems over unpredictable interruptions or systemic reconfigurations. For all its potential conservatism, resilience studies originally emerged as a critique of top-down management and the command and control mentality of the Cold War state that underwrote it.7 Contrary to the then-prevailing view of ecological systems, which argued that such systems would return to equilibrium states after disruption, resilience ecology proposed that a system could remain coherent even as it experienced profound fluctuations and disturbances.8 According to resilience ecology, endogenous crisis need not bring about the categorical dissolution of an ecosystem or be solved by the return to initial conditions. Instead, ecosystems may transform or adapt to changing conditions without entering a catastrophic state.9 I retain resilience ecology’s central insight into living with ecosystemic disruption, while interrogating contemporary practices of resilience by asking how such practices work to diminish, or even foreclose entirely, the very experience of disruption that motivates them in the first place. For me, resilience becomes an ambivalent object of analysis, one that carries resurgently critical possibilities nestled among its more conservative agendas. Critiques of resilience often hinge on the outsourcing of structural solutions and public safety nets to the beleaguered individual whose adaptive resources are drawn on—and drawn down—by the withdrawal of the state. For such critiques, flexibility becomes simply one more way to justify passing formerly state-supported services, including health care, education, disaster recovery, and retirement support, on to the overtaxed individual. Thus, Jonathan Joseph has argued that the popular appeal “Hung Up in the Flood”  193

of resilience results from its close fit with neoliberal strategies of governance.10 Turning to the mid-twentieth-century poet Lorine Niedecker, I reconsider the terms of this critique by testing neoliberal discourses of flexibility against her disrupted ecologies, variable prosody, and environmentally exposed speakers. Niedecker’s poems track the microcatastrophes that accompany a life lived on the margins of water: flooded lawns, drenched domesticity, the stray muskrat swimming through her living room. Living on the floodplain of Wisconsin’s Rock River, Niedecker identifies with the uncertain tidal zones that wash back and forth between water and land. Calling herself “swamp” in one poem and tracing her development from “marsh mud, / algae, equisetum, willows” in another, she frequently negotiates her poetic identity through the language of flooding.11 Although she was brought into the canon by feminist scholars who sought to elevate her poetry of minor forms—haikus and brief lyrics, sometimes no more than a line or two of verse each—to major status, Niedecker’s literary reception has hinged on her life at the margins, writing outside the metropoles of New York and San Francisco, working shifts as a janitor in a Wisconsin hospital, and being exposed to the shifting margins of the floodplain. 12 While Niedecker has suffered relative neglect at the hands of modernist critics, she is enjoying a critical resurgence in contemporary ecopoetics.13 In many ways, she is an obvious candidate for ecocritical scholarship. Her work engages a long history of naturalist and scientific writing, drawing on sources as various as Thoreau, John James Audubon, Linnaeus, Rachel Carson, Lucretius, and Louis Agassiz. She exhaustively documents the features of a natural world that often appear in contradistinction to urbanizing technological development. And her poems model attitudes of attentiveness that remain at the core of traditional ecocritical approaches.14 Yet her relationship to mainstream environmentalism is tenuous at best, as evidenced by her growing fear that environmental regulation might force her from her family home: “Reason we want to leave Black Hawk Island the place of my birth and where I have a grave with my name on it is: the state wants to correct pollution in the river and lake and put in a sewage disposal system that will cost us a great deal of money even with state and federal funds.”15 All too aware that environmental preservation may come at a cost too great to bear by those already living in poverty, Niedecker complicates early ecocritical investments in pristine, 194  Beyond Sustainability

unmediated nature. Her life in the boundary zones of modernity—an area at once unregulated and unprotected by modernity’s extensive infrastructure projects—offers a complex set of ecological attitudes that rest uneasily with both state-sanctioned regulation and early ecocritical concerns. As critics such as Wai Chee Dimock and Stephanie LeMenager have noted, the presumed world supremacy of America, along with its territorial fantasy of uniform development, has begun to unravel in the wake of environmental catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina.16 Dimock and LeMenager are part of a growing group of contemporary ecocritics whose commitment to environmental justice has generated a desire to account for and redress uneven development within and across the hemispheric divisions of the Global North and the Global South. Niedecker, some fifty years prior to these scholars, evinces an intense awareness of the encroachment and neglect of the state in the context of unincorporated and rural America. All three writers, it might be said, reveal that modernity’s boundary zones are subject to state control whether the state encroaches into these territories or neglects to protect them. While ecocritically inflected readings of Niedecker tend to celebrate her unmediated, immersive relationship with nature, her writings in fact repeatedly attest to the ways in which the experience of nature is in fact mediated by state structures. The period in which Niedecker wrote, roughly from the 1930s to her death in 1970, was characterized by massive nation-building projects that transformed far-flung corners of America. Many of these efforts were led by the Public Works Administration, which was created by Franklin D. Roosevelt during the aftermath of the Great Depression in hopes of combating high unemployment and popular unrest.17 By the mid 1940s, the four largest concrete dams ever built in the United States had gone up in the American West: Hoover, Shasta, Bonneville, and Grand Coulee. Dam building reached its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, as agencies like the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation competed for federally subsidized water projects.18 The 1950s also saw the passage of the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, which opened up federal funds for highway construction.19 Overall, the mid-twentieth century saw a terrific rise in state-sponsored infrastructure, much of which functioned to centralize geographically dispersed regions through the construction of roadways, electric grids, and water projects. “Hung Up in the Flood”  195

Centralization and the taming of the natural world went hand in hand during these boom years of American infrastructure investment. Niedecker’s resistance to the state-backed environmental regulation of her home must be read in light of and as resistance to this unprecedented expansion of modernity into marginalized, unregulated spaces. Guided by the command and control mentality of the Cold War state, such mid-twentieth-century infrastructure projects have become the implicit target of early twenty-first-century discourses of resilience. Theories of resilience usually attribute the failure of command and control infrastructure to its inability to respond to the unpredictable variability characteristic of complex adaptive systems. 20 Making the case against such management techniques, a 2006 textbook in resilience ecology cites the example of flood control in the Florida Everglades. From 1926 to 1963, the authors argue, levee construction, dam building, and canalization were relentlessly pursued, even as they resulted in more severe floods.21 Recent plans to remove more than four hundred kilometers of canals and levees from the Everglades indicate a significant reversal of these earlier policies. A similar pattern may be found in the undamming of American rivers. By the early years of the twenty-first century, the rate of dam removal in the United States outpaced that of dam construction, with the world’s largest undamming occurring in 2014 on the Elwha River in Washington.22 Attesting to the widespread acceptance of theories of resilience, such events indicate the timeliness of returning critical attention to Niedecker’s flood-prone poetics. One might expect—given the historical trajectory that I have been tracing—her flooded subjects to provide the prototype or prefiguration of contemporary practices of resilience through their naive, nearly pastoral celebration of the exposures of an unprotected, unregulated life. Instead, I argue, returning to Niedecker today allows us to measure the distance between the improvisational variability of open form poetry and the enforced flexibility promoted by contemporary practices of resilience. Niedecker, that is, makes apparent the impoverished concept of flexibility at work in resilience and critical resilience studies. These concerns are central to Niedecker’s 1957 poem “Linnaeus in Lapland,” which takes up the issue of state-enforced flexibility in eighteenth-century imperial Sweden. The poem reads: 196  Beyond Sustainability

Nothing worth noting except an Andromeda with quadrangular shoots— the boots of the people wet inside: they must swim to church thru the floods or be taxed—the blossoms from the bosoms of the leaves23

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 immanent 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 “Hung Up in the Flood”  197

acts of awareness could the poet articulate form as a self-revising, provisionally unfolding process in which variability and incompletion went hand in hand. Flexibility, moreover, did not belong to the poet alone. Under the influence of Riemannian geometry, Olson proclaimed reality itself to be a variable field open to novel transformations. In this new dispensation, we must, he wrote, “believe that things, and present ones, are the absolute conditions; but that they are so because the structures of the real are flexible, quanta do dissolve into vibrations, all does flow, and yet is there, to be made permanent, if the means are equal.”26 Flexibility, that is, defined both poet and world in Olson’s new poetics. Open form poetry was immensely influential in the mid-twentieth century, particularly among the writers affiliated with Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where Olson served as rector from 1951 to 1956.27 Although Niedecker is not usually approached as one of the Black Mountain poets—she is instead typically seen as an objectivist poet, with early and late surrealist leanings—she self-identified with them by submitting four poems to the Black Mountain Review, then edited by Robert Creeley. Moreover, the interest of “Linnaeus in Lapland” in the costs of regulation not only picks up on a line of inquiry familiar to open form poetics, it also extends it by requiring a distinction to be made between state-mandated flexibility and spontaneous variability. In doing so, the poem offers a political and aesthetic critique of hierarchical methods of enforcing order. While the andromeda may thrive in the flood, “the people / wet inside” the church suffer from cold.28 Despite the changed, flooded environment, the Laplanders are required to fulfill their usual duties or bear the consequences. In staging this conflict between prescriptive order and spontaneous response, the poem enables a critique of the enforced flexibility demanded by twenty-firstcentury practices of resilience. Whether the people of Niedecker’s poem walk or swim, attendance at church remains compulsory. This basic nonnegotiability of ends is central to resilience thinking. A 2012 essay on building urban environments resilient to flooding argues that urban planners should focus less on constructing storm walls, levees, and dams and more on improving the flexibility of the urban environment. If urban planners work toward “overall functionality” across multiple environmental states, including those of variable flooding, everyday life might thus be spared disruptive events.29 An example of such multistate functionality may be 198  Beyond Sustainability

found in the author’s proposal to develop a public transportation system that could quickly switch from land-based to waterborne craft during a flood. By guaranteeing the ongoing circulation of workers, consumers, and goods, resilience’s flexible solutions ensure continuity at the level of urban flows and processes. Such priorities are also evidenced by New York City’s plans to ensure that “power, liquid fuels, telecommunications, transportation, water and wastewater, healthcare and other networks will operate largely without interruption, or will return to service quickly when preventative shutdowns or localized interruptions occur.”30 I am not, of course, arguing that hospitals should forego backup generators in a misguided effort to see how patients will respond to new and hostile conditions. Such a survivalist experiment would be more in keeping with the gutting of state-supported programs by those neoliberal regimes most actively pursuing policies of resilience. The point is that resilience thinking’s preoccupation with maintaining network flows often presumes continuity to be desirable. Like the people of Niedecker’s poem who walk or swim as the situation demands, these flexible transportation systems leave modes of transport open, while duties and destinations remain fixed. While resilience rejects command and control policies that seek to conserve the status quo by fully suppressing disruption, it can be argued that it does so only to more effectively secure the continuous operation of urban infrastructures and networks. Here flexibility and responsiveness—like those boats that stand at the ready to whisk commuters to their urban workplaces in New York City’s post-Sandy recovery plans—are cultivated as techniques that prepare for and manage endogenous crisis to guarantee the persistence of business as usual. To put this more forcefully and bluntly, while networks remain open to modulation and transformation, life itself does not. Work must go on, shopping must be done, the commute must be undertaken. Flexibility acts only in the service of the most inflexible goals, whose very nonnegotiability remains unquestioned and untheorized. Unlike Niedecker’s Laplanders, who quite literally cannot afford to interrupt, let alone alter, the usual rhythms of their everyday life, her speakers frequently experience the flood as a temporary reprieve. She writes: My life is hung up in the flood “Hung Up in the Flood”  199

a wave-blurred portrait Don’t fall in love with this face— it no longer exists in water we cannot fish31

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 domesticity 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, 200  Beyond Sustainability

resilience anticipates disaster only to hope for its infinite deferral. In doing so, both the present experience of disaster and the ruptures that characterize crisis and the recovery from crisis are diligently warded off. Niedecker’s poetry casts such interruptions as crucial, necessary responses to crisis.33 Acting as both temporary reprieves and opportunities for new and improvisational arrangements of everyday life, the floods bring a halt to business as usual by reconfiguring the settled orders of life on dry land. As I have already stressed, the speakers of Niedecker’s poems rarely experience the temporary suspensions of the flood in a straightforwardly pleasurable fashion. Niedecker’s ambivalence toward the seductions of the flood is palpable in this poem she wrote around 1964: Some float off on chocolate bars and some on drink Harmless, happy, soft of heart This bottle may breed a new race no war and let birds live Myself, I gripped my melting container the night I heard the wild wet rat, muskrat grind his frogs and mice the other side of a thin door in the flood34

Those who willingly surrender to the flood are the indulgent and the intoxicated—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“Hung Up in the Flood”  201

cially surprising in a poet who famously immersed her own sense of self so fully in the surrounding landscape that she could write: “Early in life I looked back of our buildings to the lake and said, I am what I am because of all this—I am what is around me—those woods have made me.”35 Yet once self and environment are this deeply intertwined, the dissolution of landscape risks dissolving the self. Niedecker’s speaker resists the sweeping flood even as she recognizes it as a fluid, utopian space in which human acts cease to control the landscape. Simply riding along with the flood, she suggests, can risk an endangering abandonment of self-preservation instincts. As the poem puts it, one becomes “happy” only by becoming “soft of heart.” For a poet for whom rigor and clarity were the necessary qualities of strong verse, such a price is high indeed.36 The poem recognizes the ambivalent effects of Black Hawk Island’s tenuous, somewhat oblique relationship to modernity and its management projects, while refusing the limited terms of injury or freedom that are usually offered to the autonomous subject. Unregulated and unprotected by modern infrastructure, the island’s licenses arise from the same source as its dangers. Yet unlike the resilient subjects of the twenty-first century, who need hardly notice the flooded subways as they hail water taxis on their way to work, Niedecker’s flooded subjects are more exposed—and more resilient because of that exposure—than the anticipatory, defensive attitudes that contemporary resilience thinking allows. Gripping a “melting container” that seems to dissolve into the very landscape it defines itself against, kept awake by the chewing of animals on the far side of a “thin door,” Niedecker’s speaker is compromised by and vulnerable to the very flood that she also experiences as a source of pleasure and potential. These pleasures often come in the form of relief from the everyday realities of dry land—its particular rhythms and permissions. Writing to poet and long-time correspondent Louis Zukofsky, Niedecker describes the lightness that flooding brings to previously immobile orders: “I waded yesterday all around dislodging big blocks of wood, oil drums etc. After land comes out, you can’t lift these heavy things but during a flood you just touch them with your little finger and they move. So at least I got ’em off my path to the river and the low parts of my lawn. Mud hens swam right along beside me. Was very warm, I knew some weather was brewing.”37 The “heavy things” that suddenly become unmoored when buoyed by water suggest 202  Beyond Sustainability

that order may be both more adaptable and context specific than we think. Such a representation of the flood as a source of variability links it, yet again, with the mid-twentieth-century practice of open form. In the letter, the high waters bring buoyancy to the usual laws of movement, allowing for the improvisation of new activities and new projects. Like the drunken euphoria of the man and woman who, in one poem, motorboat their way over the fields that normally separate their home from town, the flood generates a zone of possibility that both liberates settled orders and provides its own temporary pleasures.38 The choice, one might note, is not between order and disorder. Unlike traditionally modernist incarnations of nature’s power to dissolve, which include William Carlos Williams’s depiction of Nietzschean creative destruction in Spring and All, Niedecker’s flood actively generates its own rhythms and possibilities of everyday life. Even as the flood levels differences between land and water, human and animal—the poet, after all, counts herself one among the flock of mud hens—it also produces an alternative order governed by its own inner logic. In these poems, Niedecker emphasizes the disruptive and productive effects of the flood. Just as it halts the usual rhythms of everyday life, it also opens up opportunities to establish an alternative order with its own set of possibilities. Rather than holding to a single sense of working order, Niedecker asks us to consider a relationship to the environment that is more flexible and adaptable than that proposed by contemporary theories of resilience. By valuing the maintenance of the status quo across variable conditions, resilience thinking tends to understand variability as a problematic, if inevitable, feature of systems that must be carefully managed. It pins its hope on withstanding changing conditions in such a way that we might emerge, triumphantly unscathed, on the far side of disaster. While the rhetoric of flexibility adopted by resilience might thus be said to simply harness flexibility in its (re)production of the ever-same, Niedecker’s flooded subjects try out new, contingent responses to changing conditions. Moreover, even as the flood and its newfound permissions recede, Niedecker suggests that the return of dry land never quite repairs or reassembles its original, preflood state. For her, that is, variability is not simply a method of shoring up existing social and environmental configurations during times of crisis. Even as she enables us to critique the impoverished concept of flexibility operating in contemporary practices of resilience, she “Hung Up in the Flood”  203

restores resilience ecology’s early impulse to reject equilibrium ecology in favor of a provisionally unfolding world. Such a sense of variation that troubles and enables return is central to the following poem that Niedecker wrote in the late 1950s: Springtime’s wide water— yield but the field will return39

The poem undermines expectations regarding environmental disruption in ways that I have traced throughout this essay. Perhaps more acutely than any of the other works treated here, it deprivileges the human perspective and its landlocked, propertied interests by rendering the field—rather than the flood—the transient space. In the world of the poem, it is the field that rises and falls, ebbs and flows, and whose eventual return is anticipated. The poem’s striking placement of “yield”—in a single line set off from the left margin—suggests that the poem is just as concerned to transform our sense of productivity as it is to trouble our expectations of the aftermath of environmental disruption. Niedecker relocates the scene of harvest, whose “yield” measures agricultural prosperity, to the desolate waterscape of the flood, reversing the historical view of wetlands as polluted and nonproductive examples of wasted nature.40 For the poem, productivity belongs to the transition from one state to another, with “yield” acting as the poem’s hinge, across which the poem tips back and forth, keeping both flood and land alive as alternative possibilities. The poem appears to stage the cyclical temporality of seasonally recurrent rhythms that return the same field that was lost. However, it also troubles and critiques this desire for identity in repetition through the complex repatterning of its meter. Thus, while one might wish to read the poem as the repetition of the same metrical pattern—four lines of stressed-unstressed-stressed syllables with “yield” falling across the line to complete the second metrical unit—“yield” can also generate a metrical irregularity that reorganizes the poem’s prosody. On this reading, the opening line reads stressed-stressed-unstressed, followed by “yield,” 204  Beyond Sustainability

which even as it insists on submission and giving way quietly reshuffles the prosody of the poem, bringing it to its closing anapests (unstressed-unstressed-stressed). Thus, in a poem of apparent regularity devoted to patterns of seasonal recovery, Niedecker constructs a counterprosody, hinging on the practice of yielding that disrupts and reorganizes the poem’s metrical order. At the same moment that the poem promises the return of the field, it just barely alters its metrical patterns. Such metrical flexibility, which becomes a governing principle of free verse in general and mid-twentieth-century open form poetics in particular, indicates variability as a feature of form itself. Thus, while “yield” suggests the muted giving way of the flood and the recovery of the field that follows, it also—on the level of prosody— asserts a quietly redistributive force. Unlike Walden Pond, which erases whatever ripples come to sully its surface, Niedecker’s poetics of the flood suggests that restoration always involves the reshuffling, however reticent, of what is to be restored. Here the field’s return promises the persistence of the ordinary, everyday earthbound world while offering a difference so small that it can be perceived as nearly no difference at all. Remarking on such “reticent” or “recessive action,” Anne-Lise François has drawn attention to the minimal reconfigurations of the world that are missed in positivist theories that define action through consequence.41 François points toward the “formal problem,” at once a critical and a perceptual one, “of how to evaluate, recognize, and name a dramatic action so inconsequential it yields no peripeteia.”42 The difficulty of registering events in which nothing or nearly nothing happens poses a specific challenge for environmental thought because of its all-too-frequent habit of oscillating between the extremes of the absolute difference of catastrophe and the absolute identity of preservation. Such minor, almost missable events bear distinguishing from recent critical work that addresses the gradual but accretive trajectories of environmental violence. Rob Nixon has argued that contemporary environmental discourse needs new ways to apprehend and address the “slow violence” of climate change, pollution, and other creeping disasters. Such a problem is, once again, a formal one. He asks: “how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies “Hung Up in the Flood”  205

of our image-world?”43 By inviting us to bear witness to the potential effects of elusive, minor acts that cannot be easily represented by spectacular narratives of crisis, Nixon’s work may appear to keep company with Niedecker’s attunement to the minute transformations that frequently remain unacknowledged in environmental thought. For Nixon, however, “slow violence is often not just attritional but also exponential.”44 Like the slow seep of toxins through an ecosystem, these invisible trajectories develop over time, their effects multiplying until they amplify into large-scale disasters. Given time, slow violence achieves a scale that retroactively proves the significance of what might once have been but no longer can be overlooked as being next to nothing at all. Against this recuperative logic, with its desire to expand what can be understood to be an event worthy of attention and action, Niedecker stages environmental transformation in terms that are resolutely noncumulative and noncatastrophic.45 Her quiet registration of minor events asks us to reconsider the narratives of dramatic crisis or culmination in which environmental transformation is typically cast. And if such alterations call on us to lay down the usual habits we bring to crisis response, they also open up new ways of thinking about environmental remediation by suggesting that repairing damage need not require the recovery of initial conditions. Unlike the defensive, anticipatory posture of the resilient subject, Niedecker’s practice of yielding suggests that surviving the flood necessarily involves becoming changed, however slightly, by it. If poetry has helped us find our way through the contemporary impasses that structure environmental thought, one might, at this point, be justly wary of literalizing Shelley’s famous cry that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”46 Poetry can hardly be taken as prescription or mistaken for policy, and art’s much-argued-for autonomy from social and political practice becomes especially crucial to the work of a poet like Niedecker, whose relationship to political movements, from the Popular Front to protests against the Vietnam War, remained perennially fraught.47 Yet while her poems can hardly sustain a consistent, prescriptive stance, her flooded subjects do ask us to assume a different relation not only to standard critiques of resilience, particularly those that emphasize flexibility and adaptability as the privileged techniques of neoliberal governance, but also to the conceptual paradigms that underwrite the temporalities of so much contemporary 206  Beyond Sustainability

environmental thought. By testing practices of resilience against the mid-twentieth-century practice of open form, the underlying rigidity and nonnegotiability of contemporary disaster response can be measured against the uncertain, variable contours of poetic form. Niedecker’s flooded speakers model an openness to disruption that remains eclipsed by the discourse of resilience in contemporary environmental thought. To call such a poetry ecological or ecopoetic is to name a relation between aesthetics and practical life that also acts to contain that relation within the ecological. In a recent conversation led by Angela Hume among contemporary poets Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Evelyn Reilly, and Jonathan Skinner, this negotiation of the limits of ecological concern became central. Could one talk about endangered species without speaking of capital? Hillman asked. Skinner went further, claiming the crossing of disciplinary divides as the defining feature of ecopoetics, stating: “focused on crossing, ecopoetics explores the difficulties and opportunities at the boundary.”48 For Niedecker, ecological concerns keep company with social and political ones such as governance, modernity and its marginalizations, and the regulation of everyday life. Her poetry complicates the contents of ecopoetics’ prefix by reminding us that ecology, like poetry, is itself a highly mediated terrain that shapes, and is shaped by, an array of sometimes competing forces. However obliquely we imagine such a relation, ecopoetics suggests that poetry might offer some remediation—as indirect, fugitive, and recursive as it will no doubt be—of ecological emergency. Suggestive not only of the desire to recover from or repair environmental damage, such remediation also draws upon poetry’s own mediating capacities to make palpable what might otherwise remain beneath or beyond the threshold of direct perception. Like Niedecker’s practice of yielding, which refigures even as it enacts the return of the field, such poetry asks us to apprehend the more elusive but no less real variability of aesthetic and environmental forms.

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10 • Reading the Environs: Toward a Conceptual Ecopoetics Joshua Schuster

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 everyday data and junkspace.1 Conceptual poetry views language more as matter than content, data than semantics, 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, skeptical, 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, canonizing 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: Reading the Environs  209

ecopoetry is a mode that, while adhering to certain conventions of traditional nature poetry, advances beyond that tradition and takes on distinctly contemporary problems and issues, thus becoming generally marked by three primary characteristics: an ecological and biocentric perspective recognizing the interdependent nature of the world; a deep humility with regard to our relationships with human and nonhuman nature; and an intense skepticism toward hyperrationality, a skepticism that usually leads to condemnation of an overtechnologized modern world and a warning concerning the very real potential for ecological catastrophe.4

Many tropes that conceptual poetry harnesses particularly well, such as “hyperrationality” 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 environmental 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 210  Beyond Sustainability

absolutely ecological, risk-free, and impregnable to questioning—such as wilderness, sustainability, biodiversity, interconnection, earth, friendship, stewardship, life. These terms have been used over the past century to expand consciousness about distressed environmental conditions. But they also have been used to deflect or replace these concerns with agendas that questionably favor some ways of life over others or end up policing what counts as nature. Often it is hard to tell what the local, let alone global, results of using these environmentally identified terms will be, as language is inherently open to future reconfigurations and unplanned recontextualizations. The same goes for planning for future environments. As Bruno Latour remarks, “No one knows what an environment can do.”6 Similarly, we don’t necessarily know in advance what makes a poem do ecological work. This “no one knows” is already a demand for experimentation with aesthetic forms and conceptual openness to keep up with how environments change. To this end, I would like to propose four themes for reading conceptual poetics in light of a critical ecopoetics where the definition of what makes a poem ecological is both open-ended and carefully directed. These four themes emphasize what conceptual poems do unusually well when poetry is focused on its own medial properties. I will also argue that each of these themes bears some special insight into the conceptual stakes of ecopoetics.

1. Concept/matter interfaces. Conceptual poems experiment with the conjunction of ideas and materials, and the very material or medium used to build a poem is often the motivating aesthetic and formal properties of the poem. Conceptual poems explore the lives of media on their own terms and pay particular attention to media-specific textures. The matter of media can be defined widely, including physical objects such as plants, minerals, or typewriters, the software and hardware of digital media, the use of other poems as found objects, and the language specific to radio, internet, cafés, or genres themselves from elegies to restaurant reviews. Ecology, too, is the study of the lives of materials, media, and the agential occurrences that make up any particular ecosystem.



2. Reversibility of surface/depth metaphors and affects. Surface reading can be aligned with digital humanities claims that we need to take the sea of information floating Reading the Environs  211

around us at face value. Conceptual poems often harness big data or similar largescale genres of information into a poem without value judgments on the content. Yet the thrill of the data sublime cannot be separated from the boredom factor of sifting through algorithm-generated conceptual poems. Reader responses to conceptual poems run through cycles of detachment and libidinal investment, disaffection and swoon. Probably the most well-known conceptual reversals are Kenneth Goldsmith’s “boring unboring” and “uncreative writing” as a mantra for reteaching creative writing.7 As previously mentioned, the history of environmental thought reveals several instances of the reversal of meanings of terms. A similar swing in affects pervades contemporary environmentalism, where despair and enthusiasm, dread and determination, commingle to create a sense of frustrated urgency confronting supercomplex ecological problems.

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 intellectual 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.



4. Textual cruelty. Conceptual poems often make outlandish or impossible demands on the reader either to pore over a massive volume of words or not read at all. Reading can shade into punishment, but it should be evident that I am talking about an aesthetic experience that calls attention to itself as such. Conceptual poetry can at times be involved in texts made from highly disturbing content, but all conceptual poetry is implicated in an examination of the protected space of the art object. Conceptual poems fill more consistently a conceptual demand rather than an ethical demand, reminding readers that art can be at odds with manifest statements of ethics but still contribute to further thinking about how to imagine

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problems that pervade the planet. In the context of an expanded approach to ecopoetics, it can certainly be the case that the most anti-ecological poem can raise further ecological thought about how the aesthetics of harm cognitively maps specific media and environmental conditions.

Conceptual ecopoetics emphasizes how the creation and mobilization of concepts in a work resonate with the medium or material manifestation of the work. By refracting the message of a poem through its material conditions and following the detours of its medial properties, a conceptual ecopoem can allow us to see how a poem ripples throughout its surrounds. Instead of trying to demarcate the ecology of poetry with preset visions of the good or sustainable, we can study the various ways that poetic forms intersect with environmental forms. Ecopoetics can uncouple itself from its own normative modes of addressing nature and of forming and defending the canon, instead following poems where they want to go, opening unforeseen ways of ecological knowing. Ultimately, all the radical artifices of conceptual poetry make for great ecopoetic devices—repetition, fakery, austerity, mechanical reading and writing, depersonalization, refusal of meaning, measuring language by weight or scale or density. Being open to any aesthetic device allows us to follow through on how these devices produce environmental effects on the page and in the world. This essay analyzes a few of these classics of conceptual poetry to better understand the ways they interact with their ecological means and contexts. It then offers a reading of Adam Dickinson’s The Polymers, which expressly combines tropes of conceptual poetry and ecopoetics. A Poetics of Conceptual Materialism Conceptual poetry is haunted by an old debate in the conceptual art world over whether the emphasis on concepts entails a lassitude or even a disdain toward the material components of the work. The question of the “dematerialization of art,” launched by Lucy Lippard in the late 1960s, turns on how conceptual art came to favor ideas over commodified objects.8 Lippard’s phrase is poised on the opposite side of another famed 1960s formula declaring that the medium is the message. These two Reading the Environs  213

poles—medium and dematerialization—are updated in conceptual poems that attend closely to the aesthetic qualities of materials and media themselves. In conceptual poems, the shape of words, books, paper, the mechanics used to manipulate these, and the complex material assemblages of objects are themselves taken as aesthetic properties and generative constraints. Already here a compelling parallel can be seen with an ecopoetics that attends to basic materials such as wood, stone, oil, and plant and animal products that are the foundations of humancentric ecosystems. Bridging the two poles of medium and dematerialization, Craig Dworkin’s “Fact” consists of a list of the material and chemical ingredients that go into whatever medium the poem appears on. When published on paper, the poem begins: 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 214  Beyond Sustainability

the bacterium E. coli, which rejects the code after a few reproductions—is a fairly conventional Romantic lyric (it begins: “any style of life / is prim . . .”).10 The bacterium gene “reads” this new sequence in its cell by expressing a matching protein sequence that Bök regards as the bacterium producing its own poem. He plans to produce a book along with other multimedia works to document the bacterium’s transformation. The biotechnological and ecological implications of the work are inextricable and complicate each other’s claims for artistic promise. D. radiodurans can survive just about any harsh environment, including nuclear radiation, and can subsist in outer space. Bök claims that poems inscribed into the genes of the bacterium would outlast humans and be recoverable by other life forms well into the future. The bacterium hosts a bio-art parasite that carries the message of a human remainder after human extinction; it is both an extension of the human self-image and an entity that can leave humans well behind. However, Bök skirts questions of whether it is ethical to manipulate another life form in order to leave messages of our own lyrical ingenuity forever embedded inside. The bioethical quandaries that this poetry experiment raises are themselves part of the art project, which is what all bio-art works aim to do. This bio-art work treats DNA as the organism’s essence and as convertible information, an instrumental view of biology that has been heavily critiqued in science studies for the past few decades. Donna Haraway points to the current “fetishization of the gene,” and Evelyn Fox Keller adds that, in overemphasizing the agency of the gene, “what is specifically eclipsed in the discourse of gene action is the cytoplasmic body, marked simultaneously by gender, by international conflict, and by disciplinary politics.”11 Although Bök’s bioethical assertions are chosen narrowly to favor his own project, and he relies on several clichés about art seeking immortality and poetry being about life, this experiment makes tangible a number of complex questions about human, animal, environmental, and scientific collaboration. What could human and animal communication look like beyond linguistic norms and despite biological and cognitive gaps? How is human-animal communication mediated by scientist-organism experimentation? And how might poetry, at the edges of language, explore and intervene in such dialogues? Another major work of conceptual poetry explores not the human-animal threshold of communication but the relations between words and machines, where the Reading the Environs  215

vehicle of meaning is just a stretch of vehicles, the traffic jam. Kenneth Goldsmith’s Traffic is a transcript of twenty-four hours of traffic reports given every ten minutes on New York radio station WINS. Here is how the poem begins: 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

Here is how it ends: 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 positions, 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 216  Beyond Sustainability

the notion of the dematerialized art object, turning the material conditions of the work into a transient stage for the formalist interaction of conceptual conceit and linguistic realization. Curiously, then, Perloff ’s reading of the tenor of the poem performs a vanishing of the vehicle in all its material versions. Oil, exhaust, and engine are nowhere to be found in her reading, which focuses on the aesthetics of moody, information-hungry drivers as analogous to digital-age readers on information highways. Yet while we are asked to look under the hood of language, no such request for analysis is made for the hood of the car, the delirious high capitalism of New York City, and the fossil fuel system that the car, city, radio, and poem run on. However, just as Dworkin’s poem demonstrated, these earthly, material conditions have as many formal, generative, and conceptual stakes for language art as the shape of words on a page. Formalist-materialist readings of the shape and sound of language are featured often in criticism of conceptual poetics, but material relations between things and persons—the world of the poem and the world the poem is situated in— are strategically underreported.15 One reason for this tendency is that arguments over the referential connections between words and things are seen by conceptual poets as too tied to expression, context, identity, and other extraliterary social concerns. These subject-intensive themes and lyric norms are said to appear tired and staid in comparison to new media-savvy decontextualizing formal procedures such as copying, pirating, and hacking. Much conceptual poetry wants to sidestep long-standing debates over how to make referential language more meaningful, politically effective, or emotional and instead approaches language as a thing itself, something that can be reformatted, reassembled, and delivered to us by a variety of genres that themselves can be explored for their stylistic contours. But reading for concepts or for the formalist-materiality of words need not exclude other ways of reading or applying conceptual poetry’s tools to other problems in the world. Copying, pirating, and hacking have never been divorced from political struggles over property, propriety, and social hierarchies. Words in their mass, shape, and weight raise issues of how language is stored, sorted, and transported; the energies, labors, social systems, and emotional resources needed to make such language; the global nodes and hubs of language; and how the machines that mediate language also mediate our relations with the planet. Reading the Environs  217

Cultures of Recycling One of the reasons why conceptual poetry has been slow in thinking through its own ecological implications has to do with the tendency of the poets to refer to new media culture as the default context of the work. Internet culture is imagined as a digital sensorium that seems to run on its own endless sublime of information. Kenneth Goldsmith, in Uncreative Writing, describes conceptual poetry as riding on the waves of the new media culture and infrastructure that bubbled up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He refers to this conceptual-digital world as “a textual ecosystem,” adapting the phrase “media ecology” already used by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s.16 Goldsmith’s phrase employs the metaphor of an ecosystem to account for the way that media technologies spread and adapt in space and time. “If we think of words as both carriers of semantic meaning and as material objects,” he writes, “it becomes clear that we need a way to manage it all, an ecosystem that can encompass language in its myriad forms.”17 Yet an ecosystem is more than just a paradigm for inhabited medial space or systems dynamics. Ecosystems are variously stressed and stabilized; they are lived systems that are contingent, prone to sudden changes and long-developing processes, fought over, collaborative, and fragile and resilient at the same time. Media ecologies are embedded in these turbulent global ecologies, too. In one of his essays, Goldsmith connects global ecosystems to linguistic and digital ecosystems by way of the procedure of recycling: “Words now find themselves in a simultaneous condition of ubiquitous obsolescence and presence, dynamic yet stable. An ecosystem: recyclable, repurposed, reclaimed.”18 The notion of textual recycling covers a wide range of ways to manipulate text, including sampling, mash-up, found material, copying, mimicking, plundering, splicing, deleting, and recoding. It is fair to say that living organisms perform all of the above through various biological processes; hence, the ecosystem tag seems apt for both textual and material repurposing. However, one problem with the metaphor and procedure of textual recycling as analogous to material and biological recycling is that textual recycling relies on the intrinsically reusable, reiterative properties of texts and language. In comparison, recycling plastic, for example, requires multiple machines, complicated engineering prowess, and outside energy sources that belie the ease of tossing something like 218  Beyond Sustainability

clamshell plastic packaging into a blue bin. The malleability of words is built into words, language must be portable, and grammar relies on the interchangeability of parts and subject positions. It is impossible to use language without recycling it. Practically any text can be recycled, any message can be retransmitted, and this recycling can occur ad infinitum without much concern for the wear and tear of either the message or the medium. Furthermore, the cost of changing parts is effectively nil. Linguistic recycling tells us very little about the process and details of recycling other forms of matter, such as a car or a computer battery. All machines allow for changing parts, but cost (in the short and the long term), engineering skill, and availability of materials are significant factors. The notion of media ecology and the ecology of e-waste and computers do indeed intersect, but they have dramatically different fates before and after they interact.19 Ultimately, moving text from one place to another, or quoting another author, or grabbing language from a database, or retyping a text tells us very little about an ecosystem’s material and biological processes of recycling. The circulating Möbius triangle icon stamped on paper and plastic, which was designed in the ecotopian moment of the early 1970s, is deceptively dematerializing. Try recycling your computer yourself versus recycling all the text you find in one day on the internet into a poem. Furthermore, it is hard to recycle without downcycling (resulting in a less functional object), which is not much of a problem with text or image plundering. Repurposing words via textual or cultural recycling belies the hard problem of recycling durable consumer goods. All objects have complicated life cycles that cannot be summed up by motifs of recycling or use and reuse. There are various ways that poetry can begin to attend to these material life cycles. One of the most explicit early examples comes from Walt Whitman, who presumes all atoms are continuously repurposed and imagines the ongoing transformations of grass into bodies into writing. Whitman also confronted the gothic reuse of morbid, decaying organic material in “This Compost,” which made him queasy but did not dissuade him from the idea of a universal system of recyclable materials. It is possible to find his adaptation of compost into poetics a canny form of biomimicry yet still question the ease by which such recycling is imagined in poetics in comparison with the intransigence, solidity, and rather slow transformation of most materials. Jed Rasula, in This Compost, remarks that linguistic composting procedures are long-standing tropes in making poetry a “truly reReading the Environs  219

creational capacity, one that redefines ‘recreation’ as original participation.”20 Rasula extends the ecological practice of composting to the creative reuse of old texts: “In the compost library books have a way of collapsing into each other, not in the improvements of more ‘authoritative’ editions or versions, but by constant recycling.”21 Composting is one way that recycling happens in language and landscapes, but it does not describe all linguistic forms and means of reuse and material resistance to repurposing. For a different example of the confrontation between linguistic recycling and material recycling, consider Evelyn Reilly’s Styrofoam, which begins: Answer: Styrofoam deathlessness Question: How long does it take? & all the time singing in my throat little dead Greek lady in your eternity.saddle [hat: 59% Acrylic 41% Modacrylic [ornamental trim: 24% Polyvinyl 76% Polyamide holding a vial enwrapped Enter: 8,9,13,14,17-ethynyl-13-methyl7,8,9,11,12,14,15,16-octahydro-cyclopenta-diol (aka environmental sources of hormonal activity (side effects include tenderness, dizziness and aberrations of the vision (please just pass the passout juice now!)22 220  Beyond Sustainability

In Reilly’s poem, there are both overlaps and antithetical relations among the plasticity of language, the plundering and repurposing methods of conceptualism, the malleability of carbon chains, and the inflexible and often painful durability of consumer plastics. The deft recycling of the language of the chemical composition of Styrofoam into a lyric composition appears on the same page as evidence of the nefariously slow degradation of the plastic. The ambiguous way that linguistic recycling circulates on the same page with bits of “Styrofoam deathlessness” precipitates side effects including “tenderness, dizziness, / and aberrations of the vision.” These effects are desirable if they are lyrically evoked but noxious when induced by biologically stifling synthetic compounds. Reilly’s book ends with a list of “synonyms of polystyrene” that takes up a whole page with chemical formulas and identifying numbers. She arrives independently at the same point as Craig Dworkin’s “Fact”: a wall of words saturated with chemical agents that can produce either poetry or toxic household objects. Plasticine Poetry As I have argued so far, there are reasons to welcome but also to question the association 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 Reading the Environs  221

declare a pure allegiance to conceptual methods of composition. The polymer form most consistently becomes the compositional design of this-enchains-that. Each poem is made from a series of links and attachments strung together in lines evocative of polymorphic plastic causality: “He tried horn, shellac, rubber, and hair / He tried shrink-wrap, juice bottles, and Teflon / He tried rinsing and repeating.”23 Dickinson’s conceptual ecopoetics comes into focus when he substitutes the motifs of reason and resin for concept and matter. Resin is one of the forms of plastic the book names (resins can occur naturally from plants; industrially made synthetic resins are used in the polymerization or hardening processes of some plastics). In “Obsessive Compulsive,” resin makes phrasal units stick together all too much: “a people / of the resin, and the resin is composed of sky, and / it composes the sky, and the people walking down / the street are the strings of resins.”24 For every poem in the book, Dickinson offers a brief and often cryptic mention of “Materials and Methods” used as compositional premises and procedures. For “Obsessive Compulsive,” he writes, “Polysyndeton as behavioural grammar.” 25 This prompt suggests that the ribbons of chains that make up polymers are in this poem similarly composed through the use of polysyndeton, a linguistic repetition compulsion in this case with the serial usage of the words “resin” and “and.” Dickinson’s discourse on method, offered as a kind of appendix to the poems, states that “in sequencing these resins the following experimental protocols were observed,” thus identifying every poem as a kind of resin or synthetically congealed concoction.26 Resin is just slightly removed from reason in this book, just as method is not so methodical. But referring to these poems as resins engages a semimethodical, semiexperimental approach to the cosequencing of concept and matter. I attribute a kind of reason-based poetics to conceptual poems as they privilege the logic of preset procedural rules for composition over spontaneous whims of personal expression. Reason and resin or conceptual conceit and matter are not always tied together directly, nor are they autonomous or detached. The two act as interfaces for each other or incitements to write and read through each other. Dickinson writes, “We have nothing to read but our chains. Our chains reread us precipitously.”27 The conceptual ecological stakes of these poems force readers to take on the experiential point of view of polymers. In other words, the book asks, 222  Beyond Sustainability

What is it like to be plastic? How do the plasticity of language and the material properties of plastics read and write each other? How can we use the procedural reasons of conceptual poems to understand the procedural reasons of polymers? We live in a polymerized world, and so do these poems. The conversations in these poems between concept and matter sometimes work synthetically and sometimes antithetically, allowing readers to see how we might approach the plastic world and plastic poetry imaginatively as well as cautiously. Let’s then posit the provocation of Dickinson’s book this way: we should be as smart as our plastics. The chemists who invented plastic already inscribed a bold burst of creativity into the material. A deceptively simple repeating chain of atomic bonds can be woven like a tapestry at industrial scales into matter that is as flexible as the capitalist age it was invented in. Plastic is ordinary, cheap, disposable, easy to ship, colorful or colorless, and ingenious as antitheft packaging in the time of ubiquitous branding. Plastic is as smart as or smarter than us, and its flexibly accumulative structure outlives us. “A polymer is the largest idea to survive serious thinking,” Dickinson writes.28 The longue durée of polystyrene objects was an early impetus for Timothy Morton’s term “hyper-object” to account for the ecological impact of things that last for thousands of years.29 Plastics toy with our mind as well as our body. Serious chemistry produces multicolored and textured plastic that appeals to our kaleidoscopic emotions, understands our deep-seated need for bargains, is genially performative, and heartily accepts being molded into kitschy shapes that express our inner sentimentality. Instead of disdaining this material, casting a relentless judgment over it as antipathetic to everything deemed natural, Dickinson’s poems scout with both worry and care the different forms plastics take in everyday life. We are learning to live with plastic and learning to die with it; we need to learn to outthink it if not outlive it. Conceptual ecopoetics welcomes a Thoreau of plastics (rather than only ponds), a Whitman of petrochemicals (rather than only grass). Dickinson’s poems are often written according to instructions (the procedural concept) and in turn offer instructions on how to read plastic in as many polymorphous ways as plastic is shaped. In “Coca-Cola Dasani,” he takes up one of the objects that raises the most environmental hackles, the plastic water bottle, and rearranges all the verbiage on the container alphabetically: Reading the Environs  223

a a a alps and applicable at at before best beverages bicarbonates bottle bottled calcium chlorides clean collection commerce composition content cool dissolved do dry exist fat facilities fact fluoride French from in ion limited magnesium mineral mineral neck nitrates not not nutrition of of of place potassium recyclable refill refund refund registered salts saturated see significant silica sodium source spring store sulphates the the trademark where where zero30

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 double 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 224  Beyond Sustainability

poetry’s claim to be against expression speak to a world where plastics are highly expressive? How does the lyric deal with plastic in a way that does not reconfirm a certain environmental narrative that sees any human invention of the nonnatural as a moral mistake? The poem “Carl Jung Steps onto a Plane” tries to allegorize the close encounter of lyric with Lycra: Lunch boxes and lipstick are our mothers. We live in formative melodies composed by the organs it takes to be awakened to emollients and parabens. As great as the meaning of fertilizer to our victory over the animals, so great is also its meaning for a motif of flight risk. We watch the air-conditioner fight the escalator as a rite of passage in the arbitrary arboretum of the shopping mall. Food courts organize appetites for deforestations weeping with shelf lives. ..................................... It’ll always be easier to culture mediums than to think autonomous products of the unconscious. The wind informs the wing and the coffee mug the hand. Goodbye and thank you for having me.31

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 Reading the Environs  225

maternal comfort (“lunch boxes and lipstick”) and sensitivity to “formative melodies” and indicates that these sentimental mainstays are now brought to us capably by the makers of petrochemicals. Plastic objects mold the psyche in collaboration with the neuroplastic cerebrum. The replacement of organics made by ecosystems with organics made in labs or enclosed consumer spaces has made life more convenient but also riskier. The poem mentions synthetic fertilizer replacing animals in fields, but this same substance is used in the homemade bombs that are signature objects of an era of terrorism. Where do the lyric and its affective-reflective mode stand here? This lyric-expressive poem hovers around tones of woe and nostalgia; it does not just want to give up here, yet the poem has a hard time avoiding these outcomes. The drift of the poem into the “rite of passage” shopping mall and its consumer glories then feels rather expected. The later lines of the poem seem to be resigned to these “culture mediums.” The gracious “goodbye and thank you” at the end of the poem feel as if present from the beginning. If this poem were at the end of the book, it would sit in judgment on it. But being placed early on in the volume, not far from the opening poem with its repeated “hellos” spoken as if from the view of bits of plastic floating in bodies and oceans, takes some of the edge off the great moral expectations such a lyric poem might be expected to hold. There is a temptation to stage a binary between lyric poetry (expressive, nostalgic, naturalist) and conceptual poetry (awash in the present, technophilic, full of junk, happily plastic), but Dickinson’s catchy use of ephemera, appendixes, tables of method, molecular diagrams, and “pataphysical conceits” helps to undo the tendency of readers to posit one genre against another. Ultimately, the lyric then becomes one tool among others to explore the world of plastic we are immersed in. These are strange ecological times, when we know more about ecosystems than ever before but feel there is little we can do about the environmental distresses piling up. We have multiple ways to create real-time images of the earth and its environments undergoing change, but the saturation of images and knowledge does not mean that there is any consensus on what the next steps are toward establishing norms for ecological good across the globe. In this context, plastic is quickly being politicized as much as it is aestheticized; it is already foundational to our psyche, senses, and cultural practices, even if we rarely think of it this way. Sensible reminders to reuse and recycle plastic are one way to gradually politicize 226  Beyond Sustainability

the material and make out of it a culture not of consumer disposables but of longterm living with materials. Another way to scramble the code of plastic as flexible commodity is to outmaneuver it, retaxonomize it, pirate it, or think through its composition to effectuate other forms of culture, as Dickinson shows. “He tried to keep it moving, amorphous and crystalline, nylons running with leaks, acrylic accounting and covalent committees covertly dispersing available light, but it all became rigid at room temperature.”32 This is how we learn to live with the planet we have changed in ways we are still coming to understand, to come to terms with every landscape and every material we find, neither to dominate it nor to be dominated by it. The tools of conceptual ecopoetics are about learning what we can do with concepts and their various junctures with materials and landscapes rather than trying to territorialize in advance the norms of ecology and poetry. To be fully aware of the ecology we are embedded in is a kind of impossible demand, perhaps the most astounding conceptual and material project since capitalism.

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11 • Hard Days Nights in the Anthropocene Joan Retallack

1 ANTHROPOSCENES ANTHROPOSCENITIES a storm is slanted toward the trailer park no immigrant ripple pith inescapable the class of all thoughts that can’t entertain themselves upend would-be transcendents lurking here shine baukna beacon no ship won’t go down in that gesamtkunst stormy sea bacon sizzles in the non-stick pan what is mean (or meant) in this who cares to know one dimension grinds noisily by another in a routine demonstration proper response: enjoy the friction avoid the collision beautiful silver fish jumps out of water and explodes in air transnipple Q: will some of us never be post-Dada long days nights are hot cold ugly too wet too dry for too many on this planet

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 Anthropocene 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, posthumously 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 Hard Days Nights in the Anthropocene  229

is sadly instructive of the way that poetic imagination is ignored in deference to so-called philosophical rigor. In fact, just as everything Boethius valued—aesthetic sensitivity, poetry, justice, his own life—is in danger of being crushed, his genre-swerving writing practice generates enough energy to keep his mind in motion. Multiple disciplinary perspectives in polylogue with his subjective position deflect certainty even when he is most obviously seeking it. He believes in the powers that Greek and Roman culture bestow on an educated man. He has deep trust in both reason and Christian faith and, not least, in the ethical force of secularly administered justice. A good deal of the discourse in early parts of The Consolation reads like a jurisprudential plea of innocence. Later, philosophy turns theological, concentrating on the problem of evil: how can a just God allow the ruin of an innocent man? What gives this text authentic liveliness is the irresolvable paradox in all this. Rather than stilling the emotions with premature conclusions or relinquishing hope and desire—a Stoical method popular at the time—Boethius is trying to figure things out with an ethically courageous Aristotelian approach of heightened intellectual and imaginative activity of soul (one’s whole nature) in accordance with virtue (excellence in the use of one’s distinctive capacities). For Aristotle, this activity is the good life, is happiness, if it is accompanied by good fortune—sadly not in Boethius’s case. But it saves the quality of life in the meanwhile, which is where he (and everyone else) actually lives.3 For Boethius, who translated Aristotle into Latin, the virtuous use of his capacities turns out to be the strenuously pleasurable practice of composing verse, the exhilarating practices of philosophical reasoning and theological inquiry. In early sections of The Consolation, Boethius is playful. He enjoys poking fun, satirizing the Platonic notion that poetry incapacitates minds for serious thought. Lady Philosophy rails at the Muses of Poetry: “Who let these whores from the theater come to the bedside of this sick man? . . . They will nourish him only with their sweet poison . . . kill the fruitful harvest of reason . . . They do not liberate the minds of men from disease, but merely accustom them to it.”4 Boethius is undeterred. Throughout his sometimes meditative, sometimes angry and grief-stricken rethinking of the nature of justice, knowledge, truth, and that great test of his Christian faith, the problem of evil, poetry is essential.5 At one point he writes, “But I see that you 230  Beyond Sustainability

are weary from listening so long to this difficult and extended discourse and want to be refreshed by poetry. Listen then, and gather your strength for what is to be explained.”6 Each genre engages Boethius’s considerable erudition and ingenuity in ways the other can’t. Neither forestalls the grim outcome, but Boethius’s activity of prosimetric composition enables him to engage with the scope of what it means to him to be human. Almost to the end—his execution was brutal. Has the problem of evil transmogrified into the problem of planetary ruin in the Anthropocene? In our posthumanist fantasies, the contradictions remain similar: hubristic Anthropos = omnipotent God. If Boethius’s imprisonment included the conceptual traps of a contradictory belief system, here is a parallel narrative of our own captivity: the beautiful Enlightenment mind was also a slave owner, a misogynist, an imperialist. The tech wizards and geoengineers who promise to bypass consequences of earthly degradation appeal to our escapist fantasies but will let us down. Both God and Anthropos-ex-machina have much to answer for but little to say about the virtual reality apocalypse unfolding on our world screens. Ah, but this discourse has turned much too murky. Perhaps we can be refreshed by poetry. 2 The Reinvention of  Truth it can be startling to hear a sentence begin with we the place of absence so precisely marked point of departure for something tragic and brutal and mistaken many times over never farce in a bright saturation of urgent green urgent orange crackup blue and white can anything be settled by pleasure v reality principle debates or lack thereof in Greek or Roman or Viennese classicisms in the monster meadow all seemed to disappear in the happy meadow oh the happy tears ah the spot of red that Hard Days Nights in the Anthropocene  231

snapped the chaos into place this much can be conjectured at last that Isaac Newton’s world was more involved with magic than mechanics may have been what made gravity conceivable7

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 conversation 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 colonialism. 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, sociopoetic 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 providential 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, 232  Beyond Sustainability

building a different kind of home for ourselves and the living world.”9 Noting that the poor are already suffering the greatest effects of climate change, he argues that we must make a truly “democratic Anthropocene” whose first principle is equality. As a legal scholar and theorist, he sees this project as one that combines law and politics with heightened attention to the language of values we can no longer simply assume are part of the nature of America: “Equality is established through language: by naming it, we place it in the common world of artificial principle where all may see it, call on it, and fight over its meaning . . . where an artificial principle such as equality can acquire reality. . . . It is only in this artificial world that autopoetic creatures turn back to examine their own self-replicating orders and change them, deliberately and reflectively.”10 This would have to mean a dauntingly extensive transfiguration of our sense of ourselves in relation to all species, races, genders, ethnicities, and classes as they are currently defined within contexts of economic expedience—a movement toward a planetary “we” that signals collaboration rather than zero-sum competition. It’s an improbable and therefore necessary vision. Purdy reminds us that the challenge we face is not a matter of politics and jurisprudence versus humanist and aesthetic revisionings; it is a need to rethink all of the above. And, I must add, it is a matter of the poetics of our conversation with the rest of nature. How can poetry help? The enormous world archive of poetries since ancient times in every culture has expanded the scope of human explorations and experiments by means of the peculiar logics that poets draw from linguistic instincts and intuitions. Those are acts of embodied imagination redolent with evolutionary connectivity—one way to think about poetic investigations proliferating internationally under the sign of ecopoetics, though not restricted to that label. As forthright discourse is regularly swayed by ingenious rationalization, Homo linguistica (now and then sapient) may not fully recapitulate the multitracked neurophysiological developments of phylogeny— we can’t really feel what it is to be a bat—but we are a key part of its future. The most important work of poets is to transgress what appear to be the limits of imagination— to exceed the apathetically probable. Without radically odd wagers on constructive alterities yet to be realized, we may be unable to “exhume the future,” as Genre Tallique puts it, from the historical follies of the Anthropocene. In that sense, poets, scientists, philosophers, visual and performance artists, and composers of every kind are Hard Days Nights in the Anthropocene  233

working on an interconnected project. We can’t really know where we are going and that is precisely why we must experientially, experimentally make (poesis) our way by means of considered poethical wagers. “The question has always been,” Tallique writes, “do we have enough courage of imagination in history’s forlorn medias res to exhume the future from our most ruinous habits of mind?”11 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 (interconnectedly) that of other species. There is much debate about just when the Anthropocene 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 populations 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? 234  Beyond Sustainability

The Ventriloquist’s Dilemma Birdsong entered our words and left with migratory echoes insufficiently dispersed. We are not designed to perceive most of what surrounds us or to fully understand the rest. Maybe it’s true nonlinear equations drove the teenager off the road. The self-propagating slope remains unhindered in its x-y axis. (It’s always difficult to state these things rigorously.) Sound waves break on the shore making some feel unwelcome. And too, there’s that conspicuous absence of real metaphor in nature. Sorry, I think I meant to say there’s that conspicuous absence of real nature in metaphor. Someone will claim real is a misleading construct. Someone will claim night flew into a tree. Those five words in a line.

“Anthropocene” is an instance of what we do with words. Stalking its etymological import in dictionaries, we quickly stumble upon this force field: ancient Greek anthropos, “man,” given eminent domain as generic “human” + cene, new, recent. “Recent” highlights planetary changes coincidental with the thriving of Homo sapiens beginning a scant twelve thousand or so years ago—a period known as the Holocene, made comfy for our species by the retreat of Ice Age glaciers.13 During that time—our time—the cascade of geological, oceanic, and atmospheric transformations became dramatic enough to merit a new linguistic lens. The lens that is etymologically embedded in the word “Anthropocene” has shifted a hitherto limited whole-earth consciousness toward new geometries of attention, revealing the sociopolitics of human desire in every ecological system. The benignly neutral “Holocene” (holo, “whole,” + cene) began rather innocuously before exploding into what might be termed, with some poetic irony, a whole new shebang—a word Walt Whitman happened to like a lot. The shebang (North American archaic for “rough hut” or “shelter”) out of which great civilizations would emerge was fueled by seemingly limitless ingenuity in turn fueled by impatience with Hard Days Nights in the Anthropocene  235

rough hut existence. Fast-forward just a bit in geological time and, slap-bang in the middle of current pockets of enormous affluence (from Latin, “flowing toward”), notice the apotheosis of the word “shelter.” Formerly any shield from the elements, even a hat (shelter: “1611 R. Cotgrave Dict. French & Eng. . . . a couert, shrowd . . . or shadie place,” OED), “shelter” now straddles two characteristic human interests—an inborn need for survival and an acquired desire for opulence. “Shelter” in the roaring 1980s in fact entered the lingo of panurban, multimillion-dollar real estate. In the same vein as the earlier use of “cottage” to refer with modesty to one’s palatial home, shelter magazines contained photo displays of mansions of the otherwise unimaginably affluent. Even as fuming (smog-heavy) skies continued to exonerate the pathetic fallacy, the play on humble country house or rough hut amused the megawealthy with barely discernible meanness. Meanwhile, etymologies steer us toward a poetics of truth via the natural and naturalized selection of everyday usage. Words in dictionaries, as J. L. Austin points out, are catalogs of what we care about. He writes, “our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations.” He goes on to characterize these words as having passed the “test of the survival of the fittest.”14 While there are many more distinctions than are found in dictionaries and while women have contributed to usage as well as men, this observation of language development as an embodied part of natural selection is enormously significant. The constantly changing feedback loops of usage give us hints about why. The OED and its equivalents in every language rival the book of Genesis and its equivalent in every culture as ceaselessly fertile creation myths of human consciousness. There are, however, feedback loops affecting language and consciousness that will always exceed an OED’s historical account of usage as well as the book-bound logic that gave us the pathetic fallacy. Nature (uncomplicatedly defined as mountains, meadows, trees and sheep, seas and skies . . . the whole shebang of our biosphere) has come to reflect our moods, whims, aspirations, and desires—their material consequences—all too well. A phrase like “the leaden evening sky” used by a nineteenth-century writer—even one, like Thomas Hardy, aware of industrial pollution—to express foreboding as a Romantic mirroring of human emotions in 236  Beyond Sustainability

natural phenomena did in fact register the interpermeability of human consciousness, culture, and the rest of nature as we understand it in the twenty-first century. The difference is that rather than reading the sky’s mood as spiritual augury, we now think first about the toxic particles suspended in it. In both cases, it is an act of the symbolic imagination that makes connections between experiences and ideas, theories and observations in the sciences as well as the arts. Since skies darkened by smog are literally leaden, the prose of the Clean Air Act can strike us as more urgently relevant than that of the Romantic novelist. It may be, but as Gertrude Stein argued and enacted in her poetic essay “Composition as Explanation,” it is by means of our poetics that we simultaneously discover and compose the times in which we live.15 4 None Too Soon Located in memories without precedent, fine stock of syllables not yet squandered in pliant affirmation. Don’t be scared. The more non-existent of the gods are the only ones counting your blunders. Hard to forget what’s never been known for sure. Yearning minds conjure thoughts bound to deform the musculature of the most determined smile. The only worthwhile thought experiment of which I’m currently aware is to construct a logical space-time bracket in which all of us —animal, mineral, vegetable—are sometimes dreaming.

The semiotics of “Anthropocene” is most importantly, and alarmingly, the recognition that nature and human culture are not only inextricable but—to the extent that human desire is estranged from its natural habitats—are in an inherently agonistic intrarelationship. This can be parsed as a conceptual matter—the agon playing out among linguistically engineered perspectives and values—idealism versus pragmatism, “truth” versus truth, ethics versus politics. But life-or-death stakes are not pacified by abstract nouns. John Dewey in Art as Experience puts it Hard Days Nights in the Anthropocene  237

frankly: “If the gap between organism and environment is too wide, the creature dies.”16 Dies from consequences of inattention. And we can add with current perspective that the dying creatures can take other creatures and the environmental equilibrium with them. Dewey’s aesthetics is deeply ecological, asserting the connection of heightened sensory attention (focus of all the arts, linking them to survival) to the life-or-death matters we have in common with every living being in our shared material world. Heightened, focused sensation also happens to be a source of pleasure for our species. So what goes wrong? Thinking about the role of art in the Anthropocene from Dewey’s point of view is to realize how important it is to create geometries of attention that reconnect us with the material correlates of our sensorium. That is most delightfully manifest in the visual and auditory, spoken and sung relation to language so vibrant in children. Does Dewey (unlike D. W. Winnicott in Playing and Reality) forget about the serious pleasures of children’s play?17 Or is he perhaps reflecting a less joyfully exploratory childhood common in his time? Either way, his essays and books on educational reform inspired and mentored many hands-on experiential pedagogies, mostly in K–12 settings but including the structure of Black Mountain College, where he was mentor to its founder and served on the board of trustees. Dewey’s education theory is closely linked to his aesthetics. In Art as Experience, he points out that we are the sole species that attempts to get by without being fully alive to our surroundings. Surroundings that of course include the materiality of language that children enjoy so much in nursery rhymes, alphabet books, and the visual hijinks and songs of Sesame Street. Dewey points out that unlike other animals, the human is prone to abstraction and estrangement—a tendency to preoccupation celebrated in the nineteenth century as a sign of the richly distracted inner life of the Romantic male genius. (Distracted women were targets of psychopathological diagnoses unless their distractions had to do with child and household management, that is, those appropriate to the role of wives and mothers.) However construed, we humans of every gender are often out of our senses and rarely use them to the utmost of our capacities. Dewey puts it this way: To grasp the sources of the esthetic experience it is, therefore, necessary to have recourse to animal life . . . The live animal is fully present, all there, in all of its actions . . . 238  Beyond Sustainability

All senses are equally on the qui vive. As you watch, you see motion merging into sense and sense into motion—constituting that animal grace so hard for man to rival . . . The dog is never pedantic nor academic.18

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 crabbedness 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 sapient—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 Hard Days Nights in the Anthropocene  239

imagination. But can it meet the challenge of being in meaningful conversation with the scientific, mathematical, philosophical, and sociopolitical in a time of cascading environmental change? 5 The Magic Rule of 9 Your sonic suit will never be a perfect fit. You’ll learn to get by. Just don’t assume all art is all about victory over death all the time. Not to say the meantime isn’t as good a time as any to enjoy not being dead. In the swell of many a meantime, many have diverted themselves with great success. Hence civilizations’ discontents and greatest hits. Take for instance the magic rule of nine. That the sums of all numbers within the sums of all multiplicands of 9, up to and including 9, equal 9— 1×9=9, 9=9; 2×9=18, 1+8=9; 3×9=27, 2+7=9; etc. This is numerically melodious (bird sings in tree) to the species that longs for more to it than a first glance affords. Someone will say, If you really think this is magic you don’t properly understand the decimal system (bird falls out of tree). Who among us doesn’t long for magic. Who among us truly understands the decimal system.

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 240  Beyond Sustainability

that no matter how constructive one wants to be, there is a cluelessness and risk constant. Despite an evolutionarily fine-tuned neural apparatus, now augmented by regular AI upgrades, we are clumsier, more benighted creatures than we like to imagine ourselves to be. Fierce Love Story To start with a taxonomic impediment and yet go on. Looking always for news of another kind. Great saturated patches of color stall in their rumble toward the horizon. Squeeze-tube dearth overflows with biblical pornography. No greater love, they had said. Sit back and watch in awe as one sophisticated critter eviscerates another on a color-coded screen. Much too bright or not enough to be convincing descriptions of nature. For the disillusioned, there are these three things: 1. sonorous cowboys hitch up primate dungarees 2. to restore the consolation of silence will remain the role of objects 3. four little girls, along with fragile creatures of many other kinds, will wander in and out of this color field just beyond our grasp

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 reasonably 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 Hard Days Nights in the Anthropocene  241

our species out of self-centered, shortsighted tendencies. All the while, the extent to which nature and culture are inextricable is reflected in a largely unexamined but habitually enacted conflation of need and desire in almost everything we do. Directly to the point of our habits, our ethos under pressure of an accusatory Anthropocene is what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus, our “present past” as it becomes “embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history.”20 In this situation of human behavior, naturalized and reified as history, the future can be nothing other than the probable. So much for Hegel’s romanticized future as “absolute possibility.”21 Bourdieu writes this in The Logic of Practice: The most improbable practices are . . . excluded, as unthinkable, by a kind of immediate submission to order that inclines agents to make a virtue of necessity, that is, to refuse what is anyway denied and to will the inevitable. . . . The habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices—more history—in accordance with the schemes generated by history.22

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) materialize 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 survive) 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. 242  Beyond Sustainability

The Long and Short of It Thought Experiment Feed long and short-beaked pigeons the same food same food. Exercise long and short-legged quadrupeds in the same same manner. Expose long and short-haired sheep to the same climate climate. Direct every time-line toward the same same set of nesting horizons. How long can the we and the they go on this way? One step takes longer than anyone thought possible and is still hovering in the air. Its shadow is swelling with prophecy and indecision. Earth is growing hotter and colder, wetter and drier. All the animals are on the move. Although the heart of the cruelty continues to elude our metrics, let any long or short life-span equal exactly the same function of x divided by the violence of zero. The math is adding up to an old geometry of the tragic spectrum—more the terror, less the pity. Must that be the long and short of it?

Bourdieu developed the notion of habitus while studying the Kabyle, ethnic Berbers in northern Algeria, but quickly saw it to be equally applicable to European 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 negatively 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 Marxist, whose critiques might be invaluable but whose solutions would be quixotic. Hard Days Nights in the Anthropocene  243

Thinking in terms of necessary “extravagances,” what about a tool kit designed to encourage poethical wagers? Assuming the importance of conceptual shifts and swerves, curiosity, the courage of gravitas and humor, collaborative exploration, conversational play respecting reciprocal alterity, what might such a tool kit require? What might surprisingly (improbably) contribute to pedagogies that stimulate life-long imaginative vitality of mind, practices of reading, writing, creating that engage/invent multiple logics, multiple geometries of attention? In other words, commitments to transformative acts of poesis.24 The Problem of Evil: Projectile Legacies The Problem of Evil is a theological puzzle: How can an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God allow injustice to thrive, allow the innocent to suffer? exceed that of its creators. anthropomorphic god will never Solution: The moral compass of an

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.

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off-kilter glances glance off breakaway silhouettes shooting gallery silhouettes already riddled with holes _________________________________________________ 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. Soon the children and all the pets went home. Boys and girls and dogs and cats. Rabbits and hens and chickens and one little yellow duck. They all went home. 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 Hard Days Nights in the Anthropocene  245

According to researchers who study chaotic patterns in nature and culture, history, like weather, is a complex dynamic system of order and disorder best characterized by the phrase “pattern-bounded indeterminacy.” It is chaotic in the sense defined by twentieth-century computer-assisted sciences of complexity. This means that historical development has a sensitive dependence on initial conditions—what is widely called the butterfly effect. What history has been—what it foretells—cannot be a closed case. Its phenomenal and textual dynamism derives from the fact that it is constantly subject to modification and reinterpretation—physically as well as textually. How we continually reinterpret, how we contradict and transgress our own interpretations, how we act on all of that in concert with the unerring reliability of chance will have as much or more to do with what happens in the future than most of what historians, economists, sociologists, political scientists, and pundits predict (the probable), except insofar as their predictions provide important material for reinterpretation and reinvention. Here is where the inertia of the pedantic and academic can cause harm. By prohibiting an extravagant play of intellect and imagination in creative conversation with the urgent matters of our time, the timidly fearful pedagogues who create docile bodies and minds can make language stall in its etymologically rich capacities for reinvention. The Reinvention of Truth Acknowledging the gap between reality and representation makes it hard to limn differences among realities and representations. Such difficulties can lead to epistemological despair. This is where poetry comes in. —D i t a F r ö l l e r , New Old World Marvels noft there ere rein invent iono trut 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 246  Beyond Sustainability

of things by human minds a late 19th century author wrote Niagara Falls is nature committing suicide yes/no the quest for a statuesque naturalism goes far beyond even that far beyond the German Alpine film or soundtracks with too many violins rapturous as women continue to succumb know what I mean? neither a saffron anecdote nor a whispered truth the didactic impulse can be violent and not so brief less what it teaches than what it makes you want

Hard Days Nights in the Anthropocene  247

Notes

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 University Press, 2016), 79. 4. For more on the poetics of nonhuman animals, see Aaron M. Moe, Zoopoetics: 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 Postcolonial 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 Criticism,” 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 Directions, 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 University 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 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), and C. S. Giscombe, Prairie Style (Champaign, 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 elsewhere we omit the preposition “about” in order to emphasize that thinking is 250  Notes to Pages 3–5

not a meditative activity (as in “to think about”) but a creative, conceptual one. Other contributors to this volume use this locution as well. 17. For a theory of recessive action, see Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 3–65. 18. Other efforts include Brenda Iijima, ed., Eco-Language Reader (Callicoon, N.Y.: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs and Nightboat Books, 2010); Joan Retallack, “What Is Experimental Poetry and Why Do We Need It?” Jacket 32 (April 2007), http://jacketmagazine.com/32/p-retallack.shtml; and Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011). 19. See Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction,” in The Ecocriticism Reader, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), xx, and Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 13. 20. Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, eds., The Ecopoetry Anthology (San Antonio, Tex.: Trinity University Press, 2013), xxviii–xxix. 21. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, “Avant-garde Anti-lyricism,” in The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 451–459. 22. M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004), 6. 23. Glotfelty, “Introduction,” xxii–xxv. 24. Scott Knickerbocker, Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 9. 25. Keller, “Green Reading,” 605. 26. John Elder, Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); Guy Rotella, Reading and Writing Nature: The Poetry of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991); and Gyorgyi Voros, Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997). 27. Leonard M. Scigaj, Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 7; Quetchenbach, Back from the Far Field, Notes to Pages 5–8  251

147–148. 28. J. Scott Bryson, ed., Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002), and The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), 5, 11. 29. Jonathan Skinner, “Editor’s Statement,” ecopoetics 1 (2001–2002): 7. 30. Jed Rasula, This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 3–4, and Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). 31. Rasula, This Compost, xi. 32. Lawrence Buell, “Toxic Discourse,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 642, 656. 33. Ibid., 640. 34. Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). See also Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 266. 35. See Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defense of Poetry,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Neil Fraistat and Donald H. Reiman (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 511. See also the discussion of Shelley’s “general sense” of poetry in Oren Izenberg, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011), 16–22. The influence of Heideggerian thought on ideas about ecopoetics and ethics can be seen in Matthew Cooperman, “A Poem Is a Horizon: Notes Toward an Ecopoetics,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 8, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 188, and Knickerbocker, Ecopoetics, 17–18. Timothy Morton argues for the ways in which Heidegger is detrimental to ecopoetics; see Morton, Ecology without Nature, 168–175. 36. Bate, Song of the Earth, 282. 37. Scigaj, Sustainable Poetry, 21. 38. David W. Gilcrest, Greening the Lyre: Environmental Poetics and Ethics (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002), and Felstiner, Can Poetry Save the Earth? 39. Felstiner, Can Poetry Save the Earth? xiii–xiv. 40. Ross Gay, Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). 252  Notes to Pages 8–10

41. Morton draws on Luce Irigaray and Emmanuel Levinas for this claim; see Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 47. 42. “Beyond greenness”: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). “Beyond nature”: Morton, Ecology without Nature, and Dana Phillips, The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). “Beyond nature writing”: Karla M. Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace, eds., Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001). “Beyond wilderness”: William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 69–90. See also the PMLA special section “The Sustainable Humanities,” published in 2012, with contributions featuring titles such as “Beyond Imagining, Imagining Beyond” (Lynn Keller) and “After Sustainability” (Steve Mentz). 43. See Sarah Jaquette Ray, The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013). 44. See Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, eds., Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (New York: Routledge, 2015); Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011); and Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), x. See also Kimberly N. Ruffin, Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), and Kimberly K. Smith, African American Environmental Thought: Foundations (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007). And see Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012); Catriona MortimerSandilands and Bruce Erickson, eds., Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); and Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 45. Glotfelty, “Introduction,” xxii–xxv. Also see Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, eds., The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Notes to Pages 10–11  253

Pedagogy (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002). 46. See Margaret Ronda, “Mourning and Melancholia in the Anthropocene,” Post45: Peer Reviewed (June 6, 2013), http://post45.research.yale.edu/2013/06 /mourning-and-melancholia-in-the-anthropocene/. 47. Giovanna Di Chiro, “Environmental Justice,” in Key Words for Environmental Studies, ed. Adamson, Gleason, and Pellow, 101. 48. Stephanie LeMenager and Stephanie Foote, “The Sustainable Humanities,” PMLA 127, no. 3 (May 2012): 572. 49. Margaret Ronda, “Anthropogenic Poetics,” Minnesota Review 83 (2014): 102, and Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr, #Misanthropocene: 24 Theses (Oakland, Calif.: Commune Editions, 2014). 50. Gabriel Gudding, Literature for Nonhumans (Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 2015), 27; see also Margaret Ronda and Tobias Menely, “Red,” in Prismatic Ecology, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 22–41. 51. Retallack, “What Is Experimental Poetry and Why Do We Need It?” 1. Making Art “Under These Apo-Calypso Rays” 1. John Ashbery, “Growing Up Surreal,” ARTnews 67, no. 3 (May 1968): 41. Lawrence Buell notes, “The nuclear generation probably does differ from its forebears in its emphasis on annihilative apocalypticism (the ‘prediction of an imminent end to history controlled by no God at all and followed by the void,’ [Douglas] Robinson succinctly defines it), but it is a change of emphasis and not a new conception. The concept of annihilative apocalypse itself is as old as Lucretius” (emphasis Buell’s). See The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 299. 2. Lynn Keller, “Beyond Imagining, Imagining Beyond,” PMLA 127, no. 3 (May 2012): 581. 3. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, “Apocalypse Fatigue: Losing the Public on Climate Change,” The Guardian, November 17, 2009, https://www .theguardian.com/environment/2009/nov/17/apocalypse-public -climate-change. 254  Notes to Pages 11–20

4. Lawrence Buell, The Enivronment Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 285. 5. Ibid., 285, 308. 6. Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 122. 7. Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2004), 104–107. 8. Ibid., 107. 9. Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), 177, and Ulrich Beck, “Risk Society and the Provident State,” in Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology, ed. Scott Lash, Bronislaw Szerszynski, and Brian Wynne (London: SAGE Publications, 1996), 40. 10. Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life, 202–203. 11. Ibid., 205–206. 12. Kathleen Stewart and Susan Harding, “Bad Endings: American Apocalypsis,” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 290. 13. M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer, “Millennial Ecology: The Apocalyptic Narrative from Silent Spring to Global Warming,” in Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America, ed. Carl G. Herndl and Stuart C. Brown (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 41. 14. Jorie Graham, Sea Change (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 32–34. 15. Graham, Sea Change, 3. 16. Ibid., 4–5. 17. Ibid., 5. 18. Ibid., 41. 19. Ibid., 42. “Positive feedback loop” is a phrase often used in connection with global climate change, since many of the changes generated by the earth’s warming themselves amplify the warming. An example is the albedo effect: dark surfaces of land and water that emerge with the melting of glacial and polar ice absorb the sunlight’s heat, accelerating the warming process. 20. Graham, Sea Change, 6. 21. Jorie Graham, interview by Dierdre Wengen, “Imagining the UnimagNotes to Pages 20–26  255

inable: Jorie Graham in Conversation,” phillyburbs.com, April 2008, www .joriegraham.com. 22. Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life, 205. 23. Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning,” in The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 68. 24. Graham, Sea Change, 25. 25. Ibid., 25–26. 26. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 141. 27. Buell, Environmental Imagination, 300–301. 28. Ibid., 301. 29. Graham, Sea Change, 14. 30. Ibid., 15–16. 31. Buell, Environmental Imagination, 41–42. 32. Graham, Sea Change, 44. 33. Ibid., 20. 34. Ibid., 54. 35. Ibid., 56. 36. Evelyn Reilly, “Environmental Dreamscapes and Ecopoetic Grief,” Omniverse 32 (June 2013), http://omniverse.us/evelyn-reilly-environmental -dreamscapes-and-environmental-grief/. 37. Evelyn Reilly, Apocalypso (New York: Roof Books, 2012), 16. 38. Ibid., 18, 14. 39. Ibid., 11. 40. Evelyn Reilly, “The Grief of Ecopoetics,” Interim 29, nos. 1–2 (2011): 320–321. 41. Ibid., 322–323. 42. Reilly, Apocalypso, 111. 43. Ibid., 10. 44. Ibid., 75. 45. Ibid., 77. 46. Ibid., 85, 75. 47. Ibid., 90, 102. 48. Ibid., 81. 256  Notes to Pages 26–35

49. Reilly, “The Grief of Ecopoetics,” 322. 50. Reilly, Apocalypso, 78. 51. Ibid., 71. 52. Ibid., 82. 53. Ibid. 54. Robert Creeley, The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 132. 55. Reilly, Apocalypso, 83. 56. Ibid., 90. 57. Ibid., 99. 58. Ibid., 106. 59. Ibid., 98, 100, 103. 60. Ibid., 97. 61. Ibid., 110. 62. Ibid., 93. 63. Ibid., 87. 64. Ibid., 84. 65. Reilly, “The Grief of Ecopoetics,” 323. 66. Reilly, Apocalypso, 84. 67. Ibid., 76. 68. Ibid., 95. 2. “The Idiot Stone” 1. George Oppen, New Collected Poems, ed. Michael Davidson (New York: New Directions, 2008), 164, 70, and George Oppen, Selected Letters, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), 29. 2. Oppen, New Collected Poems, 343. 3. It is important to note John Gery’s study, Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996). While Gery does not address either Oppen or Rukeyser, his book pursues “the fundamental challenge that the concept of annihilation poses to poets in the nuclear age” (10). Notes to Pages 35–42  257

4. Muriel Rukeyser, Out of Silence: Selected Poems (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 117–118. 5. Francis Ponge, The Voice of Things, trans. Beth Archer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 70–71. 6. John Ashbery, Houseboat Days (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 42. Although he doesn’t mention this poem in particular, John Gery does devote a chapter to Ashbery in Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry. Gery focuses on Ashbery’s Shadow Train (1981), while drawing attention to the chronologically more pertinent volume The Tennis Court Oath (1962) for its explicit thematization of annihilation in poems like “A Last World.” See Gery, Nuclear Annihilation, 170–171. 7. Oppen, New Collected Poems, 228. 8. Oppen, Selected Letters, 30. 9. Ibid., 29–32. 10. Here it would be worth considering Oppen’s midcentury poems in relation to Raymond Williams’s notion of a “structure of feeling,” which aims to register “the undeniable experience of the present” before that experience has been captured by representation and whose language exists on “the edge of semantic availability.” See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128, 134. For an excellent distillation of Williams’s idea, see Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 24–27. Also see Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 25. 11. Oppen, Selected Letters, 236. 12. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2008), 10. 13. Oppen, New Collected Poems, 150. 14. Ibid., 70. 15. George Oppen, “The Mind’s Own Place,” in Selected Prose, Daybooks and Papers, ed. Stephen Cope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 37. 16. Oppen, Selected Prose, 29. 17. Oppen, Selected Letters, 29, 33. 18. Much later, in an unpublished poem entitled “All This Strangeness,” 258  Notes to Pages 42–48

1971–1975, Oppen reflects on the empty formalism of this place—“no place but the place”—recalling Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Un Coup de Dés”: “nothing will have taken place but the place itself ” (rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu). See Oppen, New Collected Poems, 345. 19. Autonomy is an explicit concern of Oppen’s: “There is a force of clarity, it is / Of what is not autonomous in us.” See George Oppen, Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 2003), 193. 20. Oppen, New Collected Poems, 58. 21. Ibid., 179. 22. Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), 202. 23. Oppen, Selected Letters, 140. 24. Ibid., 33. 25. Oppen, New Collected Poems, 8, 193. For an excellent evaluation of Oppen’s clarity, see John Wilkinson, “The Glass Enclosure: Transparency and Glitter in the Poetry of George Oppen,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 218–238. 26. For an excellent gloss of this dialectic, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, in which she quotes Theodor Adorno’s “The Idea of Natural History”: “the moments of nature and history do not disappear into each other, but break simultaneously out of each other and cross each other in such a way that what is natural emerges as a sign for history, and history, where it appears most historical, appears as a sign for nature.” The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 39. 27. Oppen, Selected Letters, 88. 28. Oppen, New Collected Poems, 150. 29. Oppen, Selected Letters, 88. 30. Oppen, Selected Prose, 174. 31. Oppen, New Collected Poems, 248. 32. Ibid., 256. This recalls the promise of philosophy for Wittgenstein: “philosophy must set limits to . . . what can and cannot be said.” See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (New York: Routledge, 2001), 114–115. 33. Oppen, New Collected Poems, 193, 179, 257. 34. Ibid., 261. Notes to Pages 49–52  259

35. Oppen, Selected Letters, 236. 36. Oppen, Selected Prose, 108. 37. George Oppen, New Collected Poems, 134. 38. See, for example, Timothy Morton: “Objects withdraw such that other objects never adequately capture but only (inadequately) ‘translate’ them.” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 19, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2011): 166. In this citation, Morton is drawing on the work of Graham Harman in Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago: Open Court, 2005). 39. Trevor Norris, quoted by Timothy Morton, “Coexistence and Coexistents: Ecology without a World,” in Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, ed. Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2011), 168. 40. Oppen, New Collected Poems, 178. 41. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 10. Walter Benjamin offers a compelling foil to Meillassoux’s “arche-fossil” in his Arcades Project. For example: “As rocks of the Miocene or Eocene in places bear the imprint of monstrous creatures from those ages, so today arcades dot the metropolitan landscape like caves containing the fossil remains of a vanished monster: the consumer of the pre-imperial era of capitalism, the last dinosaur of Europe.” See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 540. Also see Susan Buck-Morss, “Natural History: Fossil,” in her Dialectics of Seeing, 58–77. 42. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 21, 7. 43. Jordana Rosenberg, “The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present,” Theory and Event 7, no. 2 (2014): 3. For trenchant critiques that deepen this cautionary measure, see Andrew Cole, “The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies,” Minnesota Review 80 (2013): 106–118; Margaret Ronda, “Agency without Subjects,” English Language Notes 50, no. 1 (2012): 249–253; and Christopher Nealon, “Infinity for Marxists,” Mediations 28, no. 2 (2015): 47–63. 44. Andrew Cole, “‘Those Obscure Objects of Desire’: The Uses and Abuses of Objected-Oriented Ontology and Speculative Realism,” Artforum (Summer 2015): 323. 260  Notes to Pages 53–55

45. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 53. 46. Oppen, New Collected Poems, 50. 47. For a sustained reading of “From Disaster,” see Rob Halpern, “Becoming a Patient of History: George Oppen’s Domesticity and the Relocation of Politics,” Chicago Review 58, no. 1 (Summer 2003): 58–60. 48. Oppen, New Collected Poems, 165. 49. Oppen, Selected Letters, 42. 50. George Oppen, undated manuscript, quoted in Peter Nicholls, George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 56. 51. Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones, trans. Barbara Bray (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970), 70. 52. Oppen, Selected Letters, 329, 326. 53. Ibid., 88. 54. Here I am drawing on Karl Marx’s proposition from the 1844 manuscripts where he suggests how the human body might carry us beyond a social system of private property. Marx writes: “The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians.” In other words, because of their immediate contact with the machinery of the world’s making, the sensory organs are in a privileged position to access, register, and theorize the economic exploitations and depredations of capital in advance of our intellectual cognition. See Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. and ed. Martin Milligan, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/EconomicPhilosophic-Manuscripts-1844.pdf. 55. Concerning the concept of patiency, see Halpern, “Becoming a Patient of History,” 56: “Patiency is agency’s inverse and complement: to actively become a patient of history is, paradoxically, to will a suspension of an agency that has been already historically suspended. Patiency’s mood is one of openness: open to touch, open to penetration. Its grammatical mode is subjunctive, expressing contingency and desire, anticipation and uncertainty. There is also a linguistic patiency in which the grammatical patient denotes the subject of an intransitive verb. Moreover, patiency connotes an affective state of expectancy, whose object itself is suspended within a pathos of distance, whereby the patient fails to grasp her object within hardened structures of command that determine feeling prior Notes to Pages 55–60  261

to apprehension.” 56. Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 239. 57. Oppen, Selected Prose, 136. 58. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 64. 59. Ibid., 71. 60. Ibid., 138. 3. Visceral Ecopoetics in Charles Olson and Michael McClure 1. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 189. 2. Sandra Steingraber, Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books, 2001), 15. 3. Michael McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982), 21. 4. Charles Olson, Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 179–199. 5. Michael McClure, Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems, ed. Leslie Scalapino (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 29, 31. 6. McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 26. 7. Ibid., 24. 8. Ibid., 43. 9. David Meltzer, ed., San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2001), 158. 10. McClure, Of Indigo and Saffron, 28–31. 11. Ibid., 32. 12. Douglas Kahn, “Cruelty and the Beast: Antonin Artaud and Michael McClure,” in his Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 322–358. 13. McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 10. 14. Francis Crick would contribute to “Symposium on Michael McClure,” ed. John Jacob, Margins 18, no. 3 (1975): n.p. 262  Notes to Pages 60–68

15. McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 11. 16. Ibid., 97. 17. McClure, Of Indigo and Saffron, 44; Olson, Collected Prose, 182. 18. Tom Clark, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 292–294. 19. Charles Olson, “Under the Mushroom,” in Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews, ed. Ralph Maud (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2010), 88. See also Olson’s “Black Chrysanthemum” dream of June 17, 1958: “nothing is anything but itself / measured so.” Charles Stein, The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum (New York: Station Hill Press, 1987), 167–169. 20. Donald Allen and Warren Tallman, eds., The Poetics of the New American Poetry (New York: Grove Press, 1973), 416–417. 21. McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 26. 22. Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1938), 224–225. 23. Allen and Tallman, eds., The Poetics of the New American Poetry, 416–417. 24. Ibid., 417. 25. Michael McClure, Ghost Tantras (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2013), n.p. 26. McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 85. 27. Allen Ginsberg, Howl (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1956), 3; and Jack Kerouac, in Allen and Tallman, eds., The New American Poetry (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 414. 28. McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 86. 29. Olson, Collected Prose, 242. 30. McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 86, 88. 31. Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, The Complete Correspondence, vol. 1, ed. George F. Butterick (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1980), 79. 32. McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 41. 33. Ibid., 95–96. 34. Ibid., 59. 35. Ibid., 61. 36. See Michael G. Barbour, “Ecological Fragmentation in the Fifties,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New Notes to Pages 68–71  263

York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 233–255. See also Bruce Clarke, “From Thermodynamics to Virtuality,” in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, ed. Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 17–33. 37. McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 91. 38. Ibid., 89. 39. Ibid., 100–102. 40. Ibid., 45. 41. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 259. 42. McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 96. 43. Ralph Maud, Charles Olson’s Reading: A Biography (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 158. 44. See Richard M. Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011). 45. Clark, Allegory of a Poet’s Life, 278–279. 46. Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems, ed. George F. Butterick (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 179, 479, 565. 47. Maud, Muthologos, 217. 48. Olson, Collected Prose, 200. 49. Maud, Muthologos, 90. 50. Ralph Maud notes that the Proprioception essays “were written between October 1959 and May 1962, and thus span the mushroom experience.” See his Charles Olson’s Reading, 161. 51. “Proprioception” is first recorded in the 1906 scientific work of physiologist Sir Charles Scott Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, designating the perception of the position and movements of the body, the action of “proprioceptors”: “A sensory receptor which responds to stimuli arising within the body, esp. from muscle or nerve tissue,” from classical Latin proprius, “proper,” + “-ceptor,” “forming nouns denoting cellular receptors of the nature or for the type of substance specified by the first element.” Sherrington differentiates proprioception from exteroception (associated with the external senses) 264  Notes to Pages 72–74

and interoception (associated with the internal organs or viscera). See Eireene Nealand, “Beyond the Perceptual Model: Toward a Proprioceptive Poetics,” PhD dissertation, University of Santa Cruz, 2014, 7–12, for a helpful discussion. Despite his use of the adjective “interoceptive,” Olson’s sense of “proprioception” encompasses the visceral. 52. For an overview of Floating Bear, Kulchur, and Yugen, see Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips, eds., A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960–1980 (New York: New York Public Library and Granary Books, 1998). 53. McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 75. 54. Olson, Collected Prose, 252. 55. Olson, Maximus Poems, 634. 56. Olson, Collected Prose, 181. 57. Maud, Muthologos, 247. 58. Olson, Collected Prose, 182. 59. McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 100. 60. Kurt Hemmer and Tom Knoff, Rebel Roar: The Sound of Michael McClure (Palatine, Ill.: Harper College, 2008), 35 Minutes, Michael McClure Author Page, MPEG, http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/McClure.php, 5 minutes, 45 seconds. 61. McClure, Ghost Tantras, n.p. 62. Richard O. Moore, USA: Poetry, Michael McClure (WNET, 1966), 5 minutes; Michael McClure Author Page, MPEG, http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x /McClure.php, transcription of excerpt on PennSound, 1 minute, 40 seconds. 63. McClure, “Introduction to the 2013 Edition,” Ghost Tantras, n.p. 64. Michael McClure, Three Poems: Dolphin Skull, Rare Angel, and Dark Brown (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 101. 65. McClure, “Introduction to the First Edition,” Ghost Tantras, n.p. 66. McClure, Ghost Tantras, n.p. 67. In the “Introduction to the First Edition,” McClure suggests, “Pronounce sounds as they are spelled and don’t worry about details—let individual pronunciations and vibrations occur and don’t look for secret meanings.” His performances of Ghost Tantra 51 draw out the “GROOOOOOOOOOOOOOR” with contours of pitch and timbre not indicated in the text. Notes to Pages 74–78  265

68. McClure, “Introduction to the First Edition,” Ghost Tantras, n.p. 69. See Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 344–345, 443 note 71. 70. McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 49. 71. Olson, Collected Prose, 158. 72. Michael McClure, Fragments of Perseus (New York: New Directions, 1983), 39, 42. 73. See Heriberto Yépez, The Empire of Neomemory, trans. Jen Hofer, Christian Nagler, and Brian Whitener (Oakland, Calif.: Chain Links, 2013). For more on the cultural imperialism of U.S. abstract expressionism, see Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000). 74. McClure, Fragments of Perseus, 42. 75. For visceral poetics a challenge remains: is there a visceral articulation of the social (and vice versa)? For more on this, see Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010); Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); Eleni Stecopoulos, Visceral Poetics (Oakland, Calif.: ON Contemporary Practice, 2015); and Robert Kocik, Supple Science (Oakland, Calif.: ON Contemporary Practice, 2013). 76. Buddhist philosopher Alan Watts was also popularizing the term in his weekly radio broadcasts for Pacifica Radio station KPFA. 77. Gary Snyder, “Poetry and the Primitive: Notes on Poetry as an Ecological Survival Technique,” Earth House Hold (New York: New Directions, 1969). 78. McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 74, 92. 79. Ibid., 44. 80. Cary Wolfe, “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion: Language, Ethics, and the Question of the Animal,” in his Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 36. Jed Rasula makes Maturana and Varela’s concept of autopoesis central to ecopoetics in This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002). 266  Notes to Pages 77–79

81. Ibid, 1–2, 45. 82. Moore, USA: Poetry, Michael McClure. 83. McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 85. 84. Ibid., 95. In his discussion of the ecosystem as a cybernetic system, Ramón Margalef notes that his approach “makes unnecessary any concept of superorganism or of closed biocenosis, from which ecology has suffered so much.” See Ramón Margalef, Perspectives in Ecological Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 4. 85. McClure, Three Poems, 93. 86. McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 57. 87. McClure, Three Poems, 188–189. 88. Ibid., 94. Also see Niklas Luhmann, Observations on Modernity, trans. William Whobrey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 100. 89. McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 94. 90. Ibid., 17. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Penguin Books, 1974), 413–414. 91. Margalef, Perspectives in Ecological Thoery, 17. 92. McClure, Three Poems, 187–188. 93. Michael McClure, September Blackberries (New York: New Directions, 1974), 124–125. 94. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, “Afterword,” in their The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, rev. ed. (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1992), 254–255. 95. Jonathan Skinner, “Thoughts on Things: Poetics of the Third Landscape,” in Eco-Language Reader, ed. Brenda Iijima (Callicoon, N.Y.: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs and Nightboat Books, 2010), 9–17. 96. Alfred North Whitehead, The Function of Reason (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1929), 19. 97. McClure, Three Poems, 103. For twenty-first-century visceral poetics, see Will Alexander, Kaleidoscopic Omniscience (Cheltenham, Gloucester, U.K.: Skylight Press, 2013); C. A. Conrad, Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Seattle, Wash.: Wave Books, 2014); Brenda Iijima, If Not Metamorphic (Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 2010); Hoa Nguyen, As Long As Trees Last (Seattle, Wash.: Wave Notes to Pages 79–83  267

Books, 2012); Angela Rawlings, Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2006); Jordan Scott, blert (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2008); Eleni Stecopoulos, Armies of Compassion (Long Beach, Calif.: Palm Press, 2010), and Visceral Poetics (Oakland, Calif.: ON Contemporary Practice, 2015); and Lila Zemborain, Mauve Sea-Orchids (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Belladonna Books, 2007). 98. McClure, September Blackberries, 124. 99. Ibid., 126. 4. Playing in the Planetary Field 1. Duncan’s work does not fit well in critical rubrics that emphasize explicitly environmentalist poetry, such as those of J. Scott Bryson, The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), and Leonard M. Scigaj, Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999). 2. Here I follow Jed Rasula’s This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002) in conceiving of Black Mountain poetry broadly, so that it goes beyond those poets associated with Black Mountain College or the Black Mountain Review to include poets such as Muriel Rukeyser, whose poetics is in the same ballpark as projectivism. 3. See Eric Keenaghan, Queering Cold War Poetry: Ethics of Vulnerability in Cuba and the United States (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009). 4. Robert Duncan, Collected Essays and Other Prose, ed. James Maynard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 80. 5. Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (New York: Routledge, 2002). 6. Duncan, Collected Essays, 79. 7. Charles Olson, Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 247. 8. Ibid. 9. Stephen Fredman, The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 100. 10. Olson, Collected Prose, 261, and Duncan, Collected Essays, 44. 268  Notes to Pages 83–87

11. Duncan, Collected Essays, 45. 12. Duncan, The H.D. Book, ed. Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 562, 566–567, 565. 13. Robert Duncan, Robert Duncan: The Collected Later Poems and Plays, ed. Peter Quartermain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 4; Peter Quartermain, “Introduction: Discovery Making,” in Duncan, Collected Later Poems and Plays, xxv–lii, xxxii. 14. See, for example, Olson, Collected Prose, 243. 15. Duncan, Collected Later Poems and Plays, 4. 16. Olson, Collected Prose, 247. 17. Duncan, Collected Essays, 133. 18. Olson, Collected Prose, 240, 242. 19. Duncan, Collected Essays, 137. 20. Olson, Collected Prose, 160–161. 21. Duncan, Collected Essays, 79. 22. Duncan, The H.D. Book, 43. 23. Olson, Collected Prose, 166. 24. Here I draw on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s distinction between “the global—a singularly human story—and the planetary, a perspective to which humans are incidental” in “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories,” Critical Inquiry 41 (Autumn 2014): 1–23. 25. Duncan, The H.D. Book, 574. 26. Duncan sees the “Spirit of Romance” persisting in modernism, despite modernist and New Critical squeamishness about Romanticism and heterodox spirituality; he contends that H.D., Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, D. H. Lawrence, and even T. S. Eliot “hankered after strange gods.” Ibid., 53, 361, 539. 27. H.D., Trilogy (New York: New Directions, 1973), 8–9. 28. Duncan, The H.D. Book, 340. 29. Eric Keenaghan, “Life, War, and Love: The Queer Anarchism of Robert Duncan’s Poetic Action during the Vietnam War,” Contemporary Literature 49, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 634–659. 30. Duncan, The H.D. Book, 340. 31. H.D., Trilogy, 8. Notes to Pages 87–91  269

32. See Fredman, Grounding of American Poetry, 94–130, on circling and boundary work in Duncan. 33. Duncan, The H.D. Book, 401. Duncan explicitly links H.D.’s threatening “sea thrust” with Henri Bergson’s élan vital (340). As Donna Jones argues in The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 79, the politics of Bergson’s vitalism is suspect because it involves distinguishing between life that is really alive and life that is dead, parasitic, or corrupt. Vitalism can therefore turn into the fascist decision about who is worthy of living. In this context, Duncan reads the shellfish—or the individual heart—as holding out against the Bergsonian vital force that subtends thanatopolitics. 34. Duncan, The H.D. Book, 386. 35. Ibid., 340. 36. See, for example, ibid., 131, 167, 270, 289. 37. H.D., Trilogy, 9. 38. Duncan, Collected Essays, 128. 39. Ibid., 128–129. 40. In Niedecker’s poem “Paean to Place,” the quoted phrase “We live by the urgent wave / of the verse” refers to this passage. Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 265. 41. Nathaniel Mackey notes, “I recall [Duncan] once remarking in conversation that what he could not subscribe to in Marxism was the idea that there could be an end to a dialectic.” See his Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 113. 42. Walt Whitman: Selected Poems 1855–1892: A New Edition, ed. Gary Schmidgall (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 213. 43. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (London: International Psycho-Analytical Press, 1922), 86. 44. Duncan, Collected Essays, 68. 45. Ibid., 129. 46. Ibid. 47. Duncan, The H.D. Book, 501. 48. See Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental 270  Notes to Pages 91–96

Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22–28, for a discussion of these blue planet images and the environmentalism they sparked. 49. Duncan, Collected Essays, 127, 129, 130. 50. Duncan, Collected Later Poems and Plays, 44. 51. Robert Frost, Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1995), 236–237. 52. Ibid., 237–238, emphasis in original. 53. Ibid. 54. Duncan, Collected Later Poems and Plays, 45. 55. Michael Davidson notes that this line is from John Crowe Ransom’s letter to Duncan dated August 14, 1957. See Michael Davidson, “A Book of First Things: The Opening of the Field,” in Robert Duncan: Scales of the Marvelous, ed. Robert J. Bertholf (New York: New Directions, 1979), 64, 84n7. 5. “Beyond the Vomiting Dark” 1. See Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). 2. See Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257. 3. I borrow the term “terracentrism” from Marcus Rediker. For more on terracentrism, see Marcus Rediker, “History from below the Water Line: Sharks and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” Atlantic Studies 5, no. 2 (2008): 285. 4. Here I am referring to the long cultural history that follows in the wake of the revolt, one that includes, of course, the Academy Award–nominated 1997 Steven Spielberg film Amistad. 5. Robert Hayden, Collected Poems, ed. Frederick Glaysher (New York: Liveright, 2013), 49. 6. Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). 7. For more on the dream, see Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Penguin Books, 2015), 11. Notes to Pages 96–107  271

8. Willem Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, Divided into the Gold, the Slave, and the Ivory Coasts (London: Ballantyne Press, 1705), 282. 9. See Marcus Rediker, Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 127. 10. In the words of Thomas Clarkson: “It is an opinion, which the Africans universally entertain, that, as soon as death shall release them from the hands of their oppressors, they shall immediately be wafted back to their native plains, there to exist again, to enjoy the sight of their beloved countrymen, and to spend the while of their new existence in scenes of tranquility and delight: and so powerfully does this notion operate upon them, as to drive them frequently to the horrid extremity of putting a period to their lives.” See Thomas Clarkson, History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 155. 11. See Shawn O’Sullivan, “The Aquatic Invasion: A Drexciya Discography Review,” Exchange, http://ucexchange.uchicago.edu/index.html. 12. See Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra playing “Atlantis” (MP3), Saturn, 1967; “Hydra Decapita,” Otolith Group, http://otolithgroup.org/index.php?m= project&id=3; and “Ellen Gallagher: Coral Cities,” Drexciya Research Lab, http:// drexciyaresearchlab.blogspot.com/2007/10/ellen-gallagher-coral-cities.html. 13. See Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post–Civil Rights Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 14. See Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe, U.K.: Minor Compositions, 2013). 15. Hayden, Collected Poems, 49. 16. See W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folks,” in his Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1920), 43. 17. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 168. 18. George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (New York: Coward-McCann, 1970). 19. Melvin Tolson, “The Sea Turtle and the Shark,” in Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, ed. Camille T. Dungy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 222, selected from his “Harlem Gallery,” Harlem Gallery, 272  Notes to Pages 107–111

and Other Poems (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 330–331. 20. Dungy, ed., Black Nature, 223. 21. Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, “The Black Outdoors: Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman in Conversation,” Duke University, September 23, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_tUZ6dybrc. 22. I borrow the phrase “had no selves to defend” from Mariame Kaba. Her writing can be found at www.usprisonculture.com, on her Twitter account, @ prisonculture, and elsewhere. 23. Xandria Phillips, Reasons for Smoking (Seattle: Seattle Review, 2017), 17. 24. Monique Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1. 25. See Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” in Black Skin, White Masks, 85. 26. Vincent Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” American Historical Review 114, no. 5 (2009): 1233. 27. Jonathan Howard, “The Soles of Black Folk: Blackness and the Lived Experience of Relation,” ESU Review (2016): 17. 28. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 67. 29. Phillips, Reasons for Smoking, 17. 6. Writing with the Salamander 1. See Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011). 2. On how fear of foreign bodies and mercury poisoning creates discursive and material fields of toxicity, see Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012). 3. For a rare counterexample, see Indra Sinha, Animal’s People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), and Jina Kim, “‘People of the Apokalis’: Spatial Disability and the Bhopal Disaster,” Disability Studies Quarterly 34, no. 3 (2014), http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3795/3271. 4. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 6. Notes to Pages 111–119  273

5. Paul Shepard, “Introduction: Ecology and Man—A Viewpoint,” in The Subversive Science: Essays toward an Ecology of Man, ed. Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 2. 6. Brenda Iijima, ed., Eco-Language Reader (Callicoon, N.Y.: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs and Nightboat Books, 2010), i. 7. For more on the Salamander project, see Petra Kuppers, “Swimming with the Salamander: A Community Eco-Performance Project,” Performing Ethos 5, nos. 1 and 2 (2014): 119–135. 8. See Robert D. Davic and Hartwell H. Welsh, Jr., “On the Ecological Roles of Salamanders,” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 35 (2004): 406. 9. Salamanders appear in literary culture, too, as creatures in slipstream or magical realism settings, as transformative, liminal beings. For salamanders in the fantastical literature and moments of Aztec culture, see Paula M. Bruno, “Yin/Yang, Axolotl/Salamander: Mercè Rodoreda and Julio Cortázar’s Amphibians,” Confluencia: Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura 21, no. 1 (2005): 110–122, and for salamanders as a site of Jewish and Yiddish culture, see Yechiel Szeintuch, Daniella Tourgeman, and Maayan Zigdon, “The Myth of the Salamander in the Work of Ka-Tzetnik,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 3, no. 1 (2005): 101–132. 10. Lynn Keller, “Beyond Imagining, Imagining Beyond,” PMLA 127, no. 3 (May 2012): 581. 11. Ibid., 582. 12. Michael Davidson, Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), xiv. 13. Tobin Siebers, “What Can Disability Studies Learn from the Culture Wars?” Cultural Critique 55 (2003): 215–216. 14. Jonathan Skinner, “Gardens of Resistance: Gilles Clément, New Poetics, and Future Landscapes,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 19, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2011): 260. 15. Here I move away from a politics of enumerating and analyzing how “the figure of the disabled body is the quintessential symbol of humanity’s alienation from nature”; see Sarah Jaquette Ray, The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion 274  Notes to Pages 120–125

in American Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013). Ray also addresses a foundational text for ecodisability studies, Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (Brooklyn, N.Y.: South End Press, 1999). 16. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 130. 17. Ibid., 143–144, quoting Petra Kuppers, “Outsides: Disability Culture Nature Poetry,” Journal of Literary Disability 1, no. 1 (2007): 22–33. 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 Tradition (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 Recognition’ 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, Notes to Pages 125–148  275

is Ulrich Beck’s from his Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: SAGE Publications, 1992), 36. 11. Buell, “Toxic Discourse,” 652. 12. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “Politics Surrounded,” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe, U.K.: Minor Compositions, 2013), 17. 13. In a nonecocritical context, Amy Kaplan first makes this point in “Manifest Domesticity,” in The Futures of American Studies, ed. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 111–134. 14. Dinétah refers to Navajo territory. I use it specifically to signal that the current boundaries of that territory recognized by the United States are not in any sense uncontested and that Navajo understandings of their own territoriality ought to be privileged in such discussions. 15. Bitsui, Shapeshift, 3. 16. Ibid., 4. 17. Ibid., 3. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Alan David Freeman, “Legitimizing Racial Discrimination through Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine,” in Critical Race Theory: Key Writings That Formed the Movement, ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: New Press, 1995), 29. 21. Ibid. 22. Coulthard, “Subjects of Empire,” 444. Coulthard is citing Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 109–112. 23. Coulthard, “Subjects of Empire,” 444. 24. Bitsui, Shapeshift, 8. 25. Ibid., 8–9. 26. Harney and Moten, “Politics Surrounded,” 17. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 18. 29. Bitsui, Shapeshift, 63. 276  Notes to Pages 148–154

30. Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure,” in The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 56. 31. Bitsui, Shapeshift, 62. 32. Ibid., 61–63. 33. Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 20. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 31. 36. Bitsui, Flood Song, 3–4. 37. H. C. Lockett, Along the Beale Trail: A Photographic Account of Wasted Rangeland (Lawrence, Kans.: Education Division, U.S. Office of Indian Affairs, 1939), 26. 38. Will Wilson, “The Navajo Photography of Milton S. Snow: Photography and Federal Indian Policy, 1937–1959,” MFA thesis, University of New Mexico, 2002, 43. 39. Anne McClintock, “Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib,” Small Axe 28 (March 2009): 53. 40. Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Steam Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),” Diacritics 14, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 24. “Un-veiling” here refers specifically to the etymology of apocalypse, which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means to “uncover” or “disclose.” 41. McClintock, “Paranoid Empire,” 54. 42. Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” in Critical Race Theory: Key Writings That Formed the Movement, ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: New Press, 1995), 276–291. 43. McClintock, “Paranoid Empire,” 53. 44. Bitsui, Flood Song, 45. 45. Ibid., 13. 46. Ibid. 47. Nathaniel Mackey, “Paracritical Hinge,” in Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 211–212. 48. Bitsui, Flood Song, 57. 49. Charles Bernstein, “Artifice of Absorption,” in A Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 86–87. Notes to Pages 154–163  277

50. Ibid., 87. 51. Ibid., 70. 52. Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 20. 53. Bitsui, Flood Song, 70–71. 54. Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law (Brooklyn, N.Y.: South End Press, 2011), 32. 55. 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. 167. 56. Andrea Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing,” in The Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology, ed. INCITE! Women of Color against Violence (Brooklyn, N.Y.: South End Press, 2006), 66–73. 57. Jeff Corntassel, “To Be Ungovernable,” New Socialist, no. 58 (September– October 2006): 36. 58. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “Debt and Study,” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe, U.K.: Minor Compositions, 2013), 20, 61. 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 American Poets, September 15, 2009, https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text /claudia-rankine-conversation. 6. Ibid. 278  Notes to Pages 164–170

7. Evie Shockley, “On the Nature of Ed Roberson’s Poetics,” Callaloo 33, no. 3 (2010): 730. 8. Ibid., 729–730. 9. Ibid., 730. 10. Rankine, Citizen, 82. 11. Ibid., 83. 12. See Bill Walsh, “Corps Chief Admits to ‘Design Failure,’” Times-Picayune Online Edition, April 6, 2006, https://web.archive.org /web/20070930185042/http://www.nola.com/frontpage/t-p/index.ssf ?/base /news-5/1144306231230500.xml. 13. Manuel Pastor et al., “Environment, Disaster, and Race after Katrina,” Race, Poverty and the Environment 13, no. 1 (2006): 21. 14. Rankine, Citizen, 84. 15. Sarah Jaquette Ray, The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 16. 16. Rankine, Citizen, 85. 17. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 73. 18. Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, 8. 19. Ibid., 9. 20. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 95. 21. Ibid., 102. 22. Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, 8. 23. Michel Foucault’s analysis of state racism—his insight that modern biopower, while ostensibly a mechanism for regulating and prolonging life, is predicated on the constant exposure of racialized populations to the risk of death—helps illuminate this seeming contradiction. See Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 254. At this point in Rankine, however, it is not the state that directly administers life; rather, it is the American medical system, an increasingly corporatized entity. Notes to Pages 170–176  279

For Leerom Medovoi, an eco-Marxist literary theory requires the kind of thinking Rankine performs—that is, thinking biopower in tandem with the critique of capital. See Leerom Medovoi, “The Biopolitical Unconscious: Toward an Eco-Marxist Literary Theory,” Mediations 24, no. 2 (2010): 123–138. 24. Claudia Rankine, Nothing in Nature Is Private (Cleveland, Ohio: Poetry Center at Cleveland State University, 1994), 22. 25. Ibid., 23. 26. Ibid., 24. 27. Camille T. Dungy, “Introduction: The Nature of African American Poetry,” in Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, ed. Camille T. Dungy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), xxvi. 28. Kimberly K. Smith, African American Environmental Thought: Foundations (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 3, 6. 29. Ibid., 14. 30. Ibid., 8. 31. Ibid. 32. M. H. Abrams, “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed. Harold Bloom and Frederick W. Hilles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 528. 33. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 26. 34. Rankine, Nothing in Nature Is Private, 2. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 3. 39. Ibid. 40. Alighieri Dante, The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation, trans. Robert Pinsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 3. 41. Rankine, Nothing in Nature Is Private, 24. 42. Rankine, Citizen, 89. 43. Ibid., 89–90. 44. Ibid., 91. 280  Notes to Pages 176–179

45. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 72. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 65, 75. 48. Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 738. 49. Ibid., 751. 50. Ibid., 751–752. 51. Ibid., 752. 52. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 1986), 2. 53. Ibid., 1–3. 54. Ibid., 2. 55. Ibid., 2–3. 56. “Lysis,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view /Entry/111700?rskey=hRmDeq&result=1. “Crisis, n,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/44539?redirectedFrom=crisis. 57. Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 756, 774. 58. Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, 9. 59. Rankine, Citizen, 90. 60. Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 769. 61. Ibid. 62. See Virginia Jackson, “Lyric,” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed., ed. Roland Greene et al. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 826–834. 63. On this point, Rankine echoes Foucault. See Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended.” 64. Anthony Reed, Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 98. 65. Ibid., 99. 66. Rankine, Citizen, 86. 67. Ibid., 85.

Notes to Pages 179–184  281

9. “Hung Up in the Flood” 1. See “The Ponds” chapter of Walden in Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings, 3d ed., ed. William Rossi (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 119–137. 2. Ibid., 132. 3. See Brian Walker and David Salt, Resilience Thinking (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2006). Walker and Salt define resilience as “the ability of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure” (1). 4. Thoreau, Walden, 135. 5. See Stephanie Wakefield and Bruce Braun, “Governing the Resilient City,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32, no. 1 (2014): 5. 6. City of New York, Michael R. Bloomberg, “A Stronger, More Resilient New York,” 2013, http://www.nyc.gov/html/sirr/html/report/report.shtml. 7. Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper, “Genealogies of Resilience, from Systems Ecology to the Political Economy of Crisis Adaptation,” Security Dialogue 42, no. 2 (2011): 156. 8. Ibid., 146. 9. Walker and Salt, Resilience Thinking, 51. 10. Jonathan Joseph, “Resilience as Embedded Neoliberalism: A Governmentality Approach,” Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 1, no. 1 (2013): 38–52. 11. See Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 170, 190. 12. See Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Lorine Niedecker the Anonymous: Gender, Class, Genre and Resistances,” in Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1996), 113–137. Also see Jenny Penberthy, “A Little Too Little: Rereading Lorine Niedecker,” How2 1, no. 1 (March 1999), http://how2journal.com. For an excellent primer on the importance of flooding to Niedecker’s poetry, see Mary Pinard, “Niedecker’s Grammar of Flooding,” in Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, ed. Elizabeth Willis (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 21–30. 13. Of the essays collected in Radical Vernacular, those by Mary Pinard and

282  Notes to Pages 184–194

Jonathan Skinner have an explicitly ecological bent. Critical work on Niedecker frequently exemplifies ecocritical values without naming them as such. This can be seen in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s magisterial essay on Niedecker’s personal synthesis of objectivist and surrealist practices through immersion in her environment. See Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Lorine Niedecker’s ‘Paean to Place’ and Its Fusion Poetics,” Contemporary Literature 46, no. 3 (2005): 393–421. 14. Practices of ecological attentiveness lie at the heart of Lawrence Buell’s claim that environmental writing restores the reader’s connection to the environment. See Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 83–114. 15. Letter sent to Cid Corman on October 4, 1968. See Lorine Niedecker, Between Your House and Mine, ed. Lisa Pater Faranda (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986), 171. 16. For Wai Chee Dimock, this unraveling takes the form of the “Third-Worlding of a superpower.” See “Introduction: Planet and America, Set and Subset,” in Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 2. Focusing on uneven development within the United States, LeMenager argues for the inclusion of the U.S. South in the Global South. See Stephanie LeMenager, “Petro-Melancholia: The BP Blowout and the Arts of Grief,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 19, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2011): 25–56. 17. In the years following the Great Depression, Niedecker worked for the Federal Writers’ Project, managed by the Public Works Administration’s main competitor, the Works Progress Administration. See Margot Peters, Lorine Niedecker: A Poet’s Life (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 62–67. 18. See Mark Reisner, Cadillac Desert (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), for a history of mid-twentieth-century dam building in the American West. 19. See Joseph F. C. DiMento and Cliff Ellis, Changing Lanes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014), 73–102. 20. Walker and Salt, Resilience Thinking, 11. 21. Ibid., 21. 22. See Elizabeth Grossman, Watershed: The Undamming of America (New York: Notes to Pages 194–195  283

Counterpoint, 2002). 23. Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works, 181. While Jonathan Skinner has interpreted this poem as an instance of Niedecker’s demythologizing tendencies, my reading emphasizes her punning on the etymology of the gods. See Jonathan Skinner, “Particular Attention: Lorine Niedecker’s Natural Histories,” in Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, ed. Elizabeth Willis (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 46–47. 24. See Carl von Linné, Lachesis Lapponica; Or, A Tour in Lapland, ed. James Edward Smith (London: Printed for White and Cochrane by Richard Taylor and Company, 1811), vol. 2, 28–29. 25. Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” in Selected Writings, ed. Robert Creeley (New York: New Directions, 1966), 16. 26. See Charles Olson, “Equal, That Is, to the Real Itself,” in Selected Writings, ed. Robert Creeley (New York: New Directions, 1966), 52. 27. Writers associated with open form poetics include Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov. 28. Highly tolerant of flooding, Andromeda polifolia, also known as bog rosemary, is usually found in wet ecologies such as bogs and swamps. See USDA Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System, Andromeda polifolia, http://www .fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/shrub/andpol/all.html. 29. See Kuei Hsien Liao, “A Theory on Urban Resilience to Floods: A Basis for Alternative Planning Practices,” Ecology and Society 17, no. 4 (2012): n.p. 30. City of New York, “A Stronger, More Resilient New York.” 31. Niedecker, Collected Works, 193. 32. Stephanie LeMenager and Stephanie Foote, “Editor’s Column,” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 1, no. 1 (2013): n.p. 33. It should be noted that while resilience thinking may conceive of interruption as a necessary inconvenience, it stops short of considering such interruptions grounds for possible systemic reorganization. Thus, Kuei Hsien Liao writes, “The norm in modern society is the execution of unabated socioeconomic activities, such that when a flood occurs and goods and services are not produced it is called economic loss, and that when mobility is limited by a flood it is considered inconvenient. However, the ideology that the same socio284  Notes to Pages 195–201

economic activities should be carried out continuously is built on the premise of environmental stability. . . . As environmental stability becomes uncertain, the best strategy to remain in the desirable regime is to enlarge the regime itself.” See Liao, “A Theory on Urban Resilience to Floods,” n.p. 34. Niedecker, Collected Works, 207–208. Skinner reads the leveling of humans and nature in this poem in ways that resonate with my own interest in Niedecker’s ambivalence toward the flood. See Skinner, “Particular Attention,” 48. 35. See Niedecker’s 1967 letter to Gail Roub, excerpted in Gail Roub, “Getting to Know Lorine Niedecker,” Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1996), 79–86. 36. Niedecker’s verse repeatedly attests to the importance of precision, clarity, and rigor. In one poem, she writes, “Fog-thick morning— / I see only / where I now walk. I carry / my clarity / with me.” See Niedecker, Collected Works, 181. 37. Letter to Louis Zukofsky dated April 17, 1960. See Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky, 1931–1970, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 260. 38. Niedecker, Collected Works, 195–196. 39. Ibid., 184. 40. A keen reader of natural history, Niedecker was painfully aware of this naturalist’s bias. For a summary of her reading in the natural history and environmental traditions, see Skinner, “Particular Attention,” 45. 41. Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 32. 42. Ibid., 2–3. 43. See Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 3. 44. Ibid. 45. In this way, Nixon’s valuable work resonates more with Niedecker’s long poems, particularly the geological timescales of “Lake Superior.” 46. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defense of Poetry,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 480–508. 47. For an account of Niedecker’s early proletarian experiments, see Peters, Notes to Pages 201–206  285

Lorine Niedecker, 46. Her resistance to literary activism during the Vietnam War is documented in her letters to Cid Corman, in which she describes turning down an editor’s solicitation for antiwar poems. See Niedecker, Between Your House and Mine, 87. 48. Angela Hume, “Imagining Ecopoetics: An Interview with Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Evelyn Reilly, and Jonathan Skinner,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19, no. 4 (Autumn 2012): 751–766. 10. Reading the Environs 1. Christian Bök, The Xenotext: Book 1 (Toronto: Coach House Press, 2015); Kenneth Goldsmith, Traffic (Los Angeles: Make Now Press, 2007); Vanessa Place, Statement of Facts (New York: Ubu Editions, 2008); and Tan Lin, Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking: [AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL POEM PAINTING FILM PHOTO HALLUCINATION LANDSCAPE] (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2010). 2. The phrase “reading with the grain” is from Timothy Bewes, cited by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus in “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108 (Fall 2009): 11. Hélène Aji notes that conceptual poetry “fails to construct the master figure of an author with an agenda” and thus treats the author as a linguistic function rather than as arbiter of the world. The conceptual poem is driven by acts of moving language around rather than by announcing a social project to motivate the poem. See Hélène Aji, “Un(decidable), Un(creative), Un(precedented), Un(readable), Un(nerving): Christian Bök, Craig Dworkin, Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place,” Études Anglaises 65, no. 2 (2012): 170. 3. A banner for conceptual poetry can be found in Andy Warhol’s declaration: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” See Andy Warhol, I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews: 1962–1987, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), 90. 4. J. Scott Bryson, The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), 2. I do not want simply to rehash avant-garde versus traditional formalist debates. What I do think bodes poorly 286  Notes to Pages 206–209

for more traditionally defined ecopoetics is the insistence that lines need to be drawn that exclude more dissonant poetics or poetics featuring unresolved contradictions so that traditional nature poetry, as Bryson points out, is always the preferred precedent. I also worry about a similar logic in reverse perpetrated by conceptual poets. 5. Angela Hume, “Imagining Ecopoetics: An Interview with Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Evelyn Reilly, and Jonathan Skinner,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19, no. 4 (Autumn 2012): 755. 6. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 80. 7. Goldsmith describes several examples of how he teaches “uncreative writing” and “boring unboring” in his volume Uncreative Writing, which has the feel of Ezra Pound’s didactic ABC of Reading. See Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 8. Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 9. Craig Dworkin, “Fact,” Chain 12 (2005): 73. 10. Christian Bök, “The Xenotext Works,” Harriet Blog, Poetry Foundation, April 2011, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/the -xenotext-works. 11. Donna J. Haraway, How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (New York: Routledge, 2000), 91, and Evelyn Fox Keller, Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), xv. 12. Goldsmith, Traffic, 3. 13. Ibid., 81. 14. Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 156. 15. For examples of formalist-materialist studies of media for artworks, see Craig Dworkin, Reading the Illegible (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003), and No Medium (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013). 16. Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing, 27. 17. Ibid. Notes to Pages 209–214  287

18. Ibid., 218–219. 19. For further analysis of the ecology of e-waste, see Jennifer Gabrys, Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). 20. Jed Rasula, This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 3. 21. Ibid., 17. 22. Evelyn Reilly, Styrofoam (New York: Roof Books, 2009), 9. 23. Adam Dickinson, The Polymers (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2013), 35. 24. Ibid., 19. 25. Ibid., 105. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 3. 28. Ibid., 2. 29. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 130. 30. Dickinson, The Polymers, 42. 31. Ibid., 14. 32. Ibid., 35. 11. Hard Days’ Nights in the Anthropocene 1. For an update, visit http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups /anthropocene. 2. H. R. James, preface to The Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, trans. H. R. James (London: Elliot Stock, 1897); Project Gutenberg e-book released December 11, 2004, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14328/14328-h/14328-h.htm. 3. See Aristotle’s always relevant Nicomachean Ethics. 4. Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 4. I draw all subsequent quotations from this edition. 5. Boethius sums up what is known in Christian theology as the problem of evil by quoting the pre-Christian philosopher Epicurus: “If there is a God, why is 288  Notes to Pages 214–230

there evil?” To make sense of an internal contradiction in the definition of God’s beneficence and power, Boethius argues his way into an affirmation of theodicy—the vindication of divine goodness despite the presence of evil in the world. 6. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, 96. 7. All poetry in this essay, unless otherwise noted, is by the author. Earlier versions of some poems were published in journals; all are from Bosch Studies: Fables, Moral Tales, and Other Awkward Constructions (New York: Litmus Press, forthcoming). 8. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, 12. 9. Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), 279. Purdy, a law professor at Duke University, brings a historical and jurisprudential perspective to his knowledge of literary (though not poetic) contributions to the environmental movement. He suggests that the way we define and treat nature has always been, in certain critical aspects, a legal issue. To not understand that is to remain vulnerable to neoliberal commercial enterprise as it uses, abuses, and defines nature for its own purposes. 10. Ibid., 278. 11. Genre Tallique, GLANCES: An Unwritten Book (Washington, D.C.: Pre-PostEros Press, frothcoming). 12. For more on environmental as well as human consequences of the plantation economy, see John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). 13. The Holocene, if foreshortened by the Anthropocene, will have been by far the briefest geologically defined epoch, coming in duration after the Pleistocene, which lasted for 2.6 million years. 14. J. L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” in Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 130. 15. Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein: Selections, ed. Joan Retallack (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 215–226. 16. John Dewey, Art as Experience, in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 10: 1934, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 19–20. 17. For a compelling defense of play as essential to creativity—in contrast Notes to Pages 230–237  289

to the life of compliance—see D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Tavistock-Methuen, 1984). 18. Dewey, Art as Experience, 24. 19. Ibid., 281, 283. 20. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 56. 21. Ibid., 53. 22. Ibid., 54. 23. Ibid., 56. 24. For more on Epicurus, poethics, and the swerve, see “Essay as Wager” and “The Poethical Wager” in Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 25. Some of the language in this poem is borrowed from William S. Gray et al., The New Fun with Dick and Jane (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1956).

290  Notes to Pages 238–245

Permissions

We would like to thank the following for permission to print or reprint these materials. 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 permission 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 Salamander project included in Petra Kuppers’s essay, “Writing with the Salamander: 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

Abrams, M. H., 178 action poetry, 72 Adorno, Theodor, 259n26 affect theory, 12, 72 Aji, Hélène, 286n2 Alexander, Will, 9 Allen, Donald, 73 Allewaert, Monique, 115 Amistad (ship and film), 105, 110, 271n4 Ammons, A. R., 8 animals and animality, 4, 12–13, 112–114, 239; Bitsui and, 162; Dewey on, 238; Goethe on, 71; Graham and, 26; human-animal divide, 103, 105–107, 215; McClure (“beast language”) and, 69, 72–73, 74, 75–77, 79–81; moose, 100–101; Niedecker and, 201, 202, 203; Olson and, 68; Reilly and, 20, 33, 35–36, 39–40; salamanders, 121, 134, 135–136, 274n9; sharks, 103–117 Anthropocene epoch, 15, 21, 80, 83, 228–229, 231, 232–242 anthropogeny, 15, 21, 23, 30, 80. See also

climate change anticoloniality, 147, 148, 155, 167, 168 apocalypticism, 5, 11–12, 19–41, 45, 50, 55, 60–61, 230; annihilative, 254n1; Duncan’s rejection of, 85, 89, 97, 101; eco-apocalypse, 160; etymology of, 277n40; Graham and, 23–32; Reilly and, 31–41; Rukeyser and, 42–43. See also Buell, Frederick Aristotle, 216, 230–231 Artaud, Antonin, 67 Ashbery, John, 9, 19, 258n6; “The Lament upon the Waters,” 43 Austin, J. L., 236 Basho¯, 232 Bate, Jonathan, 9–10 Beale, Edward, 158, 159 Beat poetics, 5, 67, 68, 70, 78 Beck, Ulrich, 22, 148 Benjamin, Walter, 260n41 Bergson, Henri, 92, 270n33 Berlant, Lauren, 176

Berman, Wallace, 68 Bernstein, Charles: “Artifice of Absorption,” 164 Berry, Wendell, 4, 8 biblical references, 20, 25, 85; Jonah, 112–113; Revelation, 29, 31, 35–40 big data mining, 15 bio-art, 215 biopoetics, 170, 183, 186 Bishop, Elizabeth, 8 Bitsui, Sherwin, 14, 147–148, 168; “Apparition,” 152–154; “Asterisk,” 149–152; “Chrysalis,” 154–155; Flood Song, 147, 157, 161–166; Shapeshift, 147, 149 Black Arts Movement, 170 Black Mountain poetry, 4, 9, 84, 86, 198, 238, 268n2 black radicalism, 6, 13, 113 blackness, 103–104, 111–112, 117, 181; Fanon on, 115; underwater utopias of, 108–109 Blanciak, François, 34 body and environmental writing, the, 65–66, 124; African Americans and, 176–177 Boethius, 15, 229–232, 289n5 Bosman, Willem, 107 Bök, Christian: The Xenotext, 208, 214–215 Bourdieu, Pierre, 242–243, 243 Brassier, Ray, 61 Braun, Bruce, 191–192 Brennan, Teresa, 119–120 Brown, Vincent, 115–116 Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder, 31, 40 Bryson, J. Scott, 8, 209–210, 287n4 294 Index

Buell, Frederick, 21–23, 24, 26, 31, 33, 36, 40–41, 45, 50, 146 Buell, Lawrence, 7; apocalypticism and, 5, 20–21, 28, 29, 254n1; on “ecological holism,” 9–10; on environmental writing, 283n14; on “toxic discourse,” 13, 148 Bunnell, Sterling, 67 Butterick, George, 71, 74 Cage, John, 242 Caillois, Roger, 59 Cancer Alley, 172 capitalism, 12, 45, 54, 61, 156, 160, 168, 234; Rankine and, 169, 183 Carlyle, Thomas, 93 Carson, Rachel, 19, 28, 65, 78, 148, 194 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 269n24 Clare, John, 9 Clarkson, Thomas, 272n10 climate change, 20, 26, 31, 192, 205, 232, 255n19 Cole, Andrew, 55 collage, 4, 71, 170, 174 colonialism (and settlement), 146–151, 154, 157, 160–161, 167–168 composition by field, 4–5, 13, 73, 85–87, 88, 89, 192, 197–198, 203, 205 conceptual poetry, 208–218, 221–227, 286nn2–3 Conference on Ecopoetics (2013), 1–2 Cooper, Melinda, 155–156 Cope, Stephen, 48 Corey, Joshua, 2–3 Corntassel, Jeff, 168

Coulthard, Glen, 146, 152 Crane, Heart: “A Name for All,” 77 Creeley, Robert, 66, 70, 71, 88, 198; “I Know a Man,” 36–37 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 167 Crick, Francis, 67, 68 critical race theory, 13, 14, 167, 169 Cronon, William, 10, 173 Crutzen, Paul, 228 cybernetics, 9, 69, 71–72, 78, 79, 81, 88, 267n84 dams, 195, 196, 198 Dante Alighieri, 179, 231 Davidson, Michael, 123 decolonization theory, 11, 13, 167 Deleuze, Gilles, 72 Derrida, Jacques, 160 Dewey, John, 237–239 Di Chiro, Giovanna, 13 dialectics, 12, 259n26; Duncan and, 84–85, 94, 95; Oppen and, 51, 52–53, 61  Dickinson, Adam, 15; “Carl Jung Steps onto a Plane,” 225–226; “Coca-Cola Dasani,” 223–224; The Polymers, 213, 221–227 Different Light Theatre Company, 128 digital technology, 31, 35, 39–40, 218 Dillard, Annie, 7 Dimock, Wai Chee, 195, 283n16 Dinétah, 149, 157, 159, 276n14 disability, experience of, 5, 11, 13, 118–141 Doolittle, Hilda. See H.D. Drexciya, 108 drought, 148, 157–165

Duacastilla Soler, Xavier, 138 Duncan, Robert, 4–5, 13, 72, 84–101; “Apprehensions,” 93; “The Dance,” 88; dialectic and, 84–85, 94, 95, 270n41; The H.D. Book, 87, 90–93, 96, 98, 270n33; “Ideas of the Meaning of Form,” 85, 95; “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” 86, 87–88; Olson and, 84, 86–89, 90, 93, 96, 101; The Opening of the Field, 86, 88, 89, 97; play principle in, 86–89; “Poetry, A Natural Thing,” 86, 97–101; “Towards an Open Universe,” 90, 92–97, 101; vulnerability in, 84–90, 101 Dungy, Camille, 2, 103, 177 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 283n13 Dworkin, Craig: “Fact,” 214, 217 Earth, photographs of, 96; Earth Day, 75, 97 ecocriticism, 6, 7–8, 11, 146–147; limitations of, 146, 167. See also the body and environmental writing ecological harm. See environmental degradation ecological others, 14, 173–174 ecology, 2–3, 5, 7, 8, 15, 211; early uses of term, 65–66, 67, 78, 218, 266n76. See also resilience ecopoetics: antiracist, 167–168, 171; black, 103; definitions of, 2, 10, 120, 170, 210; development of, 3–5, 7–10, 66, 72–73, 209; different terms for, 6, 7; etymology of, 2; expansion of, 124, 141, 207, 287n4; McClure on, 79, 80–81; RanIndex 295

kine on, 170; scholarship on, 3, 9, 194; Skinner on, 8–9, 124, 207, 210 ecopoetics (journal), 8 ecopoetry: anthologies of, 2–3; canon of, 7–9, 209; definitions of, 84, 209; development of, 3–4, 85; kinds of, 6–7 Eigner, Larry, 9 ekphrasis, 127, 140–141 Elder, John, 8 Eliot, T. S., 8, 44, 269n26 embodiment (and embeddedness), 12–13, 22; in Graham, 20, 26, 28, 30; in Reilly, 20, 33, 34, 40; in Salamander workshops, 140. See also the body and environmental writing Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 9, 65 enactivist poetics, 83 enclosure, politics of, 147, 148, 149–155, 156–157, 167 entropology, 81, 83 entropy, 80, 83, 85, 86, 94–95, 96, 97–99, 101 environmental degradation (harm, violence), 22, 25, 38, 145–149, 151–155, 160, 165, 167, 170, 193, 231; Nixon on, 205–206; Thoreau and, 189–191. See also “slow death” environmental ethics, 8, 16 environmental justice, 11, 13–14, 169, 171, 195 environmental management, 6, 14. See also sustainability environmental racism, 6, 11, 169, 170, 173, 186 environmental risk, 6, 169, 172, 174 Epicurus, 289n5 296 Index

Fanon, Frantz, 115, 152, 182, 184 Felstiner, John, 10 field composition. See composition by field Finseth, Ian, 103 Fisher-Wirth, Ann, 3, 6 Fletcher, Angus, 9 Foerster, Norman, 7 Foote, Stephanie, 200 Foucault, Michel, 279n23 François, Anne-Lise, 6, 205 Fredman, Stephen, 87 Freeman, Alan, 151 Freud, Sigmund, 87, 99, 102 Frost, Robert: “The Oven Bird,” 85; “The Road Not Taken,” 180; “West-Running Brook,” 86, 97–100, 101 Garrard, Greg, 21 Gay, Ross, 10 Gery, John, 257n3, 258n6 Gibbs, Lois, 148 Gilcrest, David, 10 Ginsberg, Allen, 67, 72–73 Giscombe, C. S., 5 Glave, Diane, 103 global warming. See climate change Glotfelty, Cheryll, 7, 8, 9, 10–11 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 71 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 15, 208–209; Traffic, 208–209, 216–217; Uncreative Writing, 218, 287n7 Graham, Jorie, 11, 20, 23–31, 40–41; “Embodies,” 26; “Futures,” 28–29; “Loan,” 27–28; “Long Way Round,” 30; “Positive Feedback Loop,” 25–26, 29–30; “Sea Change,” 23–25 Guattari, Félix, 72

habitus, 242–243 Haraway, Donna, 215 Hardy, Thomas, 236 Harjo, Jo, 8, 147 Harney, Stefano, 149, 154, 168 Harris, Cheryl, 160 Hartman, Saidiya, 103, 114 Hass, Robert, 1–2, 207 Hayden, Robert, 13, 102–104; “Middle Passage,” 104, 105–111, 116–117 H.D., 83, 86, 90–93, 96, 101, 269n26; Trilogy, 90–92 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 242 Heidegger, Martin, 10, 252n36 Heise, Ursula, 28 Hejinian, Lyn, 154 Heraclitus, 93 Hillman, Brenda, 2, 207 historical materialism, 12 Hogan, Linda, 8 Howard, Jonathan, 116 Howe, Susan, 8 Hume, Angela, 207 Hurricane Katrina, 195; Rankine on, 171–173, 176, 184–186 Hurricane Sandy, 192–193, 199 hydropoetics: black, 105; Niedecker and, 194, 200, 201–203; Salamander project and, 120–121, 124, 139 Iijima, Brenda, 120–121 internet culture, 218 intersectionality, 3, 5, 9, 105, 209, 210, 249n7

Jackson, Andy, 129 Jackson, George, 111 James, H. R., 229 Jameson, Fredric, 3 Jeffers, Robinson, 4, 67, 85 Jones, Donna, 270n33 Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka), 73; literary journals of, 74 Joseph, Jonathan, 193–194 Jung, Carl G., 225 Kaba, Mariame, 114, 273n22 Kafer, Alison, 125, 126–127 Keenaghan, Eric, 91 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 215 Keller, Lynn, 7–8, 9, 122, 140, 141 Kerouac, Jack, 70, 78 Killingsworth, Jimmie, 23 Knickerbocker, Scott, 7–8 Lamantia, Philip, 67 Latour, Bruno, 211 Lawrence, D. H., 67, 269n26 Leary, Timothy, 68 LeMenager, Stephanie, 195, 200, 283n16 Leto, Denise, 135–136 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 81 Liao, Kuei Hsien, 285n33 Lin, Tan, 209 Linnaeus, Carl, 194, 196–197 Lippard, Lucy, 213 Lipsit, George, 148 looking (and politics of recognition), 145–147 Lopez, Barry, 7 Index 297

Lucretius, 194, 254n1 Luhmann, Niklas, 81 lyric genre, 4, 6, 8; antilyric experimentalism, 7; Oppen and, 44, 48, 56; Rankine and, 170–171, 174, 178, 182–184 Mackey, Nathaniel, 162, 165, 270n41 Malabou, Catherine, 224 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 259n18 Mancuso, Katherine, 138–139 Marcus, Neil, 121, 131–132 Margalef, Ramón, 79, 81, 267n84 Marlatt, Daphne, 8 Marx, Karl, 261n54 Marx, Leo, 7 materialism, 13, 83, 89 Maturana, Humberto, 79, 83 Maud, Ralph, 73 McClintock, Anne, 160, 161, 162 McClure, Michael, 12, 66–83; “The Chamber,” 74; “Dark Brown,” 69, 74; !The Feast!, 74, 77; “For the Death of 100 Whales,” 67; Ghost Tantras, 69, 72, 75–78, 79, 265n67; “LISTEN, LAWRENCE, THERE ARE CERTAIN OF US,” 78; Meat Science, 69, 77; Olson and, 68, 69–74, 76, 77–78, 83; “Peyote Poem,” 68; “Phi Upsilon Kappa,” 69, 74; “Poem,” 67; “Point Lobos: Animism,” 67; “Rant Block,” 70–72; Rare Angel, 76, 79–80, 83; “Revolt,” 69; Scratching the Beat Surface, 66, 67, 68, 78, 80, 81; “Written after Finding a Dolphin Skull on the Gulf of California,” 81–83. See also animals 298 Index

McLuhan, Marshall, 218; media as message, 213–214 media ecology, 218–219, 221 Medovoi, Leerom, 279n23 Meillassoux, Quentin, 46, 54–55, 57, 60–61 Melancholia (film), 61 Meltzer, David, 67 Mesch, Harald, 81 Middle Passage. See slave trade Milton, John, 48 modernism, 4, 9, 58–59, 90, 203. See also collage Moore, Marianne, 8 Morton, Timothy, 10, 223, 260n38 Moten, Fred, 14, 114, 149, 154, 168, 170, 181–183, 186 Muir, John, 7 Murray, Elwyn, 135 Nash, Roderick, 7 nature writing, 6–7, 85, 122, 139, 148, 173–174; black authors and, 103, 176–180; ecological attentiveness and, 283n14; Niedecker and, 194 Navajo Nation. See Dinétah neoliberalism, 121–122, 194, 199, 206, 232, 289n9 New American Poetry, 4, 66, 78 Niedecker, Lorine, 9, 14, 94, 192, 194–207, 283n13, 2831n17, 286n47; “Fog-thick morning—,” 285n36; “Linnaeus in Lapland,” 196–198; “My life is hung up,” 199–200; “Paean to Place,” 270n40; “Some float off on chocolate bars,” 201–202; “Springtime’s wide,”

204–205 Nixon, Rob, 145, 205–206 Nor, Nor ’Ain Muhamad, 132–133 Nordhaus, Ted, 20 Nordmark, Susan, 136–138 objectivism (and objectism), 4, 13, 86–87, 198 objectivist realism, 46, 50–53, 57, 59–61 object-oriented ontology, 54, 55, 61 Odutola, Toyin Ojih, 185, 186 Olimpias, 121, 125, 126–127, 130, 138, 140 Olson, Charles, 4, 12, 66, 68, 69–79, 197– 198; “Against Wisdom as Such,” 87; autonomy and, 48–49, 53, 54, 58–59, 263n19; Duncan and, 84, 86–89, 90, 93, 96, 101; “Human Universe,” 68, 77–78, 88–89, 90; “The Kingfishers,” 69, 71; “Letter to Elaine Feinstein,” 74; “The Librarian,” 74; McClure and, 68, 69–74, 76, 77–78, 83; The Maximus Poems, 68, 71, 73, 74–75; Muthologos, 68; “Place; & Names,” 73; “Projective Verse,” 66, 69, 71, 74, 86, 88, 197; Proprioception, 66, 73, 74–75, 83; “Rose of the World,” 73; “The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum,” 68; “Under the Mushroom,” 73–74 open form poetics. See composition by field Oppen, George, 12, 42–61; “All This Strangeness,” 259n18; “From Disaster,” 55–56, 57; “The Mind’s Own Place,” 48; “Myth of the Blaze,” 52; “Of Being Numerous,” 51, 52–53, 54, 57; “Route,” 50, 51, 58; “Time of the

Missile,” 42, 44–45, 47–50, 55–56, 57, 58; “Two Romance Poems,” 53. See also objectivist realism Ortiz, Simon, 8, 147 Otolith Group, 109 Outka, Paul, 103 Palmer, Jacqueline, 23 Parks, Cecily, 5 pastoral, 28, 30, 39, 122, 171, 178 pathetic fallacy, 236 patiency, 60, 261n55 Pawlicki, Jasmine, 134 Perloff, Marjorie, 216–217 peyote, 68 phenomenology, 10 Phillips, Xandria: “For a Burial Free of Sharks,” 104–105, 114–117 philosophy and poetry, 229 physicalism, 68–69, 75–76 Place, Vanessa, 209 plastic, 139, 214, 218–219, 221–226 Plumwood, Val, 85 poethics, 229, 242–243 Pollock, Jackson, 72 Ponge, Francis: “The Pebble,” 43, 45, 54 postcolonialism, 11, 118, 120 postmodernism, 3–4 Pound, Ezra, 269n26, 287n7 preservationist poetry, 4, 173, 177 projective verse, 4, 5, 71; Duncan and, 84, 86, 88; Olson’s essay on, 66, 69, 71, 74, 86, 88, 89 proprioception, 74–75, 78, 83, 264n51; Olson’s essay on, 66, 73, 74–75, 83 Index 299

prosimetrum form, 229, 231 Public Works Administration, 195, 283n17 Purdy, Jedediah, 232, 289n9 queerness, 5, 11; Duncan and, 13, 84, 86, 87, 101 Quetchenbach, Bernard, 8 racism, 152, 160, 169–171; Foucault on, 279n23. See also ecopoetics: antiracist; environmental racism; slave trade Rankine, Claudia, 14, 169–186; “American Light,” 178–179; “August 29, 2005 / Hurricane Katrina,” 171–173, 176, 184–186; “The Birth,” 176–177, 179; Citizen, 169–174, 180, 183; Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, 169–170, 174–176, 182, 183, 184; “February 26, 2012 / In Memory of Trayvon Martin,” 180, 182; home trope in, 179–180; lyric mode in, 170–171, 174, 178, 182–184; Nothing in Nature Is Private, 169, 176–180; Plot, 184; wasting and exhaustion in, 169–172, 176, 179, 181–183, 185–186 Ransom, John Crowe, 86, 100–101, 271n55 Rasula, Jed, 9, 219–220, 266n80 Ray, Sarah Jaquette, 14, 173 Rebel Roar: The Sound of Michael McClure (film), 77 recycling, 15, 218–221, 226 Rediker, Marcus, 107–108, 109, 114 Reed, Anthony, 184 Reich, Wilhelm, 69 Reilly, Evelyn, 11, 20, 23, 31–41, 207; “Apocalypso: A Comedy,” 31, 35–40; 300 Index

“Dreamquest Malware,” 31–33, 34; “The Grief of Ecopoetics,” 33–34; Styrofoam, 220–221 representational writing, 7–8, 9 resilience, 11, 190–194, 196, 198–199, 200–201, 203–204, 206–207, 284n33; defined, 282n3 Rexroth, Kenneth, 8 Rich, Adrienne, 8 Rigby, Kate, 2 Romanticism, 5, 10, 13, 87, 101, 173, 178, 236–238; Duncan on, 269n26 Ronda, Margaret, 1, 11, 14–15 Rosenberg, Jordana, 55 Rotella, Guy, 8 Rukeyser, Muriel, 266n2; “Waterlily Fire,” 42–43, 45 Salamander (performance project), 13, 121–127, 140; writings and photographs of, 127–138 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 69 Schrödinger, Erwin, 93, 95 Scigaj, Leonard, 8, 10 Seetoo, Chia-Yi, 132 Shakespeare, William, 106 Shellenberger, Michael, 20 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 10, 173, 206 Shepard, Paul, 120 Shockley, Evie, 171 Siebers, Tobin, 124 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 8 Simpson, Audra, 146 Siskin, Sharon, 128 Skinner, Jonathan, 8–9, 124, 207, 210; on

Niedecker, 284n23, 285n34 slave trade, 102, 103–110, 114–116, 179, 181 “slow death,” 176 “slow violence,” 118, 205, 206 Smallwood, Stephanie, 106–107 Smit, Chris, 136 Smith, Andrea, 167–168 Smith, Kimberly, 177 Snyder, Gary, 4, 8, 9, 66, 67, 77, 78 Spade, Dean, 166–167 Spahr, Juliana, 8–9 speculative realism, 11, 46, 54–55, 57, 60–61 Spillers, Hortense, 102, 116, 181 spiritmeat, 12–13, 69 spirituals, 179 Stein, Gertrude, 237 Steingraber, Sandra, 65–66 Stevens, Wallace, 8, 26, 34 Stoermer, Eugene, 229 Street, Laura-Gray, 3, 6 Stubbs, George, 100 Sun Ra, 109 surface reading, 15 “surround, the,” 149, 154, 155, 168 sustainability, 6, 14; apocalypticism vs., 19; literature and, 122, 140 systems theory, 3, 9, 12, 72, 73, 79, 81, 84 Tallique, Genre (Joan Retallack), 233 terracentrism, 105, 109, 271n3 Thomson, Melissa, 130 Thoreau, Henry David, 7, 9, 189–192, 194, 223

Tolson, Melvin, 13, 103; “The Sea-Turtle and the Shark,” 104, 111–114, 116 toxicity, 6, 14, 20, 121, 130, 139, 145–156, 160, 166–168; “toxic discourse,” 13–14, 148–149, 151, 153, 160, 163–164 Varela, Francisco, 79, 83 variability, 192, 196, 198, 203, 205, 207 Vicuña, Cecilia, 9 visceral poetics, 66 vitalism, 91, 92, 270n33 Voros, Gyorgyi, 8 Wakefield, Stephanie, 191–192 Waldrep, G. C., 2–3 Warhol, Andy, 286n3 Watson, James, 67  Watts, Alan, 266n76 Whalen, Philip, 73 white supremacy, 108, 168 Whitehead, Alfred North, 12, 69, 79, 83, 88 Whitman, Walt, 9, 123, 162, 223, 235; “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” 94; “This Compost,” 219 Williams, Raymond, 258n10 Williams, William Carlos, 203, 269n26 Wilson, Will, 159 Winnicott, D. W., 238–239 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 79, 259n32 Wordsworth, William, 8, 173 Zimet, Julian, 44, 48–49, 50, 52 Zukofsky, Louis, 202

Index 301

Contemporary North American Poetry Series

Bodies on the Line: Performance and the Sixties Poetry Reading By Raphael Allison Industrial Poetics: Demo Tracks for a Mobile Culture By Joe Amato What Are Poets For? An Anthropology of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics By Gerald L. Bruns Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation Edited by Stephen Collis and Graham Lyons Postliterary America: From Bagel Shop Jazz to Micropoetries By Maria Damon Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry Edited by Anne Dewey and Libbie Rifkin

Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry By Rachel Blau DuPlessis On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry By Norman Finkelstein Writing Not Writing: Poetry, Crisis, and Responsibility By Tom Fisher Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work Edited by Stephen Fredman and Steven McCaffery Redstart: An Ecological Poetics By Forrest Gander and John Kinsella Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry Edited by Thomas Gardner University of Wisconsin Press, 2005

Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community By Timothy Gray

Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront By Philip Metres

Urban Pastoral: Natural Currents in the New York School By Timothy Gray

Hold-Outs: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance, 1948–1992 By Bill Mohr

Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field Edited by Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne

In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam By Urayoán Noel

Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Garde Asian American Poetry By Joseph Jonghyun Jeon

Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} By Jessica Pressman, Mark C. Marino, and Jeremy Douglass

We Saw the Light: Conversations between the New American Cinema and Poetry By Daniel Kane Ghostly Figures: Memory and Belatedness in Postwar American Poetry By Ann Keniston History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry, 1935–1968 By John Lowney Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews By Nathaniel Mackey University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie By Lytle Shaw Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry By Evie Shockley Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences By Barrett Watten Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place Edited by Elizabeth Willis