Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End 9781503604896

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Remainders

Loren Glass and Kate Marshall, Editors Post•45 Group, Editorial Committee

Remainders

American Poetry at Nature’s End

Margaret Ronda

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Excerpts from The Double Dream of Spring by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. All rights reserved. Excerpts from Three Poems by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1970, 1971, 1972 by John Ashbery. ­Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. All rights reserved. Excerpts from Rivers and Mountains by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1962, 1963, 1964, 1966 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. All rights reserved. Excerpts from The Vermont Notebook by John Ashbery and Joe Brainard. Copyright © 1975, 2001 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. All rights reserved. “By Frazier Falls,” “Straight-Creek—Great Burn,” “The Call of the Wild,” “Tomorrow’s Song,” “What Happened Here Before,” by Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island, copyright © 1974 by Gary Snyder. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache” and “Unnamed Dragonfly Species” from Well Then There Now © 2011 by Juliana Spahr. Reprinted by permission of David R. Godine, Publisher. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ronda, Margaret, author. Title: Remainders : American poetry at nature’s end / Margaret Ronda. Other titles: Post 45. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2018. | Series: Post*45 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017021390 | ISBN 9781503603141 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503604896 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. | American poetry— 21st century—History and criticism. | Nature in literature. | Ecology in literature. | Environmentalism in literature. Classification: LCC PS310.N3 R66 2018 | DDC 811.009/36—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017021390 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/15 Minion

Table of Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii

Introduction: Great Acceleration Poetics 1 North Central, South Side:

1

Postwar Ecologies in Niedecker and Brooks

21

2 3

“The Advancing Signs of the Air”: Ashbery’s Atmospheres 

43

1970s Revolutionary Pastoral

65

4 5

Mourning and Melancholia at the End of Nature

91

“NOT PEOPLE’S PARK / PEOPLE’S PLANET”:

“A Rescue That Comes Too Late”: Figure and Disfiguration in Contemporary Ecopoetics

Coda: On Storms to Come

113 129

Notes135 Index171

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Acknowledgments

This book has emerged over years of generative conversations and collaborative engagements with mentors, friends, colleagues, editors, students, and other interlocutors. Its subject matter is determinedly bleak, but the intellectual community that has fostered it has been sustaining at all turns. I’m grateful for the material support this book has received over several years. The Holloway Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California– Berkeley, the Hellman Fellowship Fund at the University of California–Davis, and the Center for Cultural Analysis Faculty Fellowship at Rutgers provided much-needed research time, institutional support, and funding. The American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellowship allowed me two years to develop this project. Many thanks to this organization, and to Indiana University’s Department of English for providing me an institutional base for those two years of postdoctoral research and teaching. Publication of this book was made possible in part by assistance from the University of California–Davis Office of Research, Division of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies. Abiding thanks to my editor, Emily-Jane Cohen, for her unstinting support of this project. Thanks to Faith Stein, Jessica Ling, Christine Gever, and the production team at Stanford for their expert assistance. I also want to thank the series editors, Kate Marshall and Loren Glass, for their belief in and thoughtful comments on this book. Michael Szalay and Florence Dore, the previous Post•45 series editors, were also very supportive of the book in its earlier stages. Thank you to Rob Wilson and an anonymous reader for thoughtful and exacting readings that pushed this book forward. My deepest gratitude to Young Suh for use of his photograph, “Bathers under Bridge,” as the cover image for this book. A previous version of Chapter 4 appeared as “Mourning and Melancholia vii

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Acknowledgments

in the Anthropocene” in Post45: Peer Reviewed (June 10, 2013), http://post45.re search.yale.edu/2013/06/mourning-and-melancholia-in-the-anthropocene/. A previous version of Chapter 5 was originally published as “Anthropogenic Poetics” in the minnesota review 83 (2014): 102–111. Copyright 2014, Virginia Tech. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, and the present publisher, Duke University Press. www.dukeupress.edu. The ideas for this book have been enriched by conversations in various institutional settings. Thanks to audiences at Johns Hopkins, Williams College, UC–Santa Cruz, UC–Irvine, UC–Berkeley, Indiana University, Penn State, Dartmouth, and Rutgers for helpful discussions of work-in-progress. Special thanks to Post•45 colleagues at the Stanford conference for a particularly rigorous dialogue that shaped the course of this book. Thanks to Jasper Bernes, Steph Burt, Chris Chen, Jeffrey Cohen, Kendra Dority, Jonathan Eburne, Amy Elias, Keegan Cook Finberg, Jennifer Fleissner, Anne-Lise François, Alysia Garrison, Ross Gay, Rob Halpern, Andrew Hoborek, Oren Izenberg, Virginia Jackson, Lynn Keller, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Madeline Lane-McKinley, Jennifer Scappettone, Kenan Sharpe, Jonathan Skinner, Juliana Spahr, Michael Szalay, Cathy Wagner, Dorothy Wang, and Rebecca Walkowitz for hospitality, collegiality, and acts of kindness along the way. Working with Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne on the Conference on Ecopoetics was a spur to deeper thinking about ecopoetics now. My years in the English Department at Rutgers in New Brunswick were truly charmed. Carolyn Williams and Jonah Siegel were supportive chairs and impeccable intellectual guides. Conversations with Evie Shockley, Meredith McGill, and Colin Jager have been important to this book’s progress; they are extraordinary mentors and friends. I was lucky enough to have a whip-smart cohort of junior faculty to share work and life with during those two years: Doug Jones, Andrew Goldstone, Mukti Mangharam, Sarah Novacich, Stéphane Robolin, and Abigail Zitin. A special shout-out to Nick Gaskill, whose friendship and intellectual comradeship remain invaluable. My graduate seminar at Rutgers on American poetry in the Anthropocene provided a pivotal space for engaging the questions of this book; many thanks to the graduate student participants in this course. The Center for Cultural Analysis Objects and Environments seminar offered a vital intellectual space. Thanks to Colin Jager, Jorge Marcone, and Henry Turner for creating such a singular venue for interdisciplinary inquiry, and to my fellow participants in the seminar for their adventurous thinking.

Acknowledgments

ix

At the University of California–Davis, I’ve been blessed with remarkable colleagues and a vibrant intellectual culture. Thanks to Liz Miller and John Marx for their warm welcome and expert guidance as department chairs. Thanks to Fran Dolan, Hsuan Hsu, and Mike Ziser for collaborations in the environmental humanities. Joshua Clover’s inimitable wit, critical insights, and friendship have been essential to my life here in Davis. My deepest appreciation to Gina Bloom, Margie Ferguson, Beth Freeman, Kathleen Fredrickson, Mark Jerng, Alessa Johns, Desirée Martin, Flagg Miller, Katie Peterson, David Simpson, Matthew Stratton, Young Suh, Claire Waters, and Jacinda Townsend for generosity and companionship. Conversations with Seeta Chaganti, especially in the final stretch of writing, were an invaluable resource. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Liz Miller for her incisive engagement with this book and for her friendship. I had the tremendously good fortune to develop my early ideas about American poetry and environmental relations in conversation with Sam Otter, Kevis Goodman, and Chris Nealon. Each of them has shaped my work immeasurably, through their superb mentoring, their brilliant scholarship, and their ongoing support and friendship. My thanks, as well, to Charles Altieri, Robert Hass, Lyn Hejinian, Brenda Hillman, and Colleen Lye. For their love and support, I am inexpressibly grateful to my extended network of interlocutors, friends, and family. Profound thanks to Julie Carr, Jessica Fisher, Ted Martin, Annie McClanahan, and Liz Young, dear companions and peerless thinkers. Hillary Gravendyk’s fearlessness and passion never stopped flooring me. She is terribly missed. Grace Kook Anderson, Lev ­Anderson, Dan Clowes, Beth Conrey, Seth Cotlar, Leslie Dunlap, Chandra Gandolfo, Yutan Getzler, Nicole Kanda, Ceridwen Koski, Olivia Koski, Jamie Mieras, Berit Rabinovitz, Jean Scarboro, and Brian Teare have been steadfast and supportive friends over the long haul. Loving thanks to my wonderful family-in-law: Linda Carroll, Tim Barraud, David Menely, Ann Garvin, Nicole Sievers, Jaimee King, and Daniel Menely. Without the essential assistance and care provided by my aunt, Ruth Inkpen, our lives over the past seven years would not have been possible. My father, Bruce Ronda, is my best and most enduring guide to a life dedicated to literature and arts. I’m so grateful to him and Chris Nelson for their abiding encouragement. Priscilla Inkpen, my mother, did not live to see this book in print, but her commitment to environmental justice is at the heart of this project. My son Rowan’s affectionate ways and curious mind are abound-

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ing sources of delight. I thank him for the joys he brings me every day. My gratitude to Tobias Menely remains beyond expression. I’m inspired every day by his brilliance, his principled commitments, and his adventurous spirit. May our collaborations continue to find new and marvelous forms.

Remainders

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Introduction

Great Acceleration Poetics

How can a poem speak for, to, with ecological phenomena? Can poetry give matter and creaturely life a “voice,” a “face”? How does a poem make loss and extinction visible, or register new, disturbing presences, such as toxic sludge, oil spills, dead zones? How ought responsibility for ecological calamity be adjudicated at the level of the individual subject and the collective? The poems of this study think through these complex representational questions as they emerge in an era of unprecedented environmental crisis: the Great Acceleration. Environmental historians have identified the Great Acceleration as a distinct phase in global ecological history, defined by rapid deleterious change to various planetary systems.1 This period, beginning after 1945 and continuing into the present, is characterized by metabolic rifts occurring at a global scale, from the sharp spike in CO2 emissions and the disturbance of the nitrogen cycle to massive biodiversity loss and ocean acidification. While many of the broadbased environmental changes occurring in the Great Acceleration precede 1945, they undergo a dramatic scaling-up in the post-1945 era, a direct result of the intensified extractivist and expansionist strategies of global capitalism and the new technological innovations that accompany them.2 These accelerating environmental changes thus illuminate a key contradiction of capitalism in the twentieth and now twenty-first century: its innovative forms of “creative destruction,” in Joseph Schumpeter’s famous formulation, generate unexpected planetary consequences, new forms of destructive creation.3 This book offers a literary history of this postwar period centered on these pervasive changes, turning to ­poetry as an essential archive of ecological reflection and response. Conceptualizing the postwar era as bearing distinctive significance has been a primary argument of environmental historians and theorists for several generations now, particularly given 1945’s bright line: the detonation of the atomic bomb.4 This apocalyptic threat was clearly the most spectacular eco1

2

Introduction

logical change of the era and the most visible signal of anthropogenic power to alter the planet. The devastating effects of nuclear warfare and testing in particular areas—Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American Southwest, Bikini Atoll—made nuclear fallout one of the first fronts in the postwar study of toxic impacts on ecosystems, as scientists turned attention to the lingering effects of strontium-90 in waterways, soil, and human bodies and to the difficulty of managing nuclear waste. This new atomic regime produced important shifts in environmental thinking, ushering in new ways of conceiving of the destructive power of human technology and introducing dizzying new temporal scales— the half-life of radioactive waste, the instantaneity of nuclear winter—into the everyday imaginary of American culture. Yet the nuclear threat has hardly been the only framework for conceptualizing emergent forms of environmental crisis in the postwar period. Historian Donald Worster famously called the postwar era the “Age of Ecology,” host to a variety of changing ideas about the environment and environmental politics.5 At the end of the 1960s, writers and activists in the United States such as Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, John Paul Galbraith, David Brower, and others had significantly widened the field of environmental attention beyond wilderness conservation and atomic fears to include pollution of air, water, and soil; toxins in consumer goods, in the home and workplace, and in bodies; population growth; and energy concerns.6 By the late 1990s, the broad-based impact of anthropogenic activity on the earth system led to globalized configurations of ecological crisis, from ocean acidification to mass extinction and climate change. This book chronicles the changing definitions of crisis across this period, examining them in terms of larger frameworks developing at the time, from critiques of agricultural exploitation, waste, and urban toxicity in the 1950s to the global scales and epochal redefinitions of the 2000s. In this book, I use the term “Great Acceleration” as an overarching period frame that defines this era’s ecohistorical specificity. This term has significant explanatory power for describing the changes to planetary systems that emerge with increasing intensity in the postwar period—changes that are inextricably tied to the forms of capitalist economic growth in America and in the world economy after 1945. As historians J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke argue in their recent book on the Great Acceleration, this period is “the most anomalous and unrepresentative period in the 200,000-year-long history of relations between our species and the biosphere.”7 The sheer dimensions and scope of planetary

Great Acceleration Poetics

3

change after 1945—the dramatic increases in population, energy use, urbanization, carbon dioxide and methane emissions, habitat loss, agricultural development, and species endangerment and extinction—demand a historical framework that can foreground these new intensities. The terminology of the Great Acceleration attunes us to the particular entwining of the economic and the ecological in this period, a distinctive phase within the longer history of the production of nature in capitalism wherein the contradictions immanent to this system become increasingly pronounced.8 The destructive speed of environmental change associated with this period must be understood not only as an outcome of capitalism’s production of nature in pursuit of profit but as another dimension of capitalism’s tendency toward crisis. The growth of capitalism in the postwar period produced a series of crises, from the oil shocks and deindustrialization of the 1970s to the financial crisis of the late 2000s, that underscored the internal contradictions of this system.9 At the same time, we see corresponding transformations in planetary systems and biospheric processes occurring during this era. While the ability to recalibrate by finding new venues for appropriation and development has been essential to capitalism’s repertoire, the material consequences of its production of nature are becoming increasingly difficult to manage. The history of this era is thus one in which capitalism’s expansionary drive, fueled by new productive capacities and speeds, comes to generate deepening global economic imbalance and devastating metabolic rifts in the earth system.10 Thus, if the term “acceleration” brings to mind capital’s fantasy of increasingly frictionless flows and flexibilization of labor, here those associations are brought up against the runaway speed of earth-systemic alteration and the forms of precarity engendered by economic and ecological dynamics.11 The Great Acceleration is often discussed in relation to the larger ecohistorical framework of the Anthropocene. For climate scientists and geologists, the Anthropocene can be measured by a series of stratigraphic signals, from changing sediment patterns to sea-level alterations to biotic changes such as extinction events, and it is by studying these geophysical changes that they date its beginning and calculate its effects.12 For humanists interested in studying these planetary changes, the Anthropocene’s most profound implication is that humans as a species have transcended their status as biological agents to become a collective force that can irrevocably mark the earth. Scholars in the environmental humanities regard this epoch as necessitating new perspectives,

4

Introduction

not only about human impacts on planetary systems but about the very nature of the human. Across various periodizations of the Anthropocene, the 1945 period plays a pivotal role, whether as the initiating point of this epoch or as a successive stage in a longer era.13 My account of this period centers on the biospheric ramifications of capitalist development in their different forms across the postwar era. ­Remainders focuses not on species-level culpability but on the dynamics of explosive economic growth and accompanying technological innovations as engines of earth-systemic alteration.14 This study also foregrounds the ways capitalist productive relations generate vast inequalities and uneven systemic effects across the globe. It explores how the consequences of these dynamics were felt in immanent ways during this time and how environmental thinkers and poetic works developed a language for describing these unfolding changes. Remainders looks in depth at three key eras of the Great Acceleration—the 1950s, the early 1970s, and the 2000s—when distinct conceptions of ecology and crisis were taking shape. The first chapter surveys the era of economic growth and prosperity beginning in the 1950s, often called the “Golden Age of Capitalism,” and it details the new scales of postconsumer waste and new forms of uneven development in the rural and urban peripheries that accompany this postwar economic boom. I turn next to the transitional time of the late 1960s and early 1970s, an era of revolutionary politics and burgeoning economic destabilization. This period heralds new conceptions of generalized ecological crisis, including atmospheric pollution, systemic toxicity, and unsustainable fossil fuel dependency, alongside explorations of radical alternatives to capital accumulation and land enclosure. The final chapters examine the turn to the discourse of the Anthropocene in the 2000s. Tracking the changing discourses of environmentalism over the second half of the century and into the present, my study attends to the evolving rhetorics that reflect on and shape collective sensibilities around ecological crisis. I consider the discourses of popular environmental thinkers across this period, including Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Bill McKibben, and Naomi Klein, placing them alongside contemporaneous works of poetry in order to discern their continuities and disjunctions. This book explores the ways these emerging paradigms of crisis after 1945 generate not only ecological and economic arguments but also aesthetic sensibilities that shape the poetry of this period. Yet in this study I resist approaching poems as merely symptomatic objects. Instead, my readings attend to the non-

Great Acceleration Poetics

5

synchrony, even friction, between poetry and environmental discourse. While the arguments of prose writers such as Rachel Carson and Bill McKibben often had a transformative effect on environmental politics, the poetry of this project largely frames itself as out of sync with its present. I contend that the enigmatic, refractory ecological imaginaries of these works provide important historiographical counterpoints to the timely interventions of mainstream environmentalist discourse. In their resistance to the emplotment and closures of narrative form, their speculative turns toward unimagined futures and recursive engagement with prior modes, and their attention to dynamics of persistence and decomposition, these poems generate distinct vantages on their contemporary conditions. In this way, Remainders illuminates the unique perspectives that poetry, rather than literary nonfiction or novels, American ecocriticism’s preferred genres, might provide for accounts of postwar ecologically oriented writing. Attuned to the planetary poiesis of global capitalism in the Great Acceleration, the poems across this book imaginatively tarry with what lives on and what is beyond repair. Taking as their subject matter remainders of various kinds, from obsolescent commodities to polluted air and toxic matter, they convey the strange temporalities and phenomenologies of socioecological life in turmoil. Some probe the ways genres long associated with environmental relations must be reimagined or deconstructed as these relations undergo significant alteration. Others invest figures of apostrophe and prosopopoeia with new proportions in relation to the accelerating destruction of habitats and biodiversity loss. Remainders examines these portrayals as meditations on the ecological aftereffects of productive innovation and on poetry’s own changing figurative investments in an age of calamitous environmental change. Charting these literary developments across a variety of texts, Remainders uncovers an urgent poetic record of the untimely history of our environmental present. A governing aim of this book is to elaborate an ecocritical outlook that attends more fully to the forms and figures of ecological calamity rather than to narratives of sustainability and hope.15 It is my contention that the history of this period, one of intensifying catastrophe at various scales, demands such attention. This is also a period of sustained environmental response, and the poems of this study all provide creative and moving contributions to this effort. But they do so in a decidedly minor key, one that is skeptical of progress and reform. Taken together, the governing ethos of the poetry in this study might be glimpsed in a phrase by poet Brenda Hillman in her recent book Practical Water

6

Introduction

(2009): “We must do something but what.”16 Resisting a perspective of innocence or ethical outrage that would suggest an observational, distanced vantage, these poems emphasize forms of complicity in environmental destruction and convey collective feelings of vulnerability, hopelessness, and dread. They replace jeremiads of imminent apocalypse with an uncanny sense of living on amidst accumulating planetary disruption, and they mourn the loss of a belief in nature’s rejuvenating powers. In so doing, this poetry offers insight into the feelings, forms, and situations arising in response to rapid environmental transformation without presenting easy resolutions. As a chronicle of these works, Remainders proposes an extended response to “green” readings that stress environmental consciousness, appreciation, and ethical action. I highlight how these poems engage in more ambivalent ways with the problem of human agency and the limits of individual perception and ethical response. Attuned to the damaging aspects of environmental existence, the works of this study dwell in unresolvable affects and bewildering sensations. Such attunement to the incipient and the untimely, I argue, embodies a sustained response to the accelerative temporality and logics of the era often called the “American Century.” Accelerations and Untimeliness To characterize this poetic ethos, I turn first to two poems, about a discarded beer can and a melting piece of glacier, respectively, which bookend this book’s historical period. Lorine Niedecker, midwestern midcentury poet, meditates in an untitled poem from 1956 on various forms of garbage that are tossed by urban weekenders onto the rural byways of her Wisconsin landscape: People, people— ten dead ducks’ feathers on beer can litter . . .       Winter will change all that17

Like Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” the haunting quality of this poem emerges through its brief image that charts the strange temporalities of its present. While Pound’s modernist poem renders human life as spectral presence, ­evanescent as fallen petals, amidst the disorienting speed of urbanized existence, Niedecker’s postwar piece portrays “people, people” by way of lingering

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remnants. In these discarded signs of rural leisure, Niedecker sees a representative image of humans’ heedless, destructive practices; her tone here is subtly chiding, as if reminding us of the wastefulness we’d prefer to overlook. At the same time, the poem evokes the strange condition of these materials, intimating and yet resisting the existential qualities of death and life. The obdurate presence of the beer can conjures the uncanny animacy of the commodity persisting beyond the productive circuits of capital; the evanescent feathers dot the can in an eerie simulation of the duck’s living being. Niedecker’s image highlights matter not just out of place but out of time, lingering beyond the organic life cycle of the bird and the commodity cycle of the beer—a living on into decay that becomes a temporal hallmark of postwar poetic representations of remainders. The closing image of this poem—“winter / will change all that”—marks, at one level, a seasonal transience that erases human traces from the landscape. In this sense, it speaks to the cyclical capacities for renewal that poets from Hesiod and Virgil forward have celebrated in the natural world. It evokes, moreover, the sense of transience and mortality that winter connotes. This reading of the image stresses the rejuvenating power of the natural world’s forces in relation to the frailty of human life and works, a powerful and enduring poetic trope. Yet Niedecker’s closing line also can be read with a more historically specific valence, evoking anthropogenic impacts on nature itself. Niedecker’s work, particularly in the 1950s and early 1960s, is imbued with the pervasive nuclear anxieties of the Cold War era. “In the great snowfall before the bomb,” begins one poem, and another poem depicts schoolchildren singing “O Tannenbaum,” with one child instead singing the phrase “atomic bomb.”18 “Winter / will change all that,” then, may refer to nuclear winter, the culminating sign of the destructiveness for which “people, people” are responsible and a figure of the increasing indistinguishability of natural and human histories in a nuclear age. The specter of nuclear winter haunting these lines, in turn, forecasts a larger concern in the post-1945 poetry I examine: an emerging anxiety about the inability to count on nature to erase human traces and make new a landscape, and a sense of human imbrication in environmental processes to the degree that even winter becomes an indeterminate signifier of human activity. If the futureorientation of Niedecker’s language—“winter / will change all that”—conveys a particular kind of ecological thinking characteristic of the nuclear era, where the anthropogenic capacities for natural destruction that nuclear winter entails remain on the horizon as apocalyptic possibility, the obsolescing litter suggests

8

Introduction

a nearer, more daily destructive presence. This four-line poem holds different scales of ecological harm, from the proleptic fears of atomic calamity to the ongoing effects of consumption and the casual violence of humans. It draws these scales together through the material remnant of the litter that merges human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, natural and historical in an uncanny form with an indeterminate life span. In so doing, the poem stakes a claim for the mediating capacity of poetry, its ability to disclose and to hold open, to attend to what remains and to glimpse what might yet come. If Niedecker’s 1956 poem registers a murmur of ecological disturbance unfolding at an incremental pace, Kaia Sand’s contemporary piece, “Tiny Arctic Ice,” is attuned to the accelerated flows of twenty-first-century global capitalism and their cataclysmic ecological implications. Here are the opening lines, each one appearing on its own page: Inhale, exhale 7.4 billion people breathing Some of us in captivity Our crops far-flung Prison is a place where children sometimes visit Jetted from Japan, edamame is eaten in England Airplane air is hard to share I breathe in what you breathe out, stranger19

Evoking the seemingly seamless movements of commodities circulating—­ edamame, saffron, roses, microchips—Sand portrays airplanes “jetting” goods around the globe. Sand’s poem, illustrating how Quito and Prineville, Japan and the Cascade Mountains are drawn into proximity through “far-flung” supply chains, is suggestive of what environmental historian Elizabeth Kolbert calls the development of a global “New Pangaea,” a supercontinent of sorts characterized by increasingly homogeneous goods and decreasing biodiversity, fueled by contemporary patterns of commodity circulation.20 At the same time, by invoking images of containment, captivity, and sterility—people in prison, ­Araucana chickens that “won’t lay eggs in captivity,” Monsanto’s infamous “terminator seeds”—Sand draws the reader’s attention to the social inequalities and ecological limits that underwrite these planetary flows. What moves and what is hard to move; what connections become perceptible and invisible in everyday patterns of living; what “stacks up” and what

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disappears; what and who is left over, cast off—these are the socioecological questions that the poem weighs. But perhaps the most powerful figure exemplifying these questions is one that appears only in the title: the “Tiny Arctic Ice” itself. This diminishing presence haunts the poem’s scenes of swift global transport and disposable goods. The arctic ice is one material reminder of the ecological consequences of these “far-flung” flows. Not directly integrated into the body of the poem, the glacier’s diminishment is nonetheless inextricably tied to them, as the repeated image of the airplane spanning the earth, emitting CO2 all along the way, underscores. Rather than distant and unreachable—a symbol of the sublime otherness of the natural world—the arctic ice, melting into “tininess,” is a material register of the indistinction of the anthropogenic and the nonhuman in a globalized age. Like the slow decomposition of Niedecker’s beer can, the remainder of the melting glacier attunes the reader to untimely forms, marginal to the rhythms of capitalist production but also unmoored from biospheric cycles associated with the Holocene. While Niedecker’s poem holds out a hope for natural reintegration, albeit mixed with new anxieties about nuclear power’s unmaking capacities, Sand’s poem depicts an interconnected world where nature appears as commodity good and disappears as wild externality. The melting ice, the resistant seeds, the products headed for slow decomposition in the landfill— each portray toxic lingering and decay unfolding at divergent tempos. To consider these poems together, then, is to observe an evolving poetic inquiry, across the second half of the century, into the ecological limits and crisis tendencies that come to characterize the Great Acceleration. These poems show how such greater tendencies might be glimpsed in small, easily overlooked materials, made perceptible via the mediating capacities of poetic form. They also reveal the ways in which nature as an organizing poetic concept signifying otherness and creative renewal becomes increasingly cast in negative terms, as that which is fugitive or no longer available. In this sense, these works investigate nature itself as a remaindered category of poetic thinking. Natural History and Nature’s End In his 1836 essay “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson calls for an American literature that attends to “new lands, new men, new thoughts” rather than remaining mired in the “dry bones of the past.”21 Emerson argues that turning to the permanence and fecundity of the natural world can provide the basis for such

10

Introduction

literary imaginings. To undertake this endeavor, “Nature” examines the alterity of nature and the complexity of our relation to it, asking, “To what end is nature?” Emerson conveys a multifaceted definition of nature whose various inflections bear, in largely negative ways, on the poetic ethos this book explores. Emerson first claims that nature remains essentially external to humans, a realm impervious to our alterations: “Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf.”22 For Emerson, the perfected forms of nature—“the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the wheat-ear, the egg, the wings and forms of most birds, the lion’s claw, the serpent, the butterfly”—serve as emblems of the possibility for spiritual and material wholeness available to humans.23 And in turn, human language and art emerge from and are indelibly connected to these perfect forms. Nature is the primal, abundant source on which humans depend for both material sustenance and imaginative “ministry.”24 Emerson’s language in this section titled “Commodity,” however, also undertakes a complex reversal of this language of dependence, suggesting that nature’s plenty is intended to “serve” humans. Emerson describes a planetary system where all elements work harmoniously toward the end of human “profit”: All the parts incessantly work into each other’s hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man.25

Here we can see the way that Emerson’s sense of creative limitlessness derives from a material base, wherein natural phenomena serve as resource for human economy. As critic Carolyn Porter writes, the answer that Emerson gives to the question “Nature” poses is simple: “the end of nature is to be used,” whether for imaginative or material purposes.26 All of these interconnected frameworks for understanding nature—as autonomous externality, as site of imaginative renewal and trove of creative images, as ceaselessly replenishable resource for human endeavor—have been central not only to Anglo-American cultural understandings of nature from the Romantic period forward but to poetic imaginations in particular.27 In Emerson’s essay, it is the poet who best demonstrates these various aspects of nature: in the emblematic language that draws readers’ imaginations back to

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natural forms, but also in the way the poet “conforms things to his thoughts” in his work, using nature to her own ends. It is in poetry, Emerson suggests, that we can glimpse both the primal alterity of nature and also the most ingenious forms of its anthropogenic use, expressed through the poet’s imaginative symbols. Invocations of nature in American works by poets from Bryant and Whitman to Frost and Moore draw not only on these various tropes that Emerson describes but also assert poetry’s particular sensitivity to nature’s forms and capacities.28 Many of the poems in this study remain powerfully influenced by this poetic sensibility. Yet they confront, again and again, the ways this aesthetics of nature no longer obtains in a time of accelerating ecological crisis. They consider what happens when the figurative potential for natural renewal or refuge becomes no longer possible, and they meditate on this very unavailability, weighing the consequences for poetic thinking without this framework.29 We might discover in this archive another sense of Porter’s reading of Emerson’s essay: “the end of nature is to be used.” These works reveal how the desire for an original relation with nature characteristic of transatlantic Romanticism and its modern inheritors is inextricable from a belief in what Marx calls the “free gifts of Nature,” inexhaustible in its ability to be appropriated to human ends.30 They point not only to the impossibility of approaching nature in the green sense that Emerson evokes but to the way such logics are bound to the intensifying commodification of nature and its calamitous effects. “Nature’s end,” a concept invoked by theorists including Bill McKibben, Carolyn Merchant, Fredric Jameson, Ulrich Beck, and Bruno Latour (and discussed in Chapter 4), here signifies not the end of the real, ongoing phenomena and entities of the biosphere but of this organizing frame of nature’s exteriority and abundance. Looking at these works, we see how figures of nature as externality come to be replaced by figures of remainders that reveal the indistinction of natural and historical phenomena amidst the processes of capital accumulation. These poems reflect on the interpenetration of ecology and economy, the natural and the historical, and they consider the ways poetic form might be uniquely attentive to these deconstructive mergings. I draw on Adorno’s and Benjamin’s historical-materialist idea of natural history to develop my readings of these postwar poems. Natural history, a philosophy of history developed in Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study and Arcades Project and Adorno’s lecture “On The Idea of Natural-History” and Negative

12

Introduction

Dialectics, emerges by way of a refusal to see the concepts of history and nature as idealized, opposed ontological categories. As a refutation of dualistic Enlightenment and phenomenological accounts, natural history offers a form of critical historiography that defamiliarizes “historical being” and “natural being” into relations of productive indistinction.31 This historiography decenters the human as history’s privileged subject, instead favoring a logic that stresses the ephemerality and finitude of all things. Natural history, in Benjamin’s and Adorno’s sense, rejects triumphal progress-narratives of historical development and cumulative meaning in favor of a governing logic of disintegration, loss, and untimeliness.32 At the site of indistinction between historical being and natural being, Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study asserts, is “originary decay.” Benjamin argues: “In the process of decay, and in it alone, the events of history shrivel up and become absorbed in the setting.”33 This decompositional principle, to which all beings are susceptible, de-essentializes nature as eternal presence while revealing human history as similarly bound by transience. Adorno claims that the work of the materialist philosopher, then, is to “awaken” the “enciphered and petrified object” by discerning in its fragmented corpus the allegorical meaning that is “transience.”34 For his part, Benjamin contributes an essential textual ingredient to this perspective, pointing to the hermeneutic task of apprehending natural history in baroque allegory, which he sees as a site in which the disintegration of history as it decomposes into nature is revealed. Benjamin argues that in such allegories, the inscriptions of history in nature become apprehensible in the form of the fragment and the ruin. These shards point not to the workings of nature in its “bud and bloom” but in “the over-ripeness and decay of her creations.”35 In turn, Benjamin’s lifelong Arcades Project extends this consideration to the petrifying commodities and decaying infrastructure of the Paris Arcades. In this natural-historical interpretation, such commodities reveal the accelerating process of transience characteristic of modern consumer capitalism.36 Benjamin’s and Adorno’s philosophy has powerful and largely unrecognized implications for socioecological thinking in the Great Acceleration. Their concept of natural history is illuminating both in its emphasis on material processes of decomposition and in its insistence that this is the fate of all historical beings.37 This attention to what Adorno calls “dialectical nature”—nature overwritten by history, history suffused by decay—gains a more urgent histori-

Great Acceleration Poetics

13

cal significance in a time of generalized environmental crisis.38 I employ the term “remainder” to draw out both key allegiances to and divergences from this Frankfurt School method. As a conceptual term, remainder operates as a means of considering the relations between ecology, history, and form as they become newly visible in the devalued remnants of capital’s circuits of production, circulation, and consumption. Such remnants might appear as unintentional by-product (emissions, toxic waste, agricultural run-off, glacial melt) or as super­seded commodity. Unlike the monumental figure of the ruin or the elliptical shard of the fragment, the remainder, as considered in these poems, evokes the ongoing and intensifying processes that characterize natural-historical entanglements in this period. Posing a challenge both to the capitalist narratives of perpetual growth via productive cycles and to the predictability of ecosystemic patterns, the material life of these remainders signifies new ecological limits. This natural-historical image works, then, not to renaturalize the production of nature under capitalism but to provide a causal account of matter-in-time and thus to expose the historicity, the social kernel, of its composition and decay. In turn, the deconstructive operations of transience central to Adorno’s and Benjamin’s sense of natural history are subtended, here, by an uncanny sense of endurance. What defines the natural-historical in the Great Acceleration is not so much the motions of transience that unmake all phenomena over time but the way this unmaking itself seems to be interrupted, altered, undone. In this sense, we might see new dimensions and scales of natural history, glimpsed in myriad contexts: in the expansive decay of landfills and oil spills, in the afterlife of obsolescent objects, in the abandoned lots of Rust Belt cities, and in the slow toxic seepage of industrial chemicals into waterways, soil, air, and animal products.39 As in Adorno’s and Benjamin’s perspective, these remainders convey, in their decompositional lingering, catastrophe unfolding at various speeds. In postwar American poetry, we can discern various literary representations of such remainders. These figurations, with their dialectical reflections on the accelerative speed of earth-systemic change, offer powerful expressions of the complex and often contradictory socioecological dynamics of their present.40 Innovation and Remainders Remainders reads these portrayals not only as meditations on socioecological transformations but also on the changing state of American poetry in a post­literary and postnatural age. My study asks whether, in a half century

14

Introduction

characterized by the progressive diminishment of poetry’s cultural authority, poems of this period might be attuned to poetry’s own cultural status as a remainder. What if a poem builds obsolescence into its own structure, signaling its imminent outmodedness and potential non-endurance as an artifact? Throughout this book, I trace how a variety of poems in the wake of modernism depart from an ethos characterized by innovation and avant-gardism and instead reflect a self-reflexive bearing of untimeliness. I argue that their imaginative tarrying with the residual offers reflections on the status and fate of poetry in mid-twentieth- to early-twenty-first-century American life, reflections that burrow deep into the very material textures and self-definitions of these works. The work of Niedecker and Sand discussed above provides instances of the way poetic attention to natural-historical dynamics extends beyond theme to compositional principle and internal ethos. These writers’ texts mark, in proleptic fashion, their own exposure to temporal decay. Perhaps the most striking example of this tendency in Niedecker’s work can be found in an early poem, “Next Year or I Fly My Rounds Tempestuous,” which is handwritten on the tear-off sheets of a desktop devotional calendar for 1935. This calendar-poem is suffused with a sense of the slippery ephemerality of time— “Wade all life / backward to its / source which / runs too far / ahead,” goes the first poem’s koan-like logic.41 This untimeliness is further underscored by the poem’s material form. Over the dates for the second half of January, Niedecker writes: “after / you know me / I’ll be no one.”42 Playing with the homophones “know” and “no,” these lines look into the future to declare anonymity as final fate and envision this anonymity not as a condition of being unknown but of being known. To be “no one” is the denouement of all matter, after it is known, encountered, read. That this poem is written by hand on the calendar only heightens its insistence on potential non-endurance, as the poem’s very existence is bound to the ephemeral presence of the tear-off calendar page, a material record intended not for longevity but for brief use and quick disposability. The poem’s marking of its own obsolescence through the calendar page speaks to an orientation toward historical time that is regressive rather than forward-looking, wading backwards rather than keeping up. While the calendar-poem persists, remediated in book form, it highlights the susceptibility of all things to transience and decay and frames its own presence as remnant, lingering on.

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Sand’s poem attends in similar ways to these dynamics. It first appeared, in 2007, as a typewritten chapbook on a tea bag, published by a small press, Dusie Press. Through this format, Sand’s poem imprints a sense of its own material impermanence, recorded on a product made for single use and instant disposal. That this product is tea, one of the commodities central to the development of global trade, underscores the poem’s thematic meditation on the global production and circulation of goods. To inscribe the poem onto a oneuse commodity good is to contemplate the materials and means by which a poem circulates in the global economy and to raise questions about the relation between disposable commodity and poem. It is to highlight, in its very form, an attention to what persists and what might not last. Sand has subsequently recast this poem as a performance piece in various evanescent or disposable formats: on paper airplanes sent into audiences, on newspapers, and inscribed on e-waste cords.43 Sand affiliates the linguistic object of the poem with these discarded material goods, even as the poem’s inscriptive capacity allows for reflections on these elements of transience. In figure and form, these works convey the larger natural-historical poetics that this study tracks, which attend in various ways to the temporal dialectics of lasting and passing. Troubling what Susan Stewart has called the “move to transcend or escape time that . . . [serves as] the paradigm for literary idealism from romanticism through modernism,” these works chart presences that linger at the verge.44 This study attends to the historical, ecological, and poetic insights that a particular archive of postwar poetry achieves through its imaginative affiliation with residual materials and forms. Across its chapters, this book attends to remaindered presence as theme, topos, and formal pattern in a variety of poems. If these texts make it new, it is often by way of testing the capacities and limits of older genres, tropes, and recurring figures. Rather than offering a declension narrative for American postwar poetics, I consider the insights this obsolescent imaginary develops in its forms of ecological attention and its self-conception of poetry’s persistence as a nondominant cultural form. Through this attention to the logics of obsolescence and residuality across postwar American poetry, my study proposes a critical counternarrative to what I call the “innovation paradigm” that has dominated literary-critical accounts of modern and contemporary poetry over the past two decades. Innovative poetry could be most broadly characterized in Marjorie Perloff ’s terms

16

Introduction

as a “language of rupture,” associated with modernist avant-garde practices of the early twentieth century but continuing into the contemporary field of poetic practice.45 A host of monographs and anthologies on twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century American poetry invoke innovation as their organizing framework.46 Beyond these particular titles, the concept of innovation has come to define the genealogies of poetry from modernism into the present more than any other term. Poetic innovation begins with the modern need to turn away from received form—from the pentameter to the genteel conventions of late Victorian verse to the lyricism of Romantic poetry—and to “make it new.” Innovation, in this sense, is grounded in poetic practices that disrupt legibility, mix genres and styles, engage in paratactic and perceptual leaps, elaborate formal constraints, and otherwise foreground the materiality of their medium. The extended analogy of this paradigm connects innovative strategies in poetry to the non-expressivist aims of other art forms.47 The inventions and refusals of the modern period, in turn, become resources for various forms of innovation in the postwar era. The poetry of Pound and other modernists, the New American poets, Language poetry, and contemporary performance, digital, Conceptual, multimedia, and post-Language writing—all have been grouped within the capacious frame of innovative or avant-garde poetry.48 Innovation paradigm proponents also suggest that beyond any specific practices, innovation bespeaks a larger ethos. Innovation has been a decidedly positive term in postwar American poetics, with liberatory and even revolutionary connotations. Innovation refuses the status quo, subverts conventional forms of thinking, and imagines new possibilities for poetic practice, according to this framework.49 The concept of innovation thus suggests an essentially optimistic narrative of poetic production, circulation, and reception, one attentive to the generative energy of poetry as a cultural form. It views poetry as a means of unveiling new forms of thought that might generate larger social change. Such views find analogical affinities with the logic of commodity production and liberal narratives of historical progress.50 We might say that this ethos, with its celebrations of subversive innovation, dovetails significantly with the progress-oriented sensibilities of the American Century. Yet even if poetry remains a widespread cultural enterprise across the second half of the century and into the present, it cannot be understood as possessing sustained, meaningful influence on the wider spheres of American social and

Great Acceleration Poetics

17

political life.51 Since the 1990s, critical pronouncements of the “death” of poetry, backed up by statistics about the steep decline in American poetry readership, have circulated widely.52 While recent cultural studies investigations have highlighted poetry’s populist forms and myriad locales, from Internet chat rooms to public elegies, these critical works nonetheless acknowledge the larger marginality of poetry as a literary form within postwar cultural production.53 Approached from this historical vantage, the imperative toward innovation itself begins to appear like an anachronistic holdover from the modernist era, a nostalgic desire to occupy a poetic modality with more direct cultural relevance.54 It is no coincidence, then, that one image this study’s title, Remainders, evokes is that of the remainders table in a bookstore, an image of the decidedly equivocal value of the literary in this period. My study is not, however, a sociological portrait of postwar poetry’s institutional life or a direct analysis of the literary marketplace for poetry, territory that has been ably covered by various scholars of postwar poetics.55 Nor does it engage in depth the “poetry wars” of recent years, suggesting by this sidestep that such frameworks have perhaps determined the methods and categories by which we frame postwar poetry at the expense of other conceptions. And it does not elegize poetry as irrelevant, archaic, or dead but instead examines ways that a sustained examination of the cultural obsolescence of poetry might be apprehensible in and through this work’s attention to the untimely persistence of remainders. Raymond Williams’s concept of cultural residuality from his chapter in Marxism and Literature titled “Dominant, Residual, and Emergent” provides a useful framework in approaching poetry’s cultural status in the postwar period. Williams describes the residual as a cultural formation that, unlike the archaic, retains a certain distance from the dominant culture and can thus possess “an alternative or even oppositional relation” to this culture.”56 Residuality not only denotes cultural status, but it conveys a necessary relation to the past that is notably absent in arguments that stress innovation. Williams’s definition of residuality indicates the ways prior cultural forms and meanings exert continuing pressure on the cultural forms of the present, as well as how these present forms represent an uncertain relation to the future. For Williams, this uncertainty centers on the ever-present possibility, for residual modes, of incorporation by the dominant culture or diminishment into nonexistence. Drawing on these ideas, I explore the ways poems across this period might be understood as residual cultural forms, still an active presence in and of the present but with no claim

18

Introduction

to dominance in the cultural sphere.57 In their shared attunement to recursivity and belatedness, these works present an alternative to literary histories organized around innovative imperatives. And in their form and theme, these various texts conceive of poetry as an aesthetic space for meditating on what remains. The Chapters My first chapter offers an introduction to the dynamics of postwar American life, a period often called the “Golden Age of Capitalism,” as revealing emergent signs of ecological catastrophe. To do so, I consider the work of two midcentury poets, Lorine Niedecker and Gwendolyn Brooks, as chroniclers of socio­ecological transition in the American Midwest.58 While environmental historians have recently drawn attention to the suburbs as the key site of inquiry into changing postwar conditions, these writers’ work highlights the rural and urban peripheries as key locales for understanding changing environmental dynamics. I turn first to Niedecker’s development of a poetics attentive to uneven development and ecosystemic degradation in the mixed economy of rural Wisconsin. Across her work, we glimpse the changing tempos of the historical nature of North Central, Niedecker’s name for her region, as it undergoes sustained transformation, charted by way of the small thing—lilacs, quack grass, corn—that emblematizes what lasts and what is rendered obsolete. The second half of the chapter moves from Niedecker’s rural Wisconsin to Brooks’s urban Chicago. Brooks depicts the production of space in relation to the forms of environmental inequity emerging in South Side housing and neighborhood conditions after 1945. In so doing, her poems, with their folk forms, detail an emergent history of racism and impoverishment as environmental conditions, a key dimension of the Great Acceleration. Chapters 2 and 3 turn from the immediate postwar period to the late 1960s and early 1970s, amidst the emergence of the modern environmental movement and new definitions of systemic ecological crisis. In Chapter 2, I place John Ashbery’s atmospheric poetry of the late sixties and early seventies in dialogue with the influential environmental reflections of Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner. In Carson and Commoner, we see two examinations of the ways the empirical verifiability of biospheric crisis—particularly in terms of systemic toxicity and pollution—remains difficult to perceive and apprehend. Ashbery’s atmospheres similarly convey not the spectacular or apocalyptic recognition of ecological calamity but a more strange and uneven perceptibility.

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My third chapter engages with two poetic texts of the early 1970s, Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island (1974) and Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters (1971), which were important documents for the countercultural left. These works reflect on a short-lived ecopolitical itinerary in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the revolutionary commitments of New Left activists and the back-to-theland practices of the counterculture generated a distinctive radical ecological politics. The creative operation of the books is to impart glimpses of an idyllic vision as an interruptive, untimely alternative to the ongoing operations of modern capitalism. At the same time, they tie this pastoral of the future to the imminent need for revolutionary transformation, offering a thoroughgoing critique of systemic ecological and social crisis wrought by industrialized capitalism and the modern state. I point toward the historical conditions that led to the decline of radical ecological politics by the late 1970s and the corporatization of the environmental movement in the Reagan-Bush era, indicating the ways these changing conditions rendered this version of pastoral not only untimely but untenable. The final two chapters turn to the 2000s and to the new global scales of ecological crisis, associated with climate change and other biospheric rifts, that characterize this period’s ecological thinking. My fourth chapter describes the emergence of the discourse of the “end of nature” and its implications for understanding biospheric relations. Pointing to the elegiac dimensions of this discourse, I read Juliana Spahr’s long poem “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache” as an example of a literary exploration of the consequences of this conceptual absence. This chapter argues that the operations of elegy become the subject of sustained investigation in Spahr’s work, which finds its forms of closure to be unavailable. Instead, I claim that “Gentle Now” serves as a representative eco-elegy that dwells in melancholia rather than moving toward the completion of the mourning process. I close with an examination of Spahr’s recent reengagement with the central preoccupations of “Gentle Now” in another poem, co-written with Joshua Clover, called “#Misanthropocene: 24 Theses,” which investigates the affective and political limits of melancholy. My final chapter turns to the contemporary mode of ecopoetics as an exploration of the problems of poiesis in a time of accelerating ecological destruction. Ecopoetics as a distinctive mode emerges in the post–Kyoto Protocol era, when the problem of how to respond to planetary environmental ­degradation—­species extinction, global climate change, and other forms of biospheric instability—

20

Introduction

has become at once increasingly urgent and seemingly insoluble. The contemporary poems I discuss present an extended redescription of human capacities and aesthetic making in light of these generalized forms of anthropogenic crisis. These works meditate on remainders—material in a landfill, cast-off plastic goods—exploring whether and how the symbolic acts of discovery, disassembly and reconstruction these poems stage differ from larger imperatives to extract, consume, discard, and repurpose materials to generate further value. Their portrayals raise questions regarding the culpability for environmental destruction and the limits of human ingenuity to salvage or make new. Our uncertain ecological present is perhaps best exemplified in the strange and turbulent weather we face, from floods and droughts to unnatural earthquakes and hurricanes of unprecedented force. My coda reads recent representations of storms and the wreckage they leave behind as vivid illustrations of the losses that have become central features of twenty-first-century Great Acceleration life. In their depictions of life-worlds undone by calamity, these works dwell in the devastation and bewilderment of scenes of aftermath. Such scenes underscore the larger ethos of this book, with its refusal of narratives of progress or resilience and its insistence on grappling with the distressing consequences of socioecological change. But these portrayals also point to the grounds for an emergent politics based in a recognition of the earthly commons we share. Such a politics, glimpsed across many of the texts in this study but finding material form in the burgeoning radical ecological movements of our time, discovers unexpected forms of solidarity amidst precarious conditions and elaborates vocabularies of mutuality alongside its language of loss.

1

North Central, South Side

Postwar Ecologies in Niedecker and Brooks

Various notable environmental histories, such as Adam Rome’s Bulldozer in the Countryside and Christopher Sellers’s Crabgrass Crucible, have drawn attention to the suburbs as key to understanding ecological change and the rise of environmentalism in the United States after World War II. According to these studies, the “homebuilding story” of the suburbs offers a direct window into the dynamics of consumerism, growth, and innovation in the postwar period as they bear on the nonhuman environment.1 This framework enables us to see the way the newfound prosperity of the American middle class and the shifting demographics of the metropolis in the 1950s came into direct conflict with a conservation ethos—a conflict dramatically captured in the iconic image of the bulldozer plowing the countryside for suburban development.2 In turn, this conflict produced new environmental responses, turning the suburbs into a central site for the rise of the postwar environmentalist movement.3 This chapter points to poetic evocations of other locales—the rural byway, the urban inner city—that provide alternate illustrations of postwar socioecological dynamics. While the suburbs present an essential means of understanding the shift in the late 1950s and early 1960s from conservationism to a more systemic definition of environmental crisis, they also orient attention toward the most visible figures—middle-class consumers, property owners, developers, politicians—and their associated frameworks of law, property, and economic growth. Environmental perspectives that foreground the suburbs remain attuned, in other words, to the ways empowered beneficiaries of postwar expansion came to recognize the unexpected environmental impacts of their own consumption habits. By contrast, Lorine Niedecker’s and Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry highlights peripheral areas and residual perspectives that illuminate the underside of this era’s accelerating economic expansion. In their evocations of the monocultures 21

22

Chapter 1

of Wisconsin fields, the strange blooms in the Rock River, and the vacant lots and crumbling infrastructure of South Side Chicago, these poems convey the essentially uneven geography of capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s. Rather than drawing attention to areas of growth and prosperity, these poets attend to what is torn down, cast off, left over, and to what might outlast. They reveal how complex dynamics of transience and endurance might be apprehensible by exploring the changing conditions of areas not typically recognized as environmental fronts. In turn, the work of Niedecker and Brooks points to other ways of under­ standing place as a framework for environmental thought. In her Sense of Place, Sense of Planet, critic Ursula Heise has argued that ecocritical arguments that explore literary representations of place have tended to foreground aspects like “spatial closeness, cognitive understanding, emotional attachment, and an ethic of responsibility and ‘care.’”4 For Heise and others, ecocritics’ focus on the local often amounts to a refusal to confront wider historical forces, and this ethos of connectedness and stability can obscure other affective ­dimensions. I read Niedecker and Brooks, by contrast, not as advocates of place but as chroniclers of socioecological transformation as it emerges in these midwestern sites. This chapter considers how the condensed surfaces of their poems unfold the traces of environmental crisis discernible in the rocks, soil, fields, rivers, and waste of the Wisconsin countryside and the South Side’s racially stratified urban sites. These writers examine the often ambivalent, detached, or even negative responses that such locales generate for their inhabitants, and they reveal the ways an ethos of environmental care can be connected to material privilege or overriden by profit motives. If there is a stubborn affection that emerges for North Central and South Side in these works, it arises through representations of these places’ ongoing transformations and the ways their dwellers cope with and adapt to them. Niedecker and Brooks explore these responses by way of forms that tend toward the minimal and the minor—the folk tale, the Mother Goose nursery rhyme, the regional vernacular, the ballad. These poems proceed by way of a rigorous minimalism that scrupulously attends to what is almost overlooked, the small phenomena and experiences that reveal larger ecological implications. They also demur from logics, social and poetic, that stress innovation and expansion, instead tarrying with what lingers and what is lost. Niedecker calls this dimension of her poetry the “element of folk time”—a measure of

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23

life imperfectly attuned to the dominant rhythms of midcentury American progress.5 Brooks evokes what grows in and amidst the crowded dwellings and vacant lots of urban Chicago. Through their attention to remaindered forms, times, and lifeworlds, these poets unfold an unsettling record of socioecological change at the dawn of the Great Acceleration. Land Histories, Agrarian Presents Niedecker’s life story has led to persistent interpretations of her poetry as lyri­ cized evocations of natural surroundings from a perspective of isolated intimacy. Her first major posthumous collection, The Granite Pail, edited by the poet Cid Corman, was key in the construction of this image of Niedecker’s work. This edition influenced a generation of Niedecker critics to see her work through a lyricized lens.6 In his preface, Corman emphasizes the way Niedecker “melds language and nature,” especially the watery landscape around her home.7 Recent Niedecker scholars have strenuously objected to her characterization as a lyric nature poet by asserting that it neglects the formal originality and multifaceted regionalism of her poems. Such critical readings frame her instead as purveyor of avant-garde poetic experiments and draw attention to her multifaceted environmental portraits and political commitments.8 Here, I read Niedecker as a poet of the residual, attentive in both form and theme to what is left behind and what lasts.9 Through this perspective, Niedecker emphasizes the mutual determination of the natural and historical, tracing a natural history of anthropogenic forces imprinted in various forms of matter discoverable in this rural area of Wisconsin.10 Her early ­poetry, including New Goose (1946) and For Paul and Other Poems (1956), surveys local land history across various permutations: settlement, dispossession, industrializing agriculture, and ecosystemic simplification. These works depict the development of this area as a rural region, both dependent on and increasingly distinct from urban areas (Madison and especially Chicago).11 In so doing, these poems chronicle a larger American story of the changing fate of agrarianism and the rural under an increasingly unified capitalist market, in and through natural-historical images of apples, corn, strawberries, and other crops as bearers of this change. These entities may appear natural to the untrained eye, but Niedecker scrutinizes them as emblems of a history of frontier settlement and land domestication. In the early 1960s, through images of trash and flood, she begins to track the intensifying changes to water, soil, and

24

Chapter 1

landscape that are affecting her area. Her later work, especially North Central (1968), grapples with the dimensions of nuclear capacity as it threatens earth systems at a newfound scale, placing this threat of total annihilation against smaller scales of anthropogenic change. Through such portrayals, Niedecker refuses a view of her rural landscape as unmediated nature, instead approaching it as what her contemporary and fellow Wisconsinite, ecologist Aldo Leopold, calls a “historical library.”12 Particularly in New Goose and her other early unpublished work, Niedecker plays with ballads and folk forms, often in truncated or experimental ways, to convey the textures of rural lives and to reengage American legends and history.13 With their subtle irony and folksy poignancy, these works make palpable what was lost—above all, with regard to Native American lives and lifeworlds—and the material changes to the land that come to seem natural in their absence.14 One of Niedecker’s untitled poems, written in 1945, retells the story of Johnny Appleseed with decided skepticism: When Johnny (Chapman) Appleseed came to a place he didn’t like he covered it with apple trees. He was the early American apple who changed the earth by dropping seeds.15

The American legend of Johnny Appleseed, about a man who planted apple orchards across the Midwest, is usually told as a story about one man’s harmony with nature and the generosity of his actions. Niedecker’s critical vantage suggests, instead, that Chapman’s actions stem from a distaste for a particular place—“a place he didn’t like”—and a willful desire to remake it according to his own imperatives. Niedecker gestures, in an understated way, to the arrogance of Chapman’s dissatisfaction with what he sees around him. A linguistic link between Chapman and the “apple,” Niedecker argues, must reveal how Chapman has harnessed the apple to his will rather than simply asserting a harmonious union between them, as his sobriquet “Appleseed” does. Subtly demythologizing this folk hero who stands for a virtuous American land history in favor of a more critical perspective, Niedecker revises the folk framework from within to offer a different version of an old story through the small detail of the apple seed and the ironic deflation of Appleseed’s iconic piety.16 Above all, her poem holds open a space for imagining what was there before Chapman,

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25

how the “place he didn’t like” might have looked in place of the monoculture of apple orchards. Other pieces in New Goose more directly confront the history of the violent expropriation of land from Native Americans, approaching these pasts as the literal grounds of the present.17 A poem from this collection, “Pioneers,” depicts the frontier process through the figure of Anson Dart, one of the early settlers of Green Lake County in Wisconsin.18 The first stanza reads: Anson Dart pierced the forest,             fell upon wild strawberries. Frosts, fires, land speculation, comet.             Corn to be planted. How to keep the strawberries?—             Indians’ sugar full of dirt. How to keep the earth.19

Dart’s very name underscores his appropriation of the forest that he “pierces” to discover its secrets. His acquisitive desire expands from the immediate preservation of the strawberries to a more generalized desire to possess the land. “How to keep the earth” emerges as the key preoccupation of white settlers such as Dart, who under the abstract auspices of property rights dispossess the native Winnebago (who “keep the earth” in fundamentally different ways).20 At the same time, this idea emerges as a logic of improvement that favors particular species and reorganizes an ecosystem so as to “keep” them. As such desired entities, the wild strawberries and corn become emblems of a violent history of colonization and an abstract, acquisitive view of land. This point is underscored by the next stanza, which describes the government’s theft of the Winnebago’s land through deceptive treaties forced on them by “agency men” such as Dart. “Red wheels gave the earth a new turn,” Niedecker writes in a subsequent stanza, invoking a classically georgic image of the earth plowed up and turned over. Yet Niedecker’s image is deeply ambivalent: the redness of the wheels not only points to the soil being upturned but also intimates the history of violent dispossession underlying nineteenth-century agricultural settlement. And at the same time, the image of the “new turn” of the earth gestures to the larger, even planetary impact of this agricultural reshaping of the land. Thus the settler logic of “keeping the earth” that the poem charts also forecasts these

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larger ecological changes to come, the “new turn” that land enclosure and intensive agriculture will bring. Niedecker’s poems detail various chapters in this broader story of ecosystemic simplification that begins in the early nineteenth century with land speculators like Anson Dart and their dispossession of Native American tribes, continues with generations of farm families who remake the prairie into fields of wheat and corn, and persists in Niedecker’s postwar present, where industrialized agriculture generates even more abstract quantifications of land.21 Through these depictions, the rural emerges as a site of struggle whose traces can be glimpsed in patterns of land alteration, past and present. This area is marked, particularly in the Depression era, by a new round of accumulation by dispossession, signified by new remainders—abandoned farms, overgrown lilacs, and vacant lots. Here it is farm families and unemployed folk who face the effects of larger economic forces that “keep the earth.” Niedecker’s poem “1937” juxtaposes the drifting subsistence of a surplus population with evanescent life on the Spanish Civil War battlefront, where soldiers’ lives appear as brief blossoms, “the flowers of war.” The second stanza reads: Here we last, lilacs, vacant lots, taxes, no work, debts, the wind widens the grass. In the old house the clocks are dead, past dead.22

Against the violent transience of war, Niedecker evokes the obsolescence of ­Depression-era rural life lived far from a battlefront. “Here we last,” ­Niedecker asserts, contrasting the slow decline of the local folk with the mobile but doomed soldiers walking through battlefields. In these lines nature is overwritten by the historical logics of the present, while the human “we” is impressed with ecological evanescence. The natural images of “lilacs,” “vacant lots,” and “wind-widened grass” become connected to the economic blight of “taxes, no work, debts”—images of fallowness and unproductivity, all. The transient temporalities of “1937” emerge, then, through images of the natural landscape transfigured by the historical violence of economic depression and war, even

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as the rhythms of nature—the bloom and withering of a flower, the creep of weeds in vacant lots—tell the time of the crisis-ridden present. Here as elsewhere in Niedecker’s work, “the element of folk-time” serves as record of the nonsynchronicity of historical time, measuring the lag and drift of rural lasting against the market’s abstract quantifications of labor and time, tracked through images of living things at the edge of vanishing. N ­ iedecker’s figuration of residual “lasting” as transience—where rural forms of life outlive their productive frames and foreshadow their own decay—is drawn into sharper relief by the closing three lines: “In the old house / the clocks are dead, / past dead.” The poem’s shift inward, from an unsown expanse to the inside of “the old house,” amplifies its atmosphere of constriction and immobility. Niedecker heightens this sense of constriction by contrasting the longer, more fluid, variable-syllabic lines of the first sentence (lines 1–5) with the abbreviated length of the second (lines 6–8). This move into two four-syllable lines and then a two-syllable closing line slows the rhythm to a deadening halt, accentuated by the spondees of the final phrase. Niedecker’s compressed syllabics and spondees bear a pressure only magnified by the poem’s diminutive scale; it is as if continuity has been foreclosed, leaving inertia and intimations of mortality in its place. The obsolescent clocks emblematize folk-time as split off from the progressive time they no longer measure—clocks not just stopped but “past dead.” Such poems from New Goose reflect on the difficult, even destitute conditions for the folk of her area, often through images of insufficient food, bankruptcy, and land expropriation.23 Niedecker’s folk poems chart, as well, the counterintuitive logics of industrializing and state-dictated agriculture and their material effects on farmers and land. We can see this in another New Goose manuscript poem, which explores the local consequences of government regulations on wheat production during the Depression: The government men said Don’t plant wheat, we’ve got too much, just keep out weeds. Our crop comes up thru change of season to be stored for what good reason way off and here we need it—Eat who can, who can’t—Don’t grow wheat

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or corn but quack-grass-bread! Such things they plant around my head.24

Contrasting the real usefulness of wheat—“here we need it”—with its low exchange value, Niedecker’s poem lodges a powerful folk protest against the subordination of immediate human needs to market logic. Here we see the ways a particular locale’s agricultural production is yoked to a complex economic system that makes farmers increasingly vulnerable to distant imperatives. To suggest the absurdity of the abstractions that now govern their immediate efforts, this speaker jokes that “quack-grass-bread” might be more valuable than “wheat // or corn,” though it has no conceivable use. While the state and market view crops as abstract, quantifiable commodities (“things”), the poem’s speaker insists on the real names, not only of wheat and corn but of “quackgrass,” a notoriously persistent midwestern weed. Yet this acknowledgment of their closer proximity to these crops does not make this speaker any less bound by larger commodifying imperatives, as the resigned tone of the closing line indicates. Niedecker’s representations of agrarian life highlight the prehistory of these changes and the consistent logics of property and profit that drive them, attending to what is almost and wholly lost as they occur. In these images, we can begin to trace new features of what Leopold calls “land-sickness” that emerge from the deleterious conditions of industrialized agriculture in the rural Midwest (and beyond).25 From the replacement of small family farms with industrialized lots to the pesticide and fertilizer use tied to monocultures, agricultural development after 1940 becomes increasingly consequential in broad-scale environmental change.26 One of the most visible sites of these changes is in local waterways, where soil erosion, abnormal floods, and pollution become signs of intensifying habitat disruption at midcentury. Changes in the Water Niedecker’s portrayals of marshland and floodplain often signify to readers as the emblematic sign of a life lived in immersive relation to her natural surroundings.27 Yet while Niedecker herself often characterized her work as grounded in the water-bound marsh habitat of this area—“The Brontës had their moors, I have my marshes,” she wrote in a letter to Zukofsky28—her depictions of a ­water-bound, flood-prone life are deeply attuned to intensifying transforma-

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tions of this area’s water systems. In a chapter from A Sand County Almanac titled “Marshland Elegy,” Leopold writes of the long history of Wisconsin marshes and the ways they have come to be depleted, by the mid-twentieth century, at the hands of new “overlords” of capitalist development and their “epidemic of ditch-digging and land-booming.”29 Marshes are turned into farmland or waterways, their systems irrevocably altered by various forms of profit- and leisure-seeking actions. One such example of a radically changed ecosystem is that surrounding Lake Koshkonong and the Rock River, ­Niedecker’s own home territory. As a Wisconsin Conservation Department study from 1965 describes, this area was once a marsh and one of the largest areas for migrating waterfowl, and is now a “carp-infested, wind swept, turbid lake.”30 This study tracks several interlocking reasons for this waterway’s degradation, including artificially maintained high water levels to generate electricity, erosion, pollution, and excessive carp population—a species introduced into regional lakes in the 1880s and the source of major habitat disruption. The Wisconsin study also points to habitat changes due to residences and recreational use.31 Many local residents used chemical weed control to reshape the terrain; other forms of residential sewage also polluted the Rock River and Lake Koshkonong. By the late 1960s, declining waterfowl populations, algae blooms, and eutrophication were notable features of the area.32 These were changes that Niedecker witnessed during her lifetime and that emerge in complex ways in her 1960s work. As she writes in a poem from For Paul and Other Poems, “Nearly landless and on the way to water / I push thru marsh.”33 If these lines describe, on one hand, a marshy walk toward shore, they subtly gesture, on the other, toward the larger shifts underway on Blackhawk Island in the 1950s. The poem goes on to depict a local worker, Homer, who “loses ground building cabins— / outdoor knickknacks— that block a view.” In this sense, “losing ground” speaks both to the precarious nature of houses built so close to water’s edge, often on marshy or eroding ground made up of human-made “fill,” and also to the development that more densely populates the area.34 In its understated way, the poem echoes Leopold’s descriptions of marshland as what is pushed through to make room for agricultural land or dwellings, and also to the precarious conditions that this intensifying development produces—the ground “lost” beneath one’s feet. Niedecker’s work is highly sensitive not only to the way humans have adapted to a life by water, but to the transformations of the local land and water

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that these adaptations generate. In “Paean to Place,” Niedecker’s long autobiographical poem from 1968, she invokes strange new features of the land: “Iris now grows / on fill.”35 In another part of the poem, she writes of her father’s life as a carp-seiner on these waters: His skiff skimmed the coiled celery now gone    from these streams       due to carp36

Both these images use the word “now” to foreground the novelty of these changes to her surroundings, from flowers growing on human-made fill to the absence of coiled celery that her father once floated through. And a short untitled piece, in a more surrealist note, offers an even stranger incipient sensing of ecological destruction: Something in the water like a flower will devour water flower37

What is this “something in the water”? The poem might be gesturing here to the floods that often overtook Black Hawk Island, whose waves could resemble flowers. It also may denote algae blooms, which were occurring in Lake ­Koshkonong in the 1950s and early 1960s owing to agricultural runoff and other pollutants.38 Yet the poem resists any such specifying, instead offering a surreal image of elusive degradation that can only be identified as “something.” The white spaces measure a temporal unfolding that is slow, incremental, and mysterious. The time frame of the poem is also proleptic, directed toward a future destruction that has not yet fully materialized. Such poems, in their gestures to the recent disappearance of plant species and their premonitions of an emerging destructive phenomenon, are attuned to immanent changes to the terrain. In this poetry, the crossing of human and water serves as a figure for the “devouring” of habitat and the new anthropogenic remainders that accompany this destruction.39 Floodplain life exists as what Niedecker calls a “melting container,” where the merge of human dwelling and waterway unmakes rather than

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sustains.40 Flood is Niedecker’s privileged sign of destructive ecological interactions, a fusion that renders all things ruined. “Goodbye to lilacs by the door / and all I planted for the eye,” she writes in a poem about spring floods.41 We might see Niedecker’s images of flood as akin to Benjamin’s and Adorno’s emphasis on transience, wherein all matter is bound to decay. Yet Niedecker highlights not only what is undone but what remains as aftermath. In her portraits of the flood, Niedecker points not only to the unmaking force of water but to the refuse left in its wake, such as soaked rugs, wet brooms, warped floors, and “all the tin cans in the world.”42 What lingers in the wake of these floods, in Niedecker’s poetry, are the still-extant remnants of anthropogenic activity, not dissolving into the landscape but persisting in uncanny forms. Niedecker’s water­logged objects and washed-up junk evoke an unsettling sense that destructive “overflow” is not only natural but natural-historical, and that unforeseen consequences might be emerging as effects of human “life by water.”43 Waste and Thrift Images of litter in Niedecker’s postwar work also signify the ways her rural surround is increasingly used as pastoral site of leisure for urban weekenders, changing the landscape in various ways.44 Several poems from her writings of the late 1950s and 1960s describe the invasive sounds of tourist leisure—­roaring motorboats and “song of gun” on the shore—that disturb the area’s quiet.45 Traffic and garbage offer visible signs of the more intensive use of this area for tourist activities: cars out rolling thru the country how they like to rest on me—beer cans and cellophane on my clean-mowed grounds. Whereas I’m quiet . . . I was born with eyes and a house.46

This poem sees, through the perspective of the dweller, how the rural is consumed by these weekenders and the way such consumption leads to careless treatment of the land. Through the leftover trash littering the “country,” the speaker and the “grounds” itself are revealed as a kind of unimagined community: the ignored terrain that is “roll[ed]” over and “rest[ed] on.” The dweller, by

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contrast, is “quiet” and watchful, tracking the destructive speed and heedlessness of the passing cars as they noticeably alter her surroundings. Here we see another dimension of folk-time’s vantage from the periphery on the dominant speed of the present. In another poem, “City Talk,” Niedecker develops this contrast further, juxtaposing the city’s “superhighways,” modern “facilities,” “information,” “and all that garbage” with a slower decay the speaker associates with rural life and its remaindered existences: “I’m rotting here.”47 Such images show how the rural peripheries are at once integrated with and differentiated from the metropolis, linked by “superhighways” but not sharing the same resources or conditions of existence.48 Nowhere are these contradictions more strikingly demonstrated in Niedecker’s poetry than in her explorations of the increasing wastefulness of postwar consumer culture—what she calls the “Time’s buying sickness”—as it changes the life-ways of her community.49 Niedecker’s poems often cast a critical eye on this culture of single-use commodities, profligate waste, and environmental carelessness—an ethos Niedecker sardonically characterizes with this phrase: “just throw it out the window / onto somebody else.”50 Such pieces detail the negative effects of the endless cycles of work and consumption that characterize many American lives in the postwar period: “selling and buying / how are you dying.”51 Automobiles, televisions, stockings, appliances: all these goods, evoked in her poetry, come to define a dominant postwar lifestyle that has grown inattentive to more sustainable and thrifty forms of living.52 Niedecker contrasts portraits of intensified consumption and quick disposability with evocations of increasingly outmoded practices of reusing still extant in her rural byway. Her poetry abounds with figures of repurposed objects—the scrap rug, the green aprons used as seat covers, the popcorn can covering a hole in the wall—that encode connections to people and land absent from the store-bought commodity.53 The value of these objects lies not in their pure immediacy but rather in their fully mediated quality, their actively recognized layers of human action and emotion and their relation to the specificity of their surroundings. They are often explicitly framed as residual objects, remainders of a lifeworld now rendered outmoded by the “‘buy! buy!’ / technicolor ads” and heedless consumption of postwar culture.54 In one poem, “Hand Crocheted Rug,” Niedecker details the slow process by which this rug has come into being, its prehistory in other forms, the careful work that harks back to “not yet the turn / of the century.”55 The rug itself is a marker of conti-

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nuity, drawing together fabrics from various eras in this particular family’s past, and a sign that objects must last for long stretches of time for them. A homely thing but full of specific meanings for this speaker and her immediate circle, its residual condition is revealed in the last lines from “Grandpa,” who says wryly to the speaker, “Ought to have a machine.”56 This sensibility is central to Niedecker’s own poetics, with its orientation toward the residual, the “homemade/handmade” (the title of her 1964 poetry collection), the condensed and the cast off. Her criticisms of consumer culture often emerge in and through her descriptions of her own poetic process. Against a governing cultural ethos of speed, disposability, and infinite exchangeability, her poems celebrate the resourcefulness and ingenuity that emerges from slow, outmoded forms of making. As she muses of her own practice and its accretions and condensations, “What would they say if they knew / I sit for two months on six lines / of poetry?”57 For Niedecker, the gradual accumulation of words and the sensuous dimension of handiwork she associates with residual practices of making can provide an alternative, however precarious, to the larger culture of getting, spending, and waste. In an untitled poem from 1951, Niedecker writes, “they tell me get a job and earn yourself / an automobile—I’d rather collect my parts / as I go.”58 Scorning the interchangeable job that allows for an equally interchangeable car, Niedecker opts for a different, slower mode of living. “Love is carried / if it’s held,” she insists, pointing both to a network of real, living relationships that sustain and to the way love can be “carried” to the reader across distances—both forms of connection that are unassimilable to the speed-bound culture of modern “transport.”59 “the grand blow-up” Across these poems, Niedecker’s vantage on the production of the rural—as site of dispossession, as agricultural nexus, as urban getaway and repository for cultural remainders and trash—offers portraits not of the stability of place but of the ceaselessly destructive capacity that accompanies modern capitalist development. We can see this in her meditations on changes in North Central water and land and in her negative appraisals of the wasteful practices of postwar American culture, as glimpsed in the remainders of litters and uncanny blooms. At another scale, she is also attentive to the violent materialities of war.60 Niedecker’s work turns with increasing frequency to the new capacity for massive annihilation and the fundamental changes to earth systems character-

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istic of the atomic era. In the specter of the atomic bomb, Niedecker discerns the outer limit of the destructive and wasteful impulses of “people, people,” with their profound antagonism to all living things and natural phenomena. Niedecker evokes this annihilative capacity by way of scale shifts that place images of cataclysmic destruction in relation to small forms of life. Thus in one untitled poem from 1950, the dropping of flower stamens and the collecting activities of bees and hummingbirds are placed alongside the destructive image of “man spray[ing] / rays / on small whirring things.”61 The juxtaposition of the minute, regenerative actions of insect, bird, and flower life with a spectacular image of human destruction of these nonhuman forms offers a striking ­vision of the ecological consequences of nuclear war. Another haiku-like Cold War poem from her 1964 collection Homemade/Handmade Poems begins with a description of a politician’s “dinner speech” about “the obliteration / of the world,” and then exhorts her dinner companion to “eat / the recommended melon” that fruit flies are gathering around.62 Here, the humble daily pleasure of eating a melon, framed as it is by “small whirring things,” is shadowed by the threat of wholesale extermination. Reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just to Say” in its wry celebration of domestic intimacy and pleasurable nourishment, Niedecker’s poem infuses this scene with premonitory anxiety. Here, the speaker’s “beseech[ing]” of the addressee to eat the melon bespeaks the need to take one’s pleasure imminently, given the proximate possibility of general cataclysm. Such poems take measure of what will be “obliterated” in the annihilation of a nuclear strike, framing the small pleasures of everyday life as unexpectedly transient and fragile. Other poems meditate on the unsettling combination of force and subjection that humans represent in a nuclear era. “Wintergreen Ridge,” Niedecker’s long poem from 1968, draws together astonishingly various scales, moving between the long time-scale of evolutionary change and the micrological workings of insect-eating plants and various kinds of wildflower, the disappearance of the dinosaurs and the ongoing life of “horsetails” and “club mosses.”63 Against these vast and minute motions of life in time, the newly catastrophic capacities of humans stand out as bewildering aberrations. The poem, as it progresses, features increasingly violent images of “the war // which ‘cannot be stopped’,” a “space-rocket,” the “grand blow-up” of atom bombs.64 Niedecker’s juxtapositions in this poem mirror those of Rachel Carson in the beginning of Silent Spring, who contrasts the long “history of life on earth,”

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a  history of complex interactions across great spans of time, with the new “moment in time” of the twentieth century, where “one species” commands transformative power.65 “Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it,” Carson writes.66 Turning to the geological terrain—the “stone perch” on which humans “live[] hard”—­ Niedecker’s poem not only points to the long history of biospheric changes but also intimates the new forms of geophysical alteration arising in a nuclear age: Man    lives hard       on this stone perch by sea    imagines       durable works67

Here Niedecker invokes at once a capacity for creativity and for destruction as inextricable parts of the human imagination, with new senses of the endurance of such catastrophic “art.” Yet the poem also meditates on the harm to which humans will be subjected in a nuclear event, detailing images of body parts, suicides, the “loss / of people” that “no wild bird” will mourn.68 Niedecker here emphasizes the fragility of the body, the creaturely susceptibility to harm we share with all beings. And she offers a glimpse of what might outlast a cataclysm, turning back to images of almost infinitesimally small processes that might persist: thin to nothing lichens     grind with their acid granite to sand    These may survive       the grand blow-up the bomb69

Imagining what the world after humans might look like, the poem meditates on the barest of remainders and their own biological processes of minimization. Aldo Leopold writes elegiacally of his Wisconsin surrounds, “During my lifetime, more land has been destroyed or damaged than ever before in recorded

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history.”70 Over her lifelong poetic inquiry into this terrain, Niedecker offers a similar sense of the various scales of ecological transformation in her area, effects of the uneven development of the rural periphery at midcentury. She attends at all turns to what lingers, as well as to what disappears, in the wake of these innovative and often catastrophic “imaginings.” In this light, Niedecker’s line from New Goose, “How to keep the earth,” takes on newly urgent significance, a question without any clear answer in a turbulent age.71 Brooks’s South Side Like Niedecker’s poetry, Gwendolyn Brooks’s work chronicles disturbances and dispossessions at the periphery of postwar affluent America. While Niedecker focuses sustained attention on the changing patterns of land use, habitat composition, and consumption practices that are remaking her rural area, Brooks examines the environmental inequalities of urban black life in ­Chicago. Brooks, like Niedecker, considers these conditions by way of folk forms like the ballad and images of small, residual entities like weeds and garbage imprinted with socio­ecological significance. Brooks’s explorations of South Side Chicago convey the ways uneven development operates in an everyday way in the built environment.72 In neatly kept front yards of prosperous neighborhoods, in crowded kitchenettes and piling garbage, Brooks offers vantages on the unequal production of space and the workings of slow violence in an era of postwar economic growth.73 Environmental historians have analyzed persistent connections between racial inequality and substandard conditions of living and working, largely in urban locations in the United States and abroad.74 These studies reveal the way discriminatory policies and racist practices produce a variety of hazardous conditions for marginalized communities, such as increased occupational hazards and proximity to industrial plants, landfills, and other toxic sites.75 All these can be grouped under the category of “environmental racism,” which the environmental studies scholar Bunyan Bryant defines as “the unequal protection against toxic and hazardous waste exposure and the systematic exclusion of people of color from decisions affecting their communities.”76 Other theorists of environmental racism have pointed to inequities in housing and the toxic ecologies that accompany conditions of overcrowding and inadequate health and sanitation services.77 While these conditions are tied to the dynamics of urban­ization and industrializing capitalism and thus have their origins in

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the pre-1945 period, the pace of these dynamics increased dramatically—particularly in developing countries but also in various U.S. cities—over the second half of the century, with the increasing pressures of urbanization and with the rise, in the postwar period, of so-called NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) environmentalism that shifted the burden of toxic sites disproportionately to poorer areas.78 South Side Chicago after World War II provides a powerful example of these forms of environmental racism and uneven development. In the wake of the Great Migration, which drastically changed the demographics of Chicago in the early twentieth century, a “Black Belt” of neighborhoods on the South Side emerged, whose cultural dynamics were explored by Black Chicago Renaissance writers such as Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Wright, and Brooks.79 The parameters of these neighborhoods were maintained by racist covenants, anti-black housing associations, and other forms of state-sponsored means of segregation.80 South Side Chicago is notorious for its longstanding conditions of environmental blight: it was first built on top of old dumps, and has been the persistent site not only of industrial meat and steel production, but of landfills and municipal garbage dumps as well.81 Historians have detailed the appalling conditions—overcrowding, pest infestations, high rates of disease, rat attacks, and various forms of waste—endemic in the neighborhoods of the South Side.82 A particularly notorious locale of blight, particularly in the interwar years, were the kitchenette buildings that Wright calls “our prison” in 12 Million Black Voices (1941).83 Run by what he terms the “Bosses of the Buildings”—greedy landlords, speculators, housing authorities—South Side kitchen­ette buildings were rarely maintained.84 In the 1940s and 1950s, a large population increase of African-Americans and a severe housing shortage created the conditions for what historian Arnold Hirsch calls the “second ghetto,” an expansion of the Black Belt into new territory through various redevelopment schemes.85 Kitchenettes were largely replaced by public housing projects; blighted buildings such as the Mecca Flats—subject of Brooks’s great long poem In the Mecca (1968)—housing thousands of black residents were razed.86 Rather than creating more integrated and diverse neighborhoods, these various housing programs extended segregation into new terrain.87 Rent inflation and violent protests by white residents over neighborhood integration, among other mechanisms, served as extralegal means for restricting black mobility.88 In all facets of life, from living quarters to leisure space to

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public transportation, patterns of geographical segregation dictated the terms of daily life for African-Americans in this period, while unsanitary and toxic environmental conditions defined their daily experience. Thus the counterpart of suburban growth in the postwar period, in Chicago and elsewhere, is the intensification of slum conditions in the urban core—conditions that persist in many Chicago neighborhoods to this day.89 Brooks’s poetry details how black lives in the postwar period were dictated by what she calls the “involuntary plan”—urban restructuring and geographical circumscription of black neighborhoods, along with their accompanying environmental effects.90 In her poetry books A Street in Bronzeville (1945), Annie Allen (1949), The Bean Eaters (1960), and In the Mecca (1968), she presents detailed phenomenologies of urban habitation in overcrowded conditions, often by sustained attention to interior spaces. The dwellings Brooks depicts seem at once temporary and intractable, flimsy in their construction and yet inescapable for those living in them. Various poems point to the infestations—rats, roaches, mites—that plague these spaces.91 The bad air, in particular, of these enclosed spaces emerges as an index of too-close conditions and their forms of contamination and ill health. Like Wright, who catalogs the “filth and foul air” and the shared toilets of the kitchenettes, Brooks foregrounds the way these impossible circumstances “inject[s] pressure and tension” into the workings of daily life.92 One of her best-known poems, “kitchenette building,” conjures the impossibly cramped quarters of the kitchenette through images of an atmosphere that presses in on all sides. Brooks characterizes the general atmosphere as “grayed in, and gray,” granting the air a palpable quality, miasmic and confining.93 The image “grayed in” evokes the visceral properties of air pollution—which was intensifying in Chicago by midcentury—as a felt pressure; but it brings this image into the interior of the kitchenette, intimating another layer of pollution (“and gray”) that follows kitchenette dwellers into their domestic space.94 “Onion fumes,” “fried potatoes,” “yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall”: a catalog of unwelcome odors indicates a palpable sense of proximity both to other bodies and their refuse. The food of today becomes tomorrow’s garbage that lingers, in an ironic inversion of healthful ecological growth. In the closing lines, the collective speaker is drawn relentlessly back to the practicalities of shared living, like the “lukewarm water” of the shared bathroom that they hope to get a turn in. All these images of the kitchenette—air, water, food—are of remainders, the left-over materials that the dwellers must live in and with. None

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of these basic necessities are portrayed as fresh or pure; they are all imprinted already with others’ use, with the signs of other bodies. It is only the garbage that “ripens,” the form of matter that seems to thrive. Brooks contrasts the “dream” of other possibilities—conjured as an evanescent “aria,” floating “white and violet” through the halls—with the leaden fact of this “gray” milieu. Tending this “dream” as if it were a small living creature is an impossibility in these minimal conditions. Nurture and care are difficult to sustain in an atmosphere where one’s own neighbors remain unnamed except by their dwelling number (“Number Five”) and serve as competitors for basic resources. If Niedecker invests images of sharing and reuse with a positive aura in her postwar work, as an alternative to an empowered and wasteful American consumerism, Brooks attaches no such sentiment to these practices. Instead, sharing scarce resources signifies daily insufficiency and anxious competition. Brooks’s images of the difficulty of caring for something—even if it is only one’s own dream, figured as a small vulnerable being—underscore the sense of ecological unsustainability and slow violence in this atmosphere. Another, even bleaker look at the difficulty of tending others in the confines of the kitchenettes can be found in her long poem “the children of the poor,” from Annie Allen. Voicing a mother’s perspective, Brooks describes how maternal caring “softly makes a trap for us,” binding the mother to these “sweetest lepers” and their needs.95 The key question becomes “What shall I give my children? who are poor.” This is not a question of gifts or treats, but an urgent query about the absolute necessities of existence—the “crusts” of food, clothes that need not be “velvet” or “velvety velour” but that can keep a child warm. Death haunts this poem, with images of “little halves” “freezing everywhere”; the mother urges her children to “resemble graves.”96 And indeed, in the fifth section the speaker mourns “dears” who do in fact “die,” their learning and “­little crooked questionings” now confined to the “university of death.”97 Drawing attention to the most vulnerable of lives, Brooks suggests that the basic conditions for survival and good health remain always precarious in these “most frugal vestibules.”98 Such portrayals follow Wright’s insistence that “the kitchenette . . . kills our black babies so fast that in many cities twice as many of them die as white babies.”99 Through these portraits of remaindered material and vulnerable life, Brooks vividly renders the constraints of the kitchenettes: “And they are constrained. All are constrained,” she writes.100 But her poems also invoke the essential pat-

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terns of underdevelopment and gentrification that characterize the geographical dynamic of uneven development. Thus Brooks’s images of immobility mix with those of changes to the built environment and populations on the move, not necessarily to improved conditions. One poem from A Street in Bronzeville describes a vacant lot that was once occupied by a family with a chaotic but also vibrant living arrangement. While the building and its occupants are gone, the lot remains, leaving an indelible mark of the environmental effects of the production of urban space.101 Another poem gestures to the dynamics of white flight from the city, evoking a former mansion, the Quincy Club, now turned into a bar for blacks. Her most sustained portrait of uneven geography occurs in her long poem In the Mecca, which considers in depth the internal scenes of the once-posh, now deteriorating apartment building of Mecca Flats, demolished in 1952 to make way for an expansion of the Illinois Institute of Technology. Winding through the Mecca’s “martyred halls,” following a mother who searches for her missing (murdered) girl, the poem surveys its many abodes, replete with roaches and rats, cats, music, and general “disorders, / bruising ruses and small hells, / small semiheavens.”102 Here, too, Brooks’s poem turns on the image of an endangered child, who is revealed at the end to “lie in dust with roaches” under the bed of her killer, another tenant. Pepita’s death finds reflection in the looming demolition of the Mecca, emblems of lives undone by different forms of violence. Recording both place and displacement, the poem serves as testament to “a material collapse / that is Construction” and to precarious existences unmoored.103 “A Sunset of the City” In an interview, Brooks points to a certain idyllic familiarity with the natural world that she once longed for as a young writer, describing a desire for country life that arose from watching films and meeting people who could identify trees, birds, and flowers.104 Acknowledging that her poetry does not treat these bucolic experiences of rural life, Brooks instead claims a pride in her urban scenes. Several poems hinge on just these differences, exploring the distinctive ecological vantages that racial stratification in an urban environment produces. These pieces convey scenes of pastoral nature as unavailable to her black urban speakers, creating a deliberate distance from transformational environmental encounter.105 What emerges instead is a different, more equivocal view of the lived environment.

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One such poem, “Hattie Scott,” depicts the speaker getting a “peek” at the sunset “from the insides of the door” when she is finishing up her workday.106 Hattie does not indulge a moment of aesthetic appreciation, stopping to watch the sun setting from the back porch. Instead, she finishes washing the dishes and cleaning up so she can go home. Yet Hattie sees in her decision an affinity she shares with the sun. Like her, the sun is tied to a strict schedule, with no time for pleasurable excess: “But the sun and me’s the same, could be: / Cap the job, then to hell with it.” Hattie works and rests by the sun’s cycle—“off, until time when the sun comes back. / Then it’s wearily back for me.” In this sense, she sees the sun as an extension of her waged life rather than as an emblem of ecological externality. Hattie’s view of the sun’s cycle as inextricably connected to the rhythm of the workday offers an instance of Brooks’s claim, from the foreword to New Negro Poets, U.S.A. (1964), that while black poets might wish to write about “the transience of a raindrop, or the gold-stuff of the sun,” they also see other dimensions of these images that are “not instantly obvious to their fairer fellows.” For example, she continues, “the raindrop may seem to them to represent racial tears,” and “the golden sun might remind them that they are burning.”107 Here, the sun serves as constant reminder to Hattie of the determined rhythms of her life. Another piece, “Beverly Hills, Chicago,” describes an African-American pair who drive by the “golden gardens” of well-to-do suburban whites, mentally comparing these idyllic environs with their own urban neighborhood.108 Chiefly what they notice is the different composition and decay of the remainders in these neighborhoods, signifiers of the racialized dimensions of uneven development. Here “the summer ripeness rots. But not raggedly. / Even the leaves fall down in lovelier patterns here. / And the refuse, the refuse is a neat brilliancy.” Ripe things, fallen leaves, and even garbage decompose in an orderly, aesthetically pleasing way, in the view of these speakers. The “brilliancy” of the refuse they see throws into relief the different form that this detritus takes in their surroundings, as sign of disorder and ill health. The black speakers imagine the white dwellers as experiencing an aestheticized, ordered, healthful relationship with their surroundings, a relationship that remains unavailable to the pair. The dwellers will live “till their hair is white” in such environs, the speakers surmise, and even their deaths will be orderly and tasteful: “They make excellent corpses, among the expensive flowers.”109 As in so many of Brooks’s poems, death is never far from view; here, the whites retain difference even in

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their posthumous decay. In life as in death, their ambient conditions are fundamentally divergent, a fact that elicits a “natural” resentment from the speakers: “It is only natural . . . that it should occur to us / How much more fortunate they are than we are.”110 Brooks’s poems are neither sentimentalizing nor wholly redemptive in their portraits of unequal environmental conditions. As these poems attest, they return again and again to the wearying toll of unhealthful urban surroundings on the bodies and spirits of black city-dwellers. Yet her work also stresses how urban South Side blacks live on and make do, pointing to the meanings they make of their surroundings and the essential dignity of their lives. “You have to keep on going,” one of Brooks’s characters declares in “In the Mecca.”111 Alongside her representations of confined and run-down Bronzeville dwellings, Brooks considers the small pleasures, important belongings, and daily habits that characterize the lives within. “In the Mecca” offers a particularly vivid account of the variety and multifaceted swirl of South Side life, with its portraits of the mothers, hucksters, murderers, evangelists, philosophers, hungry children, janitors, animal-lovers, teachers, and lovers sheltered in the Mecca’s cramped quarters. Brooks depicts these figures by way of their small cherished objects, the food they subsist on, what they tend and the things they desire. Despite its scenes of violence and insufficiency and its dirty interiors, the Mecca contains an ineffable “blaze” of life that is not only “tenable” but “beautiful.”112 What courses through the walls of the Mecca is an energetic vibrancy that Brooks links to the vitality of the natural world: “Substanceless; yet like mountains, / like rivers and oceans too; and like trees / with wind whistling through them.”113 If great natural entities such as mountains, rivers, oceans, and forests remain unavailable to those who live in the Mecca, those occupants access other, nearer forms of rejuvenating experience, circulating in the halls of this building. Brooks calls this evanescent yet substantial energy “an essential sanity, black and electric,” the grounds of black life on the South Side. The Mecca itself was long gone by the time of this poem’s composition, a fact that frames this work as an elegy to that particular lifeworld. But Brooks insists that something essential remains, even in its wake: “something, something in Mecca / continues to call!”

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“The Advancing Signs of the Air” Ashbery’s Atmospheres

What can be sensed about ecological interconnection and environmental crisis by attending to what John Ashbery calls the “advancing signs of the air”?1 Alongside novel forms of commodified materials appearing in the postwar period with protracted afterlives, such as plastics, e-waste, and synthetics, fundamental elements such as air, water, and soil come to embody the complex environmental challenges posed by the productive process. This chapter considers the period of the later 1960s to the early 1970s, when air, among other phenomena, became the focus of sustained cultural concern. It does so via a consideration of the poetry of John Ashbery, whose poems of this period, including Rivers and Mountains (1966), The Double Dream of Spring (1970), Three Poems (1972), and The Vermont Notebook (1975), provide a range of responses to emergent environmental change, developed through considerations of air as subject and sign. Air becomes one material form by which Ashbery meditates on the enmeshing of the natural and historical in this period, exploring its apprehensible qualities as an entity as well as the way it represents larger moods and shared milieu. With its uneven composition and its complex relay between corporeal interiors and exteriors, air offers an index of how nature and history interweave in an ongoing dynamic. Bearing the impress of productive relations in the form of emissions and pollutants, air expands our definition of these relations to include substances not directly generated by these processes but nonetheless entangled in them. Undergoing continual alteration with new inputs, air in turn causes various ecological effects at multiple scales, from the minutely particular to the global.2 But air, in its very recalcitrance, its invisibility, also returns us to the problem of perceptibility and knowledge that Theodor Adorno points to in his philosophical meditations on commodified nature. Following Georg Lukács’s descriptions of “second nature,” Adorno points to the e­ pistemological 43

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problem of reification that emerges under capitalist production, wherein entities and processes bound up in capitalism’s productive relations appear natural.3 Unlike the decaying commodities that Benjamin depicts in his Arcades Project or obsolescing postconsumer materials such as plastics—visible remnants of the productive process—air as an indirect product of anthropogenic productive relations remains powerfully resistant to comprehension as such. In this sense, air provides a potent illustration of Lukács’s idea that history and social relations are congealed into nature under capitalism; it is profoundly difficult to see air as historical.4 Indeed, at the level of basic material components, as anthropologist Timothy Choy argues, it remains challenging to localize what air even consists of, as these dimensions are always changing, in motion.5 Air thus serves as a privileged figure for exploring perceptual limits: not only in terms of perceiving environmental crisis but of perceiving the imbrication of capitalism’s productive relations in biospheric processes. When air appears—as smog or particulate matter—it offers a vantage point into a sense of a larger natural-historical field of relations at work.6 Ashbery’s poems are rarely, if ever, about air. To the extent that his poems are about anything—a proposition that some Ashbery critics reject entirely— they can be characterized as meditations on aspects of the living mind in its variable, ever-changing forms. Three Poems, the prose-poem work that I focus sustained attention on here, generally reads as a portrait of midlife epiphany and its unraveling, a self-reflexive contemplation of poetic aesthetics, and a consideration of various modes of social interaction: familial, cultural, romantic. Other poems of this period, Ashbery’s most canonical, have been interpreted as observations of the workings of language (its indeterminacy, its conventionality) or as meditations on subjectivity (queer, lyric, impersonal).7 Amidst these anthropocentric concerns, which undoubtedly predominate in Ashbery’s poems, air appears, circulating through these texts. To trace these appearances, not quite topical but more than incidental, is to bring to the fore what often remains recessive. How does one account for presences in poems that emerge as pressures, felt densities, something noticed but also overlooked? I argue that Ashbery’s poems of this period stage this very question. Through his ambient poetics, Ashbery opens a space for considering a range of forms of ecological consciousness, attending to the forgettable sameness, subtle modifications, and palpable differences of his surround. Ashbery examines how systemic disruption might be collectively felt before it is fully understood,

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but also how we can ignore or misperceive disturbing signs. In other works, particularly The Vermont Notebook, Ashbery explores environmental transformation in scenes of dumps, commodified suburban landscapes, and altered ecosystems. Through these varied meditations, Ashbery develops a capacious repertoire for approaching the second nature of ecology within late capitalism and for discerning signs of incipient crisis. This expanded sense of environmental consciousness yields a different model for how a literary text conveys the complexities of ecological being in a given present than do ecocritical orientations that stress awareness and ethical action. To explore these expanded dimensions of environmental consciousness, I turn first to two key figures in 1960s environmentalism, Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner. Atmospheric Consciousness This era saw the flowering of what U.S. environmental historians call the “age of environmentalism”—a period, beginning in the mid-1960s, where public discussion of various forms of environmental crisis in the United States grew pervasive, leading to a wide range of grassroots campaigns, governmental legislation, and extensive media coverage of various environmental issues. Environmental historian Samuel Hays has chronicled a cultural shift in the United States from an interest, in the early 1960s, in conservation efforts that reflected popular interest in “outdoor recreation, wildlands and open space” to an increasing focus on “the adverse impact of industrial development, with a special focus on water and air pollution” by the later 1960s.8 Widespread concern about the degradation of water, air, soil, and plant life emerged in large part as a result of the popularity of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, whose exploration of systematic toxification ranged through all these elemental constituents. By the first Earth Day, in 1970, the immense reach of environmentalism in American culture was apparent. As Adam Rome has argued, Earth Day can be understood as the moment where a generalized definition of ecological crisis, connecting pollution, overpopulation, atomic energy, and industrial chemicals as shared factors, entered the American mainstream.9 This generalized idea of crisis was grounded in a language of ecological interconnection at various scales.10 Such language was informed by the work of influential environmental thinkers of the time such as Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner, who highlighted the intricate interactions of the web of life in their groundbreaking books on ecological crisis. As Commoner famously puts it in the first of his

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four “laws of ecology” in The Closing Circle (1971), “everything is connected to everything else.”11 This revelation of fundamental interrelation among lifeforms and systemic processes unfolds, in Silent Spring and The Closing Circle, by way of images of polluted air and water, industrial chemicals in mother’s milk, mysterious blights on crops, and diseases killing songbirds. Ecological inter­ dependency becomes apprehensible under the sign of crisis, as the complex interactions of biotic life undergo fundamental reorganization. Both of these works describe the materials of ecological life as imbued with an anthropogenic imprint that signals fundamental imbalance and thus new threats of systemic collapse. As Commoner writes, “Suddenly we have discovered what we should have known long before: that the ecosphere sustains people and everything that they do; that anything that fails to fit into the ecosphere is a threat to its finely balanced cycles; that wastes are not only unpleasant, not only toxic, but, more meaningfully, evidence that the ecosphere is being driven toward collapse.”12 Commoner invokes air pollution throughout The Closing Circle as a striking sign of biospheric interconnection and pervasive damage. In a chapter titled “Los Angeles Air,” he describes the urban air of this time as a noxious brew contributing to a variety of illnesses and other forms of environmental degradation. The air becomes a central example, for Commoner, of ecological problems that are at once daily and systemic, pervasive and recalcitrant, affecting humans and nonhuman life in ways that are difficult to predict or comprehend. In this sense, air provides an index of the uncertainties involved in comprehending the causes and reach of environmental crisis, even as the presence of pollution is empirically apprehensible. Following Carson’s pioneering argument in Silent Spring, Commoner asserts that the temporal and spatial dispersal of various ecological hazards—pesticides in water, nitrates in soil— make it difficult to locate their causes or foresee effects.13 This is particularly true for the dynamic medium of air. Commoner contends that the complexities of air’s changing variables obscure a full comprehension of its composition at any given time, which can lead to challenges in assessing its risk potential.14 Yet Commoner claims that if the particular elements of pollution cannot be definitively quantified, the phenomenon can be understood in a general sense as a palpable sign of the aftereffects of productive and technological innovations. Phenomena such as industrial pollution and toxic contamination are in fact logical consequences of the runaway success of industrial advances in postwar America. As he states, “the modern high-compression gasoline engine contrib-

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utes to smog and nitrate pollution because it successfully meets its design criterion—the development of a high level of power.”15 By pointing to the unholy alliance between the successful designs of industrial goods and their deleterious environmental impacts, Commoner describes a profound disconnect between the streamlined ease and comforts of modern consumer life and the discomfiting environmental realities that accompany them. Here, too, Commoner draws on Carson’s claims about the consequences of industrial pesticides and chemicals in commodity goods, celebrated features of modern innovation that have devastating effects on species and ecosystems. According to these writers, the modern citizen leads an everyday life organized by productive systems that generate various forms of damage unfolding at various time-scales, of which she is largely unaware and to which she herself is susceptible.16 For Commoner, this is because the most meaningful environmental activity occurs in the productive sphere, at the level of the social aggregate, and in complex interactions between ecological phenomena—all levels not assimilable to immediate, firsthand experience and thus difficult, if not impossible, to perceive directly.17 A great theme of these writers’ work, then, is the way environmental crisis remains recalcitrant to perception and comprehension, even when signs of imbalance abound. Silent Spring represents modern ecological life as defined by a mysterious network of relations with shared susceptibility to various forms of toxicity and harm.18 Beginning with the opening “fable for tomorrow,” Carson invokes a fairy-tale world of enchantment and evil spells lurking beneath modern, industrialized American life. In the grocery store, the kitchen, the backyard, dwell hazards that citizens are exposed to in daily, slow, and pervasive ways. Like a character in a fable, everyday Americans wander perplexed through a world where toxic effects are disaggregated from their source. Through these fabular portraits, Silent Spring conveys a state of environmental consciousness that is diffusely anxious, neither wholly oblivious nor actively vigilant. Subtending her claims for concrete paths to reform, Carson’s portrayals of everyday life often leave the reader suspended in the midst of the story: in the poisoned forest, eating the toxic apple, overwhelmed by a strange sickness. If the rhetorical tone of Silent Spring is one of empirical explanation and calls to action, the prevailing mood is one of uncertainty and bewilderment.19 Commoner, too, highlights the persistent difficulties involved in perceiving the complexity of emergent ecological threats, pointing throughout The Closing Circle to the ways hazards often elude perceptibility or fail to be fully grasped. His book is framed by an

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opening chapter that catalogs the popular enthusiasms around Earth Day, suggesting that the contradictory descriptions of environmental crisis it provoked indicate a fundamental lack of understanding about its causes and effects. As Commoner argues, “Despite the constant reference to palpable, everyday life experiences—foul air, polluted water, and rubbish heaps—there is an air of unreality about the environmental crisis.”20 These writers offer concrete and compelling answers for these queries they raise about the definable causes of ecological degradation. Yet they also provide fascinating insights into the ways these answers resist perception in the popular imagination. Their arguments are of powerful importance, then, not only for their ecological vision and historical significance in shaping environmental discourse and activism, but for the way they present the vicissitudes of environmental consciousness emerging in this era. In this sense, works like Silent Spring and The Closing Circle direct attention to the difficult-to-address dimensions of how emergent ecological crisis was experienced as a lived phenomenon at a particular moment in time. How did abstract or generalized fears about environmental degradation, as framed by media and activist sources, translate into a felt response, a somatic perception, a collective mood? As I have suggested, these texts do not invoke these dimensions of consciousness solely in the negative.21 Instead, they describe partial sensing, or attempts to discern answers, or unlocalizable anxieties. In their depictions of these ambient moods, they orient us toward a structure of feeling of ecological crisis in this period—what Raymond Williams calls “a kind of thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate.”22 In this way, these works open up a different model of environmental consciousness from the one developed by literary ecocriticism over the past twentyfive years. Environmental consciousness often involves a heightened awareness of the nonhuman surroundings that a given text explores in its themes, patterns, images, and narrative structures, as well as the effects such portrayals produce in the reader. Drawing largely on Romantic and Transcendentalist traditions, this critical concept evokes wakefulness, a lucid awareness of the self ’s situation within larger, more-than-human surroundings.23 Literary tropes of first-person encounter, empirical and phenomenological observation, and increasing comprehension of natural world and self alike are central features of this concept. Ecocritics also stress the alternative to consciousness as a state of slumber or

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ignorance from which the speaker must be roused by an engagement with the text. This state of somnolescence is personal, but it is also cultural, a collective alienation from the natural world produced by industrialized modernity. Following Thoreau’s injunction in Walden that “we must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake,” the environmental literary text attempts to overcome this alienated modern condition through its conscious attention to the particulars of the natural world.24 The primary lesson of texts that invoke environmental consciousness, according to this green modality of criticism, concerns reintegration and belonging. Writers such as Wordsworth, Shelley, Thoreau, Muir, Dillard, and Leopold, among others, elaborate this sense of belonging by depicting an abiding connection between the patterns of the natural world and those of the human mind. For these writers, the natural environment and the human mind innately tend toward balance and harmony, a tendency that the ecologically oriented literary text can restore in the reader.25 At the same time, environmental consciousness suggests a recognition not only of the beauty of the natural environment but of its endangered, fragile condition.26 Here, too, the textual encounter alone is only the beginning, as it may require the reader to change her entire orientation to her surroundings and engage in new forms of ethical behavior, including undertaking environmental activism to foster political changes. To this end, ecocritical analyses have often highlighted the testimonial quality of the literary text as a document that leads to the pursuit of environmental justice in various forms.27 With their startling narratives of ecological endangerment, texts such as The Jungle, The Monkey Wrench Gang, Flight Behavior—or Silent Spring itself—awaken the reader to threats and can inspire forms of activist endeavor, in such analyses. Commoner himself invokes these ideas of environmental connection as represented in literary texts, arguing that works by Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and Emerson depict forms of “perceptive human contact” with the natural world in ways that prefigure his own descriptions. Yet, as he writes, “this literary heritage has not been enough to save us from ecological disaster.”28 Appreciation of one’s environment and even awareness of its degradation have not forestalled systemic crisis, he points out. Instead, Commoner asserts, we need approaches that impart insight into what lies beyond the purview of individual perception, symptomatized in visible forms of degradation such as pollution: “In the woods around Walden Pond or on the reaches of the Mississippi,

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most of the information needed to understand the natural world can be gained by personal experience. In the world of nuclear bombs, smog, and foul water, environmental understanding needs help from the scientist.”29 Such a claim speaks to the invaluable intervention that he, Carson, and other environmental thinkers of the era have provided in their development of scientifically grounded approaches to ecological crisis. Their efforts to convey clearer understandings of the interconnected nature of biospheric life and the crisis conditions facing various systems have led to essential legislative reforms and opened new paths for popular activism and intellectual inquiry.30 But by pointing to the diagnostic qualities of Carson’s and Commoner’s work—their attention to the refractory registers of environmental understanding—I argue that these texts also illuminate other modalities of consciousness beyond that of ethical awareness (or benighted ignorance). Thus while Commoner suggests we look past the literary in order to comprehend the complex scales of ecological crisis, I contend that it is in literary representations that we can discern how such crisis registers at the perceptual and affective level.31 Ashbery’s poetry of this period does not offer an extensive causal account of ecological alteration, as Carson’s and Commoner’s work provides. But with its substantiations of air and waste, it opens up new avenues for exploring how such alterations become apprehensible in a range of ways. “I Hate to Say Environmental” In an interview with the New York Quarterly shortly after the publication of his first work of prose poetry, Three Poems, Ashbery discusses why he decided to use prose in this new work: One wouldn’t have to have these [lines] interfering and scanning the processes of one’s thought as one was writing; the poetic form would be dissolved, in solution, and therefore create a much more—I hate to say environmental because it’s a bad word—but more of a surrounding thing like the way one’s consciousness is surrounded by one’s thoughts.32

What is the difference between “environmental” and “surrounding”? To tease out this difference is to begin to convey how Ashbery’s ecological imaginary emerges in these texts from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The term “environmental” suggests something pious, self-righteous, above all knowing—all qualities that Ashbery’s poetry decidedly rejects. To characterize one’s own writing

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as “environmental” is to imply, as well, a direct thematization of certain issues or an endorsement of a political stance. What is “bad” about the term, then, is its rhetorical certainty, one form of banality that Ashbery (who generally relishes cliché) disdains. To illustrate how this disdain for a certain environmental stance plays out in his poetry, I want to turn briefly to the most ironically “eco-conscious” portion of his 1975 prose poetry work, The Vermont Notebook, the book following Three Poems, in which Ashbery quotes directly from a newspaper write-up about an anthropogenically managed ecosystem in Florida. Coming in the midst of a book that details the banal spaces and scenes of American life as features of the geography of capitalism, this six-page reproduction of the newspaper piece describes Marco Island, a tourist destination drawing golfers and sport fishermen that also featured a marine ecology station undertaking conservation efforts for eagles and other endangered species. Underwritten by the Deltona Corporation as part of its development scheme, this station also participated in the reorganization of the island’s ecosystem in the name of conservation. In the newspaper article, Marco Island is presented as what we might call, in the current parlance of greenwashing, an “eco-friendly community” that highlights practices of “sustainability”: trees were moved to help endangered eagles nest, an artificial reef was created from old tires and construction rubble to draw fish for fishermen, and sewage from the island was used to water a local golf course. Yet this is primarily an ecosystem where all facets of the natural surroundings have been actively reorganized to attract more revenue from tourists and where natural features and species are valued according to profit logics. Ashbery’s deflationary citation of this article draws attention to the way the language of environmentalism itself has already been co-opted to advocate for capitalist development. In the article, such language is deployed to advertise this venture and to impart business strategy to future land developers: “Marco is an example of how a new community can be sensitive to the natural environment. . . . And one hopes that other developments will take note.”33 If developers as well as conservationists can call themselves “environmental,” the term and its connotations are certainly suspect. Ashbery’s incorporation of this article into The Vermont Notebook does not bring to mind an alternative, purer vision of nature, untainted by anthropogenic activity. Instead, the lines gesture to the illusory nature of such a vantage and to the real productive activities that make nature appear in the guise of ecological harmony.

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If, as this Marco Island vignette suggests, he presents the language of environmental awareness and advocacy only under the sign of irony, Ashbery does elaborate a “surrounding” poetics profoundly sensitive to the ecological surround of his present.34 He does so by way of his attention to what appears and occurs around us, the workings of systems at various scales in their partial perceptibility. Ashbery conveys the ambient motions of these systems, in works such as Three Poems and The Vermont Notebook, through the capacious form of the prose poem, its “dissolving” of traditional demarcations of poetic form (line breaks, formal patterning) to open a space for other modes of figuration and patterning. Across all his works, catalogs, metonymic chains, paratactical leaps and slow transitions, shifts in diction, citations and borrowed phrases, scalar and perspectival shifts, and aposiopesis are formal means by which Ashbery charts the multiform qualities of the ecological surround as it circulates in and around human life. Such formal elements conceive forms of relationality that are not about congruency, symmetry, or direct communication. Amidst the ambient drift of Ashbery’s meandering work, there is an attention to the way entities can be connected without corresponding and to how a totality involves differentiation and division. Thus, while the poems consider how an environment is mediated by human perception, they also draw our attention to gaps and rifts. At the same time, they present insights into how this enfolding surround might be undergoing meaningful disruptions at a variety of levels. In a forceful critical reading, Angus Fletcher argues that Ashbery does not represent an environment in his poetry but rather produces an “environmentpoem” that bears forth the flux of life in its immediacy.35 As Fletcher points out, Ashbery’s surrounding poetics is, in part, an inheritance from John Clare, whose descriptive poetics of the ordinary provides a model for Ashbery’s expansive meditations (as Ashbery himself claims in his Norton lecture on Clare’s work).36 But where Fletcher points to the way that the work of both poets ­models variable manifestations of the natural world’s open-endedness, I propose that Clare inspires Ashbery in part through the way Clare makes immanent historical change palpable in his poetics. What Clare discerns, in attending to his immediate present in all its particularity, is not the natural conditions of complexity and flux in a landscape but the socioecological conditions of disruptive alteration. Clare’s responses to patterns of enclosure, felt directly in his local village of Helpston, and the new forms of ecosystemic transformation

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and social dispossession they produce are powerfully thematized in his work. They are, as well, features of experience that are absorbed into the language and spatial orientations of the poems. John Barrell has written persuasively about the shift in Clare’s poetry from diction rich with provincialisms and local detail to a more abstract register, and his modulations between open-field vantages and more constrained spatial perspectives.37 Similarly, we might see Ashbery’s work as ambiently attuned to the dynamic spatial and material changes in his environmental surround. Of all his texts, The Vermont Notebook provides Ashbery’s most sustained descriptive account of his surroundings as natural-historical. While the title, The Vermont Notebook, evokes a sustained meditative engagement with a bucolic rural setting, the text itself undercuts any such pastoral orientations. Instead, tourism, whether on a bus tour or a fishing trip to Florida, becomes the book’s key figure for everyday ecological relationality, whereby deep familiarity with a place is replaced by a passive consumerism that takes in and forgets. Written on a bus tour around Massachusetts, the book opens with a series of catalogs that details elements of the built environment of New England alongside lists of consumer goods, brand names, and other dimensions of American mass culture. Later prose poems portray various interchangeable components of modern American geography: highways, railroad tracks, split-levels, spaces that are “countryish” but with fast-food chains in a row.38 As Ashbery has said of The Vermont Notebook, “Generally speaking I guess it’s a catalogue of a number of things that could be found in the state of Vermont, as well as almost everywhere else—another ‘democratic vista.’”39 Ashbery’s “democratic vistas” evoke various featureless features of a thoroughly produced late-capitalist milieu. “Industrial parks, vacant lots, yards, enclosures, fields, arenas, slopes, siding, tarmac, blacktop, service roads, parking lots,” begins one of these lists.40 As in the Marco Island scenes of an ecosystem reorganized around profit imperatives, these aspects convey a landscape where every surface and shape has been progressively altered by infrastructural projects and other forms of geographic development. To the extent that natural features appear—“the first crocus popups and the like”—they have become merely “symbolic crap,” “so much eyewash to divert our eyes from the ruthless pageant” of the production of space.41 This “ruthless pageant” is visible at the peripheries of these locales, in images of buildings torn down, s­ kyscrapers growing taller, chain stores running smaller businesses out. Through these

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scenes, Ashbery evokes the reified world of second nature, the commodified and developed surround that has come to appear as natural as biospheric phenomena. If Ashbery is writing under the sustained influence of Clare in his “environment-poems,” he is, in part, writing back through Clare’s apprehensions of his transforming rural landscape, particularly in this book. In Ashbery’s rendering of American scenery across The Vermont Notebook, he points often to the way that the rural as a site of uneven modernity now appears as simulacral, kitschy. The alterations that Clare attended to at his local level have now been realized to a generalized degree, such that his evocations of the immediacies of rural life have been replaced by the semblance of the rural, another aspect of the landscape of second nature. Here we might notice, as well, how Ashbery’s poetry conveys a later stage of geographical development in relation to Niedecker’s portrayals of North Central Wisconsin a decade before. Where Niedecker’s ­poetry charts the uneven, if intensifying, development of the countryside after World War II, in The Vermont Notebook any sense of regional particularity seems to have vanished, and few traces of ecological distinctiveness are immediately visible. Across Ashbery’s affectively flat catalogs, impersonations of chipper postcard messages, and collaged phrases, there is little evidence of nostalgia for older modes of rural living—a nostalgia that Clare himself invokes often in his poems that deal directly with the effects of enclosure. It is, it seems, too late for such nostalgia. But while the poems, with their ironic gestures to the rural, betray the inaccessibility of Clare’s modes of localized perception and response, they do not simply present an ironic postmodern scene of a simulacral, managed landscape. Circulating through these scenes are complex evocations of larger, underlying dynamics of transience and accumulation. Throughout Ashbery’s work of this period, he describes phenomena piling up, undergoing transformation, lingering, decaying in what he calls the “endless garbage chute of the present.”42 The Vermont Notebook in particular, as John Shoptaw and Christopher Schmidt have pointed out, is a book suffused with images of waste products, from bodily excrement, soured milk, and garbage to landfill and sewage.43 As in Walt Whitman’s “This Compost,” there is something profoundly “startling” about this refuse as it appears, again and again, across this work.44 Where Whitman goes on to celebrate the decompositional processes of the earth as a sign of the marvelous powers of natural renewal, Ashbery remains profoundly skeptical of this

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renewing capacity. Instead, “the dump air lasts,” as he writes in an extended meditation on the landfill.45 In the image of the dump air lingering, we sense an increasing suffusion of waste, heaped in the landfill but also carried by the air. Pointing to the lasting ecological significance discernible in the ceaseless processes of accumulating and “dumping,” Ashbery figures waste as a sign not only of the junky ephemerality of the commodified landscape but of its potential unsustainability. What if waste cannot in fact be managed, whether by way of organic cycles (as in “This Compost”) or techno-industrial processes? As Ashbery says near the end of The Vermont Notebook: “Clouding up again. Certain days there is a feeling that / whatever we arrange / Will sooner or later get all fucked up.”46 While Clare’s work elaborates evidence of the new arrangements reorganizing the rural British landscape in the early nineteenth century by way of shifts in diction and space, Ashbery’s poems trace emergent ecological disturbances to the built environment of 1970s America by way of attention to materials that linger, “clouding up again” and dematerializing, and to the felt pressures they transmit. “Who has seen the wind?” Again and again in poems of this era, Ashbery’s poems bring air to attention, and in so doing highlight the ways we overlook its presence as the “unseen mesh that draws around everything.”47 Pointing to the ways we “move around in our little ventilated situation,” Ashbery materializes the air as the encircling condition of everyday life, what we depend on for our survival but often ignore. Human relation to the air primarily consists of momentary acknowledgment, only to turn back to our own realm of desires and activities with a renewed, if misguided, sense of independence. In Three Poems, he invokes a “we” who is “scrutinizing the air only to ask, ‘Is it giving?’ but not so dependent on the answer as not to have our hopes and dreams, our very personal idea of how to live and go on living.”48 Such lines subtly probe certain taken-for-granted assumptions surrounding the air: that it will ceaselessly provide, and that questions of living, present and future, can be separated from our fundamental dependency on air. While the air is a primary means by which we interact with our environs, this relation is not one that permits knowledge. Instead, it works invisibly on and with us. “To be your breath as it is taken in and shoved out,” he writes in Three Poems. “The cold, external factors are inside us at last, growing in us for our improvement, asking nothing, not even a commemorative thought.”49

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Such portrayals emphasize not the agential capacities of the conscious mind as they emerge in an aestheticized encounter with external reality but less willed, more distracted dimensions of ecological engagement at the somatic level.50 Noticing our general lack of awareness of our reliance on the air’s constant and sustaining presence, Ashbery invokes air as indicative of a more general overlooking of our environs. In “For John Clare,” Ashbery writes: There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like. Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope—letting them come to you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much easier—if they took an ingenuous pride in being in one’s blood. Alas, we perceive them if at all as those things that were meant to be put aside—costumes of the supporting actors or voice trilling at the end of a narrow enclosed street. You can do nothing with them. Not even offer to pay.51

Our surroundings remain unable to be seen on their own terms, as we cannot communicate with them directly or comprehend their workings. Ashbery importantly refuses poetic tropes of reciprocity between observer and natural world here (such as prosopopoeia or apostrophe), instead emphasizing noncommunication or indirect communication. In fact, Ashbery often parodies any notion of the natural world’s sympathetic attention, as these lines from Three Poems attest: “I know too that my solipsistic approach is totally wrongheaded and foolish, that the universe isn’t listening to me any more than the sea can be heard inside conch shells.”52 What such lines show is precisely how Ashbery’s attention to the immanent present—a lesson learned from Clare—leads him to notice how we fail to notice or integrate our surroundings into consciousness. Such poems resist figurations of harmonious symmetry between internal and external realms, instead meditating on the fundamental disjunction between everyday ecological being and comprehension of its terms. If these poems impart no model of environmental awakening or education, they do index other forms of atmospheric sensing. Sometimes this registers simply as an attention to the constant motion of air, circulating and changing, or as a depiction of the social banalities weather invokes. Other times the air materializes through the sounds it bears, or through its palpable textures, its currents and sensations of thickness, heaviness, lightness. Ashbery refers to factories and smokestacks, “deep ugly black clouds,” and various qualities of the wind.53 But Ashbery’s air often appears as a slight disturbance at the

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periphery of awareness. One sentence in “For John Clare” reads: “The feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone’s mind.”54 We might hear echoes here of Stevens, with his interest in the external limits of imagination and the imagination’s reworking of these limits, where the palm at the end of the mind serves as a figure for the cleaving (in both senses) of mind and environment. Yet Ashbery modifies Stevens’s immanent metaphysics in a more anxious psychic register with this image of the sky “in the back” of another’s mind, as something registered, however indirectly or recessively. It is an image that stresses a more indirect set of intuitive sensings: a feeling about an unnamed other’s partial awareness. Such lines suggest not only a private but a shared sense of half-­ recognition. Other poems index this shared half-consciousness as an awareness, however momentary, of a common milieu. “Fine vapors escape from whatever is doing the living,” Ashbery writes in a poem from Rivers and Mountains. “We are together at last, though far apart.”55 The air substantializes our shared condition as breathing beings, a fact we half-notice and then overlook again. Such indirect noticing, in these poems, often modulates into a sense of the air bearing signs of change. “Hasn’t the sky?” begins “Clepsydra,” an unanswered question that marks, above all, a sense of the distinction of the ­present—some sense that the sky has done something, has acted or changed in some definitive yet unlocatable way.56 Hasn’t the sky—what? In this sense, Ashbery’s calling attention to air and sky becomes a means not only of meditating on an everpresent surround but of marking its changing dimensions. In Three Poems, one of the key preoccupations is with the question of the present: how does it differ from what has come before? What new conditions does it bear? At the beginning of “The System,” figures appear in postures of listening and waiting for whatever is borne by the air, the wind, as a sign of imminent alteration. “At this time of life whatever being there is is doing a lot of listening, as though to the feeling of the wind before it starts, and it slides down this anticipation of itself, already full-fledged, a lightning existence that has come into our own.”57 Here we can see another modulation in Ashbery’s charting of social sensation, from one of forgetting or half-attention to that of more active vigilance, where all beings are awaiting a pending impression. Throughout Three Poems, Ashbery turns to the air as a means of scrutinizing these questions of the changing proportions of the present. In its invisible encircling, air figures the present moment, what Ashbery calls “the insistent now that baffles and surrounds you in its loose-knit embrace that always seems

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to be falling away and yet remains behind.”58 The air’s constant variability serves as metaphor for the endless modifications, shifts, turns of a given moment, as well as for the way the present eludes our conscious grasp. Yet Ashbery also substantializes the vehicle of such metaphors, such that the air becomes not only a means to think toward the elusive dimensions of the present but itself a substantive presence. If this “insistent now” is given form in the “loose-knit embrace” of the atmospheric surround, this surround becomes a perceptible subject of speculative attention by the observer, who notes the “sphere of its solemn and suddenly utterly vast activities, on a new scale as it were.”59 Attending to the air as medium of the present reveals the way both air and present moment consist of new complexities of “scale” beyond individual comprehension. In a subsequent passage that continues this meditation, Ashbery’s speaker dwells on the question of the particular constitution of the present as “dusk began to invade my room.” Attending to the subtle transfigurations of air and light, the speaker discerns the way “certain new elements had been incorporated, though perhaps not enough of them to change matters very much.”60 As dusk fades to night and night turns to dawn, the “tremors slowly took on the solidity, the robustness of an object.”61 In these lines, the speaker senses qualities of palpability and difference—a felt apprehension of the changing contours of the present—as borne through but also contained within the medium of air. Such examinations of the ambience of the present materialize the air as thick with changing “elements.” By later in this section, such materialization takes on new proportions, as a strange new atmosphere that is the “product” of the “changes” this whole book invokes: “A vast wetness as of sea and air combined, a single smooth, anonymous matrix without surface or depth was the product of these new changes.”62 We might see such materializations of uncanny atmospheres as drawing on other poetic sources, Romantic and modernist: Blake’s images of the “clouded hills” and “dark satanic mills,” Wordsworth’s portraits of “smokeless air” and “common wind,” Eliot’s “yellow fog,” and even Rukeyser’s clouds of silica dust in The Book of the Dead. In all these cases, the ambient surround serves both as an index of immanent environmental experience and as an omen of larger change on the horizon. Refracted through these poetic representations of air as ecohistorical medium, Ashbery’s portrayals of these immanent substantializations appear not as explorations of symmetry between self and natural world but instead as meditations on the changing material surround and the com-

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plex forms of consciousness it engenders. Such images of the shared reading of atmospheric signs imply that the air bears more than simply a seasonal shift or impending storm, while resisting any explanatory causal account. And in turn, these repeated descriptions that draw attention to the air, delineating its undefinable nature and anticipating an as-yet-unknowable change, produce a collective form of ecological perception along the lines of Raymond Williams’s descriptions of emergent “social experience” that has not congealed into full legibility but nonetheless presses in.63 If we cannot know the air, these poems make us sense it—and what we sense is not simply immanence but imminence. Apprehensions of Crisis As Chris Nealon has argued in his compelling reading of Ashbery’s poetry in The Matter of Capital, a central preoccupation of Ashbery’s work of this era is the signals and forms of socioeconomic crisis. Nealon claims that Ashbery chronicles the era’s tumultous shift from industrial to finance capital as it occurred in New York City in particular, often by way of “figures of looming disaster that the poet believes he can simply choose to ‘wander away’ from.”64 The opening lines of “The System,” the second poem in Three Poems, dramatize this sense of impending breakdown, charting a small disruption that will eventually lead to some greater social convulsion, enfolding disparate regions into shared catastrophe. In Nealon’s reading, Ashbery’s solitary “wandering” speaker is significantly separate from this looming catastrophe, able to slip away from its grasp.65 This ability to withdraw from disaster does not reflect a stance of superiority or privilege, Nealon claims, so much as an instinctive response to endangerment. While Nealon emphasizes Ashbery’s attempts to differentiate himself from figures of concentrated power and spectacles of financial accumulation, to “counterpose” the “phenomenology of dailiness, its flux, its shifts in mood” against “the frightening public world of punctual event, of ‘news,’” I highlight here how Ashbery’s renderings of the everyday surround impart a sensation of inescapability, where dailiness itself becomes a locale of incipient crisis rather than a site of retreat.66 Rather than a spectacle that can be imaginatively turned away from, Ashbery’s atmospheres evoke an ambient space of nonprivacy and shared susceptibility. “It became impossible to breathe easily in this constricted atmosphere,” Ashbery writes in “The System.”67 In Three Poems, this sense of claustrophobic inescapability is particularly pronounced. The surround begins to appear not as life-nourishing but as

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strangely recalcitrant, even antagonistic: “But meanwhile it seems as if our little space were moving counter to us, dragging us backward,” Ashbery writes.68 Images of ecological disturbance arise, as in the following lines, which are reminiscent of the toxic circulations that Carson chronicles in Silent Spring : The days fly by; they do not cease. By night rain pelted the dark planet; in the morning all was wreathed in false smiles and admiration, but the daylight had gone out of the day and it knew it. All the pine trees seemed to be dying of a mysterious blight. There was no one to care. The sky was still that nauseatingly cloying shade of blue, with the thin ribbon of cirrus about to disappear and materialize over other, alien lands, far from here.69

Alongside Ashbery’s portrayals of the pageantry of economic circulation in breakdown mode, here we see an image of a global circulation of air itself, ominously disappearing and rematerializing, bearing some “mysterious blight.” The weather, too, is awry, with storms and darkness, or with a cheerful front that belies a weirder real. Such scenes convey a different sensation of crisis, one that is not at the forefront of the economic spectacle that Three Poems depicts but is more ambiently circulating. The mood is ominous and bewildered, as in many of Carson’s scenes of strangely bewitched settings with no clear cause. For the collective speaker of the poem, this predicament of the present registers as an “uneasiness that is undermining our health, causing us to think crazy thoughts and behave erratically. We can no longer live our lives properly.”70 In other moments in Three Poems, as the previous section detailed, the air seems to turn from invisible matter into something thicker, palpable, even a “solid block.” What the air bears is a palpable image of “wholeness,” a totality in which all beings and entities are included: Thus summed up, he felt sickened at the wholeness. Better it should evaporate into the almost palpable clouds of the night than sit around as a reproach for all that was never going to be, now, since it included everything. Begone! But the solid block just sat there. Little by little its mass began to grow transparent, like clouds just before dawn.71

Such lines underscore an idea that Ashbery returns to often in Three Poems, that all things are bound together in a system whose contours are not wholly perceptible but that is nonetheless inescapable. This image makes visible, however fleetingly, a sense of the whole: a glimpse of totality that makes the speaker

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“sickened” to contemplate. To see this is to recognize that the medium of our everyday experience, the basic precondition of whatever freedom or autonomy we believe we possess, governs us beyond our fathoming. It is to confront, through the disorientingly concrete image of a “mass,” a sense that this allinclusive surround possesses a mysterious determination that involves us all. In approaching Ashbery’s renderings of his surround as confining, we might return to Commoner’s image in the title of his book The Closing ­Circle. Commoner’s imagined inversion of the earth’s spherical capaciousness to evoke a more bounded and precarious unity conveys a palpable sense of encroaching limits. It also resignifies the well-known image of “spaceship Earth,” popularized by Adlai Stevenson, Barbara Ward, and Buckminster Fuller, but used most extensively by Paul Ehrlich in The Population Bomb to represent the planet’s limited carrying capacity and the shared destiny of its occupants.72 Commoner’s image returns us to the ground and surround of the planet, eliciting a sense of collective vulnerability and looming limits, of global interconnection glimpsed through the lens of impending disaster, in the image of the circle closing. It is this anxious mood of atmospheric enclosure that Ashbery’s poems of this era conjure with such intensity. As Ashbery writes in Three Poems of “something new” in the air: “Outside, can’t you hear it, the traffic, the trees, everything getting nearer. To end up with, inside each other.”73 In this way, Ashbery’s work provokes a startling recognition of how we are inescapably connected with others in these determined conditions. In lines from Three Poems, Ashbery presents a sudden “swarm” of people populating the speaker’s surround: At this time of year the populations emerge again into the arena of life after the death of winter, and one is newly conscious of the multitudes that swarm past one in the street; there is something of death here too in the way they plunge past toward some unknown destination, leaving one a little shaken up on the edge of the sidewalk.74

Here the air is peopled, a “swarm” of bodies materialized more as massing matter than as a human crowd, in which the poem’s speaker mingles but toward which he feels aversion. Unlike the scenes Nealon describes of wandering away from crisis, here the speaker’s position at the “edge of the sidewalk” affords no possibility for flight. Instead the feeling is one of claustrophobic immersion in the ominous motions of this “throng.” At once dissociated from and absorbed

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in this surround, the speaker embodies a state of imbricated alienation, a very different image either from models of ecological reintegration, on one hand, or awakened recognition of environmental ills, on the other. As the air materializes in strange, uncanny ways as second nature across Ashbery’s poems—thick with a human multitude, a “solid block” that resists comprehension, the “dump air” as it “lasts”—his portrayals echo Carson’s and Commoner’s portraits of ecological totality and interconnectedness that emerge through signs of incipient crisis. In their intimations of anthropogenic densities and disturbing embodiments of a transfiguring whole, these portrayals attune us to how crisis “in solution” might be perceptible and to the ambient responses—anxiety, unease, claustrophobia—it conveys. In turn, we might take notice of how these poems point in anticipatory ways toward an unknown future, meditating on a problem or presence that, as Ashbery writes, “no one recognizes . . . and it does not even recognize itself yet, or know what it is.”75 In the closing section, “The Recital,” Ashbery contemplates this incipient problem of its historical present, one that is not yet recognizable but somehow borne on the air. We might apprehend this problem today as the crisis of climate change—a problem on a new scale that Ashbery’s poems of this period could sense but not yet name. Yet a contemporary reader must resist the impulse to substantialize the air wholly in these terms, instead attempting to sustain the work’s anticipatory partiality as it dwells in an uneasy sense of atmospheric interconnection. As Timothy Clark argues in his recent book on ecocritical method, “Ecocritical reading cannot just be some act of supposed retrieval, but now also becomes a measure of the irreversible break in consciousness and understanding, an emergent unreadability.”76 Ashbery’s atmospheres do not quite return us to our own present in a time of generalized climate crisis. But in their multivalent portraits of the sensible dimensions of a surround that is not just backdrop but something more, they attune us to air’s historical sense. Untimely Poetics The beginning of Three Poems asks, “Have I awakened? Or is this sleep again? Another form of sleep?”77 Rather than illuminating the process by which a subject emerges into clarity and self-awareness (or offering a postmodern parody of this process), Three Poems dwells on the vicissitudes of what Ashbery calls “the forms of your inattention and incapacity or unwillingness to understand” and dilates these forms of imperfect comprehension.78 Yet Ashbery insists that

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this dream-bound state is not a misapprehension or distortion but instead the way we must proceed. This is a way of approaching how poetry itself is framed across Ashbery’s work, which often turns to images of reading or attempts to listen and interpret as they are imperfectly undertaken. The poetry reader, like the figures reading atmospheric signs to understand the changing contours of a present, half-attends, waiting for a message or sign that never emerges into full clarity, often drifting into another thought or distracted by another scene. As he writes in Three Poems: The unsatisfactoriness, the frowns and squinting, the itching and scratching as you listen without taking in what is being said to you, or only in part, so that you cannot piece the argument together, should not be dismissed as signs of our chronic all-too-human weakness but welcomed and examined as signs of life in which part of the whole truth lies buried.79

Ashbery insists here that such inability to put the pieces together, to see clearly, is no failure but instead the only appropriate response to the complexity of the present, in which “part of the whole truth lies buried.” There no attempt at demystification but instead an acceptance of uncertainty as inevitable. In turn, the body’s somatic responses, “frowns and squinting,” “itching and scratching,” bear their own significance. Ashbery suggests that it is this somatic register that should be examined for the “signs of life” it contains. These images of listening without understanding and the bodily responses provoked bespeak a different sense of poetic communication, akin to the nonreflective relations that these poems stage, where something may be transmitted from text to reader (or from atmosphere to subject), but not by way of direct correspondence or harmonious comprehension. In both cases, the sensing of this transmission itself tells us something vital. These transient, fleeting responses are the means by which we can discern our partial apprehension of the inaccessible “whole truth,” and it is to these responses that Ashbery’s poems carefully attend.80 Poetry’s particular task, in Ashbery’s work, is to bear this uncertainty forward in and through its surround: what he calls the “certain illegible traces” that remain “like chalk dust on a blackboard after it has been erased” that “we must learn to recognize . . . as the form—the only one—in which such fragments of the true learning as we are destined to receive will be vouchsafed to us, if at all.”81 Such lines offer a brief ars poetica, an account of how poetry contains and conveys knowledge. What we see is an ethos of transience rather

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than durability, defining poetry not as a method of comprehensible expression so much as a palimpsestic record whose marks must be scrutinized without the possibility of final understanding. “True learning” is fugitive and proceeds not by any straightforward educational method but by reading “illegible traces.” In turn, it is poetry’s very untimeliness—its nonassimilability to the dominant logics of its present, its dreamy refusals and premonitory sensings—that paradoxically attune it to “the secret of what goes on.”82 This idea is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in Ashbery’s meditation on the dump in The Vermont Notebook. As Christopher Schmidt has pointed out in his sensitive reading of Ashbery’s waste-based poetics, the dump is presented in this passage as a figure for poetry, a storehouse of old things and wasted material.83 But while Schmidt reads the dump as a figure for the ways older literature becomes fodder for poetic recycling, I contend that the dump signifies not an ethos of salvage or redemption but an attention to what lasts at the verge. The poem, Ashbery suggests, is attuned to the activities of the “dump dumped and dumping” as they unfold without narrative framing or logical explanation. Poetry’s task is to remain in and with this matter in its decompositional processes, conveying “the real story of the dump which is never telling.”84 Staying with the transient and accumulating substances of its present, the poem becomes not a receptacle of waste but a medium chronicling the material transformations it encodes and the mysterious history it bears. It is not, then, what can be made anew from this matter, its possibility for creative renewal or innovative recycling. Ashbery’s rewriting of Stevens’s metapoetic lines from “The Man on the Dump,” “the dump is full / Of images,” as “the dump air lasts,” reveals a figure for poetry as that which lingers, absorbing material and bearing it along, ever-attentive to what persists and what is swept under.85

3

“NOT PEOPLE’S PARK / PEOPLE’S PLANET” 1970s Revolutionary Pastoral

Consider two poems from that tumultuous year, 1969. The first is Gary Snyder’s “Smokey the Bear Sutra,” first delivered at a Sierra Club Wilderness Conference, which reenvisions the American icon Smokey the Bear as the incarnation of the Great Sun Buddha.1 With anarchic humor, Snyder describes Smokey the Bear’s various emblematic features—shovel, hat, overalls—as symbols of earthly tending, prayerful contemplation, and necessary destruction. At once peaceful and a warrior, “Wrathful but Calm,” Smokey the Bear is tasked with protecting “those who love woods and rivers, / Gods and animals, hobos and madmen, prisoners and sick / people, musicians, playful women, and hopeful children.” When in danger from “advertising, air pollution, television, / or the police,” Smokey the Bear’s disciples can call out his “WAR SPELL”: DROWN THEIR BUTTS CRUSH THEIR BUTTS DROWN THEIR BUTTS CRUSH THEIR BUTTS

Upon the chanting of this “war spell,” Smokey the Bear will “put the enemy out with his vajra-shovel.” Blending Eastern spiritual practices with the American iconography of Smokey, Snyder’s poem also pokes fun at the burgeoning counterculture and its wide-eyed but shallow mysticism, insisting that any such chant must be good-humored and not too self-serious. Yet for all its theatrical goofiness, the “Smokey the Bear Sutra” also catalogs ecological harm at a variety of scales: from the planetary (“total oil slick”) to the “wasteful freeways and needless suburbs” of present-day America. And despite its evocations of spiritual harmony, it is also steeped in language of confrontation and antagonism. The poem offers a beatific vision of “an age of harmony of man and nature” to come, but only 65

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in the wake of systemic upheaval and ecosocial transformation, as the Bear “smash[es] the worms of capitalism and / totalitarianism.” Leaving behind the heedless consumerism, the “cars, houses, canned food” of the present, those who follow Smokey’s path to a more simplified, enlightened future will “always have ripened blackberries to eat and a sunny spot under a pine tree to sit at.” If Snyder’s poem is guided by the promise of earthly enlightenment, Diane di Prima’s “Revolutionary Letter #38” is suffused with righteous rage. Written in response to the May 1969 bulldozing of People’s Park in Berkeley by the Berkeley Police Department and the California Highway Patrol and the subsequent police violence against protesters (including one fatality and many injuries), di Prima’s short poem is an all-caps missive: NOT PEOPLE’S PARK PEOPLE’S PLANET, CAN THEY FENCE THAT ONE IN, BULLDOZE IT 4 A.M.?2

Di Prima’s letter delivers a furious four-line critique of the “THEY,” the governmental forces who took control of People’s Park in cowardly fashion (“4 A.M.”). The critique hinges on an immediate scale-shift from local to planetary, indicating that the terrain of this conflict is far vaster than the police or Ronald Reagan (then governor of California, who ordered the raid) can anticipate. Reframing the entire planet as belonging to the “PEOPLE,” di Prima claims a revolutionary ground that refuses the logics of property and state and exposes the limits of the forces mobilized to protect such interests. In turn, from these explosive antagonisms of the present comes a two-word vision worth fighting for: “PEOPLE’S PLANET.” Blending didacticism with the immediacy of chant, each of these poems shifts between the concrete and the visionary, the antagonistic and the harmonious, the timely and the time-to-come. Both impart a vision, however evanescent, of socioecological relations that depart from present realities in favor of simpler arrangements. Such arrangements are figured as unbounded by state or capitalist interests and as shared in common. And each poem hinges on a language of willed innocence, framed in seemingly incongruous or outsized terms (Smokey the Bear, the People’s Planet) that evoke wholesale opposition to the modern state and capitalist relations. This return to innocence is at the same time an acknowledgment of the urgent need for revolutionary change that will bring the

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future more in line with a nonmodern past. Such untimely visions run through much of di Prima’s and Snyder’s work of this era, particularly their most influential volumes: Snyder’s Turtle Island (1974) and di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters (first edition, 1971), which were essential reading for the countercultural left. These books imagine an ecological commons grounded in nonmodern or “primitive” ways of living but also figured as requiring profound social change in order to come into being. Against a sense of historical time that stresses progress and accumulation, these texts convey an untimely model of cohabitation that stands clear of modern history, reconnecting the vast past with the open future on free land. Holding images of total environmental catastrophe alongside visions of possible simplicity, renewal, and light living on the earth, these poems create a distinctive friction between tumult and ease that I read here as “revolutionary pastoral,” mindful of the contradictions built into that phrase. The pastoral work of Turtle Island and Revolutionary Letters is first to highlight and then to imaginatively extract the alterations of earth systems by modern productive forces and the ensuing effects on biospheric entities, in order to envision what else is possible. They employ pastoral as a genre for imagining activities of commoning centered on principles of land use without ownership. In this sense, we might understand Snyder’s and di Prima’s work as unassimilable to the ecocritical scales of local and global, instead portraying a vision of the commons that is unbounded by property, state, and capital relations. The books repurpose pastoral’s negative ethos, its symbolic refusal of concepts of property, accumulation, and expropriation for an era of generalized environmental crisis.3 Through this reimagined pastoral, these poems offer insight into a larger ecological imaginary developing in the radical left and counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the wake of incidents such as the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire in Cleveland and the oil spill in Santa Barbara, the New Left’s thorough­ going critique of capitalist, imperialist, racist American society increasingly included ecological visions.4 At the dawn of the 1970s, protests against industrial pollution and the organization of ecology-based collectives combined with experiments in communal and “back-to-the-land” living, creating new terrain for a radical ecological politics.5 This perspective consolidated in opposition to the reformist agenda and government- and corporation-friendly ethos of the first Earth Day. A 1970 editorial in the radical Berkeley-based Ramparts warned against the “co-optive potential of ecology,” calling Earth Day “the first step in a con game that will do little more than abuse the environment even

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further.”6 For many on the left, the alternative was to discover or invent models as far removed from the current social order as possible. Many across the movement spoke with confidence about what Snyder called, in 1969, “the coming revolution” that will fight the “cancerous collectivities” of modern society who are “foul[ing] the air and water” and consuming the “soil, the forests, and all animal life.”7 In underground magazines, back-to-the land communal experiments, and ecology actions, apocalyptic visions of broad-scale catastrophe melded with utopian hopefulness about the real possibility for undertaking transformative change through activism and everyday acts. Snyder’s and di Prima’s poetry served as a source of and for such countercultural thinking in this period. Along with that of other influential poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure, Snyder’s and di Prima’s work often appeared in underground newspapers alongside manifestos, community news, and political reporting, serving as poetic inspiration for a countercultural generation seeking alternative visions. “Smokey the Bear Sutra” and “Revolutionary Letter #38” circulated in counterculture publications such as the Austin, Texas, Rag and the upstate New York Roots: A Radical Ecological Perspective, among others. As di Prima recounts in The Poetry Deal (2014), she sent poems from Revolutionary Letters to Liberation News Service as soon as she finished them, which circulated them to underground newspapers across North America.8 She also performed the poems at San Francisco’s City Hall alongside Digger companions passing out pamphlets, attempting “to persuade startled office workers on their way to lunch that they should drop out and join the revolution.”9 Snyder and di Prima were both active in the Diggers movement and other New Left undertakings, and Snyder’s own move back to the land served as a model for many aspiring homesteaders. As Snyder critic Timothy Gray has pointed out, Turtle Island was a key text for the burgeoning environmentalist segment of the counterculture, a status that was underscored by Snyder’s extensive back-to-the-land activities in this period.10 These writers’ activist orientation, lifestyle choices, and intimate connection with the burgeoning counterculture make it difficult not to read their poems as a direct reflection of their lived experiences and immediate political contexts.11 Their poetic choices that tend toward the simple and the anticipative are often framed, in this sense, as indications of their timely sensibility, expressions of the era’s impossible imaginings and irrational excesses. The reception history of these works often follows along the lines of the critique of 1960s activist culture that Language poet and critic Barrett Watten sets forth in “The Turn to Language

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and the 1960s,” which disparages the pervasive sense of the “necessity of taking a position outside a rational system in order to critique it,” a position that he argues was centered on articulations of “impossibility as politics.”12 Watten cites Allen Ginsberg’s metaphysical chants, the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine,” and Denise Lever­tov’s antiwar poetry as key instances of these representations, but certainly Snyder’s and di Prima’s poetry—with their outsized figures and theatrical rhetoric—would fit Watten’s description as well. While Turtle Island won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and has been the subject of many critical studies, prominent critics such as Charles Altieri and Michael Davidson, among others, have lamented Turtle Island’s “shrill, hectoring tone,” its “simplistic” visions, and its “explicit, even militant ecopolitics.”13 As for di Prima’s work, it has been largely ignored by poetry critics; one of the few extended pieces on Revolutionary Letters disparages the book as “an almost involuntary reaction to the events of the sixties.”14 There is no question that these works are powerfully engaged with the radical logics and lived experiments of their time. Yet rather than seeing them solely as a reflection of that era’s contradictory rhetorics, I read these works as reflections on the limitations, the untried possibilities, the openings of their present by way of an imaginative swerve beyond it. The pastoral vision of these works depends on a movement away from their immediate moment in order to unearth other trajectories that might unbind its hold. This imagined outside is not, I argue, a sign of political incoherence or irrational fervor but a sustained thought experiment in imagining an ecologically oriented commons not determined by present values and political frameworks.15 Thus my chapter engages these works less as a direct index of their radical political landscape than as an imaginative poetic response that contemplates certain deliberately simplified trajectories in the face of increasingly determined socioecological conditions. I read these works not with an expectation that they could (or did) forward an immediately achievable revolutionary politics nor as an empirically accurate portrait of biospheric relations past, present, or future.16 This chapter is interested, instead, in reading with their generative suspension of their present as it opens up approaches for radical ecological thought. It is precisely the untimeliness of this poetics, with its investments in the nonmodern and the revolutionary, that allows it to open a vantage on, and beyond, the closing frontiers of the present. And in the dystopian reckonings of these works, we can glimpse early conceptualizations of nature’s end, emerging as a nightmarish vision of a future that must be averted.

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Finding Turtle Island Perhaps Snyder’s most famous single volume of poetry, Turtle Island contemplates the possibility of returning to ways of living close to the land. The title, an indigenous name for the North American continent, opens the imaginative ground for this contemplation, invoking an alternative sense of the land that runs counter to relations founded on private property, state interests, and logics of accumulation and resource extraction.17 Like Arcadia or Innisfree, Turtle Island invokes a vision of free terrain where everyday life is structured by subsistence without intensive labor and by simple ties to one’s natural surroundings. At the same time, the evocation of the creaturely in Snyder’s title also suggests an imaginary that is inclusive of the energies that sustain various organisms and phenomena, not simply the human. Snyder’s evocation of harmonious interconnection is importantly speculative rather than realist. It echoes what Michael McKeon, in a seminal essay on pastoral, describes as pastoral’s qualities of “detachment” rather than reliance on the real.18 Across his prose pieces and imagistic lyrics, Snyder develops a pastoral poetry conditioned by this detachment from a given present, elaborating a view of Turtle Island as a fictive site of ecological relations that could be. To highlight the speculative moorings of Turtle Island is to depart from readings that stress the work’s literalism, its desire to jettison mediation in favor of more direct, instructive utterance. Charles Altieri, to take one example, claims that Snyder’s best poems in Turtle Island “disclose what he is given” with absolute accuracy, eschewing metaphor and other figurative elaboration.19 For Altieri and others, this declarative tendency often shifts from “is” to “ought,” leading to a lamentable didacticism.20 Even critics who demur from such negative judgments read Turtle Island as a largely polemical, solution-driven response to the conditions of the present and a direct reflection of his own lifestyle choices as homesteader in the Sierra Nevadas.21 By contrast, I read the central representational heuristic of Turtle Island not as the literal but as the simple, considering Turtle Island as engaged at all levels with a deliberate simplification that bears complexity.22 Like the portraits of the shepherd central to classic pastoral, many poems in Turtle Island conjure glimpses of an ideal life centered on simple sufficiency, the possibility of “grow[ing] strong on less” and the need to “go light.”23 They convey images of everyday life centered on essentials—shelter, food, community— that are in rhythm with larger surroundings. We can see this in poems like “The

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Bath,” which portrays bathing as a familial ritual that reconnects humans with their larger creaturely and ancestral inheritance, or “The Wild Mushroom,” which describes a family foraging expedition in playful tones, or “The Hudson­ ian Curlew,” with its detailing of wood-gathering and hunting birds for food (complete with extensive description of how the curlew is cleaned and cooked with minimal waste). These poems place the small scale of intergenerational life in intimate relation to ecosystem and cosmos: “we sit here near the diggings / in the forest, by our fire, and watch / the moon and planets and the shooting stars.”24 Celebrating the simple pleasures of living far from modern consumerism, Snyder highlights the small delights in activities such as “drying berries, curing meat, / shooting arrows at a bale of straw.”25 As in the pastoral tradition more generally, the poems demonstrate a powerful awareness of their invocational, rather than merely descriptive, work in their images of a scaled-down, essentials-oriented life. We might understand such images as a “representative anecdote” that serves multiple functions in a pastoral work, as Paul Alpers argues in What Is Pastoral?. Alpers writes that such images function not only “as a representative, a summary or characteristic example,” but as “a synecdochic relation to something else, for which it stands or of which it is part.”26 Snyder’s idyllic images throughout Turtle Island serve this dual purpose, not only depicting immediate scenes but suggesting a larger, as yet unachieved vision or sensibility (“Turtle Island” itself) toward which they gesture. “Turtle Island,” invoked throughout the collection, signifies not a particular geographical location nor a concrete indigenous past so much as a generalized name for a mode of existence that might steer clear of the logics of accumulation and privatization, with their unintended and intensifying biospheric effects. Snyder conjures Turtle Island as an entity that floats free of temporal and spatial moorings, existing beyond the bounds of locale, region, or planet: Turtle Island swims in the ocean-sky swirl-void biting its tail while the worlds go    on-and-off       winking27

Such evocations stress the inviolate, lateral qualities of Turtle Island, a presence that exists alongside the space-time of our “worlds” but is never synchronized to them. The compound nouns “ocean-sky swirl-void” evoke a transmuting inter­

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stellar realm beyond planetary bounds in which this entity swims, an openness underscored by the progressive indentations of these lines. In such lines, the floating entity of Turtle Island opens up a negative vantage on the present, one that involves an imaginative stripping away of the coordinates of capitalist modernity and its productive processes to explore a more unbounded spatiality. Throughout his book, Snyder turns to other patterns, from the common life of work and cohabitation to the awareness of interspecies interconnections, as illustrative of the open being and motion of Turtle Island, discoverable not in the cosmic reaches but in the daily workings of an ecosystem. The larger ecosocial vision that guides these individual images can be understood as a kind of speculative simplicity. “We could live on this Earth / without clothes or tools!,” Snyder exclaims in “By Frazier Creek Falls.”28 The key word here, of course, is “could”—a word that captures an imaginative openness, a quality of surmise, and an orientation toward the untried rather than the actual. What would it mean to hold open such a thought, to see human life in such a radically altered form? Who and what are humans “without clothes or tools”? Absent even these basic trappings of species life, what else might we consist of or undertake? In their rhythmic precisions and imagistic craft as well as their mythic cast, Snyder’s poems of this period point to the strong influence of Ezra Pound, a key figure for Snyder.29 Pound’s effect can be seen, as well, in Snyder’s central oscillation in Turtle Island between imagistic explorations of the formal shapeliness of luminous energy and excoriating social critique. But Snyder’s work eschews Pound’s heroic figures, polyvocality, and parataxis for elemental vocabularies that elaborate a nonmodern imaginary, attuned to the creaturely and the common. Snyder’s work engages the questions elaborated above by way of image and form, using simply patterned lines with strong stresses (spondees and trochees) that create a forceful, dynamic rhythm. These rhythms underscore a certain energetic principle that is common to all life-forms, a principle of lively intelligence that moves through all earthly beings. In “Tomorrow’s Song,” Snyder conveys such a conception of creaturely wisdom and shared bodily rhythms: Grasp the tools and move in rhythm side by side     flash gleams of wit and silent knowledge       eye to eye sit still like cats or snakes or stones     as whole and holding as       the blue black sky.30

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There’s a powerful dehierarchizing at work in this poem as it portrays beings existing “side by side,” “eye to eye,” sharing basic modes of life in common. We find creaturely kinship, Snyder suggests, in simple daily tasks and their rhythms. Many of Snyder’s poems stress these fundamental similarities between humans and nonhuman forms, as in “Straight-Creek—Great Burn”: Creek boulders show the flow-wear lines     in shapes the same    as running blood     carves in the heart’s main       valve31

Images such as these place humans within a larger geological and biological frame, one element in a larger pattern rather than the dominant constituent. Evocations of pattern, process, cyclical making and unmaking, course throughout the book alongside those of human work and leisure, representing common energies fundamentally indifferent to differentiation and division—a far cry from Pound’s profoundly hierarchical epic imaginary. In dynamic opposition to these imaginative pastorals is a series of poems that represent the socioecological dynamics of the Great Acceleration as a present and inescapable fact. The book alternates between visions of peaceful cohabitation on Turtle Island and poems describing various forms of environmental destruction—bulldozers and logging trucks, bombs in Southeast Asia, pollution in the air and water, fossil fuel extraction and consumption, species extinction, atomic detonations, overpopulation. In one of Turtle Island’s most searing poems, “The Call of the Wild,” Snyder decries various forms of ecological destroyers past and present, from coyote-trappers and loggers to drug-­addled hippies looking for a new high in nature and ordinary American citizens, profoundly alienated from the natural world and taught to fear its workings. All of these figures have become actors in ecological devastation, however unconscious their participation. On the horizon, Snyder foresees an ecocide of planetary proportions: All these Americans up in special cities in the sky Dumping poisons and explosives Across Asia first, And next North America,

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A war against earth. When it’s done there’ll be    no place A Coyote could hide.32

The end of nature appears here as an indelible image of a bleak earthscape leveled by war and industrial production, where natural habitats have been demolished. This angry piece presents a totalizing contrast with Snyder’s minimalist renderings of patterns of working and living in common. Such juxtapositions are illustrative of the logic of oppositions often invoked in pastorals, which tend to be organized around a rural/urban divide and all its associated divergences.33 Here, the central pastoral poles of the collection (USA / Turtle ­Island) pit resource frontiers against nonmodern communal life, capitalist innovation against natural ecological intelligence, aggrandizing state power against the imperatives of ecosystems toward survival, the end of nature against its intricate weave of life. With its decidedly nonmodern orientation, Snyder’s poetry in many ways exemplifies a primitivist ethos, with its “all-or-nothing” critique of the expropriation of nature by modern societies. As Mick Smith writes in his work on the anarcho-primitivist philosophy of John Zerzan and Earth First! activists, “Primitivism provides a counter-modern critique of the very discourses that served to justify human dominion over the natural world.”34 It does so by setting out a philosophy “expunging all those cultural features that set humans apart from nature.”35 Primitivism as a philosophy expresses a countermodern desire for a return to innocence, imagined to be constitutive of premodern societies before various forms of civilizational corruption set in, and in so doing reveals its own ideology of the modern. All of these dimensions of primitivism are certainly present in Turtle Island, with its imaginative stripping-down of the human.36 And, as some Native American scholars have pointed out, this primitivism draws on invocations of indigenous lifeways that often read as appropriative: a form of “playing Indian” that “depends upon the physical and psychological removal, even the death, of real Indians,” according to Rayna Green.37 Poems of Snyder’s such as “Anasazi” and “The Jemez Pueblo Ring” do suggest a primitivist perspective that seems to arise from a settler colonialist fantasy. Certainly, the blindness of Snyder’s project is to presume that the speaker and a generation of (largely white) counterculturalists seeking social

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alternatives could occupy—however imaginatively—the same position as the Native Americans against the “invaders.” The text’s desire for innocence runs up against the real history of colonization, a history that cannot be willed away by calls to solidarity or shared ground. This tension is built into the very title, which both names a future possibility and invokes a violently suppressed past without any way to resolve that fundamental impasse. Yet the book’s exhortation to “go native” might be understood not as a real solution—a turn to a reality principle that reinscribes the historical violence done to Native Americans—but as an imaginative expression of a deep longing for social transformation and a wish to avoid being a colonizer. This wish remains importantly unachieved in the volume, which instead foregrounds this historical and ongoing violence in and through its governing oppositions.38 “The Call of the Wild” ends with a turn to the reader: I would like to say Coyote is forever Inside you. But it’s not true.39

This acknowledgment of fundamental discontinuity and ecological estrangement resonates throughout the volume, producing a powerful self-indictment that complicates any appropriative logic.40 We can see Turtle Island ’s primitivism as grounded in an acknowledgment rather than a repression of the foundational violence that produces the very categories of primitive and modern on American soil. The work is defined, in fact, by a larger, structuring consciousness of how present socioecological pressures condition the desire for these pastoral images. The conscious simplicity of Snyder’s evocations of Turtle Island thus skirts primitivist nostalgia for prehistoric life. Instead, the work as a whole engages a subtractive logic that opens up a space for envisioning an ecologically centered commons by thinking with and without the material conditions of the present. The pastoral gestures toward meanings that have not yet materialized, whether in the past or the present. This story is certainly not exemplified by current back-to-the-land countercultural types, who Snyder scornfully describes as “ex acid-heads from the cities” who “sleep in oil-heated / Geodesic domes” planted like “warts / In the woods.”41 The possibility of “Turtle Island” remains

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dependent on a wholesale unmaking of the economic infrastructure that defines contemporary American life—a total break that Snyder leaves undescribed but whose necessity remains palpable. In this sense, the revolutionary imperative of Turtle Island remains at once elusive and essential—the precondition for Turtle Island’s emergence. The poem that illuminates the absent but motivating force of revolutionary change most powerfully in Turtle Island is “What Happened Here Before.” This poem folds geological time into historical time, moving forward from the great continental and oceanic motions of three hundred million years ago to the present time in the Sierra Nevadas. Each stanza bears a time stamp of moments in the planet’s history—three hundred million; eighty million; three million; forty thousand; one hundred and twenty five; now—from rock and river formation to the evolution of species to Snyder’s immediate present. The poem dwells on the various layers of nonhuman presences, the myriad plants and animals that “came to live here,” the slow creation of “gold and gravel.”42 It then turns to the first peoples of the Sierras, forty thousand years ago, who engaged with the land through “feasts and dances,” “songs and ­stories.”43 Against these scenes of dynamic evolution and ecosystemic interconnection, Snyder describes the forceful disruption of the “white man,” with his land enclosures, his law-making, his acquisitive exploitation of the land, and his monocultures: Then came the white man: tossed up trees and     boulders with big hoses,     going after that old gravel and the gold. horses, apple-orchards, card-games,     pistol-shooting, churches, county jail.44

This embodiment of Western capitalist modernization presents a violent aberration from “what happened here before.” But he is also placed in a temporal span that reveals his ultimate transience in relation to the long history of the planet and its ever-changing configurations. “The land belongs to itself,” Snyder insists, directly contradicting the language of taxes and property associated with white colonial modernization.45 Through these temporal progressions, Snyder’s poem unmoors the reader from the seeming inevitability of current configurations by directing attention to a longue durée that might unfold different imaginative horizons. Snyder’s

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poem concludes with a question—“my sons ask, who are we?” Pointing toward the open future represented by these children, the poem leaves the question unanswered. Instead, Snyder delivers a gnomic, intense pronouncement: “WE SHALL SEE / WHO KNOWS / HOW TO BE.” This pronouncement, with its all-caps urgency, might be read as a prophetic prefiguration of a coming sea change in modes of collective being, an imminent break from the conditions of the present. In these lines is gathered an energy that intimates the possibility of revolutionary change overseen by the “WE,” a communal consciousness that sees beyond the present toward this different future. This “WE” also, of course, implies a “THEY,” an antagonist represented here by the tax-man, the colonist, the military jets flying overhead. The poem ends not by directly resolving this antagonism, but by allowing a nonhuman “voice” to have the last word: “Bluejay screeches from a pine.” Through this closing turn, the poem connects the not yet visible future to the long ecological history of the place, relegating colonization and capitalist development to a brief interruption that will soon be left behind in the wake of revolutionary upheaval. At the same time, it envisions a possible subject—a commoner—whose identity (“who are we?”) will be defined in and through these changes to come.46 Revolutionary Vagrancy In her recent book of ecocriticism, Living Oil, Stephanie LeMenager uses Diane di Prima’s work as the symptomatic answer to her question “Was Ecology Radical?” Pointing to the uncompromising demands that motivate Revolutionary Letters, LeMenager argues that di Prima’s work illuminates the ethos of renunciation in the radical ecology movement of the early 1970s.47 Without a doubt, Revolutionary Letters articulates radical countercultural ideals in starker terms than Turtle Island, as an extended meditation on di Prima’s anarchist principles. Unlike Snyder’s crafted imagism and equanimous tone, Revolutionary Letters bears an almost relentless rhetorical intensity and a mood of anger, desperation, and desire. This mood is underscored by the work’s key formal features: di Prima’s poems are headlong catalogs with little punctuation that engender a propulsive force. Largely epistles addressed in second person to the reader, these poems call on the reader to reflect on her own position in relation to an oppressive system and ask what she would give up to live in a freer, more open way. Other letters move from this “you” to a plural perspective, pointing to the potential for collective embodiment of these forms of freedom. All of

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these textual qualities generate a palpable immediacy that Turtle Island, with its more meditative sensibility, lacks. Yet while Revolutionary Letters invokes the timely rhetorics of countercultural politics with urgency, to read it as only a realist text—and thus as doomed to “hypocrisy” and failure—is to overlook the vital imaginative project of the poems. Where LeMenager skeptically asks, “But could di Prima . . . really renounce electricity?,” I would argue instead that di Prima opens this question as speculative prospect rather than achieved state, suspending the “­really” in favor of a deliberately open-ended ethos.48 This potential, in turn, is evoked by the text’s confrontations with another kind of impossibility: the socioecological conditions of present-day America. Shifting back and forth between portrayals of a wholly corrupted, polluted America and a possible commons to come, Revolutionary Letters draws on similar pastoral tropes as does Turtle Island and shares many of its imaginative principles. Again and again, di Prima attacks the complacent consumerism and normalized forms of ecological destruction that define postwar American life, arguing that these forces do not merely structure daily lives but determine internal desires and bodily natures. The book’s address works, in part, to identify the internalization of these desires for the “you,” asking the reader to reflect on her own dependencies and forms of complicity. Di Prima portrays central features of postwar American society—freeways, plumbing, scientific advances— as crisis-prone aberrations in the long history of planetary life. These features may appear to be signs of the modern achievement of the good life, but they are in reality the materialization of techno-determinist fantasies that will lead to catastrophic results. Revolutionary Letters accumulates examples, through its catalog form, of these all-pervasive forms of unfreedom masquerading as consumer choice and economic progress. The enemy here is not only powerful leaders of corporations and nation-states together with modern scientists, engineers, and designers; it is the well-meaning liberal who enjoys her modern conveniences and who thinks that various forms of progress are the key to larger social well-being. At the same time, di Prima claims, such a citizen is becoming an unwitting “alchemical experiment,” inundated by industrial toxins and pollution. Echoing Carson’s argument in Silent Spring and other popular environmental portraits of industrial pollution, di Prima depicts the ordinary American as subjected to freakish tests carried out at a massive scale by corporations and the state, which in the name of health and progress are in fact slowly contaminat-

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ing her with processed foods, radioactive materials, and dirty air and water. Di Prima writes in “Revolutionary Letter #54”: HOW TO BECOME A WALKING ALCHEMICAL EXPERIMENT eat mercury (in wheat & fish) breathe sulphur fumes (everywhere) take plenty of (macrobiotic) salt & cook the mixture in the heat of an atomic explosion49

Slow violence and apocalyptic conflagration converge in this nightmarish portrait of the modern military-industrial complex waging total war against humans and ecosystems. Here we can glimpse di Prima’s central argument in Revolutionary Letters: whether human or nonhuman, we are all imprisoned in body and mind by an oppressive system.50 Di Prima claims that even the most powerful and nefarious figureheads of this system—Barry Goldwater, J. Edgar Hoover, President Nixon, Governor Wallace—need to be released into freedom. But while Carson and other environmental thinkers of the 1960s see scientific and technological innovation as providing solutions to the problem of pollution and ecosystemic toxicity, di Prima insists that modern science is inextricably linked to capitalist and state interests. Escaping this system cannot involve new technoscientific initiatives or further investment in capitalist projects, according to di Prima, but must instead involve a wholesale dismantling. As in Turtle Island, Revolutionary Letters details scenes of free life that involve an imaginative deletion of current realities in order to reveal simpler possibilities. This simplified condition, di Prima maintains, is humans’ intuitive way of being. Di Prima’s catalogs of minimal ways of living offer counterpoints to her accumulative lists of systemic ecocide. These images emphasize a direct knowledge of how to grow and make what is necessary for survival, and they evoke commonness rather than social division and individualism. Yet this ethos, if intuitive, has been progressively forgotten and cannot be accessed directly in the present. Instead, di Prima posits these capacities and forms of knowledge in anticipatory terms, as requiring a process of radical transformation. While T ­ urtle Island leaves the potential of revolutionary change on the horizon, di Prima draws her poetry into more immediate confrontation with this prospect. Central to this process is an imaginative movement from “you” to “we,” from the enclosures of individualism and capitalist growth to an expanded and

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simplified vision of being-in-common. To unlearn the individualist credo is an imaginative project that involves preparations for imminent social collapse and the willingness to sacrifice comfort for a communal life ahead. The secondperson address turns, in various poems, to catalogs that exhort the addressee to store food, water, and various forms of painkillers and meds, and to learn where safe houses are in times of need. These poems lay out a process that the “you” must undertake in order to radically transform her life, forgoing conveniences, escaping into the woods, and leaving her individuated life behind. These poems also catalog various skills the addressee must acquire, from foraging to setting a broken arm and navigating by the stars, in order to survive. We can see how such a transfiguration finds form in “Revolutionary Letter #34,” which sets forth two very different definitions of “revolution.” The first is that of modern American life, with all its consumerist comforts, scaled up to totalized proportions. The second is a very different revolution in values and ways of living, one that rejects these terms entirely. Di Prima writes: hey man let’s make a revolution, let’s give every man a thunderbird color TV, a refrigerator, free antibiotics, let’s build apartments with a separate bedroom for every child inflatable plastic sofas, vitamin pills with all our daily requirements that come in the mail free gas & electric & telephone & no rent. why not? hey man, let’s make a revolution, let’s turn off the power, turn on the stars at night, put metal back in the earth, or at least not take it out anymore, make lots of guitars and flutes, teach the chicks how to heal with herbs, let’s learn to live with each other in a smaller space, and build hogans, and domes and teepees all over the place BLOW UP THE PETROLEUM LINES, make the cars into flower pots or sculptures or live in the bigger ones, why not?51

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The first stanza details what a capitalist utopian fantasy might look like, erasing both nature and labor from the picture to display a scene of pure consumer comfort. Here all one’s needs are taken care of, from rent to food to entertainment, creating an interior surround so complete that no one need leave the house. This fantasy prioritizes the individual subject as an isolated, autonomous being, magically released from the waged world and the rhythms of nature and liberated into endless consumption. Di Prima here portrays capitalist modernity in its most cheerfully illusory guise, depicting the false promises it presents but also the possible appeal for the reader of these promises—free rent and TVs for everyone! The second stanza shifts to a vision of what an entirely different way of free living might look like. Such lines undertake a process of pastoralization that involves an imaginative movement from modern, privatized consumer life to a simplified existence unbounded by these imperatives. These lines pivot from the passive life of the modern consumer in her techno-surround to descriptions of more active tasks conducted with others in the open: building, healing with herbs, repurposing cars to live inside, making music. As it elaborates these images of a mode of living centered on the collective, this poem measures the distance that must be traveled in terms of one’s orientation toward space, privacy, resources, health, and pleasure by letting go of one version of “revolution” and embracing another. At the same time, the capitalized line—“BLOW UP THE PETROLEUM LINES”—affords a striking glimpse of the direct action that must accompany these psychic reorientations. Breaking from the idyllic tone of the surrounding lines, this interruptive line makes plain that achieving this state of collective peace will require armed confrontation with state and economic interests. Direct revolutionary struggle is revealed to be the means by which the individual is transmuted into a being-in-common. Revolutionary Letters provides many such glimpses of insurrectionary revolutionary conflict as the concrete way forward. Di Prima’s work lays out her larger anarchist revolutionary vision—destroying the profit motive, property, and the money-form; abandoning schools and the modern medical and scientific establishments; dismantling state power—and many of the poems describe various means by which these upheavals will proceed. But the representational burden in this book falls more on the transformations, bodily and psychic, that must be undertaken in order to be released from one’s own internal commitment to capitalist modernity’s values and activities. LeMenager frames this

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as an “abstinence aesthetic,” but I read it, rather, as a quintessentially pastoral aesthetic, evoking a flight from city to country and from struggle toward conditions of peace, conducted in a countercultural idiom.52 In various poems, di Prima’s larger pastoral design is emblematized by the repeated motif of escape and nomadic motion. Revolutionary Letters centers on images of flight and wandering, from the “you” escaping the city to collective figures walking free in the woods. While Snyder’s representational emphasis dwells on settlement, on the possibility of making an earthly home on “Turtle Island,” di Prima invokes vagrancy through speculative scenes of idyllic communal movement from place to place. These scenes are often developed as open-ended questions, thought experiments to explore. As she writes in “Revolutionary Letter #33”: how far back are we willing to go? that seems to be the question. the more we give up the more we will be blessed, the more we give up, the further back we go, can we make it under the sky again, in moving tribes that settle, build, move on and build again owning only what we carry, do we need the village, division of labor, a friendly potlatch a couple times a year, or must it be merely a ‘cybernetic civilization’ which may or may not save the water, but will not show us our root, or our original face, return us to the source, how far (forward is back) are we willing to go after all?53

This motif of common wandering imaginatively abandons the liberal subject and its logics of property, accumulation, and progress in favor of an undifferentiated, nonpropertied collective on the move. The act of motion itself becomes a form of simplification, walking away from modernity and its enclosures toward the possibility of an unfettered existence of nomadic rootlessness. As scholar Celeste Langan argues in her work on Romantic poetics and the development of the liberal subject, Romantic Vagrancy, the vagrant in modern life under capitalism illuminates the principle of “negative liberty,” where “the

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freedom to come and go” becomes “the obligation to mobility” for those without property.54 By contrast, here vagrancy will be the future condition of common life—a kind of “transcendental surplus,” to borrow a phrase from Langan, rather than the negative exception that produces the modern subject.55 This generalized condition of surplus is dependent on a larger form of wishful thinking in Revolutionary Letters, one that removes property bounds and other forms of enclosure to imagine the “people’s planet” as a common home not only for humans but for all earthly beings. This wishful thinking envisions ecological restoration on a scale grand enough to undo its present ­degradation—a vision that involves an imaginative movement backward in time. A poem like “Revolutionary Letter #33” asks: Can the continent, the planet, and its water and air become healthful and free again? Di Prima pursues a vision of a continent before colonization and a planet before capitalist enclosure and biospheric degradation, imagining a future land that bears no traces of human appropriation. This is explicitly a visionary act, calling forth situations that do not presently exist, dreaming now-lost habitats and species back into existence, moving backward in order to go forward. We might read such imaginings as naïve, evoking impossibilities as possibilities and thus ignoring the material ecological limits of extinction, habitat destruction, and anthropogenic reshaping of earth systems occurring at this time. But of course Revolutionary Letters is quite aware of these prevailing conditions and of the encroaching environmental limits they entail. Di Prima insists on the need to imagine these scenes as possibilities despite the bleak realities she acknowledges throughout the text. In so doing, di Prima’s pastorals involve an imaginative leap out of historical time in order to conjure a different path for biospheric life, one that refuses to submit to current realities as the only possible outcome. As in Snyder’s work, di Prima’s depiction of what these current conditions will bring forecasts the total absence of nature amidst an anthropogenically managed surround. Perhaps the most dystopic evocation of this future can be found in “Revolutionary Letter #39.” This letter breaks the book’s standard form of address to recount, in first-person point of view, a dream-vision of present and future. Di Prima writes: let me tell you, sisters, that on May 30th I went to one of our life festivals dropped acid in Tompkins Square Park with my

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brothers & sisters danced in the sun, till the stars came out & the pigs drove around us in a circle, where we stood touching each other & loving, then I went home & made love like a flower, like two flowers                     opening to each other, we were the jewel in the lotus, next morning still high wandered                      uptown to Natural History Museum & there in a room of Peruvian fauna, birds of paradise I saw as a past, like the dinosaurs saw birds pass from the earth & flowers, most trees & small creatures : chipmunks & rabbits & squirrels & delicate wildflowers saw the earth bare & smooth, austerely plastic & efficient men feeding hydroponically, working like ants thought flatly, without regret (I have unlearned regret)     ‘WHAT BEAUTIFUL CREATURES      USED TO LIVE ON THE EARTH’56

Like the People’s Park poem that directly precedes it, with its image of police containment of radical activity, #39 begins with a portrait of an ad hoc commons encircled by repressive forces. Such lines evoke a communal mode of being, captured in moments of ecstatic togetherness but only fleetingly realizable in the present. The following day, the speaker’s beatific vision transforms into a wholly pessimistic reckoning as she considers another possible future, summoned by the Natural History Museum’s displays of living species. In their confinement, these species now appear bound to a historical past. Reminiscent of John Berger’s trenchant description of animals in zoos as offering a “living monument to their own disappearance,” these lines detect in the museum’s arrangements a stark presentation of the enforced containment of living beings under advanced capitalist production.57 Di Prima’s speaker envisages a desolate future that generalizes this containment, characterized by mass extinction of

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flora and fauna, technologized food systems, and humans laboring ceaselessly. If Snyder’s work displays a sense of optimism about a nonmodern future from which vantage the lifeworlds of capital modernity will seem a faraway nightmare, this poem imagines a linear trajectory forward toward techno-dystopia. This trajectory will render the speaker and her comrades, along with myriad animals and plants, as relics, “BEAUTIFUL CREATURES” now vanished from the earth. It is in desperate opposition to this vision, this prospective backward glance, that di Prima directs her pastoral conjurings throughout Revolutionary Letters. To conjure this path is to preserve the possibility of averting the contained catastrophes of a future already taking shape. Pastoral Futures In closing, I want to return to the question of these texts’ historicity, gesturing to the ways their untimeliness attunes us, in unexpected ways, to the dynamics and logics of their historical moment. In his classic essay “Periodizing the 60s,” Fredric Jameson characterizes the “common objective situation” of the 1960s in these terms: “The simplest yet most universal formulation surely remains the widely shared feeling that in the 60s, for a time, everything was possible: that this period, in other words, was a moment of a universal liberation, a global unbinding of energies.”58 At the same time, as he points out, this is a period when capitalism, despite appearances to the contrary, was actually expanding into new global terrain and developing novel accumulation strategies. One key example Jameson gives of these strategies is that of the Green Revolution in the global South.59 While Jameson does not delineate the planetary impacts of these strategies here, we can glimpse how economic development schemes in the 1960s such as the Green Revolution served as another, more intensive phase in the capitalist enclosure of the global commons.60 It is in light of these developments, both worldwide and on more immediate scales, that we can understand the insistence of Snyder’s and di Prima’s summoning of “Turtle Island” and the “PEOPLE’S PLANET” as imagined alternatives. These works register the sense of capitalism’s great resilience and success in opening new resource frontiers, even as they evoke the liberatory energy of imagining otherwise. In this way, the books might be said to depict the paradoxes of the “common objective situation” that Jameson describes—not embodying the achievement of the era’s revolutionary visions but elaborating a sustained confrontation with these contradictions, by way of its pastoral oppo-

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sitions.61 Through their dialectical pastoral imaginaries, these poems dwell in this contradictory moment without resolution, attuned to the particular pressures it contains. They diagnose their moment as a turning point, one where decisive action must be taken to prevent a future already underway. The way in which these pastorals disclose the contradictions of their present is perhaps most powerfully tied to the environmental politics they refuse. Written in the midst of an era, in the United States, of environmental legislation and widespread popular support for environmentalism, these works decisively reject governmental, scientific, and technological solutions to a crisis they define as all-pervasive and tied to economic and liberal-humanist logics. They instead develop a sustained claim about the wholesale instrumentalization of biospheric phenomena and earth systems, their treatment as resources rather than as essentials on which common life depends. And they contrast images of the unsustainable outcomes of these productive processes, whether through resource depletion or metabolic rifts, with nonmodern scenes of simple subsistence and essential pieces of knowledge passed down through the generations. Orienting their work toward older senses of “commoners,” these poems envision a connection to the earthly commons that refuses the categories of property and dispossession alike.62 In turn, this shared portrayal of the subject as commoner speaks to a motivating desire to be a participant in ongoing biospheric processes without contributing in any way to the dynamics of the capitalist world-ecology. We might measure the increasing untenability of such pastoral prospects in American poetry after the early 1970s alongside the waning of American radical ecological politics and the entrenchment of reform-based environmentalism. With the decline of the New Left, the fading of the counterculture, and the government’s active repression of revolutionary political activities by the early 1970s, the radical socioecological visions of this era became increasingly fugitive. While there have been many significant examples of land-based resistance, collective acts of commoning, and ecotage in the United States after the early 1970s, these actions are largely marginalized, criminalized, and actively repressed.63 At the same time, the mainstream environmentalist factions in the early 1970s, which were never fully aligned with the other protest movements of the era, retained, and even intensified, a moderate and business-friendly character.64 In his book on the increasing conservatism of environmental politics after the early 1970s, Mark Dowie describes the steady

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corporatization of the environmental movement, particularly in the 1980s, when mainstream organizations like the Sierra Club and the Nature Conservancy turned toward corporate philanthropy and bureaucratic development, and tended to work with the Reagan administration rather than criticizing its anti-environmental policies.65 Perhaps the most spectacular example of this steady shift toward conservatism can be traced in the changing face of Earth Day from its first manifestation in 1970 to the increasing corporate spectacles of the past decades, conducted as a consciousness-raising exercise for consumers.66 The celebrity rock concerts, corporate sponsorships and tweets, and consumer goods with Earth Day logos have brought to full fruition those early radical critiques of the first Earth Day. In the wake of the protest era, various powerful forms of environmental activism have emerged across the country to address a wide array of issues from pollution, community health and racial environmental justice, toxic chemicals in consumer products, and pesticides in foods to wilderness and species protection and nuclear energy.67 These are often actions developed by and sustained within local communities, though they also draw on various forms of coalitional politics. The myriad changes these grassroots activist networks have brought about—from nuclear power plant closures to increased industrial regulations, recycling initiatives to hazardous-waste remediation programs—are an enduring testament to the power of collective environmental action, a legacy of this earlier protest era. At the same time, in their general focus on pragmatic, single-issue politics with measurable results, we can glimpse the way the more totalizing revolutionary visions of this prior era subtly gave way to more incremental action. In the meantime, the era of financialization and neoliberal governance that was firmly in place by the late 1970s and 1980s has unleashed more intensive forms of ­extraction and development with increasingly catastrophic earth-systemic effects.68 The emphasis on particular issues, interest groups, and environmental policy initiatives that has defined the horizon of environmental politics after the 1970s offers few models for responding meaningfully to these systemic socio­ecological conditions. Looking back, we can see how Snyder and di Prima anticipate, in however dystopian or outsized fashion, these new dimensions of generalized crisis. Some of di Prima’s portraits of the terrifying effects of various biotechnologies have found realization in the recent emergence of superweeds and antibiotic-­

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resistant superbugs. Snyder’s portrayals of extractivist frontiers (mining, logging, petroleum) in America and their devastated landscapes find new forms today, whether in the Alberta tar sands or the Congo’s coltan mines. And both poets’ fears about dying species and diminished habitats continue to materialize. At the same time, their shared impatience with the half-measures and incremental changes of liberal politics prefigures the reform-based turn of American environmentalism and its failure to address the root economic causes of ecological crisis or to envision genuine alternatives. Their insistence on a vision of the “PEOPLE’S PLANET” as the necessary response to a catastrophic but entirely imaginable future stands in forceful opposition to these politics. To read these works today, in turn, is to confront the extent to which this mode of pastoral thinking becomes increasingly “impossible”—to return to Watten’s phrase—in subsequent years. Indeed, reading the critical reception history of these works provides a dispiriting reminder of how utterly bewildering this radical register has been for so many of its readers. In this sense, rather than only regarding these texts as unreconstructed expressions of the excesses of their era, we might understand them as revelatory of how particular generic motives become difficult to envision in a late-twentieth- and early-twentyfirst-century American cultural context. Certain pastoral themes—­simplicity, innocence, being-in-common, the nonmodern, ­primitivism—become increasingly unavailable within American poetics of this period, particularly in relation to the possibility of a radical break from capitalist realism.69 Unmoored from a socioecological imaginary attuned to the “turnings” of revolution, pastoral appears in American poetry after the early 1970s as postmodern pastoral or necropastoral, invoked with ironic inversion or death-bound decadence, or in lyric gestures and moments of wishful thinking. This self-referential, critical pastoral mode highlights the simulacral and citational character of the natural or marks the excessive fantasy of pastoral as an “endtimes” logic marked by the death-drive it aims to suppress.70 In all these ways, American pastorals after 1970 bear little trace of the dialectic of visionary simplicity and revolutionary critique that motivates Snyder’s and di Prima’s writing.71 Appearing to a contemporary audience as anachronistic emblems of a now-faded radical era, these works might instead be understood to signify an untimely sensibility that no longer registers as such. At the same time, we might regard the unavailability of this pastoral motif as itself symptomatic of a turn away from imaginative engagement with the possibility of an ecological politics conducted in

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the idiom of revolutionary antagonism and collective struggle after the 1970s. By the turn of the new century, poets and environmental theorists had focused attention on new general formulations of ecological crisis, exploring the master-concept of the end of nature and reckoning with the scaled-up consequences of the anthropogenic alteration of earth systems.

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Mourning and Melancholia at the End of Nature

Among familiar critical pronouncements of the past twenty-five years, the insistence that the “end of nature” has arrived must surely rank high.1 Such pronouncements do not merely historicize the term “nature” by insisting on its meanings as always bound up in particular social formations, or critique its essentialist determination, or pluralize the term to allow for multiple contexts and definitions, but instead declare its wholesale extinction as salient material entity and conceptual apparatus.2 Stripped of independent empirical ­parameters or causal agency, nature becomes the absent absent cause, disappearing into human history—in fact, already “gone for good.” These declarations of nature’s nonexistence depart from the “domination of nature” thesis, which details an ongoing process by which nature comes under the aegis of human control, its cycles, phenomena, and events increasingly yoked to modernization’s rationalizing and subjugating forces. Under this older twentieth-century theory of mastery, nature remains a powerful external force that stands as the essential antagonist of industrial modernization. By contrast, the “end of nature” thesis asserts that under late capitalism, this process has drawn to a definitive close. Nature has been entirely vanquished, its cultural meanings depleted, its independent status destroyed. The provenance of this phrase and its logic of total rupture can be traced to Bill McKibben’s 1989 text The End of Nature. In this book, often described not only as the first mainstream text on climate change but as a groundbreaking theory of planetary ecological crisis, McKibben lays out the above claim in detail: the structural antagonism between nature and human culture central to modernization is finished, and a new epoch is upon us, in which human activities determine (but do not necessarily control) all dimensions of ecological life. The signature demarcation of this new universal condition is global warming, which stands in McKibben’s book as both the material fact 91

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of nature’s end and a figure for the new ways of thinking that this end necessitates. He writes: This new rupture with nature is different in scope and kind from salmon tins in an English stream. We have changed the atmosphere and thus we are changing the weather. By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning—without it there is nothing but us.3

McKibben insists on terminal terminology here because the changes he depicts are no longer preventable; we are now in the realm of necessity, not speculation. McKibben’s book thus diverges from the tradition of environmental jeremiad associated with the domination of nature thesis, with its double rhetoric of apocalyptic warning and tactics of prevention and preservation.4 If the temporal logic of the jeremiad is incipient, future-oriented—“we are running out of time”—The End of Nature locates its argument in a determined present where nature’s time has already run out. The paradigmatic image of this difference, for McKibben, is the weather itself. Unlike the salmon tin in the English stream—a marker of environmental “damage”—the weather stands as the master-sign of anthropogenic effects that are daily and systemic, visible and nonlocalizable. By changing the weather, McKibben claims, we have already produced a permanent break, not only in the material operations of atmospheric and geochemical systems but in the cultural “meaning” of nature. McKibben’s book was published in the same summer as Francis Fukuyama’s essay “The End of History?”—both appearing in that year of great world-­ historical significance, 1989. While these two texts might be seen as diametrically opposed in tone and conclusion, they share a basic narrative: that of the total triumph of fully industrialized, global capitalism and its consequences for political systems (Fukuyama) and ecological conditions and relations (McKibben). The end of history, emblematized by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the decline of communist governments, means the vanquishing of the great Other of actually existing Marxism and the “unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.”5 The end of nature, signified by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and melting polar caps, means the vanishing of any environmental realm left untouched by anthropogenic activity and of an “idea of nature” as “the separate and wild province, the world apart from man to which he adapted.”6 In both cases, the great forces of otherness, material and conceptual, that serve as limit

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or counterbalance to capitalist modernity are fully extinguished. Of course, the “end of nature” and the “end of history” might be said to require each other: the triumph of globalized capitalism rests, at least in part, on the disappearance of nature into resource, commodity, “managed risk.” As Dipesh Chakrabarty writes in “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” “most of our freedoms so far have been energy-intensive,” produced not only through exploitation of human labor but through resource extraction and development on a global scale.7 What is left in the wake of these ends is, as McKibben puts it, “nothing but us.” This is the essential phrase, measuring the negative or subtractive thinking (“nothing but”) of these theories and their heightened determination of the “us” that remains. McKibben’s phrase points not only to a new imperative to think without the master-concept of nature but to the difficulty of that task, the imaginative barriers it involves. What would it mean to imagine “nothing but us”? It is a feat of thinking that begins with the recognition of irretrievable loss, unrecuperable absence, and that dwells strangely, almost vacantly, in that logic of the break, the “nothing but.” It is, in other words, elegiac thinking, bound up in the work of learning how, as Wallace Stevens might have it, “not to think.”8 McKibben’s argument, of course, offers the direct inverse of Stevens’s thought experiment in “The Snow Man,” as it “beholds” in the wind precisely the signs of human presence that Stevens attempts not to impose. As McKibben says, “Yes, the wind still blows, but no longer from some other sphere, some inhuman place.” It is this “no longer,” and this “still,” that I am interested in here, signs of a sustained attempt to reckon with the imaginative loss of a central cultural idea in a postnatural era. Such elegiac thinking pervades McKibben’s text—and despite Fukuyama’s largely jaunty and triumphal tone, his closing note too is melancholic, describing the “sad time” of the posthistorical age, drained of struggle and imagination. “I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a nostalgia for a time when history existed,” Fukuyama declares wistfully.9 Fukuyama’s Hegelian-Kojèvean claims now tend to be read in symptomatic terms as illustrative of a certain end-of-Cold-War ideology. Indeed, his nostalgia for Cold War struggle highlights a crisis in historiography produced by the end of this defining historical antagonism. In turn, Fukuyama’s later qualifications of his argument in the post-9/11 era—both in relation to Islamic fundamentalism and Bush’s war on terror and to the complex potentialities of biotechnology—reveal the limits of his triumphalist narrative of Western liberal democracy’s universal appeal. At the same time, they provide a powerful

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demonstration of an ongoing recalibration of historical thinking in the post– Cold War era. Tracing these modifications in detail would provide a primer‑inminiature of historiographical change after 1989, as the idea of “history” is redefined, rather than resolved, in light of the dominance of global neoliberal capitalism and its attendant geopolitical dynamics. By contrast, the ideas described in McKibben’s work have remained central to theories of the environment over the past two decades. It is not merely that his arguments about the material impact of anthropocentric action on the planet have been borne out by all available standards of empirical measurement (the rate of Arctic ice cap decline, the concentration of carbon dioxide and methane in the earth’s atmosphere, population growth, species extinction, rising temperatures and sea levels, air and soil pollution, and the projected availability of fossil fuels, water, and other natural resources, to name a few), but that the idea of the end of nature as an independent domain and salient cultural concept continues to be reasserted anew. Nature’s end has retained a rhetorical constancy as a means of describing the cumulative, and still accumulating, environmental impact of capitalist development in the present. This idea has gained additional heft by the rise into scientific prominence of the Anthropocene as a human-determined geological epoch. Understanding the Anthropocene, as Chakrabarty points out, necessitates not only new periodizing approaches—“it is only very recently,” he writes, “that the distinction between human and natural histories—much of which had been preserved even in environmental histories that saw the two entities in interaction—has begun to collapse”—but a reckoning with what the unmaking of these longstanding definitions means for the possibility of historical thought itself.10 Chakrabarty’s preliminary historicizing of the Anthropocene dwells, like Mc­ Kibben’s end-of-nature thesis, in the logic of the break: “a fundamental assumption of Western (and now universal) political thought has come undone in this crisis.” This “coming undone” in turn involves an almost unfathomable “scaling-up” of collective human agency—thinking of collective human agency as “a force of nature in the geological sense.” Chakrabarty suggests that our narratives of history and humanist methodologies must be altered in order to comprehend this “geological agency”—an agency whose contours have only recently become apparent in light of the preeminence of globalized capitalism. In the past few years, ecocriticism has begun to explore this paradigm shift and its radical implications. New reading practices and theories, from new ma-

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terialist explorations of nonhuman agency to posthumanist approaches, have emerged as responses to the new framework of the Anthropocene. Yet in all these approaches, the more radical idea of nature’s end tends to be sidelined in favor of speculative inquiry into the ontologies and materialities of postnatural entanglement.11 I argue, instead, that these dynamics entail an emphasis on what is not, on the negative workings of creative imagination in light of a concept’s withering away. This perspective connects, in fundamental ways, to the natural-historical framework of Benjamin and Adorno, with their emphasis on loss, transience, and decay. To think the end of nature in the era of the Great Acceleration is both to see an intensification of Benjamin’s and Adorno’s elegiac mode of historiography in new and unexpected forms of loss and ruin and also to uncover new forms of anthropogenic endurance, whether charted in stratigraphic signals or in the changing climate, as effects of productive relations. This chapter will examine one key poem that explores the complex and contradictory dynamics of this mode of thinking: Juliana Spahr’s “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache” (2005). Among the preeminent younger poets of the post-Language generation, Spahr is often compared to Whitman in her thematics of collective intimacy as well as her formal devices of catalog, repetition, and apostrophe. Interested in “this connection of everyone with lungs” (the title of her acclaimed 2005 collection), Spahr’s poetry explores the inextricable interrelation of interior and exterior, individual physiology and global network. At the same time, her work highlights the logics of neoliberal privatization that divert attention from collective commitments toward individual interests and private encounters. “Gentle Now” takes up many of these questions, but reframes them in terms of ecological relations, marking a decisive turn from a poetics of immanent intimacy to an elegiac stance. Spahr’s poem, I contend, offers a powerful illustration of a strain of eco-elegy arising during this period, from W. S. Merwin’s writings on extinction, Nathaniel Tarn’s Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers, and Jorie Graham’s various meditations on the psychic costs of ecological devastation to recent elegiac works such as Ed Roberson’s To See the Earth before the End of the World and Aja Couchois Duncan’s Restless Continent. My aim here, then, is to explore how the disappearing idea of nature is reflected and reflected on in the workings of “Gentle Now.” I am interested not only in the ways this ecopoetics text enacts the elegiac or negative thinking that I have been characterizing as an essential feature of the end-of-nature para-

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digm, but how it conceives the consequences of such thinking for its own literary ­operations. This chapter considers the ways “Gentle Now” defines nature as an imaginative resource—an elemental site of figuration and the essential sign of otherness against which the work defines its existence—whose meanings are available only as afterimage, negative vision.12 Nature’s absence as symbolic site of renewal is the “heartache” governing the poem’s melancholic structure—an absence at the center of elegy itself. What is no longer available to the elegy as a form, Spahr makes clear, is precisely its conventional dependence on nature as the figurative resource that regulates the mourning process. This constitutive absence is also the central theme of the poem, which narrates subject-formation as a form of elegiac self-recognition that takes ecological destruction as its tragic precondition. While this narrative of subject-formation has important affiliations with Romantic characterizations of the modern subject predicated on environmental estrangement, Spahr departs from these accounts in her insistence on “scaled-up” human culpability. In “Gentle Now,” self-recognition emerges from the awareness of one’s material determination as a destructive agent, and the poem details the unresolvable, melancholic grief that accompanies this realization. By poem’s end, the speaker takes responsibility for not taking responsibility, grieves for not grieving—and it is through these acknowledgments that its subject comes to be. What renders the narrative structure of “Gentle Now” particularly complicated, however, is the fact that its elegiac framework does not become apparent until the final sections. Instead, the first three sections document, in bildungsroman form, the developmental education of the narrator into an ecosystem and the enchantment she discovers there. It is only midway through “Gentle Now” that this narrative of ecological intimacy is revealed to be a reconstitution of an origin story from a retrospective position of guilty grief. In this way, the poem reveals not how humans actually encounter the natural world but how we represent this encounter once it is no longer available to us. Impossible Elegy Juliana Spahr’s poem never mentions the word “nature,” and, as Marianne Moore would say, “omissions are not accidents.” The entire work might be read as an exploration of how nature becomes an impossible and unthinkable term, an inquiry into what it means to think “nothing but us.” “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache” elegizes a set of relations, a way of thinking, and an imaginative resource, all organized by the modern idea of “nature,” which are no longer available to the speaker.13 Its operations involve a retrospective attempt to

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comprehend how this loss occurred and to grapple with its significance. Across its five sections, the poem’s workings mimic those of conventional elegy: retrospective idealizations, disenchanted reckonings, an attempt to discern culpability, and a final logic of substitution. And yet “Gentle Now” also points, again and again, to the inadequacy and incompletion of its work of mourning. This inadequacy begins in the fact that the poem never defines precisely what its loss consists of, as if the loss is at once too intimate and too totalized to name. This mourning without an object reflects an absence whose scale and consequences remain unfathomable and yet which remains central to (in fact, constitutive of) this speaker’s sense of self. Thus elegy’s traditional questions of responsibility, guilt, and self-realization are ratcheted up to a powerful degree, as the poem considers what it would mean to possess more dramatic forms of ecological agency—a guilty recognition that cannot lead to reparative action. Yet the opening sections of “Gentle Now” attempt to forestall this recognition, lingering in the wishful space of idealized union that signifies the poem’s animating desire. These sections depict relations that will only later be definitively revealed as idealizations that speak not to what is, or even what once was, but to what cannot be. This impossible desire is captured in the poem’s opening section, which narrates a universal origin-story of entrance into the world: We come into the world. We come into the world and there it is. The sun is there. The brown of the river leading to the blue and the brown of the ocean is there. ... And we begin to breathe. We come into the world and there it is. We come into the world without and we breathe it in. We come into the world and begin to move between the brown and the blue and the green of it.14

“We come into the world and there it is,” the speaker says, offering a vision of a world that preexists us and is complete without us. The human is simply one among many creatures moving and breathing amid a swirl of colors, patterns, and life forms. World is absorbed in body; body is absorbed in world. In its evocation of this fantastical state before division, individuation, and loss, Spahr’s swirling “blue and brown and green” calls to mind Peter Sacks’s descrip-

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tion of the “evocation of life in the presence of the mother” built into elegiac recollection.15 The Freudian sense of now-lost “attachment to a unity that seems to precede a sense of individuation and of separate mortality” is here symbolized by gentle color-in-motion and lulling anaphoric repetition of the originary moment of entrance.16 Tellingly, however, the opening sequence of “Gentle Now” is not simply a vision of undifferentiated union—it is a fantasy of non-agency. The originary fantasy of these lines is that humans “come into the world” without any negative impact, acting in perfect synchonicity with its ongoing movements. “Gentle Now” will reveal the reverse to be the case, detailing the determining force of humans on ecosystems and the narrator’s constitutive dissociation from her environment. Thus we might read this section as the poem’s imaginary, which speaks powerfully to a collective wish not to harm, to “breathe in” and “move between” other species in affirmative, nonviolent coexistence. It betrays a wish to remain merged, immersed. In turn, this opening section signals the distinctive determination of the poem’s elegiac speaker, whose particular form of idealization is not only an undifferentiated unity with the natural world but a nonculpability that is never in fact possible. The poem’s beginning in a timeless present tense where “heartache” seems not yet to exist—a present tense suffused with the poignant aura of an impossible wish—lays out the negative work of the poem, which will dispel this aura by confronting what this initial section intentionally represses. The following section of “Gentle Now” opens again with a moment of origin, this time in a past- rather than present-tense perspective. Here the speaker, while still plural, is localized, describing a particular childhood by a particular stream. This second start highlights distinctively human concepts of temporal progression and development, telling a story of childhood intimacy with the natural world that gestures, in hindsight, to the impossibility of the first section’s assertions of immersive, ongoing belonging. Spahr draws on Romantic conceptions of nature as the first site of human education: it is in and with “the stream” that our perceptual and relational capacities first emerge, these sections claim. The second section opens: We came into the world at the edge of a stream. The stream had no name but it began from a spring and flowed down a hill into the Scioto that then flowed into the Ohio that then flowed into the Mississippi that then flowed into the Gulf of Mexico. The stream was a part of us and we were part of the stream and we were thus part of the rivers and thus part of the gulfs and the oceans.

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And we began to learn the stream. We looked under stones for the caddisfly larvae and its adhesive. We counted the creek chub and we counted the slenderhead darter. We learned to recognize the large, upright, dense, candle-like clusters of yellowish flowers at the branch ends of the horsechestnut and we appreciated the feathery gracefulness of the drooping, but upturning, branchlets of the larch. We mimicked the catlike meow, the soft quirrt or kwut, and the louder, grating ratchet calls of the gray catbird. We put our heads together. We put our heads together with all these things, with the caddisfly larva, with the creek chub and the slenderhead darter, with the horsechestnut and the larch, with the gray catbird. We put our heads together on a narrow pillow, on a stone, on a narrow stone pillow, and we talked to each other all day long because we loved. We loved the stream. And we were of the stream.17

These lines of “Gentle Now” portray an education into the natural life of “the stream” as definitive of human childhood. Humans learn to know and to love not through the primary maternal bond or by enculturation into human social life but by “putting our heads together” with all the beings of the stream. Nature emerges here as the Wordsworthian “teacher,” the primal, always available source of fundamental goodness, innocence, and receptivity. As Schiller describes this Romantic idea in “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” (1795), his essay that names the elegiac as the governing aesthetic and philosophical mode of modernity, “Nature, considered in this wise, is for us but the voluntary presence, the subsistence of things on their own, their existence in accordance with their own immutable laws”—forms of simple, essential presence exemplified here in the sounds, textures, and motions of the stream’s inhabitants.18 In turn, human self-development emerges through recognition and active mimicry of these qualities: we learn to be by being like nature. This immersive education is the foundation for all forms of love and the basis of all complex knowledge we develop. “This is where we learned love and where we learned depth and where we learned layers and where we learned connections between layers,” Spahr writes.19

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These lines insist on the innocence, receptivity, and openheartedness of the speaker, extending the premise of non-agency set out in the opening section. Employing the pastoral idealization central to elegy, they depict an idyllic site of natural simplicity and contentment where the now-lost beloved and the speaker once dwelled. The pastoral fiction of an innocent relation to “the stream” is crystallized in Spahr’s image of “putting our heads together on a narrow pillow” and “talk[ing] all day long.” Spahr’s scenes of pastoral enchantment invoke enduring human fantasies of ecological coexistence grounded in mutual care and protection. Yet if these scenes lay the groundwork for the banishments to come, they also speak poignantly to the psychic need for these fantasies. As Clifton Spargo suggests in his work on the modern elegy, “it is the often delusive, always wishful quality of elegy as a recuperative hypothesis of ­reciprocity—whether the elegist writes that reciprocity anew or, as is often the case with nostalgically inflected revisionings, for the first time—that constitutes much of its emotional, surprisingly ethical persuasiveness.”20 For Spargo, and for Spahr, the cultural power of elegy derives in part from this very assertion of wishful and impossible reciprocity, expressed in the language of ineffable “heartache.” Such assertions set the stage for and yet importantly counterbalance the guilty conscience that will emerge, in the final two sections of “Gentle Now,” as abiding psychic condition. These assertions of strange heartache also illuminate the difference Spahr’s contemporary elegy presents from the elegiac Romanticism of Wordsworth and Schiller. Subject-formation in Schiller’s elegiac theory is governed by a properly “sentimental” view of nature as lost experience but ever-present ideal. Of nature’s laws and forms Schiller writes, “In them, then, we see eternally that which escapes us, but for which we are challenged to strive, and which, even if we never attain to it, we may still hope to approach in endless progress.”21 If we must leave nature behind—if we must “change,” as Schiller asserts—it is with the assurance that nature “remains the same,” that it remains available as an ideal against which we can measure our difference and toward which we can “strive.” “Gentle Now” explores the very absence of this availability, the absence of nature’s knowable presence and constant renewal, as the motivating force of its elegiac work. And in turn, the differentiated subject who emerges by way of this loss must diverge from the Romantic version, which defines modern ­subject-formation vis-à-vis nature as both loss and gain, deficiency and triumph.22 For Schiller, our constitutive estrangement from the natural world highlights the “fullness” and “advantage” of human capacities of imagination,

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reflection, and reason. Spahr’s subject, by contrast, cannot find “abundant recompence” such as Wordsworth’s narrator in “Tintern Abbey” finally discovers.23 “Gentle Now” insists that this establishment of gain by loss is precisely what its speaker lacks. Who, then, is the subject emerging on the other side of this loss? The poem’s final sections begin to grapple directly with this question. “It was not all long lines of connection and utopia,” the opening line of section 4 asserts.24 Standing as a powerful turning point in the negative thinking of “Gentle Now,” this abrupt, disenchanting gesture recasts the prior portrayals as naïve and suggests a newly demystifying procedure will follow. We now see “the stream” as composed not only of various plant and animal species but of destructive toxins and waste: It was a brackish stream and it went through the field beside our house. But we let into our hearts the brackish parts of it also. Some of it knowingly. We let in soda cans and we let in cigarette butts and we let in pink tampon applicators and we let in six pack of beer connectors and we let in various other pieces of plastic that would travel through the stream. And some of it unknowingly. We let the run off from agriculture, surface mines, forestry, home wastewater treatment systems, construction sites, urban yards, and roadways into our hearts. We let chloride, magnesium, sulfate, manganese, iron, nitrite/ nitrate, aluminum, suspended solids, zinc, phosphorus, fertilizers, animal wastes, oil, grease, dioxins, heavy metals and lead go through our skin and into our tissues.25

This section reveals a portrait of ecology far uglier and messier in its intimacy: an interconnectedness where industrial by-products coexist with insects, tampon applicators with blue herons. The stream emerges as historically located rather than in an idyllic pastoral space. Reckoning with the falsity of its prior idealization of the “stream” as a purified space of peaceful coexistence, the poem now reframes this coexistence as always already mixed, impure, “brackish.” “­Nature,” in the Romantic sense that Raymond Williams describes as “an inherent original power” distinct from humanity, disappears entirely.26 In its place

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we glimpse various forms of biospheric and hydrospheric change particularly associated with the Great Acceleration. Yet Spahr’s evocation of a toxic ecological intimacy, where anything and every­thing is “let in,” must be read as a part of the poem’s elegiac operations, not as a straightforwardly realistic description of the stream’s real ecology. The denatured, polluted stream serves here as the site of elegiac recognition through which the speaker comes to understand her own agential powers. We might see this section as undertaking an initial attempt to comprehend the contours of the scaled-up agency Chakrabarty evokes. This agency precedes and exceeds the speaker’s direct knowledge; it is a condition, Spahr claims, that the speaker was “born” into: We were born at the beginning of these things, at the time of chemicals combining, at the time of stream run off. These things were a part of us and would become more a part of us but we did not know it yet.27

The narrator is born into external forces that are a part of her from the beginning and that shape her inexorably. These lines shed new light on the insufficient origin-stories of prior sections: all along, the speaker has been a participant in the stream’s destruction, even before she is aware of it. Culpability precedes intentionality; causality precedes consciousness. These facts are not mitigated by the love, identification, or aesthetic appreciation that the prior sections detail. The confessions of what was done “knowingly” and “unknowingly” thus signal the emergence of a differentiated subject, driven by the need to measure the extent of her blameworthiness.28 And this section’s revised portrait of visible and invisible pollutants coursing through stream and skin stands as the sign—like McKibben’s figure of the weather—of the radical agential force of humans on their environments, a force beyond any ability to control. As in McKibben’s theory, this agential force, whose effects have already materialized, necessitates a scaled-up conception of human agency—not posthumanism but humanism, with a vengeance. The fifth and last section of “Gentle Now” finally names the speaking subject as a differentiated “I,” a self-naming coextensive with an elegiac admission of guilt and grief. This closing section repeats a phrase again and again: “I did not know.” This is the defining phrase of Spahr’s elegy. With these words, Spahr uncovers an all-consuming, totalizing, but also importantly negative grief—a grief for what one did not know that is also a grief for what one is not. If the ele-

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giac process of subject-formation involves a retrospective reckoning with one’s former ignorance, the subject of Spahr’s elegy now knows herself to be wholly non-innocent. She implicates herself as active agent, involved in the everyday work of destroying the “stream”: I turned to each other and I began to work for the chemical factory and I began to work for the paper mill and I began to work for the atomic waste disposal plant and I began to work at keeping men in jail.29

At the same time, the speaker’s feelings of love are now rechanneled into new sources of amorous enchantment, as she is “ensnared, bewildered” by the lures of the private sphere: romantic eros and consumer goods. The narrator turns toward a human beloved, abandoning the stream entirely: “I did not know that I would turn from the stream to each other. / I did not know I would turn to each other.”30 In the eroticized body of her human beloved, the narrator rediscovers the beauty and variety formerly described in terms of the stream: the “softness of each other’s breast, the folds of each other’s elbows, the brightness of each other’s eyes.”31 Similarly fascinating to the speaker is the realm of commodities, whose names draw on (in the most inverted terms possible) the name and qualities of “the stream”: “Lifestream Total Cholesterol Test Packets,” “Snuggle Emerald Stream Fabric Softener Dryer Sheets,” “Streamzap PC Remote Control.”32 In this subject’s turn to her lover and her consumer goods, we might discern both an embodiment and an inversion of what Peter Sacks calls the “substitutive turn” of elegy, in which the mourner replaces the beloved with symbolic images of the natural world.33 The work of mourning in elegies from Milton to Hardy is grounded in an environmental framework that evolves from initial disruption toward ultimate reintegration into natural cycles. In such traditional elegies, the natural world provides figures through which the lost beloved is mourned, figures that ritualize the process of grieving by offering symbolic correlatives for loss and consolation. But in “Gentle Now,” in place of the natural image that provides symbolic substitution for the loss of the human beloved, the human image and the commodity provide substitutes for the lost stream. “I just turned to each other and the body parts of the other suddenly / glowed with the beauty and detail that I had found in the stream.”34 This substitution appears, at first, to provide a standard elegiac arc in which a relationship’s loss is consoled by the “reattachment of affection to some substitute for that object.”35 The speaker has discovered, by poem’s end, new sources

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of enchantment and love through which she becomes fully integrated into the normative social sphere. Yet “Gentle Now” proposes that mourning is actually prevented by this substitution of the human beloved. Unconscious displacement has entailed forgetting rather than remembering, integration without closure. And it is this failure to mourn, this exchange without any commemorative work of mourning, which motivates the poem’s elegiac retrospections. “Gentle Now” ends, then, with the speaker’s recognition that her mourning has yet to begin. The speaker “didn’t even say goodbye,” an acknowledgment that gains force through its repetition four times across the final section: I didn’t even say goodbye elephant ear, mountain madtorn, butterfly, harelip sucker, white catspaw, rabbitsfoot, monkeyface, speckled chub, wartyback, ebonyshell, pirate perch, ohio pigtoe, clubshell.36

The anaphoric catalogs and rhetorical negations of this final section of “Gentle Now” point again and again, in a form of repetition-compulsion, to what was not done and to a loss that defies resolution. This realization emerges into full clarity in the final lines, where the speaker, bedded down with her human beloved, confesses: And I did not sing. I did not sing otototoi; dark, all merged together, oi. I did not sing groaning words. I did not sing otototoi; dark, all merged together, oi. I did not sing groaning words. I did not sing o wo, wo, wo! I did not sing I see, I see. I did not sing wo, wo!37

With these closing words, Spahr draws on the ululations of grief found in Greek tragedy, such as the lament of Xerxes at the end of Aeschylus’s The Persians and Cassandra’s cry in Agamemnon, to mark a powerful contrast with the speaker’s unexpressed grief. As Robert Pogue Harrison has noted in his writings on the cultural work of mourning, these tragic cries of “primitive grief,” while appearing “pathological” to modern ears, are in fact part of a “rule-bound performance.”38 Such “elaborate ritualization and formalization of mourning behaviors” functions “to master grief by submitting its potentially destructive impulse to objective symbolization.”39 To sing one’s grief is to turn away from the annihilating

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pain of loss toward the social and to locate the self vis-à-vis the lost other. By contrast, Spahr preserves the primitive power of these laments, while refusing their ritualized enactment. “I did not sing,” the speaker insists, acknowledging her failure to undertake the work of mourning that would master this grief. Uttered by the poem yet left unsung by the narrator, these primitive cries signify a pain that can never be worked through and thus does not end. This is the “heartache” that points back to the poem’s first section, with its impossible fantasy of originary connection without harm, to begin the negative work of mourning anew. Melancholia Forever This endlessly circular rather than progressive logic must be understood as melancholic. In Freud’s theory, to successfully mourn is to relinquish the other and to fully adopt the norms of self-possession and social integration; melancholia refuses this consolatory and commemorative work of mourning by tarrying in guilty retrospection. Where in mourning “respect for reality gains the day,” in melancholia the loss “absorbs” its sufferer entirely.40 At the same time, the loss itself is constitutively different in melancholia: it is “loss of a more ideal kind,” a loss that resists complete comprehension. “Melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, where there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious,” Freud writes.41 This is the idealized and unconscious form of loss in “Gentle Now,” where what is lost remains undefined. Is it the beings in the stream—the “elephant ear,” the “ohio pigtoe”? Is it the stream itself? Do the stream and its creatures actually die, or does the speaker merely turn away from them, so that they are lost to her consciousness? That none of these possibilities seem quite right is precisely the point. The stream stands for a loss that is “withdrawn from consciousness”—a loss of an idea and its associated forms of experience, whose absence is at once too all-pervasive and too close to name. For Freud, melancholia’s pathology lies in the fact that these self-reproaches are out of proportion to the original loss. The melancholic punishes himself out of narcissistic and sadistic impulses that become improperly outsized in relation to the original loss. “Gentle Now” presents a different form of melancholia, where the speaker’s self-accusations are both entirely appropriate and never adequate. It is the loss itself that is outsized. “Gentle Now” lingers in selfpunishing grief because there is no way to cope with or atone for the sense of human culpability that emerges here, no way even to grasp its material or

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psychological consequences. Spahr suggests the only viable work is to return, again and again, to an imagined realm of origins, in order to fathom this very imperceptibility, this withdrawn loss. This recursive structure of wish-denial, recognition of guilt, and ceaseless heartache offers a powerful account of how the determined conditions of the end of nature might be experienced—the feeling, that is, of thinking “nothing but us.” In this way, Spahr’s poem might be productively compared to, and finally distinguished from, Tim Morton’s recent writings on ecology and elegy, which similarly highlight the importance of melancholy as an alternative to elegy. Morton’s ecotheory directs ecological art toward the present rather than the past, abjuring the elegiac poetics of loss and sorrow, and grieving for the uncanny, melancholic “reality” of ecological coexistence. Morton asserts that ecological poetry must “transcend the elegiac mode” in favor of portrayals of a disenchanted, uncanny ecological mesh.42 Elegy, Morton asserts, is too “apocalyptic,” too totalizing. Instead, melancholic representations of ecology, by focusing attention on ongoingness rather than ends, finally reveal, in fact, that “nothing is determined yet.”43 From an anti-apocalyptic, melancholy perspective, new forms of “enchantment” can arise.44 By contrast, Spahr’s melancholy takes, as we have seen, a decidedly more pessimistic form. Indeed, if Morton is interested in understanding “ecology without nature,” Spahr dwells on the painful consequences of being “without nature,” refusing to move “beyond” this loss. She is interested, moreover, in the questions of obligation, culpability, and guilt that Morton’s melancholy finally skirts. The poem insists, then, on determinative anthropogenic force rather than indulging a claim that “nothing is determined yet.” “Gentle Now” maintains the importance of elegiac retrospection and its language of necessity and loss. Its melancholia, in turn, emerges from the recognition that these conventions are finally inadequate to their current task, and that any attempt to take responsibility for this determination is never sufficient. In this way, melancholy in “Gentle Now” definitively refuses enchantment, refusing to turn away from the work of impossible mourning. The poem’s melancholic thinking extends, finally, to its inhabitation of elegy itself. The question that underlies the poem’s mobilization of elegiac procedures is whether elegy is even possible in light of the poem’s subject matter. Can there be elegy, the poem asks, without the “absolute other” of nature? Part of the reason the poem’s elegiac operations of idealization, substitution, and reintegration necessarily fail is that the imaginative resource so central to these

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conventionalized workings has become the object of mourning itself. With this shift, Spahr suggests, elegy turns in on itself, unable to fulfill its preordained tasks. Thus “Gentle Now” mourns, as well, for an idealized elegy that is now impossible, an elegy whose forms of closure are no longer inhabitable. If the drive toward closure characteristic of the genre operates, in part, to secure the poem’s inheritance within a larger tradition and to reaffirm this tradition’s significance, “Gentle Now” stages this literary transmission as unavoidably incomplete. Its relation to elegy uncannily echoes its depiction of the determination of the subject. The poem must speak the language of elegy, but this elegiac language must in turn speak its own constitutive failures. Unable to escape elegy’s perimeters, but also unable to inhabit its logics and processes fully, the poem lingers in a properly melancholic relation to the genre.45 Like the everincomplete mourning process “Gentle Now” describes, elegy never ends, and its work is never done. The Misanthropocene In her more recent work, however, Spahr has offered various revisions of this portrayal of endless elegy and negative subjectivity. Her 2015 book, That Winter the Wolf Came, explores the ways systemic capitalist crisis, whether manifesting in oil spill or state-sponsored violence, can forge new forms of communal intimacy that in turn demand a new poetics. Spahr has also recently collaborated with Joshua Clover on a poem that draws particular attention to the limits of the eco-elegiac perspective and the textual politics of mourning that “Gentle Now” dramatizes with such complexity. Called “#Misanthropocene: 24 Theses” (2014), this piece probes the inadequacies of melancholic response, articulating shared political commitments and envisioning the possibility of radical activity in response to generalized economic and ecological crisis. Like “Gentle Now,” “#Misanthropocene: 24 Theses” unfolds through a catalog structure of repetition, expansion, reversal, and restatement. But where “Gentle Now” develops a retrospective narrative chronicling a coming-toawareness of ecological crisis and personal culpability, “#Misanthropocene: 24 Theses” portrays a perspective all too aware of these dynamics, a knowingness that becomes increasingly unbearable over the course of the poem. We might say that this poem picks up where “Gentle Now” left off, stuck in moods of “nostalgia” and “west melancholy.”46 “#Misanthropocene” diagnoses, ­tarries with, and finally rejects these modalities, exploring what other psychic

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c­ omportments—refusal, “Sapphic rage,” calls to radical confrontation—might replace the ceaseless recursivities of “west melancholy.”47 In this sense, the poem might be said to counter, or at least significantly revise, the elegiac disposition of “Gentle Now,” replacing its dynamics of eros with a new emphasis on aggression. At the same time, it replaces the universalizing register of the Anthropocene with the divisions and antagonisms evoked by the term “Misanthropocene.” If the framework of the Anthropocene conceptualizes planetary ecological crisis as caused by species-wide activity, this poem’s terminology concentrates on the productive relations of capitalism as the causal agent of both ecological devastation and structural inequality: “the wage and the heat and the end of the world,” as they put it.48 The title page of the chapbook announces that the poem was first read at a short-lived “anti-eviction” reading series in the San Francisco Bay Area. This immediate context is significant, not only because specific audience members are addressed in the poem—beginning with the first line, “First of all. Fuck all y’all”—but because the piece is, among other things, a response to the gentrification of this area and its conspicuous dynamics of inequality amidst the tech boom of the past several years.49 These dynamics offer a local illustration of the more general characteristics of the Misanthropocene as the poem describes it, wherein certain conditions of living are “possible for some and not for ­others.”50 This phrase might provide a one-sentence summary of the Misanthropocene according to these writers, as characterized by conditions of vast and intensifying inequality that produce great wealth for a few and immiseration for many and that generate socioecological contradictions at a variety of scales. Such conditions structure daily life in almost every imaginable way: It keeps busy. It makes deserts bloom. It makes luxury towers just like it makes architects. It makes blockbusters and it makes producers to make them. It makes universities roads conceptual poets it makes oil-drum pyramids it makes ships of a size called Malaccamax. It makes endless small plastic representations of the African jungle or plains animals and fish ingest them and vomit them up or don’t and there they sit in their stomachs and then they die.51

With this catalog of “making,” Spahr and Clover acknowledge the immense generativity of capitalist production, its shaping of biospheric systems as well as everyday human sociocultural life. Yet they highlight the way such productivity wreaks catastrophe, whether in the displacements accompanying urban gentrifi-

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cation or in the looming extinction of the New Mexico meadow jumping mouse and the Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog due to habitat loss.52 Such descriptions mirror a point Donna Haraway makes her recent book Staying with the Trouble: “Right now, the earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge.”53 The poem’s title points to the importance of epochal naming that has come to define environmental discourse with the rise of the concept of the Anthropocene. It is an era of fierce debates among scientists and humanists regarding the characterization, dating, and historical framework of the Anthropocene. For many environmental humanities scholars, these debates highlight the urgency to characterize the complex historical forces generating biospheric crisis with the definitive stamp of a name. Haraway, for example, writes: “I think a big new name, actually more than one name, is warranted.” While the Anthropocene is an important term for Haraway, one that measures the “destruction of places and times of refuge,” it cannot stand on its own but needs to be supplemented with other terms, such as Plantationocene, Capitalocene, and ­ Chthulucene, that measure the complexity of global socioecological systems in crisis. “It matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems,” she asserts.54 For Spahr and Clover, the Misanthropocene “figures” the dimensions of economic informalization and ecological extinction that accompany capitalism’s productive dynamics. At the same time, the term illuminates how hatred—of planetary life, of earth systems, of liberated and equal conditions of existence—would seem to be the governing mood of these forces. As they write, “the hatred is real the hatred is an objective force like debt is an objective force.”55 And the Misanthropocene also foregrounds the affective responses—dread, despair, loathing, but most of all anger—that accompany one’s own inevitable participation in this system. While the catalogs of “Gentle Now” attempt to preserve the memory of various lost or endangered species, “#Misanthropocene” names in order to symbolically banish phenomena and processes associated with the ­Misanthropocene—an effort framed by various “fuck this” and “fuck that” statements. Some of these statements are witty send-ups of contemporary bourgeois habits and academic hand-wringing: “Fuck cupcakes and/or Park Slope fuck the martini fuck your Noguchi Coffee table fuck the crisis in the humanities Jonathan Safran Foer’s Chipotle-cup literature.”56 But more often, as in “Gentle Now,” there is an elegiac dimension to the naming, as Spahr and Clover mention a series of animals on their way to extinction. Through this cataloging, the poem’s litany becomes

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a gesture of self-implication, addressed both to the writers and their audience. Spahr and Clover write: And fuck this list with its mixture of environmental destruction and popular culture smugness and fuck every one of you that laughed at that rock banjo joke and fuck us all for writing it. And fuck not just the Googlebus but the Googledoc this poem rode in on and fuck us for sitting here reading you a rock banjo joke while the New Mexico meadow jumping mouse went extinct.57

In “Gentle Now,” the speaker’s sense of culpability emerges from a reckoning with her prior ignorance. Here, knowledge—cultural, political, e­ cological— does not necessarily lead to action or change. The poem points to its own ironizing gestures and the knowing laughter it provokes as in no way exempt from the dynamics it inveighs against. Critiquing the “smugness” of critique and the self-indulgence of sorrowful feeling, the poem characterizes these recursive dynamics and their affects as “west melancholy.” This, too, becomes an intolerable position: “Fuck your west melancholy,” they write. An increasing tone of anger and frustration builds over the course of the sections in response to this sense of the excruciating psychic impasses that accompany everyday life in the Misanthropocene. Near the end of the poem, the speaker takes a walk “to see if they can get away”; they end up contemplating the yelm pocket gopher, an endangered species: you just sit there staring out into space getting cold thinking about the short strong legs and small ears and eyes of the yelm pocket gopher how their lips close behind their front incisors how they use their front incisors for burrowing how as they burrow their soft loose pelts enable them to move backwards through their tunnels as easily as they move forwards how they have two oh so soft fur-lined cheek pouches extending from the lower portion of their face to their shoulders.58

The poem goes on to list all the ways humans can legally exterminate pocket gophers. Contemplating these things with “despair and Sapphic rage,” the speaker feels a kind of culminating disgust at the self-indulgence of their sorrowful feeling: “Fuck that moment most of all.”59 Rather than dwelling in the recursivities of “west melancholy” or the subjective closure of mourning, the poem imagines more oppositional and aggressive dynamics in its closing lines, in dissent from the dominant forces of capitalist realism. Playing on the closing lines of Eliot’s The Waste Land and “The Hol-

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low Men,” Spahr and Clover invoke an insurrectionary refusal: “This is how the misanthropocene ends. We go to war against it. My friends go to war against it. They run howling with joy and terror against it. I go with them.”60 Revising the last lines of “Gentle Now,” with their mournful chant and the symbolic reintegration into the social order, the poem instead claims that only “go[ing] to war” will provide an “end” to the insufferable conditions it has evoked: “Sappho Sappho Sappho not by chanting,” the poem asserts.61 These closing images shift to a didactic register reminiscent of di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters, but without the pastoral promise that serves as dialectical counterpoint to her revolutionary images. Instead, these closing catalogs portray a life-or-death fight, with bodies yielding themselves wholly to the struggle. “This is how to set an oil well on fire. Rub and lean against it. Spread your front legs and swing your neck at it. The power of a blow depends on the weight of your skull and the arc of your swing. Then sparks.”62 This is a fantastical image of revolutionary sacrifice, one’s “skull” and “neck” given over to the greater conflagration. But it is also an image of creaturely solidarity, one that returns to the earlier description of the yew pocket gopher and its bodily capacities. In another passage, Spahr and Clover detail how to “capsize a container ship”: “swim along behind it in a train then grip with the teeth and continue to swim as you insert your claspers into the cloaca and pump.”63 Such lines offer a speculative vision of mammalian abilities retooled for the embodied acts of insurrection. “Friends,” then, takes on an imaginative multispecies inflection in “#Misanthropocene,” a turn toward what Haraway calls “kin” as “something other/more than entities tied by ancestry and genealogy.”64 Haraway goes on: “Kin is an assembling sort of word.” The poem closes by envisioning a cross-species kinship, forged in resistance, that refuses rather than neglects to “say goodbye” to other creaturely beings—even if such an act necessitates one’s own “end.”

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5

“A Rescue That Comes Too Late”

Figure and Disfiguration in Contemporary Ecopoetics [Artworks] exist as a force in the long history of our efforts to represent the world to ourselves and, in the process, to humanize ourselves. Susan Stewart, The Poet’s Freedom1

This chapter explores how a literary mode, ecopoetics, which emerges in North American poetry in the early 2000s, engages and redirects poetic figures of ­address—apostrophe, prosopopoeia—in order to reimagine human obligations to the nonhuman world. Written in a period of sharply rising global emissions and failed climate accords, poems associated with this emerging mode stage imaginative encounters with nonhuman entities and remaindered materials. Dramatizing the attempt to recognize and draw into relation, these works consider the incommensurabilities and violent estrangements of that effort. The modes of address they employ appear as urgent problems rather than assurances, questions without forthcoming answers. They also occur as extravagant or ironized calls, admissions of guilt and shame, or refusals or inabilities to address another. In all these ways, this chapter contends, they illuminate a new chapter in the history of aesthetic processes of humanization that Susan ­Stewart describes in this chapter’s epigraph: what I call “anthropogenic poetics.” It is the very redundancy of the term “anthropogenic,” its routing back to poiesis along uncanny lines, that I highlight as a key dimension of contemporary ecopoetics. To think through this poetic tendency, we might turn to Bruno Latour’s description in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence of an uncanny aesthetic relay: Like technologies, let us say that works of art are always anthropomorphic, or, better, anthropogenic. Which does not mean that the artisan or artist has given a particular work the “form” of a human, but rather that the work has gained the form of a human in a rebound effect. . . . It is the anthropos stunned by the offerings made by his own hands who is made to draw back in surprise in the face of what is morphing him.2

In this passage, Latour argues that the artwork’s process of subjectification teaches the perceiver how to imagine himself in new and surprising ways. Stressing the 113

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ways that imagination and subjectification “emanate from the work” rather than preceding it, Latour claims that we are “produced by what we produce.”3 In turn, this insight points to a sense that poems or works of fiction are “unsettling” in their revelation of previously unfathomed dimensions of the human subject. Perhaps most evocative in Latour’s portrayal of this dynamic encounter is how his vocabulary stresses the face-to-face, underscoring its “anthropomorphic, or, better, anthropogenic” qualities.4 Latour’s insistence on the anthropogenic extends the human outward via the literary trope of prosopopoeia.5 Apostrophe and prosopopoeia are the essential poetic tropes for examining the problems and possibilities of speaking for, to, with, and in the absence of others. Barbara Johnson, writing of de Man’s work on these rhetorical figures, points out that they can extend who or what “counts as a person,” ascribing significance and relationality to the nonhuman world.6 These figurations of intimacy at the same time denote distance, unreachability. The speaker calls across an unbridgeable chasm, attempting to fulfill a desire to bring the other into full, flesh-and-blood presence, to allow the other to speak back. This desire to face the other involves various forms of reckoning, including a confrontation with absence itself. These are the tropes that name and draw forth, measuring dependencies, mutual obligations, imbalance, inadequacy, unnatural loss, and deprivation. In its employment of these tropes along these Latourian lines, ecopoetics can be said to be concerned with the redescription of a particular subject via the circuit of poiesis. Many poems categorizable within this mode are concerned with the ways the disconcertingly humanizing process that Stewart and Latour describe as central to the operations of the artwork must be fathomed anew in light of the global dimensions of crisis organized under the frame of the Great Acceleration. These texts eschew not only a standpoint of empirical distance—a framework common to the canonical American tradition of nature-writing— but also a perspective of dehierarchized intimacy of speaking subject with her surroundings, instead highlighting new signs and consequences of human activity in the environment that produce unfamiliar subject-effects. These poems portray forms of estranged recognition that emerge as a kind of defacement or disfiguration.7 To describe this poetry as “anthropogenic” gestures not only to this tropological inheritance and its Latourian redirection but also to the conceptual framework of the Anthropocene, the development of which is coterminous with

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the poems surveyed in this chapter. The ecopoetics texts of this chapter do not directly stage these dynamics in their representations. But they can be understood as attuned specifically to a first-world subject and his outsized privileges and obligations in an era of profound socioecological transformation. These works convey the profoundly unequal effects that accompany where and how one lives, and they meditate on the difficult question of individual responsibility for environmental crisis.8 My use of the term “anthropogenic,” then, reflects not a poetics of species universalism per se. Instead it points to the ways these poems draw on tropes of humanness, subjectification, and de-facing as they examine particular, situated subject positions in a historical moment. It calls attention to the ways these works play out the relay-effect Latour describes—the disconcerting sense of being “morphed” by one’s own creation—as a feature of a particular kind of subject-formation taking shape in an emergent poetic mode. The term “anthropogenic” draws attention, then, to the ways such tropes associated with lyric find particular inflection under these specific historical pressures.9 I argue that these works of ecopoetics offer representations of new dimensions of internal estrangement and symbolic de-facing that accompany an emerging consciousness of this differential responsibility. Without offering direct critiques of the Anthropocene concept, they illuminate the “negative discrepant history”—in a pointed modification of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s key phrase “negative universal history,” about the universalism of climate change and the new modes of historical thinking it requires—characteristic of the socioecological contradictions of the early-twenty-first century.10 At the same time, they offer insight into larger affective states—longing, denial, dread, hopelessness, grief—that emerge in response to ecological degradation in a period where the urgency of climate change has been met with political gridlock and businessas-usual capitalism. In its reflections on the strange mix of exigency and inertia that characterizes American environmental politics in the early 2000s, ecopoetics can be defined as a mode attuned to the new contradictions, subjective and objective, arising in the post-Kyoto period. Post-Kyoto / Post-Language Poetics Until the Paris Agreement of 2015, the Kyoto Protocol was the only significant piece of international legislation to attempt to combat global climate change.11 Signed by the Clinton administration in 1997, the agreement was never ratified by the U.S. Senate. The Kyoto Protocol emerged out of a decade of interna-

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tional efforts to combat global climate change, most prominently on display at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Reflecting an emerging consensus in the 1990s about the anthropogenic causes of climate change and the need to set binding emissions limits, Kyoto represented a serious attempt by industrialized nations to accept their outsized burden of carbon emissions. It was, to be sure, nowhere near an ideal accord. The protocol’s failure to deal in any meaningful way with the dynamics of global production and trade and its reliance on capand-trade emissions markets made it a deeply flawed policy, one that even with U.S. participation would not have provided a meaningful long-term solution.12 The noninclusion of China and India, the two nation-states with the highest emissions rates besides the United States, also underscored Kyoto’s imperfect capacities as environmental policy. Yet for all its flaws, the Kyoto Protocol signified an important international effort to confront the problem of global warming, an effort that remains an elusive reality two decades later. The U.S. withdrawal from the pact has had important consequences, both material and symbolic. Following on the heels of his refusal to regulate coal-burning power plants’ carbon emissions—a reversal of his campaign pledge—President George W. Bush declared that his administration opposed the protocol. In a letter to Senate members on March 13, Bush wrote that the protocol would harm the U.S. economy and also cited the “incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate change.”13 Bush would go on, throughout his presidency, to sow doubt about the causes of climate change, while undoing decades of environmental legislation and easing regulations for various heavily polluting industries.14 The Kyoto rejection, occurring near the very beginning of Bush’s first term, ushered in a bleak era in American environmental politics, one whose dynamics persisted in the Obama years and have intensified dramatically since Trump’s election. This era is characterized by protracted battles over the facticity and causes of climate change and the rise of greenwashing consumer trends, occurring amidst sharp increases in greenhouse gas concentrations and disturbing changes in weather patterns and ocean and land temperature.15 Citing the unprecedented spike in emissions in the first two decades of the new millennium, geographer Andreas Malm writes, “We are warranted in speaking of an ongoing, 21st century emissions explosion.”16 The entrance of China into the WTO in 2001 was a catalytic dimension of this sharp spike in emissions. China’s bountiful supply of cheap labor, its rapid

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expansion of energy and transport infrastructure, and its warm reception to foreign capital development made it the world’s central site for factories for global export in the 2000s.17 According to Zhu Liu of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, China’s CO2 emissions, largely generated from its coal-fired factories and other fossil fuel combustion, tripled during the first decade of the twenty-first century.18 China became the world’s highest emitting nation by 2007; and by 2012 its emissions rates were equal to those of the United States and the European Union combined.19 But China’s emissions rates must be understood as intimately linked with those of the United States, whose companies were the biggest source of foreign development in China in this period and which serves as the highest world importer of “embodied emissions.”20 In turn, scientific studies emerging by the mid-2000s revealed that the carbon footprint of the average twenty-first-century U.S. citizen is more than double the global per-capita average, including that of China’s average citizen.21 Thus the global dynamics of climate change—the key environmental issue in this period—must be understood within the more sharply defined context of the production and consumption patterns of these two countries.22 Yet throughout the 2000s, the intensifying urgency of climate change was met with an absence of meaningful environmental activism or political action in the United States. Instead, solutions to climate change were often couched in consumerist language that urged individuals to save the planet by buying green.23 As Naomi Klein describes in This Changes Everything, the top-down, corporationfriendly Big Green environmental groups such as the Nature Conservancy often led these initiatives, while also arguing for market-based carbon cap-and-trade programs. Environmental activism in this period was largely oriented around these mainstream organizations, while public polls showed an increasing lack of interest in environmental issues in the years 2000–2010 and an increasing skepticism about the causes and likely threat of global warming.24 This period also saw intense crackdowns on radical environmental groups such as the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front in the late 1990s and 2000s—what journalist Will Potter calls the “Green Scare.”25 As Potter documents in Green Is the New Red, these crackdowns cast a powerful pall over emerging grassroots activism in the United States in the 2000s and further marginalized the discourse of radical environmentalism, with its anticorporate and anticapitalist critiques. While the environmental disasters of Hurricane Katrina (2005) and the BP oil spill (2010) prompted outrage, protest, and wide-ranging cultural responses,

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they did not directly spur a more widespread activist movement. In all these ways, the climate of ecological politics in this era was characterized by what Klein calls “virtually uninterrupted backsliding.”26 The literary mode of ecopoetics thus appeared in a moment where planetary crisis had become the new normal and where no countering force for change, whether governmental or communal, seemed in sight. The emergence of the term “ecopoetics,” in 2001, occurred with the inaugural publication of the journal ecopoetics in Buffalo, New York—the same year as the rejection of the Kyoto Protocol by the Bush administration in March and the entrance of China into the WTO in December (events of world-historical significance overshadowed, of course, by the spectacular events of 9/11). The influential journal (2001–2009), with its eclectic array of authors and blend of essays, poetry, and visual art / concrete poems, served as a remarkable staging ground for poets to investigate ecological themes and forms in new ways.27 In the first issue, editor Jonathan Skinner characterizes ecopoetics as an extension of avant-garde poetry with sustained attention to environmental concerns, thus offering a rejoinder to experimental poetry’s “overall silence” on such matters while introducing into environmentalist discourse the complex workings of an “investigative poetics.”28 Some pieces featured in the journal employ the refractory surfaces, linguistic flows, and theoretical inflections of Language poetry with new attention to the nonhuman realm. Alongside these forms of linguistic “decentering,” as Skinner puts it in his editor’s note to ecopoetics no. 3, various pieces turn with increasing insistence to investigations of subjects in relation often associated with lyric poetry.29 Read together, the poems in ecopoetics embody a shift from Language poetry’s immanent critique of the commodification of language in an age of mass media to new concerns about anthropogenic, and particularly American, relations to the nonhuman world. Ecopoetics emerges, then, from a millennial literary context where culturally dominant avant-garde practices and tenets, associated particularly with Language poetry, were being challenged and transformed by younger practitioners in search of distinct modes of expression.30 The insistence on an agential reader mobilized by a resistant text so central to Language poetry loses salience in this context of ecological turmoil, where questions of agency take on more disturbing proportions. Across a series of ecopoetic works of the past decade, we can trace various dimensions of voice and voicing that chronicle material dependencies and determinations. Calling forth presences and lamenting ab-

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sences, these works present their poetic impulse as grounded in the recursive dynamics of lyric. In her 2009 book Practical Water, a meditation on water as vital, sacred, polluted, privatized, and “wrecked,” Brenda Hillman opens with a title poem that lays out, in imaginative terms, the apathy and impasses of millennial American environmental politics: Had lobbied the Congress but it was dead Had written to the Committee on Understanding Had written to the middle     middle of the middle     class but it was drinking31

Throughout Practical Water, Hillman considers the failures of American democratic politics and the diminished agency of individual citizens, often in poems set in Senate and House hearings or the individual offices of legislators. At the same time, her book abounds with images of intensifying destruction: phosphates in the ocean, global warming, trash in riverbeds, endangered species, cancer.32 Hillman points to the ways that models of democratic citizenship and individual subjectivity fail to produce a viable way of living a “moral life” in the face of environmental crisis: “It is nearly impossible to think about this,” she writes. In turn, this impossibility invokes a larger estrangement effect, where the “we” of the poem comes to a more disorienting sense of being connected to water and animal life in ways that cannot be spoken—“Your species can’t say it”—or fully understood.33 Across Practical Water, the speaker confronts the sense of being indebted to and animated by other entities whose depletion and damage she is also complicit in. In light of this moral quandary, Hillman repeats a question throughout her book: “How shall we live?”34 This question finds a contrast, in Hillman’s book and in other ecopoetics texts, with more immediate investigation of how millennial American citizens do live—how their everyday activities bear on earth-systems alterations, in direct and indirect ways. The speakers of these poems attempt to adjudicate their responsibility, confessing to their patterns of consumption, wasteful habits, or detachment from their surroundings and attempting to tally their impossible debt. Another poet often associated with ecopoetics, Hoa Nguyen, writes intimate, imagistic poems that draw together colloquial details about raising children, housework, and daily activities with invocations of biospheric upheav-

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als such as drought, oil spills, and signs of climate change. Through understated juxtapositions, her poems weigh the extent and form of her culpability—how her “white refrigerator / on all day,” her “driv[ing] too much—everywhere” connects to “a hole / in the ozone layer” and toxic chemicals in the water.35 Resignation mixes with anger in these poems: “we are guilty/ bringing in sacks of food  bought on credit,” the speaker claims.36 The “guilt” that such poems meditate on refers, in part, to an unequal material privilege claimed at the expense of others, human and nonhuman. The speaker buys garlic shipped from China, “doused with fungicide,” and muses on the Chinese laborers and global supply chain that she participates in. “It’s vague to me,” she says. While Anthropocene theorists such as Chakrabarty assert that climate change is an equal-opportunity planetary affliction—“there are no lifeboats here for the rich and privileged,” he claims37—poets such as Nguyen point toward the fundamental disparities that make some populations vulnerable while others remain comfortable. “We’ve won the climate change bonanza / Mild summer  lush lush gardens,” one of Nguyen’s poems asserts wryly.38 Homing in on the ways such contradictions are intimately experienced by a first-person speaker in a particular social milieu, these works offer a different examination of complicity in wider forces than the cultural and linguistic critiques of prior avant-gardes. At the same time, these poems engage lyric techniques of address and voicing to explore the ways recognition of one’s participation in ecological damage creates a de-facing effect. Another poem from Practical Water, “Hydrology of California: An Ecopoetical Alphabet,” offers a powerful example of the defacing subjective recognition that emerges through an imaginative engagement with a stream that responds to the speaker’s existential query. Hillman writes: My love & i so busily drove  to a poetry reading past  fuzzy artichokes  near Gilroy  Prophet thistles w/streams that drop  near Santa Cruz How shall we live & they indicated  as if John Muir replied  so low a human voice cannot hear you want your tomatoes don’t you You want Almond Delite & golf You want  to drink Sprite  w/runnels  of gravy  at Denny’s\faces in laminated menus  windsurfing widows This is the price  the stream went refugees in aqueducts like water from a book39

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Here, Hillman quotes a John Muir line from “Mountain Thoughts” about the language of a stream, which sings of the history and beauty of its location in “so low a voice a human cannot hear.”40 In Hillman’s version, the stream admonishes the speaker, reminding her that her seemingly benign everyday choices add up to an as-yet-uncountable cost for the nonhuman world. “This is the price,” the stream intones before it turns fugitive, channeled under­ ground. Hillman’s rewriting of Muir turns his portrayal of the thriving communicative capacities of the stream into an address that interrogates and warns. No matter how the speaker feels about the natural world, Hillman’s stream indicates, she is materially culpable in its degradation. In the reflection of the Denny’s menu and in the accusatory voice of the disappearing stream, the speaker discerns a startling image of herself, as her idealist question— “how shall we live?”—is answered by a materialist gesture to the “price” of her everyday habits and desires. These texts in turn reveal an intensified problem of anthropocentrism, pointing, via the mediating work of poetic language, to the ways in which this anthropogenic agency extends into and reshapes nonhuman forms. In Evelyn Reilly’s Styrofoam, the strange “immortality of plastic” that Styrofoam represents as it lives on in its nonbiodegraded state, taking on new and unintended shapes (such as “ankle bracelets of the birds”), becomes a figure for the extended time frame of ecological debt incurred by anthropogenic activity and a “deathless” sign of culpability.41 Styrofoam, the albatross of today, remakes the speaker as an Ancient Mariner, wracked by guilt both real and mysterious and compelled to repeat a dreadful tale—a tale almost too transcendental and monstrous to be believed. Michael Leong’s poem on fracking, titled “the transmission of (other subsurface agents may be considered necessary for underground control,” similarly employs prosopopoeia to interrogate and warn. In the poem, a “mouth from the open-air moratorium is now speaking”: “It says the volatile now must be accessed via the unfiltered future. / It says fire is spreading through the infrastructure of water.”42 The spectral, evanescent voices that speak back in these poems de-face their human speaker rather than absolving his guilt or motivating any transformative action. As Leong puts it, “a newly constructed awareness is now imagining us.”43 In all these cases, these ecopoetics texts are motivated by the apostrophic impulse, “troping,” as Jonathan Culler claims, “not on the meaning of a word but on the circuit or situation of communication itself.”44 In Juliana Spahr’s

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“Unnamed Dragonfly Species,” another poem from her collection well then there now, the desire to call into presence emerges via the mediated address of incessant Googling. The plural speaker attempts to understand their relationship to melting glaciers around the world, whose slow decline “happened far away from them,” by obsessively watching videos of glaciers breaking off and falling into the sea.45 The distance between the “they” and the glaciers seems to be shrinking, and their sublime otherness and “zombie”-like unknowability diminishes as they are unmade by anthropogenic activity.46 The glaciers’ gradual transformation—streaming online—draws them ever nearer, and it is this indirect yet determining causality that the speaker attempts to comprehend: The systems of relation between living things of all sorts seemed to have become in recent centuries so hierarchically human that things not human were dying at an unprecedented rate. . . . Whip-poor-will They knew this but didn’t know what else to do. Wood Turtle And so they just went on living while talking loudly. Worm Snake Living and watching on a screen things far away from them melting. Yellow-Breasted Chat47

If the speaker “faces” the melting glacier only through screens, the poem invokes nearer presences that are also disappearing: each line is punctuated by a bolded name of an endangered species in New York State. Called forth in their endangerment, these names acknowledge nearer losses and more immediate culpability. The interruptive invocation of these names evokes a sense of on­going obligation to these nearby inhabitants without otherwise integrating them into the poem. The names remain, unrescued, with no alleviating response. At the same time, the plural speaker is no less responsible for the distant diminishment of the glacier whose melting appears only as spectacle, as these final lines suggest. To go on in the face of such ecological destruction—local and distant—is both unthinkable and unavoidable. Thus the poem’s subject “just went on living while talking loudly,” de-faced by dread, shame, and disavowal. Tatters and Plastic If the ecopoetics texts discussed above highlight dimensions of nonhuman address as they morph their speakers in defamiliarizing ways, two recent works, Brenda Coultas’s The Tatters (2014) and Allison Cobb’s Plastic: An Autobiog-

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raphy (2015), inquire into another key dimension of anthropogenic poetics: the problem of aesthetic making itself.48 They do so via encounters with remaindered materials whose startling forms throw the very work of poiesis into uncertainty. Querying their own purpose, these works raise the question of how their own aesthetic acts differ from larger imperatives to extract and r­ epurpose to generate further value. Both of these poets, well-known figures in experimental-poetry circles, have previously published works of documentary poetry that investigate scenes of cultural detritus: Coultas’s A Handmade Museum (2003) surveys the dumpster culture around the Bowery in New York City, and Cobb’s Green-Wood (2010) tours a Brooklyn cemetery and studies its sedimented, often violent pasts. The newer works that I consider here, however, focus less on excavating layered histories of a particular place or offering a bricoleur-like approach to discarded goods. Instead, these books emphasize the lingering but displaced presence of the materials under examination: “Of no use to any living thing, it lasts,” Cobb writes of her object of investigation, plastic litter.49 Their approach highlights the unredeemability of these materials and the fruitless or failed efforts of the poet’s encounter with them—what Coultas calls a “rescue that comes too late.”50 Coultas’s The Tatters is composed of several long poems, mostly set in and around landfills, that portray the speaker’s various encounters with what she finds there. Across these several poems, Coultas returns again and again to scenes wherein the speaker of the poems undertakes an encounter with cast-off materials that she comes upon, from banana skins and cigarette butts to old dollheads, PCs, and cancelled postcards. If the poems offer extended catalogs of these various objects, Coultas’s tone, elegiac rather than curatorial, discloses the work’s stakes beyond a documentary approach to the dump. Framed at all turns by Coultas’s insistent evocations of lateness, lastness, scarcity, and toxic accumulation, the encounters Coultas portrays might be understood as symbolic dramatizations of the larger implications of aesthetic making in light of these larger socioecological conditions. Coultas begins by evoking images of the longue durée of geological time and its slow shaping of matter: “A fossil is a fiction written by time,” she writes.51 In her descriptions of geological making—“Perfection is time’s work or what makes bluestone blue or what makes / a quartz crystal”—Coultas echoes Rachel Carson’s descriptions of the making of planetary life over deep time.52 Carson argues that in ecological terms, “time is the essential ingre-

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dient, but in the modern world there is no time.”53 Like Silent Spring, The ­Tatters points again and again to the way time seems to be running out: “The water is an hourglass, and I write fast as I can before it runs dry,” Coultas writes in her long poem “A Gaze.”54 Her book contrasts the gradual processes of natural making over time with images of the accelerating destruction of ecological phenomena in the present: glaciers receding, species extinction, water running dry. One poem juxtaposes the geological time that generates fossils over epochs with a direct quote from the website of oilfield company Halliburton about the speed and “efficiency” of its methods of shale extraction: “Shale is incredibly complex. When it comes to finding the shale sweet spot and unlocking it in a cost-efficient manner, no one has more experience than Halliburton.”55 In the corporatized reframe of a classic image of feminized nature that an “experienced” operator can master, the complexity of this natural material—formed over the long vistas of planetary history—is immediately reduced to extractable resource with a “sweet spot” that can be swiftly “unlocked.”56 The Tatters abounds with such images of ceaseless, all-encompassing processes of extraction, production, consumption, and waste. Coultas returns repeatedly to such invocations, from “oil pumps in a corn field,” “the blanket of Monsanto crops,” and the “yellow eye of methane” to the “landfill,” the “fertilizer run[ning] off into our family well,” melting glaciers, and the growing threat of violent resource wars.57 These insistent evocations of lateness articulate a fear, increasingly voiced by climate scientists and ecologists by the end of the first decade of the 2000s, that after years of global inaction on climate change, resource depletion, and other forms of biospheric degradation, it may in fact be too late to make the necessary changes to stabilize any of these planetary conditions.58 Resource frontiers and waste frontiers increasingly overlap, such that the regenerative processes of nature have become increasingly unavailable. As in Practical Water, Coultas calls attention to the contamination and increasing scarcity of water in “A Gaze,” repeating the phrase “The last glass of water”: “The last glass of water sits before you, will you drink it slowly savoring / the taste of the glacier?”59 Here we see the face-to-face dimensions of anthropogenic poetics: the speaker is reflected in and dependent on the finite resource whose scarcity she has unconsciously contributed to. Coultas places her investigations of her own aesthetic activity in complex relation with these two kinds of planetary poiesis: the natural workings of

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deep time and the accelerating pace of development with its lingering ecological after­effects. The first poem in the volume, “My Tree,” portrays an imagined scene of the speaker making a tree: an unearthly creation with “no needles on the floor / no forest smell.”60 This tree is composed of repurposed materials from destroyed trees: “flaming pages for leaves” from burning books and “glittery pine-boughs glue- / gunned on.”61 Coultas’s fictive tree, a simulacrum of a real tree but made of its real materials, symbolically collapses the slow time of biological generation into an act of destructive creation that mimics, on a smaller scale, the larger socioecological dynamics of production and their persistent aftereffects. With the real trees in “My Tree” long since transformed into resources, what is left are these remainders, from the “wooden poles bathed in chemicals” on the mountain ridge to the art object the speaker makes. Coultas underscores this point in the closing lines of the poem, claiming that her tree, a strange and monstrous design, will persist long after she has abandoned it. The poem ends with these lines: My gift is glittery and eternal even in synthetic shreds dumped on a landlocked city sidewalk it finds its way to the sea62

The artist’s desire for aesthetic immortality is reimagined here with disturbing ecological consequences, as her made object becomes yet another unintegratable castoff circulating in landfills and oceans. Coultas suggests that the poem, as well, participates in this economy of waste, made of ravaged forests. Thinking of her own creations in these terms forces the speaker to confront herself anew: “Renamed myself writing this book, renamed myself after building / this tree.”63 In the title poem, Coultas offers an extended description of an ur-story of making, a childhood memory of dismantling and then reconstructing a hornet’s nest. She writes: “I took apart a hornet’s nest after my brother had sprayed it with heavy / chemicals. In pursuit of the natural world, I cut a swath. A giant / lifting boards and logs, uncovering sleeping animals, or embryonic mice.”64 In these descriptions, Coultas stresses the swiftness of this destruction of the nest and its complex habitat. The poem portrays this destructive impulse as a quest for knowledge—“I had to know”—that comes at the expense of others: “Paper at my feet / Bodies / Stillborns / What little I know of other lives.”65 In response,

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the speaker frantically attempts to reconstruct the nest, as if in the futile hope of turning back time and unmaking these actions: I gather the pulp and piece it together with agitated human agency, I reconstruct hundreds of bedrooms for the young and old grey sleepers, I slipcover the common spaces of the hive. I coat the outside with paper-mache making this a very dark piñata.66

As with the tree in the prior poem, the remade object here is a simulacrum, a work of artifice. The object serves as a compensatory and symbolic reconstruction after real destruction, a reconstruction that takes on the proportions of an aesthetic act. This undertaking is suffused not with the creative glee and spontaneity of the bricoleur but with the guilt of the destroyer who tries fruitlessly to undo her damage via new creation. In turn, the new nest and tree manifest this sense of guilty creation in their uncanny forms. Can aesthetic attention and care reverse time and restore natural patterns? This is a central textual desire that suffuses The Tatters. Coultas writes: “I’m building a time / machine made from parts in the past, for when I might return through / an old memory stored in wood.”67 Coultas’s portrayals make vivid a longing to return remaindered phenomena to their prior condition before they were depleted, endangered, destroyed. In another poem, Coultas writes longingly of “returning items to the sea and beads to the wire. Pushing horseshoe / crabs back into time in hopes of reanimation.”68 These “rescue[s] that come too late” attempt to trace a backward itinerary that would restore these materials to their earlier form, before time ran out: a symbolic resolution that Coultas explicitly portrays as a failed endeavor.69 The poem bears witness to this revelation of how the “agitated human agency” involved in creative processes can no longer be imagined as autonomous from the socioecological whole. In this way, The Tatters evokes a sense of living with the “tatters” of capitalism’s creative destruction and living on in an extended situation that seems beyond repair. Like The Tatters, Allison Cobb’s Plastic: An Autobiography imaginatively traces a given material, in this case plastic, backward toward its origin in order to understand the speaker’s relation to the destructive legacy it embodies: “I want to know how my blood connects to this,” Cobb writes.70 Cobb follows two displaced pieces of plastic across this Autobiography, the first a shard found in a dead albatross and the second a fender part that Cobb’s speaker brings inside her house. The book traces the history of these parts, touching on con-

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stitutive components of the Great Acceleration—atomic and mass industrial ­production—as they brought these plastic shapes into being. The plastic bits in the albatross are from materials from an American-made bomb from World War II, which Cobb ties to the larger history of atomic testing; the Honda car part is one of a seemingly infinite number of plastic goods produced on a factory floor. These material histories live on not only in the ongoing productive relations that structure everyday life under late capitalism, but in the interiorization of these materials in flesh and organisms. Cobb writes, “I learned about plastic chemicals in people’s bodies (a U.S. government study found nine out of ten people carry constituents of plastic inside them), and that babies come out of the birth canal with 232 industrial chemicals already circulating through their bloodstreams.”71 By charting their route through the productive process, Cobb insists on a materialist connection between bodies, human and nonhuman, and the systems in which they are embedded. Cobb names her work an “autobiography,” underscoring the anthropogenic poetic orientation that discerns in plastic a history of the subject. To trace this itinerary of plastic in its atomic roots, its production and circulation in commodity form, and its lingering afterlife is to write a narrative of subject-­formation, Cobb claims. Near the end of the book, the speaker turns to the plastic car part with hopes it will “tell me something about how to live,” but concludes: But it remains just me. Me alone in a room with a car part, its dirty carapace curled around me. Me and my desire, which is boundless, sidereal. It glues its glittering look onto every surface.72

Plastic acts as an alienating reflection for the self and her boundless desire—an intimacy that profoundly estranges. The “inside sense,” the “felt thought” of life-writing becomes a de-facing act, as the speaker’s “glittering look” extends outward indefinitely, an impersonal sign of the productive violence that connects dead birds, atom bombs, Hondas, breast milk, beer, and ice cores. Yet if the plastic fails to “speak,” it nonetheless “persists,” even when the speaker “wants it to go.”73 Like the symbolic tatters of Coultas’s book, Cobb’s plastic embodies an open-ended temporality, its long duration entering into a human life span but also outpacing it. Created to “protect” and “guard,” “shield” and “soothe” the human body, it is able both to dwell within and outlast it.74 In its “failure / to disappear,” the plastic “will outlast bones, the sand, this / writing.

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How long? No one knows. Five hundred / years? A thousand?”75 In this sense, to undertake an autobiography of plastic is to write a life with no conclusion, a story of living beyond that is also a story of the destructive creation characteristic of this historical time. Coultas’s and Cobb’s works return us to this chapter’s epigraph by Susan Stewart, taken from her book on the freedom of aesthetic making. For Stewart, key to this freedom is its “reversibility,” as she describes by way of a parable of a boy on a beach creating and then destroying a sand castle. “Without the freedom of reversibility enacted in unmaking, or at least always present as the potential for unmaking,” she argues, “we cannot give value to our making.”76 The boy’s destruction of the sand castle exemplifies this potential: “Unwilling or unable to be the curator of his creation, the boy swiftly returned it to its elements.”77 This sense of aesthetic freedom to invent and destroy bears troubling significance for these poets in their calamitous present, as they reckon with the unforeseen consequences and uncanny creations of capitalism’s planetary alterations. The destructive innovations characteristic of global capitalism in the era of the Great Acceleration must be understood in terms of irreversibility, as the accumulation process generates ever-intensifying metabolic rifts. The ecopoetic works that this chapter studies are profoundly attentive to this irreversible ecological destruction that defines their present. Their poems attempt to face these realities through symbolic processes of naming and addressing, and yet they also evoke a form of the disavowing desire that Stewart’s boy, “unwilling or unable to be the curator of his creation,” enacts. This sense of an unbearable responsibility that somehow must be borne is central to the psychic operations of these poems, to their forms of de-facement, and to the destructive potential they evoke. Their speakers are invented anew by this unintentional yet inescapable agency, made to carry its impossible weight. The “poet’s freedom,” then, is replaced here by p ­ oetry’s obligation, turning back with new vigilance to the longstanding figures, the “old words,” to speak of, in Hillman’s phrase, “a silence you can’t understand.”78

Coda

On Storms to Come “But a storm is blowing from Paradise.” Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”1

Here in the Central Valley of California, five years of epic drought have wreaked havoc on the region’s soil, water, and infrastructure. In the early months of 2017, the drought has been replaced by one of the wettest, most damaging rain seasons in the state’s history. A series of intense storms has caused major flooding and threatened levee systems and dams, forcing evacuations in some areas. Across the state, reservoirs are at capacity and water infrastructure is strained, made worse by soil erosion and ground sinkage created by drought conditions. Such patterns of extreme weather in California and beyond will become increasingly common in the coming century, according to climate scientists.2 California’s drought and flooding is only one of a series of alarming environmental stories of the past year. The year 2016 was the hottest on historical record and the third record-breaking year in a row. By October, the planet’s CO2 levels had passed the 400 ppm mark, marking the near impossibility of maintaining a 2 degrees Celsius ceiling on warming. In Antarctica and Greenland, the pace of glacial melt reached unprecedented levels. And the election of Donald Trump has assured the further intensification of global extractivism, the rolling back of key environmental regulations and withdrawal from accords, and, of course, more “natural” disasters that will accompany them.3 Such stories of intensifying weather events and looming tipping points exemplify, in an ever more urgent register, the larger dynamics of accelerating earth-systemic change that this book has charted. This book has focused its attention primarily on poetry as an essential site of postwar reflections on ecological calamity, but representations of weather’s strange signification of broader change abound across contemporary genres. Alongside the apocalyptic imaginary of cli-fi novels and films that speculate on new lifeworlds emerging in a bleak, storm-ridden future, we can discover a wide array of recent artwork attuned to the everyday register of calamity em129

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bodied in the strange weather of today. From films such as Beasts of the Southern Wild and Take Shelter to Tameka Norris’s “Post-Katrina” paintings, Nathalie Miebach’s storm sculptures, and Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris’s photographs of disaster sites, works in various media reflect on the violent, disorienting power of weather.4 These works often evoke natural elements like water, wind, and heat as agential forces with aesthetic properties and allegorical resonance.5 They dramatize the peculiar temporalities of weather events—periods of waiting, the propulsive motions and unpredictable path of the storm, the disjunctive time after.6 And they tarry with what is undone, left over, and newly emergent in the wake of these upheavals. With their attention to the destructive force and lingering aftermaths of severe weather, such pieces offer us examples, across multiple media, of the strange materialities of remainders that this book has charted. In all these texts, the material fact of a storm is connected to larger conditions that are more intransigent, often difficult to see or understand. The excessive eruption of contemporary weather events, as mediated by a film narrative or photograph or poem, offers one visible instance of the larger ecological limits and crisis conditions of capitalism’s production of nature. In images of upturned trucks, ruined crops, dried-up lakes, and strewn garbage, we glimpse not singular spectacle but symptom, attuning us to environmental predicaments whose contours remain difficult to grasp. As with the larger archive of poems that this study has traced, these works hold open the strange urgencies of their present, allowing us a measure of the propulsive speed of socioecological change and the turmoil it brings. One of the most urgent and moving of these meditations is a 2016 documentary text by the Bay Area poet Cheena Marie Lo titled A Series of Un/Natural/ Disasters, which catalogs Hurricane Katrina from various perspectives. Arranging found phrases from coverage of Katrina, including eyewitness descriptions, quotes from government officials, and news and weather reports, Lo creates a multifaceted portrait of the storm in its many forms. In one of the most haunting sections, Lo evokes the material remnants of destroyed homes in the Ninth Ward by way of accretive repetitions: yellow house leaning forward foundation damaged by force of flood, yellow house leaning forward shingled roof on yellow house leaning forward is patchy, blue-ish gray     shingles left on only the bottom right corner.

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shingled roof on yellow house leaning forward is patchy, dark brown     and light brown patches of the roof underneath exposed, blue-ish     gray shingles left on only the bottom right corner.7

Like Norris’s “Post-Katrina” multitextural paintings of ruined houses, this piece surveys the textures of wreckage with patient attention.8 The haphazard forms of these wrecked spaces appear in almost abstract configurations of shape, color, “mess.” In the jumble of wood, concrete, and other detritus, Lo invokes the deathly force of Katrina’s deluge and the eerie calm of its aftermath, the physical structures standing as testament to the larger suffering and losses wrought by the storm. At the same time, this work subtly describes the ways precarious living preceded Katrina for the house’s now-dispossessed occupants. The fragile foundations, poor soil, thin walls gesture to a longer story of daily difficulty. Such images point back to Lo’s title, with its insistence that Katrina must be understood as connected to a larger history of structural violence, environmental racism, and slow-moving disaster.9 In this sense, the aftermath of the storm, visible in these broken-down buildings, is not represented as the storm’s end but as another manifestation of an ongoing pattern of disruption. What is notably missing from this account of Katrina is the rhetoric of recovery that so often accompanies narratives of ecological disaster, in media depictions but also in ecocritical accounts of environmental literature and culture. Lo’s representations resist the optimism of such formulations. Instead, this text stays with the various forms of chaos and disruption of Katrina without offering more uplifting images, describing spray-painted Xs on destroyed homes, bedsheets hanging out of windows, people left with no refuge. Turning away from a historical frame that would situate moments of disaster as part of a progressive arc, these haunting images dwell within the chaos and stillness of the scene as they illuminate another, less redemptive history, where the long history of American state-sponsored racism against African-Americans meets the intensifications of economic and ecological crisis. The displaced occupants whose absence is rendered visible in the wrecked houses and flooded streets emerge, in Lo’s portrait, as climate refugees—an increasingly common figure in our contemporary era.10 In this way, Lo’s book, together with all the storm texts that this coda has gestured to, amplify a larger tendency in the poems that this study has surveyed. The works I have discussed throughout Remainders sidestep optimistic accounts of environmental history and tend to engage with hope in skeptical and ambivalent ways. Instead, they share an orientation toward the conditions

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of their present that I have characterized through the Adornian-Benjaminian framework of natural history, a modality attuned to what Benjamin calls “the untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful” workings of historical time.11 Like Adorno and Benjamin, these writers discern, in various decayed, broken-down, and persisting forms, the signs of a calamitous history in motion. At the same time, while the immanent effects of biospheric damage can be traced in such figures and forms, the long-range extent and magnitude of systemic catastrophes remain unable to be calculated with any certainty. It is this fundamental disjunction between what has been and what will be, the unknowability of future planetary conditions under capitalist production and the irreversibility of the damage already done, that defines the ethos that Remainders has explored. How will we live in and with the storms on the horizon? The works throughout Remainders pose this question in immanent fashion as they confront the unsettling changes of their present. They do not offer easy answers. What they provide, instead, is a complex vocabulary for navigating difficult terrain. These works draw our attention to life and matter undergoing turbulent upheavals, as well as to presences, places, and phenomena that are now irrecuperable. They give voice to feelings of bewilderment and grief in the face of species destruction and ruined landscapes. They develop a language of critique with regard to the larger forces unmaking and reshaping their ecological surroundings, but they also explore feelings of complicity. Perhaps most indelibly, these texts make clear links between seemingly disparate phenomena to reveal shared essential needs and forms of ­interconnection— what Lo calls the “feeling of proximity”—that persist or emerge anew amidst disruption.12 Ashbery’s poems, Sand’s “Tiny Arctic Ice,” and Spahr’s work all turn to the air as an image of shared life in all its toxic complexity. Niedecker, Snyder, and di Prima summon a poetics of soil and water as common ground. Hillman’s Practical Water attunes the reader to water’s centrality to planetary existence, taking California’s hydrology in all its complex and failing forms as key example. And through their depictions of wreckage and dispossession, these varied aesthetic representations of storms underscore the necessity of basic shelter and habitat for human and nonhuman life alike, gesturing back to Brooks’s midcentury portraits of urban displacement. At the same time, they portray recognitions, sometimes unexpected, of antagonisms and collective modes of being. Approached from this vantage, we see the ways these works all describe air, water, soil, and habitat not as extractable resources or private property but as

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elemental parts of an ecological commons. In their portraits of the sustained degradation and loss of this common planetary inheritance, such cultural works powerfully remind us what is worth struggling for. Amidst increasingly turbulent planetary conditions, socioeconomic and climatological, this poetics of remainders lays imaginative ground for a contemporary politics of the commons. Such a politics begins less with an ethos of hope than with a demystified reckoning with what is lost and what persists. It dwells in the disrupted, stormbound present as the site of radical and unpredictable affiliation, highlighting the urgent need for solidarity in a calamitous time. It draws attention to the fact that whether we live in California or Honduras, the Marshall Islands or Nigeria, Quito or New Orleans, our everyday environments are undergoing profound and unpredictable alteration by that greater “storm” that Benjamin’s allegory evokes. But such a politics also insists on the violent unevenness of its effects across these regions and for their respective populations. This politics has found material form in various ecological movements across the globe, from indigenous groups fighting locally against extractivist development—oil drilling and pipelines, fracking, coal-mining, dam-building, logging— to the emerging climate-justice and climate-debt movements in the Pacific and global South. These burgeoning radical movements enact concrete modes of collective struggle that some of this study’s texts, particularly di Prima’s radical anticapitalist visions of the 1970s, imaginatively reach toward. In turn, these struggles are generating powerful cultural works that give voice to perspectives and draw on imaginaries beyond the hegemonic United States domain, engendering a global ecopoetics for a planet in turmoil.13 Amidst a twenty-first century already defined by accelerating immiseration and climate migrancy, by megadroughts and storms, these politics, and the cultural forms that accompany them embody a refusal to naturalize these material conditions or to approach them as the only possible mode of being. If the recent history of the Great Acceleration has revealed the profound entanglements of capitalist production with earth-systemic processes—a calamitous chapter in the longer history of capitalism’s socioecological transformations—it teaches us, as well, the stark necessity of discovering other ways of occupying our ecological present. What is to come depends, quite urgently, on the insurrectionary imaginations and strategies we find, and the kinships we form, to fight for what remains.

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Notes

Introduction 1.  Scientists and historians Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen, and John McNeill argue that “the past 50 years have been a period of dramatic and unprecedented change in human history,” with increases in population, atmospheric CO2 concentration, urbanization, extinction rates, and other measures of anthropogenic environmental change.” Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen, and John McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369 (2011): 851. 2.  On the new planetary boundary thresholds emerging in this period, see John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010). 3.  Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London: Routledge, 1994), 83. My inversion of Schumpeter’s term foregrounds the way these dynamics generate unforeseen ecological consequences. 4.  Historian Donald Worster argues that this age began with a bang “on the New Mexican desert on July 16, 1945.” Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 339. For other key studies of the atomic age and environmental politics, see Martin Melosi, Atomic Age America (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012); Sarah Fox, Downwind: A People’s History of the Nuclear West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014); and M. Jean-Claude Debeir, Jean-Paul ­Deleage, and Daniel Hemery, In the Servitude of Power (London: Zed Books, 1991). 5. Worster, Nature’s Economy, 339. 6. Samuel Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). For other useful environmental histories of this period, see Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century (New York: Routledge, 2003); and J. R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the TwentiethCentury World (New York: Norton, 2000). 7.  J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 5. They claim that the Great Acceleration is a brief period within the longer

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durée of the Anthropocene: “One cannot say when the Great Acceleration will end, and one cannot say just how, but it is almost certainly a brief blip in human history, environmental history, and Earth history” (5). 8. See James O’Connor, “The Second Contradiction of Capitalism,” in Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism (New York: Guilford Press, 1998), 158–177; Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life (London: Verso, 2015), 277–305; and Farshad Araghi, “Accumulation by Displacement: Global Enclosures, Food Crisis, and the Ecological Contradictions of Capitalism,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 32.1 (2009): 113–146. 9.  Robert Brenner, Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 (Verso: London, 2006). 10.  Jason Moore argues that the development of the “waste frontier” sharply spikes in the latter half of the twentieth century, with “a series of sharp upticks after 1945, 1975, and 2008” (Capitalism in the Web of Life, 280). Moore extends the argument of worldsystems theorist Giovanni Arrighi in The Long Twentieth Century, which argues that the most recent in a series of cycles of capital accumulation is centered in the United States after 1945, with postwar economic boom followed by persistent crisis. 11.  On the cognitive experience and physical costs of these forms of acceleration, see Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013). 12.  For an extended analysis of these various stratigraphic signals, see J. Zalasiewicz et al., “Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369 (March 2011): 1036–1055. Many critical works on the Anthropocene have appeared over the past five years. For a useful treatment of the time-scales, critical discourses, and historical implications of the Anthropocene, see Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016). 13.  Measures of post-1945 anthropogenic impact include the widespread use of new materials such as plastics and concrete, genetic modifications of large-scale crops like corn, vastly increased numbers of alien species on land and in oceans, sharp spikes in nitrogen and phosphorus in soil and CO2 in the atmosphere, and atomic fallout. See Anthony D. Barnosky, “Paleontological Evidence for Defining the Anthropocene,” in A Stratigraphical Basis for the Anthropocene, Geological Society of London Special Publication 395 (October 2013): 149–165. 14.  Here I follow various theorists who have expressed unease with the concept of the Anthropocene as a means of understanding the complex entanglement of capitalism and nature that constitutes modern socioecological organization. For theorists such as Jason Moore and Andreas Malm, Anthropocene discourse mistakenly places explanatory power on an abstract concept of species rather than on the historical determinations of capitalism and its reorganizations of nature. 15.  There are three particularly compelling recent ecocritical arguments in this vein to note: Teresa Shewry, Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014),

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217–227; and Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). My argument, however, traces a different historical structure of feeling emerging in this period, one that resists the optimism of hope or makes it conditional on revolutionary change. 16.  Brenda Hillman, Practical Water (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 84. “Practical Water,” “Sacramento Delta,” and “Hydrology of California” from Practical Water © 2009 by Brenda Hillman. Published by Wesleyan University Press. Used by permission. 17.  Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 173. Excerpts from Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works © 2002 The Regents of the University of California. Published by University of California Press. Reprinted by permission. 18. Niedecker, Collected Works, 141–142. 19.  Kaia Sand, “Tiny Arctic Ice,” in A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money That Lost Its Puff (Kaneone, HI: Tinfish Press, 2016), 26–33. © 2016 by Kaia Sand. Used by permission. 20.  Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014), 193–216. 21.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Nature and Selected Essays (New York: Penguin, 1982), 35. 22. Ibid., 36. 23. Ibid., 42. 24. Ibid., 40. 25. Ibid., 41. 26.  Carolyn Porter, “Method and Metaphysics in Emerson’s ‘Nature,’” VQR 55.3 (Summer 1979): 517–530. 27.  See Raymond Williams, “Ideas of Nature,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 67–85. 28. On environmental form in American poetry, see Jed Rasula, This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002); Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Joshua Schuster, The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-garde Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015). Schuster’s work, in particular, offers a compelling modernist prehistory to this postwar archive, and argues for important distinctions between environmental and environmentalist writing in the modern period. Another recent book with topical overlap is Christopher Schmidt, The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), which explores the topos of waste in American poetry in relation to queer identity and conceptual form. 29.  For a powerful formulation of these ideas with attention to various forms of postmodern art and literature, see Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: The Death of Na-

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ture and the Apotheosis of Trash, or, Rubbish Ecology,” PMLA 123.2 (March 2008): 327–339. 30.  Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 3, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1981), 879. 31.  Theodor Adorno, “The Idea of Natural-History,” trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, in Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 260. 32.  Adorno describes this “radical natural-historical thought” as providing insight into the ways “everything existing transforms itself into ruins and fragments, into just such a charnel house where signification is discovered” (265). 33.  Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 179. 34.  Adorno, “The Idea of Natural-History,” 262, 264. 35. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 179. 36.  Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 65. 37.  On this point, see Max Pensky, “Natural History: The Life and Afterlife of a Concept in Adorno,” Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory 5.1 (2004): 235–236. Recent works by Andrew Biro and Deborah Cook also offer insight into the environmental approaches of Benjamin and Adorno. Andrew Biro, Denaturalizing Ecological Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); Deborah Cook, Adorno on Nature (London: Routledge, 2014). 38.  Adorno, “The Idea of Natural-History,” 260. 39.  Anna Tsing calls these “capitalist ruins” in her remarkable anthropological study of the ecological entanglements, at various scales, of the matsutake mushroom. Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 40.  The interdisciplinary materialist turn, from Bill Brown’s “thing theory” to the neovitalism of Jane Bennett, the object-oriented approaches of Graham Harman and Levi Bryant, and the emerging field of material ecocriticism, has offered new frameworks for ecocritical engagement with various nonhuman entities. Such approaches share an interest in exploring how various forms of material phenomena, including waste, might allow for a complicating or unmaking of the subject-object divide, generating new conceptions of relationality and extended agency. My emphasis on remainders preserves a historical-materialist framework that differentiates this book’s perspective from the general tendencies of new materialist methods. A more proximate field is that of waste studies, which explores waste from socioecological and cultural angles. See, for example, Vinay Gidwani and Rajyashree Reddy, “The Afterlives of ‘Waste’: Notes from India for a Minor History of Capitalist Surplus,” Antipode 43.5 (2011): 1625–1658; and Stephanie Foote and Elizabeth Mazzolini, eds., Histories of the Dustheap: Waste, Material Cultures, Social Justice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).

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41. Niedecker, Collected Works, 41. 42. Ibid., 42. 43.  These various “recastings” of her poem are described on her website, http:// kaiasand.net/tiny-arctic-ice/. 44.  Susan Stewart, “Notes on Distressed Genres,” Journal of American Folklore 104 (1991): 8. 45.  Perloff ’s criticism, in books such as Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1985); 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (London: Blackwell, 2002); and The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), has perhaps been most responsible for developing this critical paradigm of innovation, in its sustained attention to strategies adopted by modernist poets and carried forward by later practitioners. 46.  A very partial list of these titles would include: Jed Rasula, Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004); Craig Dworkin, ed., The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (New York: Roof Books, 2008); Maggie Sullivan, ed., Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK (London: Reality Street Books, 1996); Reginald Shepherd, ed., Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries (Denver: Counterpath Press, 2008); Thomas Fink and Judith Halden-Sullivan, eds., Reading the Difficulties: Dialogues with Contemporary American Innovative Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014); and Elisabeth Frost and Cynthia Hogue, eds., Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007). 47.  Perloff writes, “In the visual arts, in musical composition, and especially in architecture, the notion of doing something else has been widely accepted,” a key legacy of the inventions of modernism (21st-Century Modernism, 163). 48.  In their introduction to the section on “Avant-garde Anti-lyricism” in The Lyric Theory Reader, Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins detail how the oppositional definitions of lyric mobilized by avant-garde poets at the end of the twentieth century served as another chapter in the history of “lyricization.” Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, eds., The Lyric Theory Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 451–459. We might also see the ways anti-lyric readings generate a complementary normative category of innovation, with associated reading practices. 49.  Poet and critic Charles Bernstein argues that poetic innovation is an essentially improvisational and nonprogrammatic stance, responsive rather than directive: it is a “means of keeping up with the present, grappling with the contemporary.” Charles Bern­stein, “The Task of Poetics, the Fate of Innovation, and the Aesthetics of Criticism,” in The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics, ed. Craig Dworkin (New York: Roof Books, 2008), 40. 50. For example, Bernstein invokes Clayton Christiansen’s somewhat notorious

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idea of the “innovator’s dilemma” in his description of innovation in poetry, arguing that like innovators on the business model, poetic innovators “produce works that are disruptive of perceived ideas of quality” (43). 51.  Jahan Ramazani writes, “By the twenty-first century, the novel’s readership had outstripped poetry’s by a ratio perhaps as high as ten to one in America according to a 2007 Associated Press poll, or of four to one according to a 2004 report by the National Endowment for the Humanities.” Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 18–19. Ramazani blames, in part, the difficult qualities of modernist poetry for this steady decline in poetry’s fate. 52.  For a particularly grim account of poetry’s cultural decline, according to some big-data calculations, see Christopher Ingraham, “Poetry Is Going Extinct, Government Data Show,” Washington Post, April 24, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ wonk/wp/2015/04/24/poetry-is-going-extinct-government-data-show/. 53.  See Maria Damon, Postliterary America: From Bagel Shop Jazz to Micropoetries (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011); and Michael Chasar, Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 54.  Modernist poets, particularly Pound and Eliot, made strong arguments for the literary and cultural centrality of poetry. See Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). 55.  See Eric Bennett, Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015); Kamran Javadizadeh, “The Institutionalization of the Cold War Poet,” Modernism/Modernity 23.1 (January 2016): 113–139; and Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, “The Program Era and the Mostly White Room,” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 20, 2015, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ article/the-program-era-and-the-mainly-white-room/#. 56.  Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 122. 57.  In this regard, Jahan Ramazani’s concept of “dialogic poetry” in Poetry and Its Others, which examines modern and contemporary poetry’s relation to other genres and extraliterary forms, offers a rich template for understanding its “long-memoried and widely scattered genres, tropes, and linguistic inheritances” (62). 58.  Michael Davidson, in a penetrating essay on Lorine Niedecker and critical regionalism, calls for larger “alternative postwar histories of postwar poetry written not around manifestos or schools but around marginal spaces—Charles Olson’s Gloucester, Gwendolyn Brooks’s Brownsville, James Wright’s Dakotas, Cherrie Moraga’s Central Valley” (18). Michael Davidson, “Lorine Niedecker and Critical Regionalism,” in Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, ed. Elizabeth Willis (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 18. My study turns to the marginal spaces of Niedecker and Brooks, but also points to the ways these spaces are framed, in their poetry, as bound up in larger historical dynamics of integration.

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Chapter 1 1.  Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 6. 2.  Rome writes, “The image of the bulldozer in the countryside became a shorthand for one of the basic dichotomies in environmentalist argument, a dichotomy now almost a cliché—the opposition of prodevelopment and proenvironment” (151). 3.  As Sellers claims, from homeowners’ distress about the effects of postwar sprawl on bodies, soil, air, and landscape, the “grass roots of what we now call ‘environmentalism’ stirred.” Christopher Sellers, Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 2. 4.  Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 33. 5. Ibid., 57. 6.  Lorine Niedecker, The Granite Pail: The Selected Poems of Lorine Niedecker, ed. Cid Corman (Frankfort, KY: Gnomon Press, 1996). For examples of this first generation of Niedecker criticism, see Michael Heller, Conviction’s Net of Branches: Essays on the Objectivist Poets and Poetry (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985); Richard Caddel, “Consider: Lorine Niedecker and Her Environment,” in Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1996), 281–286; and Douglas Crase, “Niedecker and the Evolutional Sublime,” in Lake Superior: Lorine Niedecker’s Poem and Journal (Seattle: Wave Books, 2013), 28–49. 7.  Cid Corman, preface to Niedecker, The Granite Pail, vi. 8.  See Willis, Radical Vernacular. 9.  I am drawing on Williams’s idea of residuality in his chapter “Dominant, Residual, Emergent” (Marxism and Literature, 121–127). 10. Niedecker, Collected Works, 145. Two notable essays also describe Niedecker’s “natural history,” both drawing attention to her longstanding interest in field guides, in the natural histories of Darwin and other scientists, and in the complex forms of evolution as they bear on her poetic form. See Joseph Conte, “Natural Histories: Serial Form in the Later Poetry of Lorine Niedecker,” in Penberthy, Lorine Niedecker, 345–360; and Jonathan Skinner, “Particular Attention: Lorine Niedecker’s Natural Histories,” in Willis, Radical Vernacular, 41–60. My emphasis diverges from these two valuable works in its charting of the natural-historical as a zone of indistinction through which the transitions and accelerations of post-1945 socioecological change can be discerned. 11.  For a detailed history of this process, see William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1992). As Ruth Jennison writes in an incisive piece on Niedecker’s explorations of capitalist ideology via surrealist method, this poetry reveals the way “capital reproduces the rural, not as its backward other, but rather as its endlessly available material for exploitation.” Ruth Jennison, “Waking into Ideology: Lorine Niedecker’s Experiments in the Syntax of Consciousness,” in Willis, Radical

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Vernacular, 133. Also see Jennison’s illuminating chapter on Lorine Niedecker in her book on Objectivist poetry. Ruth Jennison, “Niedecker: The Interior Voice Commodified,” in The Zukofsky Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 137–174. 12.  Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Other Writings on Conservation and Ecology, ed. Curt Meine (New York: Library of America, 2013), 28. 13.  On Niedecker’s use of ballad and folk form, see Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Lorine Niedecker, the Anonymous: Gender, Genre, and Resistance,” Kenyon Review 14.2 (Spring 1992): 96–116. 14.  As historian William Cronon writes of early colonial settlers, they saw “landscapes in terms of commodities,” which involved approaching “members of an ecosystem as isolated and extractable units.” William Cronon, Changes to the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 20–21. 15. Niedecker, Collected Works, 118. 16.  On the history of John Chapman, see Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plants’-Eye View of the World (New York: Random House, 2002). 17.  As Jonathan Skinner points out, Niedecker’s collection New Goose was written at the same time as she was undertaking work for the WPA Writers’ Program guide to Wisconsin. Aldo Leopold was also a consultant for this guide. See Skinner, “Particular Attention,” 51. 18.  Anson Dart was a Wisconsinite who was the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Oregon in the early 1850s and negotiated treaties with the Native Americans. See Richard Dart’s Green County Settlement narrative for a detailed description. Richard Dart, “Settlement of Green County,” in Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin at Its Fifty-Seventh Annual Meeting, Held 1909, republished online in Wisconsin Local History Network, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.wlhn.org/green_lake/settlement_rdart.htm. 19. Niedecker, Collected Works, 105. 20.  In another New Goose poem, Niedecker writes of the great Sauk chief from Wisconsin, Black Hawk: “Black Hawk held: In reason / land cannot be sold, / only things to be carried away” (99). 21.  In his history of the capitalist development of Chicago and its hinterlands, William Cronon terms this process the “radical simplifications of the grassland ecosystem.” Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 145. 22. Niedecker, Collected Works, 164. 23.  The cruel twist, of course, is that many of these families are the descendants of those early settlers, marking another era in a long story of land enclosure. In New Goose, Niedecker often casts the most negative perspective on current-day insurance agents, mortgage companies, or stockbrokers out for a quick dollar as contemporary versions of Anson Dart and the agency men (103, 101). The term “accumulation by dispossession” is David Harvey’s, from his Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (London: Verso, 2006), 75. 24. Niedecker, Collected Works, 121.

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25.  Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 512. A Sand County Almanac and Leopold’s other writings are replete with stories of impoverished topsoil, erosion, and other ecological effects of the agrarian-industrial monocultures of corn and wheat. 26.  John McNeill argues that agricultural development can be understood as the “main engine behind the drastic changes to the earth’s vegetation in the twentieth century.” McNeill, Something New under the Sun, 212. 27.  Lee Upton describes Niedecker’s work as reflecting an “advocacy of place” that speaks to a harmonious relation between humans and the natural world in this area: “Humans have adapted so well to an existence near water on the peninsula of Black Hawk Island that, like the animals she writes of, they too are made in its image.” Lee Upton, Defensive Measures: The Poetry of Niedecker, Bishop, Glück, and Carson (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2005), 34. 28. Niedecker, Collected Works, 1. 29. Leopold, Sand County Almanac, 88. 30.  Laurence R. Jahn and Richard A. Hunt, Duck and Coot Ecology and Management in Wisconsin, Wisconsin Conservation Department Technical Bulletin 33, 1964, accessed online, March 5, 2017, http://images.library.wisc.edu/EcoNatRes/EFacs/DNRBull/DNR Bull33/reference/econatres.dnrbull33.i0009.pdf. 31.  According to the Wisconsin bulletin, “The lake is used for fishing, swimming, water skiing, and boating. . . . Motorboats frequently disturb resting waterfowl and discourage the birds from using the lake” (19). 32.  According to a Janesville Gazette story from 1969, “As the river has become polluted, the lake water has become murky, aquatic reeds and the wild rice which once abounded in the waterway died and the bottom silted up with thick layers of mud.” “New Hope Now for Lake Koshkonong,” Janesville Daily Gazette, October 17, 1969, 44. 33.  Niedecker, Collected Works, 138. 34.  Niedecker writes in a letter to Zukofsky, “My backyard with all its filling (fill, as they say here) collapsing in spots either from muskrats or because of cans etc. that might have been thrown in with the filling. You walk along and suddenly you go down six inches.” Lorine Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky, 1931–1970, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 280. 35. Niedecker, Collected Works, 266. 36. Ibid., 263. 37. Ibid., 202. 38.  Rich Kahl, Restoration of Canvasback Migrational Staging Habitat in Wisconsin, Technical Bulletin No. 172, Department of Natural Resources, Wisconsin, 1991, accessed online, March 7, 2017, http://dnr.wi.gov/files/PDF/pubs/ss/SS0172.pdf. 39.  In various letters, Niedecker expresses her sense that the small piece of land she owns, an inheritance from her father, is on unsustainable ground. She writes to Zukofsky in 1958 about the difficulty of finding a buyer for her flood-prone property: “You live with the knowledge that this land where your life and your money are completely

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tied up is a lost cause and it must be kept secret otherwise you’re totally sunk.” Lorine Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky, 246. 40. Niedecker, Collected Works, 208. 41. Ibid., 107. 42.  Niedecker writes to Zukofsky in 1962: “Water on standstill after a storm, now at top of second step from bottom. A man changed his tire on his car under water. All the tin cans in the world floating on my lawn. Otherwise—and a muskrat too close to my porch—all is well.” Lorine Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky, 310. 43. Niedecker, Collected Works, 237. 44. As Niedecker biographer Margot Peters writes, “Progress had not ignored Blackhawk Island. Lorine had seen it deteriorate from a rural paradise to a blue-collar tourist destination, with trailers, shacky cabins, and “BAR BAITS BOATS” resorts.” Margot Peters, Lorine Niedecker: A Poet’s Life (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 70. In several poems in the Collected Works, Niedecker marks seasonal or weekly temporal changes by the entrance or exit of these tourists. Niedecker’s poems record a new chapter in a longer history, beginning in the late nineteenth century, of the Wisconsin countryside—and especially the lake country—serving as a site for urban tourists from Chicago and other nearby cities. For histories of the changes to this region, see Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis; and Colin Fisher, Urban Green: Nature, Recreation, and the Working Class in Industrial Chicago (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 7–37. 45. Niedecker, Collected Works, 145. 46. Ibid., 172. 47. Ibid., 222. 48.  On this point, see Harry Harootunian, who argues that capitalism “has no really normal state but one of constant expansion. . . . Part of the price paid for continual expansion is the production of permanent unevenness, permanent imbalance between various sectors of the social formations, the process by which some areas must be sacrificed for the development of others, such as the countryside for the city.” Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), xv. 49. Niedecker, Collected Works, 157. As Daniel Horowitz points out, by 1960 the United States, “with only 6 percent of the world’s population, benefited from the use of nearly 50 percent of the goods and services produced on the planet.” Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–1979 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 50. 50. Niedecker, Collected Works, 119. 51. Ibid., 399. 52.  Such depictions echo Vance Packard’s critiques of Americans’ scaled-up consumption patterns in his 1960 best-seller The Waste-Makers. Packard argues that “historians, I suspect, may allude to this as the Throwaway Age.” Vance Packard, The Waste Makers (New York: David MacKay, 1960), 7. 53. Such practices are connected to Niedecker’s view of her own poetry, what

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Peter Middleton calls her “refus[al of] the blandishments that promise it can be placed anywhere in public culture without loss.” Peter Middleton, “Lorine Niedecker’s ‘Folk Base’ and Her Challenge to the Avant-Garde,” in The Objectivist Nexus, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 160–188. 54. Niedecker, Collected Works, 165. 55. Ibid., 102. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 143. 58. Ibid., 150. 59. Ibid., 151. 60.  Eleni Sikelianos has traced Niedecker’s images of bombs, guns, and dismemberment in an astute essay. Eleni Sikelianos, “Life Pops from a Music Box Shaped like a Gun: Dismemberments and Mending in Niedecker’s Figures,” in Willis, Radical Vernacular, 31–40. 61. Niedecker, Collected Works, 129. 62. Ibid., 211. 63. Ibid., 250. 64. Ibid., 253, 255, 256. 65.  Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 5. 66. Ibid., 10. 67. Niedecker, Collected Works, 247. 68. Ibid., 257. 69. Ibid., 253–254. 70. Leopold, Sand County Almanac, 874. 71. Niedecker, Collected Works, 105. 72.  As geographer Neil Smith writes, “Uneven development is social inequality blazoned onto the geographical landscape, and it is simultaneously the exploitation of that geographical unevenness for certain socially determined ends.” Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 206. 73.  For the key theoretical formulation of this concept, see Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 74.  See Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993), 83–115; Luke Cole, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (New York: NYU Press, 2001); Joni Adamson, ed., The Environmental Justice Reader (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002); and Robert Bullard, Dumping in Dixie (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000). 75.  For an overview of this concept as applied to the history of Chicago, see David

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Naguib Pellow, Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 76.  Bunyan Bryant, ed., Environmental Justice: Issues, Policies, and Solutions (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995), 6. 77.  See Bryant, Environmental Justice, and Pellow, Garbage Wars. For a discussion of the global contexts of “slum ecology” in urban areas, see Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006). 78.  See McNeill and Engelke, The Great Acceleration, 103–154, and Davis, Planet of Slums, 1–19, for detailed analyses of the intensifying urbanization of the planet after 1945 and its environmental consequences. On the rise of NIMBY politics, see Nicholas Freudenberg and Carol Steinsapir, “Not in Our Backyards: The Grassroots Environmental Movement,” in American Environmentalism: The US Environmental Movement, 1970–1990, ed. Riley Dunlap and Angela Mertig (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013), 27–35. 79.  See Darlene Clark Hine and John McCluskey, Jr., eds., The Black Chicago Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), for a history of this movement. 80.  A history of these dynamics across the first half of the century can be found in Dorceta Taylor, “The Rise of Racially Restrictive Convenants,” in Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility (New York: NYU Press, 2014), 204–212, 249–251. 81. Pellow, Garbage Wars, 183. As Pellow notes, “Most landfills and waste incinerators constructed in Chicago, both before and after 1950, were placed around the South Side” (68). Pellow also notes that the most landfills per square mile are located in Chicago. He describes how, in 1984, the Chicago City Council placed a moratorium on new landfills in the area, but there are still toxic conditions in and around the extant landfills. He goes on to detail the high cancer rates, high infant-mortality rates, and low-birthweight rates that plague contemporary South Side dwellers, arguing that the South Side of Chicago presents one of the worst cases of environmental inequality in the country. For further discussion of these issues, see Sylvia Hood Washington, “Epilogue: Raisins in the Sun; Postmodern Environmental Justice Struggles in Chicago,” in Packing Them In: An Archaeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago, 1865–1954 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 193–202. 82.  See Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 25. 83.  Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices (1941; New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2002), 106. He writes that kitchenettes are “our prison, our death sentence without a trial, the new form of mob violence that assaults not only the lone individual, but all of us, in its ceaseless attacks” (106). Wright also writes about the oppressive conditions of the kitchenette in Native Son, and Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun describes the deleterious social effects of the kitchenette. 84. Wright, 12 Million Black Voices, 103. 85. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 10.

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86.  See Cheryl Clarke, “The Loss of Lyric Space in Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘In the Mecca,’” in “After Mecca”: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 22–46. 87.  Brooks points to this geographical expansion in an interview from 1969, reprinted in Report from Part One: “I started out talking about Bronzeville, but ‘Bronzeville’’s almost meaningless by now, I suppose, since Bronzeville has spread and spread all over.” Gwendolyn Brooks, Report from Part One (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972), 160. 88.  According to Hirsch, these segregation practices were not limited to neighborhood divisions, but extended as well into leisure spaces. In one particularly vicious incident, the Calumet Park riot in the summer of 1957, thousands of whites attacked a group of black picnickers who were using a formerly segregated part of the park. Similar incidents occurred at local beaches, roller rinks, and public greens throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. 89. In The Waste Makers, Packard diagnoses the deleterious environmental conditions of inner cities such as Chicago as one of the most troubling effects of postwar development: “Vast smoke-blanketed wastelands of slums, junk yards, used-car lots, and row houses have been left behind as Americans have kept fleeing to the outer edges” (300). 90.  Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks (Chicago: Third World Press, 2001), 20. 91.  The conditions Brooks chronicles are endemic to the development of Third World cities over the past half century. See Mike Davis, Planet of Slums. 92. Wright, 12 Million Black Voices, 106, 109. 93. Brooks, Blacks, 20. 94.  Packard, in The Waste Makers, points to a survey of public health officials from the 1950s that claims that Chicago’s air is among the most polluted in the country (300). 95. Brooks, Blacks, 115–116. In 12 Million Black Voices, Wright claims: “The kitchenette is the seed bed for scarlet fever, dysentery, typhoid, tuberculosis, gonorrhea, syphilis, pneumonia, and malnutrition” (107). 96. Brooks, Blacks, 116–117. 97. Ibid., 119. This poem echoes one of Brooks’s most famous poems, “The Mother,” which describes the psychological conditions of abortion. Both poems explore what Brooks calls the “inconditions of love” for children—whether living, aborted, or dead— amidst these difficult external circumstances (115). 98. Ibid., 117. 99. Wright, 12 Million Black Voices, 106. 100. Brooks, Blacks, 416. This dialectic of displacement and immobility is also a key dimension of contemporary life in global slums, as Mike Davis describes. 101.  As Jan Zalasiewicz and Colin Waters point out, the concrete footprint is a key feature of the “rock signature” associated with anthropogenic alteration of the lithosphere. The vacant lot here can signify, in its small way, this largely urban impact that has been accelerating in the post-1945 period. See Jan Zalasiewicz and Colin Waters,

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“The Anthropocene,” Environmental Science: Oxford Research Encyclopedia, December 2015, accessed June 11, 2016, http://environmentalscience.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acre fore/9780199389414.001.0001/acrefore-9780199389414-e-7. 102. Brooks, Blacks, 416, 422. 103. Ibid., 433. Brooks’s scenes of demolished urban buildings, vacant lots, and displaced black populations prepare the way for contemporary chronicles of uneven urban development by black poets such as Ed Roberson in City Eclogue (Berkeley, CA: Atelos Press, 2006) and Harryette Mullen in Urban Tumbleweed (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2013). 104. Brooks, Report from Part One, 135. 105.  As poet and critic Camille Dungy argues in her introduction to Black Nature, “Many black writers simply do not look at their environment from the same perspective as Anglo-American writers who discourse with the natural world. The pastoral as diversion, a construction of a culture that dreams, through landscape and animal life, of a certain luxury or innocence, is less prevalent.” Camille Dungy, introduction to Black Nature: Four Centuries of African-American Nature Poetry (Athens: University of ­Georgia Press, 2009), xxi. For a sustained engagement with black ecopoetics in the postwar period, see Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 145–168. Sonya Posmentier’s Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), published as this book was going to press, offers a sustained reading of twentieth-century black literature in relation to environmental history. 106. Brooks, Blacks, 51. 107.  Gwendolyn Brooks, foreword to New Negro Poets U.S.A., ed. Langston Hughes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), xi. 108. Brooks, Blacks, 128. 109. Ibid., 129. 110.  Ibid. A companion piece, “The Lovers of the Poor,” describes the opposite vantage: white, upper-middle-class women who have come to offer charity to the poor in a run-down urban building (349). Horrified by what they see, these women flee without providing any assistance to the urban dwellers. 111. Brooks, Blacks, 411. 112. Ibid., 420. 113. Ibid., 433. Chapter 2 1.  John Ashbery, “Fragment,” in John Ashbery: Collected Poems 1956–1987, ed. Mark Ford (New York: Library of America, 2008), 243. 2.  In considering these various scales, we could think of the myriad examples of the poor quality of air in urban areas and their health consequences for vulnerable

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populations, alongside the planetary aspects of carbon emissions in the form of climate change. A contemporary literary example that addresses these questions is Juliana Spahr’s “poem written after september 11, 2001,” which explores the scalar dimensions of air as the lines zoom farther and farther out and then details the particular toxic elements in post-9/11 air. See Juliana Spahr, this connection of everyone with lungs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 3–10. 3.  In “The Idea of Natural-History,” Adorno writes that Lukács, in his Theory of the Novel, “envisioned the metamorphosis of the historical qua past into nature; petrified history is nature or the petrified life of nature is a mere product of historical development” (262). 4. Various recent works of scholarship address this very challenge, examining the ways historical texts represent air, atmosphere, and climate as subject to historical pressures. See, for example, Jesse Oak Taylor, The Sky of Our Manufacture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016); Hsuan Hsu, “Naturalist Smellscapes and Environmental Justice,” American Literature 88.4 (December 2016): 787–814; and Tobias Menely, “Anthropocene Air,” minnesota review 83 (2014): 93–101. Two other key texts on atmosphere and aesthetics as they bear on historical questions are Gernot Böhme, “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics,” Thesis Eleven 36.1 (August 2003): 113–126; and Leo Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3.2 (December 1942): 1–42. 5.  Timothy Choy, “Air’s Substantiations,” in Lively Capital: Biotechnologies, Ethics, and Governance in Global Markets (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 148. 6.  Choy usefully points out that “there is no air in itself; air functions instead as a heuristic with which to encompass many atmospheric experiences” (127). 7.  For a discussion of the various “tribes” that Ashbery has been affiliated with, see Susan Schultz, ed., The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995). 8. Samuel Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 55. Also see J. R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun, 325–355, for a largely pessimistic view of the role of environmental activism in improving environmental conditions. For a description of the political discussions regarding pollution in this period, see J. Clarence Davies III, The Politics of Pollution (New York: Pegasus, 1970). 9.  See Adam Rome, The Genius of Earth Day (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), 10. 10.  See Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 226–266, on the environmental frameworks and activist networks developing from these groundbreaking ideas of interconnection. 11.  Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Man, Nature, and Technology (New York: Knopf, 1971), 29. 12. Ibid., 8–9. 13.  Carson writes, “We are accustomed to look for the gross and immediate effect and to ignore all else. Unless this appears promptly and in such obvious form that it can-

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not be ignored, we deny the existence of hazard.” Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 190. 14.  Commoner writes, “Many . . . air pollutants interact chemically, and their reactions are influenced by temperature, humidity, and light intensity. This leads to the dismal, but I believe realistic, conclusion that the detailed composition of air is not merely unknown, but also unknowable to a considerable degree” (The Closing Circle, 76). 15. Ibid., 185. 16.  The key theoretical treatment of these ideas is Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992). On bodily susceptibility to toxins, see Nancy Langdon, Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); and Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). For considerations of cultural representations of these questions, see Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); and Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction. 17. Commoner offered sustained critiques of Paul Ehrlich’s popular claim that population growth was the central environmental problem of the age by pointing to capitalist production as the source of ecological ills such as pollution. “Pollution begins not in the family bedroom but in the corporate boardroom,” Commoner famously asserted at an Earth Day teach-in at Brown University. See Ian Angus, “Barry Commoner,” Climate and Capitalism, October 1, 2012, http://climateandcapitalism.com/2014/06/29/ barry-commoner-great-acceleration/. 18. In The Ecology of Modernism, Joshua Schuster offers an incisive extended reading of Carson’s book that highlights the new ideas of biopolitics and contamination she unveils. My own interpretation, while largely sympathetic to Schuster’s approach, diverges in its approach to the limits of “narration and activism” as they are staged in Silent Spring. Schuster, Ecology of Modernism, 133. 19.  Carson has long been embraced as the key figure in the American environmental movement and also the initiator of its paradigms of awakening and action. Her arguments in Silent Spring have also been the subject of important ecocritical interpretations. See, in particular, Lawrence Buell’s analysis of Carson as an initiator of “toxic discourse”—a perfect inversion of the ecocritical trope of environmental consciousness, with its emphasis on shocked realization of environmental ills. Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 35. Also see Rob Nixon’s preface to Slow Violence (x–xi). 20. Commoner, The Closing Circle, 293. 21.  Such a wholly negative perspective might be understood as an instance of what Buell calls the “environmental unconscious” (18). 22. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 131. 23.  To take one example of this idea, leading ecocritic Scott Slovic writes: “By con-

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fronting face-to-face the separate realm of nature, by becoming aware of its otherness, the writer implicitly becomes more deeply aware of his or her own dimensions, limitations of form and understanding, and processes of grappling with the unknown.” Scott Slovic, Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1998), 4. 24.  Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (1854; New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), 73. 25.  For canonical instances of these “green” readings in relation to Romantic poetry, see Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991), and The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); and Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). For studies that employ these approaches in relation to American poetry, see David Gilcrest, Greening the Lyre: Environmental Poetics and Ethics (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002); and Scott Knickerbocker, Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). 26.  An ecologically oriented text, according to Knickerbocker, offers “the power to nudge consciousness to a more ecologically ethical state, which in turn shapes behavior” (18). See also Heather Houser’s Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction for further formulations of these dimensions of consciousness and ethics, routed through a sustained examination of tropes of sickness and affect in contemporary environmental fiction. 27.  Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 5. Rome describes this narrative as “the introduction of a new product or process, welcomed as a miracle, that people eventually come to see as the source of disturbing environmental problems. That is the story of DDT and nuclear power and detergents—and that is the story of tract housing,” the central focus of his study (5). 28. Commoner, The Closing Circle, 43. 29. Ibid., 44. 30.  In the wake of Silent Spring’s call for action on pesticides and other environmental threats, there was immense progress in environmental legislation, including the 1964 Wilderness Act, the 1968 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, the Clean Air Act, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. 31.  Heather Houser’s work on ecosickness offers a useful approach involving dimensions of affect in narrative fiction. She writes that “‘affect’ designates body-based feelings that arise in response to elicitors as varied as interpersonal and institutional relations, aesthetic experience, ideas, sensations, and material conditions in one’s environment. Though there is a relation between affect and eliciting conditions, the relation is not determinate” (Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, 3). Houser’s work points to the way certain narrative techniques can bring affective dimensions to perception; similarly, I am interested here in the ways Ashbery’s poetics consistently seeks a language for the barely discernible perceptual and affective response.

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32.  John Ashbery, “Craft Interview with John Ashbery,” in The Craft of Poetry: Interviews from the New York Quarterly, ed. William Packard (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974), 111–132. 33. Ashbery, Collected Poems, 409. 34. An account of Ashbery’s weather poems in this period, Clara Van Zanten’s unpublished dissertation, “Word Clouds: Ashbery, Weather Poems, Ecology,” frames Ashbery’s poetry within a long history of philosophical materialism to highlight its openended ecological thinking. Clara Van Zanten, “Word Clouds: Ashbery, Weather Poems, Ecology” (PhD dissertation, University of California–Davis, 2010). 35.  Angus Fletcher’s description of Ashbery as a writer of the “environment-poem”— a “genre that neither writes about the surrounding world, thematizing it, nor analytically represents that world, but actually shapes the poem to be an Emersonian or esemplastic circle”—derives in large part from his reading of Ashbery as in sustained dialogue with John Clare’s poetics (9). See “Ashbery’s Clare,” in Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry, 57–74. 36.  Fletcher draws extensively on Ashbery’s Norton lecture on Clare. John Ashbery, Other Traditions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 37.  See John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 99–188. 38. Ashbery, Collected Poems, 391. 39.  John Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 14. 40. Ashbery, Collected Poems, 395. 41. Ibid., 389. 42. Ibid., 363. 43. See Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out, 14–17; and Christopher Schmidt, “The Queer Nature of Waste in John Ashbery’s The Vermont Notebook,” in The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 57–90. 44.  Walt Whitman, “This Compost,” in Whitman: Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 495. 45. Ashbery, Collected Poems, 353. 46. Ibid., 415. 47. Ibid., 311. 48. Ibid., 255. 49. Ibid., 248. Here my reading diverges from scholarship on Ashbery that emphasizes a fundamental reciprocity between consciousness and the natural world in his work, where the mind becomes a landscape and landscape moves in and with the mind. My interpretation, instead, focuses on the ways Ashbery stages differentiation as well as immersion in order to discern the ecological change of his present. See Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry, 135–136; Bonnie Costello, Shifting Ground: Reinventing Land-

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scape in Modern American Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Srikanth Reddy, Changing Subjects: Digression in Modern American Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 50.  In his book on atmosphere as a material and cultural phenomenon, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht writes of an “experience familiar to everyone: that atmospheres and moods, as the slightest of encounters between our bodies and our material surroundings, also affect our psyche; however, we are unable to explain the causality (or, in everyday life, control its workings).” Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 4. 51. Ashbery, Collected Poems, 198. 52. Ibid., 309. 53. Ibid., 413. 54. Ibid., 198. 55. Ibid., 136. 56. Ibid., 140. 57. Ibid., 280. 58. Ibid., 323. 59. Ibid., 324. 60. Ibid., 324–325. 61. Ibid., 325. 62. Ibid. 63. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 131. 64.  Chris Nealon, The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 78. 65.  Nealon argues: “Again and again in his poems from this period, the poet describes scenes of spectacle, pageantry, and even apocalypse, which are made harmless by the poet’s turning to face the other way, or drifting in a different direction” (The Matter of Capital, 78). 66. Ibid., 91. 67. Ashbery, Collected Poems, 287. 68. Ibid., 305. 69. Ibid., 322. 70. Ibid., 321. 71. Ibid., 276. 72.  For a discussion of new postwar tropes of the planet, based in part on NASA’s image of the Blue Planet in 1972, see Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 17–65; for a critique of such global images, see Sheila Jasanoff, “Heaven and Earth: The Politics of Environmental Images,” in Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance, ed. Sheila Jasanoff and Marybeth Long Martello (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 31–54. 73. Ashbery, Collected Poems, 248. 74. Ibid., 274–275.

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75. Ibid., 318. 76.  Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2015), 62. 77. Ashbery, Collected Poems, 247. For Ashbery’s dream-like approach in Three Poems, see Andrew Dubois, Ashbery’s Forms of Attention (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 63–78. In my reading, this state is less privately and spiritually rooted, but is instead an exploration of incipient collective sensibilities and moods. In Raymond Williams’s phrasing, such sensibilities embody forms of “practical consciousness,” as opposed to “official consciousness” (Marxism and Literature, 130). 78. Ashbery, Collected Poems, 299. Here I gesture toward Harold Bloom’s wellknown reading of Three Poems that argues the poem is “addressed by I, John Ashbery writing, to You, Ashbery as he is in process of becoming,” in “John Ashbery: The Charity of the Hard Moments,” in Salmagundi 22/23 (Spring–Summer 1973): 126. Marjorie Perloff instead sees “the constant interrupting or undercutting of ‘beautiful and simple designs’ by parody, pastiche, and the lampooning of the self ” (281). See Marjorie Perloff, “Barthes, Ashbery, and the Zero Degree of Genre,” in Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990). As my reading here suggests, neither of these canonical versions adequately accounts for the questions of the social and ecological textures of the present that Ashbery investigates in his work of this era. 79. Ashbery, Collected Poems, 299. 80.  Such a point draws on the conceptual claims of affect theory and its prioritizing of the somatic, the precognitive. I invoke this language here as a way of describing Ashbery’s own conception of his poetics, his metapoetic representation of the features of his writing and the effects it produces on a reader, rather than making any truth claims about the real-life effects such writing might have on an actual body. For a strong critique of affect theory, see Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37.3 (Spring 2011): 434–472. 81. Ashbery, Collected Poems, 299. 82. Ibid., 242. 83. Schmidt, The Poetics of Waste, 83. In his reading of Ashbery’s The Vermont Notebook, Schmidt argues that Ashbery develops a queer poetic approach that approaches waste as a means of blurring the bounds between natural and cultural and revaluing what has been devalued. Schmidt approaches Ashbery’s queering of nature in a register that is finally affirming rather than abject, suggesting that Ashbery’s portrayals of waste work to symbolically include what has been socially excluded and to refuse an ethos of purity or authenticity. 84. Ashbery, Collected Poems, 353. 85.  Wallace Stevens, “The Man on the Dump,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1954), 201. For a remarkable deconstructive reading of Stevens’s poem as the “proleptic foretelling of a present situation”—that is, climate change—see J. Hillis Miller, “Anachronistic Reading,” Derrida Today 3.1 (2010): 75.

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Chapter 3 1.  Gary Snyder, “Smokey the Bear Sutra,” online reprint at Modern American Poetry website, http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/snyder/onlinepoems.htm. Snyder stipulates that this poem can be circulated freely forever, without copyright. Smokey the Bear is having a new heyday as an icon of resistance in the Trump era, inspired by rogue Park Service rangers tweeting facts on climate change and other environmental issues in response to a gag order on communications by federal agencies imposed by Trump in the first days of his presidency. 2.  Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letters (San Francisco: Last Gasp Press, 2007), 51. “Revolutionary Letter #33,” “Revolutionary Letter #34,” “Revolutionary Letter #38,” “Revolutionary Letter #39,” and “Revolutionary Letter #54” from Revolutionary Letters by Diane di Prima © Diane di Prima. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. 3.  On these tendencies of pastoral, see Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). 4. Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 121–158. 5.  As Gottlieb writes, “For many in and around the New Left, environmentalism came to be associated with the search for alternative institutions and a new way of living” (ibid., 138–139). 6. “Editorial,” Ramparts, May 1970, 2. The editorial argues that the danger of environmentalist discourse is its potential disconnection from other dimensions of social struggle, an argument that various countercultural voices made following the success of Earth Day. 7.  Gary Snyder, “Buddhism and The Coming Revolution,” in Earth House Hold (New York: New Directions, 1969), 91. 8.  Diane di Prima, The Poetry Deal (San Francisco: City Lights, 2014), 7. 9. Ibid., 7–8. 10.  Timothy Gray, Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Counter-Cultural Community (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 274. Gray’s book offers an indispensable guide for considering Gary Snyder’s poetry, politics, and intellectual and spiritual life during this period. Also see Richard Cándida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 379–380. 11. For an incisive description of Gary Snyder’s back-to-the-land practices and their influence on his reception history, see Lytle Shaw, Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013). Shaw’s book usefully situates Snyder’s poetry alongside other poetic projects of the period that we might call “nonmodern,” from Olson’s anthropological imaginary to ethnopoetics. 12.  Barrett Watten, “The Turn to Language and the 1960s,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Autumn 2002): 171–172. 13.  George Hart, “Gary Snyder: Turtle Island,” in Literature and the Environment, ed. Scott Slovic and George Hart (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 81–82. 14.  Anthony Libby, “Diane di Prima: ‘Nothing Is Lost; It Shines in Our Eyes,’” in

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Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation, ed. Ronna C. Johnson and Nancy M. Grace (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 57. 15.  Here I draw on Kristin Ross’s discussions of William Morris in Communal Luxury, whose lectures and writings offer scenes from ancient Iceland “as a way of recruiting past hopes to serve present needs.” Like Morris’s “parables,” these pastorals offer a kind of imaginative leap out of historical time that allows “other paths taken through historical time, including the time to come, to become visible.” Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (London: Verso, 2015), 74–75. 16. In Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, Ursula Heise offers a sustained critique of Snyder’s place-based ecological ideas along these lines, arguing that Snyder fails to offer a persuasive “utopian vision” that can account for the real relations and divergences between local and global that he sets forth (43–44). However, I argue in this chapter that these poems do not rest on a realistic description either of ecological relations and processes or of sociopolitical forms but are instead grounded in an imaginative engagement with forms of socioecological simplicity. 17.  For an examination of Snyder’s engagement with the Turtle Island myth, see Bron Taylor, “Resacralizing Earth: Pagan Environmentalism and the Restoration of Turtle Island,” in American Sacred Space, ed. David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 97–151. 18.  Michael McKeon, “The Pastoral Revolution,” in Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 272. McKeon writes, “Pastoral’s temporal dimension can be felt as a subtly emotional inflection of spatial detachment, the evocation of an immediacy that is nonetheless elusive, perhaps irreversibly unavailable.” 19.  Charles Altieri, “Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island: The Problem of Reconciling the Roles of Seer and Prophet,” boundary 2 4.3 (Spring 1976): 765. 20.  Altieri writes, “When dealing with social problems Snyder manifests the simplistic sense of history and the uncompassionate misanthropy that we expect in satire” (772). See also Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Davidson writes, “When this unitary voice is fully aware of its pedagogical role . . . the result can be a shrill, hectoring tone that seems intolerant of the reader” (109). 21.  See Gray, Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim, 279. 22.  Here I point to Empson’s classic idea of pastoral’s representational strategy as “putting the complex into the simple.” William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1974), 22. 23. Snyder, Turtle Island (New York: New Directions, 1974), 77, 86. 24. Ibid., 80. 25. Ibid. 26.  Paul Alpers, What Is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 22.

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27. Snyder, Turtle Island, 80. 28. Ibid., 41. 29.  See Christopher Beach, ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 190–217. 30. Snyder, Turtle Island, 77. 31. Ibid., 52. 32. Ibid., 23. 33.  As McKeon writes, “This basic oppositional structure, grounded in a spatial or geographical antithesis between country and city, rural and urban, yields a familiar series of value-laden extensions: simplicity versus sophistication, innocence versus corruption (or experience), . . . peace versus war, communal affiliation versus individual aggression (or industry), and so forth” (268). See as well Raymond Williams’s descriptions of this central framework of pastoral in The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 34.  Mick Smith, Against Ecological Sovereignty: Ethics, Biopolitics, and Saving the Natural World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 76. 35. Ibid., 92. 36.  See Snyder’s prose essay “Four Changes” in Turtle Island for other formulations of this primitivist aesthetic (91–102). Also see Snyder’s essay “Poetry and the Primitive: Notes on Poetry as an Ecological Survival Technique” for a sustained argument about poetry’s ability to draw humans toward what he calls a “mythological present”: “Poetry and the Primitive: Notes on Poetry as an Ecological Survival Technique,” in Symposium of the Whole, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Diane Rothenberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 116. 37.  Rayna Green, “A Tribe Called ‘Wannabe’: Playing Indian in America and Europe,” Folklore 99.1 (1988): 31. 38.  For a sustained elaboration of this idea, see Tim Dean, Gary Snyder and the American Unconscious: Inhabiting the Ground (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991). Dean argues that Snyder’s book works in direct opposition to the “American unconscious,” defined by the wholesale repression of Native American genocide and land expropriation. 39. Snyder, Turtle Island, 23. 40.  As Dean writes, “Although Snyder is not immune to the ideological representations by which the American ground has historically been apprehended, he is conscious as few other cultural representatives are of what is at stake in the effort to ‘inhabit the ground.’” Dean, Gary Snyder and the American Unconscious, 3. 41. Snyder, Turtle Island, 21. 42. Ibid., 78–79. 43. Ibid., 79. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 80.

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46.  Snyder’s work has often been read in relation to the deep ecology movement, and he has himself claimed great philosophical affinity with its principles. Here I read Turtle Island in particular as holding open a space for the possibility of revolutionary change that diverges from the pacific visions of deep ecology. As Snyder argues in Earth House Hold, he advocates “any cultural and economic revolution that moves clearly toward a free, international, classless world.” Earth House Hold (New York: New Directions, 1969), 92. For more on Snyder’s radical principles, see Paul MessersmithGlavin, Between Social Ecology and Deep Ecology: Gary Snyder’s Ecological Philosophy, The Anarchist Library, 2011, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/paul-messersmithglavin-between-social-ecology-and-deep-ecology-gary-snyder-s-ecological-philos. For background on the deep ecology movement, see Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living As If Nature Mattered (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2001). 47.  Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 25. LeMenager’s book offers a valuable portrait of the radical and reformist dimensions of environmentalism in the early 1970s, focused particularly around the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. 48. Ibid., 26. 49.  Di Prima, Revolutionary Letters, 69. 50. Ibid., 62. 51. Ibid., 47. 52. LeMenager, Living Oil, 25. 53.  Di Prima, Revolutionary Letters, 46. 54.  Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 19. 55. Ibid., 237. 56.  Di Prima, Revolutionary Letters, 52. 57.  John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?,” in About Looking (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 26. On this topic, also see Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 58.  Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” Social Text 9–10 (Spring–Summer 1984): 207. 59. Ibid., 185. 60.  See Raj Patel, “The Long Green Revolution,” Journal of Peasant Studies 40.1 (2013): 1–67, for an extended analysis of the ongoing effects of the Green Revolution on global agricultural policy. See also McNeill, Something New under the Sun, 219–226. 61.  Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” 178. 62.  On this radical historical tradition of the commoner, see Peter Linebaugh, Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosure, and Resistance (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014). For a history of commoners in England, see J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure, and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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63.  For notable exceptions, particularly in relation to anarchist eco-radicalism and Earth First! activism in the 1990s and 2000s, see Will Potter, Green Is the New Red (San Francisco: City Lights, 2011); Rik Scarce, Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmentalist Movement (London: Routledge, 2007); and Craig Rosebraugh, Burning Rage of a Dying Planet: Speaking for the Earth Liberation Front (New York: Lantern Books, 2004). These authors describe the marginality of these movements and their equivocal successes. At a global level, there have been a variety of actual social movements that might be understood as living undertakings of such imaginings, from the Chipko movement in India in the 1970s and the MOSOP movement in Nigeria in the 1990s to recent land struggles in Mexico, Honduras, and Indonesia, among other places. Rob Nixon details many of these uprisings in his Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Also see Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (New York: Pearson, 1999); and Michael Watts and Richard Peet, eds., Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2004). 64.  Gottlieb writes, “But by the late 1970s, most of the professional groups had become thoroughly linked to the environmental policy system, a system designed to manage and control rather than reduce or restructure the sources of pollution and other environmental ills” (Forcing the Spring, 401). 65.  Dowie writes, “As the movement that took shape in the early 1960s grew and became an established voice in political debates, the prism of environmentalism narrowed to protect the economic interests of institutions that directly or indirectly supported its dominant players, the nationals.” Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 29. 66.  In the postscript to his book on Earth Day, Adam Rome offers a striking comparison between the success of the first Earth Day and the 1990 Earth Day. He writes, “The organizational effort in 1990 was more top-down and more directive than in 1970. . . . [The organizers] sought to ‘enlist’ people in a well-defined movement, not to empower them to work out their own vision of how they might make a difference” (278– 279). Contrast this with Barry Commoner’s description of the first Earth Day: “It was a sudden, noisy awakening. School children cleaned up rubbish; college students organized huge demonstrations; determined citizens recaptured the streets from the automobile, at least for a day” (1). For a more contemporary perspective on the greenwashing of Earth Day, see Pete Dolack, “Corporate Greenwashing on Earth Day in New York,” Climate and Capitalism, April 26, 2015, http://climateandcapitalism.com/2015/04/26/ corporate-greenwashing-on-earth-day-in-new-york/. 67. For histories of these environmental movements, see Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 227–266; Riley Dunlap and Angela Mertig, eds., American Environmentalism: The US Environmental Movement, 1970–1990 (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013); Luke Cole and Sheila Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (New York: NYU Press, 2001); David Naguib Pellow

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and Robert Brulle, Power, Justice, and the Environment: A Critical Appraisal of the Environmental Justice Movement (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); and Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, eds., The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002). 68.  Jason Moore describes these changes as a “series of appropriations,” including “oil frontiers in the 1970s, deruralization in China, and above all, cheap food from the Green Revolution and later, debt-driven trade liberalization.” He argues that it was this “conjuncture that compelled and enabled neoliberalism to burn through its paltry inheritance of uncommodified energy, water, resources, and labor” over the past decades. Jason Moore, “Cheap Food and Bad Money: Food, Frontiers, and Financialization in the Rise and Demise of Neoliberalism,” Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 33.2–3 (2010): 253. 69.  The term “capitalist realism” is drawn from Mark Fisher’s brilliant book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Alresford, UK: Zero Books, 2009). For example, we might see contemporary poets such as Peter O’Leary, Jennifer Scappettone, Lisa Robertson, and Elizabeth Willis, among many others, taking up visions of pastoral with an ecological vantage—even a vantage attentive to profound planetary degradation—but without deploying the revolutionary perspective that defines these earlier poets’ version. One notable exception is the work of Canadian poet Stephen Collis. 70.  See Joyelle McSweeney, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014). As McSweeney describes the necropastoral, “the term ‘necropastoral’ re-marks the pastoral as a zone of exchange, shading this green theme park with the suspicion that the anthropocene epoch is in fact synonymous with ecological endtimes” (3). 71.  See Ann Marie Mikkelson, “Conclusion: Late Twentieth-Century Pastoral: Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Robertson, and the Continuity of a Mode,” in Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Joshua Corey and G. C. Waldrep, eds., The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Boise, ID: Ahsahta Press, 2012), for recent discussions and examples of pastoral in American poetry. Chapter 4 1.  These alternative formulations are central to the critical discourse of ecocriticism. For an extended consideration of these ideas in relation to the end-of-nature paradigm, see Arturo Escobar’s “After Nature: Steps to an Anti-essentialist Political Ecology,” Current Anthropology 40.1 (February 1999): 1–16. End-of-nature discourse includes Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 1980); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Tim Morton, Ecology without Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); and Paul Wapner, Living

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through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). 2.  Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989), 58. 3.  Environmental jeremiad is often framed in terms of a choice that will determine the outlook of the future. “Either we change our ways or we face global catastrophe, destroying much beauty and exterminating countless fellow species in our headlong race to apocalypse,” writes Cheryl Glotfelty, for example, in her foreword to The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryl Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), xx. 4.  Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” National Interest 6 (Summer 1989): 3. 5. McKibben, The End of Nature, 48. 6.  Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 208. 7. Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1954), 9. 8.  Fukuyama, “The End of History,” 16. 9.  Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 207. 10.  Here I am referencing the new materialist turn of the past decade, with its emphasis on horizontal entanglements and subject-object enmeshment. See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); and Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). 11.  For an astute discussion of the poetics of refrain in Spahr’s work, see Dianne Chisholm, “Juliana Spahr’s Ecopoetics: Ecologies and Politics of the Refrain,” Contemporary Literature 55.1 (Spring 2014): 118–147. For a useful framing of Juliana Spahr as a post-Language poet, see Lynn Keller, “‘Post-Language Lyric’: The Example of Juliana Spahr,” Chicago Review 55.3–4 (2010): 74–83. 12.  See Adorno’s key formulation in Aesthetic Theory: “Authentic artworks, which hold fast to the idea of reconciliation with nature by making themselves completely a second nature, have consistently felt the urge, as if in need of a breath of fresh air, to step outside of themselves. Since identity is not to be their last word, they have sought consolation in first nature. . . . The extent to which this taking a breath depends on what is mediated, on the world of conventions, is unmistakable.” Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 63. What does it mean for a literary work not only not to “step outside,” to “seek consolation in first nature,” but to stage this incapacity? If, as Adorno points out, this act of “taking a breath” is governed by longstanding “conventions,” what happens when those literary conventions become unavailable? This is a key preoccupation in “Gentle Now.”

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13.  See Raymond Williams on the definition of “nature” in Keywords: “Indeed one of the most powerful uses of nature, since C18, has been in this selective sense of goodness and innocence. Nature has meant the ‘countryside’, the ‘unspoiled places’, plants and creatures other than man. . . . Nature is what man has not made, though if he made it long enough ago—a hedgerow or a desert—it will usually be included as natural. Nature-lover and nature poetry date from this phase.” Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976; New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 169. 14.  Juliana Spahr, “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache,” in well then there now (Boston: Black Sparrow, 2011), 124. 15.  Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 99. 16. Ibid., 100. 17.  Spahr, “Gentle Now,” 124–125. 18.  Friedrich Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” in Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime: Two Essays (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), 84. 19.  Spahr, “Gentle Now,” 126. 20.  Clifton Spargo, The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 165. 21.  Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 85. 22.  Thomas Pfau defines elegy itself as “the defining characteristic of aesthetic production in Modernity” (546–548). He reads Schiller’s essay as the decisive text in conveying the elegiac aesthetics of modernity. Pfau, “Mourning Modernity: Classical Antiquity, Romantic Theory, and Elegiac Form,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, ed. Karen Weisman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 546–564. 23. William Wordsworth, “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” in Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose (New York: Norton, 2013), 68. 24.  Spahr, “Gentle Now,” 130. 25. Ibid., 130–131. 26. Williams, Keywords, 168. 27.  Spahr, “Gentle Now,” 131. 28.  Here Spahr employs the Judaic structure of confession and atonement, where the sinner confesses his “intentional” and “unintentional” transgressions. The poem as a whole employs a Judeo-Christian logic of postlapsarian loss and constitutive guilt. 29. Ibid., 132. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 132–133. 33. Sacks, The English Elegy, 4. 34.  Spahr, “Gentle Now,” 133. 35. Sacks, The English Elegy, 6. 36.  Spahr, “Gentle Now,” 133.

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37. Ibid. 38.  Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 58. 39. Ibid., 65–66. 40.  Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 243. 41. Ibid., 244. 42.  Timothy Morton, “The Dark Ecology of Elegy,” in Weisman, Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, 255. 43. Ibid., 254–255. 44.  Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 104. 45.  This is, then, a form of elegy that bears important family resemblances to the modern elegy as theorized by critics such as Jahan Ramazani and Clifton Spargo. Both Ramazani and Spargo argue that elegy from modernism forward follows a melancholic path, emphasizing discontinuity and lack of closure along with skepticism toward elegy’s preoccupation with social cohesion. If, as Spargo argues, melancholia offers an “ethics of mourning” through its acknowledgment of “the other’s uncancellable and unassimilable value,” Spahr’s poem explores what it means to have already “canceled” this “value”; its “ethics,” then, can only be construed as negative rather than subversive or resistant, as in Spargo’s version (13). See Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 46.  Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr, #Misanthropocene: 24 Theses (Oakland, CA: Commune Editions, 2014), 6. Reprinted with permission of Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr for Commune Editions. 47. Ibid., 4. 48. Ibid., 8. 49. Ibid., 3. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 3–4. 52. Ibid., 5. 53.  Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 100. 54. Ibid., 100–101. 55.  Clover and Spahr, #Misanthropocene, 8. 56. Ibid., 4–5. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., 6–7. 59. Ibid., 7.

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60. Ibid., 8. 61. Ibid., 9. 62. Ibid., 8. 63. Ibid., 8–9. 64. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 102–103. Chapter 5 1.  Susan Stewart, The Poet’s Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 198. 2.  Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 246. Original emphasis. 3. Ibid., 247, 248. 4. Ibid., 246. 5.  Paul de Man defines prosopopoeia as “the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech.” Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” MLN 94.5 (1979): 926. See also Jonathan Culler’s extended treatment of prosopopoeia in Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 186–211. 6.  Barbara Johnson, Persons and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 6. Johnson writes, “Apostrophe enables the poet to transform an ‘I–it’ relationship into an ‘I–thou’ relationship, thus making a relation between persons out of what was in fact a relation between a person and non-persons” (9). 7.  Here I follow de Man’s description of prosopopoeia as concerned with “the giving and taking away of faces, with face and deface, figure, figuration and disfiguration” (“Autobiography as De-facement,” 926). 8.  As Andreas Malm has noted, “A person’s imprint on the atmosphere varies tremendously depending on where she is born. . . . A single average U.S. citizen emits more than 500 citizens of Ethiopia, Chad, Afghanistan, Mali, or Burundi.” Andreas Malm, “The Anthropocene Myth,” Jacobin, March 3, 2015, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03 / anthropocene-capitalism-climate-change/. 9.  For Jonathan Culler, lyric address functions primarily not as a means of portraying an event in the past but of making an event occur in the moment of the poem’s utterance. He writes, “The bold wager of poetic apostrophe is that the lyric can displace a time of narrative, of past events reported, and place us in the continuing present of apostrophic address, the ‘now’ in which, for readers, a poetic event can repeatedly occur” (226). I argue here, however, that poetic address in this “anthropogenic” sense can be understood not primarily as a performative utterance that displaces context for immanent event but instead as a form of voicing grounded in and routed through specific historical situations. The poem’s address is bound up, inseparably, with the problems emergent in that present. 10.  Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 222.

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11.  The Paris Agreement was drafted in 2015; 195 United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCC) member nations have signed the agreement. See “Paris Agreement,” United Nations Treaty Collection, July 25, 2017, https://treaties.un.org/pages/ ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=XXVII-7-d&chapter=27&clang=_en. In July 2017, President Trump announced that he would withdraw the United States from the accord. 12.  For a history of the failed Kyoto Protocol, see Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014). 13.  See George W. Bush, “Letter to Members of the Senate on the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change,” The American Presidency Project, March 13, 2001, http://www.presi dency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=45811. 14.  See Katherine Seelye, “President Distances Himself from Global Warming Report,” New York Times, June 25, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/05/us/president -distances-himself-from-global-warming-report.html. For further discussion of governmental obfuscation of the causes of global warming during the Bush era, see Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 169–216. After the United States’ withdrawal, other countries brought the protocol forward into international law; in the following years, many of the member countries have in fact met their targets. However, for a variety of reasons, most centrally the fact that the top three carbon emitters—China, the United States, and India—have not committed to any meaningful climate change reduction, CO2 levels have continued to soar since 2001. 15.  The World Meteorological Organization calls the years 2000–2010 a “decade of climate extremes.” See World Meterological Organization, “Press Release No. 976,” July 3, 2013, https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/no-976-2001-2010-decade -of-climate-extremes. 16.  Andreas Malm, “China as Chimney of the World: The Fossil Capital Hypothesis,” Organization and Environment 25 (2012): 147. 17.  Malm writes, “China had, relatively speaking, low wages and high carbon intensity, certain other countries high wages and low carbon intensity, and capital flowed from the latter to the former” (“China as Chimney of the World,” 163). 18.  See Zhu Liu, “China’s Carbon Emissions Report 2015,” Harvard Kennedy School, May 2015, http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/carbon-emissions-report-2015-final .pdf. 19. Ibid., 2. 20.  Malm argues that to understand emissions in proper perspective, you must trace any given commodity back through the supply chain to its point of origin: “A sequence of emissions, running all the way from the extraction of the fossil fuels through to assembly, can be seen as embodied in the commodity, so that the actual volume of emissions caused by consumers in a country may stretch far beyond its borders” (“China as Chimney of the World,” 149).

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21.  Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Carbon Footprint of Best Conserving Americans Is Still Double Global Average,” ScienceDaily, April 29, 2008, http://www.sci encedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080428120658.htm. 22.  In “Cheap Food and Bad Money,” Jason Moore argues that the early 2000s marks the closure of what he calls the “Great Frontier” of capitalist appropriation of planetary resources (245). In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Moore describes the concomitant rise of what he calls “negative-value” in this period: “Negative-value can be understood as the accumulation of limits to capital in the web of life” (277). We might see the poems in the second half of this chapter as meditations on “negative-value” in relation to the materials they explore. 23.  In a 2008 article for Outside magazine, Bill McKibben sardonically criticizes the substitution of Prius-buying and other “green” consumer choices for significant climate action: “I am entirely in favor of green building, smart metering, carbon-neutral reggaeton festivals, presidential solar panels, eco-christenings, eco-weddings, eco-funerals. . . . But it’s still a crisis.” Bill McKibben, “It’s Not Getting Any Colder,” Outside, February 27, 2008, http://www.outsideonline.com/1892646/its-not-getting-any-colder. 24.  See, for example, the Gallup Poll on Earth Day at 40, which also aggregates various polls over the past forty years to show the decline in environmentalist values in American culture. Riley Dunlap, “At 40, Environmental Movement Endures, with Less Consensus,” Gallup, April 22, 2010, http://www.gallup.com/poll/127487/environmentalmovement-endures-less-consensus.aspx. Klein writes, “In the first decade of the new millennium, climate talk was a strikingly elite affair, the stuff of Davos panels and geewhiz TED Talks, of special green issues of Vanity Fair and celebrities arriving at the Academy Awards in hybrid cars. And yet behind the spectacle, there was virtually no discernable movement” (211). Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014). 25. Potter, Green Is the New Red. Particularly in the wake of 9/11, anarchist groups and individuals who undertook acts of vandalism and property destruction were labeled “eco-terrorists” and the government’s Homeland Security resources were employed to arrest and prosecute them. 26. Klein, This Changes Everything, 11. 27.  The provenance of the contemporary term “ecopoetics” is often traced to Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), which studies the literature of ecological dwelling and naming in writers from Wordsworth and Clare to Stevens and Bishop. But Bate’s framing of ecopoetics through a Heideggerian critique of postmodern textuality and an emphasis on canonical authors is quite far removed from the practices of ecopoetics as an emergent twenty-first-century literary mode, for which Language poetry serves as key forerunner. 28. Jonathan Skinner, “Editor’s Statement,” ecopoetics 1 (2001): 6–7. There have been several formulations of ecopoetics as an emergent mode and set of practices over the past few years. Skinner’s series on ecopoetics at Jacket2 is the first place to look for

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a dynamic account of this field. Skinner, “Ecopoetics Commentary,” Jacket2, August–­ November 2011, http://jacket2.org/commentary/conceptualizing-field. Skinner describes other important precursors to ecopoetics in American poetics and art, including the Black Mountain, Beat, and San Francisco Renaissance poets, ethnopoetics practitioners, and earth and conceptual art. Also see Brenda Iijima, ed., the ecolanguage reader (New York: Nightboat Books, 2010); Lynn Keller, “Beyond Imagining, Imagining Beyond,” PMLA 127.3 (May 2012): 579–585; Scott Knickerbocker, Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language, 1–18; Robert Hass, “American Ecopoetry: An Introduction,” in The Ecopoetry Anthology, ed. Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2013), xli–lxv; and Kate Rigby, “Ecopoetics,” in Key Words for Environmental Studies, ed. Joni Adamson, William Gleason, and David Naguib Pellow (New York: NYU Press, 2016), 79. 29.  Jonathan Skinner, “Editor’s Note,” ecopoetics 3 (2003), i. For a formulation of the return to lyric concerns at the turn of the twenty-first century in American poetry, see Juliana Spahr, introduction to American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, ed. Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 1–17. This return, in ecopoetics, to certain definitions of the lyric would surely represent a further step in the historical process that Jackson and Prins describe in their chapter on anti-lyricism in The Lyric Theory Reader. Here I’m interested in the ways this conscious return to techniques associated with lyric serves the particular end of delineating the subjective implications of ecological destruction. 30.  The Poetics Program at SUNY–Buffalo, where Jonathan Skinner, the editor of ecopoetics, was a PhD student at the time of its publication, was a legendary site in the late 1990s and early 2000s for the study and practice of avant-garde poetics. Its alumni include Juliana Spahr, Jena Osman, Yunte Huang, Kristen Prevallet, and Elizabeth Willis, among many other notable poets. Many of these writers would go on to write works, both critical and creative, that explicitly challenge the divide between “lyric” and Language poetry. 31.  Brenda Hillman, Practical Water (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 4. 32.  Practical Water is one of four books in Hillman’s tetralogy of the elements: Cascadia (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), Pieces of Air in the Epic (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), Practical Water (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), and Seasonal Work with Letters on Fire (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013). 33. Hillman, Practical Water, 4, 6. 34. Ibid., 90. 35.  Hoa Nguyen, Red Juice: Poems 1998–2008 (Seattle: Wave Books, 2014), 194, 225. © 2014 Hoa Nyugen. Poems from Red Juice reprinted with permission of the author and Wave Books. 36. Ibid., 225.

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37.  Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 221. 38. Nyugen, Red Juice, 192. 39. Hillman, Practical Water, 90–91. 40.  John Muir, “Mountain Thoughts,” in John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, ed. Linnie Marsh Wolfe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 95. 41.  Evelyn Reilly, Styrofoam (New York: Roof Press, 2009), 20, 9. 42.  Michael Leong, “the transmission of (other subsurface agents may be considered necessary for underground control,” Interim 29.1–2 (2011): 309. 43. Ibid., 311. 44. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 213. 45.  Spahr, well then there now, 76. 46. Ibid., 90. 47. Ibid., 93. 48.  Brenda Coultas, The Tatters (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014). “My Tree,” “The Midden,” “Animations,” “A Gaze,” and “The Tatters” from The Tatters © 2014 by Brenda Coultas. Published by Wesleyan University Press. Used by permission. Allison Cobb, Plastic: An Autobiography (Essay Press, September 2015), http://www.essay press.org/ep-35/. © 2015 Allison Cobb. Reprinted with permission of the author. 49. Cobb, Plastic, 48. 50. Coultas, The Tatters, 45. 51. Ibid., 14. 52. Ibid., 6. Carson writes, “It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth—eons of time in which that developing and evolving and diversifying life reached a state of adjustment and balance with its surroundings” (Silent Spring, 6). 53. Carson, Silent Spring, 6. 54. Coultas, The Tatters, 17. 55. Ibid., 15. 56.  For a powerful meditation on the persistent language of nature as feminized and recalcitrant, see Anne-Lise François, “‘Shadow-Boxing’: Empty Blows, Practice Steps, and Nature’s Hold,” Qui Parle 25.1–2 (Fall 2016): 137–177. 57. Coultas, The Tatters, 7, 17, 19. 58.  On these planetary rifts, see Brett Clark, John Bellamy Foster, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, 13–48; Bill McKibben, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” Rolling Stone, July 2012, http://www.rollingstone.com/poli tics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719; and Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016). In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Moore describes this contemporary situation as the “unsavory convergence of nature-as-tap and nature-as-sink” under twenty-first-century capitalist production (277).

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59. Coultas, The Tatters, 17. 60. Ibid., 2. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 1. 64. Ibid., 22. 65. Ibid., 24. 66. Ibid., 25. 67. Ibid., 32. 68. Ibid., 13. 69. Ibid., 45. 70. Cobb, Plastic, 59. 71.  Ibid., v. 72. Ibid., 60. 73. Ibid., 15. 74. Ibid., 22. 75. Ibid., 47. 76. Stewart, The Poet’s Freedom, 1–2. 77. Ibid., 2. 78.  Brenda Hillman, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), 13, 19. “The Body Politic Loses Its Hair” and “In the Room of Glass Breasts” from Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire © 2013 by Brenda Hillman. Published by Wesleyan University Press. Used by permission. Coda 1. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 392. 2.  Lydia O’Connor, “California’s Wild Climate Will Only Get More Volatile As Temperatures Rise,” Huffington Post, March 5, 2017, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ california-climate-temperature_us_58a49f38e4b03df370dca5cf?5l6o77pl9ynmnp14i&. 3.  Naomi Klein, “Get Ready for the First Shocks of Disaster Capitalism,” The Intercept, January 4, 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/01/24/get-ready-for-the-first-shocks -of-trumps-disaster-capitalism/. 4.  Beasts of the Southern Wild, dir. Benh Zeitlin (Century City, CA: Fox Searchlight Pictures), 2012; Take Shelter, dir. Jeff Nichols (Hollywood: Sony Pictures Classics), 2011; Tameka Jenean Norris, Post-Katrina painting series, 2009–2010, http://www.janelom bardgallery.com/tameka-norris/; Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris, The Disappearing City, 2006, digital images, http://www.polarinertia.com/may06/disappear01.htm; Nathalie Miebach, Katrina’s Track, 2016, wood, yarn, paper, 22x22x6, http://nathaliemie bach.com/gulf33.html.

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5.  Miebach’s intricate sculptures of yarn, wood, and paper, woven into patterns that map the meteorological data of powerful storms such as Hurricanes Noel and Sandy, materialize these weather systems in eerily beautiful and strangely embodied forms. 6.  Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild depicts an unfolding storm and its lingering aftermath in the bayou community of the Bathtub via a child narrator’s divigational, imaginative sense of time. Zeitlin’s film places this storm in complex relation to the melting of ice caps and reemergence of prehistoric creatures, the aurochs. 7.  Cheena Marie Lo, A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters (Oakland, CA: Commune Editions, 2016), 62. Reprinted with permission of Cheena Marie Lo. 8.  Norris paints with oil on plaid or patterned bedsheets, depicting houses in various states of decay after Katrina from photographs she took. In an interview, she says that she “wanted to remember and remap those places so that they did not disappear”; her own grandmother’s house was destroyed in the hurricane. Tameka Norris, “Tameka Norris: Almost Acquaintances,” interview in Hunger, January 30, 2014, http://www.hun gertv.com/feature/tameka-norris-almost-acquaintances/. 9.  On the environmental-justice dimensions of Katrina, see Gregory Squires and Chester Hartman, eds., There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina (New York: Routledge, 2006); and Michael Dyson, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2007). 10.  On the contemporary global history of climate refugees, see Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (New York: Nation Books, 2011). 11. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 166. 12. Lo, A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters, 39. 13.  See Elizabeth Ammons and Modhumita Roy, eds., Sharing the Earth: An International Environmental Justice Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), which gathers writings of contemporary activists from around the world. For discussions of transpacific ecopoetics, see Hsinya Huang, “Toward Transpacific Ecopoetics: Three Indigenous Texts,” Comparative Literature Studies 50.1 (2013): 120–147; and Rob Sean Wilson, “Towards an Ecopoetics of Oceania: Worlding the Asia-Pacific Region as Space-Time Ecumene,” in American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning Toward the Transpacific, ed. Yuan Shu and Donald Pease (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth University Press, 2016), 213–236.

Index

abandonment, 26 Adorno, Theodor, 11–13, 31, 43–44, 95, 132 Aeschylus, 104 Agamemnon (Aeschylus), 104 Age of Ecology, 2 agriculture, 2, 3, 13, 23, 25–30, 33, 101 air, 43–44, 55–58, 60–62 air pollution, 2, 5, 13, 38, 43, 46, 94 algae, 29, 30 Alpers, Paul, 71 Altieri, Charles, 69, 70 American Century, 16 anaphora, 98, 104 “Anasazi” (Snyder), 74 Animal Liberation Front, 117 Annie Allen (Brooks), 38, 39 Antarctica, 129 Anthropocene, 3–4, 94–95, 108–109, 114–115, 120 aposiopesis, 52 apostrophe, 5, 56, 113, 114 Arcades Project (Benjamin), 11, 12, 44 Arctic ice caps, 94 Arrighi, Giovanni, 136n10 Ashbery, John, 18, 44–45, 132; air thematized by, 43–44, 55–62; Clare’s influence on, 52–54; on complexity of the present, 62–64; on “environmental” vs. “surrounding,”

50–51; interconnectedness viewed by, 60–61; literary devices employed by, 52; waste-based poetics of, 54–55, 64 atomic bomb, 1–2, 34, 127 atomic energy, 45 back-to-the-land movement, 19, 67–68, 75 Barrell, John, 53 Bate, Jonathan, 166n27 “Bath, The” (Snyder), 70–71 Beasts of the Southern Wild (film), 130 Beatles, 69 Beck, Ulrich, 11 Benjamin, Walter, 11–12, 31, 44, 95, 129, 132, 133 Bennett, Jane, 138n40 Berger, John, 84 Berlin Wall, 92 Bernstein, Charles, 139nn49–50 “Beverly Hills, Chicago” (Brooks), 42–43 Bikini Atoll, 2 biodiversity, 1, 5, 8 biotechnology, 87–88 Black Chicago Renaissance, 37 Black Hawk Island, 30 Blake, William, 58 Book of the Dead, The (Rukeyser), 58 BP oil spill (2010), 117–118 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 18, 21–23, 36–42, 132

171

172

Index

Brower, David, 2 Brown, Bill, 138n40 Bryant, Bunyan, 36 Bryant, Levi, 138n40 Bryant, William Cullen, 11 Bulldozer in the Countryside (Rome), 21 Bush, George W., 93, 116, 118 “By Frazier Creek Falls” (Snyder), 72 California, 129, 132 “Call of the Wild, The” (Snyder), 73–74, 75 cap-and-trade programs, 117 capitalism, 1, 2; crises linked to, 3; destructiveness of, 33; environmental language co-opted by, 51; geography of, 22, 51; “Golden Age” of, 18; inequality linked to, 4; new accumulation strategies of, 85; reification under, 44; science linked to, 79; transience linked to, 12 carbon dioxide, 1, 3, 9, 94, 117, 129 Carson, Rachel, 2, 4, 78; environmental confusion depicted by, 46, 47, 50, 60; influence of, 5, 18; interconnectedness viewed by, 45, 62; technology idealized by, 79; time viewed by, 34–35, 123–124 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 93, 94, 102, 115, 120 Chapman (“Appleseed”), Johnny, 24–25 Chicago, 18, 22, 23, 36, 37, 38–42 “children of the poor, the” (Brooks), 39 China, 116–117 Choy, Timothy, 43 “City Talk” (Niedecker), 32 Clare, John, 52–53, 54, 55, 56 Clark, Timothy, 62 “Clepsydra” (Ashbery), 57 climate change, 2, 19, 91–92, 115–117, 119, 120, 129 climate justice, 133

“Climate of History, The” (Chakrabarty), 93 Clinton, Bill, 115 Closing Circle, The (Commoner), 46–48, 61 Clover, Joshua, 19, 107–111 Cobb, Allison, 122–123, 126–128 Cold War, 93 Commoner, Barry, 2, 4, 18, 45–50, 61, 62 communism, 92 Conceptual writing, 16 conservation, 45 consumerism, 32–33, 47, 66, 80, 86 Corman, Cid, 23 Coultas, Brenda, 122–126 Crabgrass Crucible (Sellers), 21 creative destruction, 1 Crutzen, Paul, 135n1 Culler, Jonathan, 121, 164n9 cultural studies, 17 Cuyahoga River fire (1969), 67 Dart, Anson, 25–26 Davidson, Michael, 69, 140n58 Dean, Tim, 157n38, 157n40 deindustrialization, 3 Deltona Corporation, 51 de Man, Paul, 114 democracy, 93 Depression, 26, 27 destructive creation, 1 dialectical nature, 12–13 Diggers movement, 68 digital writing, 16 Dillard, Annie, 49 Di Prima, Diane, 19, 66–67, 68, 69, 77–88, 111, 132, 133 disposability, 9, 14, 15, 33. See also obsolescence Double Dream of Spring (Ashbery), 43 Dowie, Mark, 86–87

Index

173

droughts, 20, 120, 129 Duncan, Aja Couchois, 95 Dungy, Camille, 148n105 Dusie Press, 15

Frost, Robert, 11 Freud, Sigmund, 105 Fukuyama, Francis, 92, 93 Fuller, Buckminster, 61

Earth Day, 45, 48, 67–68, 87 Earth First!, 74 Earth Liberation Front, 117 earthquakes, 20 Ecopoetics (journal), 118 Ehrlich, Paul, 61 elegy, 100, 102–103, 106–107 Eliot, T. S., 58, 110–111 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 9–11, 49 Empson, William, 156n22 “End of History?” (Fukuyama), 92, 93 “end of nature,” 19, 91 End of Nature, The (McKibben), 91–94 endurance, 13 Engelke, Peter, 2 Enlightenment, 12 environmentalism, 4–5, 21, 37, 45; corporatization of, 86–88; in counter­culture, 68; language of, 51 environmental racism, 36 erosion, 28, 29 eutrophication, 29 extinction, 2, 3, 19, 84–85, 88, 94, 95, 119, 124

Galbraith, John Kenneth, 2 garbage, 6, 31, 32, 37, 38–39, 119. See also landfills “Gaze, A” (Coultas), 124 “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache” (Spahr), 19, 95–111 gentrification, 40, 108–109 Ginsberg, Allen, 68, 69 glaciation, 9, 122, 94, 124, 129 globalization, 15 global warming, 2, 19, 91–92, 115–117, 119, 120, 129 Goldwater, Barry, 79 Gottlieb, Robert, 155n5, 159n64 Graham, Jorie, 95 Granite Pail, The (Niedecker), 23 Gray, Timothy, 68 Great Acceleration, 1, 2–3, 9, 73, 95, 101–102, 114, 127, 128, 133; sub-eras of, 4; storms during, 20 Great Migration, 37 Green, Rayna, 74 greenhouse gases, 116 Green Is the New Red (Potter), 117 Greenland, 129 Green Revolution, 85 Green-Wood (Cobb), 123 Grinevald, Jacques, 135n1 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 153n50

fertilizer, 28, 101, 124 financial crisis, 3 Fletcher, Angus, 52 Flight Behavior (Kingsolver), 49 floods, 20, 28, 129 folk-time, 22–23, 27, 32 “For John Clare” (Ashbery), 56–57 For Paul and Other Poems (Niedecker), 23, 29 fossil fuels, 4, 73, 94, 117 fracking, 133

habitat loss, 3, 5, 109 “Hand-Crotcheted Rug” (Niedecker), 32–33 Handmade Museum, A (Coultas), 123 Hansberry, Lorraine, 37 Haraway, Donna, 109, 111

174

Index

Hardy, Thomas, 103 Harman, Graham, 140n40 Harootunian, Harry, 144n48 Harrison, Robert Pogue, 104 “Hattie Scott” (Brooks), 41 Hays, Samuel, 45 hazardous waste, 87 Heise, Ursula, 22, 156n16 hermeneutics, 121 Hesiod, 7 Hillman, Brenda, 5–6, 119–121, 132 Hiroshima, 2 Hirsch, Arnold, 37 “Hollow Men, The” (Eliot), 110–111 Homemade/Handmade Poems (­Niedecker), 33, 34 Hoover, J. Edgar, 79 “Hudsonian Curlew, The” (Snyder), 71 hurricanes, 20; Katrina (2005), 117–118, 130–131 “Hydrology of California” (Hillman), 120–121 ice caps, 94 “In a Station of the Metro” (Pound), 6 India, 116 innovation paradigm, 15–16 Inquiry into Modes of Existence, An (Latour), 113–114 Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers (Tarn), 95 Internet, 17 In the Mecca (Brooks), 37, 38, 40, 42 Islamic fundamentalism, 93 Jackson, Virginia, 139n48 Jameson, Fredric, 11, 85 “Jemez Pueblo Ring, The” (Snyder), 74 Jennison, Ruth, 141–142n11 Johnny Appleseed legend, 24–25 Johnson, Barbara, 114 Jungle, The (Sinclair), 49

“Kitchenette building” (Brooks), 38 Klein, Naomi, 4, 117, 118 Kolbert, Elizabeth, 8 Kyoto Protocol, 19, 115–116, 118 Lake Koshkonong, 29, 30 landfills, 13, 20, 36, 37. See also garbage “land-sickness,” 28 Langan, Celeste, 82–83 Language poetry, 16, 118 Latour, Bruno, 11, 113–115 LeMenager, Stephanie, 77–78, 81–82 Leong, Michael, 121 Leopold, Aldo, 4, 24, 28, 29, 35–36, 49 Liberation News Service, 68 Liu, Zhu, 117 Living Oil (LeMenager), 77–78 Lo, Cheena Marie, 130–131 logging, 73, 88, 133 Long Twentieth Century, The (Arrighi), 136n10 Lukács, Georg, 43, 44 Malm, Andreas, 116, 136n14, 164n8, 165n17, 165n20 “Man on the Dump, The” (Stevens), 64 Marco Island, Fla., 51–52, 53 marshes, 28–29 Marx, Karl, 11 Marxism, 92 Marxism and Literature (Williams), 17 Matter of Capital, The (Nealon), 59 McClure, Michael, 68 McKeon, Michael, 70, 157n33 McKibben, Bill, 4–5, 11, 91–94, 102 McNeill, J. R., 2, 135n1 melancholia, 19, 105, 106 Melville, Herman, 49 Merchant, Carolyn, 11 Merwin, W. S., 95 methane, 3, 94

Index

metonymy, 52 Miebach, Nathalie, 130 Mikkelson, Ann Marie, 160n71 Milton, John, 103 mining, 88 “#Misanthropocene: 24 Theses” (Spahr and Clover), 19, 107–111 modernism, 14, 15–16, 17 Monkey Wrench Gang, The (Abbey), 49 Monsanto, 8 Moore, Jason, 136n10, 136n14, 160n68, 166n22 Moore, Marianne, 11, 96 Morris, Edward, 130 Morton, Tim, 106 “Mountain Thoughts” (Muir), 121 mourning, 19, 96–97, 103–107, 110 Muir, John, 49, 121 multimedia writing, 16 “My Tree” (Coultas), 125 Nagasaki, 2 Native Americans, 24, 25–26, 74, 75 “Nature” (Emerson), 9–11 Nature Conservancy, 87, 117 Nealon, Chris, 59, 61 Negative Dialectics (Adorno), 11–12 neoliberalism, 87, 94 New American poets, 16 New Goose (Niedecker), 23–28, 36 New Left, 19, 67, 68, 86 new materialism, 94–95 New Negro Poets, U.S.A., 41 “New Pangaea,” 8 “Next Year or I Fly My Rounds Tempestuous” (Niedecker), 14 Nguyen, Hoa, 119–120 Niedecker, Lorine, 132; Brooks likened to, 21–23; consumer culture assailed by, 6–8, 31–33, 39; nuclear destruction adumbrated by, 7–8, 24, 33–35; as

175

regional poet, 18, 22–31, 33, 36, 54; on temporal decay, 6–8, 9, 14; water thematized by, 28–31 9/11 attacks, 93, 118 “1937” (Niedecker), 26–27 nitrates, 46 nitrogen cycle, 1 Nixon, Richard, 79 Norris, Tameka, 130, 131 North Central (Niedecker), 24 nuclear energy, 9, 87 nuclear waste, 2 nuclear weapons, 1–2, 7–8, 24, 33–35, 127 nuclear winter, 2, 7 Obama, Barack, 116 obsolescence, 5, 13–15, 17, 26–27, 44. See also disposability ocean acidification, 1 oil shocks, 3 oil spills, 13, 67, 117–118, 120 “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” (Schiller), 99 “On the Idea of Natural-History” (Adorno), 11 overcrowding, 36, 37, 38 overpopulation, 2–3, 45, 94 Packard, Vance, 145n52, 147n89, 147n94 “Paean to Place” (Niedecker), 30 parataxis, 52 Paris Agreement (2015), 115 pastorals, 19, 67, 69–71, 73–75, 81–83, 88 “People’s planet,” 83, 85 performance writing, 16 Perloff, Marjorie, 15–16 Persians, The (Aeschylus), 104 pesticides, 28, 46–47, 87 Peters, Margot, 144n44 Pfau, Thomas, 162n22

176

Index

phenomenology, 12 phosphates, 119 “Pioneers” (Niedecker), 25–26 Plastic: An Autobiography (Cobb), 122–123, 126–128 plastics, 43, 44, 126–127 Poetry Deal, The (di Prima), 68 Population Bomb, The (Ehrlich), 61 population growth, 2–3, 45, 94 Porter, Carolyn, 10, 11 posthumanism, 95 post-Language writing, 16 Potter, Will, 117 Pound, Ezra, 6, 16, 72, 73 Practical Water (Hillman), 5–6, 119, 120, 124, 132 primitivism, 74–75 Prins, Yopie, 139n48 prosopopoeia, 5, 56, 113, 114 racism, 18, 36–37, 87, 131 radioactivity, 2 Rag (publication), 68 Ramazani, Jahan, 140n51, 140n57, 163n45 Ramparts (magazine), 67 readership, 17 Reagan, Ronald, 87 “Recital, The” (Ashbery), 62 recursivity, 18, 108, 110 recycling, 87 Reilly, Evelyn, 121 residuality, 17 Restless Continent (Duncan), 95 “Revolutionary Letter #33” (di Prima), 82–83 “Revolutionary Letter #34” (di Prima), 80–81 “Revolutionary Letter #38” (di Prima), 66–67, 68 “Revolutionary Letter #39” (di Prima), 83–84

“Revolutionary Letter #54” (di Prima), 79 Revolutionary Letters (di Prima), 19, 67, 68, 69, 77–85, 111 revolutionary pastoralism, 67 Rio Earth Summit (1992), 116 Rivers and Mountains (Ashbery), 43, 57 Roberson, Ed, 95 Rock River, 29 Romanticism, 10, 11, 15, 48, 82, 96, 98, 100, 101 Romantic Vagrancy (Langan), 82–83 Rome, Adam, 21, 45 Roots: A Radical Ecological Perspective (publication), 68 Rukeyser, Muriel, 58 rurality, 18, 33 Sacks, Peter, 98, 103 Sand, Kaia, 8–9, 14–15 Sand County Almanac, A (Leopold), 29 Santa Barbara oil spill, 67 Sayler, Susannah, 130 Schiller, Friedrich, 99, 100–101 Schmidt, Christopher, 54, 64 Schumpeter, Joseph, 1 Schuster, Joshua, 137n28 sea level rise, 94 Sellers, Christopher, 21 Sense of Place, Sense of Planet (Heise), 22, 156n16 Series of Un/Natural/Disasters, A (Lo), 130–131 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 49 Shoptaw, John, 54 Sierra Club, 87 Silent Spring (Carson), 34–35, 45–49, 60, 78, 124 Skinner, Jonathan, 118 Slovic, Scott, 150–151n23 Smith, Mick, 74

Index

Smith, Neil, 145n72 “Smokey the Bear Sutra” (Snyder), 65–67, 68 “Snow Man, The” (Stevens), 93 Snyder, Gary, 68, 82, 83, 88, 132; counterculture linked to, 19, 67; counterculture mocked by, 65–66, 75–76; future foreseen by, 73–74, 76–77, 85, 87; human likened to nonhuman by, 73; as pastoral poet, 70–71; Pound’s influence on, 72; as primitivist, 74–75 soil pollution, 2, 13, 94 Spahr, Juliana, 19, 95–111, 132 Spanish Civil War, 26 Spargo, Clifton, 100, 163n45 species extinction, 2, 3, 19, 84–85, 88, 94, 95, 119, 124 spondee, 27, 72 Staying with the Trouble (Haraway), 109 Steffen, Will, 135n1 Stevens, Wallace, 57, 64, 93 Stevenson, Adlai, 61 Stewart, Susan, 15, 113, 114, 128 “Straight-Creek—Great Burn” (Snyder), 73 Street in Bronzeville, A (Brooks), 38, 40 strontium-90, 2 Styrofoam (Reilly), 121 subjectivity, 44 suburbia, 18, 21, 45 “System, The” (Ashbery), 57, 59 Take Shelter (film), 130 Tarn, Nathaniel, 95 Tatters, The (Coultas), 122–123, 124–126, 127 “Tatters, The” (Coultas), 125–126 That Winter the Wolf Came (Spahr), 107 This Changes Everything (Klein), 117 “This Compost” (Whitman), 54–55

177

“This Is Just to Say” (Williams), 34 Thoreau, Henry David, 49 Three Poems (Ashbery), 43, 44, 50, 52, 55, 56, 57, 59–60, 61–63 “Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth), 101 “Tiny Arctic Ice” (Sand), 8–9, 15, 132 “Tomorrow’s Song” (Snyder), 72–73 To See the Earth before the End of the World (Roberson), 95 tourism, 53 toxins, 2, 5, 13, 18, 36–37, 87 Transcendentalism, 48 transience, 12, 13 Trauerspiel (Benjamin), 11–12 trochee, 72 Trump, Donald, 116, 129, 155n1 Tsing, Anna, 138n39 “Turn to Language and the 1960s, The” (Watten), 68–69 Turtle Island (Snyder), 19, 67, 68–78, 79, 82, 85 12 Million Black Voices (Wright), 37 “Unnamed Dragonfly Species” (Spahr), 122 Upton, Lee, 143n27 urbanization, 3, 18, 36–37 Vermont Notebook (Ashbery), 43, 45, 51, 52–56, 64 Virgil, 7 wakefulness, 48 Walden (Thoreau), 49 Wallace, George, 79 war, 33–34. See also nuclear weapons Ward, Barbara, 61 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 110 Waste Makers, The (Packard), 145n52, 147n89, 147n94 Watten, Barrett, 68–69, 88

178

Index

water supply, 94 water pollution, 2, 28–29. See also oil spills Well then there now (Spahr), 122 “What Happened Here Before” (Snyder), 76–77 What Is Pastoral? (Alpers), 71 Whitman, Walt, 11, 49, 54, 95 “Wild Mushroom, The” (Snyder), 71 Williams, Raymond, 17, 48, 59, 101 Williams, William Carlos, 34 “Wintergreen Ridge” (Niedecker), 34

Wisconsin, 6, 18, 22, 23, 25, 29, 35–36, 54 Wordsworth, William, 49, 57, 100 World Trade Organization (WTO), 116, 118 Worster, Donald, 2, 135n4 Wright, Richard, 37, 38, 39 “Yellow Submarine” (Beatles), 69 Zerzan, John, 74 Zukofsky, Louis, 28, 143n34, 143n39, 144n42

Jasper Bernes, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization Annie McClanahan, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture Amy Hungerford, Making Literature Now J. D. Connor, The Studios after the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood, 1970–2010 Michael Trask, Camp Sites: Sex, Politics, and Academic Style in Postwar America Loren Glass, Counter-Culture Colophon: Grove Press, the “Evergreen Review,” and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde Michael Szalay, Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party Jared Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling Jerome Christensen, America’s Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures