Ecopoetics

Essays in the Field

Angela Hume, Gillian Osborne, Angela Hume, Gillian Osborne

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781609385590
• eBook ISBN: 9781609385606
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field makes a formidable intervention into the emerging field of ecopoetics. The volume's essays model new and provocative methods for reading twentieth and twenty-first century ecological poetry and poetics, drawing on the insights of ecocriticism, contemporary philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, black studies, Native studies, critical race theory, and disability studies, among others. 

Contributors offer readings of a diverse range of poets, few of whom have previously been read as nature writers—from midcentury Beat poet Michael McClure, Objectivist poet George Oppen, and African American poets Melvin Tolson and Robert Hayden; to contemporary writers such as Diné poet Sherwin Bitsui, hybrid/ collage poets Claudia Rankine and Evelyn Reilly, emerging QPOC poet Xandria Phillips, and members of the Olimpias disability culture artists' collective. While addressing preconceptions about the categories of nature writing and ecopoetics, contributors explore, challenge, and reimagine concepts that have been central to environmental discourse, from apocalypse and embodiment to toxicity and sustainability. 

This collection of essays makes the compelling argument that ecopoetics should be read as "coextensive with post-1945 poetry and poetics," rather than as a subgenre or movement within it. It is essential reading for any student or scholar working on contemporary literature or in the environmental humanities today. 
Contributors: Joshua Bennett, Rob Halpern, Matt Hooley, Angela Hume, Lynn Keller, Petra Kuppers, Michelle Niemann, Gillian Osborne, Samia Rahimtoola, Joan Retallack, Joshua Schuster, Jonathan Skinner.
 

PART ONE

The Apocalyptic Imagination

1

Making Art “Under These Apo-Calypso Rays”

Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics

LYNN KELLER

I belong to a generation born after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but raised in their shadow. We grew up in the Cold War era of aboveground nuclear testing and bomb shelters, with the constant threat of nuclear war, and in the time of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, with its dire warnings of environmental poisoning. The end of the world loomed over us. Just as John Ashbery, born in 1927, could claim that his generation “grew up surreal,” I would venture that my own grew up apocalyptic.¹ No doubt my personal experience with the anxiety of such awareness was partly responsible for my asserting in a published forum on sustainability that apocalyptic literature was likely to be of limited usefulness to what I termed a “literature toward sustainability.”² My sense has been that apocalypticism can as readily lead to paralysis as to action or if not to paralysis, then to a falsely placating sense of having already done something about the danger simply by fearfully recognizing it. I’m not alone in having doubts about the current usefulness of apocalyptic discourse. There’s a widespread sense that too much doom talk tends to produce a kind of deafness in those addressed. The telling phrase “apocalypse fatigue” appeared in the headline of a November 2009 article in the Guardian by environmental strategists Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, where they claim that apocalyptic rhetoric has only polarized the politics surrounding climate change and undermined public faith in climate science.³

Yet apocalyptic thinking is so much a part of the Judeo-Christian inheritance that in these times of increasing awareness of global warming, mass extinction, and pervasive toxic pollution, apocalyptic rhetoric continues to attract poets, even those who are skeptical of its power or conscious of its limitations. This essay will examine how two such poets, Jorie Graham and Evelyn Reilly, have adapted this rhetoric to the particular pressures posed by contemporary environmental crisis awareness, even as they critique the mode or attempt to self-consciously avoid its pitfalls. Jorie Graham, in the earnestly apocalyptic poems of Sea Change, and Evelyn Reilly, in the mockingly metapoetic and self-consciously ambivalent exploration of apocalyptic discourse in Apocalypso, employ differing poetics as well as contrasting tones, yet both offer distinct modes of pleasure as counterpoint to the potentially overwhelming darkness of apocalyptic thinking. Those pleasures, moreover, are connected to a shared awareness of embodied embeddedness in threatened ecosystems. In Graham’s poetry, such embeddedness puts into sharp relief the aesthetic pleasures of the pastoral, which has often provided a literary foil to apocalyptic destruction. In Reilly’s apocalyptic writing, embeddedness is registered most through human connection to nonhuman animal species and their destinies. For Reilly, paying attention to oncoming disaster in a context of ongoing crisis requires especially the pleasures of humor—even if, as in the blues, the pleasure of laughter may be mixed with pain. As in Graham’s work, this double burden of ongoing crisis and threatening apocalypse encourages renewed appreciation of presently available sensory delights.

Lawrence Buell has argued that “apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal.” He continues:

Of no other dimension of contemporary environmentalism, furthermore, can it be so unequivocally said that the role of the imagination is central to the project; for the rhetoric of apocalypticism implies that the fate of the world hinges on the arousal of the imagination to a sense of crisis. It presupposes that “the most dangerous threat to our global environment may not be the strategic threats themselves but rather our perception of them, for most people do not yet accept the fact that this crisis is extremely grave.”⁴

Such writing, in which “the imagination is being used to anticipate and, if possible, forestall actual apocalypse,” may be justified by the hope of practical efficacy; for Buell, “even the slimmest of possibilities is enough to justify the nightmare.”⁵ Yet the potential pitfalls are many. The most commonly cited risk is that of seeming to cry wolf; the public learns to dismiss claims of impending catastrophe as dire predictions fail to prove true—even when the predicted scenarios may not have materialized because people recognized and averted the danger. Other acknowledged problems with apocalyptic environmental literature include its extreme moral dualism (noted by Greg Garrard, among others) and the genre’s implicit reliance on the “pastoral as the template for alternative scenarios.”⁶ When explaining “The Trouble with Apocalypse,” Garrard notes that the rhetoric of catastrophe tends to produce the crisis it purportedly describes, generates polarized responses, and tends to simplify scientific findings and compromise scientific caution because of millennial panic.⁷

However, the problems that most concern me in relation to poetry arise from the issue with which I opened: how apocalypticism shapes politically consequential individual and social affects. The onslaught of dire news concerning an endless stream of seemingly irreversible anthropogenic environmental changes can produce profound emotional and cognitive exhaustion and even a kind of shutdown that discourages acts that might help avert catastrophe. The predictions of doom feel too convincing, while the awareness of environmental transformation on scales vast enough to warrant the new epochal designation of the Anthropocene only reinforces feelings of hopeless disempowerment. Those emotions may weaken the will toward collective action. What I’m describing may be the inverse of Garrard’s assertion that “only if we imagine that the planet has a future, after all, are we likely to take responsibility for it.”⁸

In considering ways around or through this state of apocalyptic emotional exhaustion, I have found useful some ideas that Frederick Buell presents in From Apocalypse to Way of Life. His central claim that “environmental crisis seems increasingly a feature of present normality, not an imminent, radical rupture of it” amounts to a less generation-specific version of my assertion about growing up apocalyptic—an assertion also anticipated by Ulrich Beck’s influential conception of our “risk society,” which, he says, has “come to take for granted . . . the impending ‘suicide of the species.’”⁹ Frederick Buell proposes that we

abandon apocalypse for a sadder realism that looks closely at social and environmental changes in process and recognizes crisis as a place where people dwell, both in their commonalities and in their differences from each other. Seen thus, problems will have both gone beyond and become too intimate to suggest authoritarian solutions or escape—for dwelling in crisis means facing the fact that one dwells in a body and in ecosystems, both of which are already subject to considerable degradation, modification, and pressure. No credible refuge from damage to these is at hand.¹⁰

The response to dwelling in crisis that Buell advocates is an initially individual act of “coming to one’s senses in a damaged world.” A “persistent awareness of ‘embodiment’ and ‘embeddedness’ in ecosystems,” he argues, can teach one to “[dwell] actively within rather than accommodating oneself to environmental crisis.” Such awareness “makes people experience in their senses the full impact of dwelling in environmental and ecosocial deterioration and rising risk,” which in turn, he optimistically claims, prompts more focus on ecological and social health and more caring behavior toward the environment with which people recognize themselves to be intimately involved.¹¹ Happily for environmental poets with similar views, among poetry’s long-celebrated powers is its ability to help us come to our senses in literal as well as figurative ways. Moreover, “coming to one’s senses” can bring joy as well as knowledge of damage or vulnerability. Buell’s “sadder realism” therefore seems an inadequate term for the environmentally grounded vision of these poets.

While Buell urges abandonment of apocalyptic discourse in favor of writing that emphasizes ongoing crisis, I contend that actively “dwelling in crisis” in the way he outlines does not preclude anticipation of dramatic catastrophe on top of the creeping degradations one already inhabits. Although Buell regards such active dwelling as generating a commitment to care for the environment, that mode of thinking and behaving does not necessarily increase one’s empowerment or ensure such strong social change that the sense of impending doom disappears. This may well be more evident currently than it was in 2004, when his book was published. Poets like Reilly and Graham write with an awareness of inhabiting a world already in crisis even as they also anticipate or prophesy more devastating changes to come. In the readings that follow, I will analyze the differing ways in which Graham and Reilly convey awareness of embodiedness and embeddedness in increasingly vulnerable ecosystems. Their work counterbalances cataclysmic vision with kinds of perception that make it more bearable and less emotionally exhausting. Hoped-for consequences include freeing politically and existentially useful energy and inspiring its devotion to (re)opening the search for meaningful courses of environmental action.

There has previously been consensus among those who analyze apocalyptic discourse that, as a rhetoric, apocalypticism is “a strategy of persuasion or coercion that interrupts routine and acquiescence with a call of alarm” whose usual function is to persuade the audience to change course.¹² Environmentalist apocalyptic writings, as Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline Palmer noted in the mid-1990s, “are not to be taken literally. Their aim is not to predict the future but to change it.”¹³ When one writes from the already hazardous position of dwelling in crisis, however, this function of apocalyptic rhetoric may be destabilized if not undone. Graham’s and Reilly’s engagement with apocalyptic discourse acknowledges that the destruction of life as we know it is well under way; at the same time, it reflects at least an intermittent hope that humans might have the will and the ability to change course with sufficient speed. Graham writes of the “obligatory / hope” that the artist must take up, despite inner resistance, in order to continue creating: “hope forced upon oneself by one’s self” “before the next catastrophe.”¹⁴ That precariously hopeful perspective proves difficult to maintain, however, as the consequentiality of anthropogenic environmental changes becomes ever more evident. For Graham and Reilly, the impulse to warn becomes entangled with the desire for escape, with grief, with despair.

From the opening moments of Sea Change, Graham conveys a clear awareness that once-dreaded changes have already begun. The first poem, “Sea Change,” opens onto an extreme weather event perceived as part of an ongoing “unnegotiable / drama” of environmental dissolution:

One day: stronger wind than anyone expected. Stronger than

ever before in the recording

of such. Un-

natural says the news. Also the body says it. Which part of the body—I look

down, can

feel it, yes, don’t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Ecopoetics as Expanded Critical Practice: An Introduction
• Part 1. The Apocalyptic Imagination
• Part 2. Embodiment and Animality
• Part 3. Environmental Justice
• Part 4. Beyond Sustainability
• Notes
• Permissions
• Index
• Series List