Geopoetry

Geology, Materiality, Ecopoetics

Dale Enggass

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780826365583
• eBook ISBN: 9780826365590
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

At its core, geopoetics proposes that a connection between language and geology has become a significant development in post–World War II poetics. In Geopoetry, Dale Enggass argues that certain literary works enact geologic processes, such as erosion and deposition, and thereby suggest that language itself is a geologic––and not a solely human-based––process. Elements of language extend past human control and open onto an inhuman dimension, which raises the question of how literary works approach the representation of nonhuman realms. Enggass examines the work of Clark Coolidge, Robert Smithson, Ed Dorn, Maggie O'Sullivan, Jeremy Prynne, Jen Bervin, Christian Bök, and Steve McCaffery, and he finds that while many of these authors are not traditionally connected to ecocritical writing, their innovations are central to ecocritical concerns. In treating language as a geological material, these authors interrogate the boundary between human and nonhuman realms and offer a model for a complex literary engagement with the Anthropocene.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Language of Geology and the Geology of Language
• Chapter 1. Printed Matter: Robert Smithson’s Depositions
• Chapter 2. “The World Soul / Slumbers in Matter”: Gunslinger and The Magic Door
• Chapter 3. Bedrock and Drift: Earth, Language, and Bodies in J.H. Prynne and Maggie O’Sullivan
• Chapter 4. “Clasitc Mates”: Sedimentary Language in Clark Coolidge and Steve McCaffery
• Chapter 5. Cropping the Desert: Erasure, Erosion, and Reclamation in Jen Birvin and John C. Van Dyke
• Chapter 6. Crystal Gazing
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index