Ecopoetics

Ecopoetics
contemporary north american poetry series
Series Editors Alan Golding, Lynn Keller,

and Adalaide Morris
ecopoetics •
Essays in the Field
Edited by Angela Hume
and Gillian Osborne
u n i v e r s i t y o f i owa p r e s s ,
i owa c i t y
University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242
Copyright © 2018 by the University of Iowa Press
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Contents
Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Ecopoetics as Expanded Critical Practice: An Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne
part 1. The Apocalyptic Imagination

1. Making Art “Under These Apo-Calypso Rays”:
Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Lynn Keller
2. “The Idiot Stone”: George Oppen’s Geological
Imagination; Or, Objectivist Realism as Ecopoetics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Rob Halpern
Part 2. Embodiment and Animality

3. Visceral Ecopoetics in Charles Olson and Michael McClure:
Proprioception, Biology, and the Writing Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Jonathan Skinner
4. Playing in the Planetary Field: Vulnerability and Syncretic
Myth Making in Robert Duncan’s Ecopoetics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
Michelle Niemann
5. “Beyond the Vomiting Dark”: Toward a Black Hydropoetics. . . . . . . . . . 102
Joshua Bennett
6. Writing with the Salamander: An Ecopoetic
Community Performance Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
Petra Kuppers
Part 3. Environmental Justice

7. Toxic Recognition: Coloniality and Ecocritical Attention. . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Matt Hooley
8. Toward an Antiracist Ecopoetics: Waste and
Wasting in the Poetry of Claudia Rankine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Angela Hume
Part 4. Beyond Sustainability

9. “Hung Up in the Flood”: Resilience, Variability,
and the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Samia Rahimtoola
10. Reading the Environs: Toward a Conceptual Ecopoetics. . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
Joshua Schuster
11. Hard Days Nights in the Anthropocene. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
Joan Retallack
Notes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
Permissions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
Acknowledgments
Without the support of many people, this book would not have been possible. We
are grateful to all those who participated in the Conference on Ecopoetics at the
University of California, Berkeley, in February 2013. Their energy, imagination,
and passion for ecopoetics inspired this book in the first place. We are especially
indebted to our conference co-organizer, Margaret Ronda, and to Brenda Hill-
man, both of whose brilliance and guidance have enriched our understanding
of ecopoetics.
In addition to this volume’s individual essay contributors, we wish to thank a
number of scholars and poets who have been especially important to our thinking
about ecopoetics: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Joshua Corey, Adam Dickinson, Camille
Dungy, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Anne-Lise François, Forrest Gander, Cecil Giscombe,
Robert Hass, Brenda Iijima, Myung Mi Kim, Rusty Morrison, Craig Santos Perez,
Sonya Posmentier, Claudia Rankine, Jed Rasula, Evelyn Reilly, Frances Richard,
Evie Shockley, Juliana Spahr, Heidi Lynn Staples, Laura-Gray Street, G. C. Waldrep,
Tyrone Williams, Laura Woltag, and Michael Ziser. Our gratitude goes also to the
two anonymous readers who provided generous, encouraging feedback on our
manuscript in its early stages. We thank James McCoy and Susan Hill Newton at
the University Iowa Press and series editors Adalaide Morris, Lynn Keller, and Alan
Golding for their enthusiastic commitment to our project. An additional thank-you
to Lynn Keller, whose informal advising was indispensable.
Finally, we wish to thank our families and friends for their support and encour-
agement in all our endeavors.
Ecopoetics
•
Ecopoetics as Expanded Critical Practice
An Introduction
Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne
This book began with an event. In February 2013, scholars, poets, artists, activists,
and educators gathered at the University of California, Berkeley, for the first-ever
Conference on Ecopoetics. Along with Margaret Ronda, we organized this con-
ference in order to open up a conversation around a term that had been circulating
in both academic and poetry circles with increasing frequency. We could not have
anticipated how the conference would inspire a weekend-long performance of
ecopoetics itself. There were traditional academic panels but also creative, partic-
ipatory, and lab-based sessions. There were two marathon poetry readings along
with snacks made with locally foraged plants and fungi by a food activist. There
were educational excursions and installations throughout the Bay Area. Conference
participants visited Treasure Island, a former navy base where some areas are still
contaminated by radioactive waste; Arrowhead Marsh, one of the East Bay’s last
remaining wetlands and a restored wildlife habitat; Point Reyes National Seashore;
and an urban farm. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass led participants on a
tour of campus trees. The conference concluded with a service project at Strawberry
Creek, an ongoing restoration site that runs through the main campus area.1
Leading up to the conference, we were inundated with registrations. When
we ran out of slots and closed registration due to resource constraints, people
showed up anyway. They drew pictures and wrote poems on our registration forms.
They sat cross-legged on the floors of packed classrooms. They organized off-site
events—reflections on the concept of ecology in a Berkeley backyard garden beside
a “pond of unlimited facilities” and a poetry reading in downtown Oakland in a
musty old building that housed the radical, autonomous Bay Area Public School.2
The conference was quickly transformed through its interactions with the social
and material ecologies of the Bay Area. Ecopoetics flourished and abounded.
Ecopoetics might be defined as “the incorporation of an ecological or environ-
mental perspective into the study of poetics,” as Kate Rigby has suggested.3 One
thing the Conference on Ecopoetics illustrated is how capaciously poets and critics
understand the concepts both of an ecological perspective and of poetics. Partic-
ipants demonstrated that ecopoetics can encompass experiments in community
making, ranging from poetry and visual art, literary criticism, and performance
to walking, foraging, farming, cooking, and being alongside each other, whether
human or other than human, in space and place.4 The fullness of these practices
reflects the Greek etymological roots of ecopoetics: “eco” from oikos, meaning
“family,” “property,” and “house,” and “poetics” from poiesis, meaning “to make,”
in a broad sense.
When we started envisioning the Conference on Ecopoetics in early 2012, it was
clear that for many poets from different schools, scenes, and places, ecology and
nature were not only important themes for poetry, as they have always been, but
urgent points of contention. Poets were and are continuing to actively investigate
enduring assumptions about what nature has been, might be, or will be and about
which objects, bodies, people, and experiences count as natural. Along these lines,
Brenda Hillman argues that “a term like ‘ecopoetics’ is not meant to narrow but to
open the conversation about poetry’s relationship to the environments.”5 We see this
sentiment evidenced by several widely inclusive poetry anthologies from the past
decade, all of which are edited by poets: Camille Dungy’s Black Nature, a volume that
reexamines African American voices within ecological poetry; Joshua Corey and G. C.
2 Introduction
Waldrep’s The Arcadia Project, which emphasizes experimental poetic traditions and
techniques; and Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street’s The Ecopoetry Anthology,
which showcases a range of formal techniques, suggesting connections among and
across various periods, schools, and traditions. These anthologies demonstrate an
expansive engagement with the concept of nature by poets, some of whom have
been among the most commonly anthologized and others whom had previously
been left out of nature poetry canons.
Until recently, this growing interest in poetry, poetics, and ecology among
both poets and scholars was not fully reflected in literary criticism. Now articles
on ecopoetry and ecopoetics appear in academic journals with greater frequency.
Scholarly work in and on ecopoetics has gained visibility in realms outside of eco-
criticism as well, with critics starting to make connections between ecopoetics and
debates within gender and sexuality, critical race, and disability studies, among
others.6 That said, intersectional scholarship on ecopoetics is still just beginning
to emerge.7 And while scholars have begun to take seriously the phenomenon of
ecologically oriented poetry and poetics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,
they have yet to articulate how, arguably, ecopoetics is not so much a subcategory
or a school within but rather a coextension of post-1945 poetry and poetics. We
think that any scholar of post-1945 literature, not just scholars working on poetry
and the environment, should attend to the influence of ecopoetics—an approach
to both writing and reading—on contemporary poetry and theory more broadly.
It is this view that inspired Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field, and it is this narrower sense
of ecopoetics as critical practice with which our book is primarily concerned.
With the advent of the atomic bomb, the development of systems theory and
quantum physics, and the escalation of fossil fuel and other natural resource ex-
traction and exhaustion by humans—precisely the types of historical phenomena
that are often used to periodize postmodern or contemporary literature in the first
place—came new forms of ecological consciousness. Fredric Jameson, for exam-
ple, defined postmodernism as “what you have when the modernization process
is complete and nature is gone for good” and dated the beginning of this era to
1973, the year of the first oil crisis, making late capitalism synonymous with late
oil culture.8 With these new material realities and forms of consciousness came
new forms and practices for poetry. In the years preceding the first oil crisis, var-
Introduction 3
ious experimental poetries—objectivism, composition by field, projective verse,
and other modernist-influenced renovations of form—anticipated postmodern
environmental consciousness and registered poetry’s evolved sense of the ma-
terial interconnection of all life, anxieties about annihilation and extinction, and
humanity’s impact on and place in geologic time and history.
Many of these midcentury practices have been particularly influential for con-
temporary ecopoetry and ecopoetics, as several of the essays in this volume demon-
strate. In fact, we could have easily organized Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field into two
sections: the first focusing on the ecopoetics of objectivism, Black Mountain poetry,
and the New American Poetry, and the second on contemporary ecopoetic practices
that, arguably, inherit and adapt these traditions. Such an organization would have
implied a different literary history for ecopoetics than has been often assumed,
displacing the preservationist triumvirate of Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder, and
Wendell Berry, who have often been discussed as the harbingers of contemporary
ecopoetry, and foregrounding instead the influence of the midcentury avant-garde.9
It would have simultaneously decentered a perceived lyric tradition practiced by
such poets as Berry and Snyder, elevating instead the influence of modernist and
innovative free-verse forms like collage and projective verse practiced by such poets
as Robert Duncan and Charles Olson.10
Our title and subtitle—Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field—give a nod to these midcen-
tury traditions, invoking Olson’s notion of field composition and Duncan’s related
ideas about composition by field and suggesting the influence of twentieth-century
experimental practices like Olson’s and Duncan’s on environmental thinking and
ecopoetics today. For Duncan, the poem is “a field of ratios in which events appear in
language” and in which language’s parts—its sounds, stresses, images—contribute
to a greater dynamic design of complex meaning.11 While poetry composed in a
field is not organic material or life itself, it gets as close to the organic as possible
without actually becoming it: “a word has the weight of an actual stone [and the]
tone of a vowel has the color of a wing,” Duncan writes.12 The content of the field
poem “arises as the living body or form,” a body conditioned by its organs and
systems.13 Thus, the field poem is “a practicing of our life in language”—and that
“life” is “the life-story not only of man, but of animals, not only of animals, but
of the DNA code-language, not only of the DNA code-language, but of elements
4 Introduction
themselves.”14 Duncan’s field metaphor is an ecological one that reflects how the
scientific principles of ecology had, by midcentury, begun to enter mainstream
environmental and avant-garde poetic imaginations.
But while a number of the essays in Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field do suggest that
contemporary ecopoetics might be understood as arising from an ecologically ori-
ented midcentury avant-garde, mapping this trajectory is not our only interest. In
addition, we aim to highlight the changing and intersectional nature of ecopoetics
as both poetry and critical practice today. In recognition of the range of writing
types to which the term “ecopoetics” might be applied, we intend our title to invoke
a diversity of field-writing practices. While the field persists as a metaphor today,
and while American poetry continues to be framed as flourishing within the open
fields of American space, our subtitle might also point toward recent postpastoral
and postgeorgic reimaginations of the field: Cecily Parks’s Field Folly Snow, for
example, or C. S. Giscombe’s Prairie Style.15 To this end, we have organized this
book into four parts, each of which articulates a prominent line of thinking in the
current critical study of ecopoetics. We think that this organization also helps clarify
the fact that the primary contribution of this volume is not so much a rewriting of
literary history—that is to say, a single, sustained argument about poetry—as it is
a demonstration of where ecopoetics as critical practice seems to be heading. The
foremost aim of this book is to perform much-needed work on a rapidly developing
critical field—or, alternatively, as our subtitle suggests, to explore the dynamic
potential of the essay within that evolving field.
We have collected essays that draw from and contribute to a range of fields and
subfields and that foreground experimental work by women and queer poets, poets
of color, and poets with disabilities, work that continues to be underrepresented
not only in ecocriticism but in literature studies more broadly. Part 1, “The Apoc-
alyptic Imagination,” features essays that examine poetry’s history of attempting
to think the end of nature, the end of the human, and the end of the world, capi-
talizing on or, alternatively, undermining what Lawrence Buell describes as “the
single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary imagination has at
its disposal.”16 In part 2, “Embodiment and Animality,” we draw together essays
that focus on ecopoetics as embodied practice as well as a literary archive. These
essays examine legacies of Romantic organicism, projective verse, Beat poetics,
Introduction 5
and the black radical tradition and bring ecopoetics into conversation with science,
animal and plant, queer, disability, and critical race studies. Part 3, “Environmental
Justice,” explores how poetry articulates the uneven distribution of environmental
risk. These essays illuminate how poetry can lend form to material, embodied ex-
periences of environmental racism and toxic burden. The essays gathered in part
4, “Beyond Sustainability,” consider possibilities for ecopoetics as an imaginary
and ethical counterpoint to environmental management and sustainable devel-
opment paradigms. In some of these readings, ecopoetics is modulated by a kind
of recessive action: while poetry may not transform human systems, the practice
of ecopoetics can constitute an openness to what exists or what might exist.17 In
others, ecopoetics constructs playful geometries of attention (to borrow Joan Re-
tallack’s phrase) that have the power to bridge theory with pedagogy and praxis.
Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field is one of the first consolidated efforts to bring a
range of critical approaches to ecopoetics and to treat the scholarly essay, too, as
ecopoetics.18 At the same time, there are schools, methods, voices, and environ-
mental interests not represented here, adequately or at all. We would have liked,
for example, to include writing on ecopoetics in relation to Language poetry, Lati-
no/a/x poetry, and the Asian American avant-garde, among others. The gaps here
are due in part to space restrictions. They are also due to the fact that ecopoetics is
still in the process of establishing a foundational body of scholarly work. We lay
no claim to comprehensiveness; however, we do hope that Ecopoetics: Essays in the
Field will inspire other scholars to imagine ecopoetics with attention to methods
and poetries beyond those addressed here.
Ecopoetics Then and Now

Like ecocriticism—environmental criticism, green cultural studies, ecocritique—
ecopoetics has gone by different names. Sometimes it is used interchangeably with
the term “ecopoetry,” and at times we, too, use these terms nearly synonymously.19
In The Ecopoetry Anthology, Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street name three
kinds of ecopoetry: nature poetry, environmental poetry, and ecological poetry.20
According to their taxonomy, nature poetry, inspired by a lyric tradition, takes the
experience of the poet as its starting place, while environmental poetry focuses
6 Introduction
on nonhuman experiences and conditions. A third category, ecological poetry,
extends the antilyric experimentalism of avant-garde poetics in the direction of
the ecological. As helpful as these categories may be, they raise almost as many
questions as they answer. If nature poems and ecological poems resemble other
kinds of poetry—lyrics or avant-garde antilyrics, respectively—is it their content
alone that ultimately tips them toward nature or ecology?21 Is a beast or a moun-
tain all it takes to turn a poem into an ecopoem? If this is the case, one becomes
hard-pressed to find poems within the Western tradition that couldn’t be counted
as ecopoems.
Although ecopoetics as critical practice has been, as one critic puts it, a “tributary
of ecocriticism,” it has also had a distinct critical trajectory.22 While ecocriticism
builds on certain predecessors—seminal works by critics like Norman Foerst-
er, Roderick Nash, and Leo Marx, who investigated the significance of nature,
wilderness, and the pastoral in American literature and culture—it had its real
beginnings in the 1980s, with its first significant publications arriving mostly in
the 1990s. While several recent anthologies trace the phases through which eco-
criticism has already passed, these phases were largely anticipated two decades ago
by Cheryll Glotfelty in her introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader. Glotfelty identifies
three stages for ecocriticism: a period in which critics trace representations of nature
in literature, followed by efforts to recover or establish a canon of nature writing,
and finally a theoretical phase, in which critics investigate concepts informing the
division between nature and culture as well as new ways of thinking informed by
ecological models.
Glotfelty presciently predicts that ecocriticism will become “ever more inter-
disciplinary, multicultural, and international,” committed to social justice. 23 We
see a comparable trajectory in ecopoetics as well. But while ecocriticism tended
to favor the representative capabilities of prose in works by writers such as Henry
David Thoreau, John Muir, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez—Lawrence Buell’s 1995
The Environmental Imagination is an exemplary study—ecopoetics has forwarded
forms of environmental imagination that do not necessarily require mimetic ac-
curacy. Critics have become more explicit about this difference. In 2012, Scott
Knickerbocker questioned whether “ecocentrism should be limited to realism.”24
In an essay published the same year, Lynn Keller called for critics to look beyond
Introduction 7
“straightforwardly representational writing” and to consider the ecopoetics of
more recent and experimental poetry.25
Although Glotfelty includes ecopoetics in the theoretical phase of ecocriticism,
Knickerbocker’s and Keller’s comments reveal that ecopoetics as both poetry and
critical practice continues to wrestle with some of ecocriticism’s earliest concerns:
the question of representation and the establishment of a canon. Indeed, in their
early attempts, critics chose poets based largely on how well they represented the
natural world. John Elder, in his 1996 Imagining the Earth, for example, sought to
draw new attention to poets like Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, and A. R. Ammons
by connecting them to such predecessors as Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot, while
Guy Rotella and Gyorgyi Voros reread established modernist poets—Marianne
Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens—through the lens of ecology.26 A few
years later, Leonard Scigaj and Bernard Quetchenbach identified additional poets
whom they argued were worthy of attention as ecopoets: Susan Howe, Adrienne
Rich, and Kenneth Rexroth, among others.27 These studies culminated in J. Scott
Bryson’s 2002 Ecopoetry, the first edited collection of essays on the topic. Bryson
contextualized contemporary ecopoetry within longer traditions, including essays
on ancient poetry, transcendentalism, and modernism, and further expanded the
canon of contemporary ecopoetry with essays focused on writers such as Chicka-
saw poet Linda Hogan and lesbian poet Daphne Marlatt. He continued to survey
a more diverse ecopoetry canon in a study of his own published a few years later,
with discussions of Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz, and Leslie Marmon Silko.28
While these projects established a more inclusive archive in terms of the cultures,
ethnicities, and sexualities of the poets included, they continued to favor poets work-
ing largely in a traditionally lyric or narrative vein. But in 2001, ecopoetics entered
a new era with the emergence of Jonathan Skinner’s journal ecopoetics. Skinner’s
journal was founded on the belief that innovative poetic form might constitute
an environmental ethics. In his editor’s preface, he criticized the environmental
movement for protecting “a fairly received notion of ‘eco’ from the proddings and
complications, and enrichments, of an investigative poetics” and members of the
poetic avant-garde for “their overall silence on . . . environmental questions.”29
Skinner drew attention to poets entirely different from those of Bryson and his
predecessors, turning to overtly political or experimental poets such as Juliana
8 Introduction
Spahr, Will Alexander, and Cecelia Vicuña. He also reinterpreted the ecopoetics
tradition, suggesting its indebtedness not only to writers like Gary Snyder but to
midcentury poets like Larry Eigner and Lorine Niedecker, who had been left out
of earlier attempts to paint modernism green.
Skinner’s interest in reclaiming experimental midcentury American poetry for
the ecopoetics canon was shared by two other critics. In This Compost, Jed Rasula
charted a new tradition as well, linking Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman to Black
Mountain poetics and the advent and influence of cybernetics and systems theory,
while Angus Fletcher in A New Theory for American Poetry connected Whitman and
John Clare to John Ashbery.30 While building on these studies and responding to
Keller’s call for more critical attention to experimental and contemporary ecopo-
etics, the contributors to Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field analyze how poetic form, in
addition or in contrast to content and in both past and present poetry, enacts what
Rasula calls a “stance toward the living planet.”31
Theorizing Ecopoetics
Despite interventions by critics such as Skinner, Keller, and Rasula, a methodolog-
ical reticence has persisted in scholarly writing in and on ecopoetics. This writing
has lagged behind some recent interdisciplinary and intersectional environmental
humanities scholarship. To return to Glotfelty’s terminology, we might say that
as ecopoetics as critical practice has shifted its focus away from representations
of nature in poetry and the establishment of a canon, entering its own more the-
oretical phase, its first point of order has been to establish how poetry fosters an
ethos or ethical relation. In the process, some studies have tended to reproduce
what Lawrence Buell has named ecocriticism’s preferred model, characterized by
what he calls an ecological holism.32 In Buell’s words, these critical approaches are
motivated primarily by “ethico-political commitments” to the imagination of the
protection, recuperation, and reconnection of humans with the natural world.33
It is not our intention to disparage the ethical commitments of ecopoetics. Rather,
we wish to chart the emergence of the idea of the ethical relation as a sine qua non
for ecopoetics and a first critical focus. Of particular import to this theoretical phase
has been Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth. Building on a tradition that locates
Introduction 9
modern environmental consciousness in Romantic poetry, Bate defines ecopoetics
“not as a set of assumptions or proposals about particular environmental issues,
but as a way of reflecting upon what it might mean to dwell with the earth.”34 He
relates experiential and political Romantic poetry—Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “poetry
in the general sense”—to Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological poetics, partic-
ularly the philosopher’s ethics of dwelling or being with.35 At the same time, Bate
distances himself from Heidegger’s politics by insisting that ecopoetics itself is
always prepolitical; its primary task is to help readers imagine, not enact, different
ways of living on the earth. Bate’s emphasis on poetics as a recuperative imaginative
act might be said to exemplify the preferred model that Buell describes.
Bate’s turn to phenomenology in the process of arguing that ecopoetics can
foster an ethos of “respecting the earth” is echoed elsewhere.36 Leonard Scigaj wrote
that “environmental poetry is capable of much subtlety, rich and complex states
of feeling and participation in nature, if one finds the right theoretical approach
to elucidate that complexity,” ultimately calling for a more ethically oriented ap-
proach.37 David Gilcrest and John Felstiner also made the ethical orientation central
to their studies of environmental poetics.38 The title of Felstiner’s book—Can Poetry
Save the Earth?—summarizes the hope and perhaps some of the hyperbole involved
in such arguments. If one of poetry’s greatest strengths is raising awareness and
heightening attention, he argues, “poetry could prompt new ventures, anything
from a thrifty household, frugal vehicle, recycling drive, communal garden, or lo-
cal business going green, to an active concern for global warming.”39 (Ross Gay’s
poems of praise to plants growing in the community garden he helped start in
Bloomington, Indiana, would seem to effusively uphold Felstiner’s claims.)40
Arguments for more ethically oriented forms of attention, consciousness, and
dwelling have been central to ecocriticism more broadly. Timothy Morton has argued
for “an ethical attitude we might call ‘coexistentialism’” based on our acknowl-
edgment of our “ethical entanglement with the other.”41 Notably, some ecocritics
have begun to vary their approaches by decentering, building on, or complicating
emphases on the ethical relation. Such work might be summarized as an effort to
move beyond: beyond greenness, beyond nature, beyond nature writing, or beyond
wilderness in terms that can be traced back to William Cronon’s influential essay
“The Trouble with Wilderness: Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.”42 Glotfelty’s
10 Introduction
prediction that ecocriticism would become more “interdisciplinary, multicultural,
and international” and more explicitly involved with social justice has been borne
out in critical work investigating the problem of environmental racism and exclu-
sion.43 This work has brought ecocriticism into conversation with postcolonialism
and global cosmopolitanism; drawn attention to the importance of environmental
thought in the African American literary tradition; and explored how people of
color, women, queer people, and disabled or chronically ill people negotiate their
environments differently from white cis men or able-bodied people.44 This work
also asks what environmental justice might mean when we broaden our definition
of who or what counts as an environmental subject.45
We see Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field as taking a step toward expanding the critical
methods and questions available to critics working on poetry, poetics, and the
environment. The sections of this book frame ecopoetics through concepts and
ideas that critics have begun to reconsider: from apocalypticism to embodiment
and from notions of environmental holism or purity to the concept of sustainability.
In order to critique these and other ideas, the essayists draw from an eclectic crit-
ical tool kit, mobilizing, extending, and challenging the insights of a diversity of
discourses, including speculative realism (Rob Halpern), black studies and black
radicalism (Joshua Bennett), decolonization theory (Matt Hooley), “queer crip”
feminism (Petra Kuppers), and resilience theory (Samia Rahimtoola), among others.
In the process of bringing a range of critical approaches to ecopoetics, they in turn
illuminate new directions for the methods that inform their readings.
In part 1, “The Apocalyptic Imagination,” the contributors draw on the work of
environmental historians and theorists in order to interrogate apocalyptic discourse,
given that, as yet, crisis rhetoric—which has been wielded in its modern form since
the advent of the nuclear age—has had little effect in terms of prompting humans
to prevent ecological collapse. Building on scholarship by such critics as Margaret
Ronda, who has theorized the “negative elegiac modes” of poets faced with rep-
resenting a nature that is no longer available to them, the contributors examine
the effects of apocalyptic rhetoric on human thought and the imagination.46 In her
essay on the poetry of Jorie Graham and Evelyn Reilly, “Making Art ‘Under These
Apo-Calypso Rays,’” Lynn Keller suggests that today the pervasiveness of crisis
rhetoric can result in “profound emotional and cognitive exhaustion” that prevents
Introduction 11
the kinds of attitudes or actions required to effectively respond to ecological crisis.
Going back to midcentury, Rob Halpern considers how poetry registered the difficulty
of imagining the end of the human in his essay “‘The Idiot Stone.’” Challenging
recent object-oriented ontologies and philosophies of extinction consciousness,
Halpern argues that for George Oppen the recurring figure of the stone allegorizes
what will have been here all along, even after humanity’s total destruction.
Halpern’s essay brings the dialectics of historical materialism to affect theory
in order to articulate how Oppen’s poetry registers human desires for consolation
in times threatened by ecological collapse, while exposing the impossibility of
catharsis. Under the conditions of modern capitalism, in which nature has been
supplanted by the commodity, and faced with the “seemingly suspended human
capacity to remake the world,” as Halpern puts it, what poetry has the capacity to
reveal more than anything is what it feels like to live the contradictions that define
the post-1945 environmental imagination. Keller, whose method is historical as
opposed to historical materialist, also develops an affect-oriented account of the
apocalyptic imagination, arguing that amid the grief and despair of apocalypticism,
poetry is notable for its turn to cultivating experiential and perceptual pleasures,
even humor.
Part 2, “Embodiment and Animality,” brings together four essays that focus on
ecopoetics and embodiment, drawing on and furthering critical plant and animal
studies. Three of these—Jonathan Skinner’s “Visceral Ecopoetics in Charles Olson
and Michael McClure,” Michelle Niemann’s “Playing in the Planetary Field,” and
Joshua Bennett’s “‘Beyond the Vomiting Dark’”—continue to extend a midcentury
archive. Petra Kuppers’s essay, “Writing with the Salamander,” brings ecopoetics
into the present, documenting a community performance project. Alfred North
Whitehead’s process philosophy and Charles Olson’s process-based proprioceptive
poetics—poetry originating in and experienced through the body—offer important
groundwork for Skinner’s and Niemann’s studies. Working through a different
tradition of embodied poetics, Bennett’s essay connects contemporary black rad-
ical and critical race theory to animal studies in order to show how cross-species
encounters can become sites for black resistance.
Skinner demonstrates how Beat poet Michael McClure draws from Olson and
scientific systems theory to develop a poetics of “spiritmeat,” in which composi-
12 Introduction
tion is an energetic process of connecting with animal being. Niemann also em-
phasizes the influence of science on midcentury poetics but suggests that Robert
Duncan fuses science with myth in order to revise Olson’s objectivism. She argues
that Duncan introduces the values of vulnerability and extravagance to open field
poetics—qualities that Duncan understood to be feminized, queer, and Romantic
and that Niemann reads as environmental categories. Both Skinner and Niemann
connect their readings to contemporary new materialisms, which reimagine the
agency and affect of and between materials and beings.
Bennett’s and Kuppers’s essays also reconceive of relations among animality,
agency, and affect—in both cases, by taking ecopoetics offshore. Bennett inves-
tigates how Melvin Tolson and Robert Hayden deploy sharks to simultaneously
articulate antiblack systems, such as the slave ship traversing the Atlantic Ocean,
alongside radical black resistance to those same systems. Kuppers chronicles the
Salamander performance project, which brought together people with disabilities
and their allies in pools, rivers, and oceans around the world. A participant herself,
Kuppers weaves voices and images to show how bodies that are often seen as the
result of ecological disaster—people with cognitive and physical differences—can
reclaim and remediate shared spaces. While immersed in different archives, both
Bennett and Kuppers show how poetry, in the words of Bennett, can explore the
freedom of the water, making “hazy the division between person and nonperson.”
Kuppers also navigates the open water among critical, personal, and art historical
writing. She demonstrates how ecopoetics might challenge conventions of literary
criticism in order to include other art forms—visual, sonic, and somatic.
In part 3, “Environmental Justice,” the contributors draw on the insights of
decolonial and critical race theory along with toxic discourse to show how poetry
confronts the unequal distribution of risk and harm in indigenous and African
American communities. Toxic discourse, as Lawrence Buell originally termed it,
has been central to environmental justice theory. As Giovanna Di Chiro writes,
“In contrast to the legacy of Anglo-American environmentalist concerns stem-
ming from nineteenth- and twentieth-century aspirations to protect an external,
nonhuman, and endangered ‘nature’ from ‘humanity’s’ excesses, environmental
justice . . . advocates focus on the everyday, embodied realities of people living in
polluted ‘sacrifice zones.’”47 However important toxic discourse continues to be
Introduction 13
for environmental justice theory, though, it remains vulnerable to cooptation by
an alarmist politics (to borrow Matt Hooley’s language) that retreats from or con-
demns who or what is perceived as other. Sarah Jaquette Ray argues that this type
of politics produces ecological others, groups of people whom the dominant white
society, through settler and white supremacist logics, deems a health risk that must
be managed and mitigated. In light of these complexities, Hooley’s and Angela
Hume’s essays simultaneously activate and interrogate toxic discourse through
readings of Diné poet Sherwin Bitsui and African American poet Claudia Rankine.
Hooley’s essay, “Toxic Recognition,” shows how the concept of toxicity as a shared
social vulnerability fails to recognize how differences of race and class determine
to what degree individuals and groups are exposed to environmental threats. He
argues that Bitsui enacts a fugitive ecopoetics that reveals how the collapse of all
publics into one is itself a toxic act. In her essay, “Toward an Antiracist Ecopoetics,”
Hume draws on critical race theory to develop an environmental justice approach
to Rankine’s twenty-year poetic investigation of the wasting body. Hume argues
that through practices of duration—by critically inhabiting states of what Fred
Moten calls exhaustion as a way of life—Rankine’s poetry exposes the debilitating
conditions for writing and life under white-dominant social, governmental, and
economic structures.
The final three essays in part 4, “Beyond Sustainability,” explore how poetry and
poetics might expose or even undermine problematic ideologies of environmental
management in neoliberal culture. Samia Rahimtoola’s essay, “Hung Up in the
Flood,” returns again to the ecopoetics of the mid-twentieth-century open form,
reconsidering the flexible, provisional practice of Lorine Niedecker’s poetry in con-
trast to the paradoxical rigidity of contemporary plans for landscape resilience and
urban sustainability. While resilience planning aims to make built environments
adaptable to a changing environment, much of it can end up preserving the status
quo rather than investigating “the very state of affairs that got us into trouble in the
first place,” as Stephanie LeMenager and Stephanie Foote have put it.48 By way of
contrast, Rahimtoola shows how Niedecker bases her poetics on the flux of both
the nonhuman and the built environments of her watery midland Wisconsin home.
Niedecker’s responsiveness to the interdependence of humans and nonhu-
mans resonates with what Margaret Ronda has elsewhere theorized as the “re-
14 Introduction
dundancy” of anthropogenic poetics in the Anthropocene, or what others have
called the Misanthropocene.49 Although artists and critics might be committed
to imagining the outsides of the human, these accounts remind us that both the
horror and the radical potential of our current geological era lie in the fact that
there is no outside. Where earlier generations of poets could settle themselves
beneath a linden tree and apostrophize its boughs, in a time of the “post-modern
pastoral” poets see not only greenery but the red of the slaughterhouse dripping
through.50 In this context, Joshua Schuster’s “Reading the Environs,” a study
of contemporary conceptual ecopoetics, challenges our sense of possibility for
ecological form, including its anthropogenic redundancies.
Schuster surveys surface reading, recycling, and mining big data in conceptual
poetry as ways of exploring the concept of ecology from outside the perspective of
sustainable development. In the process, he pushes back against conceptual poet
Kenneth Goldsmith’s likening of textual ecologies and the recycling of language
to living ecologies and the recycling of actual materials. As Schuster points out,
biological ecosystems are more than just models for systems dynamics; they are
living, fragile, and highly contingent. Moreover, recycling in literature can tell us
only so much about the actual chemical processes for the recycling of objects like
cars or batteries. Schuster then offers a reading of Canadian poet Adam Dickinson’s
The Polymers, a conceptual project with a more fraught understanding of language’s
relationship to the materials that make it, one that ultimately tarries with the reality
of our “polymerized world.”
Finally, we include Joan Retallack’s “Hard Days Nights in the Anthropocene,”
a prosimetric essay incorporating both prose and poetry in the spirit of the Ro-
man philosopher-poet Boethius. Constellating Boethius, American pragmatism,
social theory and ecotheory, civilization and etymological histories, poetry, and
more, Retallack enacts her own definition of ecopoetics: the embrace of alteri-
ties at a time when “anthropocenities” abound. For Retallack, the imagination
of “constructive alterities” via language experiments or wagers can help humans
grasp complex, agonistic nature-culture intrarelationships. Importantly, her essay
stages a pedagogical intervention, suggesting ways for teachers and students to
grapple with ecological and political crises through swerving, subversive, and
playful language practices.
Introduction 15
Environmental ethics remains at the heart of Retallack’s essay—the enduring
critical question of what to do, how to live, and how poetry might aid praxis. Yet
the restless form of her investigation exemplifies the ways in which both creative
and critical experiments in poetics can lead not only to new formal understandings
of complex problems but to new ways of thinking, responding to, and being with
those problems. Retallack’s work reminds us that literary theory must remain in
vibrant, dynamic relation with its histories, methods, and texts and that the po-
ethical wager has always also been an ecological one.51
16 Introduction
part one
The Apocalyptic Imagination
1 •
Making Art “Under These
Apo-Calypso Rays”
Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics
Lynn Keller
I belong to a generation born after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but
raised in their shadow. We grew up in the Cold War era of aboveground nuclear
testing and bomb shelters, with the constant threat of nuclear war, and in the time
of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, with its dire warnings of environmental poisoning.
The end of the world loomed over us. Just as John Ashbery, born in 1927, could
claim that his generation “grew up surreal,” I would venture that my own grew up
apocalyptic.1 No doubt my personal experience with the anxiety of such awareness
was partly responsible for my asserting in a published forum on sustainability
that apocalyptic literature was likely to be of limited usefulness to what I termed a
“literature toward sustainability.”2 My sense has been that apocalypticism can as
readily lead to paralysis as to action or if not to paralysis, then to a falsely placat-
ing 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 plea-
sure of laughter may be mixed with pain. As in Graham’s work, this double burden
of ongoing crisis and threatening apocalypse encourages renewed appreciation of
presently available sensory delights.
Lawrence Buell has argued that “apocalypse is the single most powerful master
metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal.”
He continues:
Of no other dimension of contemporary environmentalism, furthermore, can it be

so unequivocally said that the role of the imagination is central to the project; for the
rhetoric of apocalypticism implies that the fate of the world hinges on the arousal of the
20 The Apocalyptic Imagination

imagination to a sense of crisis. It presupposes that “the most dangerous threat to our
global environment may not be the strategic threats themselves but rather our perception
of them, for most people do not yet accept the fact that this crisis is extremely grave.”4
Such writing, in which “the imagination is being used to anticipate and, if possible,
forestall actual apocalypse,” may be justified by the hope of practical efficacy; for
Buell, “even the slimmest of possibilities is enough to justify the nightmare.”5 Yet
the potential pitfalls are many. The most commonly cited risk is that of seeming
to cry wolf; the public learns to dismiss claims of impending catastrophe as dire
predictions fail to prove true—even when the predicted scenarios may not have
materialized because people recognized and averted the danger. Other acknowl-
edged 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 in-
Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics 21

creasingly a feature of present normality, not an imminent, radical rupture of it”
amounts to a less generation-specific version of my assertion about growing up
apocalyptic—an assertion also anticipated by Ulrich Beck’s influential conception of
our “risk society,” which, he says, has “come to take for granted . . . the impending
‘suicide of the species.’”9 Frederick Buell proposes that we
abandon apocalypse for a sadder realism that looks closely at social and environmen-
tal 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 ‘embod-
iment’ 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 op-
timistically 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 ac-
tive 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 func-
tion 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 creat-
ing: “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 know
where. Also submerging us,
making of the fields, the trees, a cast of characters in an
unnegotiable
drama, ordained, iron-gloom of low light, everything at once undoing
itself.15
The line break between “Un” and “natural” conveys at once the wrenching, hitherto
abnormal changes taking place and how they yield a new normal that we must now face
as natural. Capturing the near inconceivability of this sea change, Graham oxymoroni-
cally observes, “The permanent is ebbing”—neatly conveying the sense of living in dire,
almost unimaginable crisis that Frederick Buell points to as the contemporary condition.
Then, in a single sentence, whose unspooling over two pages itself suggests the cascad-
ing consequences of changes in our ecosystems, Graham records some of the ways that
global warming is affecting our ecologically interdependent world, for instance,
. . . at the very bottom of

the food
chain, sprung
from undercurrents, warming by 1 degree, the in-
dispensable
plankton is forced north now, & yet farther north,
spawning too late for the cod larvae hatch, such
that the hatch will not survive, nor the
species in the end, in the right-now forever un-
interruptible slowing of the
gulf
stream 16

Again, the line breaks separating “in” from “dispensable” and “un” from “interrupt-
ible” convey how what had seemed impossible is now not just possible but inescapably
taking place. Feeling in this context the uselessness of the poems she has written, Gra-
ham moves from speaking “in this wind today, out loud in it, to no one” to speaking
for the wind. This wind, which urges listeners to “consider your affliction . . . do not
plead ignorance,” recalls the destructive winds in Job or Jeremiah, two touchstones of
apocalyptic writing:
. . . & quicken
me further says this new wind, &
according to thy
judgment, &
I am inclining my heart towards the end,
I cannot fail, this Saturday, early pm, hurling myself,
wiry furies riding my many backs, against your foundations and your
best young
tree, which you have come outside to stake again, & the loose stones in the sill.17
That the civilization or the species may well be doomed is suggested by the word “foun-
dations,” which denotes not just the substructure of the speaker’s home but the things
fundamental to her or her society’s life, while the line breaks temporarily isolating “best
young” speak to the precarious position of the younger generations whose future is
jeopardized. Using biblical phrasing that suggests that its work enacts divine judgment,
the voice—at once the poet’s and the wind’s—becomes that of an apocalyptic prophet.
This is writing of crisis and of apocalypse; the immediate experience of Graham’s
speakers is shadowed by consciousness both of present ecological degradation and risk
and of a devastating future. The present is a transitional moment in which seasons still
move in normal succession, but we notice their normalcy (“summer will be here / soon,
which is normal, which we notice is normal”) because incipient deviations tell us that
soon there won’t be seasons as we currently know them; once tediously reliable, the
“normal” now appears intensely precious, experienced on the verge of its dissolution.18
Looking toward that transformation, the speaker of “Positive Feedback Loop” positions
herself “in this silence that precedes,” from which she invites her reader to try to hold

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

world now consider ordinary will appear unimaginably luxurious. Parts of “Loan,” for
instance, address an audience in the future, asking whether its members can remember
when clean water was abundant, when
. . . the faucet flared like a glare of

open speech, a cry, you could say what you
pleased, you could turn it
off, then on again—at will—and how it fell, teeming, too much, all over your
hands, much as you please—from where you are now
try to
feel it—what
was it this thick/thin blurry coil
flowing into the sink 24

The poem ends with a warning followed by a sensory celebration of the wondrous or-
dinary we now take for granted:
. . . & the day which comes when there are to be no more harvests from now on,
irrigation returns only as history, a thing made of text,
& yet, listen,
there was
rain, then the swift interval before evaporation, & the stillness
of brimming, & the
wet rainbowing where oil from exhaust picks up light, sheds glow, then
echoes in the drains where
deep inside the
drops fall individually, plink,
& the places where birds
interject, & the coming-on of heat, & the girl looking sideways carrying the large
bouquet of blue hydrangeas, shaking the water off, &
the wondering if this is it, or are we in for another round, a glance up, a quick step
over the puddle

carrying speedy clouds,
birdcall now confident again, heat drying, suddenly no evidence of its having been wet—but
no, you
didn’t even notice it—it rained.25
The onward momentum of Graham’s rarely end-stopped lines effectively conveys the
density of the material joys of embodied life. Although her announcement about the
harvestless “day which comes” avoids the language of fable, the contrast between present
and future may still function partly as did Rachel Carson’s admonitory fable that opened
Silent Spring. At the same time, the particularization of Graham’s appreciative catalog
encourages readers to use their eyes and ears, to take notice.
The pleasures of sensory experience on which Graham focuses generally fall within
the realm of the literary pastoral. The perhaps suburban world in which her speakers take
pleasure functions as the pastoral’s green world traditionally has: as a precious oasis that
offers an escape from a diminished or corrupted world and that is the object of nostalgic
longing. Because Graham keeps in her readers’ view the backward-looking perspective
from a drastically degraded future in which our current world will look paradisal, her
speaker’s present time becomes an already nostalgically viewed past.
Invoking a pastoral realm as a foil—what Ursula Heise calls the “ideal socioecolog-
ical countermodel”—to the horrors of the apocalypse is a common move in apocalyptic
writing.26 Lawrence Buell has observed that “the pastoral logic . . . rests on the appeal to
the moral superiority of an antecedent state of existence when humankind was not at war
with nature in the way that prevails now.”27 Apocalyptic texts that invoke the pastoral are,
he notes, “activist appeals to nostalgia, accomplishing their interventions by invocations
of actual green worlds about to be lost.”28 Such uses of the pastoral generate discomfort
in some ecocritics, including Heise and sometimes Buell as well, because the mode sets
nature in opposition to culture and can serve as a retreat from environmental problems.
Graham seems aware of the ethical and political risks posed by her attraction to the
pastoral and to an associated aestheticization. “Futures” reflexively critiques her own
pastoral impulse as it explores how seeing the world can become a form of ownership.
The poem is set in “Midwinter. Dead of,” in a scene of environmental devastation: “the
crop destroyed / water everywhere not / drinkable, & radioactive waste in it, & human
bodily / waste.”29 Yet in the poem’s closing passages, the speaker finds herself turning

this painfully degraded version of the pastoral into one she can take pleasure in
visually owning through an act of enumeration that is also an aestheticization:
one day a swan appeared out of nowhere on the drying river,

it
was sick, but it floated, and the eye felt the pain of rising to take it in—I own you
said the old feeling, I want
to begin counting
again, I will count what is mine, it is moving quickly now, I will begin this
message “I”—I feel the
smile, put my hand up to be sure, yes on my lips—the yes—I touch it again, I
begin counting, I say one to the swan, one,
do not be angry with me o my god, I have begun the action of beauty again, on
the burning river I have started the catalogue,
your world.30
The burning river is an apocalyptic image, recalling the many destructive fires in
Revelation; to begin the action of beauty in these circumstances seems gruesomely
inappropriate, and the speaker’s sense of guilty transgression is evident in her plea.
Lawrence Buell astutely observes that “in pastoral, beauty never functions only as
critique. At some level there is always the chance that the text will tempt the reader
to see all sugar and no pill and that even hard thrusts will get deflected into quaint
excursions.”31 If this is a risk in Graham’s Sea Change, “Futures” might be read as
a combination of confession and warning to readers to resist such deflections.
“Positive Feedback Loop” also exposes the escapist potential in the pastoral, but
here Graham avoids potential criticism by making it clear that this refuge is only
temporary. The speaker ends a divagating inward meditation by relocating herself
first “in the Great Dying again”—dwelling in a crisis of extinctions—but then also
in “a / lovely evening” when, after a bit of food and drink, “we / shall walk / out
onto the porch and the evening shall come on around us, unconcealed, / blinking,
abundant, as if catching sight of us, / everything in and out under the eaves, even
the grass seeming to push up into this our / world as if out of / homesickness for
it, / gleaming.”32 This moment is one of pastoral pleasure: of inhabiting a simpler

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

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

Brighter dimmers replaced the blighted meters
and the blinded windows
were given decorative grills
Even the situation drive restarted

which had exhausted us for weeks
So today the sun is ambulatory! the planet ambulatory!
The surplus bark in spite of snow

peels in permeable tentacles of façade plu!37
“Plu” suggests not only the French for “rain” and the past participle of being pleased
but also the current internet abbreviation for “people like us.” At least two of the
three meanings—pleasure and community—have to be artificially generated here,
in “this sober landscape // littered with so much / dreamware wreckage” where the
speaker is “so lonely / [she’s] been talking to [her] software / for three years.”38
The darkness of this dystopian series arises in part from the way in which tech-
nical vocabularies are superposed on emotional ones, conveying half-successful
attempts to repress emotion, particularly a nearly disabling grief. Here, for instance,
is a report sent from what is identified as one of the original build sites:
The signal is so sticky with procedure dreck

we grow desperate
for dislocation lubricant
Yet today we completed

2 fulfillment interstices
and 6 perfusion upsinks
after which it took hours to adjust

the nose cone of rampant grief

We have now pried countless tender chordate features
from the slab encasement
105 translation blockages

79 embedded snares
kneeling
yrs39
Talk of “dislocation lubricant” and “fulfillment interstices” may suggest techno-

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

of devastation that tend to dominate the literature of apocalypse. . . . Thus, the more I
worked on this project, the more I began to be subsumed by despair.
I was struggling with this for quite a while and getting gloomier and gloomier until
one day I changed my working title from Apocalypse to Apocalypso, on one level just a
tinkering with language, but on another level thinking of [Wallace] Stevens’ “It must
give pleasure,” and needing to dig myself out of an emotional and creative hole. And
then I started reading about calypso, . . . the Afro-Caribbean music with roots in both
underground communication systems used by slaves and French troubadour poetry. . . .
Putting these two ideas together—apocalypse and calypso—began to solve something
for me about the role of poetry and the joy of the aesthetic impulse, about how to bring
that back into our notion of ourselves as animals, and perhaps how to love ourselves
again as animals, and maybe find a base of action and of language in that love.41
While every sequence in Apocalypso reflects an apocalyptic or dystopic vision of the fu-
ture, each also engages in some form of play that brings pleasure. The time stamps for
“Dreamquest Malware,” for instance, make an allusive joke, since ZMT, with which
they all begin, is a drug for migraines. Drawing sometimes upon the linguistic inven-
tiveness of the French architect François Blanciak, who in his book Siteless has drawn
1,001 imagined siteless “building forms” to which he gives names, Reilly produces
some grimly hilarious documents.42 Here’s the beginning of one, addressed to a Ms. T,
where the speaker’s righteous tone in the context of the faux-techno vocabulary produc-
es a comic effect:
It was a shock that you would send

this ignition system
instead of the slogan-infestation compress

we had so explicitly requested
What exactly was your intent?43
The irritated entitlement communicated in the manner of a formal business letter

collides amusingly with the speaker’s degraded circumstances and with the absurd
idea of a bandage that would alleviate an infestation of slogans.

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

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

crisis situation, then an emphatic rejoinder that urges taking immediate preventive
action when disaster threatens:
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I
sd, which was not his

name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for

christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.54
Here Reilly’s speaker addresses John of Patmos “as we are just about to cross / the
George Washington Bridge”:
Excuse me,
a question while we are driving
I sd., John, I sd
what do you have anyway
against historical time?55
Even as the lack of apparent urgency in her question with its stalling “anyway”
resonates comically against Creeley’s hard-hitting conclusion, the question none-
theless carries a good deal of force. For while Reilly invites an awareness of human
insignificance in geological time, historical time is what matters immediately to
her—and, she implies, is what should matter to us all. If historical time is only
something to be transcended en route to a blessed eternity where all is made new,
then we’ve little reason to watch where we’re going.

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

while sleeping on your carbon cushion
Flight 267
New York from Kiev61
Presenting the poem’s contents as a dream vision experienced in a traveler’s fitful

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

such as cockroaches. It’s a perspective, moreover, that draws on the pleasures of
embodiment—that is, on coming to one’s senses—and on what she calls “the joy
of the aesthetic impulse.”65 That section of the poem ends, compellingly:
singing loving my vermin

singing sunniest day
dancing my aptest app-dance

under these apo-calypso rays66
The passage brings together much that the poem values in this moment of environ-
mental crisis and incipient apocalypse: concern for the well-being of nonhuman
life, embrace of technology as an aid (though not a sole solution), recognition of
the needs of the weak and oppressed (recalling the Afro-Caribbeans who invented
calypso), and appreciation of the very real pleasures of inhabiting a body on this
planet—of singing and dancing and enjoying the sunshine.
At one point in her apocalyptic comedy, Reilly contemplates the section of
Bruegel’s Fall of the Rebel Angels that appears on her book’s cover and remarks, “So
many pretty revels / in these devastation pictures.”67 There’s a critique of aesthet-
icization there—and a reflexive acknowledgment that artists like herself may be
tempted to play with apocalypse just because it offers such an amazing array of
powerful images: “A big artistic impetus this endtime vision.”68 Reilly is wary of
the prettiness that is Graham’s forte, just as her sharp ironicism contrasts with the
earnest self-examination that Graham offers. By staying with the book of Revelation
throughout “Apocalypso: A Comedy,” Reilly remains more consistently focused
on apocalyptic discourse than Graham does in the poems of Sea Change. Yet Reilly’s
poetry also acknowledges, as Graham’s demonstrates, the psychological difficulties
of dwelling unrelentingly in preapocalyptic crisis. Their poetics differ significantly,
yet both poets’ works highlight the precarious dynamics and unsteady purposes
of apocalyptic writing in the context of ongoing environmental crisis.
The poets combine an awareness of living in crisis with a belief that we are
either poised on the cusp of environmental apocalypse or already tipped into it.
Rather than following Frederick Buell’s advice to leave aside apocalyptic prediction,

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

2 •
“The Idiot Stone”
George Oppen’s Geological Imagination;
Or, Objectivist Realism as Ecopoetics
Rob Halpern
At the center of George Oppen’s effort to think and feel the present tense of disaster
at midcentury there is a stone. From a professed “hatred of the ‘Stone universe’” to
“The pure joy / Of the mineral fact,” Oppen’s geological imagination moves from
metaphysical rage against the seeming imminence of nuclear annihilation—born
of what he refers to in a 1962 poem called “Time of the Missile” as the atom’s “stone
chain reaction”—to a paradoxical affirmation of factual clarity in the stone’s im-
penetrable opacity.1 The stone emerges in his work as an ecopoetical figure avant
la lettre accentuating a seemingly insoluble tension between the human and the
inhuman while marking the site where the logic of that tension breaks down: “I
would go home o go home to the rough // stone.”2
Oppen isn’t alone in summoning the mineral in relation to a specter of anni-
hilation at midcentury.3 Muriel Rukeyser’s great poem “Waterlily Fire,” also from
1962, offers another elemental illustration of similar thematic material organized
around a stony image of disaster. “I go to the stone street turning to fire,” the poem
begins, going on to sustain an apocalyptic scene wherein stone metaphorizes what
will have always been here, connecting our postholocaust remains with what exists
here, now.
An arm of flame reaches from water-green glass,

Behind the wall I know waterlilies
Drinking their light, transforming light and our eyes
Skythrown under water, clouds under those flowers,
Walls standing on all things stand in a city noon
Who will not believe a waterlily fire.
Whatever can happen in a city of stone,
Whatever can come to a wall can come to this wall.
I walk in the river of crisis toward the real,

I pass guards, finding the center of my fear4
Writing through a series of dreams whose images depict a civilization seem-

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

with a passionate—and passionately ambivalent—attachment. Indeed, “Prosody
// Sings // In the stones.”7
For Oppen, the affective vicissitudes of stone run from hatred to joy, between
which he professes to suffer “something like despair because destruction by the
missile would indeed be total defeat and meaninglessness in the future perfect.”8
His invocation of the future perfect—the grammatical tense denoting what will
have been—suggests how the very substance of that defeat cohabits with the pres-
ent. This sentence appears in a 1959 letter to Julian Zimet devoted to his lengthy
reflections on “Time of the Missile.” Oppen’s letter reads like a virtual ars poetica
and includes a catalog of the metaphysical concerns that will dominate his prac-
tice throughout the 1960s. It is worth quoting at length because it thematizes the
convergence of geological, geopolitical, and poetical imaginaries that will occupy
me throughout this essay:
The universe is stone but we are not. The universe’s time is some kind of elapsed time,
whatever that may be, but our time is historical time, and the difference between one
generation and a next, and we make that time. . . .
. . . the poem is a poem of hatred of the ‘Stone universe’ and of love for ourselves
and Linda—and all we have made of the universe by looking at it. I’m afraid that goes
to real metaphysics in the Missile. Says among other things that we didn’t make the
atom we are made of, but all the rest is subjective. I believe it—and it matters to me.
Have to say it. That’s why it opens with the lyric of praise for vision . . .
You suggest it isn’t really the missile—that it could have been said at any time that
‘This is the way the world ends’ etc. Sure you’re right. I didn’t really mean to disguise
it as a political or topical poem—I just meant that I thought these things must be in
everyone’s mind with the threat of the missile right there. . . .
. . . I don’t understand . . . You think it unmanly to admit? Or braver to pretend that
it doesn’t exist—the stone universe and its own stone chain reaction that might really—
(And come to think of it, that’s why I have to keep the name of the missile—the poem
describes something like despair because destruction by the missile would indeed be
total defeat and meaninglessness in the future perfect.)
I’m protesting at length because all of the poems are about this same thing. As
whose are not? The shorter lyrics are simply what the opening of the Missile is—‘The

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

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

commitment to realism—what I’ll call objectivist realism—offers a prophylactic
against the metaphysics of speculative realism in our own present tense.
And so I ask, how might a poem enable our capacity to feel the present, that is,
to encounter the present in a way not already determined by representations whose
logic at once arouses and neutralizes our ability to respond? In what follows, I will
argue that Oppen’s poems offer ecopoetics a model of a compositional practice
committed to an encounter with the material world, a world irreducible to repre-
sentation and language while still radically there to be witnessed in a context pen-
etrated by history. Oppen’s realist practice moves him to “a place without words”:
—a place a place at least to begin. But place in another sense: place without the words,
the wordless sphere in the mind—Or rather the wordless sphere with things including
a word or so in it. . . . That I still believe to be, as they say, Poem: the thing in the
mind before the words to be able to hold it even against the language11
In my effort to throw the realism of this place into relief, I will turn to Quentin
Meillassoux’s After Finitude, whose speculative realism, I wish to show, can only fail
ecopoetics because, like the various object-oriented ontologies it accompanies, it
can’t account for its own historical motivations to think the “beyond” of history
itself. For Meillassoux, this “beyond” manifests in a radically exterior world that
exists independent of our language and consciousness and whose figures, what he
refers to as the “ancestral trace” or “arche-fossil,” echo Oppen’s “stone universe”
and “mineral fact” with an uncanny correspondence.12 Yet Oppen’s writing cuts a
distinct ecopoetical figure whose objectivist realism mustn’t be confused with its
speculative doubles. In short, while speculative realism defaults to an ahistorical
metaphysics, Oppen’s realist poetics registers the historical conditions that mo-
tivate that encounter.
Oppen returned to writing poetry in 1959 after a period of self-imposed exile and
a concomitant poetic silence coextensive with his political commitments. These
commitments included participation in Communist Party organizing during the years
of the Popular Front, as well as service during World War II. This was followed by a
decade in Mexico beyond the reach of the House Un-American Activities Committee,
under whose power it was as if language itself had contracted a terminal illness

whereby public speech, political speech, became inseparable from its ideological
function, becoming part of the very spectacle—“The constant singing / Of the
radios and the art // Of the colored lights”—with which poetry, Oppen believed,
could have nothing to do if it were to maintain its integrity.13
“Time of the Missile” was published in The Materials in 1962. Here’s the poem
in its entirety:
I remember a square of New York’s Hudson River glinting

between warehouses.
Difficult to approach the water below the pier
Swirling, covered with oil the ship at the pier
A steel wall: tons in the water,
Width.
The hand for holding,
Legs for walking,
The eye sees! It floods in on us from here to Jersey tangled
in the grey bright air!
Become the realm of nations.
My love, my love,
We are endangered
Totally at last. Look
Anywhere to the sight’s limit: space
Which is viviparous:
Place of the mind

And eye. Which can destroy us,
Re-arrange itself, assert
Its own stone chain reaction.14
This is a poem about vision, about looking, and about the complicated relations
among seeing, creating, and destroying. The poem’s two parts hang on a frag-

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

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

poem. “Time of the Missile” concludes with an expression of love and longing
whose repetition (“My love, my love”) communicates both alarm and relief, the
sense of having at last arrived at a point of patient determination where pathos and
eros—suffering and desire—correspond in poiesis.
Obj e c t i v i s t R e a l i s m , o r T h e D i a l e c t i c
of Clarity in the Age of the Bomb
Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful
thing in the world,
A limited, limiting clarity
I have not and never did have any motive of poetry

But to achieve clarity
—o p p e n, “Route”
In From Apocalypse to Way of Life, Frederick Buell argues that it’s time to “aban-
don apocalypse for a sadder realism,” a realism that registers the insufficiency of
apocalyptic rhetoric to organize an adequate political response to ecocidal crisis.22
Oppen may have well anticipated Buell’s “sadder realism.” “It is true,” he writes
in a letter from 1966, “I speak of a realist poetry: Realist in that it is concerned
with a fact which it did not create.”23 This would be “the mineral fact,” as he will
come to call it, a figure whose genealogy stretches back to another figure in his
ecopoetical imagination, that of “the idiot stone,” at once luminously clear and
impenetrably opaque. “I like cars and such,” he writes in the 1959 letter to Zimet,
“I like them when they’re handled beautifully. I like the things that people have
wrested out of the idiot stone. The universe—it should excuse me, but I don’t like
it.”24 Despite his avowed preference for the things people make over the things
we will never make—a preference, that is, for cars over rocks—Oppen’s poetics
at midcentury grants an ontological privilege to the stone itself but not to the
things wrested from it.
Twenty-five years after his first collection, 1934’s Discrete Series, where “Nothing
can equal in polish and obscured / origin that dark instrument / A car,” Oppen’s

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

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

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

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

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

We are the beginning of a radical depopulation of the earth
Cataclysm . . . cataclysm of the plains, jungles, the cities
Something in the soil exposed between oceans
—O p p e n, “Of Being Numerous”
According to the terms of Oppen’s realism, the stone inclines toward a place of
maximum distance, an autonomous “outside.” His realist desire to encounter some-
thing that the mind did not make anticipates the speculative realist’s endeavor to
think the radical autonomy of the object independent of human cognition. Indeed,
Quentin Meillassoux’s various figures of “fossil matter” offer compelling analogues
for Oppen’s “mineral fact” and “idiot stone,” while also suggesting a placeholder
for Francis Ponge’s “farther back than the Flood.”41 Just to be clear, Meillassoux’s
speculative realism aims “to think what there can be when there is no thought”—

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

Ultimately the air
Is bare sunlight where must be found
The lyric valuables. From disaster
Shipwreck, whole families crawled

To the tenements, and there
Survived by what morality

Of hope
Which for the sons

Ends its metaphysic
In small lawns of home.46
“From Disaster” historicizes catastrophe, whose referent here could be the crisis
of European Jewry, the immigrants’ figural “shipwreck” on the shores of America,
or the metaphysics of economic value itself. Moreover, the poem suggests its own
historical imperative to find meaning—“lyric valuables”—against the ground of
“bare sunlight” where it cuts its figure. One might also hear, in the word “ultimate-
ly,” an echo of Oppen’s “Totally at last” in the final lines of “Time of the Missile,”
as if the opening lines of “From Disaster” were situated in the immediate wake of
that “stone chain reaction” as the dust clears. If one reads “ultimately” as “finally”
or “in the end,” Oppen can be read as arousing the future perfect tense, folding
time on itself so that what will have been here after the human history of meaning
ends will be nothing but air and light. But the bareness that will have been here
cohabits with what is already with us, here, now, however imperceptible that bare-
ness has become. Its temporality haunts the present tense separated from itself
by some discontinuity or crisis that we must learn how to think if only in order to
save ourselves. “Small lawns of home”—where the “morality of hope” converges
with democracy’s midcentury promise of wealth whose “valuables” suggest a very
different realization and betrayal of the poem’s desire for historical meaning—have
come not only to occupy the bare place of air and light but to foreclose even the
possibility of perceiving it.47 One thing Oppen’s poems model, then, is the work
of ecopoetics to render that discontinuity—say, the space between ontological and

historical disaster—perceptible. This is the distance between “the idiot stone” and
its pedestrian counterpart that will appear in section 5 of “Of Being Numerous”:
The great stone

Above the river
In the pylon of the bridge
‘1875’
Frozen in the moon light

In the frozen air over the footpath, consciousness
Which has nothing to gain, which awaits nothing

Which loves itself 48
Whereas Meillassoux’s speculative realism emphasizes the “ancestral” dimension

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

“Not to Be,” A Provisional Conclusion
Not to reduce the thing to nothing—
—O p p e n, “Route”
For Oppen, then, a poem’s ontological status—what the poem is in its essence, a
linguistic trace of an encounter with what will still be here when we stop believing
in it—emerges in opposition to the poem’s ideological status—what the poem
means, re-presents, or communicates. It’s the disjunction between the ontological
and the ideological that opens the space of his vertigo. Arguably, this is part of a
structure of feeling that betrays, at the physiological level, an acute anxiety at a
historically specific moment when ontological being coincides with the specter of
its own annihilation. By extension, even the poem’s ontological autonomy appears
threatened. In other words, the autonomy at stake in a poem like “Time of the Mis-
sile,” the radical autonomy of the atom after having been harnessed by the bomb,
has implications for the status of the poem itself. This is so because, for Oppen,
“the poem replaces the thing, the poem destroys—its meaning—I would like the
poem to be transparent, to be inaudible, not to be.”50 Just as the autonomy of the
atom has been captured by the missile, so too has the stony thing been captured
by the poem. Similarly, one might say that ontological being has been captured by
ideology much in the way that a thing’s use value has been captured by the com-
modity form. The poem can thus only fail to achieve the strange autonomy that
Oppen desires for it, and this is characteristic of his realism. “The poem destroys,”
he writes, and the poet is implicated. He would prefer for the poem “not to be,” as
the poem’s persistent being contains a reminder that historical action, for him,
has ended in failure, and this incites despair.
Against the grain of modernism’s insistence on the finite entanglement of being
and thought—an entanglement that renders it difficult to conceive of subjectivity
and objectivity independent of one another—Oppen’s figure of the stone offers a
placeholder for a speculative site beyond the terms of this entanglement, a nonsite
of autonomy and the equivalent of his “nothing place [that] reclaims our atomic
structure.” And yet, by contradictorily desiring the poem to be the equivalent of the
autonomous stone to which it is obliged to subordinate itself, Oppen reinstates

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

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

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

part two
Embodiment and Animality
3 •
Visceral Ecopoetics in Charles
Olson and Michael McClure
Proprioception, Biology, and the Writing Body
J o n a t h a n Sk i n n e r
Environmental writing today, between the abstractions of ecology it engages and

its many experiential precipitates and barring some ecofeminist instances, can be
as disembodied as Emerson’s transparent eyeball. When not entirely scopic, the
environmental body prefers phenomenological surfaces, an exchange at the skin
that leaves the viscera untouched. The principal mode of environmental writing
has been descriptive, where traces of the writing body are nearly always effaced,
and where reading happens politely, in silence.
Yet the book that brought the word “ecology” into the mainstream, Rachel
Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring, focuses not so much on the environment, on nature
or wilderness—even if ecologies of natural terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems
play a strong role—but on the body, the cell, the viscera: “there is also an ecology
of the world within our bodies. In this unseen world minute causes produce
mighty effects,” she writes.1 In her study of the migration and induction of
embryonic cells, Sandra Steingraber refers to the body itself as a “wetlands”:
“Organogenesis begins with three flat layers and, one week later, produces a
coiled, segmented object that looks like an architectural detail on the end of a
stair banister. Three weeks and a few more folds later, a ‘grossly recognizable’
human being resides in the wetlands of the uterus.”2 According to some of our
most environmental texts, then, ecology and the environment begin with the
body, at the depth of its viscera.
Ecology also can efface the body by withholding an observer from participa-
tion in the first-order systems of ecology. Able bodies that diagnose the health or
imbalance of ecological systems rarely appear within those systems. Like their
expressionist counterparts in the arts, certain of the New American poets wanted
to return writing to the body for a more immediate access to its energies, whether
they be libidinal, athletic, choreographed, dramatized, or even ventriloquized: the
poem as direct extension or projection of energy. The following essay attempts to
fill in some of the missing history of the development of ecopoetics by highlight-
ing the relevance of projectivist process-based poetics, at the forefront of the New
American Poetry, to poets seeking direct access to physiological energy in their
writings to outline the basis of what might be called a visceral poetics.
Gary Snyder’s 1990 book of essays, The Practice of the Wild, may be the most influ-
ential title in the early development of ecopoetics. Yet eight years before, Michael
McClure published Scratching the Beat Surface, a Gray Chair Charles Olson Memo-
rial Lecture delivered at SUNY Buffalo in 1980 at the invitation of Robert Creeley.
Whereas Snyder grounds his essays on environmental literary praxis in Poundian
poetics, Asian sources, and the “deep image” school of ethnographic translation,
McClure asks us to “step outside of the disaster that we have wreaked upon the
environment and upon our phylogenetic selves” with findings based in fieldwork,
biogenetics, and a thorough engagement with Olson’s so-called projective poetics.3
Part of tracing energy pathways between poetry and the body in what I am calling
a visceral ecopoetics entails uncovering what has been an overlooked exchange be-
tween Michael McClure and Charles Olson. The collection of Olson texts gathered
as Proprioception, rather than “Projective Verse,” sits at the heart of this exchange.4
Olson’s Proprioception informed ecopoetics-related practices by McClure and others
but, as I suggest here, McClure’s early ecopoetics-related thinking and practices
also influenced Proprioception. Thus this essay also recenters Olson’s work for our
understanding of ecopoetics.
66 Embodiment and Animality

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

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

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

for which he would be better known. Noting his difficulty with the word “form” in
Robert Creeley’s maxim that “form is never more than an extension of content,” he
confronted a “writhing multidimensionality of thought” as he studied and wrote
his way through Olson’s poetry: “a poem grew in my notebooks . . . a line would
occur—I’d try it with other lines—more would accrue to it. . . . At the end, rather
than a tortured and studied poem, it felt like my most sudden thought.”26 Elsewhere
he describes this method, discovered while writing the poem “Rant Block,” as
“alluvials,” something he had picked up from Jack Kerouac’s “spontaneous bop
prosody”: whenever you get stuck, you reread your draft from the top down and
write the first line that comes into your head as you reach the end.27
WILD ANGER MORE THAN CULTIVATED LOVE!

Wolf and salmon shapes free to kill
for food love and hatred.
Life twists its head from side to side to test
the elements and seek
for breath and meat to feed on.
I AM A FIRE AND I MOVE IN AN INFERNO
sick I smolder
and do not burn clear.28
Unlike the projective poetry line that comes “from the breath,” McClure’s lines
suck breath into their twisting vortices (“swirls,” as he likes to call them) of ex-
clamation, observation, invocation, assertion, confession.29 The poems hunger
for breath as they chastise, challenge, goad, and question their own vitality. The
opening and closing stanzas of “Rant Block” include the lines:
THERE IS NO FORM BUT SHAPE! NO LOGIC BUT SEQUENCE!

SHAPE the cloak and being of love, desire, hatred,
hunger. . . .
..........
These are the dull words from an animal of real flesh. Why?
Where is the fire in them?

Never let them stop until they are
moving things. Until
they stir the fire!30
Revising Robert Creeley’s form as “extension of content” dictum, McClure

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

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

some in states of consciousness. From Ginsberg’s “Howl” to Olson’s Proprioception
to McClure’s beast language, a changed consciousness convulses writing practices
from 1955 to 1961. If, as I am suggesting, an ecopoetics emerges directly from
McClure’s engagement with Olson’s process-based composition by field, one that
finds guidance from theories at the nexus of the developing biological sciences of
the cell and genetics—general systems theory, thermodynamics, and information
theory—rather than from tropes based on closed ecosystems, it should be noted
that a plant ally catalyzes this “powerful knowledge.” Logocentric poetics cannot
account for the visceral assemblage (more “gastric” than “gnostic,” according to
Ralph Maud) of belly and consciousness forged by the ingestion of a psychoactive
plant.43 The undersoul at work here may be more plant than beast. That said, the
work of historicizing and detailing the role of plant allies in the emergence of
ecopoetics, integral to a posthumanist history of visceral poetics, lies beyond the
scope of this essay.44
Proprioception: Placing Logography

McClure wrote Olson nearly twenty letters between 1957 and 1960. In November
1959, along with Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Donald Allen, and Philip Whalen, he
paid a visit to Olson in Gloucester. Olson treated the group to a tour of Dogtown,
prompting an on-site version of the tale of “Merry and the bull” and his composition
of the first, breakthrough “Maximus from Dogtown” poems following his guests’
departure.45 “Maximus from Dogtown—II,” written two weeks later, represents a
notable break in style. These poems helped launch a turn in Olson’s work (“turn
yr Back on / the Sea, go inland, to / Dogtown”), a search for a new center visually
invoked in his spiraling “Rose of the World” poem.46 Olson would spend the next
three years literally pacing the ground of Dogtown, a terminal moraine that was the
site of what he surmised was an experiment in community ended by the American
Revolution.47 In the 1962 verse essay “Place; & Names,” he makes it clear that this
site is coterminous with the body itself: “the crucialness being that these places
or names / be as parts of the body, common, & capable / therefore of having cells,
which can decant / total experience.”48 In his 1963 “Under the Mushroom” dis-
cussion, he clarifies what he means by cells decanting “total experience”: “what

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

& the Twist the Nasturtium
is any one of Ourselves

And the Place of it All?
Mother Earth Alone55
Over the next decade, Olson will reforge topos/typos/tropos in the crucible of
proprioception to relocate theme (topos) as placement in the cavity of the body, con-
cept (typos) as working with one’s given bent, the disposition of one’s organs, and
metaphor (tropos) as twisting of phrases and imagery through visceral engagement
with language. In Proprioception, he directs us to “the cavity of the body, in which
the organs are slung,” to “place” the unconscious.56
The “Mother Earth Alone” of “the Place of it All” is less deep ecological
fantasy of union with a primordial earth mother (Earth Day would not be found-
ed for another four months, in the spring following Olson’s death) than it is an
appeal to the unknown of “self ’s insides,” to the dark condition of self as “an
impediment of creation”57—what in Proprioception he calls “the intervening thing,
the interruptor, the resistor.”58 Rather, the emerging ecopoetics of The Maximus
Poems, as explored in Proprioception and enacted in the Dogtown poems, places what
Olson calls logography with physical ritual, guided by an extension of writing into
mapping, pursuing energy pathways back to the body. For McClure, impediment
enables creation; with beast language, he attempts to connect to an environment
(the field) precisely where the body interrupts.
Beast Language
Emerging from his own “dark night of the soul,” McClure also wrote from darkness
of self but differed in his vector of attention: “The use of writing is not to lead out
but to enact and create appendages of the body, of personal physiology. Making a
radiance or darkness into an actual morphological part, an extension even.”59 The
poem is not a negotiation of physiology, not a placing of psychic energies, but is
itself physiological, an appendage of the body. The most direct expression of this
“gestural biography,” McClure’s beast language, including the ninety-nine poems
of Ghost Tantras, emerged from this period.60 “SILENCE THE EYES! BECALM THE
SENSES!” begins Ghost Tantra 49—made famous in 1964 when McClure roared it to
lions at the San Francisco Zoo—commanding an ascetic (or religious) turn inward.61

McClure works with a proprioceptive concept of image, of image as muscular
activity, if not cellular in the sense of Olson’s cells decanting “total experience”:
“I wanted to make poetry that didn’t have images in the sense that Shelley calls
mimetic images, where the image describes something in the real world, but in
the sense where the sound of the poetry itself creates an image in the mind, in the
body, in the muscles in the body, and it created a melody that was also an image that
imprinted itself in the body physically.”62 McClure’s poetry is rooted in “muscular
music coming from the body and organs.”63 In Rare Angel, “THOUGHT / is / a /
muscular / sensation / pouring outward like / pseudopods with feathered hoofs.”64
While most of the Ghost Tantras are almost entirely beast language, some also
thematize the emergence of human from beast language that they enact, like the
stanza halfway through the sequence that McClure highlights in his introduction:
“Look at stanza 51. It begins in English and turns into beast language—star be-
comes stahr. Body becomes boody. Nose becomes noze.”65
51
I LOVE TO THINK OF THE RED PURPLE ROSE

IN THE DARKNESS COOLED BY THE NIGHT.
We are served by machines making satins
of sounds.
Each blot of sound is a bud or a stahr.
Body eats bouquets of the ear’s vista.
Gahhhrrr boody eers noze eyes deem thou.
NOH. NAH-OHH
hrooor. VOOOR-NAH! GAHROOOOO ME.
Nah droooooh seerch. NAH THEE!
The machines are too dull when we
are lion-poems that move & breathe.
WHAN WE GROOOOOOOOOOOOOOR
hann dree myketoth sharoo sreee thah noh deeeeeemed ez.
Whan eeeethoooze hrohh.66

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

As only they can praise, who build their days
With fin and hoof, with wing and sweetened fang
Struck free and holy in one Name always.70
!The Feast! processes the same “dark night of the soul” recounted in the fuck
manifesto of Meat Science, a response to McClure’s animist vision of life moving
through a “chain of meat”—a monist vision in tension with his postpeyote identifi-
cation with Olson’s admission in “Human Universe” that “the individual who peers
out from that flesh is precisely himself, is a curious wandering animal like me.”71

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

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

SONG EVER CHANTED
by the whale hunter

is a collector’s item
and wafts like mountain fog
from node to node before becoming clouds.
EVERY
BACKWARD
LOOK
puts us in touch with sentiment,
and hurts less than peering forward,
for tomorrow is the shadow of today.
Even the blue jay
gloats over his stash
of brass buttons. See the octopus play
with the exoskeleton
of his prey.85
Practically an ars poetica, this is a poem about energy. The sequence talisman,
song, predation, collection, evapotranspiration links multiple systems. Hunting
humans leave talismans and songs; the atmosphere collects these songs. Song hunts
energy, and human culture is enmeshed in fog and flesh. The second sentence of
the poem reverses temporality, as the footprint of present human culture, set on the
future, appears in the emerging light of the Anthropocene. What we do now sets
its footprint on the future. Is the affective play of song, the poem seems to ask, on
the side of sentiment or of hard peering forward? Can song be as negentropic as
bodies? The attempt to answer entangles one in the paradoxes of thermodynam-
ics: is entropy undergone or produced? It’s impossible to tell at the boundary. The
poem sings ambivalence with visceral affirmation.
McClure’s is a poetry of paradox and uncertainties, in the sense in which quantum
physics makes uncertainty integral to knowledge, and in which it differs markedly
from the certainties (if not pieties) by which science is known in so much of the
work that has come to characterize ecopoetics: “so that it may accommodate,” as he
puts it in Scratching the Beat Surface, “both Negative Capability and agnosia—knowing
through not knowing.”86 For McClure, ecopoetics does not begin with a known fact
(such as anthropogenic climate change) but with felt “primate nature”—with a love

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

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

BACK WITH A ROAR
and it is best to think the war
IS LOST
and we are survivors
of the Future.93
The poem thematizes more than it enacts entropology, a contemplation of

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

4 •
Playing in the Planetary Field
Vulnerability and Syncretic Myth Making
in Robert Duncan’s Ecopoetics
Michelle Niemann
It is not obvious that Robert Duncan wrote ecopoetry as that term is still most often
defined: his poems do not warn or mourn, and they are not devoted to describing a
particular place.1 Duncan’s work is, however, central to the projectivist ecopoetics
that Black Mountain poets developed in the 1950s and ’60s, a poetics that would
later thoroughly inform the contemporary, linguistically experimental poetries
represented in Jonathan Skinner’s journal, ecopoetics.2 Like Charles Olson and other
Black Mountain poets, Duncan was taken with systems thinking and process phi-
losophy, but he added an essential focus on psychology, asking how an individual
can participate in complex systems. If we are to participate in such systems without
trying to control them, he realized, we have to allow ourselves to be vulnerable.
Duncan often figures this vulnerability as queer, feminized, and Romantic.3 In
part through his reading of H.D.’s work, he came to see that an unending dialec-
tic between limit and emergence, discipline and spontaneity, fosters this saving
vulnerability—not only in the poet but also in the mollusk whose shell allows
it to both open and close to the tides. In his essays, Duncan crafted a myth that
knits religion and science together to trace the rhythms of this unending dialectic
through which matter, life, consciousness, and poetry emerge. At the same time,
he rejected the thermodynamic concept of entropy—the idea that the universe is
inevitably running down to a state in which matter is uniformly dispersed—and the
nihilism that linked entropy with Cold War atomic threat, conventional biopolitics,
and thanatopolitics. Duncan’s rejection of doom, belatedness, and apocalyptic
thinking not only inspired the counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s but also makes
his ecopoetics an important resource for our current moment.
Duncan’s ecopoetics of possibility starts with admitting that humans are vul-
nerable. In his essay “Ideas of the Meaning of Form,” he contends that reason
itself is a “tribal magic” invented to ward off unreason, heterodox religion, and the
imagination, which threaten to upset our control of self and world.4 His critique
of reason thus resonates with ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood’s critique
of rationalism, which for her is to reason as scientism is to science. That is, both
Duncan and Plumwood criticize not the act of reasoning but cultural convictions
that rationalism is the only legitimate way of knowing. Plumwood argues that
rationalism obscures how human subjects depend on functioning ecosystems
and even on our own bodies; while we humans assume that we can transcend the
nonhuman environment at will, through technology or science, we in fact rely on
it for our very existence.5 Like Plumwood, Duncan sees reason as a way to avoid the
knowledge that we depend on a world we cannot control—a world, in his words,
“where information and intelligence invade us, where . . . we become creatures,
not rulers, of what is.”6
Duncan’s vulnerable receptivity and participatory play are crucial for an ecopo-
etics that does not position the poet as Jeremiah crying that the people must reform
to avert apocalypse. By the time Duncan began his mature work in the mid-1950s,
environmental decline was a well-established theme in American poetry, from
Robert Frost wondering “what to make of a diminished thing” to Robinson Jeffers
elaborating his “inhumanism.” Duncan refuses the tone of tragedy or jeremiad;
instead, the poet’s role is to practice and model a participation that respects the
agency of others, human or more than human, in the compositional field. Also,
unlike much contemporary nature poetry, Duncan’s work does not describe partic-
ular places. Rather, in his essays, he crafts an origin story that syncretizes scientific
Playing in the Planetary Field 85

realism with myth to link the rhythms of inanimate matter with those of the tides,
life, the individual human body, and poetry. In its insistence that what happens on
Earth cannot be separated from the broader cosmos, Duncan’s ecopoetics imagines
a planetary environmentalism.
This essay traces how Duncan theorized and practiced an avowedly queer, Ro-
mantic, and vulnerable ecopoetics of emergent form. In the first section, I show
how his poem “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” revises Olson’s
projectivist field, insisting that the poet does not oversee the field of composition
but enters it only by invitation of its own lively orders. The second section focuses
on Duncan’s prose; I argue that through his reading of H.D.’s work, he developed
his concept of vulnerability and the syncretic myth of ecopoetic origins that he
elaborates in his essays. In the final section, I read “Poetry, A Natural Thing,” a
poem in which Duncan rewrites Robert Frost’s “West-Running Brook” and re-
sponds to John Crowe Ransom’s rejection of his work, countering both entropic
fatalism and conventional definitions of poetic naturalness. Duncan’s ecopoetics
decouples nature from convention, wedding it instead to extravagant emergent
forms, and invites us not to seek technoscientific mastery of Earth and cosmos but
to participate in them playfully by cultivating vulnerability and a “vital weakness.”
At a time when pervasive apocalyptic thinking pushes us toward unwise technofixes
to global environmental problems, Duncan’s work offers contemporary ecopoetics
an alternative way of imagining and practicing hope.
Olson’s Field and Duncan’s

Queer Play Principle
Charles Olson’s 1950 essay “Projective Verse,” with its concept of composition by
field, catalyzed a group of poets loosely associated with Black Mountain College,
where he was rector, around a new, projectivist poetics. Both in his 1960 The Opening
of the Field and in his essays, Duncan playfully revises Olson’s field: while Olson
analyzes and enacts the field as system, Duncan emphasizes the vulnerability that
is required to enter such a field as a participant. Duncan underscores the queer,
feminized, and Romantic aspects—that is, the disavowed aspects—of vulnerability,
drawing out the psychological consequences of Olson’s ecological “objectism”

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

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

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

Myth of Ecopoetic Origins
Though Duncan valued spontaneity in composition and saw poetic form as an
emergent rather than an imposed order, one of his key interlocutors in the develop-

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

in every sea-shell:

continuous, the sea thrust
is powerless against coral,
bone, stone, marble

hewn from within by that craftsman,
the shell-fish:
The shell is itself a protective spell, guarding the “flabby, amorphous hermit /
within” against “the sea thrust.” In comparing the shellfish to a “craftsman,” H.D.
not only indicates that we can read it as a figure for the poet but also suggests that
art or poetry itself should protect the poet-hermit’s hidden life: “my shell-jaws
snap shut // at invasion of the limitless, / ocean-weight; infinite water // can not
crack me.”27 In this poem, Duncan writes, “the individual life begets itself from
and must also hold itself against the enormous resources of life, against the too-
much”; it must “take heart in what would take over the heart in its greater power.”28
He constantly moves among varied registers of life in The H.D. Book and his essays,
using each to interpret the others: here the biological life of the shellfish, which
lives in the sea by shutting the sea out, echoes the sociopolitical and cultural life
of oppressed sects that survive both within and against the dominant order and
the hermetic life of poets who dissent from conventional values. Eric Keenaghan’s
interpretation of Duncan recognizes this: his use of life to encompass vitalism,
biography, life writing, and biopolitics picks up on the mobility of life in Duncan’s
own work.29 Duncan reads H.D.’s poem in biological, political, and imaginative
registers at once; for him, “the Trilogy is the story of survival” in all those senses.30
The passage in which the shellfish opens to the tide lends Duncan not only
this conceptual structure but also key images for his myth of ecopoetic origins.
H.D. writes:
yet that flabby, amorphous hermit

within, like the planet
senses the finite,

it limits its orbit

of being, its house,
temple, fane, shrine:
it unlocks the portals

at stated intervals:
prompted by hunger,
it opens to the tide-flow:
but infinity? no,

of nothing-too-much:31
While H.D. emphasizes limit and the poet’s self-protection, she acknowledges
the need for interchange between the shellfish and its environment. “Hunger”
requires the shellfish to open “to the tide-flow”; it must make itself vulnerable in
order to survive.
Duncan underscores this necessary vulnerability; for him, boundaries and other
always-provisional closures ultimately protect and allow for receptivity.32 For him,
the shell “sustains ‘that flabby, amorphous hermit / within’—the possibility for
the living organism to keep its tenderness to experience, its vital weakness.” This
vitality is not a Bergsonian élan vital, a vital force or strength, but a “vital weakness”;
Duncan does not endorse the vitalism of the strong but recognizes that “tender-
ness to experience” enables life.33 To participate in cocreating the world, living
creatures must receive as well as give; the shellfish has to open “to the tide-flow”
as much as it has to protect itself against it. For Duncan, the poet also must foster
receptivity: “We speak of the poet as ‘gifted’ . . . and we obscure in this the fact that
the willingness of the poet to receive, his acceptance of what is given is initial to
the gift. The poet must be a host to Poetry, ‘open to the tide flow.’”34
In The H.D. Book, Duncan begins drafting the astounding passage in “Towards
an Open Universe” in which he crafts a myth of origins for planet, life, self, and
poetry. I will turn to that passage in a moment, but first I want to note how he draws
an essential analogy between the individual human body and the planet from his
reading of H.D.: “A correspondence is felt between the tide of the sea and the tide
of the blood, between ebb and flow and the systole and diastole, between the valves

of the heart and the valves of the shell-fish who lives in the tidal rhythm, as the
brain lives in the tidal flow of the heart, fed by charges of blood in the capillaries.”35
In this passage and others, Duncan develops the language and images he will use
in his myth of ecopoetic origins in “Towards an Open Universe.”36 Here he plays
not only on H.D.’s image of the shellfish but also on the likeness between self and
planet that she sets up: “I know the pull / of the tide, the lull // as well as the moon.” 37
“Towards an Open Universe” characterizes the emergent orders of Duncan’s
planetary ecopoetics. Like H.D., Duncan links his own life with that of the planet
via images of the sea. He begins the essay with the story of his own birth and a
passage from his poem “Apprehensions” that connects his birth with “the birth
of life itself in the primal waters,” reaching far back to set up the essay’s lyrical
evocation of rhythms: “In the very beginnings of life, in the source of our cadences,
with the first pulse of the blood in the egg then, the changes of night and day must
have been there.”38
Duncan does not retell classical myth but instead draws on the work of biophys-
icist Erwin Schrödinger, Heraclitus, Thomas Carlyle, and Olson to write what we
might call a syncretic myth that includes science. He tells a story about how poetic
order emerges within the rhythms of the body and the planet:
We are, all the many expressions of living matter, grandchildren of Gaia, Earth and
Uranus, the Heavens. Late born, for the moon and ocean came before. The sea was our
first mother and the sun our father, so our sciences picture the chemistry of the living
as beginning in the alembic of the primal sea quickened by rays of the sun and even,
beyond, by radiations of the cosmos at large. Tide-flow under the sun and moon of the
sea, systole and diastole of the heart, these rhythms lie deep in our experience and when
we let them take over our speech there is a monotonous rapture of persistent regular
stresses and waves of lines breaking rhyme after rhyme. There have been poets for
whom this rise and fall, the mothering swell and ebb, was all. Amoebic intelligences,
dwelling in the memorial of tidal voice, they arouse in our awake minds a spell, so that
we let our awareness go in the urgent wave of the verse. The rhyming lines and the re-
peating meters persuade us. To evoke night and day or the ancient hypnosis of the sea
is to evoke our powerful longing to fall back into periodic structure, into the inertia of
uncomplicated matter. Each of us, hungry with life, rises from the cast of seed, having

just this unique identity or experience created in the dance of chromosomes, and having
in that identity a time; each lives and falls back at last into the chemistry of death.39
Here Duncan’s sonorous invocations of a primordial scene echo through his refer-
ences to periodic structure and chromosomes to create an ecopoetic origin myth out
of scientific realism. I suspect that part of the broad appeal of “Towards an Open
Universe”—including for other poets, such as Lorine Niedecker—lies precisely
in his ability to evoke the mythic through secular forms of scientific knowledge.40
He uses poetry to syncretically join science with religion and myth, stitching them
together in a way that honors the differences, tensions, and contradictions among
them. As in practices of religious syncretism that involve merging two traditions
without treating either as more true than the other, Duncan blends scientific, re-
ligious, mythic, and psychological discourses without making any of them the
primary way of knowing.
By putting an essentially scientific origin story in both mythic and embodied
terms, Duncan’s “Towards an Open Universe” transvalues scientific language,
taking it back from a culturally dominant rationalism and making it available for
poets and environmentalists to use in constructing alternative ways to live. To
overcome the fatalism associated with the military-industrial complex’s version of
technoscience, his myth incorporates both the thermodynamic concept of entropy
and Freud’s death drive as stages within an endless dialectic.41 His poetics is thus
ecological; he does not privilege biological life as ordered while matter is chaotic
but instead represents life and death, organic beings and inanimate matter, as
different kinds of emergent order, both essential to planetary rhythms.
The rhythm of the sea, in the passage quoted above, is double-hinged: it informs
the lively rhythm of the heart and calls up a longing for death, gesturing toward
the repetitive patterns of inorganic matter. This sea is both what Duncan calls a
“mothering swell and ebb” and Walt Whitman’s sea that seethes “Death, Death,
Death, Death, Death” in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”42 By contending
that a “powerful longing to fall back into periodic structure” defines the living,
Duncan recalls Freud’s death drive.43 In Duncan’s myth, the death drive corresponds
to living beings’ physical return to matter in “the chemistry of death”; it is the
psychological aspect of patterns that are also biochemical. He does not mention

thermodynamics or entropy in “Towards an Open Universe.” But in the opening of
“Ideas of the Meaning of Form,” which appears to be another draft for the passage
above, he works against entropy’s fatalist contest between order and disorder, in
which chaos always wins:
Phases of meaning in the soul may be like phases of the moon, and, though rationalists
may contend against the imagination, all men may be one, for they have their source
out of the same earth, mothered in one ocean and fathered in the light and heat of one
sun that is not tranquil but rages between its energy that is a disorder seeking higher
intensities and its fate or dream of perfection that is an order where all light, heat,
being, movement, meaning and form, are consumed toward the cold. The which men
have imagined in the laws of thermodynamics.44
Duncan rewrites entropy in part by reversing its terms: the sun’s “energy” is not an
order but a “disorder seeking higher intensities,” while the stasis of final entropic
dispersal is not only an “order” but even a “dream of perfection.” He pictures the
sun as raging between energetic disorder and the order of death, anticipating the
endless dialectic he elaborates in “Towards an Open Universe.”
In an echo of the way he reverses “order” and “disorder” here, Duncan frustrates
a simple opposition between life and matter, animacy and inanimacy, by using
paradoxical pairs of terms for them in “Towards an Open Universe.” The first of
these appears in the long passage from that essay that I quoted earlier, where he
refers to the periodic structure of matter. He borrows its counterpart—life as an
aperiodic structure—from Schrödinger’s What Is Life? Even more important is the
other pair of terms that Duncan uses: equilibrium and disequilibrium. Schrödinger
defines life as that which “evades the decay to equilibrium.”45 In Duncan’s words,
life is a disequilibrium that resists the equilibrium of death.
This paradoxical view of life as an aperiodic structure, a disequilibrium, that
emerges from and holds out against the periodic structure of matter and the equi-
librium of death transforms the conventional opposition between life as order and
death as disorder into a contrast between two different kinds of order. By speaking
of the periodic structure of matter and the equilibrium of death, Duncan insists
that the inanimate has its own order—in fact, a more regular order than that of

life. Life’s disequilibrium is not disorder but a more complex order: “this picture
of an intricately articulated structure, a form that maintains a disequilibrium or
lifetime—whatever it means to the biophysicist—to the poet means that life is by
its nature orderly and that the poem might follow the primary processes of thought
and feeling.”46 In other words, by attending carefully to their own thinking and
feeling, poets may have access to the emergent orders—that is, structures and
laws—of the planet, which both give rise to lively ecosystems and connect them
with the cosmos.
In The H.D. Book, Duncan claims that “the imperative of the poem towards its
own order” is a “biological instinctual reality” for H.D., but he then immediately
broadens beyond the biological to rewrite entropic “inertia” as a material and
spiritual “calling . . . toward concretion”:
She compares the soul’s objectification with ‘the stone marvel’ of the mollusc, ‘hewn
from within,’ but it may represent a spiritual force of the cosmos beyond the biological.
This ‘life’-will towards objective form is ultimately related to an animal crystallization,
and the images of jewel, crystal, ‘as every snowflake / has its particular star, coral or
prism shape’ suggest that there is—not an inertia but a calling thruout the universe
toward concretion. The poet in the imminence of a poem (what now after Olson we
may see as the projection) answering such a calling as a saint has his calling or a hero
his fate. ‘Inexorably.’47
Here Duncan repositions both Olson’s projective verse and the traditional idea of
inspiration—that a poet does not write by choice but takes dictation from gods
or muses—in a wider field: the imperative that the poem emerge no longer dis-
tinguishes poetry but, rather, links it with biological growth and the formation of
snowflakes.
In its “sense of planet,” “Towards an Open Universe” arguably anticipates the
environmental imagination sparked by the photographs of Earth from space that
Stewart Brand put on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog in the late 1960s and early
’70s.48 But while those photographs of Earth were obtained through the techno-
scientific might of the state and the military-industrial complex, Duncan does not
pretend to possess a masterful view from nowhere. His myth imagines the planetary

and the primordial while reminding us of his (and our own) limited embodiment.
The essay opens, “I was born January 7, 1919, in the hour before dawn, in the depth
of winter at the end of a war.” In crafting a myth adequate to the way poetry “comes
in a dancing organization between personal and cosmic identity,” he imagines
what it means to think globally and act locally. That persistent slogan came into use
around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, but it is still tricky to enact. In part,
thinking globally and acting locally must mean understanding our own limits: “I
am but part of the whole of what I am, and wherever I seek to understand I fail what
I know.”49 Duncan challenges us to imagine planetary systems but to participate in
those systems as what we are—limited players who can neither comprehend nor
control all the consequences of our actions.
“Poetry, A Natural Thing”

A poem in The Opening of the Field counters narratives of doom in a less grand, more
humorous way than Duncan’s essays, as it also revises the dominant New Critical
understanding of poetic naturalness. In “Poetry, A Natural Thing,” Duncan pushes
back against the entropic fatalism of Robert Frost’s “West-Running Brook,” throw-
ing into relief the playfulness that informs his own ecopoetics. Duncan represents
the poem as a salmon that resists the current and goes back “toward the source”:
The poem
feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse,
to breed itself,
a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping.
This beauty is an inner persistence

toward the source
striving against (within) down-rushet of the river,
a call we heard and answer
in the lateness of the world
primordial bellowings
from which the youngest world might spring . . .50

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

In that white wave runs counter to itself.
It is from that in water we were from
Long, long before we were from any creature.51
In Fred’s speech, the brook becomes a vast analogy for “the stream of everything
that runs away”: “Some say existence,” he continues, “Stands still and dances, but it
runs away, / It seriously, sadly, runs away / To fill the abyss’ void with emptiness.” In
doing so, “It flows between us, over us, and with us.” Fred paints a gloomy picture of
The universal cataract of death

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

Our life runs down in sending up the clock.
The brook runs down in sending up our life.
The sun runs down in sending up the brook.
And there is something sending up the sun.
It is this backward motion toward the source,
Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,
The tribute of the current to the source.
It is from this in nature we are from.
It is most us. . . .52
The universe’s entropic current flows with the speakers, carrying them along.
Fred explains resistance—all that seems to run counter to this entropic pull—as
a fleeting, paradoxical phenomenon that entropy itself generates. While Duncan
suggests that “striving against” the current is possible, Frost’s speaker insists that
entropy is in fact “unresisted.” Everything results from “the universal cataract of
death” and its self-resistance. Thus the brook sends up living beings, and they in
turn send up their creations, like the mechanical clock.
Fred’s elaborate analogy arguably stands as the point of Frost’s poem, though
the poem’s dialogic structure implies a different epistemology than its content. The
poem memorializes Fred’s pronouncement despite its avowed dissolution of history
into entropy. Its gender politics are also fascinatingly problematic: Fred ridicules
his unnamed wife, who says that the brook is waving to her “in an annunciation,”
for taking it “off to lady-land.” She responds by coaxing him out of his pout so
that he gives the speech quoted above, and she concludes the poem with another
compromise: “‘To-day will be the day of what we both said.’”53
In “Poetry, A Natural Thing,” Duncan responds to Frost, but as in his essays
he also takes on the third law of thermodynamics and Freud’s death drive; against
these assertions of death’s victory, he celebrates what strives against it. He not only
invokes the image of the river and the notion of going back “toward the source,” but
he also transmutes Frost’s “white wave,” passively thrown up by the stream, into the
salmon that swims against the current under its own power. While Frost’s wave is
created by the brook and only apparently resists its current, Duncan’s salmon has
the agency to actually resist and even make it back up the falls, though a quote that

he embeds near the beginning of the poem suggests that its journey ends with death
“‘on the rocks.’” Despite this, Duncan’s poem promises possibility and renewal,
rather than the world-weary inevitability of decline. While “West-Running Brook”
presents a tragic vision in which regret is sacred, “Poetry, A Natural Thing” hopes
that “the youngest world might spring” from strife against the current.
Duncan’s poem also does not take itself as seriously as Frost’s. Calling the
salmon “one picture apt for the mind,” he concludes with a different metaphor:
A second: a moose painted by Stubbs,

where last year’s extravagant antlers
lie on the ground.
The forlorn moosey-faced poem wears
new antler-buds,
the same,
“a little heavy, a little contrived”,
his only beauty to be

all moose.54
The line in quotes is from a rejection letter that John Crowe Ransom wrote to Dun-
can.55 By calling Duncan’s work contrived, Ransom implies that his poems should
seem more natural. This kind of naturalness, though, does not involve conceiving
of a poem as a salmon (let alone a moose); instead, it draws on the New Critical
idea that poems should be written in a natural diction, defined through the work
of a poet like Frost.
In celebrating the moose, Duncan embraces both extravagant nature and ex-
travagant contrivance, showing them to be one. Ransom, in calling Duncan’s lines
“a little heavy, a little contrived,” takes for granted not only that all poems should
aim for an appearance of naturalness rather than contrivance but also that “con-
trived” and “natural” are opposites. Duncan’s perverse image of the moose rebuts
just this assumption: the moose’s “extravagant antlers” may look like they were
constructed by an inept artisan, but they are natural. Just as the new antlers that

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

5 •
“Beyond the Vomiting Dark”
Toward a Black Hydropoetics
Joshua Bennett
Those African persons in ‘Middle Passage’ were literally suspended in the ‘oceanic,’ if we
think of the latter in its Freudian orientation as an analogy for undifferentiated identity:
removed from the indigenous land and culture, and not-yet ‘American’ either, these
captive persons, without names that their captors would recognize, were in movement
across the Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all. Inasmuch as, on any given day,
we might imagine, the captive did not know where s/he was, we could say that they
were culturally ‘unmade,’ thrown in the midst of a figurative darkness that ‘exposed’
their destinies to an unknown course.
—H o r t e n s e S p i l l e r s, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American
Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 72
In the darkest recesses of the deep sea, altogether impractical colors take hold.
Purples, greens, and yellows exist for no discernible reason, shades and hues that
serve no known evolutionary purpose, given the utter lack of light, the absence
of photons that might make such traits beneficial to a given creature’s duration.
I would like to suggest that the capacious, irreducible blackness found at the
bottom of the ocean as well as the myriad forms of uncanny life we observe there
once we dare to look—dragonfish with appendages that end in the shimmer of
a bright green bulb, Vampyroteuthis infernalis with its twin rows of teeth like razor
wire—serve as an occasion for thinking about blackness as a means of organizing
both human and nonhuman life. That is to say, they are a means of thinking about
the color line as the human-animal divide by another name—and the social lives
of the nonhuman animal entities that dwell within the oceanic realm. For even if
we turn away from the very depths of the water and train our gaze on its surface,
we will find a history of violent proximity between the people who are called black
and the nonhuman animals who roam the waves. Though this proximity does
not begin with the institution of chattel slavery in the Americas, it is from that
nodal point in the ever-expanding archive of African diasporic letters—as well
as that foundational moment in the development of the modern world economy
and ecology—that this particular study takes flight. We will begin in the hold of
the ship and move from there to consider what the sea and its animal lifeworlds
make possible for the black literary imagination and what they potentially, or
necessarily, foreclose.
How does the ever-present specter of the transatlantic slave trade—what we
might think of, following Saidiya Hartman and other critics, as the afterlife of slav-
ery—propel us to theorize black ecopoetics not as a matter of ground but as an
occasion to think at the intersection of terra firma and open sea, surface and benthos,
the observable ocean and the uncharted blackness of its very bottom?1 Given recent
critical attention paid to African American nature writing in works such as Camille
Dungy’s Black Nature as well as academic monographs including Ian Finseth’s Shades
of Green, Dianne Glave’s Rooted in the Earth, and Paul Outka’s Race and Nature from
Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance, among others, I am interested in how we
might think alongside black writers who have historically taken up oceanic ecolo-
gy—and their necessarily strained relationship to it—as a central concern. In this
essay, I will concentrate on the writings of two major twentieth-century African
American poets, Robert Hayden and Melvin Tolson, in order to elaborate a theory
of black ecopoetics gone offshore. I will undertake this project primarily through
investigating the ways that both poets deploy sharks in their writings about the
Toward a Black Hydropoetics 103

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

and Tolson as it pertains to the potential interplay between black life on the ship
and the presence of the sharks in the water below. In Phillips’s hands, the slave ship
becomes a space from which we might launch a critique of “the overrepresentation
of Man” as the only meaningful genre of human life and, what’s more, the dominant
configuration of the human body itself as always already independent and auton-
omous.2 “For a Burial Free of Sharks” asks us instead to embrace the swarm or the
school (in the doubled sense that an aquatic register demands), over and against
an individualized subject position or self. It asks that we reckon with the possibility
of becoming multiple, that we might better understand how the enslaved survived
the hold, what they transformed it into, and what such transformation means for
how we imagine sociality as such in the present day. In sum, my goal in analyzing
this constellation of texts is to elucidate a divergent approach to the work of think-
ing at the intersections of black studies, animality studies, and ecocriticism. I turn
toward the sea in order to unsettle the sort of historical terracentrism that obscures
the social and political possibilities of a wetter archive.3 In doing so, I chart a black
hydropoetics that does not require solid ground in order to make its claims or sustain
its movement but, rather, relishes the freedom of the open water, dodges death at
every turn, and makes hazy the division between person and nonperson so that a
more robust ethical lexicon for black life might rise to the air.
From its opening lines, Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage” creates a world in which
the boundaries between human and nonhuman, living and dead, are thrown into
crisis. The poem itself, which is composed of three sections, each containing stanzas
of varying structure and line length, is primarily set on a manned ship at sea, the Amis-
tad—or, from another angle, what we might also read as many ships operating under
the metonymic reach of a single dreamscape, indistinguishable from one another
against the haze of the speaker’s memory—which famously bore human chattel as its
primary cargo:4
Jesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy:
Sails flashing to the wind like weapons,

sharks following the moans the fever and the dying;
horror the corposant and compass rose.

Middle Passage:
voyage through death
to life upon these shores.
10 April 1800—
Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says
their moaning is a prayer for death,
ours and their own. Some try to starve themselves.
Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter
to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under.
Later in the poem, we find Hayden deploying a timely allusion to Shakespeare’s

The Tempest:
Deep in the festering hold thy father lies

of his bones New England pews are made,
those are altar lights that were his eyes.5
The reader is presented with an image of the slave ship as not only a site of un-
relenting violence but one in which species boundaries are crossed as a direct
by-product of such brutality. The migratory patterns of the sharks in this passage
are transformed in the wake of blood spilled from the decks of the seaborne vessel,
their every movement altered by the scenes taking place above the surface of the
water. The ineluctable irony of each ship’s name lands like a scythe: Jesús, Estrella,
Esperanza, Mercy, all transcendent principles or celestial beings, gods and stars and
holy affect, all of which belie the muck and grime of the hold. The sharks in this
opening scene are merely one component of a much larger network of hypervio-
lent actors that Hayden draws our attention to from the outset. Even the sails are
instruments of war, “flashing . . . like weapons” as sharks dart through the current
below. The compass rose is fear itself. Everywhere in Hayden’s landscape terror
reigns, and human beings are not the only ones who serve as its enacting agents.
The entire ship, as well as the broader environment surrounding it, comes alive
and works in tandem to create what we might envision, to riff on Stephanie Small-

wood’s work, as a kind of living death for every enslaved person onboard.6 In this
sense, the very phrase “Middle Passage” connotes both a literal movement along
the routes of the transatlantic slave trade over the course of several centuries and
an intermediary category between living and dying. That is, not a space of limbo
so much as the fusion of both planes into something like a deathly persistence—a
mode of existing outside human boundaries and protections and thus in closer,
generative proximity to nonhuman life forms, or what I have described elsewhere as
low life. It is during this process, while being forced to move through the countless
day-to-day violences endemic to life aboard the ship, that the enslaved Africans
who serve as Hayden’s primary points of concern first learn what it will mean to
live as black nonpersons, the very objects against which the dream—the utopian
vision of a life worth living on the very shores he describes—will come to be op-
positionally defined.7
Rather than accepting such a fate with quiet resignation, the enslaved characters
in “Middle Passage” rebel from the very first, striking back against their captors in
order to take the vessel as their own. As Willem Bosman writes in his 1705 New and
Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, sharks are part and parcel of this collective
resistance: “I have sometimes, not without horrour, seen the dismal Rapacious-
ness of these Animals; four or five of them together shoot to the bottom under the
Ship to tear the dead Corps to pieces.”8 The insurgents that Hayden describes leap
overboard once it is clear that there is no rebellion that can be waged and won on
the decks of the ship. Marcus Rediker writes about this historical practice—that
is, of enslaved insurgents deploying suicide as a means of resisting the conditions
of their bondage—in his seminal study, Outlaws of the Atlantic:
Some jumped in the hope of escape while docked in an African port, while others chose
drowning over starvation as a means to terminate the life of the body meant to slave
away on New World Plantations. The kind of resistance was widely practiced and just as
widely feared by the organizers of the trade. Merchants warned captains about it in their
instructions, formal and informal. Captains in turn made sure their ships had nettings
all around. They also had the male captives chained to a ring bolt whenever they were
on the main deck, and at the same time made sure that vigilant watches were always
kept. . . . One of the most illuminating aspects of these suicidal escapes was the joy

expressed by people once they had gotten into the water. Seaman Isaac Wilson recalled
a captive who jumped into the sea and “went down as if exalting that he got away.”9
Not unlike Hayden’s vision of the affective economies and exchanges that charac-
terized the Middle Passage for the enslaved, what Rediker describes here is a social
world in which any and all approaches to opposition are at play, including those
that leverage the presence of nonhuman animal actors toward the end of stealing
oneself away, refusing to become the property of another even if that choice ends
in death. Sharks, which are described in the above section of “Middle Passage” as
simultaneously waiting and following, thus function as a kind of specter, both an
ever-looming threat to the flourishing of black life and a release valve, a guaranteed
exit. This is especially important given all the precautions taken by slavers—the
aforementioned netting around ships, for example—to ensure that the black hu-
man beings onboard lived long enough to be appraised and sold. Of critical import
here also is the role of West African cosmologies and spiritual practices as they
pertain to the enslaved and their vision of what it might mean to steal away—the
numberless captives who saw biological death not as an absolute conclusion but
as a way to return to their native land.10
Stealing oneself away was a refusal of objectification, an unmooring of the re-
lentless, necromantic machinations of a global order that demanded human beings
be transformed into salable commodities. Over and against the lethal pressures of
global white supremacy, the men and women Hayden describes dared to imagine
a second home beyond the sea: life and death by other names. The afterlife of such
thinking can be found, it bears mentioning, within the realm of twentieth- and
twenty-first-century black expressive cultures. The Detroit-based electronic band
Drexciya, for instance, constructed an entire mythology around just such a vision
of black social life beneath the sea. In the liner notes of their 1997 album, The Quest,
the electronic music duo of James Stinson and Gerald Donald first began to fashion
an origin story wherein the band’s name is that of an entire underwater country,
one founded by the children of enslaved women thrown overboard, women whose
children developed the ability to breathe water in utero, survived, and went on to
create something akin to a black Atlantis, an underwater utopia far more advanced
in terms of its technology and its ethics than any civilization on land.11

This notion of an underwater refuge for black people is also reflected in the
works of artists such as Sun Ra, the experimental film collective the Otolith Group,
and the visual artist Ellen Gallagher.12 In all these works, the haunting presence of
the Middle Passage is recalibrated toward imagining an elsewhere, however remote
or deeply submerged, where black life can flourish. Conceptualizing black Atlantis
is labor that unsettles the terracentrism of our political imaginations, threatens
the seeming interminability of the land-borne nation-state, and demands a more
dynamic approach to organizing life on earth. Gratuitous violence is alchemized
in the light of the black fantastic, allowing for new practices of being together
to emerge.13 When we immerse ourselves within this archive, we find both oth-
erworldly despair and fugitive possibility: uncharted, undercommon marronage
made possible by the opacity of the oceanic realm.14
In this vein, the outpouring of exuberant affect that both Hayden and Rediker
describe in the moments when enslaved persons begin to sink below the surface
of the sea also demands our attention. How do we make sense of such unfettered
emotion on this occasion? Captives give their very suffering over to the tide and
all they can do is exalt, the slavers’ power torn asunder at last by laughter. This
refusal to be transmogrified into property without will or imagination, especially
as reflected in the act of giving one’s flesh to the water, is a theme of critical import
throughout “Middle Passage.” It is most forcefully articulated toward the end of
the poem’s first section, where sharks yet again make an appearance, though in a
fashion that veers somewhat from their role earlier on:
Misfortune
follows in our wake like sharks (our grinning
tutelary gods). Which one of us
has killed an albatross? A plague among
our blacks—Ophthalmia: blindness—& we
have jettisoned the blind to no avail.
It spreads, the terrifying sickness spreads.
Its claws have scratched sight from the Capt.’s eyes
& there is blindness in the fo’c’sle
& we must sail 3 weeks before we come to port.

What port awaits us, Davy Jones’
or home? I’ve heard of slavers drifting, drifting,
playthings of wind and storm and chance, their crews
gone blind, the jungle hatred/crawling up on deck.15
The aforementioned sharks transition from being invoked as physical threats

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

and the enslaved that we see throughout “Middle Passage.” As Hayden demon-
strates, a rigorous accounting of chattel slavery and its afterlives demands that
we engage nonhuman sociality, and that we recognize the work of Afrodiasporic
ecopoetics—and black study more broadly—as species thinking, as ecological
thought at the end of the world.17
Poet and critic Melvin Tolson’s “The Sea-Turtle and the Shark” is an altogether
brief yet striking meditation on the shape and tenor of black social life in moder-
nity, a harrowing account of how it feels to navigate a world in which one is forced
to live daily under the threat of violence that is not aberrational but algorithmic,
built into the code of the contemporary social order. Tolson’s poem intervenes as
an alternative cartography of the present, a set of survival instructions for those
who are, to use George Jackson’s turn of phrase, born in jail.18 From the outset of
the poem, readers are forced to look outward from the confines of an enclosure:
Strange but true is the story

of the sea-turtle and the shark-
the instinctive drive of the weak to survive
in the oceanic dark.
Driven,
riven
by hunger
from abyss to shoal,
sometimes the shark swallows
the sea-turtle whole.19
We are introduced to the sea turtle as a character that serves as the embodiment
of “the weak,” a broader network of actors whose survival is marked throughout
the poem by unceasing labor, an ongoing refusal of the normative order of things.
Indeed, readers are forewarned that what they are about to read is a “strange but
true” story that demands attention. We might understand this strangeness as a
particular set of inversions deployed by Tolson in order to use the sea turtle as a
metonym for black experience. Swallowed by the shark, the sea turtle turns the

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

withdraws,
into the shell
of his undersea craft,
his leathery head and the rapacious claws
that can rip
a rhinoceros’ hide
or strip
a crocodile to fare-thee well;
now,
inside the shark,

the sea-turtle begins the churning seesaws
of his descent into pelagic hell;
then...then,
with ravenous jaws
that can cut sheet steel scrap,
the sea-turtle gnaws
...and gnaws...and gnaws
his way in a way that appalls-
his way to freedom,
beyond the vomiting dark
beyond the stomach walls
of the shark.20
The story of Jonah and the giant fish thus becomes an allegory put to revolutionary
use, a black radical operation with a nonhuman actor at its center. Here the forms
of life trapped in the blackening depths of the leviathan’s belly are not rescued by
the workings of a watchful sovereign. They suffer and are not saved. Instead, the
sea turtle uses all that it has at its disposal, its very flesh, to tear a pathway through
the body of the shark that, for Tolson, stands in for the interlocking systems of
domination that serve as civil society’s architecture. The sea turtle does not and
cannot wait to be rescued. It takes its freedom back through a gradual cutting away
at the material foundations of its cage. Held firmly within the belly of the shark and
nonetheless alive, Tolson’s sea turtle provides us with a theory of black fugitivity in
the flesh of the animal, its persistent burrowing a model for how we might enact
our freedom dreams though we might be hunted, hamstrung, surrounded on all
sides. Notice too how Tolson invokes an entire bestiary full of larger creatures in
order to emphasize the sheer power of the sea turtle’s bite, its largely unheralded
capacity for destruction. Crocodiles and rhinoceroses alike are cited as no real
match for the sea turtle’s unsung power; both make a certain argument against
appearance, against the utility of possessing brute strength alone.
Rather, it is precisely the size and otherwise advantageous attributes of the
crocodile, the rhinoceros, and the shark that bar them from the sort of lifeworlds
available to the sea turtle, who is underestimated, demeaned, seen as little more

than raw matter fit for consumption. From its position at the very bottom of the
hierarchy, the sea turtle attacks, gains its freedom, and also, the reader is led to
believe, mortally wounds that which depends upon its destruction for sustenance.
The sea turtle’s work, the speaker tells us, is appalling. It is not quick or pristine. It
reminds us, per Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, that fugitive practice is inherently
processual, that escape is not an achievement but an activity.21 Such movement
is made manifest in the form of the poem itself, primarily in the way that Tolson
uses enjambment and short lines, some of which are only a word, to mimic the
unceasing, deliberate movement of the sea turtle.
The rigorous push toward liberation framed by “The Sea-Turtle and the Shark”
is an altogether bloody affair that takes place in a space of what many would call
nothingness. These are the conditions from which abolitionist instruments emerge.
This is how and where one develops the meditative tenacity needed to slice the
machine clean through. Envisioning resistance, for Tolson, begins with those who
have been all but completely consumed by the present order, the ones detained,
held in suspension, and never allowed to breathe. Rather than begin with the birds
of the air or even with the various forms of animal being and becoming that can be
found beneath the surface of the earth, Tolson elects to turn toward the sea that he
might imagine black flight anew. He transports the hold from the surface of the
ocean to its very underbelly. And there, in the absence of light or human life, he
sketches a world wherein the shark, the very embodiment of an antiblack social
order—and thus, it follows, precisely the sort of exploitative, exorbitantly violent
figure that Rediker’s etymology gestures toward—is decimated from within, laid
to waste by the least of these, the drowned and yet undead.
Xandria Phillips’s “For a Burial Free of Sharks” attends as its central objects of in-
quiry to people who, to use Mariame Kaba’s phrase, had no selves to defend, those
whose very living served as a critique of selfhood.22 The poem’s first lines provide
a critical language for the experience of utter fungibility, which is also always to
say black life within the confines of the hold:
in the hull we worked we wormed at earth’s lack in we lives and in those deaths / and
I say we / not collective not tongued the same and not kin and not in love / but in all of

we pressed up against we heat and doings similar and reduced to sameness / saw the
first of we plunging for home / landing into a shiver of them / in not looking towards
the carnage saw the moon reflected onto by we water was pink / we may have known /
well I did not / that a drop would not take us to the bottom and buried / we had to try to
die better / without soil to pollinate pores no soul restoration / some of we / we risked
death to put dead in the ground23
The figures Phillips invokes have no access to any legible form of individualized
personhood. What takes its place, at least within the world of this poem, is an
echoing we, a refrain that doubles as a critique of humanity, an unmooring of any
singular, autonomous speaker. Over and against a dominant, Lockean vision of
personhood in which a given body, as Monique Allewaert reminds us, is imagined
as a “single, self-identical and particular consciousness that persists despite the
diverse materials, things, temporalities, and places that press upon it and pass
through it,” the speaker of “For a Burial Free of Sharks” enacts a vision of person-
hood that is inherently multiple.24 That is, a vision of human becoming akin to what
Frantz Fanon describes in “The Fact of Blackness” as inner kinship, the sense that
blacks are not unitary beings but multitudinous, always already representing not
only themselves as individual actors but a larger, diasporic conglomerate, as well
as one’s deceased ancestors, during any given moment of racialized encounter.25
One hears echoes of Fanon in the speaker’s invocation of a people who are “not
kin” but “reduced to sameness.” The lived experience of this reduction—the social
practices and protocols, the black operations—that emerges from such brutality is
a central focus of the poem. This emphasis is expressed most poignantly perhaps
in the speaker’s claim that those forced to live in the hold were willing to sacrifice
their very lives in order to honor the dead. On the funereal practices of the enslaved,
Vincent Brown writes:
The death rite thus enabled them to express and enact their social values, to articulate
their visions of what it was that bound them together, made individuals among them
unique, and separated this group of people from others. The scene . . . typifies the way
that people who have been pronounced socially dead, that is, utterly alienated and with
no social ties recognized as legitimate or binding, have often made a social world out

of death itself. The funeral was an act of accounting, of reckoning, and therefore one
among the multitude of acts that made up the political history of Atlantic slavery. This
was politics conceived not as a conventional battle between partisans, but as a struggle
to define a social being that connected the past and present.26
Following Brown then, we can imagine the space of the hold in “For a Burial Free
of Sharks” as one in which the enslaved came to bend and blur the division that
demarcates life and death as such. The world of the poem offers a space of inde-
terminacy in which there is no need for earth in order to bury the deceased, no
ground to dig up or stand on, ontological or otherwise. One might argue, in fact,
as Jonathan Howard does, that “slaves in the hold may be understood to have
constituted the ground upon which whiteness could originally stand and purport
to be.”27 For both Brown and Howard, there is a kind of life beyond life, a form of
being without borders, that finds expression in the hold. From within the irrep-
arable break engendered by the instantiation of the transatlantic slave trade, the
ever-expanding caesura that has many names but no sufficient description, there
emerges a critique of Western civilization that extends far beyond the slave ship.
In the absence of ground, the enslaved imagine and enact a modality that operates
under radically divergent principles: a grammar of the flesh, of that which, following
Hortense Spillers’s work on the unmooring and unmaking of gender under chattel
slavery, provides us with a line of flight away from the self-contained, individuated
body of Man and invites us to study life as it exists at that “zero degree of social
conceptualization” instead.28 For Spillers, flesh marks the critical distance between
“captive and liberated subject positions” and thus operates, I think, as a singular
site of gathering for the enslaved on Hayden’s ship, Tolson’s sea turtle, and the
denizens of the hold in Phillips’s “For a Burial Free of Sharks.”
The question of groundlessness or, rather, another sort of ground altogether
is central and reappears explicitly in the poem’s final movement:
but tides did rise and sharks plowed what we hands put over we / found we bodies to
devour / failure to send we home was not without punishment / one of we / not I was
tethered / ankle to hull / and we saw this one we disappear by limb until there was only
a pair of feet trailing the ship / I still haven’t a want for death / and I know my burial

impends / we all been too physical / our flesh is the closest ground in sight / putting
the mind on a high shelf is a burial without sharks / I double where my joints can and
bury self in self 29
At long last, in these closing lines, the eponymous sharks swerve into the frame. In
the first instance, they seem to operate in a vein not unlike those of Hayden’s “Middle
Passage,” that is, as a persistent, existential threat to the lives of the captives. The
second time they appear, however, the sharks are more or less immaterial, more an
abstract illustration of the continuous threat to black life that modernity represents
than any discrete danger. The speaker claims that something like a natural death—one
without the spectacular violence that so often attends black mortality—is possible
only through placing “the mind on a high shelf,” one far higher, we might imagine,
than even the topmost corners of the hold. Higher than the walls of any cage in the
world. Thus, the dream of a burial free of sharks is not just the dream of black life
lived beyond the reach of the bull’s-eye. Rather, it is enacted in the everyday social
practices and the mentation of those who know that sharks are everywhere and
always in relentless pursuit—those who nonetheless look to the blackness of the
deep and dare to proclaim that they are likewise unfathomable, untamable, endless.

6 •
Writing with the Salamander
An Ecopoetic Community Performance Project
Petra Kuppers
Much of ecopoetics’ emerging frame focuses on language interventions in eco-

logical disaster. This essay offers a different setup. It centers on disabled people
in an open engagement with their environment, in immersion, and in contact.
Many contemporary perspectives on disability’s presence in our world relate hu-
man diversity to ecological change, to war, to the rupture of disaster and the different
temporality of slow violence.1 Some public discourses around autism categories,
for instance, speak about metal poisoning; asthma becomes linked to changes in
public health, sterility, and exposure; attention differences are rhetorically clasped
to new communication practices, chemical sensitivities to overexposure to polluted
environments, metabolic changes like diabetes to postcolonial food production.2
Industrial aggressions and war actions like those at Bhopal, Fukushima, Hiro-
shima, and Chernobyl and the chemical exposures of the Vietnam and Iraqi wars
have created new ways of being in the world, for both newborns and people who
lived or fought in these regions. Radiation and land mines create no-go areas. In
the disaster narratives around these sites, people with mental and bodily differ-
ences usually feature as victims, rarely as survivors or as people learning to live in
new ways.3
In this essay, disabled people and their allies reclaim and remediate our shared
spaces in a field of interdependency. We live engaged with our world, whatever
our world is, and we find an equilibrium with our sensoriums, pain thresholds,
cognitive differences, and mobility challenges. We live with change.
In the project at the heart of this essay, disabled artists and their allies go un-
derwater together in the name of art and press their boundaries. While doing so,
we experience edge spaces: humans in nonhuman environments connecting to the
biochemical milieu we are part of, realigning words like “wildness” or “animal” as
we dive into places that stress our hormonal system and get our adrenaline going.
Arguments run through this essay in complex and intersected ways. As its writer,
editor, and montage artist, I do not pull up all the strands presented but leave trailing
threads for readers to pick up and run with. Academic writing means writing in a
field, engaging in citational practice, and weaving. Community work goes against
some of the core assumptions of traditional academia, like individual authority,
distancing independence, and concepts of mastering. Yet community writing can
also fulfill many of academic writing’s functions, as interferences and connections
can come to the fore in unusual ways. I do not wish to make my collaborators and
community participants into case studies, dissecting their work. Disabled people
are too often the object of stares, diagnostic gazes, and analyses. By offering a sec-
tion of open writing as a methodological intervention into conventional academic
discourse, we try to deflect those gazes and to channel their energy into other paths.
With this particular method, this essay leans into cultural studies methodologies
and away from a literary studies mode that privileges close analysis as its main
mode of generating knowledge. As a reader of this work, you are invited to feel
your own shifts in perspective.
Given this awareness of traditional power relations around disability, this es-
say works in an open pool of power and its deployment, its invisible pulls and
effects, trying to think of humans not as pristine biologic entities but as creatures
spun into nets of historic injustice and its ongoing effects. In The Transmission of
Affect, feminist philosopher Teresa Brennan offers alternatives to an insistence
on individual sovereignty, a view of tightly closed borders and pristine spaces of
Writing with the Salamander 119

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

class and culture intersect with the development of individual or collective ecopoetic
projects?”6 The Olimpias disability culture collective responds: by going swimming.
The Salamander Project: Disability Culture

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

net. In California, with In-Home Supportive Services and other programs under
constant pressure to let people slip through the cracks, many of us find ourselves
under assault, under pressure to conform to narrow prescriptions of what being
human means. Floating together in the waters, we had many conversations about
this. The shift in gravity allowed for an opening to talk about pressures and sorrows.
Literary critic Lynn Keller sums up how many see the history of nature writing
as a genre. The critique is a bit stinging. There are many examples of nature writing
that shift outside these boundaries but, even so, this description resonated with
many of us paddling in the pool. Keller writes:
Nature writing as it has developed from traditions of the pastoral contributes valuably
to readers’ appreciation of the given world and can instill reverence or respect that
prompts a desire to preserve the earth’s resources, yet this genre may play a relatively
minor role in the conversation around sustainability. Received ideas of nature codified
in such writing tend, as many have noted, to position nature as something apart from
the human, making it difficult to conceptualize ways for large populations to live ap-
propriately in and with nature. The elegiac or nostalgic cast of much nature writing is
likely to be of little use to clearheaded envisioning of an attainable, sustainable future.10
Keller writes from a perspective as a critic of experimental poetry, and she sees
value in a fostering of aesthetic diversity:
I believe the demanding projects that must be undertaken by a literature toward sus-
tainability will require the literary and imaginative equivalent of biodiversity: different
contributions will come from a variety of generic, formal, structural, rhetorical, and
thematic approaches, many of them deliberately resisting inherited conventions, and
from varied critical and social perspectives. Independently and in interaction with one
another, the diverse species in this literary ecology may open up our perceptions and
with them our understanding of our options.11
The Salamander project offers a perspective on how this interdependent, complex,

multigenre poetic work may operate on the ground or, rather, in flotation among
many different bodyminds.

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

At the pool, lifeguards tend to tense for a while as we collect our wheelchairs
and walkers (and strollers for children) or get very stiffly into the pool, an effect
that might be partly due to psych meds, autistic embodiment, pain, or other neu-
rodiversity effects. Assuring people that we are safe, both to ourselves and to them,
is part of the performance display of Salamander. Here be dragons.
Disability theorist Tobin Siebers offers a framework that allows us to rethink
these connections between aesthetics and the environment. He writes:
Works of art called ugly ignite public furor. Unaesthetic designs or dilapidated buildings
are viewed as eyesores. Deformed bodies appear as public nuisances. Not only do these
phenomena confront the public with images of the disabled body, they expose the fact
that the public’s idea of health is itself based on unconscious operations designed to
defend against the pain of disability.13
So if disability is preferably unseen because it reminds people of projected and

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

is always already an aesthetic in space, one that can be tweaked, made conscious,
through a gentle and seductive play with difference.15
Our Salamander work has many different invitations, opening outward, inviting
engagement. Taking a photo in the pool is such a framing device, a poetic gesture that
frames a moment as something set apart from the flow of diving underwater. Many
Salamander photos come about when strangers are drawn into our circle. They see
the camera, see what we are up to, find out what we are doing, and want to be part of
it. Chatting about technologies of underwater cameras can be an opening into poetic
play. Many give permission for us to take their photos. And there they are in the photos,
dripping wet, skin to skin with Olimpias people, all laughing, all blowing out air, bub-
bles mixing, all breathless together in the euphoria that comes with depleted oxygen.
As the Salamander project continues, we go well beyond cameras in pools. We
hover and swim and horseplay and dive in rivers, oceans, and lakes. In all these
places, “disability” is an issue, a highly visible unusual presence, not one struc-
tured into the aesthetics of the human-nature interface. Our natures are beyond
the imagination of nature. Queer crip feminist Alison Kafer pulls the rug out from
under any theorizing that somehow sees “natural spaces” as “natural” and disabled
people as “naturally” outside of them. Here she describes how the human activity
of camping mirrors dominant social arrangements:
Disability studies could benefit from the work of environmental scholars and theorists
who describe how “social arrangements” have been mapped onto “natural environ-
ments.” Many campgrounds in the United States, for example, have been designed to
resemble suburban neighborhoods, with single campgrounds for each family, clearly
demarcated private and public spaces, and layouts built for cars. Each individual camp-
site faces onto the road or common area so that rangers (and other campers) can easily
monitor others’ behaviors. Such spacing likely discourages, or at least pushes into the
cover of darkness, outwardly queer acts and practices.16
In the Salamander project, we foreground alternative erotics, social arrangements,

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

lane swimming that was the “normal” mode of working in that particular water.
We pointed out that most of us just can’t swim a whole lane, only bits of one, and
that we were careful not to inconvenience linear swimmers. But our nodular con-
glomeration at the edges was just too aesthetically disruptive, and we were (not
unkindly) asked to leave.
On the plus side, going into nature does not necessarily mean trekking for miles
out into a place where no other humans are (and where a sprained ankle would
mean a helicopter rescue). Our “naturalness” might be five feet off the path, help-
ing each other over an uncut curb to touch a tree and sing to it. Others, bystanders
who also can’t do the whole trekking thing, can observe us from the picnic areas
and join us in our near-edge spaces.
Alison Kafer uses a different one of our Olimpias projects to point to our em-
phasis on nearness rather than distance. She picks up on some core themes of
Olimpias’s explorations and sharpens the lens: the joys of academic interdepen-
dence. For example:
Cripping this terrain, then, entails a more collaborative approach to nature. Kuppers
depicts human-nonhuman nature interactions not in terms of solo ascents or individ-
ual feats of achievement, but in terms of community action and ritual. Describing a
gathering of disabled writers, artists, and community members, she writes,
We create our own rhythms and rock ourselves into the world of nature, lose our-
selves in a moment of sharing: hummed songs in the round, shared breath, leanings,
rocks against wood, leaves falling gentle against skin, bodies braced against others
gently lowering toes into waves, touch of bark against finger, cheek, from warm
hand to cold snow and back again.
In this resolutely embodied description, the human and nonhuman are brought into
direct contact, connecting the fallen leaf to the tree, or the breath to the wind. What
entices me about this description is that it acknowledges loss or inability—she goes
on to describe the borders of parking lots and the edges of pathways as the featured
terrain, not cliff tops and crevices—and suggests alternative ways of interacting with
the worlds around us. Rather than conquering or overcoming nature, Kuppers and her
comrades describe caressing it, gazing upon it, breathing with it.17

Olimpias participants change over time, and while some of the people in our
loose collective have been with us for more than a decade, others come in for
just one project. Thus, our aesthetic politics changes, and the temperature of
our writings changes. The Salamander project, while retaining many traces of
the embodied writing Kafer comments on, offers a slightly different lens, with
the caress and the awareness of boundaries and resistance in balance with one
another.
The Salamander Project: Open Pool Writings

In this section, I share a range of Salamander writings, all emerging out of free-
writes and ekphrastic work on the photos of our project. Some people wrote after
swimming with us, some wrote in response to the images we post in the world pool
of Facebook. Ekphrasis is central to our disability culture politics: acknowledging
different sensory experiences in a poetics of translation across forms is a cultural
convention providing access for blind and visually impaired people, people with
different cognitive processes, and others. When we, in our Olimpias workshops,
engage in freewrites about an image or an experience and share the diversity of
responses, we can clearly understand that there are many different ways of being
in the world, responding to stimuli, engaging with thought.
The writings below were shared on the Salamander listserv or on Facebook.
Many of the themes developed in the first part of this essay return in these writ-
ings, unfolded and deepened. In different forms, you will find water and flesh
as connective media, thoughts on the pain of disability and the violence it en-
genders in public, meditations on inclusion and exclusion, the mythic status of
disability and its lean into stories, public performances as politics, connection
and wildness, and ways of conceiving of ourselves and our relation to the world
differently. Presenting these themes in this way, through an assemblage of voic-
es, is an enactment of biodiversity: many styles and choices, different distances
to and within language frames. There are many ways to sing and shroud how
disabled bodyminds engage in our worlds. See what lines, images, or stories
resonate for you.

The author swimming with members of A Different Light Theatre Company,
Christchurch, New Zealand.
Light, Shadow
Water, Body
Liquid, Solid
Flowing, Stasis
Roaring, Silence
Moving, Stillness
Let’s float together
You and I in the egg of
This world, protected,
Within from the reality of what they/we have done to our nest.
—S h a r o n S i s k i n, Berkeley-based visual artist, EcoArt Matters teacher at
Laney College

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

With Melissa Thomson as part of a group Salamander performance at the Association
for Theatre Research, Dallas, Texas.
Who can feel comfortable in a bathing suit, in a swimming pool, in what is considered
a healthful space in our shared culture? These are questions that come into focus as
Salamander gets underway, and our workshops proliferate. Barriers emerge: the chlo-
rine in many public pools is a barrier to our chemically injured participants. For many
black children, learning how to swim is an act of defiance of white norms, something
beset with historic and contemporary racial tension. Gender images are also an issue
for many people in pool settings. Some Olimpias collaborators who identify as trans,
either pre- or post-transitioning, are uncomfortable with sharing themselves in public
pools, acknowledging the danger of ‘male’/‘female’ changing areas.
The slides between experiences of hate, shame, and reclamation are complex, and
with each e-mail or conversation in these first weeks of Salamander, I feel again and
again the power of disclosure, exposure, the toxicity of the public sphere, the sadness
of feeling excluded. The privilege of fitting in, or of having assembled enough cultural
capital to own one’s visible difference as a place of pride, comes sharply into focus for
me as I see and read of people being attracted and yet unable(d) to join us.

I am writing this a day after I was spat on, in public, by a drunken woman on a public bus.
She was upset before we entered the bus. As the bus waited around for the bus driver to strap
us in, to “secure” us according to his regulations, she got more and more enraged, mumbled
“bitch” at me, and paced in agitation. When she left the bus, she spat at me, and her spit on
my skin and hair smelled of booze. I am a half-time city dweller, full-time public transport
user, and though used to abuse and bus drama, the intensity of hate pierced my composure.
“Bitch”: I am a large woman, articulate, owning my space. I signal complexly: my skin
color, carriage, and German Welsh accent speak of privilege, my wheelchair (strapped in
place, unable to move, when someone spits on me) makes me vulnerable and easy prey. My
femininity is hidden for many by the bulk of my person—in public, many people call me “sir”:
classed and gendered in complex ways, size hides my pendulous breasts.
In the water, I am a salamander: I am mobile in ways I cannot be out of the water. Noth-
ing straps me down, and I have the privilege of movement, sidewinder, undulating, rolling
in the pleasure of my round strong limbs. In the water, pressure deforms. But even though
this is a place of safety for my aching limbs, this is not a place free of the constraints of nor-
mativity: race, class, gender, and disability very much inform who has access to my place of
freedom. Many people we have swum with so far in Salamander haven’t been in pools for a
long time—this is an opening, a tentative step, often hard-won, and we shall understand it
to be such. To see ourselves in the pool is a political action in its own right. So we shall swim
together this summer, trying to be attentive to who is not in the circle with us, not able to
float, deliciously, tenderly regarded.
—P e t r a K u p p e r s
it is hard to get to the pool. I mean . . . it has been over the years.
but lately its been easier. its art. its performance. its . . . Showtime. . . .
water has always been my comfort. I fall into i.e. jump into it . . . totally. it’s the only place.
I can . . . fall. my body be itself. just who I am. me Spastic . . . falling.
turning, twisting, writhing. its o.k. water. in water face down. holding breath like an
alligator/log. first thrashing as Tarzan gets me in his grip. I thrash in resistance
grappling with him. then I am subdued . . . appearing lifeless. though not lifeless at all.
this leads me to theater. the stage. the fourth wall.
I feel also very at home in this world.

Neil Marcus and Chia-Yi Seetoo exploring a new medium for their dance.
the fourth wall, to me is like . . . as I am . . . in water

another element is the audience. in the pool it is the camera. I know this lens. I can
work with it. it is capturing new images.
I am egged on. I know what I have to ‘say’ is important.
‘ACTOR’ is such a charged word. I guess it means being seen
and knowing how to relate to oneself onstage in front of an
audience. STAGES are magic places.
—N e i l M a r c u s , artist, Bay Area
Did i see you flinch as i danced through the water?

The clear blue body embracing every crevice of my skin from the bridge of my nose to
the folds of my elbows
i am touched, like i have never been touched before. My lover was never like that.
As i move my body with the water it’s like
a dance routine, those graceful leaves of fire and gold
they don’t stand a chance, not even on windy nights. My bones no longer tremble

like they always do, the veins in my arms no longer battle like soldiers, at war.
I am not afraid of myself anymore.
The Sun is gentle with me. It caresses me through
the silence the way mothers caress their sleeping babies
on hospital beds, i am illuminated and rebirthed as the air that keeps me afloat escapes my
lungs as fast as you turn away.
I do not listen to dogs who parade their dirty bones, so do not tell me that i can’t do this.
The distance between the surface of the
water and the tip of my fingers spreads as I let
my body sink into peace. Dark locks of hair liberating upwards, denying the existence of gravity.
I am the astronaut, yearning for soft landing,
i am the ripples, moving my surrounding,
I am water, fluid and enchanting.
Finally.
I am at the bottom, and my heart beats, slow. Here in the dark where light cannot reach
me, and noise cannot come for me, i become my own. The water guards me
from the poisons of the norm, I am free. Let me stay here forever.
Let me breathe.
Let me breathe.
—N o r ’ A i n M u h a m a d N o r , student in earth and environmental sciences,
University of Michigan
There is a mermaid clan among the local Ojibwe, and my conduit to that knowledge is slim,
and personal: Jasmine, one of our Anishinaabe Salamander swimmers, told me about this
clan, and their relationship to sleep. They sleep, and see deeply, in dreams. I dream with the
salamander, my mythical companion in the water lands, in my childhood, in my maternal
line, in my new homes, in Michigan, in Berkeley. Another participant, Agnieszka, speaks of
the difference between her Poland and the Bay Area, and of water and mountains, close and
accessible. The difference for me is one of age, and of freshness, of layered ancient water,
of accreting skins of moss and lichen and fungi, of losing myself in story and membrane.
Salamander falls into the fairy tales. My grandmother walked with me the stations of the
cross, strewn across miles of farmland and woods. Near one of these stations was a small

Jasmine Pawlicki, Anishinaabe, in a Michigan Salamander.
wood with a lake, and a ruined boat. This, my grandmother told me, was Sleeping
Beauty’s castle. I believed this, and I still remember the ruined castle, one of many in
the German countryside. Weeds wound through the stones, and the lake was calm,
full of water roses. I bet a salamander or two made their home in it, too. Black and
gold. In the dark green. Water I do not wish to swim in, scum on my arms and legs,
the green sludge accumulating under my breasts. Fertile creatures, half soil, half wa-
ter, plant animals, clinging to me. I am hugged by these sticky German waters, by the
Michigan lakes in their own placid greenness, the sign of overfertilization, the mark
of terraforming upon them.
If I were to find the salamander, he might speak of survivance in a colonized land,
of habitat loss and of shrinking gene pools. But he is here, a web search assures me:
farmers and urban dwellers have not yet succeeded in excavating each dark nook, the
crevasses are still hidden, there is still a dark fetid smell of fecundity and of weeds
wrapping themselves over stones and breaking their backs.
—P e t r a K u p p e r s

Floating with designer Elwyn Murray off the white sands of Jervis Bay, New South Wales,
Australia.
The last salamander I saw in San Diego was not at the body of water I was speaking of
when walking in the water there and here with the sense of mom in both places now
that she is gone. It was not in the ocean. It was not in the uncanny valley. It was in the
mountains. It was black with red spots. Or maybe I’m making up that it was black with
red spots because I want to be inside the myth of all things wet. Landed, I think of all
things wet. In the ocean, you don’t think of wet/dry, hot/cold, alive/dead . . . you think
of ocean. I think of not just the sentient being, “a salamander” but just the word too.
Salamander. They show up in my poems. I’m not sure why. It doesn’t matter. There they
are. I am now in a circle of salamanders. We write and write. They do not look like us.
I am grateful that demarcations of wet/dry, land/water, beginning/end do not matter.
They are both things at once as are we.
Later I dream: of a phosphorescent salamander singing.
Later still I dream: my friend who is dying sits cross-legged on the floor with a blanket
wrapped around her but then the blanket is not a blanket it is an octopus.

I dream these in the same night. The family Salamandridae surround. They have some-
thing to do with writing in the near-amphibious rain.
—D e n i s e L e t o , poet, Bay Area
I am terrified by water . . . But I wasn’t once. As a child I loved the water, I

loved swimming with my father, I loved the floating and the use of my legs
which during the day were not used because they were tucked into my wheelchair.
In 1989, surgeons cut open my back and put in a Harrington rod . . .
Connected it to my spine. The rod took away my love for the water . . . Simply
made me sink.
I haven’t been in the water for swimming reasons in over two decades.
But the smiles, the bubbles, the movement that I see here in the Salamander
images . . . They call to that child who used to love swimming. They awaken
a sort of mystery that I have not felt in many years . . . Can I find some sort of
rhythm in the water again? Can I pursue movement in a new way?
—C h r i s S m i t, director, DisArt, Grand Rapids
I cast my eyes around and, seeing no one I knew, slipped in.

then i saw them. Neil eased into the pool. Petra said he’d have limited time in the water,
as he’d get cold at some point. She cradled his head against her neck, fond. we swam
and talked, under and over each other, took turns snapping group photos, surreptitious
like children in a forbidden club. i somersaulted forward and backward, and at one
point neil threw himself against me, his arms flew around my shoulders, they were
muscular and firm, and his head covered with thatchy gray curls rough like weeds, and
he laughed and i laughed. . . .
denise and i exchanged gazes, questions. we were otters, diving and twirling below the
surface, bodies agile and lithe. the familiar unfamiliarity of each person new to another,
her specific features, nature, how her body and brain respond. how she is and is not
like another person. how i am and am not like another. how she and i have fish skin,
seaweed hair, bright eyes, limbs, porpoise lungs.
It had been glorious. The next day I woke and my shoulders were hard and strong.
They were happy I had let them swim again. I had to think. Do I want to swim once or

Floating in a pool with Neve Be, filmmaker, performance artist, and disability activist,
Bay Area.
twice a week there and take a powerful, immunosuppressive, blood-vessel-damaging

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

of safety that is harder to discuss than it is to negotiate the official concept of “safe” sex.
Who is “more disabled” is not. Is not a hierarchy. “More” is not. Hierarchy dissolves. Water
dissolved: difference, sexuality and sensuality, adult and child, talk and laughter and breath.
—S u s a n N o r d m a r k, writer, Bay Area
Ser Salamandra, ese es la cuestión.

En esta vida hay que poder transformarse, mental y corporalmente.
Bajo el agua todo se transforma.
En el agua el cuerpo recibe impulsos de vida, otra mobilidad, otra manera de danzar la vida.
—X a v i e r D u a c a s t i l l a S o l e r, disability activist, Barcelona
Being Salamander, that is the question.

In this life you have to be able to transform, mental and bodily.
Underwater everything changes.
In water the body receives life impulses, another mobility, another way of life dancing.
—translated by X a v i e r D u a c a s t i l l a S o l e r
Conclusion: Why Writing?

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

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

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

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

part three
Environmental Justice
7 •
Toxic Recognition
Coloniality and Ecocritical Attention
Matt Hooley
This essay is interested in what makes environmental harm discernible and what
makes it actionable. A basic premise, therefore, is that there is a link between
how we encounter environments as healthy or harmful and how human and
other-than-human populations are produced through the rubrics of health and
harm by U.S. settler colonialism and racial capitalism.1 In this essay I bookmark
this link—a zone of epistemic encounter, political invention, and inestimable vi-
olence—with the term “looking.”
Looking—and what Rob Nixon calls ecologies of looking—references our par-
ticipation in “the racial dynamics of sanctuary and trespass, visibility and invisibility,
looking and looking away.”2 Looking is a cooperation of states and subjects, a syncing
of infrastructural attention to the management of life and the impromptu postures
of attention that choreograph lives staged by empire. I want to explore the moments
that we invest in this cooperation, in the coloniality of the aesthetics of ecological
well-being and harm: how the look that empire gives to a landscape is reflected
in how we approach it as beautiful or ugly, useful or expendable, healthy or toxic.
Looking is an imperative of American ecocriticism, one of the ways it conceives
and mobilizes itself as a political enterprise. In response to perceived public apathy
about environmental damage, critics like Frederick Buell advocate a politics of
“facing and understanding” disaster, a “direct eye-to-eye encounter with crisis.”3
And insofar as Buell and others are interested in intensifying public attention to
industrial toxification, their emphasis on the explanatory power of looking also
operates as a theory of art’s role in an age of environmental crisis. Art, for Buell,
is useful insofar as it “asks that people gaze on and on without being able to avert
their eyes or seize upon easy remedies or prescriptions for change.”4 On its own
terms, this is a cultural politics that assumes the transparency and autonomy of the
look and that does not consider the collapse of the subjects and state power that it
underwrites. For Buell, activists and writers intensify the public’s power to see. As
such, he describes their work as gathering attention and building consensus toward
policy interventions that ultimately look like expanded state control: “legislative
initiatives, regulatory activities, and court action.”5 I argue that this account of the
politics of looking narrows our understanding of how environmental well-being is
perceived and who or what has the power to redress environmental harm. It also,
therefore, delimits what environmental perception itself is: what it means and
what can happen in the moments when we consider the vast and ornate systems
of living that are always beyond and constitutive of ourselves.
One aim of this essay is to show that ecocriticism does not have to be so delimited in
its ability to theorize how state power is extended in the ways we discern environments
or in its ability to think outside of social formations—those positions from and by way
of which we are given to look, such as the individual, the family, the neighborhood
enclave, and the nation—that make the discernibility of health and harm possible
and actionable to the state. In a sense, this is to consider in an ecocritical context
what Audra Simpson and Glen Coulthard call the colonial politics of recognition.6
Coulthard and Simpson show how settler colonial states manage and constrain the
claims made by indigenous communities by sanctioning models of indigenous polit-
ical organizing that comport with settler sovereignty. As Coulthard points out, while
acts of state recognition are billed as “ushering in an era of peaceful coexistence . . .
the politics of recognition . . . reproduce the very configurations of colonial power that
Indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend.”7
146 Environmental Justice

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

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

given community or landscape is recognizable as vulnerable. As such, it is a stance
that reinvests in the organizing doxa of the settler state: the ruling schematics of
property, the liberal individual as default subjectivity, and politics as self-defense.
What toxic discourse does not do is show how settlement is itself the precondi-
tion of environmental harm that justifies its political expansion through its own
authority to recognize what’s harmful or who’s vulnerable. In this essay, I track
cycles of ecological violence rooted in the justificatory logics and structures of
settler empire. In this context, Bitsui’s work is useful and exciting in its refusal to
rehearse sanctioned postures of artistic intervention into the political, its disavowal
of the constrained theatrics of settler ecopolitics—panic or reassurance, apoca-
lypse or Eden, sacrifice or salvation. Instead, Bitsui’s is a ruptural, disarming, and
consternating ecopoetics, an opening into social and ecological life—what Fred
Moten and Stefano Harney call the surround—that is more than empire, more
than empire can envision.12
Spectacular Enclosure
Undercurrent anxieties about communicability and vulnerability are instantiated
at the scene of the domestic and the insulatory aesthetics of enclosure. For settler
social economies, there is nothing more precious than enclosure, not only because
it insulates but because its insulation produces the rationale and the political cover
for relentless expansion.13 Bitsui’s Shapeshift examines institutional or cartographic
enclosures reproduced by aesthetic and epistemic enclosures of environmental
narrative. The volume not only turns away from conventionally recuperative lyric
technologies of voice, witnessing, or revelatory encounters with alterity but asks
what happens when ecopolitics begins by throwing the structures of settler enclosure
into relief. For instance, the opening poem, “Asterisk,” resists visualizing a single
or local site of environmental harm. Rather, the poem traces three interlocking
histories of colonial incursion into Dinétah that depend on the reproduction of
material and epistemic enclosures.14 First, coal and oil development, whose im-
pacts are measured in eroded mesas, appropriated water resources, and devastated
social economies:

It peers over his shoulder at the dirt road dug into the mesa’s skirt,
where saguaro blossoms bloom nightfall at the tip of its dark snout,
and motor oil seeps through the broken white line of the teacher’s loom.15
Second, uranium mining, which directly affects Navajo miners as well as families whose
hooghans were inadvertently constructed from illegally dumped radioactive tailings:
But look—
something lurking in the mineshaft—
.....................................
Twigs from their family tree flank the glove’s aura
and asterisk water towers invisible,
while fragrant rocks in the snout remain
unnoticed in the bedroom,
because the bridegroom wanted in,
Pioneers wanted in,
and the ends of our feet yellowed to uranium at the edge of fear.16
Third, colonial histories from the boarding schools to the Long Walk whose ecopolitics
lives in language and knowledge suffocated (sewn shut, asphyxiated) into silence:
Something
can’t loop this needle into it,
occurs and writes over their lips with thread;
barnacles on their swings;
fleas hyphened between their noses;
eels asphyxiating in the fruit salad.
Remember, every wrist of theirs acclimates to bruises.17
As a whole, the poem tracks material and social enclosures that secure the enclosure
of settler history. “Asterisk” points this out by bookending itself between “Fourteen
ninety-something” (the first line) and “1868” (the last line), a date that marks the

end of the Navajo imprisonment at Fort Sumner. But Bitsui also challenges the
neatness of this enclosure by insistently exposing the possessory representational
politics of history:
its rising action photographed

when the sign said: do not look
irises planted inside here.18
History appears within constrained and contaminated Navajo domestic scenes,

yet it never amounts to a single image of environmental harm. The argument of
the poem, then, might be said to refuse to allow such scenes to settle into familiar
explanatory political spectacles. The poem does not allow the motion of colonial
environmental violence to close down into a set of discrete acts or actors. Bitsui’s
opening lines, in fact, explicitly refuse the narratives of criminality so often used
to distance settler citizens from settler politics:
Fourteen ninety-something,
something happened
and no one can pick it out of the lineup,19
The shift away from visualizing a colonial perpetrator aligns Bitsui’s poem with
Alan Freeman’s analysis of antidiscrimination law in which he differentiates be-
tween two perspectives on the problem of discrimination. First, “the perpetrator
perspective sees racial discrimination not as conditions but as actions, or series
of actions, inflicted on the victim by the perpetrator. The focus is more on what
particular perpetrators have done or are doing to some victims than on the overall
life situation of the victim class.”20 Second, the “victim . . . conception . . . sug-
gests that the problem will not be solved until the conditions associated with it
have been eliminated.”21 Freeman’s analytic helps demonstrate how fixating on
supposedly aberrant individual acts of violence—including environmental vio-
lence—collaborates with totalizing collectivities imagined by toxic discourse to
disguise the structural preconditions for that violence. The work of “Asterisk”
links settler ecological damage to precisely this circuitry of attention: to the ways

localizing environmental harm to the past or to particular perpetrators not only
protects colonial subjects from culpability but also preserves the insulating and
toxifying barriers of race, gender, and class.
The figure of the asterisk also points out that the conditions that intend violence
are obscured: “no one can pick it out of the lineup.” The ways of looking that sustain
such violence are always only sensible in the enclosures they execute on behalf of
colonial power. Glen Coulthard writes,
arguably the most famous passage from [Black Skin, White Masks is] where Fanon shares
an alienating encounter on the streets of Paris with a little white girl. “Look, a Negro!”
Fanon recalled the girl saying. . . . At that moment the imposition of the child’s racist
gaze “sealed” Fanon into “crushing objecthood” (1967, 109), fixing him like “a chemical
solution is fixed by a dye.”22
He adds: “Far from assuring Fanon’s humanity, the other’s recognition impris-
oned him in an externally determined and devalued conception of himself.”23 In an
ecopolitical context, the sensible enclosures of ecological violence are also always
social. The politics of recognition creates toxic vectors of aesthetic and affective
attachment between humans and ecologies. Bitsui explores this in a poem about
nuclear weapons testing committed during the mid-twentieth century on indigenous
lands in New Mexico, Nevada, the Marshall Islands, and elsewhere.
The poem, titled “Apparition,” wrestles with the spectacular weapons tests
whose expansive colonial logic is inseparable from the social and ecological pol-
itics of settler belonging:
Strange, how they burrowed into the side of this rock.

Strange . . . to think,
they “belonged”
and stepped through the flowering of a future apparent in the rearview mirror,
visible from its orbit
..................
when rocks swarmed over
and blew as leaves along the knife’s edge

into summer,
without even a harvest between their lies
they ignited a fire—
it reached sunlight in a matter of seconds.24
Although Bitsui suspends the poet’s or reader’s posture as witness to ecological

violence, this poem moves closer to articulating the conditions of that possibility.
Specifically, “Apparition” examines structures that organize settler attention around
the politics of belonging, including the automobilized progressive present, “the
flowering of a future apparent in the rearview mirror”; the ubiquitous globality
imagined by toxic discourse, “visible from its orbit”; and the investments and
sacrifices that make settlement possible, the cadenced step from “burrowed” to
“belonged.”
These structures of attention are not sights but ways of seeing. They are the
precondition for enclosures that insulate settlers from violence or environmental
toxicity and, in the same stroke, the precondition for enclosures of toxic recogni-
tion. In the last stanza of the poem, Bitsui turns to subjects recognized by empire
only as the yet to be included: native bodies whose exposure to nuclear toxification
is coextensive with the idea that nuclear toxification is something that can be seen
or exposed:
Mention ————,
and a thickening lump in the ozone layer
will appear as a house with its lights turned off—
radio waves tangled like antlers inside its oven,
because somewhere
in the hallway nearest thirst,
the water coursing through our clans
begins to evaporate
as it slides down our backseats—
its wilderness boiled out of our bodies.25

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

against the genocidal silencing of a boarding school, he traces the irrepressible
and unmeasurable resounding of indigenous thought:
Bread dipped in gunpowder is to be fed to the first graders in that moment

when their hair is cut
and a ruler is snapped,
and their whispers metamorphose into a new chrysalis of thought.
A new wing emerging from the lips of these Indians,
who are no longer passing thoughts in the paragraphs of an oil-soaked dictionary
but hooves carved into talons,
hilltops from which light is transformed into the laughter of crickets.31
The chrysalis is the rejection of enclosure. It is a casing fashioned against the logic
of security: supposed never to enclose but only to open. At the same time, against
the racializing threat of “passing” (a passing over, a making past), this opening
also resonates as an illicit escape, a stealing away predicted by the unlawful cas-
ing of enclosure. In this way, Bitsui’s poem imagines the incipient epistemic and
political potential that erupts at the occasion of anticolonial noncompliance, an
ecology and a belonging measured by the urgent unsealing of subjects from the
threat of recognition:
Rattles erupt on the north horizon.

The harvester unties her shoelaces.
..............................
“It wasn’t like this before,” I tell myself.32
Unveiling Drought
Thus far, I have argued that the spectacle of enclosure executes a politics of the limit,
the boundary line that marks off the secure from the surround. Thinking about
toxicity as a spatial and political limit joins my reading of Bitsui with biopolitical
analyses of how environmental damage participates in the larger drama of scarcity
and expansion that animates U.S. empire. For instance, Melinda Cooper asserts

that the “space-time . . . of late capitalism” is distinguished by the reproduction
and the reproductivity of resource limits:
I take for granted that the periodic re-creation of the capitalist world is always and nec-
essarily accompanied by the reimposition of capitalist limits; that capitalist promise is
counterbalanced by willful deprivation, its plentitude of possible futures counteractualized
as an impoverished, devastated present, always poisoned on the verge of depletion.33
For Cooper, late capitalist expansion generates appropriable value at “the limits
of life on earth and the regeneration of living futures—beyond the limits.”34 This
“delirium of contemporary capitalism” is animated by an ecologically conditioned
debt relation:
The promise of capital in its present form—which after all is still irresistibly tied to
oil—now so far outweighs the earth’s geological reserves that we are already living
on borrowed time, beyond the limits. U.S. debt imperialism is currently reproducing
itself with an utter obliviousness to the imminent depletion of oil reserves. Fueling
this apparently precarious situation is the delirium of the debt form, which in effect
enables capital to reproduce itself in a realm of pure promise, in excess of the earth’s
actual limits.35
“U.S. debt imperialism” is an effect of limits that are measured in terms of both
space and capital. And debt, in particular, might be understood as a kind of en-
closure, a fantasy of insulation against harm that is also always the precondition
for the advancement of that harm.
The toxicity of empire requires us to conceive of the limit not only as a space
but also as an absorptive membrane, a structure of commerce or exchange that
displaces vulnerability and overrides minority claims to resources. In this sec-
tion, I argue that the spectacle of the resource limit enables the misrecognition of
ecopolitical stakes and subjects such that responses to ecological harm advance
an imperialism in which resources are figured as forms of debt. It is important
to examine this relational action of toxicity (not a site but a threshold) because
resource conflicts and the apocalyptic attention they inspire often do not obey

simple spatial coordinates. In what follows I consider drought—a phenomenon
produced across colonial infrastructures whose costs are inequitably distributed
to minority communities. Drought occurs because of political enclosures deter-
mined by ecological value, by what is recognizable as fecund or wasted, irrigable
or expendable. As such, drought is a language and a justification for expanding
the appropriative capacity of the colonial state.
To make this argument, I will read between the complicated history of the colonial
visualization of drought on Dinétah and Bitsui’s second collection, Flood Song. Bitsui’s
collection does not narrate drought or its effects in a straightforward way, nor is it
politically prescriptive. It is a sequence organized by a kinesis of water, moving from
the volume’s cover—a painting by Bitsui titled Drought—through its opening poem:
tó, the Diné word for “water,” repeated seven times in a vertical line, a choice that is
less visual than aural in its effect of producing the sound of slowly dripping water.
As the second poem in the collection indicates, Bitsui’s volume might be said
to intervene in the ecopolitics of drought by disturbing the coordinates of colonial
attention. Against the visually imperializing, revelatory logic of apocalypse—ety-
mologically an uncovering of an ecologically damaged future—he begins:
I bite my eyes shut between these songs.
They are the sounds of blackened insect husks

folded over elk teeth in a tin can,
they are gull wings fattening on cold air

flapping in a paper sack on the chlorine-stained floor.
.....................................................
They speak a double helix,
zigzag a tree trunk,
bark the tips of its leaves with cracked amber—
they plant whispers where shouts incinerate into hisses.36
In these lines, the visual commerce that organizes conventional apprehensions

of drought (stillness, emptiness, waste) is interrupted, bitten shut. Instead, the

Between Holbrook and Winslow Arizona, photograph by Milton S. Snow, 1938.
poem activates around the rattles and rustles of lives unsubdued—an incipient and
uncoordinated stirring, not a promise but a provocation of living.
After Dinétah became a site of U.S. settler occupation in the mid-nineteenth
century, drought served to make visible a catastrophic water shortage and to justify
intensified colonial expropriation of native human and ecological resources. For
example, in 1938 the Bureau of Indian Affairs organized an expedition across the
Navajo reservation to survey pastureland. A year later, it published a text that sets
photographs taken by the team (during an unusually dry year) against narrative
descriptions written in 1849 by another U.S. military official, Lieutenant Edward
Beale, of roughly the same twenty-five sites.
The text’s juxtaposition of a spectacle of aridity and emptiness against Beale’s
account—“The soil over which we have passed this evening, is excellent; the grass
fully attests that fact”—hardly needs the BIA’s moralizing caption: “81 years later. . . .
A graveyard of the range is this hummock-spotted scene. Thousands of cattle once
concentrated in this bottom land where there was an abundance of good grass and
water.”37 The effect of such depictions of landscapes in crisis was to secure a bur-
geoning infrastructure of expropriated water management, including the damming
of the Colorado River in 1935, the authorization of coal and uranium mines that
ran on Diné water, and the evisceration of Diné agricultural economies, including
livestock reduction, a policy that destroyed (largely without compensation) half
of all Diné livestock.
Will Wilson, a contemporary Diné artist, writing about the same report, chal-
lenges the BIA’s depiction of drought:
The text polarizes any discussion of land use practices and concepts. . . . Reinforced by
the irrefutable photographic evidence of a desolate landscape, this construction proves
the failure of Navajo land management practices and negates any complex consideration
of indigenous knowledge. The text, as a pedagogic tool, teaches Navajo people that
they are ‘stupid’ and unequipped for the management of lands they have occupied since
time immemorial. The technical expertise and government superiority in managing
the Navajo homeland are proven through the negation of Navajo knowledge and a
simple camera trick.38

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

drought conditions: an inexhaustible promise of security, guaranteed by the exhaus-
tion of minority political claims and the toxifying attention of state recognition.
U n va l i n g D r o u g h t
If the valence of drought is the frictionless and coordinated exchange of security-
granting recognition for resources, Flood Song is a holding out, a holding open, a
denial of exchange, and a recourse to the friction of lives that do not depend on the
promise of security. What Anne McClintock describes as the oscillation that links
“deliriums of grandeur and nightmares of perpetual threat” is the same political
momentum that Flood Song drags out, distends, and at certain moments breaks
open.43 For instance, the poem frustrates the colonial absorption of ecology into
cartography—the transmission of heterogeneous and layered systems of social
and biological attachment into quantifying coordinates of property, arability, and
waste. Sometimes such interventions are funny, gestures of emotional and carto-
graphic antigravity:
With a gaping mouth,

I sought an image to describe the knot in my chest,
the car door jammed—
the land divided into two new car scents.44
Sometimes they intercede through a stripping away. For example, Flood Song distills
the already simplifying coordinates of colonial maps even further, down to the
basic apertures of their acquisitive attention:
What land have you cast from the blotted-out region of your face?
What nation stung by watermarks was filmed out of extinction and brought forth resembling
frost?
.....................................................................
What makes this song a string of beads seized by cement cracks when the camera climbs
through the basement window—winter clouds coiling through its speckled lens?

What season cannot locate an eye in the dark of the sound of the sun gyrating into red
ocher after I thought you noticed my language was half wren, half pigeon and, together,
we spoke a wing pattern on the wall that was raised to keep “us” out, there where “call-
ing” became “culling,” “distance” distanced, in a mere scrape of enamel on yellow teeth?45
And at other times Flood Song loosens the sutures that fasten living landscapes to
the resource maps they are remeasured as:
Coyote howls canyons into windows painted on the floor with crushed turquoise;
captured cranes secrete radon in the epoxied toolshed;
leopard spots, ripe for drilling, ooze white gas when hung on a copper wire.
I pull electricity from their softened bellies with loom yarn.
I map a shrinking map.46
Animals “ooze” out of the Manichaean schematics of environmental vulnerability,

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

ly obscured such that the reader’s attention can never quite seep in around familiar
attitudes of responsibility, solace, or solidarity. Working in and against drought
conditions that are both lived and live in the distributions of colonial attention, the
untraceability of the poem’s subjects is the unvaling of the absorptive politics of toxic
discourse. Flood Song draws out unsettling gaps between its subjects and readers:
I sensed the knife in your past,

its sharp edge shanked from the canyon stream—
a silver trickle between the book jacket,
nihízaad peeled open inside a diabetic mouth.
The waters of my clans

flash-flooded—
I fell from the white of its eyes—
.............................
that I was reaching for the cornfield inside you,
that I was longing to outlive this compass
pointing toward my skull
gauzed inside this long terrible whisper
damp in a desert canyon,

whitewashed by the ache of fog lights
reaching to unravel my combed hair.48
Thwarting comfortable postures of exchange or attachment, the poem explores

encounters among subjects, readers, and ecosystems that are incomplete, muf-
fled, unfastened. Rather than facilitate the readers’ immersion into an unfamiliar
standpoint or cultural economy, the poem unfixes us from ready ecocritical en-
closures (the book, the canyon, the body, the field, the compass), dramatizing the
straining and ultimate failure of our own appropriative attention: “I fell from the
white of its eyes.”
Vexing the hinged discourse between spectacles of harm and the politics these
produce implies a different relationship between art and environment than is pos-

sible within a toxic discourse framework. Written in and against drought, the poem
effects what Charles Bernstein calls an anti-absorptiveness. As opposed to works
that encourage the ideological or perspectival immersion of reader into text into
subject matter, anti-absorptive poetics directs vectors of saturating engagement
(absorption) against those of “impermeability” to produce semantic “gaps” among
subject, text, and reader. In this sense, anti-absorptive poetics creates politically
loaded interventions, as Bernstein notes:
The intersection
of absorption & impermeability is precisely
flesh,
....
. . . Yet writing re-
verses the dynamic [Merleau-Ponty] out-
lines for the visible & the invisible:
..............................
. . . The visibility of words
as a precondition of reading
necessitates that words obtrude impermeably into
the world . . .
............
. . . Writing . . .
.............
. . . is
the intrusion
of words into the visible
that marks
writing’s own absorption into the world.49
For Bernstein, anti-absorptive writing generates frictional vectors of spectacle and

exchange such that the intrusive surface of the text becomes a threshold of entry
into the “material world.”50 The gaps of Flood Song intrude into assumptions that
environmental attention is not structured by empire. In one example of this, the

poem dismantles the idea that recovery from drought originates outside native
social or environmental economies. Water is the materialization of working native
ecologies and is indistinguishable from what Bitsui calls song:
I wanted to swallow the song’s flowers, swim diagonally its arched back, its shadow
stinging my hands with black pollen.
We were on the surgical table waiting for the surgeons to carve us back into shape.
The drum pulsed somewhere in the dark and I heard a woman unbraiding her hair.
I felt morning songs leap from the hooghan’s smoke-hole and curl outward from the
roof of the sky, gliding through us like rain.
I sang, sang until the sun rose.51
This is no retreat into a precolonial past but an opening into the depth of a native
present. As a poetics, the gap that the poem enters between ecological security
and the colonial state is what Mackey calls a “discrepant” articulation of social and
environmental health that “worries resolute boundary lines, resolute definitions,
obeying a vibrational rather than a corpuscular sense of being.”52
To Be Unrecognizable
In its final pages, Flood Song turns to the discomposure of the scene of environ-
mental harm, not in a gathering of political consensus but in an opening out of
sensible politics:
A cloud became a skull and crashed to the earth above Black Mesa.
The cloud wanted to slip through the coal mines and unleash its horses.
It wanted to crack open bulldozers and spray their yolk over the hills so that a new
birth cry would awaken the people who had fallen asleep.

It wanted to push their asymmetrical ramblings into the weft of storm blanket, dye it
hazel and sink it into the rising waters.
A city dragged its bridges behind it and finally collapsed in a supermarket asking for
the first apple that was ever bitten.
No one questioned the sand anymore.
No one untucked themselves from their bodies and wandered the streets without
knowing their clans.
Everyone planted corn in their bellies and became sunlight washing down plateaus
with deer running out of them.
The phone was ringing through it all.
The line was busy when I picked the ax

and chose the first tree to chop down.53
It is a conclusion both joyous and unrecuperating. A longed-for cloud does not

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

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

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

8 •
Toward an Antiracist Ecopoetics
Waste and Wasting in the Poetry of Claudia Rankine
Angela Hume
While critics have published review essays about Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An
American Lyric, literary scholars have just begun to consider the poet’s latest book
as it relates to her earlier poetry, a task this essay undertakes. Drawing on critical
race and environmental justice theories, I read Citizen as the latest installment of
Rankine’s twenty-year meditation on the “wasting body”—a figure that, in her
poetry, accounts for how certain bodies are attenuated or made sick under capital-
ism and the state, while simultaneously being regarded as surplus by these same
structures. While Citizen is not ostensibly a work of ecological poetry or environ-
mental criticism, one of its most pointed critiques—a critique Rankine makes in
her earlier books, too—concerns the difficulty of relating to or identifying with
one’s environment when one has been othered by the dominant white society and,
consequently, forced to live with greater amounts of environmental risk. In the
pages that follow, I track Rankine’s engagement with embodied experiences of
racism and environmental risk in her 2014 Citizen, 2004 Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An
American Lyric, and 1994 Nothing in Nature Is Private.
Citizen opens by asking readers to imagine themselves “alone and too tired
even to turn on any of your devices.”1 Paralyzed in bed, “you let yourself linger in
a past stacked among your pillows . . . nestled under blankets.”2 The exhaustion
of the body and mind by a racist society is a central focus of Citizen. In Rankine’s
previous book, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, the poet asks, “Why do people waste away?”3
Between the most daily of discriminatory microaggressions and the entrenched
forms of structural racism that facilitate them in the first place, Rankine sug-
gests, black bodies are rendered increasingly deindividuated and expendable.
In the process, life comes to be defined at and by a limit—between near death
and actual death, living life and maintaining life—and by its state of wasting,
the condition of and for life at this precarious threshold. Rankine’s work figures
not only the wasting of the body and the self but also the wasting of the envi-
ronments in which they are placed. Through an examination of figures of waste
and wasting, I will argue that her poetry, in its duration of a vexed lyric mode,
registers the structural forces and forms of power that both racialize and subject
raced bodies and environments to forms of degradation and violence. In using
the term “duration,” I refer to Rankine’s continuance or persistence within, as
opposed to outright rejection of, lyric. In the process of this duration, her poetry
exposes the attenuating conditions for both writing and life under racist social,
political, and economic structures. For Rankine, it is in critically inhabiting these
states of wasting—what Fred Moten has called exhaustion as a way of life—that
one becomes capable of realizing alternative modes for thinking and enacting
ecological emplacement and sociality—what Moten calls a “social biopoetics of
and in the experiment.”4
Drawing from modernist collage, the Black Arts Movement, and the lyric and
Language traditions, Rankine’s work is not always overtly ecopoetic. Even so, the
concept of an ecopoetics is one that she has cited as being important to her. In a
2009 interview, she asserted that ecopoetics is an “engagement with the landscape
as it exists rather than in a romantic way.”5 Presumably, “as it exists” means in all
its contamination and degradation; ecopoetics refuses to idealize nature. Rankine
argued, moreover, that the engagement of ecopoetics has to do with the body; eco-
poetics is, in fact, “a bodily thing.”6 Tracing representations of the wasting body
in her work—both in her earlier poetry, which tarries with more conventional lyric

and pastoral modes, and in her later poetry, which departs from them—enables
us to articulate an expanded sense of what an antiracist ecopoetics might look like
today. As Evie Shockley points out, a “false dichotomy that says one has to choose
between writing about nature and writing about socio-political subjects” has long
informed the way that both poets and critics think about possibilities for poetry.7
This dichotomy poses challenges to African American poets in particular, whose
experiences of nature have always been suffused with the political, given America’s
history of racism.8 Rankine’s antiracist ecopoetics refuses this binary and posits
instead what Shockley describes as “the identity . . . of the natural and political
realms,” or what I would call a poetics of environmental justice.9
“In the Difficulty”: The Poetics

of Environmental Justice
Citizen: An American Lyric intersperses prose poems, essays, and scripts with images.
The prose poems are often anecdotes about everyday racism in America. Many of
the poems are written in the second person, demanding that the reader relive or
imagine what it is like to be on the receiving end of a racist encounter. The images
include media photographs and reproductions of visual works by contemporary
black artists. Section 6 of Citizen is comprised of what Rankine calls “scripts for
Situation videos.” The poet’s website features some of these videos. Notably, no
such video exists at the website for one of the scripts in the book, “August 29,
2005 / Hurricane Katrina.” As Rankine explains, “Hurricane Katrina” features
quotes from CNN in the wake of the Gulf Coast disaster, one of the deadliest in
U.S. history.10 The first paragraph highlights one particularly devastating aspect
of Hurricane Katrina: the waiting that many African American residents of New
Orleans endured after the storm had passed:
Hours later, still in the difficulty of what it is to be, just like that, inside it, standing there,
maybe wading, maybe waving, standing where the deep waters of everything backed
up, one said, climbing over bodies, one said, stranded on a roof, one said, trapped in
the building, and in the difficulty, nobody coming and still someone saying, who could
see it coming, the difficulty of that.11
Toward an Antiracist Ecopoetics 171

For Rankine, what was and continues to be difficult to accept is twofold: first, the
trauma of continuing to be inside the storm, a form of trauma that many people
endured for days on end, and second the pervasiveness of statements like “who
could see it coming” in the aftermath, when in fact the American government had
known that such a disaster in New Orleans was probable due to the faulty design
of the city’s federally funded levees.12 In its repetition of the attributive phrase “one
said,” the poem emphasizes the fact of so many individual experiences of being
forced to wait for aid. The repetition of the phrase within a single long sentence
demands endurance of the reader, too—of both the upsetting imagery and the
exhausting sentence.
As many people now know, the part of New Orleans that was hit hardest by Hur-
ricane Katrina was populated primarily by African Americans. What most people
do not know is that this area has long been part of Cancer Alley, an eighty-five-mile
stretch along the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans containing
numerous petrochemical complexes.13 Even before Katrina, black communities in
New Orleans were subject to a greater degree of environmental risk. This moment
in Rankine’s poem points toward society’s collective denial of what the facts them-
selves would seem to lay bare: an entire population was not perceived as valuable
enough to warrant preventive measures to ensure its safety in general, including
its safety in the case of a major storm along the Gulf Coast.
The poem goes on to describe the detritus left in the wake of the storm—ruined
homes and objects but also human detritus, bodies in pieces:
Then each house was a mumbling structure, all that water, buildings peeling apart, the
yellow foam, the contaminated drawl of mildew, mold.
The missing limbs, he said, the bodies lodged in piles of rubble, dangling from
rafters, lying facedown, arms outstretched on parlor floors.14
These descriptions (again, quotes from CNN) demand that readers experience the
horror of firsthand accounts of the storm’s aftermath. Rankine’s juxtaposition of
observations of destroyed homes with descriptions of destroyed bodies reveals how
what was horrifying to some people was not only the large-scale loss of black life

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

well outside the realm of nature poetry, instead approaching something more akin
to a poetics of environmental justice—one that recognizes precisely those land-
scapes, along with the people who inhabit them, that do not fit and are therefore
excluded from the sublime wilderness ideal.
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely—a collage project incorporating drawings, media images,
and other cultural documents—similarly investigates how black bodies are ecologi-
cally othered by the dominant white society. Through the juxtaposition of private lyric
language with documents, Rankine demonstrates how even personal experiences
like grief are mediated by the ideologies of capitalism and the state. As in Citizen, she
takes up the problem of environmental risk in this earlier book. In particular, she
examines the issue of chronic illnesses endemic to African American populations.
Breast cancer, depression, liver failure, and heart disease are some of the conditions
that Rankine names while suggesting an epidemiological relationship between bodily
illness and the hostile environments that many black bodies must navigate—envi-
ronments in which human bodies are increasingly understood as symptoms to be
managed and pacified with the help of medical technologies and prescription drugs.
At one point Rankine writes,
The lump was misdiagnosed a year earlier. Can we say she might have lived had her
doctor not screwed up? If yes—when does her death actually occur?
..........................................................
During the mastectomy she has muscle mass and some fatty something or other re-
moved from her abdominal area and used in the reconstruction of her left breast. The
plastic surgeon argued she could do a far better job with natural versus artificial tissue.
It added an extra day to her hospital stay.18
Between these two passages appears a document; lyric prose is interrupted by an

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

Mammogram image. From Claudia Rankine, Don’t
Let Me Be Lonely.
On the next page, Rankine writes:
Cancer slowly settled in her body and lived off it until it, her body, became useless to
itself. . . . We watch a lot of television the four days I sit at her bedside. We talk. She
grows tired. She is sad. She grows tired. She becomes angry. She grows tired. She is
accepting. She grows tired. She grows tired.19

The repetition of “she grows tired” points to the condition of wasting that defines
the woman’s life with terminal illness. As in “Hurricane Katrina,” here the poem
requires readers to endure the tedium of repetition, creating a feeling of weariness
not unlike that which both the speaker and her dying friend experience. For the
subject of each poem, a life has become a life approaching death, a life in death.
Lauren Berlant names this form of life in death “slow death,” which she defines
as “the physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration
as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence.”20 In Rankine’s
poem, the failure of the medical system to identify breast cancer, the most com-
mon cancer found in women in the United States, in the speaker’s friend costs her
friend her life. The poem’s emphasis on the surgeon’s flip treatment of her patient
underscores the way that the privatized medical system treats bodies as objects
to be fixed—that is to say, incorporated into the labor process for the purpose of
turning a profit. In the end, the care provided by the system—its services (inpatient
hospitalization) and the commodities it produces (a reconstructed breast)—fur-
thers the process of capital accumulation. For Berlant, in slow death, what kills is
nothing more than “an upsetting scene of living,” in which “dying and the ordinary
reproduction of life are coextensive.”21 As Rankine writes: “Can we say she might
have lived had her doctor not screwed up? If yes—when does her death actually
occur?”22 If the medical system’s original misdiagnosis or negligence is the cause
of the woman’s death, the health care itself is also the moment of the killing; in
modernity, care for life is, paradoxically, also the slow wasting of life.23
“A Life in Homelessness”:
T h e Wa s t i n g o f P l a c e
Rankine’s meditation on the wasting body dates back to her early work. In Nothing
in Nature Is Private, her first book, natural spaces become disorienting, and the
threat of racial violence suffuses almost every landscape. In her poem “The Birth,”
for example, an allegorical account of the interpolation of the black male subject,
Rankine evokes the difficulty of occupying a raced subject position in an alienating
natural world. She writes, “where / nothing, no one should / have lived. He enters.”24
Over the course of the poem, nature is repeatedly depicted as being hostile toward a

black male subject: “He enters / to find his will assumed broken, / to find his spirit
swollen, / and the climate mean.” Paradoxically, nature simultaneously produces
and destroys the man: “Always he was, / is here, is the land’s bruised / utterance.”25
For this reason, his is a life in death: “If I as human / am meant to live this way / then I
will die or am dead.” At the end of the poem, Rankine writes,
In humanity—
into its strange house,
he enters . . .
And always the hurt

is all the same,
even if he wouldn’t take it,
even if he wouldn’t make it home.26
The last line emphasizes the man’s vulnerability, reiterating the idea that he is always
at risk of not making it home, of being annihilated by a nature that is inextricable
from culture or from humanity.
Ambivalence about the environment in black writing is nothing new, as Camille
Dungy points out in her introduction to Black Nature, an anthology of African American
poetry that spans four centuries. In her words, the poems in the anthology “point to
the collusion between nature and man, the manner in which the natural world has
been used to destroy, damage, or subjugate African Americans. . . . Given the active
history of betrayal and dangers in the outdoors, it is no wonder that many African
Americans link their fears directly to the land that witnessed or abetted centuries
of subjugation.”27 Kimberly Smith makes a similar point, arguing that histories of
slavery and oppression have conditioned black Americans’ relationships to nature. 28
Slavery, for example, forced its victims into a close relation with the environment
while at the same time alienating them from it.29 As a result, the African American
tradition of environmental writing often veers away from the focus of mainstream
environmentalism, which tends to be on humility and preservation.30 In the words
of Smith, the black tradition conceptualizes “the American landscape not as pristine
and innocent wilderness but as a corrupted land in need of redemption.”31

In her poem “American Light” in Nothing in Nature Is Private, Rankine throws
into relief the complexity of environmental relations for African Americans. The
poem adheres somewhat to the conventions of a particular lyric tradition, what
M. H. Abrams has named the “greater Romantic lyric,” in which a speaker situated
outdoors performs a meditation and eventually “achieves an insight.”32 This lyric
mode is intertwined with the Romantic pastoral mode, one that emerged in the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.33 The opening lines of Rankine’s
poem call attention to their engagement with this Romantic lyric-pastoral tradition
in and through their relative adherence to it:
Cardinals land
on a branch, female and male.
The sky shivers
in puddles created of night rain.34
Here the poem is descriptive, its lines compressed and its images precise. One
might almost overlook an irony: the way the poem references the sky but then di-
rects the reader’s attention downward toward the ground, into shivering puddles.
This moment of disorientation and subsequent reorientation serves as a harbinger
for what follows: “Then the shadow of a black oak / leans forward like a wounded
man.”35 In being likened to the figure of a wounded man, the silhouette of an oak’s
shadow becomes frightening. The tree, a pastoral archetype, becomes a figure for
danger and violence, bringing to mind the relationship between trees and lynching.
In this way, Rankine explicitly realigns her pastoral inheritance from the Romantic
tradition to that of what we might call a black pastoral tradition—one according
to which nature is implicated in histories of racialized violence.
In the next stanza, Rankine writes,
The lit landscape conceives

a shadow, its face dark, wide-open,
its eyes bloodshot
from what had come before.36

And then, two stanzas later:
A shadow on ships, in fields

for years, for centuries even, in heat
colored by strokes of red, against
the blue-white light—and in it
I realize I recognize myself.37
Here the tree’s shadow is personified again, this time as the exhausted face of one
whose attention is fixed on the past (“what had come before”). The next stanza
suggests that this shadow, or backward-turned gaze, encompasses everything
from the Atlantic slave trade to chattel slavery in America to the constitution of
African American identity in the present—an identity that is “colored by strokes
of red” or past acts of violence against the “blue-white light.” The invocation of
red, white, and blue brings to mind the American flag, suggesting that America as
we know it is constructed out of the instrumentalization of and violence against
black bodies. It also brings to mind the flashing lights of a police car, which, in
the context of the poem, point toward the racial profiling of and police violence
against African Americans. And here, in the image of a corrupted, policed nature,
the poet recognizes herself.
In the penultimate stanza, Rankine writes, “I step into my shadow / as if not to
take it anymore, / and wonder where I am going.”38 Paradoxically, for the speaker
to step into the shadow of historical violence—ostensibly to succumb to it—con-
stitutes a refusal. At the poem’s conclusion, Rankine asks, “when the sun / goes
down on this aged, / dirt road, will I end / in dark woods, or make it home?”39 Here
readers can hear the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno: “Midway on our life’s journey,
I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost.”40 Rankine pits the dark woods
of historical experience against home. Only in escaping—even repudiating—the
punishing dark woods does one become capable of reaching home.
It is notable that “make it home” appears in “American Light” as well as in “The
Birth.”41 Rankine’s repeated references to a journey home also echo the African
American spiritual tradition. Spirituals often invoked home, a promised land at the
end of suffering. In this context, the lines might be read as hopeful ones. Alterna-

tively, one might read the speaker as asking whether she might eventually be able
to cultivate a homelike place while remaining in the woods. In other words, is it
possible for the natural world to be redeemed for the black subject, when so many
aspects of nature have already been disgraced by history? The questions posed by
this latter reading cast a less hopeful mood over the poem. In connection with this
reading, one might hear an oblique reference to Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” a
poem whose speaker enjoys the simple pleasure of choice and luxury of mobility
at a light-dappled fork in a wooded road. By contrast, Rankine’s speaker enjoys
no such luxury; in her poem, the road is a reminder that for the black subject there
can be no promise that one will find one’s way.
We can locate Rankine’s struggle with tainted nature in Citizen, too. In a script
titled “February 26, 2012 / In Memory of Trayvon Martin,” she asserts: “The hearts
of my brothers are broken.”42 She continues,
Those years of and before me and my brothers, the years of passage, plantation, mi-
gration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty, inner cities, profiling, of one in three,
two jobs, boy, hey boy, each a felony, accumulate into the hours inside our lives where
we are all caught hanging, the rope inside us, the tree inside us, its roots our limbs, a
throat sliced through and when we open our mouth to speak, blossoms, o blossoms,
no place coming out, brother, dear brother, that kind of blue.43
In this stream-of-consciousness lament about the mass incarceration of young

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

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

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

view, the “disavowal of self ” that contrasts sovereign expression is “animated by
both lyric and lysis, continually driven toward new fields of exhaustion.”60 In other
words, through poetic experiments that inhabit a lyric speaker precisely in order
to expose the necessity of abjuring that speaker—experiments that are always also
acts of lysis or wasting—poets might begin to exhaust dominant orders. One’s
biopoetics becomes both a destructive force and a mechanism for survival or life
(bio) making (poetics). The paradox, of course, is that with this line of thinking
it is only in and through acts of exhaustion and wasting—of one’s own body and
world—that one can begin to challenge the power structures that have system-
atized and perpetuated the wasting of life for centuries. In its contradictions, poetic
language—a “social biopoetics” or the “ongoing disturbance of language that is
language’s anoriginal condition,” to use Moten’s phrasing—might constitute a
kind of experimental sociality.61
“ C a l l O u t A n y w a y ” : L y r i c Ex h a u s t i o n
How does Rankine’s language itself perform acts of exhaustion? How do the con-
tradictions in her language model exhaustion as a way of life? One might begin
to answer these questions by considering the subtitles of her most recent books.
By subtitling them An American Lyric, Rankine invokes a contested genre history.62
While both adapting and resisting ideas of what a lyric is and has been, she ges-
tures toward the amorphousness of the term (“lyric”) and also that of its modifier
(“American”). The subtitle invites the questions, “What is it to be lyric?” and “What
is it to be an American citizen?” The latter question is one that both books overtly
take up. Their answer is definitive: to be a citizen is, for black Americans, to be
exposed to the risk of death by a capitalist state whose right to kill is implied and
reproduced by its constitutive racism.63 The former question is one that the books
take up only obliquely, and they offer no definitive answer—aware, I would argue,
that in fact none actually exists. However, by yoking the two questions together,
Rankine suggests that acknowledging the conjectural nature of the first becomes
key to recognizing the answerability of the second; through experimental, even
failed “lyric” practices, one becomes capable of exposing the interrelation and
coconstitution of race and environment.

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

I don’t see them.
Call out anyway.
Did you see their faces?66
By this point, readers can infer that “they” are African American survivors of the
storm. In response to the imperative “Call out to them,” an unnamed speaker, one
whom we might assume to be white, replies, “I don’t see them.” Here Rankine
invokes the recognition problem that Fanon articulates: because the black subject
is relegated to always being the white subject’s production, the black subject will
never be recognized by the white subject. As if to refuse these conditions for black
lives—as if to assert the intolerability of racialized nonrecognition—Rankine’s
speaker risks the imperative “Call out anyway.” But what the speaker hears in re-
sponse—“Did you see their faces?”—is only an echo of a line that appears earlier in
the poem. Midway through the poem, the line “Have you seen their faces?” follows
“You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals, so many of these
people almost all of them that we see, are so poor, someone else said, and they

Uncertain, Yet Reserved by Toyin Ojih Odutola (Adeola, Abuja
Airport, Nigeria). From Claudia Rankine, Citizen.
are so black.”67 This quote exemplifies the othering of black bodies by the media
that occurred in the wake of the storm. In this context, “Have you seen their fac-
es?” is inflected with the language of spectacle. What might initially seem like an
expression of empathy is revealed to be a racist utterance of horror, pity, even fear.
These two nonrecognition moments, exacerbated by each other, give way to the
white of the page. In this way, the poem has performed, endured, the exhaustion of
the language of resistance.

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

part four
Beyond Sustainability
9 •
“Hung Up in the Flood”
Resilience, Variability, and the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker
Samia Rahimtoola
Even while living in his cabin at Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau could not re-
treat from the extractive logics of nineteenth-century industrial modernity. Walden,
it might be said, catalogs the unavoidable evidence of environmental degradation
just as diligently as it advocates for the simplicity of a life lived in nature. The
felling of forests, the planned piping of the pond’s waters for household use, the
neighboring railroad’s cacophony and pollution, even the ice cutters’ poaching
of the pond’s top layer: all enter the text as testaments to modernity’s ravaging
of the Concord woods. Ever the attentive observer, Thoreau not only tracks the
encroachment of the resource-hungry town deeper and deeper into the woods,
he also attends to nature’s own possibilities of responsiveness, challenging us to
consider the limits of its capacity to self-repair. How much change, he asks, can
an environment accommodate and still be considered the same thing? How much
difference, in the end, makes any difference at all?
Such questions, of course, cannot be separated from the formal one of delineating
identity and difference in a provisionally unfolding world. Walden has long served
as a touchstone for ecocritical practices, and I return to it here to point to the ways
in which Thoreau opens up connections between contemporary environmental
discourse and the aesthetic tradition. Thoreau, that is, allows us to see the formal
questions that animate and occasionally obstruct contemporary environmental
practices, particularly in the growing field of resilience studies. For him, it is the
surface of Walden Pond that best figures nature’s capacity to absorb and attenu-
ate human activity. Both “a perfect forest mirror” that registers every movement
of the surrounding woods and a self-repairing tabula rasa that unfailingly erases
every arriving trace, the pond becomes the site at which Thoreau negotiates two
apparently contradictory responses to the transformation of nature.1
On the one hand, the pond offers a seductive image of nature’s endless capacity
for self-renewal, in which the extraction of resources only partially and temporarily
depletes its profligate riches:
Of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its
purity. Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and
the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and
the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my
youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me. It has not acquired one permanent wrinkle
after all its ripples.2
Walden Pond’s capacity to absorb human disturbances without losing its basic
character—its resilience—allows Thoreau to imagine an unchanging, unsullied
natural landscape that “preserves its purity” by fending off the approach of even
“one permanent wrinkle.” 3 Because such a wrinkle would evidence an irreversible
change of the pond’s surface, Thoreau links the pond’s preservation to its ability
to absorb difference. To be Walden Pond means to be “the same water,” forever
caught up in the timelessness of nature.
Just a few pages later in the same chapter of Walden, on the other hand, Thoreau
tries on another attitude toward environmental degradation. Now, the changes
to Walden can no longer be ignored, and Thoreau responds by withdrawing his
affections from the pond and attaching them to its more perfect neighbor: “Since
the woodcutters, and the railroad, and I myself have profaned Walden, perhaps the
190 Beyond Sustainability

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing worth noting
except an Andromeda
with quadrangular shoots—
the boots
of the people
wet inside: they must swim

to church thru the floods
or be taxed—the blossoms
from the bosoms
of the leaves23
At first glance, the poem appears to place social coercion somewhat uneasily within
the frame of natural attention. The poem begins and ends with lines that are near
copies of Linnaeus’s eighteenth-century journals of his explorations of Lapland, in
which he wrote, “Nothing occurred particularly worth noticing by the way, except an
Andromeda (tetragona) with quadrangular shoots, and flowers from the bosoms of
the leaves.”24 Yet while the poem begins with the naturalist’s attention to botanical
objects, it immediately troubles the politics of such attention by moving from the
poverty of flooded nature to the poverty of an exploited underclass.
Picking up on the etymology of andromeda, which comes from the Greek for
“ruler of men,” the poem’s concerns circle around the enforcement of regulatory
order under unpredictably changing conditions. It exposes the coerciveness of
a ruling power that dictates that whatever the conditions, the Laplanders must
appear in church or be taxed. Such concerns with regulatory order were central to
the mid-twentieth-century practice of open form poetry, which emphasized im-
manent modes of organization rather than the transcendent, regulatory structures
of traditional poetic forms with their set prosody and stanzaic structure. Initiated
by Charles Olson in his 1950 essay “Projective Verse,” open form poetry sought to
restore responsive immediacy to poetic composition by breaking with scripted,
prepatterned forms. For Olson, the capacity to respond to changing circumstances
defined the role of the poet, who “has to behave, and be, instant by instant, aware
of some several forces just now beginning to be examined.”25 Only through intense

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

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

a wave-blurred
portrait
Don’t fall in love

with this face—
it no longer exists
in water
we cannot fish31
The poem opens with the temporary suspension of the speaker’s life—she is “hung
up,” delayed or worried by the flood. Niedecker draws on the language of do-
mesticity to suggest an interval or a respite necessary to the work of repair. Like
laundry hung out to dry, such a pause operates as a temporary caesura that is part
of the everyday rhythms of household affairs. A series of dissolutions follows—the
portrait is “wave-blurred,” a face dissolves into nothingness, and even the usual
routines associated with water, like fishing, must be discontinued in the newly
transformed environment. While such intervals allow for the temporary stoppage
of everyday affairs that the Laplanders are denied, they can hardly be claimed as
pleasurable occasions.
While Niedecker’s speakers navigate the uncomfortable, uncertain conditions
that follow natural disaster, theories of resilience frequently evacuate just such an
undergoing of disaster’s present tense. As Stephanie LeMenager and Stephanie Foote
point out in the inaugural issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities,
resilience’s “focus on precarity and the limits of our ability to predict and insure
against the future oddly protects it from all emergency, insofar as resilience theory . . .
promises that unforeseeable systemic disruptions are natural and survivable.”32
In this analysis, the emergency that resilience foretells is one that it never has to
endure. If resilience’s efforts are successful, the crisis will pass unmarked by its
survivors, who will either fail to register disruption entirely or will do so only in
the most minimal fashion. Despite a proclaimed desire to admit disturbance as a
crucial force that shapes and transforms ecosystems, practices of resilience tend
to anticipate crisis only to better contain and attenuate its effects. By prioritizing
a flexible urban environment that can seamlessly adapt to meet systemic needs,

resilience anticipates disaster only to hope for its infinite deferral. In doing so, both
the present experience of disaster and the ruptures that characterize crisis and the
recovery from crisis are diligently warded off.
Niedecker’s poetry casts such interruptions as crucial, necessary responses to
crisis.33 Acting as both temporary reprieves and opportunities for new and impro-
visational arrangements of everyday life, the floods bring a halt to business as usual
by reconfiguring the settled orders of life on dry land. As I have already stressed,
the speakers of Niedecker’s poems rarely experience the temporary suspensions
of the flood in a straightforwardly pleasurable fashion. Niedecker’s ambivalence
toward the seductions of the flood is palpable in this poem she wrote around 1964:
Some float off on chocolate bars

and some on drink
Harmless, happy, soft of heart
This bottle may breed

a new race
no war
and let birds live
Myself, I gripped my melting container

the night I heard the wild
wet rat, muskrat
grind his frogs and mice
the other side of a thin door
in the flood34
Those who willingly surrender to the flood are the indulgent and the intoxi-
cated—floating off on chocolate bars and drink. Against this position of radical
passivity, which is also one of intense license and enjoyment, the speaker tightens
her hold on both property and self. Reiterating personal identity three times in a
single line (“myself,” “I,” and “my”), the poem suggests that however desultory
the flood might be, it risks dissolving the speaker’s identity. Such a fear is espe-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10 •
Reading the Environs: Toward
a Conceptual Ecopoetics
Joshua Schuster
Some of the classics of conceptual poetry are ecopoems hiding in plain sight.
Conceptual poetry names a group of avant-garde poets who for the last decade
and a half have been producing poems that are based on an idea or a procedure
that minimizes or eliminates traditionally styled creative or personally cogitated
writing. These poems have garnered much attention for their canny use of new
media, evasion of well-worn lyric stereotypes, and refreshing gusto for treating
language as a material object and database that can be manipulated to deliver
new aesthetic and intellectual highs. What has been rarely remarked, however,
by the poets and their readers is how distinctly such work is embedded in the
ecological dilemmas of the day. Consider these examples: Christian Bök’s The
Xenotext is an ongoing project to inject poetry transcribed at the level of DNA into
an extremophile bacterium, which raises issues of scientific control, postdisaster
biological durability, and the means to send messages beyond Earth. Kenneth
Goldsmith’s Traffic, a transcript of twenty-four hours of traffic reports from a
New York radio station, shows the link between everyday non-nutritious speech
and fossil fuel dependency. Vanessa Place’s use of factorylike assembly methods
for writing, even when the language inside these works is scorchingly intimate,
treats the poem like any other commodity in a packaging-saturated planet. Tan
Lin’s application of ambience as a soothing, impersonal aesthetic device to all
kinds of texts seeks to immerse us in ubiquitous artificial environs made of ev-
eryday data and junkspace.1
Conceptual poetry views language more as matter than content, data than se-
mantics, and it emphasizes the execution of ideas rather than expression. These
poems may present ideas impossible to realize, are often positioned as ethically
neutral, welcome the role of machines as substitutes for handcrafted writing, and
celebrate fetishizing language rather than critically examining it. Perhaps what
distinguishes conceptual poetry most from previous avant-garde poetries is its
rejection of the hermeneutics of suspicion, the assumption that the real message
of a text is behind what is being said and needs to be teased out by a trained, skep-
tical, politicized reader. Instead, conceptual poetry embraces what has been called
reading with the grain, reading the surface or literal meaning rather than probing
the depths, inviting ambient reading rather than ideology critique, and applauding
directly the formal and mediated properties of poems rather than debunking them.2
Conceptual poems wear their sources and procedures on their sleeves; usually
without explaining their social usefulness in advance, they beckon the reader to
become immersed in each text by pondering its structuring idea.3
What do these tropes have to do with ecopoetry or environmental consciousness?
What might conceptual poetry be able to learn from environmentally oriented
poetics and vice versa? These questions necessitate thinking the intersection of
conceptual poetry and ecopoetry in ways that have rarely been explored. None
of the poets listed above claims any particular affinity for ecological thought,
perhaps for good reason, as there is a strong anti-avant-garde and anti-urban
strain among some critics of environmental humanities. A significant portion
of writing done under the sign of ecopoetics since the 1990s tends to root itself
in values of no-nonsense discourse and effusiveness toward rustic nature, can-
onizing poetry that is self-reflexive, but not too much, about the way words and
world are interlaced according to an avowed land ethic. Here, for example, is
J. Scott Bryson’s definition:
Reading the Environs 209

ecopoetry is a mode that, while adhering to certain conventions of traditional nature
poetry, advances beyond that tradition and takes on distinctly contemporary problems
and issues, thus becoming generally marked by three primary characteristics: an eco-
logical and biocentric perspective recognizing the interdependent nature of the world;
a deep humility with regard to our relationships with human and nonhuman nature;
and an intense skepticism toward hyperrationality, a skepticism that usually leads to
condemnation of an overtechnologized modern world and a warning concerning the
very real potential for ecological catastrophe.4
Many tropes that conceptual poetry harnesses particularly well, such as “hyperra-
tionality” or “overtechnologized” writing, are aesthetic purviews that would seem
to hold little promise for those interested in such ecopoetics.
However, more recent definitions of ecopoetics have been more inclusive of a
wider variety of themes and forms, including the technophilic. Jonathan Skinner’s
panoramic description of ecopoetics begins with an accretive outlook:
Definitions of ecopoetics can range from the making and study of pastoral and wilderness
poetry to the intersection of poetry and animal studies, or from the poetics of urban
environments to poets’ responses to disasters and matters of environmental justice.
It might mean the study and deployment of formal strategies modeling ecological
processes like complexity, nonlinearity, feedback loops, and recycling, or even a ‘slow
poetry’ that joins in a push for sustainable, regional economies.5
It might make sense then to describe this trend as critical ecopoetics, where there
is no clear normative assumption about what the good standard is for ecology or
poetry. Instead, a critical environmentalist poetics is an ongoing and open-ended
engagement with all kinds of poems and environs, technological ones included.
Critical ecopoetics assesses how the world of the poem interacts with the world
outside the poem, and how poetic forms are part of and made out of other envi-
ronmental forms.
A different kind of critical pressure on ecopoetics arises from the growing
recognition that there is no such thing as a stable ecological referent: a concept
or an activity that is always ecological all the time. There are no signifiers that are

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

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

with digital humanities claims that we need to take the sea of information floating

around us at face value. Conceptual poems often harness big data or similar large-
scale genres of information into a poem without value judgments on the content.
Yet the thrill of the data sublime cannot be separated from the boredom factor
of sifting through algorithm-generated conceptual poems. Reader responses to
conceptual poems run through cycles of detachment and libidinal investment,
disaffection and swoon. Probably the most well-known conceptual reversals are
Kenneth Goldsmith’s “boring unboring” and “uncreative writing” as a mantra for
reteaching creative writing.7 As previously mentioned, the history of environmental
thought reveals several instances of the reversal of meanings of terms. A similar
swing in affects pervades contemporary environmentalism, where despair and
enthusiasm, dread and determination, commingle to create a sense of frustrated
urgency confronting supercomplex ecological problems.
3. Excessive formalism. Conceptual poems are typically too long, too much, too
empty, too full, too flat, too monochromatic, or too forced. Yet the pursuit of any
of these categories to extremes can reveal a unique experience of beauty and in-
tellectual frisson that appears at the edges of aesthetic phenomena. Poetry itself
is one long tradition of excessive formalism. In this grappling with the extremes
of form, conceptual poetry moves far away from typical human subjective states
and approaches some aspects of the formal conditions of what it is like to be a
machine or a mountain or a star, where too much of one material condition or
process has remarkable generative properties. Hence, one of the means by which
to understand nonhuman actors in an ecosystem would be to pursue these overly
done formalizations into new aesthetic territories.
4. Textual cruelty. Conceptual poems often make outlandish or impossible demands

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

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

cepts in a work resonate with the medium or material manifestation of the work.
By refracting the message of a poem through its material conditions and following
the detours of its medial properties, a conceptual ecopoem can allow us to see
how a poem ripples throughout its surrounds. Instead of trying to demarcate the
ecology of poetry with preset visions of the good or sustainable, we can study the
various ways that poetic forms intersect with environmental forms. Ecopoetics
can uncouple itself from its own normative modes of addressing nature and of
forming and defending the canon, instead following poems where they want to
go, opening unforeseen ways of ecological knowing. Ultimately, all the radical
artifices of conceptual poetry make for great ecopoetic devices—repetition, fakery,
austerity, mechanical reading and writing, depersonalization, refusal of meaning,
measuring language by weight or scale or density. Being open to any aesthetic
device allows us to follow through on how these devices produce environmental
effects on the page and in the world.
This essay analyzes a few of these classics of conceptual poetry to better under-
stand the ways they interact with their ecological means and contexts. It then offers
a reading of Adam Dickinson’s The Polymers, which expressly combines tropes of
conceptual poetry and ecopoetics.
A Poetics of Conceptual Materialism

Conceptual poetry is haunted by an old debate in the conceptual art world over
whether the emphasis on concepts entails a lassitude or even a disdain toward the
material components of the work. The question of the “dematerialization of art,”
launched by Lucy Lippard in the late 1960s, turns on how conceptual art came to favor
ideas over commodified objects.8 Lippard’s phrase is poised on the opposite side of
another famed 1960s formula declaring that the medium is the message. These two

poles—medium and dematerialization—are updated in conceptual poems that attend
closely to the aesthetic qualities of materials and media themselves. In conceptual
poems, the shape of words, books, paper, the mechanics used to manipulate these,
and the complex material assemblages of objects are themselves taken as aesthetic
properties and generative constraints. Already here a compelling parallel can be
seen with an ecopoetics that attends to basic materials such as wood, stone, oil, and
plant and animal products that are the foundations of humancentric ecosystems.
Bridging the two poles of medium and dematerialization, Craig Dworkin’s
“Fact” consists of a list of the material and chemical ingredients that go into what-
ever medium the poem appears on. When published on paper, the poem begins:
Ink on a 6 by 9 inch substrate of 60 pound offset matte white paper. Composed of: varnish
(soy bean oil [C57H98O6], used as a plasticizer: 52%. Phenolic modified rosin resin [Tall
oil rosin: 66.2%. Nonylphenol [C15H24O]: 16.6%. Formaldehyde [CH2O]: 4.8%. Maleic
anhydride [C4H2O3]: 2.6%. Glycerol [C3H8O3]: 9.6%. Traces of alkali catalyst: .2%] . . .9
Some fifty ingredients follow. An epic chemical concoction exists in each sheaf of
paper. If one is inquiring about the ecosystem implications of a poem, one could
very well start with the natural and chemical materials used to make the paper and
ink it is printed on. Many of these chemicals listed are vicious pollutants, which are
fine in small doses for the pages of poetry but dangerous when they escape from
the page into the water—suggesting a similar potency for the contained danger
of the poem. This vocabulary of paper and ink in its chemical state is linguistically
rich with compound formulations that add up like portmanteaus. “Nonylphenol”
seems a made-up word to name a nonexistent phenol, until Wikipedia tells us it
is an organic compound that can be found naturally and is used in detergents and
emulsifiers. It is toxic in larger doses and commonly found in wastewater. Whether
expressionist or against expression, poetry relies on these nasty, lethal, but also
ingeniously synthesized physical substrates.
Another classic of conceptual poetry, Christian Bök’s The Xenotext, is a multimedia
bio-art project that involves ultimately injecting nucleotide material that enciphers
code for a short poem into the DNA of the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans. The
poem that Bök has managed to encode within DNA base pairs—so far only in

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

vehicle of meaning is just a stretch of vehicles, the traffic jam. Kenneth Goldsmith’s
Traffic is a transcript of twenty-four hours of traffic reports given every ten minutes
on New York radio station WINS. Here is how the poem begins:
12:01 Well, in conjunction with the big holiday weekend, we start out with the Hudson
River horror show right now. Big delays in the Holland Tunnel either way with
roadwork, only one lane will be getting by. You’re talking about, at least, twenty
to thirty minutes worth of traffic either way, possibly even more than that.
Meanwhile the Lincoln Tunnel, not great back to Jersey but still your best option.
And the GW Bridge your worst possible option.12
Here is how it ends:
12:01 We’re over the hump and into the official holiday weekend. I want to wish
everybody out there a safe and happy holiday, especially when traveling on the
road this weekend. If you’re trying to get out of town now, you’re in for an easy
time of it. No reported delays around the metropolitan area as I see it live on the
Panasonic Jam Cam.13
This conceptual poem works especially well because the content and form of the poem
create a feeling for the material conditions the poem is set in, namely, the tedious world
of traffic and the radio reporter’s information flow. In Unoriginal Genius, Marjorie Perloff
features a reading of this poem, locating classical poetic categories in Traffic such as
Aristotelian unities of time, space, and action. She finds upon close reading that these
conventions operate in surprising ways in a work that ostensibly has no surprises. Perloff
concludes with a flourish of definitions on what traffic is as both text and experience:
“messy, unbearable, infuriating, debilitating, but also challenging, invigorating, and
unpredictable. Traffic is both an existential and a linguistic challenge.”14
Perloff ’s list of the aesthetic effects of both Traffic and traffic limits her mention of
the poem’s challenge to the assumption that the poem reflects only two subject posi-
tions, driver and reader, who become superimposed. Her argument actually reinstates
expressivism as the primary logic of the work, turning the poem into a theatrical piece
that performatively conveys the inner feelings of reader and driver. This view relies on

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

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

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

creational capacity, one that redefines ‘recreation’ as original participation.”20 Rasula
extends the ecological practice of composting to the creative reuse of old texts: “In
the compost library books have a way of collapsing into each other, not in the im-
provements of more ‘authoritative’ editions or versions, but by constant recycling.”21
Composting is one way that recycling happens in language and landscapes, but
it does not describe all linguistic forms and means of reuse and material resistance
to repurposing. For a different example of the confrontation between linguistic
recycling and material recycling, consider Evelyn Reilly’s Styrofoam, which begins:
Answer: Styrofoam deathlessness
Question: How long does it take?
& all the time singing in my throat
little dead Greek lady

in your eternity.saddle
[hat: 59% Acrylic 41% Modacrylic

[ornamental trim: 24% Polyvinyl 76% Polyamide
holding a vial
enwrapped
Enter: 8,9,13,14,17-ethynyl-13-methyl-
7,8,9,11,12,14,15,16-octahydro-cyclopenta-diol
(aka environmental sources of hormonal activity
(side effects include tenderness, dizziness
and aberrations of the vision
(please just pass the passout juice now!)22

In Reilly’s poem, there are both overlaps and antithetical relations among the plas-
ticity of language, the plundering and repurposing methods of conceptualism,
the malleability of carbon chains, and the inflexible and often painful durability of
consumer plastics. The deft recycling of the language of the chemical composition
of Styrofoam into a lyric composition appears on the same page as evidence of
the nefariously slow degradation of the plastic. The ambiguous way that linguis-
tic recycling circulates on the same page with bits of “Styrofoam deathlessness”
precipitates side effects including “tenderness, dizziness, / and aberrations of the
vision.” These effects are desirable if they are lyrically evoked but noxious when
induced by biologically stifling synthetic compounds. Reilly’s book ends with a list
of “synonyms of polystyrene” that takes up a whole page with chemical formulas
and identifying numbers. She arrives independently at the same point as Craig
Dworkin’s “Fact”: a wall of words saturated with chemical agents that can produce
either poetry or toxic household objects.
Plasticine Poetry
As I have argued so far, there are reasons to welcome but also to question the asso-
ciation of the media ecology of conceptual poetry with global ecologies. Conceptual
poetry mobilizes writing procedures that allow concept and matter to read and write
through each other but also to expose each other’s dependencies on planetary-scale
material infrastructures and ecosystems. Adam Dickinson, in his conceptually and
ecologically driven The Polymers, takes plastics as his base material and concept and
creates a series of poems using procedures that imaginatively adapt the polymer
form, a repeating chain of macromolecules, to generate lines that in turn reflect
on the materials that make the text. Plastic is antithetical to composting and is not
thematically subsumed to concepts of recycling in this series of poems.
Dickinson’s procedures vary from poem to poem and are not always strictly
conceptual, but he does employ frequently the practice of excessive formalization
and seeks to pluralize concept/matter interfaces. Some of his poetic instructions
generate the whole text, while others involve selection from a specific database
(internet search, industrial products list, words overheard while standing in line).
Some poems riff on loosely formed conceptual conceits, and Dickinson does not

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

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

a a a alps and applicable at at before best beverages bicarbonates bottle bottled calci-
um chlorides clean collection commerce composition content cool dissolved do dry
exist fat facilities fact fluoride French from in ion limited magnesium mineral mineral
neck nitrates not not nutrition of of of place potassium recyclable refill refund refund
registered salts saturated see significant silica sodium source spring store sulphates
the the trademark where where zero30
This basic defamiliarizing gesture pauses the tropes of refreshment on the bottle
that cover for the industrializing of natural resources. The inelegant repeating
“a” cedes to the airy “alps,” which then gives way to the bureaucratic language
of “applicable” and the chemical language of “bicarbonates.” The clear liquid
is written on by many different discourses. Indexing the language of the plastic
water bottle provides a cross section of how natural resource capitalism works at
a polymorphic and polysemic crossroads. The procedural aspect of the poem, its
composition by index, displays a reorganization of language according to rules of
alphabetical order. This procedure splices organizational reason with resin, just
as the water bottle does. Once water is trademarked, the cool liquid shows what it
is made of when it is spread out in the cool medium of the poem: reason is made
plastic, matter is made plastic, capital is plastic, language is plastic, and our ways
of becoming self-aware about this condition are probably plastic, too. Dickinson
does not sweepingly dismiss all plasticity, and in this sense his philosophical dou-
ble is Catherine Malabou, who has long written on plasticity in philosophy and
biology (but strangely not on the synthetic object of plastics). Rather, his poems
begin to parse the specific plastic properties of different media and their effects
on our minds and bodies.
Form, concept, and content all demonstrate plastification in varying degrees in
Dickinson’s book. Plastic is not a matière noble, a nonsynthetic material like silver
or leather, nor is it a substance that enriches any ecosystem by restoring nutrients
to the soil, so it has little traditional Romantic or lyric value attached, but the
aesthetic potential of the material is still vast. When Dickinson turns to poetry
motivated more by lyric than by conceptual traditions, the reader then must ask
what we are to learn about the composition of lyric poetry in this age of plastic.
Are poems in the age of plastic then written differently, and how does conceptual

poetry’s claim to be against expression speak to a world where plastics are highly
expressive? How does the lyric deal with plastic in a way that does not reconfirm a
certain environmental narrative that sees any human invention of the nonnatural
as a moral mistake? The poem “Carl Jung Steps onto a Plane” tries to allegorize
the close encounter of lyric with Lycra:
Lunch boxes and lipstick

are our mothers.
We live in formative melodies
composed by the organs
it takes to be awakened
to emollients and parabens.
As great as the meaning of fertilizer
to our victory over the animals,
so great is also its meaning
for a motif of flight risk.
We watch the air-conditioner
fight the escalator
as a rite of passage in the arbitrary
arboretum of the shopping mall.
Food courts organize appetites
for deforestations weeping with shelf lives.
.....................................
It’ll always be easier to culture mediums
than to think autonomous
products of the unconscious.
The wind informs the wing
and the coffee mug the hand.
Goodbye and thank you for having me.31
It is hard to tell what degree of meaningfulness is offered in the title, but suffice
it to say now that if Jung entered a plane today, he would have to submit to a full
body check and be profiled like anyone else. The poem then opens with images of

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

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

11 •
Hard Days Nights in the Anthropocene
Joan Retallack
1
ANTHROPOSCENES ANTHROPOSCENITIES
a storm is slanted toward the trailer park

no immigrant ripple pith inescapable
the class of all thoughts that can’t entertain themselves
upend would-be transcendents lurking here
shine baukna beacon
no ship won’t go down in that gesamtkunst stormy sea
bacon sizzles in the non-stick pan
what is mean (or meant) in this who cares to know
one dimension grinds noisily by another in a routine demonstration
proper response: enjoy the friction avoid the collision
beautiful silver fish jumps out of water and explodes in air
transnipple Q: will some of us never be post-Dada
long days nights are hot cold ugly too wet too dry for too many on this planet
The Anthropocene enters our vocabulary to denote the time interval during which
humans have profoundly altered Earth’s biosphere. Coined by chemist Paul Crutzen
and biologist Eugene Stoermer, the term has attained wide currency among climate
scientists and others concerned with the human impact on the fate of Earth’s species.
A working group of geological stratigraphers is debating whether the Anthropo-
cene warrants official status as an entirely new epoch and, if so, when it began.1
The “Anthroposcene” is a word I’ve coined for the period in which human culture
has thrived on earth—for better and for worse—as defined by humans. The essay
form is just one of our cultural inventions. This essay explores poetics, poethics,
and epistemology of the Anthropocene.
If the wager that is an essay in the exploratory tradition of that genre can have an
ecopoetic microsystem, this one is an experiment in prosimetrum. A twelfth-century
mongrel term coupling Greek and Latin, prosimetrum refers to a dialogic genre
alternating prose and poetry. As I use it, neither form is subordinate to the other.
The practice precedes its medieval label by at least a millennium and is found in
non-European cultures worldwide. But my model is the remarkable Anicius Manlius
Severinus Boethius, philosopher-poet, theologian, musician, orator, and Roman
official. In 524 CE, four decades after the fall of Rome to the Ostrogoths, Boethius
fell out of favor with King Theodoric. Exiled and imprisoned for dubious charges
of treason, execution looming, he composed a lively—mostly grave, sometimes
humorous—conversation that begins with an exchange between the frank authority
of “Lady Philosophy” and the moral pathos of the “Muses of Poetry.”
Philosophy almost immediately commandeers poetry for her own use, imbuing
pathos with increasingly reflective wisdom. The translator H. R. James saw the text
as “skillfully fitted together like dialogue and chorus in a Greek play.” 2 Every bit
of it was designed to muster imaginative and intellectual courage and, no doubt,
elusive equanimity. It’s clear that Boethius needed poetry as much as philosophy
(perhaps even more) to engage the deeply felt values of his highly cultured humanity,
to sustain a robust life of the mind in extremis. The Consolation of Philosophy, post-
humously published, continuously available to date, was revered and enormously
influential all over Europe until the eighteenth century, when disciplinary divisions
more strictly separated philosophy from theology and other genres. In our own
time, the complexities of life may require conversations among disciplines and
genres, but academia—and commerce—finds them awkward. To read summaries
without mention of Boethius’s prose poetic form in encyclopedias of philosophy
Hard Days Nights in the Anthropocene 229

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

are weary from listening so long to this difficult and extended discourse and want
to be refreshed by poetry. Listen then, and gather your strength for what is to be
explained.”6 Each genre engages Boethius’s considerable erudition and ingenuity
in ways the other can’t. Neither forestalls the grim outcome, but Boethius’s activity
of prosimetric composition enables him to engage with the scope of what it means
to him to be human. Almost to the end—his execution was brutal.
Has the problem of evil transmogrified into the problem of planetary ruin in the
Anthropocene? In our posthumanist fantasies, the contradictions remain similar:
hubristic Anthropos = omnipotent God. If Boethius’s imprisonment included the
conceptual traps of a contradictory belief system, here is a parallel narrative of our
own captivity: the beautiful Enlightenment mind was also a slave owner, a misog-
ynist, an imperialist. The tech wizards and geoengineers who promise to bypass
consequences of earthly degradation appeal to our escapist fantasies but will let
us down. Both God and Anthropos-ex-machina have much to answer for but little
to say about the virtual reality apocalypse unfolding on our world screens. Ah, but
this discourse has turned much too murky. Perhaps we can be refreshed by poetry.
2
The Reinvention of Truth
it can be startling to hear a sentence begin with we

the place of absence so precisely marked
point of departure for something tragic
and brutal and mistaken many times over never farce
in a bright saturation of urgent green urgent
orange crackup blue and white can anything
be settled by pleasure v reality principle debates
or lack thereof in Greek or Roman or Viennese classicisms
in the monster meadow
all seemed to disappear
in the happy meadow
oh the happy tears ah the spot of red that

snapped the chaos into place
this much can be conjectured at last
that Isaac Newton’s world was
more involved with magic than mechanics
may have been what made gravity conceivable7
I’ve admired the form of The Consolation for decades but until now never used it,
except in interdisciplinary classroom experiments where it is always revelatory. Despite
working on every difficult question that interests me by means of poetry, philosophy,
essay, and prose poetic hybrids in a conversational manner, I’ve tended—except for
hybrid forms of prose poetry—to publish the genres separately. The prosimetric con-
versation in Boethius’s text and other well-known examples (Bashoˉ’s The Narrow Road
to the Deep North and Dante’s La Vita Nuova) are most importantly not hybrids. Each genre
retains its own identity, its own effective logics. Prosimetrum presents a challenge of
reciprocal alterity in its writing and reading poesis that our world might benefit from
in other areas. Constructive reciprocal alterity is the opposite of neoliberal colonial-
ism. True conversation—turning (verse) toward and with (con) one another—is just
that. Although what happens on pages is removed in kind and magnitude from what
happens across cultures, ethnicities, races, genders, at borders, and on city streets, so-
ciopoetic models can affect the pragmatic and visionary imagination. When I recently
revisited The Consolation, I saw that for all its moral and theological gravitas (“For the
wicked to overcome the innocent in the sight of God—that is monstrous”) Boethius
derives hope (if not optimism) from the improbable conversation he constructs among
poetry, philosophy, and theology.8 In less conclusively fatal circumstances, like (one
hopes) our current climate crisis, imaginative swerves may lead to new paradigms
that generate ethical energy from constructive optimism.
Jedediah Purdy in After Nature points out that the “American environmental
imagination” has undergone major shifts since the colonial period. From provi-
dential to Romantic to utilitarian views of our landscape, we have recently arrived
at an ecological understanding of the environment. But we are foundering in what
Purdy sees as the dystopia of the neoliberal Anthropocene. This is both what we
have made of our environment and what its transformations make of us. Purdy is
calling for us “as citizens” to “deliberately and collectively shift our autopoesis,

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

working on an interconnected project. We can’t really know where we are going and
that is precisely why we must experientially, experimentally make (poesis) our way
by means of considered poethical wagers. “The question has always been,” Tallique
writes, “do we have enough courage of imagination in history’s forlorn medias res to
exhume the future from our most ruinous habits of mind?”11
3
“Anthropocene” is the first ethically charged name for a geological epoch. Not
surprising, since it’s the first to designate the ascendancy of planet-wide human
meddling in things geophysical. Some of that meddling has been beautiful, some
tragic, some constructive, some brutally despoiling of human life and (intercon-
nectedly) that of other species. There is much debate about just when the Anthro-
pocene ascendancy began. Was it the ancient turn from nomadism to agriculture?
Was it the industrial age? Was it the explosive start of the nuclear age? From an
ecohumanist point of view, we can say all of the above and more. The problems
we now face have emerged with contributions from every aspect of human life on
earth. But in my view, having been affected by living for ten years in the pre–civil
rights South, the large-scale Anthroposcenities began in full force with the geoethical
disaster that was plantation agribusiness: deforestations, crop monoculture, and
most horrendously millions of women, men, and children wrenched into brutal
lives and deaths as commodities on the international slave market.
The plantation economy remains a template for the succession of megascale
ethical and moral compromises that have exploited human and material resources
for capitalist wealth accumulation.12 Plantations in the U.S. and Euro-American
colonies can be seen as prototypes of what are currently being called sacrifice zones
in the corporate world—a term for lands and waters, communities and popula-
tions devastated by the upheaval and contamination that are matters of course in
industrialized and extractive sites. An if-then exercise: if the entire planet is coming
to be understood as a sacrifice zone, if there is increasing scientific legitimation
of climate apocalypse, if thoughts of colonizing other planets to escape a ruined
earth are gaining credence beyond sci-fi literature and films—even if indirectly,
even if only in our largely phantom space program—then what?

The Ventriloquist’s Dilemma
Birdsong entered our words and left with migratory

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

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

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

natural phenomena did in fact register the interpermeability of human conscious-
ness, culture, and the rest of nature as we understand it in the twenty-first century.
The difference is that rather than reading the sky’s mood as spiritual augury, we
now think first about the toxic particles suspended in it. In both cases, it is an act of
the symbolic imagination that makes connections between experiences and ideas,
theories and observations in the sciences as well as the arts. Since skies darkened
by smog are literally leaden, the prose of the Clean Air Act can strike us as more
urgently relevant than that of the Romantic novelist. It may be, but as Gertrude
Stein argued and enacted in her poetic essay “Composition as Explanation,” it is
by means of our poetics that we simultaneously discover and compose the times
in which we live.15
4
None Too Soon
Located in memories without precedent, fine stock of syllables

not yet squandered in pliant affirmation. Don’t be scared. The
more non-existent of the gods are the only ones counting your
blunders. Hard to forget what’s never been known for sure.
Yearning minds conjure thoughts bound to deform the
musculature of the most determined smile. The only
worthwhile thought experiment of which I’m currently aware
is to construct a logical space-time bracket in which all of us
—animal, mineral, vegetable—are sometimes dreaming.
The semiotics of “Anthropocene” is most importantly, and alarmingly, the rec-

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

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

All senses are equally on the qui vive. As you watch, you see motion merging into sense
and sense into motion—constituting that animal grace so hard for man to rival . . . The
dog is never pedantic nor academic.18
To be pedantic and academic (in the pejorative sense of that word) is to have lost one
of our most vital senses—humor; to have lost, as Winnicott put it, the ability to enjoy
the play of those who haven’t heard of games—games of the sort that have nothing
to do with embodied pleasures or imaginative escapades. Winnicott advocates the
life-long necessity of the kind of play that explores and invents ways to converse
with the material reality that is our world. Play is thus a vital form of poesis, though
he doesn’t name it as such. Both Winnicott and Dewey think of imaginative play
as importantly distinct from the passivity and inwardness of fantasy and dream
states. In a chapter called “The Challenge to Philosophy,” Dewey says this:
The theory that art is play is akin to the dream theory of art. But it goes one step nearer
the actuality of esthetic experience by recognizing the necessity of action, of doing
something. Children are often said to make-believe when they play. But children at
play are at least engaged in actions that give their imagery an outward manifestation;
in their play, idea and act are completely fused.19
What the admittedly marvelous dog—a model of freedom from pedantic crab-
bedness along with elephants, pigs, rabbits, mice, spiders, flies, and everything
else save us humans—might do with language has been beguilingly explored in
children’s literature, but with more anthropomorphizing than alternatives to human
modes of being. Anthropomorphizing in the Anthropocene sounds like an amusing
redundancy. In truth, it seems most often to foster feelings of connectedness to
other species (good thing) while bypassing radical curiosity and respect for their
alterity (dangerous thing). At the same time, Homo linguistica—sometimes sapi-
ent—has for millennia been developing a sensually intelligent poetics with which
we have (consciously and unconsciously) explored forms of sensual intelligence
in the extralinguistic world. (Onomatopoeia and rhythmic structures are only the
most obvious examples.) An intuitive collaboration of visual and sonic semiotics
with cognitive apperception may be what is most significantly meant by the poetic

imagination. But can it meet the challenge of being in meaningful conversation
with the scientific, mathematical, philosophical, and sociopolitical in a time of
cascading environmental change?
5
The Magic Rule of 9
Your sonic suit will never be a perfect fit. You’ll learn to

get by. Just don’t assume all art is all about victory over
death all the time. Not to say the meantime isn’t as good
a time as any to enjoy not being dead. In the swell of
many a meantime, many have diverted themselves with
great success. Hence civilizations’ discontents and
greatest hits. Take for instance the magic rule of nine.
That the sums of all numbers within the sums of all
multiplicands of 9, up to and including 9, equal 9—
1×9=9, 9=9; 2×9=18, 1+8=9; 3×9=27, 2+7=9; etc. This is
numerically melodious (bird sings in tree) to the species
that longs for more to it than a first glance affords.
Someone will say, If you really think this is magic you
don’t properly understand the decimal system (bird
falls out of tree). Who among us doesn’t long for magic.
Who among us truly understands the decimal system.
Whether the agon of what has been heroically called Man and Nature continues
to the death knell of millions more species, including our own, is partly a matter
of chance—a reliably significant factor in complex dynamic systems like Earth’s
biosphere—partly a matter of our choices. What we call choice is actually the pattern
of wagers we sometimes initiate but are always participating in wittingly or not.
Whatever else we think we’re doing, our careless or considered presence is at any
moment setting off countless butterfly effects. Indeterminacy has to do with the fact
that consequences always outdistance intentions. Which is another way of saying

that no matter how constructive one wants to be, there is a cluelessness and risk
constant. Despite an evolutionarily fine-tuned neural apparatus, now augmented
by regular AI upgrades, we are clumsier, more benighted creatures than we like to
imagine ourselves to be.
Fierce Love Story
To start with a taxonomic impediment and yet go on.

Looking always for news of another kind. Great
saturated patches of color stall in their rumble toward
the horizon. Squeeze-tube dearth overflows with
biblical pornography. No greater love, they had said. Sit
back and watch in awe as one sophisticated critter
eviscerates another on a color-coded screen. Much too
bright or not enough to be convincing descriptions of
nature. For the disillusioned, there are these three things:
1. sonorous cowboys hitch up primate dungarees
2. to restore the consolation of silence will remain the
role of objects
3. four little girls, along with fragile creatures of many
other kinds, will wander in and out of this color field
just beyond our grasp
Given the charge that the term “Anthropocene” implies—opening new territory
beyond scientific and ethical neutrality—what kinds of poethical wagers are worth
making? Or is the question a different one: Does our planetary emergency demand
rhetoric more than poetry? Persuasion more than acts of playful investigation? Might
not the crux be to convince the “we” who live in opulence, the “we” who live reason-
ably above subsistence level, to rethink the difference between need and desire, to
review what the privileged must give up for the survival of a thriving multispecies
habitat on earth? Much of the language of an environmental movement under threat
of climate catastrophe has been rhetorical rather than poetic, relying on ancient
Greek and Roman modes of persuasion—ethos, logos, pathos. Hoping to argue

our species out of self-centered, shortsighted tendencies. All the while, the extent
to which nature and culture are inextricable is reflected in a largely unexamined
but habitually enacted conflation of need and desire in almost everything we do.
Directly to the point of our habits, our ethos under pressure of an accusatory An-
thropocene is what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus, our “present past” as it becomes
“embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history.”20
In this situation of human behavior, naturalized and reified as history, the future
can be nothing other than the probable. So much for Hegel’s romanticized future
as “absolute possibility.”21 Bourdieu writes this in The Logic of Practice:
The most improbable practices are . . . excluded, as unthinkable, by a kind of immediate

submission to order that inclines agents to make a virtue of necessity, that is, to refuse
what is anyway denied and to will the inevitable. . . . The habitus, a product of history,
produces individual and collective practices—more history—in accordance with the
schemes generated by history.22
Poetry, I’d like to suggest, is the linguistic laboratory and playground of the
improbable. Suppose, a poet might parry, after reading Bourdieu very carefully,
that the most improbably significant practices (and their consequences) materi-
alize only on the edges of discernment. Unthinkable because unseen in the lenses
of current categories. Silent, in John Cage’s sense, not because there is nothing
present but because it goes unnoticed. Once noticed, via swerves in geometries of
attention brought on by accident or speculative design—aesthetic devices, thought
experiments, paradigm shifts—the revelation must endure (and improbably sur-
vive) a period of unintelligibility, even scorn. If it does survive, it is because it is
probed and argued with and celebrated with logics, thought processes, imaginative
perspectives that are critically divergent from the official thought of the habitus.
There can be nothing instant about this process. It is appreciated for the most part
retrospectively. But it is enjoyed from the outset—from merest glimmer to clear
realization. The source of pleasure and exhilaration for those who create generative
conditions that change improbability to possibility is in the act, in the poesis. And
that, in the broadest of terms, is the work of experimental poethics.

The Long and Short of It Thought Experiment
Feed long and short-beaked pigeons the same food

same food. Exercise long and short-legged
quadrupeds in the same same manner. Expose long
and short-haired sheep to the same climate climate.
Direct every time-line toward the same same set
of nesting horizons. How long can the we and the they
go on this way? One step takes longer than anyone
thought possible and is still hovering in the air. Its
shadow is swelling with prophecy and indecision.
Earth is growing hotter and colder, wetter and drier.
All the animals are on the move. Although the heart
of the cruelty continues to elude our metrics, let
any long or short life-span equal exactly the same
function of x divided by the violence of zero.
The math is adding up to an old geometry of the
tragic spectrum—more the terror, less the pity.
Must that be the long and short of it?
Bourdieu developed the notion of habitus while studying the Kabyle, ethnic
Berbers in northern Algeria, but quickly saw it to be equally applicable to Euro-
pean society. Can it be scaled up further to throw light on global culture? Despite
overwhelming odds for the uneasy equilibrium that perpetuates habitus, Bourdieu
tosses this in: “Without violence, art, or argument, [habitus] tends to exclude all
extravagances (not for the likes of us), that is, all the behaviours that would be neg-
atively sanctioned because they are incompatible with the objective conditions.”23
Objective conditions are everything that has prior legitimation in the official thought
rationalizing the nature of the habitus—what comes to be considered the objective
conditions of nature and culture. (Circular reasoning is essential in maintaining
habitus.) I reject violence as a means of resisting habitus. At this point, it could
be seriously defended as an agent of progress only by a pre-post-historical Marx-
ist, whose critiques might be invaluable but whose solutions would be quixotic.

Thinking in terms of necessary “extravagances,” what about a tool kit designed to
encourage poethical wagers? Assuming the importance of conceptual shifts and
swerves, curiosity, the courage of gravitas and humor, collaborative exploration,
conversational play respecting reciprocal alterity, what might such a tool kit require?
What might surprisingly (improbably) contribute to pedagogies that stimulate
life-long imaginative vitality of mind, practices of reading, writing, creating that
engage/invent multiple logics, multiple geometries of attention? In other words,
commitments to transformative acts of poesis.24
The Problem of Evil: Projectile Legacies
The Problem of Evil is a theological puzzle:

How can an omniscient, omnipotent, omni-
benevolent God allow injustice to thrive,
allow the innocent to suffer?
exceed that of its creators.

anthropomorphic god will never
Solution: The moral compass of an
Look Up
Dick said, Look, look.
Look up.
Look up, up, up.
Jane said, Run, run.
Run, Keisha, Jabhar, Juan, Miguela, Ashraf, Intesar,
Run. Run, said Jabhar, run and see.
Keisha said, Look, look.
Look over there.
Run, shouted Ashraf, run away.
Run, cried Intesar, run.

off-kilter glances glance off
breakaway silhouettes
shooting gallery silhouettes
already riddled with holes
_________________________________________________
the body of Christ is riddled with holes
the body of Christ has no thing but holes
the body of Christ is darkest matter
the body of Christ is the mystery of dark
matter blasted into starry nights
____________________________________
Look, cried Miguela, see.
See shiny yellow police tape
replace the horizon in our romantic
landscape at the end of the block.
See the empty cracks, said Juan, the cracks
where Chicory and Lamb’s Quarters used to grow.
See, they said in unison, see those ancient clouds
drifting by, most delicately formed. See how
beautiful they are, how pink and puffy they are
scattering star dust on that prison roof, on
the border fences, the walls, the occupied territories,
the blood stained sidewalks, the plantation heritage sites.
Soon the children and all the pets went home.

Boys and girls and dogs and cats. Rabbits and
hens and chickens and one little yellow duck.
They all went home.
Coda
The angle of attention is the
most beautiful act of free will.
If there is a God than which nothing greater
can be conceived that tragedy is inconceivable.25

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

makes it hard to limn differences among realities and
representations. Such difficulties can lead to epistemological
despair. This is where poetry comes in.
—D i t a F r ö l l e r , New Old World Marvels
noft there ere rein invent iono trut
counterfactuals
the world is full and doesn’t ask for more
I’d like to know better than to claim
a song of songs or the illumination

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

Notes
E c o p o e t i c s a s Ex p a n d e d C r i t i c a l P r a c t i c e
1. The conference program as well as links to postconference reflections,
collaborations, and essays are available at http://ecopoeticsconference.blogspot
.com/.
2. “The pond of unlimited facilities” off-site event was organized by Laura
Woltag. “The Pond of Unlimited Facilities: Let’s Do This!” February 1, 2013,
e-mail invitation.
3. Kate Rigby, “Ecopoetics,” in Key Words for Environmental Studies, ed. Joni
Adamson, William A. Gleason, and David N. Pellow (New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 2016), 79.
4. For more on the poetics of nonhuman animals, see Aaron M. Moe, Zoopoet-
ics: Animals and the Making of Poetry (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2014).
5. Brenda Hillman, interview, “Red, White, and Blue: Poets on Politics,”
Poetry Society of America, 2012. See https://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry
/crossroads/red_white_blue_poets_on_politics/brenda_hillman/.
6. See, for example, George Hart, “‘Enough Defined’: Disability, Ecopoetics,
and Larry Eigner,” Contemporary Literature 51, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 152–179, and
Peter Jaeger, “Ethnicity, Ecopoetics, and Fred Wah’s Biotext,” Journal of Postcolo-
nial Writing 46, no. 2 (May 2010): 199–208.
7. By using the phrase “intersectional scholarship,” we gesture toward
intersectionality theory, an antiracist, feminist project. See Kimberlé Crenshaw,
“Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of
Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University
of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, no. 1, Article 8.
8. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), iv, xviii–xxi.
9. For more on the Jeffers-Snyder-Berry triumvirate, see Lynn Keller, “Green
Reading: Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and Environmental Crit-
icism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 608.
10. For more on a perceived lyric tradition, see Virginia Jackson and Yopie
Prins, “General Introduction,” in The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed.
Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2014), 1–8.
11. Robert Duncan, “Introduction,” in Bending the Bow (New York: New Direc-
tions, 1963), v–vi.
12. Ibid, vi.
13. Robert Duncan, “From Notes on the Structure of Rime,” in Collected Essays
and Other Prose, ed. James Maynard (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2014), 295.
14. Ibid., 299.
15. For a discussion of the field as a space for poetry, see John Felstiner, Can
Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2000); Bernard W. Quetchenbach, Back from the Far Field: American
Nature Poetry in the Late Twentieth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 2000); and Stephen Yenser, A Boundless Field: American Poetry at Large
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). For examples of poets who
investigate the field’s poetic legacy, see Cecily Parks, Field Folly Snow: Poems (Ath-
ens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), and C. S. Giscombe, Prairie Style (Cham-
paign, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008).
16. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and
the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1995), 285. Regarding the locution “to think the end of nature,” here and else-
where we omit the preposition “about” in order to emphasize that thinking is
250 Notes to Pages 3–5

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

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

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

Pedagogy (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002).
46. See Margaret Ronda, “Mourning and Melancholia in the Anthropocene,”
Post45: Peer Reviewed (June 6, 2013), http://post45.research.yale.edu/2013/06
/mourning-and-melancholia-in-the-anthropocene/.
47. Giovanna Di Chiro, “Environmental Justice,” in Key Words for Environmen-
tal Studies, ed. Adamson, Gleason, and Pellow, 101.
48. Stephanie LeMenager and Stephanie Foote, “The Sustainable Human-
ities,” PMLA 127, no. 3 (May 2012): 572.
49. Margaret Ronda, “Anthropogenic Poetics,” Minnesota Review 83 (2014):
102, and Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr, #Misanthropocene: 24 Theses (Oakland,
Calif.: Commune Editions, 2014).
50. Gabriel Gudding, Literature for Nonhumans (Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press,
2015), 27; see also Margaret Ronda and Tobias Menely, “Red,” in Prismatic Ecolo-
gy, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 22–41.
51. Retallack, “What Is Experimental Poetry and Why Do We Need It?”
1. Making Art “Under These Apo-Calypso Rays”

1. John Ashbery, “Growing Up Surreal,” ARTnews 67, no. 3 (May 1968): 41.
Lawrence Buell notes, “The nuclear generation probably does differ from its
forebears in its emphasis on annihilative apocalypticism (the ‘prediction of an
imminent end to history controlled by no God at all and followed by the void,’
[Douglas] Robinson succinctly defines it), but it is a change of emphasis and
not a new conception. The concept of annihilative apocalypse itself is as old as
Lucretius” (emphasis Buell’s). See The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature
Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1995), 299.
2. Lynn Keller, “Beyond Imagining, Imagining Beyond,” PMLA 127, no. 3
(May 2012): 581.
3. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, “Apocalypse Fatigue: Losing
the Public on Climate Change,” The Guardian, November 17, 2009, https://www
.theguardian.com/environment/2009/nov/17/apocalypse-public
-climate-change.

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

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

49. Reilly, “The Grief of Ecopoetics,” 322.
51. Ibid., 71.
52. Ibid., 82.
53. Ibid.
54. Robert Creeley, The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1982), 132.
56. Ibid., 90.
57. Ibid., 99.
58. Ibid., 106.
59. Ibid., 98, 100, 103.
60. Ibid., 97.
61. Ibid., 110.
62. Ibid., 93.
63. Ibid., 87.
64. Ibid., 84.
65. Reilly, “The Grief of Ecopoetics,” 323.
67. Ibid., 76.
68. Ibid., 95.
2. “The Idiot Stone”

1. George Oppen, New Collected Poems, ed. Michael Davidson (New York: New
Directions, 2008), 164, 70, and George Oppen, Selected Letters, ed. Rachel Blau
DuPlessis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), 29.
2. Oppen, New Collected Poems, 343.
3. It is important to note John Gery’s study, Nuclear Annihilation and Contempo-
rary American Poetry (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996). While Gery
does not address either Oppen or Rukeyser, his book pursues “the fundamental
challenge that the concept of annihilation poses to poets in the nuclear age”
(10).

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

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

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

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

to apprehension.”
56. Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (New York: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2007), 239.
58. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 64.
59. Ibid., 71.
60. Ibid., 138.
3. Visceral Ecopoetics in Charles

Olson and Michael McClure
1. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 189.
2. Sandra Steingraber, Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Perseus Books, 2001), 15.
3. Michael McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface (San Francisco: North Point
Press, 1982), 21.
4. Charles Olson, Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 179–199.
5. Michael McClure, Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems, ed. Leslie
Scalapino (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 29, 31.
6. McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 26.
7. Ibid., 24.
8. Ibid., 43.
9. David Meltzer, ed., San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets (San Francisco:
City Lights Books, 2001), 158.
10. McClure, Of Indigo and Saffron, 28–31.
11. Ibid., 32.
12. Douglas Kahn, “Cruelty and the Beast: Antonin Artaud and Michael Mc-
Clure,” in his Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1999), 322–358.
14. Francis Crick would contribute to “Symposium on Michael McClure,” ed.
John Jacob, Margins 18, no. 3 (1975): n.p.

16. Ibid., 97.
17. McClure, Of Indigo and Saffron, 44; Olson, Collected Prose, 182.
18. Tom Clark, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life (New York: W. W. Nor-
ton, 1991), 292–294.
19. Charles Olson, “Under the Mushroom,” in Muthologos: Lectures and In-
terviews, ed. Ralph Maud (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2010), 88. See also Olson’s
“Black Chrysanthemum” dream of June 17, 1958: “nothing is anything but itself
/ measured so.” Charles Stein, The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum (New York:
Station Hill Press, 1987), 167–169.
20. Donald Allen and Warren Tallman, eds., The Poetics of the New American
Poetry (New York: Grove Press, 1973), 416–417.
22. Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1938), 224–225.
23. Allen and Tallman, eds., The Poetics of the New American Poetry, 416–417.
24. Ibid., 417.
25. Michael McClure, Ghost Tantras (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2013),
n.p.
27. Allen Ginsberg, Howl (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1956), 3; and
Jack Kerouac, in Allen and Tallman, eds., The New American Poetry (New York:
Grove Press, 1960), 414.
29. Olson, Collected Prose, 242.
30. McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 86, 88.
31. Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, The Complete Correspondence, vol. 1, ed.
George F. Butterick (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1980), 79.
33. Ibid., 95–96.
34. Ibid., 59.
35. Ibid., 61.
36. See Michael G. Barbour, “Ecological Fragmentation in the Fifties,” in
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New

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

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

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

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

Books, 2012); Angela Rawlings, Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists (Toronto: Coach
House Books, 2006); Jordan Scott, blert (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2008);
Eleni Stecopoulos, Armies of Compassion (Long Beach, Calif.: Palm Press, 2010),
and Visceral Poetics (Oakland, Calif.: ON Contemporary Practice, 2015); and Lila
Zemborain, Mauve Sea-Orchids (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Belladonna Books, 2007).
98. McClure, September Blackberries, 124.
99. Ibid., 126.
4. Playing in the Planetary Field

1. Duncan’s work does not fit well in critical rubrics that emphasize explic-
itly environmentalist poetry, such as those of J. Scott Bryson, The West Side of Any
Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005),
and Leonard M. Scigaj, Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets (Lexington: Uni-
versity Press of Kentucky, 1999).
2. Here I follow Jed Rasula’s This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American
Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002) in conceiving of Black Moun-
tain poetry broadly, so that it goes beyond those poets associated with Black
Mountain College or the Black Mountain Review to include poets such as Muriel
Rukeyser, whose poetics is in the same ballpark as projectivism.
3. See Eric Keenaghan, Queering Cold War Poetry: Ethics of Vulnerability in Cuba
and the United States (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009).
4. Robert Duncan, Collected Essays and Other Prose, ed. James Maynard (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 2014), 80.
5. Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (New
York: Routledge, 2002).
6. Duncan, Collected Essays, 79.
7. Charles Olson, Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 247.
8. Ibid.
9. Stephen Fredman, The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Em-
ersonian Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 100.
10. Olson, Collected Prose, 261, and Duncan, Collected Essays, 44.

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

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

Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22–28, for a
discussion of these blue planet images and the environmentalism they sparked.
49. Duncan, Collected Essays, 127, 129, 130.
51. Robert Frost, Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark
Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1995), 236–237.
52. Ibid., 237–238, emphasis in original.
53. Ibid.
55. Michael Davidson notes that this line is from John Crowe Ransom’s
letter to Duncan dated August 14, 1957. See Michael Davidson, “A Book of First
Things: The Opening of the Field,” in Robert Duncan: Scales of the Marvelous, ed.
Robert J. Bertholf (New York: New Directions, 1979), 64, 84n7.
5. “Beyond the Vomiting Dark”

1. See Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).
2. See Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Free-
dom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,”
CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257.
3. I borrow the term “terracentrism” from Marcus Rediker. For more on
terracentrism, see Marcus Rediker, “History from below the Water Line: Sharks
and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” Atlantic Studies 5, no. 2 (2008): 285.
4. Here I am referring to the long cultural history that follows in the wake of
the revolt, one that includes, of course, the Academy Award–nominated 1997
Steven Spielberg film Amistad.
5. Robert Hayden, Collected Poems, ed. Frederick Glaysher (New York: Liv-
eright, 2013), 49.
6. Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to
American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).
7. For more on the dream, see Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
(New York: Penguin Books, 2015), 11.

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

and Other Poems (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 330–331.
20. Dungy, ed., Black Nature, 223.
21. Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, “The Black Outdoors: Fred Moten
and Saidiya Hartman in Conversation,” Duke University, September 23, 2016,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_tUZ6dybrc.
22. I borrow the phrase “had no selves to defend” from Mariame Kaba. Her
writing can be found at www.usprisonculture.com, on her Twitter account, @
prisonculture, and elsewhere.
23. Xandria Phillips, Reasons for Smoking (Seattle: Seattle Review, 2017), 17.
24. Monique Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism
in the American Tropics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1.
25. See Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” in Black Skin, White Masks, 85.
26. Vincent Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,”
American Historical Review 114, no. 5 (2009): 1233.
27. Jonathan Howard, “The Soles of Black Folk: Blackness and the Lived
Experience of Relation,” ESU Review (2016): 17.
28. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Gram-
mar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 67.
29. Phillips, Reasons for Smoking, 17.
6. Writing with the Salamander

1. See Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011).
2. On how fear of foreign bodies and mercury poisoning creates discursive
and material fields of toxicity, see Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Matter-
ing, and Queer Affect (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012).
3. For a rare counterexample, see Indra Sinha, Animal’s People (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2007), and Jina Kim, “‘People of the Apokalis’: Spatial
Disability and the Bhopal Disaster,” Disability Studies Quarterly 34, no. 3 (2014),
http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3795/3271.
4. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 2004), 6.

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

in American Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013). Ray also address-
es a foundational text for ecodisability studies, Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride: Disabili-
ty, Queerness, and Liberation (Brooklyn, N.Y.: South End Press, 1999).
16. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2013), 130.
17. Ibid., 143–144, quoting Petra Kuppers, “Outsides: Disability Culture Na-
ture Poetry,” Journal of Literary Disability 1, no. 1 (2007): 22–33.
7. Toxic Recognition
1. Cedric J. Robinson, “Racial Capitalism: The Nonobjective Character of
Capitalist Development,” in his Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tra-
dition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 9–28.
2. Rob Nixon, “Stranger in the Eco-Village: Environmental Time, Race, and
Ecologies of Looking,” in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, ed.
Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), 160.
American Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), xiv.
4. Ibid., 294.
5. Ibid., 8.
6. Audra Simpson, “Indigenous Interruptions: Mohawk Nationhood,
Citizenship, and the State,” in Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders
of Settler States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 1–36, and Glen
Coulthard, “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recog-
nition’ in Canada,” Contemporary Political Theory 6 (2007): 437–460.
7. Coulthard, “Subjects of Empire,” 438–439.
8. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit
from Identity Politics (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1998).
9. Sherwin Bitsui, Shapeshift (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003), and
Flood Song (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2009).
10. Lawrence Buell, “Toxic Discourse,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 3 (Spring 1998):
646. The quotation “poverty is hierarchic, smog is democratic,” cited by Buell,

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

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

50. Ibid., 87.
51. Ibid., 70.
52. Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and
Experimental Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 20.
53. Bitsui, Flood Song, 70–71.
54. Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the
Limits of the Law (Brooklyn, N.Y.: South End Press, 2011), 32.
55. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex:
A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and
Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, no.1., Article 8. 167.
56. Andrea Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Suprem-
acy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing,” in The Color of Violence: The INCITE!
Anthology, ed. INCITE! Women of Color against Violence (Brooklyn, N.Y.: South
End Press, 2006), 66–73.
57. Jeff Corntassel, “To Be Ungovernable,” New Socialist, no. 58 (September–
October 2006): 36.
58. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “Debt and Study,” in The Undercommons:
Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe, U.K.: Minor Compositions, 2013),
20, 61.
8 . T owa r d a n A n t i r a c i s t E c o p o e t i c s
1. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis, Minn.: Graywolf
Press, 2014), 5.
2. Ibid.
3. Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (Minneapolis,
Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2004), 11.
4. Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” South
Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (2013): 738, 769.
5. Claudia Rankine, “Claudia Rankine in Conversation,” Academy of Ameri-
can Poets, September 15, 2009, https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text
/claudia-rankine-conversation.
6. Ibid.

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

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

45. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Gram-
mar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 72.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., 65, 75.
48. Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 738.
49. Ibid., 751.
50. Ibid., 751–752.
51. Ibid., 752.
52. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann
(London: Pluto, 1986), 2.
53. Ibid., 1–3.
54. Ibid., 2.
55. Ibid., 2–3.
56. “Lysis,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view
/Entry/111700?rskey=hRmDeq&result=1. “Crisis, n,” OED Online, Oxford Univer-
sity Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/44539?redirectedFrom=crisis.
57. Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 756, 774.
60. Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 769.
61. Ibid.
62. See Virginia Jackson, “Lyric,” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics,
4th ed., ed. Roland Greene et al. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2012), 826–834.
63. On this point, Rankine echoes Foucault. See Foucault, “Society Must Be
Defended.”
64. Anthony Reed, Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental
Writing (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 98.
65. Ibid., 99.
67. Ibid., 85.

9. “Hung Up in the Flood”
1. See “The Ponds” chapter of Walden in Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Civil
Disobedience, and Other Writings, 3d ed., ed. William Rossi (New York: W. W. Nor-
ton, 2008), 119–137.
2. Ibid., 132.
3. See Brian Walker and David Salt, Resilience Thinking (Washington, D.C.:
Island Press, 2006). Walker and Salt define resilience as “the ability of a system
to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure” (1).
4. Thoreau, Walden, 135.
5. See Stephanie Wakefield and Bruce Braun, “Governing the Resilient City,”
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32, no. 1 (2014): 5.
6. City of New York, Michael R. Bloomberg, “A Stronger, More Resilient New
York,” 2013, http://www.nyc.gov/html/sirr/html/report/report.shtml.
7. Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper, “Genealogies of Resilience, from
Systems Ecology to the Political Economy of Crisis Adaptation,” Security Dialogue
42, no. 2 (2011): 156.
8. Ibid., 146.
9. Walker and Salt, Resilience Thinking, 51.
10. Jonathan Joseph, “Resilience as Embedded Neoliberalism: A Govern-
mentality Approach,” Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 1, no. 1
(2013): 38–52.
11. See Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2002), 170, 190.
12. See Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Lorine Niedecker the Anonymous: Gender,
Class, Genre and Resistances,” in Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet, ed. Jenny
Penberthy (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1996), 113–137. Also see
Jenny Penberthy, “A Little Too Little: Rereading Lorine Niedecker,” How2 1, no.
1 (March 1999), http://how2journal.com. For an excellent primer on the impor-
tance of flooding to Niedecker’s poetry, see Mary Pinard, “Niedecker’s Grammar
of Flooding,” in Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, ed. Eliza-
beth Willis (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 21–30.
13. Of the essays collected in Radical Vernacular, those by Mary Pinard and

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

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

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

Lorine Niedecker, 46. Her resistance to literary activism during the Vietnam War is
documented in her letters to Cid Corman, in which she describes turning down
an editor’s solicitation for antiwar poems. See Niedecker, Between Your House and
Mine, 87.
48. Angela Hume, “Imagining Ecopoetics: An Interview with Robert Hass,
Brenda Hillman, Evelyn Reilly, and Jonathan Skinner,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Stud-
ies in Literature and Environment 19, no. 4 (Autumn 2012): 751–766.
10. Reading the Environs

1. Christian Bök, The Xenotext: Book 1 (Toronto: Coach House Press, 2015);
Kenneth Goldsmith, Traffic (Los Angeles: Make Now Press, 2007); Vanessa
Place, Statement of Facts (New York: Ubu Editions, 2008); and Tan Lin, Seven Con-
trolled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking: [AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL
POEM PAINTING FILM PHOTO HALLUCINATION LANDSCAPE] (Middletown, Conn.:
Wesleyan University Press, 2010).
2. The phrase “reading with the grain” is from Timothy Bewes, cited by Ste-
phen Best and Sharon Marcus in “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representa-
tions 108 (Fall 2009): 11. Hélène Aji notes that conceptual poetry “fails to con-
struct the master figure of an author with an agenda” and thus treats the author
as a linguistic function rather than as arbiter of the world. The conceptual poem
is driven by acts of moving language around rather than by announcing a social
project to motivate the poem. See Hélène Aji, “Un(decidable), Un(creative),
Un(precedented), Un(readable), Un(nerving): Christian Bök, Craig Dworkin,
Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place,” Études Anglaises 65, no. 2 (2012): 170.
3. A banner for conceptual poetry can be found in Andy Warhol’s declara-
tion: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of
my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” See
Andy Warhol, I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews: 1962–1987, ed.
Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), 90.
4. J. Scott Bryson, The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), 2. I do not want simply to rehash
avant-garde versus traditional formalist debates. What I do think bodes poorly

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

18. Ibid., 218–219.
19. For further analysis of the ecology of e-waste, see Jennifer Gabrys, Digital
Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2011).
20. Jed Rasula, This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2002), 3.
21. Ibid., 17.
22. Evelyn Reilly, Styrofoam (New York: Roof Books, 2009), 9.
23. Adam Dickinson, The Polymers (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2013), 35.
24. Ibid., 19.
25. Ibid., 105.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 3.
28. Ibid., 2.
29. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2010), 130.
30. Dickinson, The Polymers, 42.
31. Ibid., 14.
32. Ibid., 35.
11. Hard Days’ Nights in the Anthropocene

1. For an update, visit http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups
/anthropocene.
2. H. R. James, preface to The Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, trans. H. R.
James (London: Elliot Stock, 1897); Project Gutenberg e-book released Decem-
ber 11, 2004, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14328/14328-h/14328-h.htm.
3. See Aristotle’s always relevant Nicomachean Ethics.
4. Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans.
Richard Green (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 4. I draw all subsequent quota-
tions from this edition.
5. Boethius sums up what is known in Christian theology as the problem of
evil by quoting the pre-Christian philosopher Epicurus: “If there is a God, why is

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

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

Permissions
We would like to thank the following for permission to print or reprint these ma-
terials.
Robert Creeley: “I Know a Man,” first published in For Love: Poems 1950–1960
and reprinted in The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975, by permis-
sion of the University of California Press.
Michael McClure: Ghost Tantra 51 from Ghost Tantras, copyright 1964, 2013
by Michael McClure, by permission of the Permissions Company on
behalf of City Lights Books.
Michael McClure: “Raven’s Feather, Eagle’s Claw, Every Song Ever Chanted”
from Three Poems: Dolphin Skull, Rare Angel, and Dark Brown, by permission
of Penguin Books.
Michael McClure: “Written after Finding a Dolphin’s Skull on the Gulf of
California” from September Blackberries, copyright 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971,
1972, 1973, 1974 by Michael McClure, by permission of New Directions.
George Oppen: “Time of the Missile” from New Collected Poems, copyright
1962 by George Oppen, by permission of New Directions.
George Oppen: “From Disaster” from Collected Poems, copyright 1975 by
George Oppen, by permission of New Directions.
Previously unpublished writing and images by participants in the Salaman-
der project included in Petra Kuppers’s essay, “Writing with the Sala-
mander: An Ecopoetic Community Performance Project”: Andy Jackson,
Susan Nordmark, Chris Smit, Denise Leto, Petra Kuppers, Neil Marcus,
Nor ’Ain Muhamad Nor, Sharon Siskin, and Xavier Duacastilla Soler, by
permission of the authors and artists.
Toyin Ojih Odutola: Uncertain, Yet Reserved (Adeola, Abuja Airport, Nigeria),
copyright 2012 by Toyin Ojih Odutola, by permission of the artist and the
Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
The mammogram image in Angela Hume’s essay, “Toward an Antiracist
Ecopoetics: Waste and Wasting in the Poetry of Claudia Rankine,” was
originally published in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia
Rankine, reprinted by permission of Claudia Rankine.
Angela Hume’s “Toward an Antiracist Ecopoetics: Waste and Wasting in the
Poetry of Claudia Rankine” appeared as a longer essay in Contemporary
Literature 57, no. 1 (2016): 79–110, copyright 2016 by the Board of Regents
of the University of Wisconsin System, by permission of the University of
Wisconsin Press.
Joan Retallack: “The Ventriloquist’s Dilemma” and “The Magic Rule of 9,”
originally published in Jacket2, by permission of the author.
Xandria Phillips: “For a Burial Free of Sharks” from Reasons for Smoking, by
permission of the Seattle Review.
Index
Abrams, M. H., 178 climate change

action poetry, 72 anticoloniality, 147, 148, 155, 167, 168
Adorno, Theodor, 259n26 apocalypticism, 5, 11–12, 19–41, 45, 50,
affect theory, 12, 72 55, 60–61, 230; annihilative, 254n1;
Aji, Hélène, 286n2 Duncan’s rejection of, 85, 89, 97, 101;
Alexander, Will, 9 eco-apocalypse, 160; etymology of,
Allen, Donald, 73 277n40; Graham and, 23–32; Reilly
Allewaert, Monique, 115 and, 31–41; Rukeyser and, 42–43. See
Amistad (ship and film), 105, 110, 271n4 also Buell, Frederick
Ammons, A. R., 8 Aristotle, 216, 230–231
animals and animality, 4, 12–13, 112–114, Artaud, Antonin, 67
239; Bitsui and, 162; Dewey on, 238; Ashbery, John, 9, 19, 258n6; “The Lament
Goethe on, 71; Graham and, 26; upon the Waters,” 43
human-animal divide, 103, 105–107, Austin, J. L., 236
215; McClure (“beast language”) and,
69, 72–73, 74, 75–77, 79–81; moose, Bashō, 232
100–101; Niedecker and, 201, 202, Bate, Jonathan, 9–10
203; Olson and, 68; Reilly and, 20, 33, Beale, Edward, 158, 159
35–36, 39–40; salamanders, 121, 134, Beat poetics, 5, 67, 68, 70, 78
135–136, 274n9; sharks, 103–117 Beck, Ulrich, 22, 148
Anthropocene epoch, 15, 21, 80, 83, Benjamin, Walter, 260n41
228–229, 231, 232–242 Bergson, Henri, 92, 270n33
anthropogeny, 15, 21, 23, 30, 80. See also Berlant, Lauren, 176
Berman, Wallace, 68 Buell, Frederick, 21–23, 24, 26, 31, 33, 36,
Bernstein, Charles: “Artifice of Absorp- 40–41, 45, 50, 146
tion,” 164 Buell, Lawrence, 7; apocalypticism and,
Berry, Wendell, 4, 8 5, 20–21, 28, 29, 254n1; on “ecologi-
biblical references, 20, 25, 85; Jonah, cal holism,” 9–10; on environmental
112–113; Revelation, 29, 31, 35–40 writing, 283n14; on “toxic discourse,”
big data mining, 15 13, 148
bio-art, 215 Bunnell, Sterling, 67
biopoetics, 170, 183, 186 Butterick, George, 71, 74
Bishop, Elizabeth, 8
Bitsui, Sherwin, 14, 147–148, 168; “Appa- Cage, John, 242
rition,” 152–154; “Asterisk,” 149–152; Caillois, Roger, 59
“Chrysalis,” 154–155; Flood Song, 147, Cancer Alley, 172
157, 161–166; Shapeshift, 147, 149 capitalism, 12, 45, 54, 61, 156, 160, 168,
Black Arts Movement, 170 234; Rankine and, 169, 183
Black Mountain poetry, 4, 9, 84, 86, 198, Carlyle, Thomas, 93
238, 268n2 Carson, Rachel, 19, 28, 65, 78, 148, 194
black radicalism, 6, 13, 113 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 269n24
blackness, 103–104, 111–112, 117, 181; Clare, John, 9
Fanon on, 115; underwater utopias of, Clarkson, Thomas, 272n10
108–109 climate change, 20, 26, 31, 192, 205, 232,
Blanciak, François, 34 255n19
body and environmental writing, the, Cole, Andrew, 55
65–66, 124; African Americans and, collage, 4, 71, 170, 174
176–177 colonialism (and settlement), 146–151,
Boethius, 15, 229–232, 289n5 154, 157, 160–161, 167–168
Bosman, Willem, 107 composition by field, 4–5, 13, 73, 85–87,
Bök, Christian: The Xenotext, 208, 214–215 88, 89, 192, 197–198, 203, 205
Bourdieu, Pierre, 242–243, 243 conceptual poetry, 208–218, 221–227,
Brassier, Ray, 61 286nn2–3
Braun, Bruce, 191–192 Conference on Ecopoetics (2013), 1–2
Brennan, Teresa, 119–120 Cooper, Melinda, 155–156
Brown, Vincent, 115–116 Cope, Stephen, 48
Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder, 31, 40 Corey, Joshua, 2–3
Bryson, J. Scott, 8, 209–210, 287n4 Corntassel, Jeff, 168
294 Index
Coulthard, Glen, 146, 152 Duacastilla Soler, Xavier, 138
Crane, Heart: “A Name for All,” 77 Duncan, Robert, 4–5, 13, 72, 84–101;
Creeley, Robert, 66, 70, 71, 88, 198; “I “Apprehensions,” 93; “The Dance,”
Know a Man,” 36–37 88; dialectic and, 84–85, 94, 95,
Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 167 270n41; The H.D. Book, 87, 90–93, 96,
Crick, Francis, 67, 68 98, 270n33; “Ideas of the Meaning of
critical race theory, 13, 14, 167, 169 Form,” 85, 95; “Often I Am Permitted
Cronon, William, 10, 173 to Return to a Meadow,” 86, 87–88;
Crutzen, Paul, 228 Olson and, 84, 86–89, 90, 93, 96, 101;
cybernetics, 9, 69, 71–72, 78, 79, 81, 88, The Opening of the Field, 86, 88, 89, 97;
267n84 play principle in, 86–89; “Poetry, A
Natural Thing,” 86, 97–101; “Towards
dams, 195, 196, 198 an Open Universe,” 90, 92–97, 101;
Dante Alighieri, 179, 231 vulnerability in, 84–90, 101
Davidson, Michael, 123 Dungy, Camille, 2, 103, 177
decolonization theory, 11, 13, 167 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 283n13
Deleuze, Gilles, 72 Dworkin, Craig: “Fact,” 214, 217
Derrida, Jacques, 160
Dewey, John, 237–239 Earth, photographs of, 96; Earth Day, 75,
Di Chiro, Giovanna, 13 97
dialectics, 12, 259n26; Duncan and, 84–85, ecocriticism, 6, 7–8, 11, 146–147; limita-
94, 95; Oppen and, 51, 52–53, 61 tions of, 146, 167. See also the body and
Dickinson, Adam, 15; “Carl Jung Steps environmental writing
onto a Plane,” 225–226; “Coca-Cola ecological harm. See environmental deg-
Dasani,” 223–224; The Polymers, 213, radation
221–227 ecological others, 14, 173–174
Different Light Theatre Company, 128 ecology, 2–3, 5, 7, 8, 15, 211; early uses of
digital technology, 31, 35, 39–40, 218 term, 65–66, 67, 78, 218, 266n76. See
Dillard, Annie, 7 also resilience
Dimock, Wai Chee, 195, 283n16 ecopoetics: antiracist, 167–168, 171; black,
Dinétah, 149, 157, 159, 276n14 103; definitions of, 2, 10, 120, 170, 210;
disability, experience of, 5, 11, 13, 118–141 development of, 3–5, 7–10, 66, 72–73,
Doolittle, Hilda. See H.D. 209; different terms for, 6, 7; etymol-
Drexciya, 108 ogy of, 2; expansion of, 124, 141, 207,
drought, 148, 157–165 287n4; McClure on, 79, 80–81; Ran-
Index 295
kine on, 170; scholarship on, 3, 9, 194; Fanon, Frantz, 115, 152, 182, 184
Skinner on, 8–9, 124, 207, 210 Felstiner, John, 10
ecopoetics (journal), 8 field composition. See composition by field
ecopoetry: anthologies of, 2–3; canon Finseth, Ian, 103
of, 7–9, 209; definitions of, 84, 209; Fisher-Wirth, Ann, 3, 6
development of, 3–4, 85; kinds of, 6–7 Fletcher, Angus, 9
Eigner, Larry, 9 Foerster, Norman, 7
ekphrasis, 127, 140–141 Foote, Stephanie, 200
Elder, John, 8 Foucault, Michel, 279n23
Eliot, T. S., 8, 44, 269n26 François, Anne-Lise, 6, 205
embodiment (and embeddedness), 12–13, Fredman, Stephen, 87
Freeman, Alan, 151
22; in Graham, 20, 26, 28, 30; in
Freud, Sigmund, 87, 99, 102
Reilly, 20, 33, 34, 40; in Salamander
Frost, Robert: “The Oven Bird,” 85; “The
workshops, 140. See also the body and
Road Not Taken,” 180; “West-Running
environmental writing
Brook,” 86, 97–100, 101
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 9, 65
enactivist poetics, 83
Garrard, Greg, 21
enclosure, politics of, 147, 148, 149–155, Gay, Ross, 10
156–157, 167 Gery, John, 257n3, 258n6
entropology, 81, 83 Gibbs, Lois, 148
entropy, 80, 83, 85, 86, 94–95, 96, 97–99, Gilcrest, David, 10
101 Ginsberg, Allen, 67, 72–73
environmental degradation (harm, vio- Giscombe, C. S., 5
lence), 22, 25, 38, 145–149, 151–155, Glave, Diane, 103
160, 165, 167, 170, 193, 231; Nixon on, global warming. See climate change
205–206; Thoreau and, 189–191. See Glotfelty, Cheryll, 7, 8, 9, 10–11
also “slow death” Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 71
environmental ethics, 8, 16 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 15, 208–209; Traffic,
environmental justice, 11, 13–14, 169, 171, 208–209, 216–217; Uncreative Writing,
195 218, 287n7
environmental management, 6, 14. See also Graham, Jorie, 11, 20, 23–31, 40–41;
sustainability “Embodies,” 26; “Futures,” 28–29;
environmental racism, 6, 11, 169, 170, 173, “Loan,” 27–28; “Long Way Round,”
186 30; “Positive Feedback Loop,” 25–26,
environmental risk, 6, 169, 172, 174 29–30; “Sea Change,” 23–25
Epicurus, 289n5 Guattari, Félix, 72
296 Index
habitus, 242–243 Jackson, Andy, 129
Haraway, Donna, 215 Jackson, George, 111
Hardy, Thomas, 236 James, H. R., 229
Harjo, Jo, 8, 147 Jameson, Fredric, 3
Harney, Stefano, 149, 154, 168 Jeffers, Robinson, 4, 67, 85
Harris, Cheryl, 160 Jones, Donna, 270n33
Hartman, Saidiya, 103, 114 Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka), 73; literary
Hass, Robert, 1–2, 207 journals of, 74
Hayden, Robert, 13, 102–104; “Middle Joseph, Jonathan, 193–194
Passage,” 104, 105–111, 116–117 Jung, Carl G., 225
H.D., 83, 86, 90–93, 96, 101, 269n26;
Trilogy, 90–92 Kaba, Mariame, 114, 273n22
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 242 Kafer, Alison, 125, 126–127
Heidegger, Martin, 10, 252n36 Keenaghan, Eric, 91
Heise, Ursula, 28 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 215
Hejinian, Lyn, 154 Keller, Lynn, 7–8, 9, 122, 140, 141
Heraclitus, 93 Kerouac, Jack, 70, 78
Hillman, Brenda, 2, 207 Killingsworth, Jimmie, 23
historical materialism, 12 Knickerbocker, Scott, 7–8
Hogan, Linda, 8
Howard, Jonathan, 116 Lamantia, Philip, 67
Howe, Susan, 8 Latour, Bruno, 211
Hume, Angela, 207 Lawrence, D. H., 67, 269n26
Hurricane Katrina, 195; Rankine on, Leary, Timothy, 68
171–173, 176, 184–186 LeMenager, Stephanie, 195, 200, 283n16
Hurricane Sandy, 192–193, 199 Leto, Denise, 135–136
hydropoetics: black, 105; Niedecker and, Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 81
194, 200, 201–203; Salamander project Liao, Kuei Hsien, 285n33
and, 120–121, 124, 139 Lin, Tan, 209
Linnaeus, Carl, 194, 196–197
Iijima, Brenda, 120–121 Lippard, Lucy, 213
internet culture, 218 Lipsit, George, 148
intersectionality, 3, 5, 9, 105, 209, 210, looking (and politics of recognition),
249n7 145–147
Lopez, Barry, 7
Index 297
Lucretius, 194, 254n1 McLuhan, Marshall, 218; media as mes-
Luhmann, Niklas, 81 sage, 213–214
lyric genre, 4, 6, 8; antilyric experimental- media ecology, 218–219, 221
ism, 7; Oppen and, 44, 48, 56; Ran- Medovoi, Leerom, 279n23
kine and, 170–171, 174, 178, 182–184 Meillassoux, Quentin, 46, 54–55, 57, 60–61
Melancholia (film), 61
Mackey, Nathaniel, 162, 165, 270n41 Meltzer, David, 67
Malabou, Catherine, 224 Mesch, Harald, 81
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 259n18 Middle Passage. See slave trade
Mancuso, Katherine, 138–139 Milton, John, 48
Marcus, Neil, 121, 131–132 modernism, 4, 9, 58–59, 90, 203. See also
Margalef, Ramón, 79, 81, 267n84 collage
Marlatt, Daphne, 8 Moore, Marianne, 8
Marx, Karl, 261n54 Morton, Timothy, 10, 223, 260n38
Marx, Leo, 7 Moten, Fred, 14, 114, 149, 154, 168, 170,
materialism, 13, 83, 89 181–183, 186
Maturana, Humberto, 79, 83 Muir, John, 7
Maud, Ralph, 73 Murray, Elwyn, 135
McClintock, Anne, 160, 161, 162
McClure, Michael, 12, 66–83; “The Nash, Roderick, 7
Chamber,” 74; “Dark Brown,” 69, nature writing, 6–7, 85, 122, 139, 148,
74; !The Feast!, 74, 77; “For the Death 173–174; black authors and, 103,
of 100 Whales,” 67; Ghost Tantras, 69, 176–180; ecological attentiveness and,
72, 75–78, 79, 265n67; “LISTEN, 283n14; Niedecker and, 194
LAWRENCE, THERE ARE CERTAIN Navajo Nation. See Dinétah
OF US,” 78; Meat Science, 69, 77; Olson neoliberalism, 121–122, 194, 199, 206,
and, 68, 69–74, 76, 77–78, 83; “Peyote 232, 289n9
Poem,” 68; “Phi Upsilon Kappa,” New American Poetry, 4, 66, 78
69, 74; “Poem,” 67; “Point Lobos: Niedecker, Lorine, 9, 14, 94, 192, 194–207,
Animism,” 67; “Rant Block,” 70–72; 283n13, 2831n17, 286n47; “Fog-thick
Rare Angel, 76, 79–80, 83; “Revolt,” 69; morning—,” 285n36; “Linnaeus in
Scratching the Beat Surface, 66, 67, 68, 78, Lapland,” 196–198; “My life is hung
80, 81; “Written after Finding a Dol- up,” 199–200; “Paean to Place,”
phin Skull on the Gulf of California,” 270n40; “Some float off on chocolate
81–83. See also animals bars,” 201–202; “Springtime’s wide,”
298 Index
204–205 Missile,” 42, 44–45, 47–50, 55–56, 57,
Nixon, Rob, 145, 205–206 58; “Two Romance Poems,” 53. See also
Nor, Nor ’Ain Muhamad, 132–133 objectivist realism
Nordhaus, Ted, 20 Ortiz, Simon, 8, 147
Nordmark, Susan, 136–138 Otolith Group, 109
Outka, Paul, 103
objectivism (and objectism), 4, 13, 86–87,
198 Palmer, Jacqueline, 23
objectivist realism, 46, 50–53, 57, 59–61 Parks, Cecily, 5
object-oriented ontology, 54, 55, 61 pastoral, 28, 30, 39, 122, 171, 178
Odutola, Toyin Ojih, 185, 186 pathetic fallacy, 236
Olimpias, 121, 125, 126–127, 130, 138, 140 patiency, 60, 261n55
Olson, Charles, 4, 12, 66, 68, 69–79, 197– Pawlicki, Jasmine, 134
198; “Against Wisdom as Such,” 87; Perloff, Marjorie, 216–217
autonomy and, 48–49, 53, 54, 58–59, peyote, 68
263n19; Duncan and, 84, 86–89, 90, phenomenology, 10
93, 96, 101; “Human Universe,” 68, Phillips, Xandria: “For a Burial Free of
77–78, 88–89, 90; “The Kingfishers,” Sharks,” 104–105, 114–117
69, 71; “Letter to Elaine Feinstein,” philosophy and poetry, 229
74; “The Librarian,” 74; McClure and, physicalism, 68–69, 75–76
68, 69–74, 76, 77–78, 83; The Maximus Place, Vanessa, 209
Poems, 68, 71, 73, 74–75; Muthologos, plastic, 139, 214, 218–219, 221–226
68; “Place; & Names,” 73; “Projective Plumwood, Val, 85
Verse,” 66, 69, 71, 74, 86, 88, 197; poethics, 229, 242–243
Proprioception, 66, 73, 74–75, 83; “Rose Pollock, Jackson, 72
of the World,” 73; “The Secret of the Ponge, Francis: “The Pebble,” 43, 45, 54
Black Chrysanthemum,” 68; “Under postcolonialism, 11, 118, 120
the Mushroom,” 73–74 postmodernism, 3–4
open form poetics. See composition by field Pound, Ezra, 269n26, 287n7
Oppen, George, 12, 42–61; “All This preservationist poetry, 4, 173, 177
Strangeness,” 259n18; “From Disas- projective verse, 4, 5, 71; Duncan and, 84,
ter,” 55–56, 57; “The Mind’s Own 86, 88; Olson’s essay on, 66, 69, 71,
Place,” 48; “Myth of the Blaze,” 52; 74, 86, 88, 89
“Of Being Numerous,” 51, 52–53, 54, proprioception, 74–75, 78, 83, 264n51;
57; “Route,” 50, 51, 58; “Time of the Olson’s essay on, 66, 73, 74–75, 83
Index 299
prosimetrum form, 229, 231 “Dreamquest Malware,” 31–33, 34;
Public Works Administration, 195, 283n17 “The Grief of Ecopoetics,” 33–34;
Purdy, Jedediah, 232, 289n9 Styrofoam, 220–221
representational writing, 7–8, 9
queerness, 5, 11; Duncan and, 13, 84, 86, resilience, 11, 190–194, 196, 198–199,
87, 101 200–201, 203–204, 206–207, 284n33;
Quetchenbach, Bernard, 8 defined, 282n3
Rexroth, Kenneth, 8
racism, 152, 160, 169–171; Foucault on, Rich, Adrienne, 8
279n23. See also ecopoetics: antiracist; Rigby, Kate, 2
environmental racism; slave trade Romanticism, 5, 10, 13, 87, 101, 173, 178,
Rankine, Claudia, 14, 169–186; “American 236–238; Duncan on, 269n26
Light,” 178–179; “August 29, 2005 Ronda, Margaret, 1, 11, 14–15
/ Hurricane Katrina,” 171–173, 176, Rosenberg, Jordana, 55
184–186; “The Birth,” 176–177, 179; Rotella, Guy, 8
Citizen, 169–174, 180, 183; Don’t Let Me Rukeyser, Muriel, 266n2; “Waterlily Fire,”
Be Lonely, 169–170, 174–176, 182, 183, 42–43, 45
184; “February 26, 2012 / In Memory of
Trayvon Martin,” 180, 182; home trope Salamander (performance project), 13,
in, 179–180; lyric mode in, 170–171, 121–127, 140; writings and photo-
174, 178, 182–184; Nothing in Nature Is graphs of, 127–138
Private, 169, 176–180; Plot, 184; wasting Sartre, Jean-Paul, 69
and exhaustion in, 169–172, 176, 179, Schrödinger, Erwin, 93, 95
181–183, 185–186 Scigaj, Leonard, 8, 10
Ransom, John Crowe, 86, 100–101, 271n55 Seetoo, Chia-Yi, 132
Rasula, Jed, 9, 219–220, 266n80 Shakespeare, William, 106
Ray, Sarah Jaquette, 14, 173 Shellenberger, Michael, 20
Rebel Roar: The Sound of Michael McClure Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 10, 173, 206
(film), 77 Shepard, Paul, 120
recycling, 15, 218–221, 226 Shockley, Evie, 171
Rediker, Marcus, 107–108, 109, 114 Siebers, Tobin, 124
Reed, Anthony, 184 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 8
Reich, Wilhelm, 69 Simpson, Audra, 146
Reilly, Evelyn, 11, 20, 23, 31–41, 207; Siskin, Sharon, 128
“Apocalypso: A Comedy,” 31, 35–40; Skinner, Jonathan, 8–9, 124, 207, 210; on
300 Index
Niedecker, 284n23, 285n34 Tolson, Melvin, 13, 103; “The Sea-Turtle
slave trade, 102, 103–110, 114–116, 179, 181 and the Shark,” 104, 111–114, 116
“slow death,” 176 toxicity, 6, 14, 20, 121, 130, 139, 145–156,
“slow violence,” 118, 205, 206 160, 166–168; “toxic discourse,” 13–14,
Smallwood, Stephanie, 106–107 148–149, 151, 153, 160, 163–164
Smit, Chris, 136
Smith, Andrea, 167–168 Varela, Francisco, 79, 83
Smith, Kimberly, 177 variability, 192, 196, 198, 203, 205, 207
Snyder, Gary, 4, 8, 9, 66, 67, 77, 78 Vicuña, Cecilia, 9
Spade, Dean, 166–167 visceral poetics, 66
Spahr, Juliana, 8–9 vitalism, 91, 92, 270n33
speculative realism, 11, 46, 54–55, 57, 60–61 Voros, Gyorgyi, 8
Spillers, Hortense, 102, 116, 181
Wakefield, Stephanie, 191–192
spiritmeat, 12–13, 69
Waldrep, G. C., 2–3
spirituals, 179
Warhol, Andy, 286n3
Stein, Gertrude, 237
Watson, James, 67
Steingraber, Sandra, 65–66
Watts, Alan, 266n76
Stevens, Wallace, 8, 26, 34
Whalen, Philip, 73
Stoermer, Eugene, 229
white supremacy, 108, 168
Street, Laura-Gray, 3, 6
Whitehead, Alfred North, 12, 69, 79, 83, 88
Stubbs, George, 100
Whitman, Walt, 9, 123, 162, 223, 235;
Sun Ra, 109
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,”
surface reading, 15 94; “This Compost,” 219
“surround, the,” 149, 154, 155, 168 Williams, Raymond, 258n10
sustainability, 6, 14; apocalypticism vs., Williams, William Carlos, 203, 269n26
19; literature and, 122, 140 Wilson, Will, 159
systems theory, 3, 9, 12, 72, 73, 79, 81, 84 Winnicott, D. W., 238–239
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 79, 259n32
Tallique, Genre (Joan Retallack), 233 Wordsworth, William, 8, 173
terracentrism, 105, 109, 271n3
Thomson, Melissa, 130 Zimet, Julian, 44, 48–49, 50, 52
Thoreau, Henry David, 7, 9, 189–192, 194, Zukofsky, Louis, 202
223
Index 301
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part 1. The Apocalyptic Imagination

Part 2. Embodiment and Animality

Part 3. Environmental Justice

Part 4. Beyond Sustainability

Ecopoetics Then and Now

Of no other dimension of contemporary environmentalism, furthermore, can it be

20 The Apocalyptic Imagination

Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics 21

22 The Apocalyptic Imagination

Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics 23

. . . at the very bottom of

24 The Apocalyptic Imagination

Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics 25

26 The Apocalyptic Imagination

. . . the faucet flared like a glare of

Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics 27

28 The Apocalyptic Imagination

one day a swan appeared out of nowhere on the drying river,

Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics 29

30 The Apocalyptic Imagination

Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics 31

Even the situation drive restarted

So today the sun is ambulatory! the planet ambulatory!

The surplus bark in spite of snow

The signal is so sticky with procedure dreck

Yet today we completed

after which it took hours to adjust

32 The Apocalyptic Imagination

105 translation blockages

Talk of “dislocation lubricant” and “fulfillment interstices” may suggest techno-

Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics 33

It was a shock that you would send

instead of the slogan-infestation compress

What exactly was your intent?43

The irritated entitlement communicated in the manner of a formal business letter

34 The Apocalyptic Imagination

Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics 35

36 The Apocalyptic Imagination

sd, which was not his

drive, he sd, for

Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics 37

38 The Apocalyptic Imagination

Presenting the poem’s contents as a dream vision experienced in a traveler’s fitful

Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics 39

singing loving my vermin

dancing my aptest app-dance

40 The Apocalyptic Imagination

Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics 41

An arm of flame reaches from water-green glass,

I walk in the river of crisis toward the real,

Writing through a series of dreams whose images depict a civilization seem-

George Oppen’s Geological Imagination 43

44 The Apocalyptic Imagination