by Lynn Keller
About a fifth of the pages in Styrofoam are occupied solely by single graphic images, three of them being scientific graphs or molecular drawings. In addition, four poems contain smaller images integral to Reilly’s collage text. Heterogeneous in content and tone, aesthetics, and relation to the verbal text, almost all if not all of them derive from the Internet. Because scientific graphs and molecular models are treated in the same fashion as both high and low art, Reilly’s visuals construct a complexly ironic cornucopia. As we’ll see, its evocation of plenitude (or excess) acknowledges the appeal not just of abundance but particularly of plasticity. At the same time, the visual elements of her collage reinforce how all three ultimately interconnected enterprises, which consume resources and produce so much stuff, currently threaten human survival and the planet’s environmental health. Reilly’s ironic cornucopia of images might even be understood as giving visual form to the slow violence of plastic’s accumulation, when slow violence, including “the cellular dramas of mutation,” often goes unrecognized because its lack of spectacle makes it hard to see.37
The (anti-)environmentalist meaning of cornucopia—the view that environmental “dangers are illusory or exaggerated,” that we have plenty of environmental resources, and that whatever environmental problems arise will be amenable to techno-fixes—is often the perspective disseminated by industry, including powerful plastic-producing corporations like DuPont or Dow Chemical.38 “A Key to the Families of Thermoplastics,” the poem in Styrofoam with the largest number of visual images, repeatedly invokes the term, implying a sharp and sometimes anguished critique of such a view. The concept of cornucopia is introduced via facing-page images that immediately precede the poem. The first depicts an ancient stone relief that Reilly captions descriptively, “King holding a cornucopia, symbol of abundance and ‘inexhaustible store.’ ” Opposite that is a black-and-white version of the Periodic Table of Thermoplastics. (On the Web, this table appears in a dozen colors; amusingly, Reilly has reproduced the “Reduced version—For people who don’t want to know about the properties!”) Juxtaposed, the images suggest that what we now have in great abundance is not grains or fruits, but thermoplastics. As a caption for the right-hand image, Reilly quotes Hegel (the opening of section C of his Jena Lectures, “Art, Religion, and Science”), “The absolutely free spirit, having taken its determinations back into itself, now generates another world.” With the godlike powers available through the “free” play of our wonderfully plastic brains, humans have invented enough types of new thermoplastic molecules to fill a table comparable to the periodic table of naturally occurring elements. The poem’s title, while it alludes to works by Roger Williams and Rosmarie Waldrop, derives more immediately from the line at the bottom of the Tangram Technology table headed “Key to Major Polymeric Families” schematizing this particular new world.39
The allusion to Roger Williams’s A Key into the Language of America (1643)—the first English dictionary to translate a Native American language—remains significant, however, since it positions Reilly as a translator who makes the language of science available to the larger population. Williams studied the language and culture of the Narragansett Indians when most of his compatriots were either vilifying or attempting to ignore them. Reilly, however playful much of the poem may be, invites her readers to learn about and acknowledge their connection to plastics, as Williams’s “key” invited his readers to learn about the Indians whose territory they occupied. Such education in scientific information is one role that poetry may valuably assume in the self-conscious Anthropocene.
Most of the poem’s text catalogs major types of thermoplastics and some of the products made from them, thereby suggesting how thoroughly this generated world has transformed the given one. Tongue in cheek, its opening provides an aggrandizing, mythologizing lineage for what are in fact recently developed materials, invented and named by modern science and produced by modern technology:
Polyethylene, Most Ancient of the Crystalline Polymers
gasoline tanks, water bottles, the plastic bag
Polypropylene, also called Mother of Abundance
carpet squares, garden furniture, automobile interiors
PVC, the Prince of Commodity Plastics
blister packaging, pipes and fittings, magnetic stripe cards
The Acrylics and their Most Adaptable Cousins
Ethyl, Methyl, Butyl, Stearl and Laurel (S 48)
Later, as if the glamour has worn off, the listing uses only abbreviations and more matter-of-fact description:
PE-LD and PE-LLD, flexible, durable, with a waxy feel
(ENWRAP)
irrigation tubing, pallet sheets
PE-HD, semi-rigid and very tough (ENCLOSE)
shopping bag handles, cereal box liners, chemical drums
PET, with exceptional clarity, but “notch sensitive”
carbonated drink bottles MATERIAL FLOOD
throw-away condiment tubs MATERIAL STORM
POM, translucent, with good processing qualities (S 51)
From a cornucopian perspective, the poem’s catalog would substantiate how human lives have been improved by advances in technology—and, undeniably, some of the plastic products that have come to dominate our material culture have saved human lives and, in substituting for natural materials, saved plants and animals as well. Certainly, many of the products listed have come to seem essential to modern life. Simply the variety and number of images in the book taken from the seemingly inexhaustible resources of the World Wide Web would for a cornucopian only be further grounds for celebration of what Reilly elsewhere dubs “our infinite plasticity prosperity plenitude” (S 43). But the cornucopian perspective reflects a delusion: the store of oil and natural gas from which most plastics are made and that largely powers the Internet is by no means “inexhaustible”—a key word in the definition of cornucopia Reilly presents. Moreover, although plastic may be, in a phrase from the poem, “capable of being deformed continuously without rupture,” living beings lack “infinite plasticity.” Our brief survival is contingent on suitable environmental conditions, which are jeopardized by the “MATERIAL FLOOD” or “MATERIAL STORM” of plastics and their energy-consuming manufacture.
The abundance of plastics displayed through the Tangram table and Reilly’s catalog is undoubtedly impressive, both in itself and as evidence of the power of human scientific invention; moreover, as the quotations like Hegel’s “INFINITE PLASTICITY IS THE ESSENCE OF THE SPIRIT” make clear, the traits of plastic—its “immortality,” its amazing malleability, adaptability, and variety—resonate with ancient, even fundamental, human aspirations. At the same time, this product of science and technology is monstrous and terrifying, as the poem’s turn at its close to horror films involving insatiable plastic forms such as “The Blob” and “The Thing” emphasizes. Images like those Reilly uses to demonstrate LIVING HINGES (a product listed under PP, polypropelene) also suggest something monstrous about the invention of plastic, as if its very creation were a Frankensteinian transgression of the boundary between the living and the dead. For though not alive, plastic, as Reilly has emphasized from the volume’s opening line (“Answer: Styrofoam deathlessness”) is also something that refuses to die. One of these pictures of living hinges looks like a plastic coffin (though actually a Tic Tac box, from the Wikipedia page for living hinges), and the other, a figure whose right bent elbow and wrist are more literally living hinges, looks like a bloodied zombie. Though perhaps amusing in their revelation of plastic as at once unliving and undead, these images call into question the ethics of our so unrestrainedly transforming the carbon atoms that are the metamorphic remains of the abundant plant life of the Carboniferous era into a material “STUCK BETWEEN THE DEAD / AND THE LIVING (PURGATORY CORNUCOPIA)” (S 57).
On the facing page, three visually echoing images depicting different versions of being “changed in form” add to the poem’s visual discourse on material recomposition, now bringing in forms from
nature and high art. The left-hand image in this triptych is a beautiful, almost bejeweled amoeba, an organism that readily changes its shape. The center image is Correggio’s depiction of Io being ravished by metamorphic Jupiter in the form of a thundercloud; her backward tilting body, upward gaze, and ecstatic expression recall Bernini’s statue of Saint Teresa that figured in several of the volume’s earlier poems. On the right is a cartoon female ninja, a figure of surreptitious transformation and deadly violence. Combined, the images suggest that metamorphosis is a tremendous power—one essential to many life forms, wielded by the classical gods, and cultivated by those seeking political or military dominance. Although potentially dangerous, metamorphosis here seems no more inherently bad or good than Dickinson’s polymeric forms are, while its potential aesthetic appeal is clear from two of the three images. But Reilly’s move from this trio to a quote from Dante about pursued desire leading to eternal grief, and then to description of “The Thing” as “an abhorrent force of plasticity [that] imitates / and destroys almost any form of life it encounters” (S 57) suggests that we humans have gotten ourselves in deep trouble by letting so much of this metamorphic material, plastic, loose upon the world. Importantly, the desire that led us to do so seems as based in aesthetic sensibility or social and economic ambition as in scientific curiosity. Just as her poetics insists on the interconnection of all living beings, of what is artificial with what is found in nature, and of the corporeal inside with the outside, it demonstrates the interconnectedness of the cultural forces, including both art and science, that have produced the currently airing drama: “MATERIAL CHANGE THE PILOT / UNCONTROLLED GROWTH THE SERIES” (S 58).
Styrofoam’s final poem, “The Whiteness of the Foam,” is a meditation on white bodies and materials that connects our blanketing the planet with (white) thermoplastics to global warming and the melting of the arctic habitat of polar bears. (Borrowing from the playbook of environmental organizations like the World Wildlife Fund, Reilly deploys anthropogenic threats to charismatic megafauna—polar bears’ “white ears above the flood. melt” or a humpback whale killed by a cruise ship—to give readers an emotional focus for the consequences of environmental degradation.) Reilly puns on carbon footprint to merge the current self-destructive situation of the human species warming its own planet with the image of Rudolf Stingel dissolving the Styrofoam panels he walks on: “to ride on the heat of y/our own melting . . . to melt on the foam of y/our own molding” (S 61). Evidently, the artist cannot hold him or herself apart. Drawing from Melville’s chapter on whiteness, Reilly paints a stark portrait of our deadly situation as Styrofoam waste takes the place of snow cover and vegetation (the italicized words are Melville’s):
here in [un]eternal [de]frosted desolateness
where the solvent properties
of our insolvent imprints
admit not (even) the cheerful greenness of complete decay (S 64)
Yet she won’t completely give up on the blue marble (“Yet still driving.for-thin.blue.carbon / beneath this white blanket debris.galaxypicture”) or on the human love for it that she juxtaposes against plasticization:
having been pieces ofcosmos once
polymerization of the reaction beloved
catalyst for the reaction cherished
product of the reaction tenderest
aftermath of the reaction dearest (S 64–65)
Moreover, the poem contains what I take to be an example of a better use of human creativity and scientific ingenuity than the invention of additional plastic polymers. That is the development of nanolight technology derived from cloning florescent proteins in marine organisms—a technology that medical science can use in place of toxic radioisotopes or radioactive agents. I don’t want to push too far in claiming that this new science is positively represented here; it is clearly part of a capitalist economy (Reilly includes a list of prices for differently sized vials), and it depends on humans presuming rights over other creatures and their genomes. (A distinctive resource of art is its ability to present a multifaceted vision, easily displaying multiple and even conflicting truths.) But these vials present a heartening alternative to the enwrapped vial (think Saran Wrap) held by the muse of plastic at the volume’s opening. The bioluminescent materials being developed from luciferin remain within the cycles of decay that govern the biosphere, and they can substitute for toxic manufactured materials that have potentially devastating effects on trans-corporeal planetary life.
In that final poem in Styrofoam, Reilly offers a three-line characterization of the book—“this apoplexy apocalypse incantation / this devastation deflection invocation / this reflex context perplex” (S 63)—which leads her back to plastics through the rhyming Perspex®, an acrylic more widely known as Plexiglass. The last two formulations in her trio seem to me most apt: the volume enacts a hope to deflect devastation by cultivating an ecologically embedded sense of plastic’s threats to environmental and human health and by highlighting our trans-corporeal interconnection. And it muses, sometimes with an ambivalence that bespeaks perplexity, on the contexts for our situation and the seemingly automatic behaviors that drive it. Even her visual images, which convey various forms of human creativity and aspiration expressed in Western culture over the centuries, function as material emblems of values and attitudes that provide contexts for our contemporary addiction to plastic. Dickinson’s pataphysical project in The Polymers, too, can be read as an attempt at rethinking and reenvisioning that aims to deflect disaster, while many of his cultural polymers point to contexts for producing the manufactured ones.
What about “this apoplexy apocalypse incantation”? Reilly’s visions of humans “holding hands for the briefest moment of shared materiality / among longtermheritage styrene” (S 12) and of “white ears above the flood.melt” (S 62) signaling “the possibility(optionshift) // mammalless” (S 35) invoke looming catastrophe, and perhaps her cataloging of plastics in her “Key” should be heard as a catastrophic incantation. For more extended, direct engagement with “apocalypse incantation,” I turn in the next chapter to Reilly’s subsequent volume, along with other recent poetry that responds to the self-conscious Anthropocene through the discourse of environmental apocalypse.
CHAPTER 3
“Under These Apo-calypso Rays”
Crisis, Pleasure, and Eco-Apocalyptic Poetry
Apocalyptic discourse is, in the eyes of some environmentalists and ecocritics, a key resource for inciting environmental concern and activism; others see it as counterproductively generating pastoral nostalgia, distrust of scientific data, or emotional exhaustion. But for better or worse, apocalyptic thinking is so much a part of the Judeo-Christian inheritance that apocalyptic rhetoric attracts even writers who are skeptical of its power or keenly aware of its limitations. That is the case with the two poets whose work I will examine here: Jorie Graham and Evelyn Reilly. In their respective volumes Sea Change (2008) and Apocalypso (2012), these poets are engaged in eco-apocalyptic writing, adapting it to the particular pressures posed by the increasing sense of crisis experienced in the self-conscious Anthropocene, even as they critique the mode or attempt self-consciously to avoid its pitfalls.
This chapter, then, will explore two different approaches to apocalyptic writing that together suggest how the pressures of the self-conscious Anthropocene are molding apocalyptic discourse employed in relation to environmental threats. Using not Beck’s concept of risk society that figured in chapter 2 but Frederick Buell’s related notion of dwelling in crisis, I will demonstrate that the prominent function of environmental apocalyptic writing to date—as a warning that conveys to readers the gravity of current circumstances so as to avoid disaster—is being destabilized as human impact on the planet increases and the sense of ongoing crisis intensifies.1 While holding onto the hope that apocalyptic writing might help avert planetary environmental catastrophe, these two poets seem unable to maintain a steady faith in that possibility. The result is a rhetoric that, while highlight
ing the complex temporality of apocalyptic vision, mixes avertive warning and despairing prediction. Both poets also counterbalance the grief and despair of apocalyptic awareness through deliberate cultivation of pleasures grounded in immediate physical experience and perception. Without some counterforce, such grief and despair can prove paralyzing, both artistically and politically; Reilly has observed in her essay, “The Grief of Ecopoetics,”
if you combine grief over our limited role as citizen-artists with environmental grief, the place from which you are writing can get almost paralyzingly grim. Jonathan Skinner has talked about the power of silence, meaning, I believe, that sometimes we shouldn’t look to poetry for the kinds of power that might better come from direct action. But if you also think, as I do (and I feel pretty certain that Jonathan does as well), that there is a kind of power that comes through art, then even in the grip of overwhelming grief, the key may be to find a way to still work out of the joy and aesthetic pleasure that are essential to that kind of power.2
Graham in the earnestly apocalyptic poems of Sea Change and 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 that serve as counterpoint to the potentially overwhelming darkness of apocalyptic thinking.