by Lynn Keller
Very occasionally, a few words denoting nature in the (presumed) present and without unpleasant associations do appear in Penury, as in the lines “tree frog toads” (P 58) or “a ripple | birched / alyssum”—the latter example perhaps providing relief from a woman’s “weeping work” (P 22). The solace associated with traditional ideas of a pure, relatively undisturbed nonhuman nature has not, then, been eradicated despite the “scorched earth tactics” (P 58) and famine that fill these pages; hints of pastoral landscapes appear as precious alternatives to the living conditions of the disenfranchised. In this book, we should note, degraded or corrupted living conditions are not evidently urban, as they have been in conventional pastoral writing. The environmental refugees and forced laborers whose suffering is sketched here inhabit camps or desertified landscapes or “makeshift shelters.” So the urban versus rural or urban versus natural dichotomy that Roberson challenged is not reestablished here. Rather, its terms are shifted and expanded to acknowledge environmental degradation caused by phenomena like war or the extraction industries that support industrial development and the consumerism of the developed nations.
The thread in Kim’s volume that reaches back toward pastoral scenes associated with less damaged ecosystems reaches also toward traditions and ceremonies that suggest more intact cultures than those subject to military occupation, environmental disruption, and diaspora. The single scene in which “sumptuous blossoms and fresh herbs” are joyfully evoked begins, “Near one, do you recall,” as if the speaker is trying to prompt in a relative a shared memory of the distant past. The scene exists as a treasured remembrance of a traditional ceremony “celebrated by a family for the welfare of all belonging to it”; there’s no suggestion that such rituals are still practiced by the speaker or the person addressed. On the volume’s final page, where Kim, I think, suggests the possibility of something positive emerging when people start from scratch, turning the space of destitution and emptiness into a space for future abidance, she employs the kind of imagery that one might find in a nature poem written before the self-conscious Anthropocene:
Radiant falcon
Scattering acacias
The recitation of acacias
A grove of riverbeds
Residence of years’ repose
The imagery also has links to traditional Korean culture, where acacia and other thorny branches have been used to chase away bad spirits from homes. The genus of acacias, however, is heterogeneous, suited to varied habitats and climates. This passage may invoke cultural as well as ecological recuperation, but more generally it gives embodiment to the hope of again experiencing political freedom (figured in the falcon’s flight) accompanied by belonging in and to a land healthy enough to sustain human and non-human life.
The politics and priorities of those concerned with social justice issues and those concerned with environmentalism do not always align. Yet the three poets discussed here understand social justice as environmental justice, and see justice as inseparable from traditional environmentalist concerns. In addition to understanding the spaces where people live and work as part of “the environment,” they integrate into their environmental justice writing attention to the well-being of the habitats and nonhuman creatures long recognized as part of nature. Both the discourses of nature and those of environmental justice benefit: environmental justice writing broadens its appeal by locating in the pastoral, modified in varying degrees, a center of value. Current discourses of nature gain ethical force from their incorporation into the writing of environmental justice.
Coda
Writing the Self-Conscious Anthropocene
The chapters of this book have been organized around specific issues so that particular volumes of poetry have been examined in terms of single environmental concerns. This structure has enabled me to intervene, chapter by chapter, in distinct critical conversations and also to highlight the poetry’s contributions to particular environmental discourses of the self-conscious Anthropocene. The first chapter, on scale—a key issue for scientists considering, for instance, the scalability of particular ways of producing or distributing food or energy—foregrounds psychological and perceptual dimensions of scalar thinking, explored in works by Spahr, Gander, and Roberson, that must also be taken into account if society is to meaningfully address the environmental issues of the Anthropocene. The poetic treatments of plastics examined in the second chapter demonstrate art’s crucial ability to explore complex issues in ways that respect conflicting claims and ambivalence. Reilly in Styrofoam and Dickinson in The Polymers celebrate plasticity and playfully display the marvels of plastics’ multifunctionality while stressing the costs, downplayed by industry and insufficiently addressed by policymakers, of these accumulating toxic materials to human and environmental health. The third chapter’s examination of current apocalyptic discourse in Graham’s Sea Change and Reilly’s Apocalypso reveals how resourcefully poets are revising an ancient rhetoric some have thought exhausted so as to both call attention to the entanglement of human fate with that of other species and provide pleasures that make bearable confrontation with potentially devastating risks. The poets discussed in chapter 4, a.rawlings, Gladding, and Skinner, daringly experiment with the visual and aural resources of poetry in order to learn about and from nonhuman animals; in ways that honor interspecies differences, they model versions of the human/animal indistinction some animal studies theorists have championed. In the fifth chapter, on how the self-conscious Anthropocene has affected ecopoetic representations of place and place-attachment, Spahr, Gander, and Osman demonstrate poetry’s ability to represent place as translocal in ways appropriate to this era of globalized movement of trade, pollutants, and information, as well as people and other bioforms. In the final chapter, analysis of Roberson’s City Eclogue, Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary, and Kim’s Penury reveals possibilities for bringing together discourses often at odds—the nature-based discourses of environmentalism and the socially based discourses of environmental justice—partly by refurbishing the ancient literary resources of the pastoral.
This issue-based approach has been fruitful. Yet such an organization obscures a key aspect of the self-conscious Anthropocene: the multiple environmental issues that come together in its awareness. The widespread concern about human impact on planetary systems that defines the self-conscious Anthropocene has been produced by myriad environmental transformations that together justify the dramatic claim that, rather than inhabiting the Holocene, we now live in the Anthropocene. While each of the issues I have foregrounded is crucial to our time, their intertwining is also essential to how poets and readers experience the Anthropocene. The multiplicity of anthropogenic transformations now taking place and their frequent interaction prove crucial to the difficulty they pose for both personal response and public policy.
In this book, work from one volume has occasionally been featured in more than one chapter—as with Well Then There Now, treated in chapters 1 and 5—or different volumes by one poet have figured in separate chapters—as has been the case with Roberson, Gander, and Reilly. In those ways I have gestured toward the range of concerns on the writers’ minds. Yet the works under discussion were selected in part because of their relevance to a particular focus, when in fact a good deal of contemporary ecopoetry draws attention to multiple, sometimes intertwined environmental issues. Additionally, environmental concerns so saturate consciousness in the self-conscious Anthropocene that writing on a surprising array of subjects assumes an ecopoetic cast. To more fully acknowledge the intertwining of multiple environmental concerns that increasingly characterizes environmentally conscious poetry—or that informs work one might not regard as obviously ecopoetic—I will by way of brief conclusion examine a poem by Brenda Coultas that demonstrates the mix of environmental anxieties or problems, and their convergence with social and political issues, typically acknowledged in current North American poetry. This poem’s weaving together of digital technology and social media with
fossil fuel consumption and global warming, the diminution of potable water, the environmental impacts of fracking, and the relation of corporate power to land rights, water rights, and genetic manipulation conveys the complexity of our environmental circumstances.
Like several works examined in previous chapters, “A Gaze,” from Coultas’s fourth poetry collection The Tatters (2014), is a generic hybrid that uses prose and relies heavily on parataxis to generate meaning. Its epigraph from the Halliburton website might be a clue to the poem’s anti-fracking stance: “Shale is incredibly complex. When it comes to finding the shale sweet spot and unlocking it in a cost-efficient manner, no one has more experience than Halliburton.” However, fracking is only one of many concerns raised in “A Gaze.” More generally, the epigraph identifies a context for that array of concerns in a set of attitudes toward the natural world and a set of values operating in corporate capitalism: the complexity of the earth’s sedimentary geology is acknowledged but taken as a challenge for human ingenuity; humans (rightly, from the website’s perspective) use the technologies they have developed to triumph over that complexity while insuring the financial profit served by cost efficiency.
Further into the poem one comes to understand the anger and politicized energy behind it, but that is not immediately evident from its matter of fact, observational mode, in which environmental and social preoccupations intertwine. The opening lines seem to contemplate human striving for interpersonal connection as much as they observe people’s obliviousness to the connections between their technology-dependent lifestyles and global warming:
A man texts a photograph of his meal, but to who? Himself or others?
Others too, texting in a crowd on 1st Avenue as glaciers recede.
They do not feel the fading cold of the ice. Only the heat of the key strokes.
A man texts crystal water glass pixels to quench real thirst.1
Observing our failure to connect physically or emotionally to the environmental consequences of the way we live, the poet may suggest contemporary social media prevent us from making those connections. Overreliance on technology remains a preoccupation as the speaker recounts being on the top of a mountain “where only small mammals live” and recognizing that she does not belong where the air is so thin, “though I can drive there.” She describes using her phone’s camera “as an extension of [her] eyes” in the gift shop on the glacier and then admits she sometimes forgets she’s “not an extension of the machine” until burning her palms on a pot hot from the stove reminds her that she needs to protect her flesh. Implicitly, less attachment to our machines would enhance our perception of how dangerously we are heating the world.
Simultaneously, a cluster of thematic threads involving water is developing as well. Introduced by the man texting an image of his water glass, water recurs as the speaker “texted forward a rumor of siphoned great lakes water to China. A / Chinese bureaucrat texts images of fresh lake water to billions at home.” Soon a preoccupation with water—with the preciousness of clean water, with our wasting of it, with who has rights to it, and with the extraction industries polluting it—comes to dominate the poem. Strikingly, even as Coultas returns repeatedly to receding glaciers, she doesn’t, despite her attention to water, mention consequent rising sea levels, which would keep the focus on global warming. This bears upon my argument about the conglomeration of concerns that burden the self-conscious Anthropocene. Instead of focusing readers’ minds exclusively on the consequences of anthropogenic melting of the world’s glaciers, Coultas is raising questions about the purity and availability of drinking water or the diversion of water for hydro-fracking, and she is contemplating ancient sea beds that are now dry land, the corpses emerging from melting glaciers, or the deceptive labels of water bottles that suggest the contents come from pure mountain steams when “you know the source is a corporate tap of public water” (TT 17). Coultas even gestures toward issues associated with industrial agriculture: “Fertilizer runs off into our family well. . . . Even though people spoke of the well running dry, ours magically replenished itself under the blanket of Monsanto crops” (TT 17). The reader of this poem, while considering several versions of the line, “The last glass of water sits before you, how fast or slow will you drink it?”—a puzzle both literally and in its metaphorical resonances—is asked to keep in mind issues ranging from digitally generated alienation to private satellites in public space to monopolist genetic engineering.
The poem’s second part looks at water through the lens of fantasy, prompted apparently by the phrase “water table,” here imagined as a table on which one would eat, the underground location of “a banquette of the last supper.” This event “we” attend is initially an elegant one—“the clear plates as detailed as a sea monkey’s anatomy or the vulvas of Judy Chicago’s dinner party. // A centerpiece of lilies welcomes us. A waiter comes with his crystal water pitcher” (TT 18)—but apparently we are not invited guests, and, with a dreamlike shift, the scene loses its “diamond-worthy” elegance and becomes threatening:
We sit down before the guards can catch us.
Wastewater, its chemicals pass through the tablecloth, and infect it with radiation. Inside pantry doors, mining deep into the cabinet, the heavy minerals are stored in the far reaches of the cupboard and on the top shelf out of reach
Who holds the crystal-clear machine guns?
Who fires the shocks of the invisible fence?
We gaze at the fence of ownership
Once set for us
Then set against us (TT 19)
The next line finds the speaker taking shelter in the watershed, imagining it “untouchable, such / a treasure, Catskill pure.” But her description invokes a part of New York City’s water history that makes clear such places are far from untouchable. She shelters “in a house that once sat in a place now underwater, a house meant to be drowned under the Ashokan.” Between 1907 and 1914 the Ashokan Reservoir was constructed to provide New York City with clean water. In the process two thousand people were relocated, as four towns and thousands of acres of farmland were submerged and eight additional towns relocated. “Theft of water from Bishop Falls / Greatest heist of all / Starts the flow downstream,” Coultas observes, referring to one of the lost towns and a famous landmark, now under 180 feet of water at the deepest part of the reservoir.
The next set of lines begins “Marcellus Shale” and speaks of “Shalenlaires, farmers made wealthy overnight” by selling their lands to companies extracting natural gas. (The Marcellus Shale formation runs beneath New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia and, as of 2015, yielded over 36 percent of the shale gas produced in the United States.) Coultas doesn’t say anything about water, but its relevance is obvious: according to the U.S. Geological Survey, fracking a well in the Marcellus Shale requires on average 4.5 million gallons of water. Fracking is known to contaminate wells, and chemical spills of fracking fluid can leak into the water table. Coultas’s juxtaposition of the Ashokan dam project’s “theft of water” with the extraction of natural gas from Marcellus Shale is no more subtle than the poem’s closing lines: “They use private forces against us / Weapons to keep us away from our water.” The lines’ crude us-versus-them dichotomy doesn’t do justice to the kinds of widespread if not always conscious complicity in environmental degradation suggested in the work’s opening depiction of people texting while glaciers melt or in the speaker’s early admission, “Sometimes, the tap runs while I brush my teeth and empty bathwater down the drain.” Yet Coultas is not without justification: “experienced” corporations like Halliburton have been subject to far weaker controls and far less accountability than environmentally minded citizens believe prudent for the protection of America’s potable water (as well as protection from the health problems associated with frack-sand mining, or even from earthquakes thought to be prompted by widespread subterranean injection of fracking solutions). People have reason to regard such powerful corporations and the political lobbies
that support them as a terrible other, a “they,” opposing citizens’ rights and environmental health. The last glass of water that Coultas invites us to imagine sitting before us may be the last because anthropogenic global warming has eliminated the glacial sources of clean water, but it could equally well be the last because human activities have lowered water tables and poisoned aquifers. In the self-conscious Anthropocene, one necessarily thinks in terms of multiple, often interacting developments shaping the environment.
With her closing phrase, “our water,” Coultas seems to mean the people’s water, as opposed to the corporations’ or the government’s. But the phrase returns us to the key challenges of the Anthropocene and the power of humans it acknowledges. This is, after all, the planet’s water, on which the entire biosphere depends. The environmental future rests in large part on the “we” we think and act with: Will it include nonhuman species? Will it include the people of the global South, or the impoverished populations of the global North? And will “we” adequately recognize the limits of human understanding and human powers (humans may “start the flow downhill,” but it is gravity that carries the water down) along with the likelihood of unanticipated consequences to our actions? The work of ecopoetics in the self-conscious Anthropocene includes fostering such inclusive perspectives while making vivid the multifaceted damage humans are doing to what we like to think of, whether in hubris or humble stewardship, as our Earth.