by Lynn Keller
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Pope Francis, “Laudato Si’: Encyclical Letter of the Holy Father Francis on Care for Our Common Home.”
2. Lewis and Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene.”
3. Boes and Marshall, “Writing the Anthropocene,” 66; N. Clark, Inhuman Nature, xiii.
4. Boes and Marshall, “Writing the Anthropocene,” 66. Gabriele Dürbek “proposes the term Anthropocene literature . . . to characterize literary texts that reflect on the human condition in the face of fundamental human transformations of the planetary surface on a global scale” (“Ambivalent Characters and Fragmented Poetics in Anthropocene Literature,” 112). Her term might have been useful for this book had her definition been less narrow. Reflecting on more than the human condition, the artists I consider explore the conditions of many parts of the biosphere, often attempting to shift the focus away from humankind. Dürbek takes into consideration only works of prose fiction, so that many traits of Anthropocene literature she observes involve plot, narrative, and protagonists, all of which have little relevance for ecopoetics.
5. There is not yet consensus about the meaning of “ecopoetry.” Some use it to identify all environmentally engaged poetry of any period, including nature poetry. In a chronologically restricted version of that position, Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street use “ecopoetry” as an umbrella term for poetry since 1960 that responds to environmental crisis; within that they locate subcategories of nature poetry, environmental poetry, and ecological poetry (The Ecopoetry Anthology, xxviii–xxix). Some reserve “ecopoetry” for recent work that diverges from traditional nature poetry in being formally and linguistically experimental (what Fisher-Wirth and Street call “ecological poetry”). Using the term in distinction from traditional nature poetry, I join those who apply it to poetry that approaches environmental writing with an interest in the intertwining of nature and culture.
6. See, for example, Asafu-Adjaye et al., “An Ecomodernist Manifesto.”
7. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” 23; the piece published in 2000 is Crutzen and Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene.’ ”
8. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” 23; Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill, “The Anthropocene,” 614, 618–20.
9. Autin and Holbrook, “Is the Anthropocene an Issue of Stratigraphy or Pop Culture?,” 61.
10. Zalasiewicz, Williams, et al., “The New World of the Anthropocene,” 2230–31.
11. Zalasiewicz, Cearreta, et al., “Response to Autin and Holbrook,” e21.
12. Lewis and Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene.”
13. Nixon, “The Anthropocene: Promise.”
14. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 49.
15. Elder, Imagining the Earth; Scigaj, Sustainable Poetry; Bate, The Song of the Earth. The traditions of nature writing on which anglophone writers draw go back to the classical Greeks and works like the Georgics, and there are important developments in English nature writing before Romanticism. However, the tradition of the Romantic nature lyric (with its assimilated earlier influences) is most formative for twentieth-and twenty-first-century poets.
16. Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture, 79–81.
17. Wordsworth, Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, 66.
18. Bate, The Song of the Earth, 245, 64, 247.
19. L. Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, ch. 1; Scigaj, Sustainable Poetry, 28, 27.
20. Silliman et al., “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry,” 263.
21. Skinner, “Editor’s Statement,” 7, 6; Corey and Waldrep, The Arcadia Project; Fisher-Wirth and Street, The Ecopoetry Anthology; Dungy, Black Nature; Rasula, This Compost; Iijima, Eco Language Reader.
22. Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 71, 81.
23. Crutzen and Schwägerl, “Living in the Anthropocene”; Purdy, “Losing Nature.”
24. Morton, Ecology without Nature, 1; Morton, The Ecological Thought, 7, 9; Heise, review of Hyperobjects.
25. L. Buell, “Ecocriticism,” 94.
26. Berry, The Selected Poems, 30.
27. Wordsworth, Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, 67, 403.
28. Kumin, “Intimations of Mortality.”
29. Oliver, House of Light, 18.
30. Slovic, Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing, 18.
31. Arguably, the category “environmentalist” now includes those, like the noted evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson, who are championing the idea of “half earth”—of avoiding a cataclysmic extinction event by setting aside half the earth for nonhuman species (Half-Earth). The “ecomodernists” or “ecopragmatists,” too, are committed to shrinking human impact on nature, and in fact to reinforcing the division between the human and the rest of nature, by “decoupling human development from environmental impacts” (Asafu-Adjaye et al., “An Ecomodernist Manifesto”). The “ecomodernists” are techno-optimists whose thinking in many ways diverges from mainstream environmentalism.
32. The quoted phrase comes from Oliver’s “Nature.” The poem describes a nighttime scene of an owl hunting and ends with tree branches tossing “the white moon upward / on its slow way / to another morning / in which nothing new // would ever happen, which is the true gift of nature, / which is the reason / we love it” (House of Light, 55).
33. Spahr, Well Then There Now, 69.
34. For more extended analysis of the poem, see Keller, “The Ecopoetics of Hyperobjects.”
35. Reilly, Styrofoam, 27. From now on, this work will be cited parenthetically in the text as S.
36. Reilly, “Eco-Noise and the Flux of Lux,” 257.
37. Ibid., 261.
38. Ibid.
39. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 28, 29, 31.
40. See Retallack, The Poethical Wager, where this concept recurs, esp. 25–26, and “Poethics of a Complex Realism,” 196–221.
41. Purdy, “Losing Nature.”
42. Grubisic, “Instructions for Building the Arc.”
43. Blackie, “An Interview with Jorie Graham.”
44. Bate, The Song of the Earth, 64.
45. Retallack, “What Is Experimental Poetry?”
46. L. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 285; Nordhaus and Shellenberger, “Apocalypse Fatigue”; F. Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life.
47. Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass; Plumwood, Environmental Culture; Gander and Kinsella, Redstart, 11.
48. Schellnhuber et al., “Earth System Analysis for Sustainability,” 12.
1. “IN DEEP TIME INTO DEEPSONG”
1. Worster, “Second Earth.” This talk was an early version of material that Worster develops in his 2016 book, Shrinking the Earth.
2. Some cultures have recognized human insignificance in ways that Judeo-Christian cultures have not, since Christian teaching situates humans as the pinnacle of creation and gives humans dominion over the rest of creation. Recognition of human insignificance requires more of a conceptual change for some populations than for others.
3. Gee, In Search of Deep Time, 31, 26.
4. Woods, “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene.”
5. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 201, 204–7, 213.
6. Ibid., 216, 220.
7. Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital,” 3.
8. The three rifts Chakrabarty discusses are (1) “the various regimes of probability that govern our everyday lives in modern economies and which now have to be supplanted by our knowledge of the radical uncertainty of the climate”; (2) “the story of our necessarily divided human lives having to be supplemented by the story of our collective life as a species, a dominant species, on the planet”; and (3) “our inevitably anthropocentric thinking in order to supplement it with forms of disposition towards the planet that do not put humans first” (ibid.).
9. Ibid., 9.
10. Chakrabarty, “Brute Force.”
11. Woods, “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene,” 133, 136.
12. T. Clark
, “Scale,” 148–50.
13. Woods, “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene,” 134.
14. T. Clark, “Scale,” 152.
15. Woods, “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene,” 139.
16. There is controversy about the scientific status and the appropriateness of “tipping point” warnings in connection with climate change. The term signals a critical threshold, a point where rapid and irreversible shifts in large systems are triggered. James Hansen used it in a presentation to the Geophysical Union in 2005, and the term now appears with some frequency in scientific literature concerning climate change. However, its initial popularity in the discourse around climate change came in popular media and public debate; scientists may be using it as a “generative metaphor.” For an analysis of the term’s use, see Russill and Nyssa, “The Tipping Point Trend in Climate Change Communication.”
17. Spahr, Well Then There Now, 6–7. From now on, this work will be cited parenthetically in the text as WTTN.
18. Butler, Gender Trouble, 32.
19. Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.
20. T. Clark, “Scale,” 150.
21. For another reading of this poem, focusing on the refrain, see Chisholm, “On the House That Ecopoetics Builds.”
22. Margaret Ronda, in “Mourning and Melancholia in the Anthropocene,” argues that another poem from Well Then There Now, “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache,” mimics conventional elegy but repeatedly points to the incompleteness of mourning. Some of the same arguments could be applied to “Unnamed Dragonfly Species.”
23. Franzen, “Carbon Capture”; italics in original.
24. Gander and Kinsella, Redstart, 5. From now on, this work will be cited parenthetically in the text as RS.
25. Roberson, To See the Earth Before the End of the World. From now on this volume will be cited parenthetically in the text as TSEB.
26. Keller and Wagstaff, “An Interview with Ed Roberson,” 412.
27. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 56.
28. Heringman, “Deep Time at the Dawn of the Anthropocene,” 57.
29. As the poet Giovanni Singleton pointed out to me, his title alludes to the lyrics of jazz musician, Sun Ra, “It’s after the end of the world. Don’t you know that yet?” In the context of Sun Ra’s worldview, the lines suggest the foolishness of anxiety focused on anticipated disaster. Roberson dedicates a later poem in the collection, “Sight Read on a Couple Stars,” to Sun Ra.
30. For an interesting discussion of the translation of that passage from Marx and Engels, see Menely, “Anthropocene Air,” 97.
31. Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, 1608.
2. TOXICITY, NETS, AND POLYMERIC CHAINS
1. Reilly, “Eco-Noise and the Flux of Lux,” 258.
2. Beck and Chalmers, “Risk Society and the Provident State,” 27.
3. Beck, “Living in the World Risk Society,” 338; Beck and Chalmers, “Risk Society and the Provident State,” 28.
4. Beck and Chalmers, “Risk Society and the Provident State,” 29; Beck, Risk Society, 163, 162; italics in original.
5. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2, 18.
6. Ibid., 16.
7. Reilly, “Eco-Noise and the Flux of Lux,” 261.
8. Reilly, Styrofoam, 9. From now on, this work will be cited parenthetically in the text as S.
9. Freinkel, Plastic, 10; Gourmelon, “Global Plastic Production Rises, Recycling Lags”; Parker, “Ocean Trash.” According to an article published in 2012 by the Earth Institute of Columbia University, “today Americans discard about 33.6 million tons of plastic each year, but only 6.5 percent of it is recycled and 7.7 percent is combusted in waste-to-energy facilities, which create electricity or heat from garbage” (Cho, “What Happens to All That Plastic?”).
10. Micro- or nano-plastics are a growing concern for scientists. Because they do not figure prominently in the two books under discussion, I will not address the dangers they pose. However, I recommend the overview provided by Tamara S. Galloway in “Micro- and Nano-Plastics and Human Health.”
11. Langston, Toxic Bodies, 6. According to Langston, whose study focuses not on plastics but on the hormonally active chemical DES, researchers in the 1950s found that “small doses of DES could be more effective at inducing cancer than larger doses, just as lower doses of DES were more effective at inducing weight gain in the cattle,” its intended purpose (78). There was also research “showing that chronic, low-dose exposure to estrogens had induced cancer in mice even though intermittent high doses had not. Putting DES in the food supply . . . had resulted in precisely this continuing, chronic, low-dose exposure in humans that had caused cancer in mice” (79). Because most endocrine-disrupting chemicals are fat soluble and get stored in body fat, they do not flush out readily and instead bio-accumulate up the food chain. Very low levels of a chemical in the air, water, or soil may lead to high levels in carnivores and omnivores.
12. Partly for this reason, I have chosen not to invoke the structures of toxic discourse that Lawrence Buell has outlined. However, aspects of his description are certainly pertinent, particularly his observation that “the nature that toxic discourse recognizes as the physical environment humans inhabit is not a holistic spiritual or biotic economy but a network or networks within which, on the one hand, humans are biotically imbricated (like it or not), and within which, on the other hand, first nature has been greatly modified (like it or not) by techne” (Writing for an Endangered World, 45.)
13. Dickinson, “Pataphysics and Postmodern Ecocriticism,” 134; Duncan-Cole and Bosley, “The Great Canadian Writer’s Craft Interview.”
14. Dickinson, “The Weather of Weeds,” para 2, para 9.
15. Dickinson, “Pataphysics and Postmodern Ecocriticism,” 147.
16. Ibid., 133, 135.
17. Queyras, “In Conversation.”
18. Dickinson, The Polymers, 25. Subsequent quotations from this work will be cited parenthetically in the text as TP.
19. Poems in this vein bring to mind Harryette Mullen’s punning verbal substitutions in her work of the 1990s. Dickinson has written about her S*PeRM**K*T as an example of “ambient” pataphysical poetics that explores contemporary consumption of petrochemical products while challenging conventional assumptions about distinctions between inside and outside (“Pataphysics and Postmodern Ecocriticism”).
20. Both poets under discussion are drawn to languages of the World Wide Web that are transmitted through plastic (or plastic-coated glass) fibers. Reilly imitates domain name punctuation (pointing to nonlinear organization of information) as she lifts text and images from the Internet, while Dickinson practices a proceduralist mining of what Joshua Clover has identified as the “junkspeech” of the Internet. See Clover, “Generals and Globetrotters.”
21. See “List of Coalition Military Operations of the Iraq War”; “Stupid Facts—License Plate Slogans.”
22. “Habitat (disambiguation).” Accessing this Wikipedia page in 2015, I find Habitat 67 and Habitat for Humanity still among the entries, but not the others Dickinson lists. The two companies for blinds and insulating foam still exist, however, and both are Canadian.
23. Duncan-Cole and Bosley, “The Great Canadian Writer’s Craft Interview.”
24. My essay “The Ecopoetics of Hyperobjects” considers in more depth the relation between Reilly’s work and two concepts of Morton’s: the ecological mesh and hyperobjects. While that essay duplicates some of the material here, it analyzes more fully the workings of her collage as well as Reilly’s citational practices.
25. Reed, Nobody’s Business, 87.
26. Reilly, “Eco-Noise and the Flux of Lux,” 257.
27. FPPG is now PFPG, the Plastics Foodservice Packaging Group, which, according to their website “creates programs to educate the public about the importance and benefits of plastic foodservice packaging. PFPG members include major resin suppliers as well as manufacturers, also known as converters, of plastic f
oodservice products” (“The Plastics Foodservice Packaging Group (PFPG)”). A few years ago, I could find online what Reilly quotes in italics here, but I can no longer locate those entries on thriftyfun.com. The PFPG website now makes lots of claims for the environmental benefits of their products.
28. Reilly’s capitalization of SEA turns this literary usage into the acronym for Strategic Environmental Assessment, a directive by which the European Union has attempted to ensure decisions that are more environmentally responsible.
29. Yang et al., “Most Plastic Products Release Estrogenic Chemicals,” 989.
30. James Watt patented his steam engine in 1781; Coleridge’s poem was first published in 1798 and Melville’s novel in 1851.
31. Coleridge, The Complete Poems, 170.
32. Melville, Moby-Dick, 256.
33. On March 15, 2012, when I accessed this Wikipedia entry, the list of examples and their illuminance did not include an LCD screen, though it did mix office lights and family living room lights with various situations of natural light (“Lux”). Reilly’s line “that which fallsoutside.thespectrum” may come from the statement on that entry, “The luminosity function falls to zero for wavelengths outside the visible spectrum.”
34. Melville, Moby-Dick, 264.
35. Reilly, interview. Sarah Dimick and I conducted this filmed interview for the benefit of our introductory literature students on September 11, 2014, in Madison, Wisconsin.
36. M. Brown, Goodnight Moon.
37. Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 6.