by Lynn Keller
38. Garrard, Ecocriticism, 16.
39. Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America; Waldrop, A Key into the Language of America.
3. “UNDER THESE APO-CALYPSO RAYS”
1. F. Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life. For Buell on Beck’s Risk Society, see 192, 204.
2. Reilly, “The Grief of Ecopoetics,” 323.
3. Beck, Risk Society, 22; italics in original.
4. L. Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 35.
5. L. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 295.
6. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 130. In Hyperobjects, Morton significantly expands the term so that it might designate the biosphere or the solar system or global warming. I find more useful his narrower definition in The Ecological Thought where it seems limited to specific materials like Styrofoam.
7. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 140.
8. Ibid., 141.
9. Ibid., 142.
10. Nordhaus and Shellenberger, “Apocalypse Fatigue”; Simms, “Apocalypse?”; Knefel, “Apocalypse Soon”; Mukerjee, “Apocalypse Soon”; Altucher and Sease, The Wall Street Journal Guide to Investing in the Apocalypse.
11. L. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 285. The quote is from Al Gore.
12. Ibid., 285, 308; Veldman, “Narrating the Environmental Apocalypse”; Garforth, “Green Utopias,” 398.
13. Berger, After the End, 5; Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 122; L. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 44, 40; Garrard, Ecocriticism, 104–7.
14. Garrard, Ecocriticism, 93.
15. Stewart and Harding, “Bad Endings,” 290.
16. Killingsworth and Palmer, “Millennial Ecology,” 41, 22; L. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 284; Kunkel, “Dystopia and the End of Politics.”
17. Garrard, Ecocriticism, 87–88.
18. Ibid., 87.
19. Ibid., 88.
20. Veldman, “Narrating the Environmental Apocalypse,” 4; Garrard, Ecocriticism, 99; Graham, Sea Change, 32–34.
21. Garrard, Ecocriticism, 107; italics in original.
22. F. Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life, 177. It is more widely acknowledged now than it was in 2004 that “across diverse geopolitical and biopolitical locations, the present moment increasingly imposes itself on consciousness as a moment in extended crisis” (Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 7). Lauren Berlant, for instance, tracks the affective consequences of “crisis ordinariness.”
23. F. Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life, 202–3, 206.
24. Berger, After the End, 6.
25. Graham, Sea Change, 3. From now on, Sea Change will be cited parenthetically in the text as SC.
26. Further biblical echoes sound in “I am inclining my heart toward the end,” which recalls Proverbs 2:2, “Incline your heart to understanding.” Quotations from the Bible come from the New American Standard Bible. I have also used the version comparison available through BibleGateway.com, “New American Standard Bible (NASB)—Version Information.”
27. Wengen, “Imagining the Unimaginable.”
28. F. Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life, 205.
29. Wengen, “Imagining the Unimaginable.”
30. Ibid.
31. Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 68.
32. Heise attributes the influence of apocalyptic narrative in the environmental movement to its having “often implicitly or explicitly relied on pastoral as the template for alternative scenarios.” Wanting to foster forward-looking planetary perspectives and large-scale changes through environmentally oriented cosmopolitanism, Heise finds it problematic that “such pastoral residues manifest themselves variously in longings for a return to premodern ways of life, ‘detoxified’ bodies, and holistic, small scale communities” (122).
33. L. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 300–301.
34. Daniel 7:10 provides another apocalyptic antecedent to this image: “A river of fire was flowing and coming out before him.”
35. L. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 41–42; italics in original.
36. Marx, “Pastoralism in America,” 56–57.
37. Reilly’s perspective aligns with Donna Haraway’s in The Companion Species Manifesto and may have been influenced by Haraway’s meditations on technobiopolitics. The realm of “significant otherness” that Haraway wants to cultivate may productively include the cyborg and the biological animal; she presents the cyborg as a companion species (21). Neither Haraway nor Reilly takes an anti-technological stance, but ultimately they find the realm of animal interactions more promising for the environmentally beneficial, ethical enactment that Haraway calls “significant otherness-in-connection” (51).
38. Byron, Lord Byron, 19–206; Johnson, Harold and the Purple Crayon.
39. Reilly, Apocalypso, 29. From now on this work will be cited parenthetically in the text as A.
40. Reilly, “Eco-Noise and the Flux of Lux,” 260–61.
41. Reilly, “Environmental Dreamscapes.”
42. Reilly, “The Grief of Ecopoetics,” 320–21.
43. Ibid., 321.
44. Ibid., 322–23.
45. Blanciak, Siteless.
46. L. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 300.
47. She has additional criticisms: she points to the brutal power dynamics established among humans in Revelation, “allowing those with the seal / upon their foreheads / to torture the rest / for a numerologically important / number of months and years” (A 101). Those lines call attention to an aspect of biblical apocalypticism infrequently addressed in environmental apocalyptic discourse: its creation of an insider/outsider dynamic in which the apocalypse will mean heaping the blessings of God on the saved, but heaping destruction and dire punishment on all others. Elsewhere she critiques Revelation from a feminist standpoint: she wants to “unblot” the name of the whore of Babylon “in the book of life,” clothing her in innocent white and designating her “a victim of privilege screen / comfort mechanisms” (A 89)—a reference to patriarchy’s turning of women into (pornographic?) objects whose function, whether as angel or whore, is to serve male desires.
48. L. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 303–4.
49. Reilly, “The Grief of Ecopoetics,” 322.
50. Ibid.
51. Creeley, The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975, 132.
52. David Zimmerman, who astutely critiqued a draft of this chapter, cautions that, historically, the focus of Christian apocalyptic doctrine on a blessed future for the saved has not interfered with the use of apocalyptic rhetoric in sermons and jeremiads to urge immediate action and reform. See Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad; University of Virginia Library Online Exhibits, “Red, White, Blue and Brimstone.” In my understanding, Reilly’s wariness of a focus on transcendence reflects her concern particularly with the association between her chosen genre, poetry, and transcendence—a linkage especially strong in Romanticism and its legacies. Despite her mockery of the tangled language of apocalyptic prophesy, I don’t think she would suggest that all Christian futurism is irresponsible.
53. Reilly, “The Grief of Ecopoetics,” 323.
4. UNDERSTANDING NONHUMANS
1. One could label such work “zoopoetics.” I have not done so, however, because the emphases of Aaron Moe’s book Zoopoetics don’t entirely fit the work I discuss or the approach I take. Like Moe’s zoopoetics, the works I discuss here assume animal agency and are interested in animals’ ability to make signs. His emphasis is on how animal bodily poesis or making catalyzes poetic intelligence, on how “human poets continue to imitate animals throughout the process of making their poems” (7); his work explores “the places where the gestures of poetic form depend on, mine, or play with the gestures of animals” (24). More explicitly ecocritical, my own emphasis is on how environmentally conscious poets use the making of poems to generate fuller understanding of animals and to encourage altered animal/human relations.
2. Retallack, “Wh
at Is Experimental Poetry?”
3. Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” 394; italics in original.
4. Ibid.
5. For an engaging overview, see Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction.
6. Haraway, When Species Meet, 19–21.
7. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 50.
8. Haraway, When Species Meet, 22.
9. Skinner, “Slow Listening.”
10. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 51.
11. Calarco, “Identity, Difference, Indistinction,” 42, 48, 51, 54, 56.
12. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 80, 96.
13. Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” 439, 442.
14. Soper, “Humans, Animals, Machines,” 105, 101.
15. Higgins, “Words on Stone, Eggshells, Feathers, Etc.”
16. Little, “Jody Gladding, Translations from Bark Beetle.”
17. Gladding, Translations from Bark Beetle, 7. This work will be cited parenthetically in the text as TBB.
18. Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 137.
19. Plumwood, Environmental Culture, 167.
20. Abram, Becoming Animal, 3.
21. Soper, “Humans, Animals, Machines,” 100.
22. Skinner, “Countersong.”
23. Plumwood, Environmental Culture, 142, 132–134, 142, 177, 190.
24. Calarco, “Identity, Difference, Indistinction,” 58.
25. Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 53, 49.
26. Ibid., 55–56. Mel Y. Chen’s valuable Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect exemplifies the growing interdisciplinary interest in the concept of animacy. Chen extends the linguists’ sense of animacy—“the grammatical effects of the sentience or liveness of nouns” (2)—to help theorize “current anxieties around the production of humanness in contemporary times.” The Potawatomi notion of animacy differs in not being centered on humanness. However, in harmony with Kimmerer’s perspective, Chen’s study demonstrates that “animacy has the capacity to rewrite conditions of intimacy, engendering different communalisms and revising biopolitical spheres, or, at least, how we might theorize them” (3). Chen is “leveraging animacy toward a consideration of affect in its queered and raced formations” (11); the study’s important concern with the dehumanization of oppressed humans, within which animals function primarily as figures, is not my focus here.
27. Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 56, 58.
28. Gander and Kinsella, Redstart, 11.
29. Retallack, “What Is Experimental Poetry?”
30. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 78.
31. Daston and Mitman, Thinking with Animals.
32. Rawlings, “Coach House Books Asks a.rawlings.”
33. Though formally more experimental than the twentieth-century poets Scott Knickerbocker treats in Ecopoetics, a.rawlings offers a version of what he calls “sensuous poesis,” which “relies on the immediate impact on the senses of aural effects . . . and visual effects . . . even as words simultaneously invite the reflective consideration of the intellect. Such an experience is not so much prelingual as it is ‘extra-lingual,’ beyond semantic language” (Ecopoetics, 17).
34. Rawlings, Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists, 68–71, 98. Subsequent parenthetical citations from this book will abbreviate the title as WS.
35. Retallack, “What Is Experimental Poetry?”
36. This would not be the northern pearly-eye that is pictured in the text, which, unlike many butterfly species, almost never feeds on flowers. A shade-loving butterfly found in wooded areas, it feeds on sap, dung, and mud.
37. Rawlings, PennSound: a.rawlings.
38. In response to my questions about the production of the sound recordings I sent her after I had completed an early draft of this, Angela Rawlings wrote as follows: “To answer your questions, WSFL was imagined first as a visual object. I spent nearly six years crafting the page-bound version of the book. The performed version came once the book was published, and I spent about nine months with it (and working with a team of arts interdisciplinarists to bring the book from page to stage). We staged a ‘rough draft’ of the performance (an hour in length) at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre in November 2006. Beyond that, I adapted some of the more ‘sound-poetry’ performance strategies to the reading that I’ve since given probably over 300 times in the last five years. This includes the breathy, throat-singing-esque ‘a hoosh a ha’ and the insectile clicks and hisses and buzzes of ‘xxx y zzz thorax cervix.’ . . . As for the recordings on PennSound, they’re comprised solely of my voice, edited using GarageBand to give an approximation of what I’d done in a few performances when working with multiple people. ‘Prologue’ takes the first four pages of WSFL (pp. 7–10) and overlaps them. ‘Egg 0 Insomnia’ features the first segment (pp. 14–17) with just a hint of ‘deep slumber’ (pp. 40–41) and ‘bruxism’ (pp. 68–71). ‘Apnea’ combines the prologue (pp. 7–10) with apnea (p. 24) as its centrepiece and some more ephemeral ‘singing’ sounds which I imagine run throughout this overall quite sound-oriented book.” Rawlings, email to Keller.
39. Ibid. She continues, “I can understand a certain amount of ‘false advertising’ perhaps evident in the back-cover copy at this juncture (and also with the ‘you, you, you’ that peppers the copy when the book has been carefully written solely with ‘us’).” This book is hardly unusual in having the language of the back cover (e.g., “Pattern your breath on the sound of moth wings, magnified and frenzied, as you fight for sleep . . .”) designed more to attract readers than to represent the text with precise accuracy.
40. My perspective here will not be shared by all readers. The other critic who has published an article on this book, Erin Gray, focuses in “ ‘The Good Sentences of Sleep’: Parasomnia and ’Pataplay in Rawlings and Legris” on the text’s representation of sleep as “a sensuous practice and a source of knowledge rather than a passive state of withdrawal” (154). Our readings coincide in Gray’s claim that “sleep is placed at the centre of this interspecies and interdiscursive confrontation in order to interrupt the commonly-held epistemic division between observer and observed” (156), but, unlike me, Gray reads in terms of a human-focused narrative that “illustrates the violence of sleep disturbances” (157). In my reading, the volume has less narrative coherence and is less human centered, while its violence is as much a potential inherent in language as a quality of sleep disturbance.
41. Higgins, “Words on Stone, Eggshells, Feathers, Etc.”
42. Bervin, “Three Dimensions.”
43. Fimrite, “Bark Beetles Ravaging Drought-Stricken Forests in California.”
44. Skinner, Chip Calls, 25.
45. Skinner, Birds of Tifft.
46. Skinner, “Animal Transcriptions.”
47. Ibid.; Skinner, “Poetry Animal,” 99, 98, 103.
48. Skinner, “Poetry Animal,” 100.
49. Skinner, “Animal Transcriptions.”
50. Skinner, “Blackbird Stanzas.”
51. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 74–76.
52. Skinner, “Blackbird Stanzas.”
53. Skinner, “Slow Listening.”
54. Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 58.
5. GLOBAL REARRANGEMENTS
1. Cresswell, Place, 14.
2. Tuan, Space and Place, 6.
3. L. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 252; Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, 45.
4. Hass, “American Ecopoetry,” xli; Snyder, The Back Country, 13.
5. Hass, “American Ecopoetry,” xliii.
6. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 9. Heise provides an excellent discussion and critique of the persistent sense-of-place rhetoric in American ecocriticism in the early chapter of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, “From the Blue Planet to Google Earth: Environmentalism, Ecocriticism, and the Imagination of the Global.”
7. See, for example, Heidegger’s essay, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 141–160.
8.
Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 44; Garrard, Ecocriticism, 118; L. Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, 84.
9. Berry, What Are People For?, 146.
10. Massey foregrounds different terms in the titles of two nearly identical essays. The earlier one, published in Marxism Today in 1991, is titled “A Global Sense of Place”—the title used also in Space, Place, and Gender (1994), from which I am quoting—while the one published in 1993 is titled, “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place.” She uses the term “progressive” to counter the view that seeking after a sense of place is necessarily reactionary—a view prompted by responses to the spatial disruption of our time that include “certain forms of nationalism, sentimentalized recovering of sanitized ‘heritages’, and outright antagonism to newcomers and ‘outsiders’ ” (147).
11. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity.
12. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 147, 149, 151, 153.
13. Ibid., 154–56.
14. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 28–29, 21, 9.
15. Massey, For Space, 4–5.
16. Massey died in 2016. Harvey, however, has devoted quite a bit of attention to how environmental concerns intersect with his own Marxist perspectives; his well-known essay “The Nature of Environment: Dialectics of Social and Environmental Change,” for instance, looks for ways to bridge the antagonism between Marx’s perspectives on money and community on the one hand, and Aldo Leopold’s land ethic and its sense of land as community on the other.
17. Keats, Complete Poems, 270.
18. Roberson, City Eclogue, 83.
19. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 53–55.
20. Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost, 348.
21. For an argument that Spahr uses refrains to build figurative houses, habitats, and territories whose habitability she then questions, see Dianne Chisholm, “On the House That Ecopoetics Builds.”
22. Spahr, Well Then There Now, 11. From now on, this work will be cited parenthetically in the text as WTTN.
23. Spahr, The Transformation.
24. Dening, Islands and Beaches.
25. Massey, For Space, 4.