Recomposing Ecopoetics

by Lynn Keller

  26. This quote is from Abbott, Lā‘au Hawai‘i, 14.

  27. Rukeyser, The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, 73, 111.

  28. L. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 261.

  29. K. Brown, Dispatches from Dystopia, 2.

  30. Gander, Core Samples from the World, 84. From now on this work will be cited parenthetically in the text as CSW.

  31. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 154.

  32. Massey, For Space, 123.

  33. Magee, “Paul Magee Interviews Forrest Gander.”

  34. In the “video-poem” version of this work available on Gander’s website, many more of Foglia’s photos appear and more varied communities are represented. There one sees people living in everything from brick houses to teepees and people conservatively dressed in Amish fashion or in camo or ordinary work clothes, as well as people without clothing. One sees more agriculture than in the book’s version, which points more to hunting and foraging for wild edible plants. The video’s images are in color, while the photos throughout the book are black and white (Gander, “Forrest Gander’s Website.”).

  35. Meeks, A Clearing; Claxton, “A Clearing, Raymond Meeks.”

  36. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 151.

  37. Enstad, “Toxicity and the Consuming Subject,” 55; Chen, Animacies, 203.

  38. Osman’s introduction of another planet might bring to mind Chakrabarty’s observation in “Climate and Capital” that study of other planets has been crucial to our understanding of climate change on Earth; the comparative planetary perspective, he notes, is one to which humans are incidental (23).

  39. Osman, The Network, 107. From now on this work will be cited parenthetically in the text as TN.

  40. See L. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 266; Writing for an Endangered World, 71; The Future of Environmental Criticism, 73.

  41. L. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 266.

  6. ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE POETRY OF THE SELF-CONSCIOUS ANTHROPOCENE

  1. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 20.

  2. Wenzel, “Turning over a New Leaf,” 165.

  3. Nixon, “The Anthropocene and Environmental Justice,” 29.

  4. According to the World Bank in 2015, 1 in 7 people across the globe—1.1 billion people—live without electricity. In 2014 the average annual electricity consumption per person in the US was close to 11,000 kilowatt hours (Rowling, “One in Seven People Still Live without Electricity”).

  5. Pope Francis, “Laudato Si’.” In the United States, environmental justice often has racialized dimensions and an urban focus. Environmentalism of the poor, a phrase introduced in 1988, has been used more in reference to movements in the less industrialized world where class stratification is more central than race, and where the issues often arise from poor people’s material interests in a rural or wild environment as the source of their livelihoods. There, the poor are often the majority of the population. Guha and Martínez-Alier speak of the “ ‘full-stomach’ environmentalism” of the global North and the “ ‘empty-belly’ environmentalism” of the global South (Varieties of Environmentalism, xxi). Scholars such as Guha and Martínez-Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism (1998), and Wenzel, “Turning over a New Leaf ” (2016), have proposed a convergence of environmental justice and the environmentalism of the poor; in that I am not limiting my concerns to U.S. contexts, I bring them together now, as Wenzel proposes, under the lowercase designation of environmental justice.

  6. Margaret Ronda has published an insightful essay, “ ‘Not Much Left’: Wageless Life in Millennial Poetry,” bringing together the same three poets. Ronda examines them as writers “turning their attention to forms of collective being subsisting at the margins of the marketplace” who attempt to restore visibility to the unemployed and poor and to investigate the representational problems their subsistence raises.

  7. People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, “Principles of Environmental Justice,” 279.

  8. See L. Buell, “Ecocriticism,” 94, 96.

  9. L. Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, 23.

  10. Nixon ties the Great Acceleration to the developing plutocracy of the era; he emphasizes that “any account of human-induced planetary morphology since 1950 needs to keep neoliberalism’s durable impacts front and center” (“Anthropocene 2,” 46). Mark Nowak is equally emphatic about neoliberalism’s responsibility for the injustices and suffering his poetry documents, while attributing to neoliberalism the institutionalization of US poetry that keeps it from engagement with a broad public including the working class (Wagstaff, “An Interview with Mark Nowak,” 462).

  11. Nixon, “The Anthropocene and Environmental Justice,” 29.

  12. Roberson, “We Must Be Careful,” 5.

  13. Roberson, City Eclogue, 16. From now on this work will be cited parenthetically in the text as CE.

  14. Roberson, “We Must Be Careful,” 3.

  15. In “On the Nature of Ed Roberson’s Poetics,” Evie Shockley presents a reading of Roberson that coincides significantly with my own. (In revised form, the essay became a chapter in Renegade Poetics, a study that seeks recognition for innovative black poetry.) Developing our analyses independently and largely contemporaneously, both of us have emphasized that his writing resists the nature/culture divide and positions the human within nature. Presenting Roberson as a figure many regard as anomalous, the African American nature poet, Shockley explores the formal strategies through which he accomplishes a nuanced kind of political poetry that is also nature poetry.

  16. Bennett, “Manufacturing the Ghetto,” 170, 173.

  17. Ibid., 182, 177.

  18. Agamben, Homo Sacer.

  19. Duncan, The Opening of the Field, 7.

  20. Nowak, “Coal Mountain.”

  21. Nowak, Coal Mountain Elementary, 179. From now on this work will be cited parenthetically in the text as CME.

  22. American Coal Foundation, “American Coal Foundation.”

  23. American Coal Foundation, “About the American Coal Foundation.”

  24. C2ES Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, “Global Warming Facts and Figures.”

  25. Olivier et al., “Trends in Global CO2 Emissions: 2015 Report,” 23, 16, 18.

  26. For a sobering assessment, see Epstein et al., “Full Cost Accounting for the Life Cycle of Coal.”

  27. People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, “Principles of Environmental Justice,” 279–80.

  28. Manning, “Coal Mountain Elementary”; quoted by Nowak in Clinton, “Chronicles in the First Person Plural.”

  29. Some of Teh’s photos have more complicated impact, for though never pastoral, the images are often very striking. Artfully composed, and sometimes with strong reds or turquoises juxtaposed against grime and smoke, his images are discomfortingly beautiful even as they are gritty or even hellish. His defamiliarization of scenes of industrial degradation invites renewed attention to those places and those who live or work there.

  30. Graves, “Spotlight.”

  31. Featherston, “ ‘What Kind of Poem Would You Make Out of That?’: A Review of ‘Coal Mountain Elementary.’ ”

  32. For a fuller discussion of Kim’s poetics, see chapter 7 of my Thinking Poetry.

  33. Kim, “Convolutions,” 251; brackets and bracketed words are Kim’s.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Kim, Penury. From now on this work will be cited parenthetically in the text as P. In “An Ecopoetics of the Limit,” Angela Hume rightly identifies the anonymous voices of Penury’s poem “fell” as “the abject citizen, the refugee, the immigrant.”

  36. Hume, “An Ecopoetics of the Limit.”

  37. Westra, Environmental Justice and the Rights of Ecological Refugees.

  38. Martin, “On Penury.”

  39. Bate, The Song of the Earth, 25–26.

  CODA

  1. Coultas, The Tatters, 15. From now on, this work will be cited parenthetically in the text as TT.

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