The Ecopoetics of Our Own Demise

With mainstream attention drawn to natural disasters, such as hurricane’s Harvey, Irma, and Maria, the Trump Administration’s assault on environmental regulation, and the looming effects of climate change, disaster, and environmental discourse should be a focus for all of us. Language and its use is the mediator of our relationship to the environment. Our connection to our environment is emotional, whether it be the simple pleasure of a sunny day or tragedy of a Category 4 hurricane, and our response to these events are elicited through language. It is how we make sense of our environmental surroundings. It is how we react to our environmental surroundings and envision our future.

Thus, Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field from University of Iowa Press and edited by Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne is a timely and relevant addition to ecocritical discourse. The edited collection narrows its primary attention on post-1945 poetics, poetry, and critical practice. The book is organized into four sections, and according to the editors, “each of which articulates a prominent line of thinking in the current critical study of ecopoetics.” The first part of the collection, “The Apocalyptic Imagination,” contains two contributions focusing upon the poetic view of the end of it all. In the second section, “Embodiment and Animality,” the four essays “examine legacies of Romantic organicism, projective verse, Beat poetics, and the black radical tradition and bring ecopoetics into conversation with science, animal and plant, queer, disability, and critical race studies.” “Environmental Justice,” the third section with two essays, examines the disproportionate effects and risks that saddle specific populations that have little or no political leverage. The final section of three essays is “Beyond Sustainability,” and it addresses the “possibilities for ecopoetics as an imaginary and ethical counterpoint to environmental management and sustainable development paradigms.” Despite the imbalance within the four sections, the organizing philosophy works well for this valuable text.

However, in terms of contemporary ecocritical theory and practice, Part One and Part Three align nicely with the broad current critical and creative attention. That these sections have only two essays each does seem like an oversight, but the caliber of contributions in these sections should draw readers’ attentions. In particular, Hume and Osborne’s decision to begin the collection with one of the strongest contributions, Lynn Keller’s “Making Art ‘Under These Apo-Calypso Rays’: Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics,” serves as an effective entry to spectrum of collected essays. Keller proposes a primary issue about “how apocalypticism shapes politically consequential individual and social affects.” This leads to collective and personal questions concerning the environment. How come I am not doing more? Why aren’t we doing more? In Keller’s analysis of poetry by Jorie Graham and Evelyn Reilly, she claims, “both offer distinct modes of pleasure as counterpoint to the overwhelming darkness of apocalyptic thinking.” This “pleasure” can serve as a form of awareness to avoid a paralyzing crisis that could lead (or, one could argue, already has led) to overwhelming human inaction on our part.

Perhaps as a result of the East Coast’s soggy spring and summer and constant flood warnings, Samia Rahimtoola’s contribution “‘Hung Up in the Flood’: Resilience, Variability, and the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker” in Part Four should resonate with readers. In addition, the effects of 2017’s summer of Atlantic and Gulf Coast storms are still apparent in parts of Texas, Florida, and the many islands devastated by strong wind and tidal surge. Rahimtoola identifies a “crucial impasse facing environmental thought today … best registered in discourses and practices of resilience, particularly their widespread deployment in fields such as disaster management, urban planning, environmental conservation, and securitization.” Niedecker’s mid-twentieth-century poetry registers the “small events” of perpetual, and sometimes seemingly invisible, progress of environmental transformation and the attempts to recover what has been lost. For Rahimtoola, “remediation also draws upon poetry’s own mediating capacities to make palpable what might otherwise remain beneath or beyond the threshold of...