Cueva de las Manos — Santa Cruz, Argentina, ca. 7300 BC
Imagining a future, let alone poetry, ten thousand years from now requires thinking the afterward of our present crises. A worst-case scenario: planetary conditions in many thousands of years will no longer support organic life as we know it. But human consciousness will continue to operate, albeit as code on servers, not neurons firing across fatty gray matter. To imagine this future, one must think beyond bodies made of mostly water, blood, tissue, birth, and death.
Post-ecopoetics is a guide for thinking the longevity and durability of the poem in deep time. I have asked a number of poets and scholars to serve as additional guides by asking them to respond to the following questions: “What will poetry be in ten thousand years? If you wrote a poem that you knew would last ten thousand years, how would this impact your writing?”
Each of their responses will be posted as an individual commentary linked to this series.
So far in these commentaries on “post-ecopoetics” I have been focused on assessing how a number of recent potent poems draw from an environmental aesthetic in distress. There is no one way to envision or respond to the distresses of ecopoetics, and I do not mean to fixate on any declension narratives for culture (i.e. we lost our chance to realize the garden, so now we only get apocalypse). Poets and readers can respond to aesthetics in distress in multiple ways, using any range of approaches and attitudes. We don’t need to read the apocalyptic genre apocalyptically. Also, a sense of the origins and ends of our devices has always been present in our devices.
1. So far in these commentaries on “post-ecopoetics” I have been focused on assessing how a number of recent potent poems draw from an environmental aesthetic in distress. There is no one way to envision or respond to the distresses of ecopoetics, and I do not mean to fixate on any declension narratives for culture (i.e. we lost our chance to realize the garden, so now we only get apocalypse). Poets and readers can respond to aesthetics in distress in multiple ways, using any range of approaches and attitudes. We don’t need to read the apocalyptic genre apocalyptically.
Once upon a time poetry offered a realization of the dream of unalienated labor. The poet, as both writer and reader, tuning into the community while being tuned into by the community, produced and consumed the products of her own labor. For this poet, life power affirmed labor power and vice versa. The radicality of poetry was in its free human sensual activity that sowed together poet and poem, subject and object, material life and historical life. The poet, as unalienated maker of her own sensorium, embodied the interweaving natural processes of making with social processes of making.
Post-ecopoetics is about the art of writing and reading through a damaged ecopoetics. It is the art of writing and reading when we still had summer arctic polar ice and most of the world’s coral colonies. Part of the inspiration for this project comes from Donna Haraway’s new book Staying with the Trouble, where she calls for “arts of living on a damaged planet” as a way to begin to confront the Anthropocene and focus on making its tenure brief.
Trust in the object — gateway into the deep time history of matter and form — absorption into the flow of energy. Utopia and entropy — inscribing both into the landscape.
Reconnect to primal forms and forces, rituals of dwelling and shaping, primitive feeling of being exposed and enveloped in the immensity of a landscape.
Art without institutions, capital, possession/property; art in the commons, made of common materials; art of primordial shapes, activities, emotions, and forces.
Ecology and art — can join up to resolve problems in the environment and the art world relatively quickly. Vision that most environmental problems can be solved by becoming aligned with Earth forces.
Post-Ecopoetics