What will poetry be in ten thousand years? (2)

Adam Dickinson

Cueva de las Manos — Santa Cruz, Argentina, ca. 7300 BC

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.

Adam Dickinson:

The unpredictable expansiveness of poetry precludes any certainty when it comes to particular forms and contents. However, I suppose one can be certain that if there are humans then there will be poetry and it will continue to inhabit the edges of what is sayable and knowable, regardless of whatever repressive political or cultural forces may exist.

I can only assume that poetry in ten thousand years will be what it is now: an attempt to shift frames and scales of conventional forms of signification in order to bring into focus the neglected, alternate, inscrutable biological, geophysical, and cultural writing intrinsic to any historical moment.

In some ways, I already approach my writing on the timescale you have proposed. It’s not that I expect the writing of Adam Dickinson to be relevant in ten thousand years, but that I am interested in writing through, with, and into processes that operate on far-reaching timescales. The microbes have always been with us, even as they have evolved and shifted in concentrations over time (I love how the anaerobic environment of the lower intestine is similar to the atmospheric conditions of early earth). Metabolism and its endocrine disruptors are at once immediate and long-term: the chemicals we live with and that affect our bodies will be with us for many years to come (whether through contaminated soil and water or other forms of bioaccumulation). We’ve already known mercury to be a neurotoxin for a thousand years. I see no reason we won’t still be carrying it inside our bodies in ten thousand years. Certainly our heaps of plastic will still be poking into us for ten thousand plus years. I think about these time-scales right now as I write.

April 13, 2017

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Post-ecopoetics: in a time when the world itself is at stake, all our poetic devices and figures have taken on existential proportions. Our figures and cultures show the unraveling of figures and cultures. We often have to turn our devices either up to 100 or down to 0 to get them working at all and be “permitted to return to a meadow.”

This is not about replacing ecopoetics, an enduring, shaken, but unfinished and unfinishable project worth forever fighting for. Still hitching a ride on ecopoetics, but ready for anything. How to respond to “peak everything”/ “this changes everything” in multiple ways with multiple forms and multiple questions.

Establish this post-ecopoetics against USA declaration of itself as post-ecology and post-truth, as it dismantles the E.P.A., re-militarizes the nation, and fuel-injects manufacturing and consumerism in a bid to pit nationalism against the planetary.

Samuel Beckett: “You’re on Earth, there’s no cure for that.”

Naomi Klein: “But there is no reason why future disasters cannot be laboratories for those who believe in reviving and reinventing the commons.”

What kind of writing and reading can provide the basis for collective planetary way of life now? Will Alexander: “we’re on this planet, and we have to start to build an internal ark.” Use, for example, Rogue NASA as model.

How many worlds do we have left? What kind of Earth do we want? It seems easier to address the great, wide off-worlds of the universe than it is to address a better future tomorrow. No matter how many versions of the end of the world we’re exposed to, amidst and within it all we still must continue to experiment on how to live, how to be together socially, politically, aesthetically.

We must continue the tradition of experimenting with the sayable, knowable, and writeable with regard to past, present, and future Earths. This is post-ecopoetics.

Joshua Schuster is an associate professor of English at Western University. His book The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics (U of Alabama P, 2015) won the Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize from the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada. Recent essays have appeared in Humanimalia, minnesota review, and Photography & Culture, as well as in an edited volume Critical Perspectives on Veganism and in the book Edward Burtynsky: Essential Elements (Thames & Hudson, 2016). He is currently working on a book project What Is Extinction? A Cultural and Natural History of Last Animals.

Jacket2 Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Jacket editors here.