Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, Biology and Technology in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry

Description

This book asks what it means to write poetry in and about the Anthropocene, the name given to a geological epoch where humans have a global ecological impact. Combining critical approaches such as ecocriticism and posthumanism with close reading and archival research, it argues that the Anthropocene requires poetry and the humanities to find new ways of thinking about unfamiliar spatial and temporal scales, about how we approach the metaphors and discourses of the sciences, and about the role of those processes and materials that confound humans’ attempts to control or even conceptualise them. Poetry and the Anthropocene draws on the work of a series of poets from across the political and poetic spectrum, analysing how understandings of technology shape literature about place, evolution and the tradition of writing about what still gets called Nature. The book explores how writers’ understanding of sciences such as climatology or biochemistry might shape their poetry’s form, and how literature can respond to environmental crises without descending into agitprop, self-righteousness or apocalyptic cynicism. In the face of the Anthropocene’s radical challenges to ethics, aesthetics and politics, the book shows how poetry offers significant ways of interrogating and rendering the complex relationships between organisms and their environments in a world increasingly marked by technology. Tags: Public Policy, Environmental, General, Development, Technology & Engineering, Environmental Policy, Sustainable Development, Business & Economics, Political Science Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents Acknowledgement Introduction: Poetry and science Undermining Nature’s solid ground Welcome to the Anthropocene The form of ecology The evolution of Ted Hughes Derek Mahon’s ironic ecology Rematerialising Prynne 1. Evolving systems of (eco)poetry A non-local habitation and a name Anthropos kainos – technology and the posthuman Ecologies of mind: communicating ecosystems and systems of communication Poetics in the Anthropocene 2. ‘Life subdued to its instrument’: Hughes, mutation and technology Fishing: adaptation and contact Living form and posthuman adaptation Science, religion and the environmental revolution Violence and technology Crow: evolving myth/mythologising evolution Hatching a crow: mutation and poetry Testing his metal 3. ‘Germinal ironies’: Changing climates in the poetry of Derek Mahon ‘Rage for order’: ironies of time and place A ‘chaos of complex systems’: economy and ecology Beautiful souls and simulative politics Climate change and a new look at Life on Earth Pious hopes 4. The resistant materials of Jeremy Prynne Coal and metal: conditions of landscape and questions concerning technology Pertinent junk and the sound of information The secret lives of plants and viruses Mutating code scripts Wasted fields and digested hydrocarbons This difficult matter Conclusion: Evolution, agency and feedback at the end of a world The life of the poets Feedback loops Index