Margaret Ronda

Remainders

American Poetry at Nature's End

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Margaret Ronda is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. Her collection of poetry, Personification, was the winner of the 2009 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 192
• Erscheinungstermin: 20. März 2018
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 155mm x 18mm
• Gewicht: 431g
• ISBN-13: 9781503603141
• ISBN-10: 1503603148
• Artikelnr.: 48863107

Autorenporträt

Margaret Ronda is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. Her collection of poetry, Personification, was the winner of the 2009 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Great Acceleration Poetics
chapter abstract
The Introduction lays out the historical framework of the Great
Acceleration. Rather than aligning the Great Acceleration with the
discourse of the Anthropocene, this introduction argues that the particular
historical model of the Great Acceleration is more attentive to the
explosive economic growth in this period and its ecological ramifications.
Postwar American poetry's interest in leftovers, residual matter and life,
and unredeemable goods makes it a particularly keen chronicler of the
larger ecohistorical changes of this era. At the same time, this interest
in remainders rather than natural externality becomes a measure of the
increasing inaccessibility of the master-concept of nature as an
imaginative resource and a cultural concept in this time. It also reveals
the changing self-conceptions of the cultural work and status of poetry
after modernism.
1North Central, South Side: Postwar Ecologies in Niedecker and Brooks
chapter abstract
The opening chapter reads two mid-century poets, Lorine Niedecker and
Gwendolyn Brooks, as chroniclers of socioecological transition in the
immediate postwar period. While environmental historians have recently
turned attention to the suburbs as the key site of inquiry into changing
postwar conditions, the chapter emphasizes the rural and urban peripheries
as locales that reveal many of the emerging characteristics of the Great
Acceleration. Turning first to Lorine Niedecker, the chapter describes her
development of a poetics attentive to uneven development, residual forms of
life, and ecosystemic degradation in the mixed economy of rural Wisconsin.
The second half of the chapter moves from Niedecker's rural Wisconsin to
Brooks's urban Chicago. Brooks explores the production of space in relation
to the forms of environmental racism emerging in South Side housing and
neighborhood conditions after 1945.
2"The Advancing Signs of the Air": Ashbery's Atmospheres
chapter abstract
This chapter begins with a discussion of the new forms of environmental
consciousness emerging in the 1960s and early 1970s around pollution and
systemic toxicity. It focuses specifically on Rachel Carson and Barry
Commoner, discussing their approaches to ecological interconnection under
the sign of crisis but also the ways in which this interconnection is
difficult to perceive or understand. The chapter then turns from their
reflections on the scarcely perceptible intimacies of ecological
interconnection to an examination of John Ashbery's poetry, which explores
these thresholds. Exploring Ashbery's portrayals of waste and air as
phenomena undergoing change, this chapter argues that Ashbery's work
depicts various forms of environmental consciousness. His poetry unfolds an
affirmative embrace of ecological uncertainty that involves neither
critique nor attempt to repair damage, nor even an attempt to understand
the causes of emergent crisis. Instead, he traces the way crisis can be
sensed in his poetic surrounds.
3"NOT PEOPLE'S PARK / PEOPLE'S PLANET": 1970s Revolutionary Pastoral
chapter abstract
This chapter engages with two poetic works of the early 1970s, Gary
Snyder's Turtle Island (1974) and Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters
(1st ed. 1971), which were essential reading for the countercultural left.
These books envisage an ecological commons that is grounded in nonmodern or
"primitive" ways of living but is also figured as not yet existent,
requiring revolutionary change in order to come into being. Holding images
of ecological catastrophe alongside visions of living lightly on the earth,
these poems create a distinctive friction between tumult and ease that this
chapter calls "revolutionary pastoral." These books repurpose the
pastoral's opposition to acquisitive logics and the concept of property for
an era confronting new forms of capital expansion and environmental
enclosure. The chapter closes by examining the historical conditions that
led to the decline of radical ecological politics by the late 1970s and the
corporatization of the environmental movement.
4Mourning and Melancholia at the End of Nature
chapter abstract
This chapter begins with a consideration of the development of the
discourse of the "end of nature" and its implications for understanding
ecological relations. Pointing to the elegiac dimensions of this discourse,
the chapter turns to Juliana Spahr's long poem "Gentle Now, Don't Add to
Heartache" as an example of a literary exploration of the consequences of
this conceptual absence. The chapter draws on the Romantic philosophy of
Schiller as well as more recent psychoanalytic accounts of elegy and
mourning to argue that the operations of elegy become the subject of
investigation in Spahr's work. "Gentle Now" serves as a representative
eco-elegy that dwells in melancholia rather than moving toward the
completion of the mourning process. The chapter closes with a consideration
of a more recent poem by Spahr, co-written with Joshua Clover, that
investigates the affective and political limits of melancholy as a response
to present conditions.
5"A Rescue That Comes Too Late": Figure and Disfiguration in Contemporary
Ecopoetics
chapter abstract
This chapter turns to the contemporary mode of ecopoetics as an exploration
of the problems of poiesis in a time of accelerating ecological
destruction. Ecopoetics as a distinctive mode emerges in the post-Kyoto
Protocol era, when the problem of how to respond to planetary environmental
degradation has become increasingly urgent. The ecopoetics texts of the
chapter present an extended redescription of human capacities and aesthetic
making in light of anthropogenic crisis. Discussing works by Brenda
Hillman, Hoa Nguyen, Brenda Coultas, and Allison Cobb, the chapter
highlights how their use of prosopopoeia and apostrophe dramatizes uncanny
and defamiliarized dimensions of relationality. These portrayals raise
questions regarding the culpability for environmental destruction and the
limits of anthropogenic ingenuity to fix, remake, or salvage.
Coda: On Storms to Come
chapter abstract
The Coda argues that storms are one key way to register the unfathomable
earth-systemic changes characteristic of the Great Acceleration. It points
to the intensifying weather patterns of this time and offers examples of
some recent cultural works-poetry, film, photography-that represent these
storms. In these representations, the spectator confronts the bewildering
sense of change without any narrative arc that might point to recovery or
renewal. One documentary text by Cheena Marie Lo on Hurricane Katrina
offers a powerful investigation of these conditions of aftermath. The coda
explores Lo's orientation toward the nonredemptive and the lost as a model
of approaching the larger ethos of this study's poetry. The Coda ends with
a turn toward the forms of connectivity that these works have charted,
despite their larger historical pessimisms, and points to the ways these
connections are materializing in contemporary struggles for the ecological
commons.