<i>Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene</i>. Lynn Keller. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017. Pp. xv+284.

Previous article FreeBook ReviewRecomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene. Lynn Keller. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017. Pp. xv+284.Samia RahimtoolaSamia RahimtoolaBowdoin College Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLynn Keller's Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene makes the case that the formal and linguistic experimentation associated with avant-garde poetry yields important contributions for environmental literature and ecocriticism. Written under the influence of Wittgenstein's pronouncement that "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world," such poetry has long been animated by the idea that the very linguistic structures of language privilege certain modes of thought and preclude others.1 If language shapes what we know, who we are, and even our inmost desires, experimenting with its conventions through disjunctive grammar, juxtaposition, and other experimental techniques may open up radical new ways of thinking and being in the world. This capacity to guide us toward thinking otherwise, Keller suggests, may be contemporary poetry's most important contribution toward "recomposing" the environmental attitudes that got us into our planetary predicament.Her attention to formally innovative poetry by Forrest Gander, Jody Gladding, Myung Mi Kim, Evelyn Reilly, Ed Roberson, Juliana Spahr, and seven others draws ecopoetics out of its early home in the Romantic pastoral. For Jonathan Bate, whose Song of the Earth (2000) remains a seminal text of ecopoetics, Romantic poetry heals the rift that so damagingly segregates human affairs from their sustaining contexts in nature. Drawing on Heideggerian notions of dwelling, Bate grants poetry a privileged role in generating "a mode of dwelling that is not alienated" by technology, industry, and capitalism.2 Looking beyond the pastoralism that so often lurks behind literary engagements with Heideggerian dwelling, Recomposing Ecopoetics reads poetry that is "more analogous to landfills scavenged by gulls or city boulevards awash in diesel fumes" (10–11).Two of the book's central interventions follow from this literary and philosophical paradigm shift. First, the book argues that unlike Romantic nature poetry, contemporary North American ecopoetics unfolds within an epistemological condition Keller names "the self-conscious Anthropocene" (1). Keller's reframing has the advantage of sidestepping debates about geological periodization that have raged since Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer first named the Anthropocene, the new geological epoch in which human activity has achieved planetary force.3 One might, however, justly point out that Romanticism itself exhibits self-awareness of the Anthropocene—just think of the ravaged landscapes of John Clare's Helpston period or the abandoned wasteland at the heart of William Wordsworth's "The Ruined Cottage"—and so reinaugurate the very debates around periodization that Keller hopes to escape. Periodization quandaries aside, emphasizing human awareness of this geological condition incurs an obvious cost: not everyone is admitted to the party. If we live in the Anthropocene, like it or not, we only inhabit the "self-conscious Anthropocene" in so far as we maintain a "reflexive, critical, and often anxious awareness of the scale and severity of human effects on the planet" (2). This exclusivity, unlike the exclusions of race, class, and national difference that undergird the Anthropocene's fantasy of a humankind equally responsible for, and equally exposed to, environmental degradation, is far more likely to include precisely those individuals who must live with their unfair share of environmental damage.The benefit of Keller's conceptualization of "the self-conscious Anthropocene" becomes most apparent when viewed in light of the book's second major intervention: the ways poets test and respond to new scientific knowledge. Far from an extractible proposition, knowledge, Keller reminds us, names a relation between knower and known. At times, the book focuses on the affective and psychological dimension of such knowing: an early chapter reads Juliana Spahr's "Unnamed Dragonfly Species" as a "conceptual and psychological drama" (40) staged between the environmentally aware reader and the overwhelming barrage of scientific information she must sort through in order to maintain that awareness. More often, the book examines ecopoetics as the literary translation of scientific knowledge, such as Forrest Gander's translation of evolutionary "deep time" into human perceptual scales or the research-driven translations of nonlinguistic animal communication in the poetry of a. rawlings, Jody Gladding, and Jonathan Skinner. Such translations, Keller argues, are hardly seamless or straightforward, nor do they allow for easy anthropomorphisms. Like Gladding's Translations from Bark Beetle (2014), which invents a new pronoun form that works across singular and plural cases in order to capture the collective labor behind bark beetle carvings, they preserve "the divergences between the species' experiences of the phenomenal world we all … occupy" (142).Keller's willingness to entertain science, poetry, and environment as collaborative partners marks a refreshing departure from technophobic and technophilic environmentalisms, which tend to either rehearse humanity's fall from nature through the story of technological development or make such developments their sole remedy for environmental damage. The poets at the center of Keller's study chart a more nuanced—and more ambivalent—path, which will extend the book's interest to scholars of science and technology studies. So, even as the rapid development of plastics is one way in which "invention [outpaces] knowledge" (72) in what Ulrich Beck has named the contemporary risk society,4 Evelyn Reilly's exuberant verbal play in the collage poems of Styrofoam (2009) also reflects "the flexible resourcefulness of the human brain demonstrated in their very invention" (67). And, if the collecting practices of lepidopterists suggest that scientific knowledge is produced through a deadly "fixing that is counter to the processes of life and ecology" (159), the hermeneutical methods of literary criticism are also blamed for stabilizing meanings in ways that destroy the complexity of life and its representations in texts. "Art," Keller reminds us, "may be complicit with science's failures" and "offer valuably different ways of knowing the world that can complement those of science or counter science's limitations" (63).Other common threads such as pastoral and scalar dissonance also cross-stitch the book. As a whole, however, Recomposing Ecopoetics is structured by individual chapters on the major environmental issues of our time, including scalar dissonance, apocalyptic discourse, technological invention and toxicity, nonhuman communication, global senses of place, and environmental justice. This segregated approach enables Keller to focus on distinct debates within ecopoetics and the environmental humanities, but it also risks missing the very "intertwining" of issues that she finds central "to how poets and readers experience the Anthropocene" (240). A reader may be left wishing to hear more about how the scientific collaborations of the book's early chapters might connect with the overtly social focus of the book's final two chapters. Encountering our age of toxic consumerism through Canadian poet and water activist Rita Wong's Undercurrent (2015), for instance, would allow plasticity, permeability, and pollution to be addressed in ways informed by settler colonialism and decolonial theory.5 Certainly, Keller is keenly attentive to what Timothy Noah has named "the Great Divergence" of human inequality that accompanies the converging narratives of the Anthropocene,6 and I do not intend to suggest otherwise. The book, instead, provides a robust framework of questions and methods for future scholars to build on as they pursue further intersections within its multiple lines of inquiry.One of the pleasures of Recomposing Ecopoetics is witnessing Keller's dexterity as she moves between detailed readings of poems and the environmental debates to which they open up. And, even though "none" of the thirteen writers she studies "imagines that poetry will save the world" (24), Keller shows her audience that poetry has become a key arena for the interrogation and reimagination of human relationships to nature. In this, Recomposing Ecopoetics joins a growing body of critical work, including Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne's edited collection Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field (2018), Sonya Posmentier's Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature (2017), and Margaret Ronda's Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End (2018), which attends to poetry written beyond the mimetic, straightforwardly representational mode that has for too long dominated ecocriticism and environmental literature. The strength of Recomposing Ecopoetics is the case it makes for experimental poetics in a field that has so often found itself preferring direct, prereflective experience to the experimental investigation of discourse. Notes 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1974), 56.2. Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 64.3. Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, "The 'Anthropocene,'" IGBP Global Change Newsletter, no. 41 (May 2000): 17.4. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992).5. Undercurrent confirms Keller's argument that contemporary North American poets attend to the harmful spread of endocrine-disrupting chemicals by exploring the permeability of body and soil. By situating this concern in a First Nations context, Wong's poems instruct us to approach fantasies of containment within a colonial history devoted to keeping humans and nature in their "proper" place. She writes, "let the colonial borders be seen for the pretentions that they are / i hereby honour what the flow of water teaches us" (Rita Wong, Undercurrent [Gibsons, BC: Nightwood Editions, 2015], 14).6. Timothy Noah, The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do about It (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012). Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 117, Number 2November 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/705696HistoryPublished online August 23, 2019 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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