On Combustion: Contemporary British Poetry and the Pyrocene (1990-2017)

Proposed by the environmental historian Stephen J. Pyne, the term Pyrocene ‘renames and redefines the Anthropocene according to humanity’s primary ecological signature, which is our ability to manipulate fire.’ This thesis draws on Pyne’s ‘Pyrocene’ in order to examine the defining roles of combustion, flame, and fire across a range of contemporary works of experimental British poetry in the period 1990-2017 (particularly those arising from the so-called ‘Cambridge School’). It argues that this body of texts proves exceptionally sensitive to registering and evaluating the cultural traces left by environmental crisis at large, and the Pyrocene in particular, and—also—that this poetry shows itself capable of challenging and developing Pyne’s bio-chemical account of the Pyrocene in new political and ethical directions. A detailed introduction begins by recovering ‘combustion’ from its dispersal across several disciplines and discourses in order to establish, as it were, a contemporary-historical dimension to the process. A case is made for 1990 as a plausible start-date for the current Pyrocene (marked by the predictive modelling of the Kuwaiti oil fires at the 1990 World Climate Conference), while the period surveyed concludes with the Fort McMurray Fire of 2016-17, which consumed a Canadian city dedicated to maximising fossil-fuel extraction from the Albertan tar-sands. This introduction concludes by detailing the specific poetic tradition under scrutiny in the thesis, as well as the forms of reading and criticism which such writing has tended to invite. Having established these contexts, this thesis then undertakes three major case studies across three main chapters, each dedicated primarily to reading a single collection by a single poet: consecutively, Andrea Brady’s Wildfire (2010); Rosa van Hensbergen’s In Accident & Emergence (2015); and Dan Eltringham’s Cairn Almanac (2017). It adopts a methodology of ‘extreme’ close reading throughout; not—as the eco-critic Timothy Clark (and others) have argued—because this method is particularly appropriate to an age of environmental polycrisis, but rather because it is particularly appropriate to the works in question. These readings therefore unfold at an ultra-detailed level of inspection—dwelling on the allusions, references, and formal properties of each collection—while also attending to the way in which the conceptual profile of combustion develops over their courses. These hyper-local readings nevertheless allow the thesis to advance a broader argument concerning the conceptual and formal stakes of combustion for contemporary culture. Each chapter also seeks to excavate planetary-scale thematic preoccupations—among them the geo-political stakes of combustive material; combustion’s relation to states of emergency; and the effects of combustion upon climate—thereby allowing the thesis to expand its range outwards to involve other works of art and literature, from Werner Herzog’s 1992 film Lessons of Darkness to John Kinsella’s 2016 collection Firebreaks. Together, these analyses enable this thesis’s central and concluding claim: that scenes and tropes of combustion recur within contemporary experimental poetry not only as sites for examining the recent history and politics of the fossil fuel industry, but also as means of comprehending aspects of the subjective experience of what might be thought of as ‘the everyday Pyrocene.’

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