Against Arcadia: Rereading Pastoral in Contemporary Poetry in Canada

“Against Arcadia” argues that the pastoral persists in Canadian poetry, often redeployed to address the ongoing manifestations of settler-colonialism and the ever-accelerating environmental crisis. I read this emergent critical pastoral in the context of governmental tactics aimed at the material dispossession of land, health, and life, linking neoliberalism and the attendant fraying of social relations to intensifying ecological degradation. The logic of neoliberal capital privileges a particular mode of relationality that underlies what Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman name a “common sense” that naturalizes the political and economic status quo. Against this neoliberal common sense, the redistributed pastoral invokes a “sense of the common,” my critical shorthand for a reorganization of ways of being and relating in the Anthropocene that might open onto a more equitable and just “common world.” I begin with two texts that borrow explicitly from pastoral predecessors: Lisa Robertson’s XEclogue (1993) and Erin Moure’s Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (2001). In Robertson’s appropriation of Virgil and Moure’s “transelations” of Portuguese bucolics, I find two, related models for contemporary engagement with the pastoral: the seed bomber and the terraformer. My second and third chapters, focusing on Jordan Abel, Rachel Zolf, and George Elliott Clarke, complicate the “common” by foregrounding the pastoral’s correspondence with both settler colonialism’s dispossession of Indigenous land and what Christina Sharpe identifies as the historical and ongoing “climate of antiblackness.” Together, these chapters demonstrate the necessity of approaching both the Anthropocene concept and the pastoral in Canada through the lens of settler colonialism. In the fourth chapter I turn to the oil sands poetry of Stephen Collis and Rita Wong, arguing that their “petropastoral” poetry positions extractivism as a contemporary manifestation of settler-colonial appropriation, one carried out at the expense of the health and livelihood of predominantly Indigenous, racialized, and poor communities. Responding to the entanglements of neoliberalism, global capital, settler colonialism, and extractivism, “Against Arcadia” offers the contemporary pastoral as one particular mode through which to approach the question of how to think and write poetry in Canada under the sign of the Anthropocene.

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