Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End

By Margaret Ronda

A literary history of the Great Acceleration, Remainders examines an archive of postwar American poetry that reflects on new dimensions of ecological crisis. These poems portray various forms of remainders—from obsolescent goods and waste products to atmospheric pollution and melting glaciers—that convey the ecological consequences of global economic development. While North American ecocriticism has tended to focus on narrative forms in its investigations of environmental consciousness and ethics, Margaret Ronda highlights the ways that poetry explores other dimensions of ecological relationships. The poems she considers engage in more ambivalent ways with the problem of human agency and the limits of individual perception, and they are attuned to the melancholic and damaging aspects of environmental existence in a time of generalized crisis. Her method, which emphasizes the material histories and uneven effects of capitalist development, models a unique critical approach to understanding the causes and conditions of ongoing biospheric catastrophe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Mar 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781503604896

Book preview

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from The Double Dream of Spring by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from Three Poems by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1970, 1971, 1972 by John Ashbery.

Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from Rivers and Mountains by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1962, 1963, 1964, 1966 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from The Vermont Notebook by John Ashbery and Joe Brainard. Copyright © 1975, 2001 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. All rights reserved.

By Frazier Falls, Straight-Creek—Great Burn, The Call of the Wild, Tomorrow’s Song, What Happened Here Before, by Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island, copyright © 1974 by Gary Snyder. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache and Unnamed Dragonfly Species from Well Then There Now © 2011 by Juliana Spahr. Reprinted by permission of David R. Godine, Publisher.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ronda, Margaret, author.

Title: Remainders : American poetry at nature’s end / Margaret Ronda.

Other titles: Post 45.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2018. | Series: Post*45 | Includes

bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017021390 | ISBN 9781503603141 (cloth : alk. paper) |

ISBN 9781503604896 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. | American poetry—21st century—History and criticism. | Nature in literature. | Ecology in literature. | Environmentalism in literature.

Classification: LCC PS310.N3 R66 2018 | DDC 811.009/36—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017021390

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/15 Minion

Remainders

American Poetry at Nature’s End

Margaret Ronda

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Loren Glass and Kate Marshall, Editors Post•45 Group, Editorial Committee

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Great Acceleration Poetics

1. North Central, South Side: Postwar Ecologies in Niedecker and Brooks

2. The Advancing Signs of the Air: Ashbery’s Atmospheres

3. NOT PEOPLE’S PARK / PEOPLE’S PLANET: 1970s Revolutionary Pastoral

4. Mourning and Melancholia at the End of Nature

5. A Rescue That Comes Too Late: Figure and Disfiguration in Contemporary Ecopoetics

Coda: On Storms to Come

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

This book has emerged over years of generative conversations and collaborative engagements with mentors, friends, colleagues, editors, students, and other interlocutors. Its subject matter is determinedly bleak, but the intellectual community that has fostered it has been sustaining at all turns.

I’m grateful for the material support this book has received over several years. The Holloway Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California–Berkeley, the Hellman Fellowship Fund at the University of California–Davis, and the Center for Cultural Analysis Faculty Fellowship at Rutgers provided much-needed research time, institutional support, and funding. The American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellowship allowed me two years to develop this project. Many thanks to this organization, and to Indiana University’s Department of English for providing me an institutional base for those two years of postdoctoral research and teaching.

Publication of this book was made possible in part by assistance from the University of California–Davis Office of Research, Division of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies.

Abiding thanks to my editor, Emily-Jane Cohen, for her unstinting support of this project. Thanks to Faith Stein, Jessica Ling, Christine Gever, and the production team at Stanford for their expert assistance. I also want to thank the series editors, Kate Marshall and Loren Glass, for their belief in and thoughtful comments on this book. Michael Szalay and Florence Dore, the previous Post•45 series editors, were also very supportive of the book in its earlier stages. Thank you to Rob Wilson and an anonymous reader for thoughtful and exacting readings that pushed this book forward. My deepest gratitude to Young Suh for use of his photograph, Bathers under Bridge, as the cover image for this book.

A previous version of Chapter 4 appeared as Mourning and Melancholia in the Anthropocene in Post45: Peer Reviewed (June 10, 2013), http://post45.research.yale.edu/2013/06/mourning-and-melancholia-in-the-anthropocene/. A previous version of Chapter 5 was originally published as Anthropogenic Poetics in the minnesota review 83 (2014): 102–111. Copyright 2014, Virginia Tech. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, and the present publisher, Duke University Press. www.dukeupress.edu.

The ideas for this book have been enriched by conversations in various institutional settings. Thanks to audiences at Johns Hopkins, Williams College, UC–Santa Cruz, UC–Irvine, UC–Berkeley, Indiana University, Penn State, Dartmouth, and Rutgers for helpful discussions of work-in-progress. Special thanks to Post•45 colleagues at the Stanford conference for a particularly rigorous dialogue that shaped the course of this book. Thanks to Jasper Bernes, Steph Burt, Chris Chen, Jeffrey Cohen, Kendra Dority, Jonathan Eburne, Amy Elias, Keegan Cook Finberg, Jennifer Fleissner, Anne-Lise François, Alysia Garrison, Ross Gay, Rob Halpern, Andrew Hoborek, Oren Izenberg, Virginia Jackson, Lynn Keller, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Madeline Lane-McKinley, Jennifer Scappettone, Kenan Sharpe, Jonathan Skinner, Juliana Spahr, Michael Szalay, Cathy Wagner, Dorothy Wang, and Rebecca Walkowitz for hospitality, collegiality, and acts of kindness along the way. Working with Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne on the Conference on Ecopoetics was a spur to deeper thinking about ecopoetics now.

My years in the English Department at Rutgers in New Brunswick were truly charmed. Carolyn Williams and Jonah Siegel were supportive chairs and impeccable intellectual guides. Conversations with Evie Shockley, Meredith McGill, and Colin Jager have been important to this book’s progress; they are extraordinary mentors and friends. I was lucky enough to have a whip-smart cohort of junior faculty to share work and life with during those two years: Doug Jones, Andrew Goldstone, Mukti Mangharam, Sarah Novacich, Stéphane Robolin, and Abigail Zitin. A special shout-out to Nick Gaskill, whose friendship and intellectual comradeship remain invaluable. My graduate seminar at Rutgers on American poetry in the Anthropocene provided a pivotal space for engaging the questions of this book; many thanks to the graduate student participants in this course.

The Center for Cultural Analysis Objects and Environments seminar offered a vital intellectual space. Thanks to Colin Jager, Jorge Marcone, and Henry Turner for creating such a singular venue for interdisciplinary inquiry, and to my fellow participants in the seminar for their adventurous thinking.

At the University of California–Davis, I’ve been blessed with remarkable colleagues and a vibrant intellectual culture. Thanks to Liz Miller and John Marx for their warm welcome and expert guidance as department chairs. Thanks to Fran Dolan, Hsuan Hsu, and Mike Ziser for collaborations in the environmental humanities. Joshua Clover’s inimitable wit, critical insights, and friendship have been essential to my life here in Davis. My deepest appreciation to Gina Bloom, Margie Ferguson, Beth Freeman, Kathleen Fredrickson, Mark Jerng, Alessa Johns, Desirée Martin, Flagg Miller, Katie Peterson, David Simpson, Matthew Stratton, Young Suh, Claire Waters, and Jacinda Townsend for generosity and companionship. Conversations with Seeta Chaganti, especially in the final stretch of writing, were an invaluable resource. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Liz Miller for her incisive engagement with this book and for her friendship.

I had the tremendously good fortune to develop my early ideas about American poetry and environmental relations in conversation with Sam Otter, Kevis Goodman, and Chris Nealon. Each of them has shaped my work immeasurably, through their superb mentoring, their brilliant scholarship, and their ongoing support and friendship. My thanks, as well, to Charles Altieri, Robert Hass, Lyn Hejinian, Brenda Hillman, and Colleen Lye.

For their love and support, I am inexpressibly grateful to my extended network of interlocutors, friends, and family. Profound thanks to Julie Carr, Jessica Fisher, Ted Martin, Annie McClanahan, and Liz Young, dear companions and peerless thinkers. Hillary Gravendyk’s fearlessness and passion never stopped flooring me. She is terribly missed. Grace Kook Anderson, Lev Anderson, Dan Clowes, Beth Conrey, Seth Cotlar, Leslie Dunlap, Chandra Gandolfo, Yutan Getzler, Nicole Kanda, Ceridwen Koski, Olivia Koski, Jamie Mieras, Berit Rabinovitz, Jean Scarboro, and Brian Teare have been steadfast and supportive friends over the long haul. Loving thanks to my wonderful family-in-law: Linda Carroll, Tim Barraud, David Menely, Ann Garvin, Nicole Sievers, Jaimee King, and Daniel Menely. Without the essential assistance and care provided by my aunt, Ruth Inkpen, our lives over the past seven years would not have been possible.

My father, Bruce Ronda, is my best and most enduring guide to a life dedicated to literature and arts. I’m so grateful to him and Chris Nelson for their abiding encouragement. Priscilla Inkpen, my mother, did not live to see this book in print, but her commitment to environmental justice is at the heart of this project. My son Rowan’s affectionate ways and curious mind are abounding sources of delight. I thank him for the joys he brings me every day. My gratitude to Tobias Menely remains beyond expression. I’m inspired every day by his brilliance, his principled commitments, and his adventurous spirit. May our collaborations continue to find new and marvelous forms.

Introduction

Great Acceleration Poetics

How can a poem speak for, to, with ecological phenomena? Can poetry give matter and creaturely life a voice, a face? How does a poem make loss and extinction visible, or register new, disturbing presences, such as toxic sludge, oil spills, dead zones? How ought responsibility for ecological calamity be adjudicated at the level of the individual subject and the collective? The poems of this study think through these complex representational questions as they emerge in an era of unprecedented environmental crisis: the Great Acceleration. Environmental historians have identified the Great Acceleration as a distinct phase in global ecological history, defined by rapid deleterious change to various planetary systems.¹ This period, beginning after 1945 and continuing into the present, is characterized by metabolic rifts occurring at a global scale, from the sharp spike in CO2 emissions and the disturbance of the nitrogen cycle to massive biodiversity loss and ocean acidification. While many of the broad-based environmental changes occurring in the Great Acceleration precede 1945, they undergo a dramatic scaling-up in the post-1945 era, a direct result of the intensified extractivist and expansionist strategies of global capitalism and the new technological innovations that accompany them.² These accelerating environmental changes thus illuminate a key contradiction of capitalism in the twentieth and now twenty-first century: its innovative forms of creative destruction, in Joseph Schumpeter’s famous formulation, generate unexpected planetary consequences, new forms of destructive creation.³ This book offers a literary history of this postwar period centered on these pervasive changes, turning to poetry as an essential archive of ecological reflection and response.

Conceptualizing the postwar era as bearing distinctive significance has been a primary argument of environmental historians and theorists for several generations now, particularly given 1945’s bright line: the detonation of the atomic bomb.⁴ This apocalyptic threat was clearly the most spectacular ecological change of the era and the most visible signal of anthropogenic power to alter the planet. The devastating effects of nuclear warfare and testing in particular areas—Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American Southwest, Bikini Atoll—made nuclear fallout one of the first fronts in the postwar study of toxic impacts on ecosystems, as scientists turned attention to the lingering effects of strontium-90 in waterways, soil, and human bodies and to the difficulty of managing nuclear waste. This new atomic regime produced important shifts in environmental thinking, ushering in new ways of conceiving of the destructive power of human technology and introducing dizzying new temporal scales—the half-life of radioactive waste, the instantaneity of nuclear winter—into the everyday imaginary of American culture.

Yet the nuclear threat has hardly been the only framework for conceptualizing emergent forms of environmental crisis in the postwar period. Historian Donald Worster famously called the postwar era the Age of Ecology, host to a variety of changing ideas about the environment and environmental politics.⁵ At the end of the 1960s, writers and activists in the United States such as Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, John Paul Galbraith, David Brower, and others had significantly widened the field of environmental attention beyond wilderness conservation and atomic fears to include pollution of air, water, and soil; toxins in consumer goods, in the home and workplace, and in bodies; population growth; and energy concerns.⁶ By the late 1990s, the broad-based impact of anthropogenic activity on the earth system led to globalized configurations of ecological crisis, from ocean acidification to mass extinction and climate change. This book chronicles the changing definitions of crisis across this period, examining them in terms of larger frameworks developing at the time, from critiques of agricultural exploitation, waste, and urban toxicity in the 1950s to the global scales and epochal redefinitions of the 2000s.

In this book, I use the term Great Acceleration as an overarching period frame that defines this era’s ecohistorical specificity. This term has significant explanatory power for describing the changes to planetary systems that emerge with increasing intensity in the postwar period—changes that are inextricably tied to the forms of capitalist economic growth in America and in the world economy after 1945. As historians J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke argue in their recent book on the Great Acceleration, this period is the most anomalous and unrepresentative period in the 200,000-year-long history of relations between our species and the biosphere.⁷ The sheer dimensions and scope of planetary change after 1945—the dramatic increases in population, energy use, urbanization, carbon dioxide and methane emissions, habitat loss, agricultural development, and species endangerment and extinction—demand a historical framework that can foreground these new intensities. The terminology of the Great Acceleration attunes us to the particular entwining of the economic and the ecological in this period, a distinctive phase within the longer history of the production of nature in capitalism wherein the contradictions immanent to this system become increasingly pronounced.⁸

The destructive speed of environmental change associated with this period must be understood not only as an outcome of capitalism’s production of nature in pursuit of profit but as another dimension of capitalism’s tendency toward crisis. The growth of capitalism in the postwar period produced a series of crises, from the oil shocks and deindustrialization of the 1970s to the financial crisis of the late 2000s, that underscored the internal contradictions of this system.⁹ At the same time, we see corresponding transformations in planetary systems and biospheric processes occurring during this era. While the ability to recalibrate by finding new venues for appropriation and development has been essential to capitalism’s repertoire, the material consequences of its production of nature are becoming increasingly difficult to manage. The history of this era is thus one in which capitalism’s expansionary drive, fueled by new productive capacities and speeds, comes to generate deepening global economic imbalance and devastating metabolic rifts in the earth system.¹⁰ Thus, if the term acceleration brings to mind capital’s fantasy of increasingly frictionless flows and flexibilization of labor, here those associations are brought up against the runaway speed of earth-systemic alteration and the forms of precarity engendered by economic and ecological dynamics.¹¹

The Great Acceleration is often discussed in relation to the larger ecohistorical framework of the Anthropocene. For climate scientists and geologists, the Anthropocene can be measured by a series of stratigraphic signals, from changing sediment patterns to sea-level alterations to biotic changes such as extinction events, and it is by studying these geophysical changes that they date its beginning and calculate its effects.¹² For humanists interested in studying these planetary changes, the Anthropocene’s most profound implication is that humans as a species have transcended their status as biological agents to become a collective force that can irrevocably mark the earth. Scholars in the environmental humanities regard this epoch as necessitating new perspectives, not only about human impacts on planetary systems but about the very nature of the human. Across various periodizations of the Anthropocene, the 1945 period plays a pivotal role, whether as the initiating point of this epoch or as a successive stage in a longer era.¹³

My account of this period centers on the biospheric ramifications of capitalist development in their different forms across the postwar era. Remainders focuses not on species-level culpability but on the dynamics of explosive economic growth and accompanying technological innovations as engines of earth-systemic alteration.¹⁴ This study also foregrounds the ways capitalist productive relations generate vast inequalities and uneven systemic effects across the globe. It explores how the consequences of these dynamics were felt in immanent ways during this time and how environmental thinkers and poetic works developed a language for describing these unfolding changes.

Remainders looks in depth at three key eras of the Great Acceleration—the 1950s, the early 1970s, and the 2000s—when distinct conceptions of ecology and crisis were taking shape. The first chapter surveys the era of economic growth and prosperity beginning in the 1950s, often called the Golden Age of Capitalism, and it details the new scales of postconsumer waste and new forms of uneven development in the rural and urban peripheries that accompany this postwar economic boom. I turn next to the transitional time of the late 1960s and early 1970s, an era of revolutionary politics and burgeoning economic destabilization. This period heralds new conceptions of generalized ecological crisis, including atmospheric pollution, systemic toxicity, and unsustainable fossil fuel dependency, alongside explorations of radical alternatives to capital accumulation and land enclosure. The final chapters examine the turn to the discourse of the Anthropocene in the 2000s. Tracking the changing discourses of environmentalism over the second half of the century and into the present, my study attends to the evolving rhetorics that reflect on and shape collective sensibilities around ecological crisis. I consider the discourses of popular environmental thinkers across this period, including Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Bill McKibben, and Naomi Klein, placing them alongside contemporaneous works of poetry in order to discern their continuities and disjunctions.

This book explores the ways these emerging paradigms of crisis after 1945 generate not only ecological and economic arguments but also aesthetic sensibilities that shape the poetry of this period. Yet in this study I resist approaching poems as merely symptomatic objects. Instead, my readings attend to the non-synchrony, even friction, between poetry and environmental discourse. While the arguments of prose writers such as Rachel Carson and Bill McKibben often had a transformative effect on environmental politics, the poetry of this project largely frames itself as out of sync with its present. I contend that the enigmatic, refractory ecological imaginaries of these works provide important historiographical counterpoints to the timely interventions of mainstream environmentalist discourse. In their resistance to the emplotment and closures of narrative form, their speculative turns toward unimagined futures and recursive engagement with prior modes, and their attention to dynamics of persistence and decomposition, these poems generate distinct vantages on their contemporary conditions. In this way, Remainders illuminates the unique perspectives that poetry, rather than literary nonfiction or novels, American ecocriticism’s preferred genres, might provide for accounts of postwar ecologically oriented writing.

Attuned to the planetary poiesis of global capitalism in the Great Acceleration, the poems across this book imaginatively tarry with what lives on and what is beyond repair. Taking as their subject matter remainders of various kinds, from obsolescent commodities to polluted air and toxic matter, they convey the strange temporalities and phenomenologies of socioecological life in turmoil. Some probe the ways genres long associated with environmental relations must be reimagined or deconstructed as these relations undergo significant alteration. Others invest figures of apostrophe and prosopopoeia with new proportions in relation to the accelerating destruction of habitats and biodiversity loss. Remainders examines these portrayals as meditations on the ecological aftereffects of productive innovation and on poetry’s own changing figurative investments in an age of calamitous environmental change. Charting these literary developments across a variety of texts, Remainders uncovers an urgent poetic record of the untimely history of our environmental present.

A governing aim of this book is to elaborate an ecocritical outlook that attends more fully to the forms and figures of ecological calamity rather than to narratives of sustainability and hope.¹⁵ It is my contention that the history of this period, one of intensifying catastrophe at various scales, demands such attention. This is also a period of sustained environmental response, and the poems of this study all provide creative and moving contributions