Climate Poetics: Contemporary Ecopoetry and the Remaking of Elegy

Abstract

One manifestation of the cascading ecological crises that characterize our current moment is a weakening of any sense of futurity. The implacable escalation of the climate crisis, the amplification of which is already inevitable given the carbon already in the atmosphere, has the effect of eroding any forward-facing enterprise and concentrating our focus on the immediacy of the present. In ecopoetics, a genre of poetry that has emerged in response to ecological crisis, this altered temporal framework has manifested in a new form of elegy, one that takes as its subject planetary survival. Unlike earlier forms of elegy, these ecopoetic works do not just mourn for what has passed, but for what remains. Many of these works therefore offer an interrogation of the value and meaning of hope in a chronically diseased environmental body; they question the end of futurity and seek consolation in the project of making kin across human and nonhuman divides. Such works question what can be passed on to future generations when our capacity to think the future has corroded. These works therefore establish a form of ‘climate poetics’, reflecting the ways in which an awareness of climate breakdown has altered poetic representation. This article will analyze this trend in ecopoetics through a close reading of poems by two prominent practitioners, Jorie Graham and Ed Roberson, while also situating their work within the wider cultural tendency toward the end of futurity. The work of these two poets reveals how elegiac writing has the potential to reconceptualize climate breakdown as a type of recursive bereavement, enacted on the nonhuman and the human alike, while also showing how ecopoetic elegy can function as a means of reconsidering the relation between the lyric self and the wider ecosystem, conceived of as a site of perpetual disaster and loss.