The No-Prospect Poem

This chapter argues that, to bring the Anthropocene into a specifically poetic language, poets have recalled and revised the tradition of the loco-descriptive poem and the prospect poem. J.H. Prynne, Kofi Awoonor, Natasha Trethewey, and Juliana Spahr use the hill as an imaginative location for staging the dilemmas of the putative “global citizen” examined at length in chapter two. Far from offering spectatorial mastery to the poet, however, the hill is transformed into the ground and habitation of precarious life. The hill thus makes visible an alternative trajectory of contemporary subjectivity in which the poem’s “I” emerges from and is shaped by the collective immiseration of global capitalism.