What is an Emergency Ecopoetics?

Abstract

The structure of feeling for environmental knowledge and art has evolved over the past decades; with new pollutions like plastic, resource depletions, climate change, and mass extinctions, the danger feels at once more extensive, more various, more powerful, and more intimate. This paper asks what this shift implies for ecopoetics, the wordcraft of ecological perspectives and worlds. What might an “emergency ecopoetics” look like? I propose what I see as at least two general steps towards an emergency ecopoetics, which I call an “expanded ecopoetics”: (1) The first step is to foreground an ecocritical exposure of the poetics or fabrication of all the texts we read, not only environmentally oriented ones, and to see this fabrication in two ways, as a poetics of both their (material) conditional ecology and their (imaginative) propositional ecology. What messages do literature and art have for us, positive and negative, subliminal or deliberate, about what we are and what we might be? (2) A second step requires a poetics of reading and teaching in addition to the poetics of the text itself. I will briefly look at the network and streaming TV series Riverdale (2017 and ongoing) as a case study.

Bio

Glenn Willmott is a Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Queen’s University in Canada. His interests are in modernism, comics, and ecocritical and economic views of culture; and is recently the author of Reading for Wonder: Ecology, Ethics, Enchantment (2018).

Thermography: A Poetics of Heat

Abstract

How do we imagine writing with and about heat in a warming world? What forms of writing might emerge when heat and its effects are invited into the compositional process? This creative presentation will involve an explanation of procedures and a reading of two poems from a project about writing, metabolism, and heat. I will briefly discuss ongoing work emerging from a series of laboratory experiments involving heat stress and my body, as well as an experiment involving cockroaches, Kafka, heat, and thermal imaging.

Bio

Adam Dickinson is the author of four books of poetry. His work has been nominated for awards including the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and the Raymond Souster Award. He was also a finalist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Poetry Prize and the K.M. Hunter Artist Award in Literature. His book Anatomic won this year's Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize from the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada. He teaches Creative Writing at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario.

Notes on Heliopoetics

Abstract

This essay discusses how to look at the sun today. The sun is our energy future and energy humanities future. As we turn towards a transitional and generational shift to solar, what kind of transitional cultural forms and productions will serve as guide? What will the world of solar energy look like? Most imaginations of this energy regime envision it as primarily ecotopian. However, as Imre Szeman mentions, the belief "that a shift to wind and solar power occasions a more general expansion of social justice – [is] a completely unsubstantiated view of how energy and social possibility are linked" (On Petrocultures, 11). The associations of solarity and what Szeman calls "energy justice" must be produced rather than assumed. I use the term "heliopoetics," borrowed from Derrida, to track different metaphorical possibilities for the sun. Some of these metaphors are regressive as authoritarian and fascist groups have long used the sun to represent sovereign power. However, several progressive, anti-fascist, and anti-racist groups have also sought to resignify the sun. I examine work from the Black Arts movement, including poems by Sun Ra and Amiri Baraka, as fostering an African American consciousness of the sun as a figure of resistance and planetary consciousness. I also examine the visual art of Canadian artist Malcolm Pate, whose digital media installation of a sun composed of flickering candles conveys a sense of the fragility and elegiac quality of the sun.

Bio

Joshua Schuster is an associate professor of English and core faculty member of the Centre for Theory and Criticism at Western University in London, Ontario. Western University is situated on the traditional territories of the Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Lunaapeewak and Attawandaron peoples; Professor Schuster gratefully acknowledges the First Nations peoples who have longstanding relationships to the land and region of southwestern Ontario and across Turtle Island. Professor Schuster's first book The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics (U of Alabama Press, 2015) won the Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize in 2016. His current book project What Is Extinction? A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals is nearing completion.