10 - Blockade Chants and Cloud-Nets: Terminal Poetics of the Anthropocene

Summary

Poetry emerging under the sign of the Anthropocene must, like all cultural work, contend with the terminal horizon of climate change. New levels of social and environmental complexity open up the possibility for, and the necessity of, uncommon forms of solidarity, in resistance movements run through with insurmountable difference. Poetry that resonates with the chants of protests and, provoked by the indeterminate cloud architecture of digital networks, attempts to weave what cannot be woven, convokes these forms of solidarity while exposing the seams of difference. One important seam is a temporal difference between those for whom the Anthropocene harbors an imminent collective future and those for whom it names a long and already too present collective experience of oppression. In many respects, place rather than identity, site rather than form or figure, determine the trajectories of this writing. Discussing poetry by Juliana Spahr, Danez Smith, Stephen Collis, and Layli Long Soldier, this chapter sounds some of the key differences activating the uncommon solidarities of North American poetry in the emergent awareness of the Anthropocene.