Chapter 20 - Addressing Globalization in the Anthropocene

Summary

This chapter argues that ‘address’, one of poetry’s most fundamental — if sometimes overlooked – dimensions, offers insights into the concepts, affects, and scales surrounding our planet’s intertwined economic and ecological systems. Analysing work by Jorie Graham, Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover, Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Stephen Collis and Adam Dickinson, it explores poems that address a variety of subjects and entities. These include poems addressed to future generations, to geographical places, to online communities, to the human species, to the planet, and from the non-human to the human. In doing so, I show how understandings of globalization and the Anthropocene have caused a recalibration in the form as well as subject-matter of environmentally engaged poetry. This has implications for how we negotiate questions of climate change, temporality, extinction, technology, activism and agency. Now, more than ever, it matters not only what poems speak about, or even who (or what) is speaking, but to whom (or to what) they speak