Abstract
David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics melds the poetic and the geologic. Symbols, text, spaces, and syntax knot together into the visceral, providing a grammar to understand the way air, ice, magma, and rock envelop and destroy one another to make the planet both habitable and volatile. Though Farrier (p. 128) is careful not ‘to overstate the case for poetry in the Anthropocene’, he points toward the ways in which it ‘can help frame the ground we stand on as we consider which way to run’. Turning attention to the often overlooked but taken for granted elements of the apparent Anthropocene – the slick of ‘liver-thick mud’ as described in Seamus Heaney’s poetry or Evelyn Reilly’s ‘anti-pure’ poetics of plastics – Farrier’s writing allows readers to firmly plant their feet in the sensuous nature of our geologic reality in addition to framing the ground it creates.
Much of Anthropocene Poetics reads like poetry. Standalone passages, such as – ‘Intimacy allows us to imagine worlds of possibility; whether in terms of texture, sensuality, or violence, intimacy achieves a form of knowledge in the traffic of entities’ (p. 19), or ‘We need to feel ourselves made strange to perceive how a once loudly abundant world is being made strange – silent, empty – to itself’ (p. 94) – punctuate and accentuate the poetics of the text, even when taken out of context. However, the book is most effective when combining poetics with analysis, which is particularly salient in Farrier’s discussion of Christian Bök’s The Xenotext. Bök attempts to write an ‘eternal poem’ by encoding a mutually enciphering pair of sonnets onto the genome of the extremophile bacterium, d. radiodurans (p. 110). Due to the robust characteristic of the bacterium, the poem will, in theory, persist until the death of the sun. As Farrier notes, this project makes known both the hubris of humanity and the preciousness of multispecies meaning-making. In other words, Bök’s poetry brings together both the paradoxes and political possibilities of the apparent Anthropocene.
Notice, I keep using the word ‘apparent’ to qualify Anthropocene. This is in part due to the politics of naming the Anthropocene, and also due to the fact that the start-date or ‘golden spike’ of the Anthropocene is still speculative. I raise these points precisely because Farrier, who is clearly aware of this -cene’s other names (Capitalocene, Plantationocene, etc.-cene) chooses to not privilege any particular name or origin story. While I understand his reasoning, I argue that this is a missed opportunity for engaging more deeply with the political subtext of much of the poetry mentioned in the book. Further, it is a missed opportunity to think through the ways in which issues of racialization and colonialism are entrenched in geologic truths of the epoch. 1 The poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, 2 specifically The Book of the Dead (2018), comes to mind as a text that explicitly deals with intersections of race, class, labor, and the geologic, bringing to light the nested nature of life, death, and deep time. While I understand that Farrier’s book is not meant to be prescriptive, so much as it is meant to be critical and analytical, I was left wondering which direction I should begin running after having my feet planted in the sensuousness of the Anthropocene.
In Farrier’s book, poetics help make the planet and its processes less uncanny and more knowable on an emotional and aesthetic level. The work of making-knowable, especially in the face of profound change, makes this text vital. He outlines a geological humanities, cohering the growing fields of environmental humanities, energy humanities, and geohumanities, which is no small task.
