Remainders

Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End discusses postwar poetry as an essential archive of ecological thinking in the era of the Great Acceleration, a period of rapid and unprecedented change to various planetary systems. While North American ecocriticism has tended to focus on narrative forms in its investigations of environmental consciousness and ethics, this book highlights the forms and themes of poetry as it imaginatively engages with various aspects of ecological crisis across this period. This book examines how works by poets including Lorine Niedecker, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Ashbery, Gary Snyder, and Juliana Spahr offer representations of remainders, from obsolescent goods to waste products and toxic matter, that explore the lingering consequences of productive relations. In their attention to these material forms, these poems explore unresolvable affects and sensations of living on amidst ecological calamity. This book’s method of reading for remainders redirects attention from postwar historical frameworks that stress social progress and economic development toward an emphasis on their socioecological effects, developing an ecomaterialist approach that draws on the critical historiography of natural history developed by Lukács, Benjamin, and Adorno. This approach also provides a distinctive account of the investments of postwar American poetry. Through its figurations of materials and activities cast adrift by capitalist modernization, poetry across this period develops a powerful ethos of untimeliness. Remainders argues that this ethos reflects on poetry’s own increasingly marginal status as a cultural form.