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Tag Archives: Anthropocene

Meditations in an Emergency: The Cosmopolitan, the Quotidian, and the Anthropocene Turn in Sun Dong’s 2020 Pandemic Poetry

This past July I spent two weeks in the mountain village of Chenjiapu translating a set of poems by the Nanjing-based poet Sun Dong. She was able to join me for a few days toward the end of the residency, and we worked together on drafts of the translations. I finished the residency with drafts of two dozen poems […]

Of Rare Compatibility”: Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems and Making Kin in the Sericene in The Journal of Foreign Languages

I’m pleased to see my article on Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems and the Anthropocene appear in JFLC. Thanks go out to editor Lauri Scheyer in particular. The paper can be downloaded here and here. Abstract: Scripting what may be read as a “string figure” companion to Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, Jen Bervin’s 2017 Silk Poems project becomes […]

Generational breakdowns: Deep time fissures & abyssal geological vortices vs. Greatest Generation nostalgia vs. MAGA

It’s really something, isn’t it, to reckon with generational narratives, such as that of the Greatest Generation and the US role in WWII, in light of MAGA on one hand and, on the other, the end-Holocene transition into the [ ]? My father recently shared via group email a truly touching Memorial Day Salon column by US military family […]

What is [urban] poetry now without photography? With photos as cheap [we’d like to think] as words [are we mistaken] why not just [also] take a picture? (Post-Personism?)

  All things Anthropocene. All things, that is, marked by language — this word, Anthropocene, in particular, in this instance — by the inadequacies of language to do more than whatever it might be doing in the moment of its activation in embodied mind (in the human brain). Poetry goes way back: representation pushed to limits beyond “mere” representation, the attempt […]

Aesymnetes LAWKI / Holocene, Sweet Holocene

A utilitarian AI charged with global sovereignty by a cabal of well-intentioned scientists and their monied supporters. Its goal: in the face of cascading catastrophic climate change, nothing less than the preservation to the greatest degree possible of Life As We Know It — life on this planet as it has emerged in the last 10,000 years or […]

Metastate of Exception

The anthropocene means a “permanent” — intensifying, long-duration — state of exception. Reichstäglich fires: Western democracy burns and burns. It’s capital! The tire fire, the coal bed fire. Natural causes. A metastate of exception? What is a “metastate?” Wikipedia says: “In statistical mechanics, the metastate is a probability measure on the space of all thermodynamic states for a system with quenched randomness.” As […]

Soft focus, soft censorship, self-censorship: “Poetry,” “China,” and Biz Journo Expats

As much of a pleasure as it was to appear at the Shanghai International Literary Festival with Jen Bervin, Jen Hyde and Wen Jin, it was one mixed — as is always the case for me here in Shanghai — with significant measures of the odd and the off. Don’t get me wrong: One of the things I like about life in […]

Toward a Poetics of the Anthropocene

Abstract from NYU Shanghai Faculty Lecture, based on talk given at Fudan University, on poetry, poetics and the Anthropocene. I remain unconvinced in my own work, by my own work, and of it, and that’s perhaps the point, the point that can only be to keep working: In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, […]