Cogent Arts & Humanities

Ecopoetic Technologies: Extraction, Mediation, and Hybridity in Contemporary Environmental Poetry

Cogent Arts & Humanities is pleased to welcome you to submit your research to the Article Collection "Ecopoetic Technologies: Extraction, Mediation, and Hybridity in Contemporary Environmental Poetry".

Ecopoetics is a field that emphasizes attention to nonhuman life, ecological interconnectedness, and the elegiac accounting of environmental depletion and planetary crisis. It has not conventionally been considered a poetic mode that foregrounds encounters with technology. Nonetheless, many ecopoets offer profound interrogations of the ways in which technological systems and concepts infiltrate, and subsume, environmental objects, systems, and resources. They do so through various thematic and formal means, including the integration or foregrounding of the technological materiality of poetic writing itself and the establishment of parallels between forms of poetic inspiration and technologies of extraction and resource depletion. This Article Collection intends to document and analyse the myriad ways in which technology – from systems of extraction to media and communication technologies, and technologies of writing – has become a topic of ecopoetic observation, while also showing how ecopoetry can offer a means of thinking through the techno-environmental hybridity of the current moment, and the ethical and representational claims that hybridity makes on the self.

This Article Collection is intended to expand the study of ecopoetics beyond a focus upon ecological entanglement, climate anxiety, and related forms of environmental affect. In recent years several ecopoetic writers, notably Jorie Graham and Juliana Spahr, have revealed new pathways for thinking through what ecopoetics can offer as a mode of encountering ecologies that overlap and become imbricated with technological systems. Their work also introduces the question of ecopoetic ethics, by asking what complicity and action mean at a time of systematic planetary crisis. Integrating representations of technology into the study of ecopoetics is a necessary means of furthering that trajectory; it has the potential to foreground the way in which individuals become entangled in systems that are both ecological and technological, extractive and mediated, and co-constitutive of an ongoing, and escalating crisis, and thereby become hybrid, cyborg entities themselves. Reading ecopoetics in terms of technological representation also has potential application as a means of re-assessing older poetic traditions, including Romanticism, modernism, postmodernism, and Language poetry, in which environmental technologies, or techno-environmental forms, were evident formally or thematically, but not always addressed explicitly. Building on the work of scholars from throughout the fields of poetics, environmental humanities, political ecology, and digital media theory, this Article Collection will offer a space for deep thinking about the possibilities of ecopoetry as a mode of material representation, both today and in the future.

While the primary purpose of this Collection is to analyse the ecopoetic representation of technologies, the topic should be interpreted broadly, allowing scope for a range of conceptual and literature-focused approaches. Alongside single-author or comparative studies of ecopoets and their works, possible article topics include:

•  Ecopoetic depictions of media representations of climate breakdown
• Interrogations of the figure of the cyborg or biomachinic hybridity in ecopoetry
• Depictions of the material workings of technologies of extraction, mediation, or creation
• Analyses of poetic space, form, and line as ecopoetic technologies
• Works of ecopoetry that integrate technology into the process of creation and/or operate through specifically digital means
• Studies of the way in which Romantic/modernist/postmodern writers work with both environmental and technological topics
• The role/value of ecopoetry as a radical, ethically situated means of opposition to climate breakdown and resource extraction
• Attention to ecopoetic accounts of extraction in specific locales, such as sacrifice zones in the Global South, and the technologies of neo-colonialism
• Interrogations of ecopoetry as a label in the current moment with its own ethical valence and connotations

Meet the Guest Advisor

Dr Thomas Storey is an early-career academic working in literary and cultural studies, the environmental humanities, contemporary poetics, and digital media studies, with a research focus on the intersections of technological mediation, extractive economies, environmental crisis, and literary representation. He holds a PhD from King’s College London, and recently published a Routledge monograph on the Anthropocene sublime from Romanticism to digitality.

The Guest Advisor declares no conflict of interest regarding this work.