University of Cambridge
'Not Infinite Enough': Experimental British Poetics, Industrial Ecology and Scarcity, 1969-Present
Abstract
dc:description.abstractThis dissertation assesses the relationship between experimental British ecopoetics, literary form and what I term ‘landscapes of ecological exhaustion’. It undertakes detailed studies of three key terrains — the agricultural field, the forestry plantation and the desertified upland pasture — and the close engagement with these sites by three late modernist poets: J.H. Prynne, Peter Larkin and Carol Watts. These terrains have tended to fall outside the scope of existing humanities scholarship on cultures of extractivism, which typically centres the ‘petroscapes’ of fossil fuel extraction and combustion in discussions of resource exhaustion. As I show here, however, it is these less obvious sites of ‘industrial ecology’ (Tsing) which have compelled British ecopoetic attention in persistently fraught and generative ways over the last five decades. Mimicking the organic environments to which they refer, these sites are what Larkin calls ‘compromised landscapes’: though depleted by domestication, they nevertheless retain aspects of their pastoral frame and thereby provoke complex and ambivalent poetic reckonings with questions of resource, finitude and exhaustion. As its central claim, this thesis theorises a poetics of scarcity as emergent from these landscapes. It offers the first sustained study of these poets in conversation, drawing on archival material to illuminate the affinities and distinctions between the densely patterned negotiations with scarcity, sufficiency and surplus that link their bodies of work. In particular, I argue, this shared preoccupation with scarcity produces reflexive experiments with poetry’s own finite or renewable capacities, in search of a language ‘adequate to its insufficiencies.’ Couching my close readings within the competing discourses of historical and new materialisms, I contend that this poetry both clarifies and contests these intensifying debates, drawing out the resources it offers for ecological ethics and poetic practice in an age of exhaustion. Following an introductory section which locates my enquiry within the field of Anthropocene poetics and the broader scholarly context of anti-extractive critique, Chapter One undertakes a study of Prynne’s agricultural poetics, moving from the Neolithic grain fields of *The White Stones* (1969) through to the toxified soils of *High Pink on Chrome* (1975). Bringing Olson’s ‘open-field poetics’ into disruptive dialogue with the specificities of British agrichemical degradation, I relate Prynne’s break from Olson’s influence to his embrace of forms of finitude. Chapter Two addresses Larkin’s ‘plantation poetics’, exploring representations of vegetal labour and rentier ecology in *Prose Woods* (1985). I then analyse Larkin’s post-1992 move towards scarcity’s ontological dimensions, and the tension this illuminates between a poetics of witness or ‘complaint’, and one of remediation. Chapter Three addresses the upland desert in Watts’s sequence *Zeta Landscape* (2005–ongoing), drawing scarcity into a near-contemporary climate of austerity and extinction. I discuss Watts’s integration of procedural and lyric modes to figure the rifts and relations that shape the production of creaturely life in this pastoral territory. My fourth chapter is an extended coda, appraising these poetic projects and their regard for ethical limits in light of contemporary ecopolitical debates over degrowth and rewilding, and identifying some emerging directions for innovative ecopoetry in an extractive age.
Degree
thesis:*- Name dc:type.qualificationname
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of Cambridge
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2023
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Campion, Phoebe
- Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Macfarlane, Robert
Subjects
dc:subject × 14Rights
dc:rightsIdentifiers
dc:identifier.*- DOI dc:identifier.doi
- https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.108368
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/367986