Roll on that day: A dialectical poetry

Abstract

Phil O’ Keefe’s Roll on that day is not just poetry, but a dialectical materialist rendition of reality. In this tribute, I refer to his poetry as “rendition,” rather than, interpretation. O’ Keefe renders nature, time, and space not as separate and discrete, but as a complete assemblage of hope and fear; second, he renders resources, labor, and landscape as simultaneously “nature(al)” and produced. “Rendering” as opposed to “interpreting” is O’Keefe’s Marxist poetic justice because “rendition” is reality communicated, expressed, viewed, and revealed in the richness of its relationality. Rendition is poetic and dialectical. Interpretation, on the other hand, involves the treatment of data collected through externalization and segmentation, a prosaic analysis that externalizes nature as an environment to be prodded, tabulated, experimented, and fixed. Inspired by O’ Keefe’s poetry, I trace Marxist concepts of alienation and commodification of nature, arguing that O’Keefe’s poetry provides a dialectical ebb and flow which disrupts teleology and provides a conceptual lens to understand modes of production not as discrete or ahistorical, but instead, as containing seeds of the previous modes of production. This tribute concludes by emphasizing O’Keefe’s contention that development has to be decolonized, that uneven development is the death of dialectical poetry and the victory of analytical prose, that theorists must begin with an honest acceptance that development theory is simultaneously a response to the effects of capital and are conditioned by it.