Shifting scales, inventive intermediations: posthuman ecologies in contemporary poetry

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay describes and investigates representations and figurations of ‘posthuman ecologies’ in contemporary poetry, i.e., how non-human agencies and materialities are evoked and explored in poetic writing, and how this is accompanied by a problematisation of anthropocentrism and certain strands of humanism. Specific attention is paid to shifts in scale and ‘intermediations’ between, for instance, bacteria and humans. The emergence and analysis of such ecologies are connected to a history of ‘cyberneticization’ and ‘ecologization’ manifested both in digital media, techno- and bio-capitalism, and in a rejuvenation of the concept of ecology in contemporary thinking. In this essay, these issues are discussed in relation to three recent poetic works by Adam Dickinson, J. R. Carpenter, and Nasser Hussain. While affirming a new historical situation shaped by computational technologies and cultures of control, this poetry also challenges this situation – and invites alternative ways of seeing and understanding the world – through a playful critique partly influenced by ideas, forms, and operations from an avant-garde tradition in literature and art.