The writing of the disaster poem: Knowing oil through global apocalypse movies

Abstract

Based on a chapter of my dissertation’s exegesis, my paper will discuss using disaster as a theme and motif in my petropoetic project as a way of mediating and renegotiating the ways hegemonic petrocapitalism is experienced in the Global North. Oil extraction leads to disasters across very different spatial, temporal and visual frames. Oil spills, for instance, may be localised and devastating, while all “successful” oil consumption draws us incrementally closer to global catastrophe. In the meantime, disaster cinema often positions oil use as both exciting, for its implied role in both narrative and visual effects, and as a saviour, for its ability to get protagonists out of trouble. The challenge, as Graeme Macdonald puts it, is “how to demonstrate the catastrophic in the everyday life of ‘banal’ oil, to advocate that the fundamental disaster inheres in the productive volume of the ‘efficient,’ operative, and regularized extraction-emission cycle” (2017, p. 55). Poetry can act as a critical space to observe these lived contradictions, while drawing a reader’s attention to the prominence of both petroaesthetics and oil’s prominent materiality in popular screen entertainment.