Anthropocene Poetry

 This chapter examines scientific and cultural interpretations of the Anthropocene, discusses their ethical and political dimensions, and analyses debates about gender and race, inequality, and inter-species ethics. It situates the concept of the Anthropocene within theoretical discussions about cultural geography and science studies, and discusses how the idea of the Anthropocene challenges long-held assumptions about poetry and place. Literary critics' burgeoning interest in ecopoetics - from the lyric to the experimental - is examined with reference to debates about the Anthropocene, and recent critical projects on poetry and the Anthropocene are explored. This opening chapter continues with a look at how the Anthropocene as a concept is shaping the production of poetry, and considers the Anthropocene issues that writers contributing to anthologies of poetry and literary journals have highlighted. If many poets considered in this monograph look to scientific knowledge to inform their creative work, and sometimes their environmental activism, some subvert its white, patriarchal biases. The chapter argues that a transdisciplinary understanding of the idea of the Anthropocene has come to inform literary projects relating to it. Poets, arts practitioners, scientists, and environmental activists are entering into dialogue, to try to put into words its simultaneously vast and insidiously intimate impacts. In 2019, the majority of the Anthropocene Working Group proposed to formalise the Anthropocene as a geological epoch beginning with radionuclides from nuclear bomb testing. The site the Working Group proposed in 2023 to provide evidence of this is a lake in Canada. The chapter cautions that while it would be excessively totalising to propose that Anthropocene poetry is a genre, or to read all contemporary poetry through the lens of the Anthropocene, the poetry presented in recent anthologies and journals suggests that interdisciplinary and collaborative ways of understanding the Anthropocene are arising.