Ecopoetics and the Capitalocene (Creative Writing; Poetry)

This class offers an immersive, practical, and theoretical engagement with ecopoetics: an array of creative and critical practices concerned with human-nature entanglements, environmental destruction, and ecopolitical challenges. Focusing on poetry, we will investigate approaches to contemporary writing in ecopoetics and examine how poets register and respond to ongoing transformations of the planet. These considerations will be linked to the notion of the Capitalocene, a counter-concept to the Anthropocene that acknowledges some of the controversies surrounding a designated ‘human epoch’. Correspondingly, the creative writing we will develop in this class will be guided by questions concerning human/more-than-human encounters, energy and extraction, interactions between language and the physical-material world, innovative ecopoetical form, and socio-ecological justice. As we approach these issues from an interdisciplinary perspective, we will explore the capacity of ecopoetics to enmesh webs of life with world-systemic processes of accumulation and reflect on the impact of imaginative, critical, and activist practices in our present moment.