Text Matters, Number 13, 2023
https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.13.05

Radical Ecopoetics: The Apocalyptic Vision of Jorie Graham’s Sea Change

Gi Taek Ryoo

Chungbuk National University, Korea
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4673-3085

Keywords: Jorie Graham, Sea Change, apocalypse, ecopoetics, emotion, lyric

INTRODUCTION

At the turn of the new millennium, we found ourselves abruptly (yet not unexpectedly) confronting the end of the world. The ecological harms caused by humans pose a significant threat to our survival, and it is the environmental exploitations induced by human avarice that would bring the world to an end. Jorie Graham’s Sea Change (2008) addresses the issue of irreversible climate change, with the purpose of awakening the public to environmental crises such as species extinction, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, melting ice caps, and rising sea levels. This highly acclaimed collection of poems transmits a dire warning of the end of humanity by featuring an apocalyptic world, in which, as Graham writes in Sea Change, “there are sounds the planet will make, even / if there is no one to hear them” (“No Long Way Round,” Sea Change 56). Graham investigates experimental forms of language to convey anthropogenic environmental destruction and evoke feelings of human complicity, dread, and hopelessness.

Graham’s apocalypse is grounded in Bill McKibben’s sense of crises, in The End of Nature (1989), that we can no longer find “nature” or wilderness untouched by human activities. According to McKibben, nature has been vanquished because there now is no remaining part of the world independent from and untainted by the human race. In 2000, Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer proclaimed that we have now entered a new geological epoch called the “Anthropocene,” when the earth’s environment is transformed and shaped by humans rather than vice versa (17). These stunning proclamations, together with the documentary of former US Vice President Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), greatly raised public awareness of global warming, pressing America to think of the causes and moral obligations of climate change. The US was then one of the largest contributors to climate change in terms of per capita carbon emissions that generate greenhouse gas effects. This ecological crisis was accelerated by the market mechanism of production and consumption and has had a particular bearing on the emergence of America as a global economic power in the twentieth century.

However, the US refused climate change negotiations and disavowed environmental responsibility.^[1] As Kari M. Norgaard observes, “even though a large majority of Americans believe global warming is occurring and is a serious problem, a sense of urgency is lacking” because they assume that climate change occurs somewhere in a distant place and sometime in a deferrable future (194). Any events or issues “outside the cultural sphere of attention” are often considered ‘“unimportant’ and ‘unreal,’ ‘inaccessible’ not ‘close to home’” (Norgaard 116). Global-level climate change remains less important than local- or national-level environmental issues. Norgaard calls this phenomenon “socially organized denial,” which prescribes a “sense of knowing and not knowing, of having information but not thinking about it in their everyday lives” (9, 4). The notions of what to consider and what to ignore are socially constructed and eventually become “norms of emotion” (Norgaard 9), which often creates enormous psychological blocks for taking immediate, necessary actions.

It is within these socio-political contexts of the early twenty-first century that Graham’s Sea Change was written. While nature and environmental themes are pervasive from Graham’s first collection, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980), onward, her poetry has been placed squarely in the realm of poststructuralism or postmodernism because of her ongoing experiments with language. Unlike Graham’s other earlier collections, however, Sea Change has enjoyed a number of ecological analyses as it stands out for its explicit concern with the climate crisis. Lynn Keller defines Sea Change as “poetry of the self-conscious Anthropocene” (2), which conveys the widespread awareness of human impacts on the planet in its linguistic forms. Matthew Griffiths, for his part, demonstrates how Graham’s textuality in Sea Change can be reconfigured—while drawing our attention to its own artificiality—as a form of sustainability. These studies offer new possibilities for appreciating Graham’s ecopoetics and reevaluating her apocalyptic vision within the context of experimental poetry.

This paper, while building on existing studies of Graham’s work, explores the full implications of her ecopoetics, which brings our attention to the affective dimension of experimental forms of language. Graham’s poetry is not just discursively constituted, it involves our emotional or bodily engagement, which allows us to have an experiential encounter with the environmental crisis. Graham’s Sea Change evokes ecological awareness and a sense of interconnectedness with the environment, not primarily through linguistic representation or (de)construction but via a consorted enactment of lyric language and our sensory perception. It is Graham’s particular mode of writing that brings together linguistic (discursive) and emotional (physical) factors into an embodied performance. This paper draws on Graham’s Sea Change and her interviews to investigate how her ecopoetics disrupts our normal modes of perception and attention—often involved in the social production of apathy or denial regarding climate change—to redirect our sensibility, and examine how her poetry awakens our sense of coexistence with and responsibility towards nonhuman others.

POETICS OF APOCALYPSE

Graham’s apocalypse is a way of imagining the end of nature and, thus, the end of the world that might have already happened. We are currently facing the total destruction of the environment and human civilization. As Lawrence Buell states, “apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor . . . the rhetoric of apocalypticism implies that the fate of the world hinges on the arousal of the imagination to the sense of crisis” (285). Apocalypse usually refers to either revelation in its biblical sense or the end of the world in its popular sense. The former can be called “revelatory apocalypse,” which envisages eschatological salvation; the latter may be termed “secular apocalypse,” which denotes any natural or human-driven catastrophe. The revelatory apocalypse is central to Western cultures as—Malcolm Woodland claims—it intimates “a particular discursive power and a particular desire” for mastery, finality, and closure (xvi) that promotes the arrival at “the promised land” or promised end (Parker qtd. in Woodland 20). It is this desire for finality and closure that gives shape and meaning to history, and this meaning is inseparable from Western apocalyptical teleology.

However, Graham’s apocalypse in Sea Change is presented rather as an antithesis to the traditional revelatory apocalypse. As Woodland observes when analyzing Graham’s The Errancy (1997), “Graham’s anticlosural stance, then, is an antiapocalyptic stance” (171). Graham considers the aesthetic discourse of finality or closure to be complicit with the revelatory apocalypse. In an interview, she claims that “ending-dependence and eschatological thinking” has shaped “Western sensibility,” as evident in notions such as “manifest destiny, westward expansion. Imperialisms of all kinds”; this kind of “apocalypse,” she adds, is “the ultimate commodification” (Graham, Interview by Thomas Gardner [A] 84). Graham associates “eschatological thinking” with the imperial desire for order and mastery—with an urge to dominate and appropriate—which contributes to “the ultimate commodification” of social relations and of the natural (nonhuman) world. The fact that the earth is fundamentally transformed as a result of pollution, exploitation, and colonization compels her to question the aesthetic discourse of “the end” and by extension the capitalistic culpability for the destruction of the earth.

The revelatory apocalypse has been a basis for the very Western capitalistic thinking that has brought about the present environmental crisis. Thus, Graham strives to subvert aesthetic closure and rational control and leaves the text completely “open” by bringing into play the poetic devices she characteristically employs in her experimental poems, such as broken syntax, wide spacing between lines, enjambment, dashes, abstract diction, and so on. Graham has found a way to render apocalypse while avoiding the pitfall of teleological revelation by transforming or recontextualizing the revelatory apocalypse into the secular environmental apocalypse.^[2] The textual openness of her poetry, designed to disrupt any teleological schemes and the desire for closure, comes to disclose environmental crisis and ecological entanglement. Because of its radical openness, her text appears to be chaotic and fragmentary, which ironically dramatizes the apocalyptic ruins and wreckage. Yet, within the crumbling relics of this failing planet, one can witness, with unusual clarity, the interconnectedness of all the beings—animate or inanimate—that share the same destiny.

APOCALYPTIC DRAMA

The apocalyptic vision of Sea Change allows us to “experience” catastrophic climate change, the inevitable death of species, and all other destructive effects of humanity on the planet. The poem presents a deteriorating world, against which Graham tests her sense of what she is—that is, having mind and body. Graham explores new modes of lyric poetry that may respond to the questions Margaret Ronda asks in her Remainders (2018) even though the latter does not consider Graham in her analysis:

How can a poem speak for, to, with ecological phenomena? Can poetry give matter and creaturely life a “voice,” a “face”? How does a poem make loss and extinction visible, or register new, disturbing presences, such as toxic sludge, oil spills, dead zones? How ought responsibility for ecological calamity be adjudicated at the level of the individual subject and the collective? (1)

The question of how a poem can depict “ecological phenomena” and evoke a sense of “responsibility for ecological calamity” is precisely what Graham is concerned with. Graham’s unique solution is to render Sea Change as an apocalyptic drama, which enacts the human-nonhuman entanglement. This is a stage where a multitude of human and nonhuman actors (including natural phenomena) appear to have their own agencies—forces and “voice[s].” Sea Change, thus, invites readers to enter the drama as actors themselves to encounter who we are, who we are with, and where we all (humans and nonhumans) are.

In Sea Change, Graham imagines the worst-case scenario that, because of increasing anthropogenic intervention, we may have irreversibly crossed the tipping point, the point of no return at which the earth has lost its capacity to restore equilibrium. Sea Change was written, Graham explains, “after a very deep apprenticeship to the facts and issues involved in climate science” (Interview by Sharon Blackie 39). The poem “Positive Feedback Loop,” for example, employs the scientific model of the tipping point thematically and stylistically to show how a slight change in the climate can bring about unpredictable consequences through the amplifying (“positive”) loops of cause and effect.

I am listening in the silence that precedes. Forget
everything, start listening. Tipping point, flash
point,
convective chimneys in the seas bounded by Greenland.
. . . . . . . . . . .
fish are starving to death in the Great Barrier Reef, the new Age of
Extinctions is
now
says the silence-that-precedes—you know not what
you
are entering, a time
beyond belief. Who is one when one calls oneself
one?
(“Positive Feedback Loop,” Sea Change 42)

The poem describes a series of feedback loops between global warming, melting icebergs, and ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, and rising sea levels across the globe. The melting of Greenland’s ice sheet, caused by the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, leads to a rise in sea levels, which, as von Holle et. al. demonstrate, has devastating effects on coastal habitats: “fish are starving to death” (694). Moreover, the gradual retreat of the ice in Greenland leads to a progressive reduction of “convective chimneys,” which diminishes the supply of dense water to the Atlantic Ocean, which, in turn, makes it more difficult for oceanic convection—“a key mechanism that regulates . . . water-mass transformation, CO2 exchange, and nutrient transport” (Vreugdenhil and Gayen 1)—to occur. “Once feedback loops like the above cut in,” Frederick Buell would argue, “global warming can suddenly and catastrophically increase” (103), with the increasing possibility of passing the tipping point.

positive feedback loops—& the chimneys again, & how it is the ray of sun is taken in
in freedom, & was there another way for
this host
our guest,
we who began as hands, magic of fingers, laying our thresholds stone upon stone,
stretched skin between life and death,
(“Positive Feedback Loop,” Sea Change 43)

The poem also reminds us of the fact that global warming is a phenomenon engendered by the industrial activities of humanity and the reckless pursuit of profit. The result is that the environmental damage caused by humans has reciprocal effects on humanity. With the extinction of species and loss of habitat, we “are entering, a time” of total annihilation when there is no “one” left: “Who is one when one calls oneself / one?” Our rapacious “hands, magic of fingers” have fundamentally transformed the planet, while “laying our thresholds stone upon stone, / stretched skin between life and death.” It is this “positive feedback loop” in which humans and nonhumans are caught up, as “this host / our guest,” in the vicious circle.

Sea Change incorporates the discourse of climate change into our physical body in the form of feeling. Graham does not want us to simply understand the scientific concepts of climate change; her goal is to have us “actually ‘feel’ (and thus physically believe) what we have and what we are losing” (Interview by Deidre Wengen). Graham’s task then is to reengage us with the moribund planet by embodying the deteriorating world of matter in the discursive structure of her poetry. The poem alternates between long lines and short lines (set in the middle of the page), which, Graham expounds, is designed to “enact a sense of a ‘tipping point’––the feeling of falling forward, or ‘down’ in the hyper-short lines” (Interview by Deidre Wengen). The fluctuating, zigzag lines give us a sensation of passing the tipping point, making us undergo the hazardous oscillations of cause and effect. While the vertical lines embody the speed and immediacy of the environmental crisis in the manner of linear inevitability, the horizontal lines enact the non-linear swings of sudden amplification, which provoke the anxiety of the “positive feedback loops.”

Indeed, global warming is not something we can directly experience or whose physical substance we can discern. Because global warming is not a thing that is visible to the naked eye, it can be grasped only through scientific concepts and models such as “positive feedback” and “tipping point.” As Ben Dibley argues, the unintended consequences of climate change, such as changes in sea level, mass extinction, and oceanic acidification, “escape the human sensorium.” These effects are “only brought to vision through scientific analysis” as they are beyond or outside our experiential realm (Dibley). In other words, no human being ever perceives climate change or its effects on the planet.^[3] Moreover, it is notable that we cannot see ourselves as one of the creatures affected by our activities. As Dipesh Chakrabarty maintains: “We humans never experience ourselves as a species. We can only intellectually comprehend or infer the existence of the human species but never experience it as such” (220). Our failure to imagine beyond our experience is part of the reason why we have created the environmental crisis. This poses a significant challenge for Graham, since it involves the imagination of immense-scale events and species-level impacts.

One day: stronger wind than anyone expected. Stronger than
ever before in the recording
of such. Un-
natural says the news. Also the body says it. Which part of the body—I look
down, can
feel it, yes, don’t know
where. Also submerging us,
making of the fields, the trees, a cast of characters in an
unnegotiable
drama, ordained, iron-gloom of low light, everything at once undoing
itself.
(“Sea Change,” Sea Change 3)

The news about the unusual nature of phenomena (the “Un- / natural” news of climate change) is now everywhere, and we can hear about it every day. Nevertheless, the speaker is led to question “Which part of the body” can truly “feel it.” The speaker is unable to locate the area of sensation in the body (“don’t know / where”). Indeed, it is the power of poetry that enables us to have an experiential encounter with unimaginable environmental dissolution, the “unnegotiable / drama” of climate change. This encounter is achieved through linguistic experiments, which bestows on Graham a kind of “negative capability” to perceive truths without the framework of logic or science.^[4] We need courage, Graham advises, to break away from the conventional use of language: “I saw the failure of courage as a failure of imagination. And that is where art comes in” (Interview by Sharon Blackie 38). Therefore, “the primary job of the imagination,” Graham argues, is “to connect the world in which you are, to one in which you have not yet been, or cannot imagine being” (Interview by Poets Q&A). This is precisely her intention or ambition in writing Sea Change: “I think artists have a large responsibility at present—that of awakening the imagination of a deep future, . . . in order that people feel ‘connected’ to it in their willingness to act. . . . I happen to feel one can reawaken that sensation of an ‘unimaginably’ far off horizon” (Interview by Deidre Wengen). Sea Change gives the dynamics of climate change—shifting ocean currents, species extinction, floods, and droughts—a poetic voice through the use of various rhetorical devices (such as enjambment) and the particular spatial arrangement of language. With these diverse and multi-layered artifices, Graham’s poetry can articulate what scientific discourse cannot and render the declining ecosystem more sensible and perceptible than any scientific model can.

. . . in the
coiling, at the very bottom of
the food
chain, sprung
from undercurrents, warming by 1 degree, the in-
dispensable
plankton is forced north now, & yet further north,
spawning too late for the cod larvae hatch, such
that the hatch will not survive, nor the
species in the end, in the right-now forever un-
interruptable slowing of the
gulf
stream, so that I, speaking in this wind today, out loud in it, to no one, . . .
(“Sea Change,” Sea Change 4)

We read that the “1 degree” increase in temperature makes the “plankton” “[spring] / from undercurrents,” disrupting the whole system of “food chain,” which will lead to “the end” of “species.” The wiggling zigzag lines endow motion and vitality to the agential force of the plankton. These tiny invisible organisms, which are unable to propel themselves against the current, manifest their catalytic roles in the substantiality of the marine environment and biodiversity, through the actions—embodied in a series of sharp turns—such as “coiling,” “sprung,” and being drifted (by the current) “further north” to help the “spawning” “cod larvae” (albeit “too late”). Particularly, as Keller argues, the unexpected line breaks separating “in” from “dispensable” and “un” from “interruptible” convey “how what had seemed impossible is now not just possible but inescapably taking place” (109). Moreover, these line breaks, which introduce the opposite meaning of a word, make us stand dangerously on the edge or threshold of civilization as if the world had been pushed beyond the limits of sustainability and entered a “time” of existential uncertainty.

Poetry, for Graham, is an act of perception in its present situation, which allows readers to experience the environmental crisis as happening “here and now.” Graham’s experimental forms of language are founded upon the perceptive language of the lyric. For Graham, it is the “lyric” language (“I, speaking in this wind today”) that creates a sense of presence—the subjective feeling of actually “being” in a particular time and place—and, therefore, allows us to participate in ungraspable or unimaginable catastrophes: “One has to find means to see what isn’t apparently ‘there.’ . . . I believe that ‘unseeable thereness’ (if I can call it that) is what one is looking for, in lyric” (Interview by Poets Q&A). As Min Hyoung Song, in Climate Lyricism, suggests, “the lyric is a way to train attention on a here and now” in order to apprehend “a phenomenon that eludes familiar scales of comprehension” (40, 3).

Notably, the lyric sense of presence is associated with the act of perception, which assumes a bodily action in its cognitive situations. Sharon Lattig, in Cognitive Ecopoetics, claims that “lyric language is intensely active, generating meaning in the manner of perception”; it reproduces “the physical activity of the neural substrate and thus the basic dynamics of cognitive functioning” (19). Lyric poetry recapitulates the way we engage with the environment through cognitive processes. It involves the perceptual activity of our brain system that enables the comprehension of environments. Lattig’s cognitive ecopoetics sheds light on Graham’s lyric language as an embodied performance of our sensory systems. Graham’s lyric moves beyond what Jonathan Culler defines as the Romantic mode of “intense expression of the subject’s inner experience” (22) to awaken a sense of crisis within the physical act of perception. The lyric subjectivity in Sea Change takes no prevailing center from which to speak; it enacts the multiple dynamics of entanglements between the self and the other (environment), between humans and nonhumans.^[5]

Writing a poem, in this sense, is an act not of description but of ethical engagement with the material world, in which humans are fundamentally interwoven with the substances and agencies of the environment. Graham’s aim in Sea Change is to help people “‘see’ in their mind’s ‘eye’ that far-off horizon many generations beyond their own time” (Interview by Deidre Wengen). Sea Change is designed to arouse our empathy with the future generations who will have to live with the detrimental impacts of climate change. “[W]hat is being sought by scientists,” Graham explains, shall be translated “in artists’ practical use of the Imagination” as the question of “how to make the ‘deep future’—seven to ten generations hence—feel actually ‘connected’ to us, right down to this very minute of our lives” (Interview by Sharon Blackie 38). The “mind’s ‘eye’” does not refer to an Emersonian transcendent consciousness—“transparent eye-ball” (6)—but to our bodily “feeling,” where the discursive “mind” and the physical “eye” are brought together through “intra-action” (in Karen Barad’s words) to become “the eye-thinking heart.”^[6]

Midwinter. Dead of. I own you says my mind. Own what, own
whom. I look up. Own the looking at us
says the cuttlefish branching, lichen-black, moist. Also
the seeing, which wants to feel more than it sees.
Also, in the glance, the feeling of owning, accordioning out and up,
seafanning,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
the crop destroyed,
water everywhere not
drinkable, & radioactive waste in it, & human bodily
waste, & what,
says the eye-thinking heart, is the last color seen, the last word
heard–someone left behind, then no behind–
(“Future,” Sea Change 14)

The desire of the “I’s” or “eye’s” for “the seeing, which wants to feel more than it sees,” allows the lyric “I” to give way to the “you.” The phrase “I own you says my mind” is then displaced by the counteracting one, “Own the looking at us / says the cuttlefish.” As we look at the cuttlefish, it looks back at us. The fact that the cuttlefish has its own “look” troubles the distinction between human and nonhuman: “Own what, own / whom.” Nature appears to have mind (agency), and the human is reduced to a species-level existence. With the conflation of looking and being looked at, owning and being owned, Graham not only destabilizes the basic premises of human exceptionalism, which separates us from the rest of the world, but also enacts what Barad calls “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (33) which disrupts the very structure of ownership, to such a degree that one can never have the privilege to “own” or act upon the other; they can only “intra-act” with one another.

What Graham has done is to bring the environmental plights to “the human sensorium,” so that people can truly feel what they think they already know. Graham relates in an interview that “[s]cientists can provide all the information [on climate change] in the world, but . . . it does not necessarily awaken them [people] to a genuine physical belief” (Interview by Poets Q&A). She continues, in another interview: “They feel they ‘know’ this information already, . . . That is precisely the point. They ‘know’ it. They are not ‘feeling it’” (Interview by Sharon Blackie 40). For Graham, information or knowledge should be made affective to be effective or capable of motivating people to take action; thus, “feeling” can be an intra-active way of engaging the reader with the ecological crisis. Poetry, for this reason, should be somehow experienced through the body because knowing (a discursive process) is dependent on one’s physical experience of material reality. As Griffiths puts it, “Graham is trying to give thought its due in bodily perception in order to engage abstract phenomena through sensory experience” (222). Graham believes that poetry can provoke “feeling” in our material body, through which we come to know that we are (constitutive parts) of the world, not (simply living) in the world.

Graham’s association between feeling and knowing becomes evident when she declares, in a manner reminiscent of Descartes, “I think I feel my thinking self and how it / stands” (Materialism 142). She is in line with Antonio Damasio who, rejecting Descartes’s dichotomy of mind and body in his Descartes’ Error, emphasizes the affective body involved in the production of the human mind. For Damasio, feelings are embodied ways of knowing, and they are responsible for steering behavior, specifically decision-making. Feelings actually take place in the brain: they are “mental experiences of body states” (Damasio and Carvalho 143). Damasio’s clinical studies of the brain suggest that consciousness (mind) emerges from feelings: “Mind begins at the level of feeling. It’s when you have a feeling (even if you’re a very little creature) that you begin to have a mind and a self. . . . Feelings are where the self emerges, and consciousness itself” (Interview by Jason Pontin). As Damasio says, feelings are “just as cognitive as other precepts”; they are part of reason and thought (Descartes xv). Without emotion, there is no such thing as rational decision-making.^[7] Emotion involves engagement with the world as it gives us the meaning of the world. Damasio’s scientific insights into feeling as part of the reasoning process underscore the interdependence of mind and body—that is, of how we think and how we feel.

However, our “natural” feelings are not intact; they can be altered and shaped. In particular, they are subject to social control or management. In The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, sociologist Arlie Hochschild argues that we have been estranged from our feelings as social factors participate in the very formulation of emotions. She provides a set of examples of how society uses feelings as norms of conduct, exploring the implications of civilization and commercialization for the management of emotion. Human emotion has been manipulated through the process of civilization; such maneuvering of emotion has been intensified in a capitalistic society. Hochschild maintains that emotion is “a means by which we know about our relation to the world” (220); “When we do not feel emotion, or disclaim emotion, we lose touch with how we link inner to outer reality” (223). In a similar vein, Graham claims that “We have managed to divorce people from their capacity for sensation, and from the way in which sensation would lead to the heart and to conscience, fear, compassion, mortal outrage, and action” (Interview by Thomas Gardner [B]). She would agree with Hochschild who states that feelings have become “‘products,’ thus belonging more to an organization and less to the self” (198). For Graham, such emotional management is nothing but “a coup upon the reality status of events and of people and therefore on nature itself,” and it is, therefore, the role of “[p]oetry . . . to break through, to make reality feel real” (Interview by Thomas Gardner [B], italics mine).

The irregular linguistic forms and the textual openness in Sea Change, intended to disrupt teleological closure and, thus, reject commercialized ways of producing meaning, can be duly understood as a strategy to evoke or appeal to our unmanaged primitive emotion, which allows us to draw on the elemental life that is experienced as a species. Damasio’s neuroscience and Hochschild’s sociology of emotions align with Graham’s insistence on feeling as physical knowledge and the body’s power to affect the mind. Their notions of coexistence of mind and body also support Graham’s recognition that the human and the nonhuman have a shared physicality in origin as well as a shared destiny on the planet. She states that “here is another kind of knowledge we need in addition to that of the intellect. These are feelings of belonging in creation. That is what I am trying to awaken in myself and others in this book” (Interview by Deidre Wengen). This may be an extension of the Whitmanian sense of belonging in creation—“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (27)—to include more explicitly nonhuman others and build a sense of shared agency. All beings are created equally; they are made out of the same materials. Graham’s purpose in evoking “feeling” is to awaken in herself and others multiple ecologies of belonging and the material interrelatedness of all beings. It is this ethical dimension of Graham’s ecopoetics that stresses an enlarged sense of interconnection between the self and nonhuman “earth” others.

CONCLUSION

Graham’s Sea Change is an artistic response to the prevailing public apathy and social denial regarding climate change, at a time when the US refuses to take its share of responsibility for ecological destruction. The poem is designed to raise public awareness of the environmental crisis by embodying an apocalyptic world in its linguistic forms and thus making us “experience” catastrophic events and the destructive impact of human activity on the planet. For Graham, feeling is an effective way of engaging the reader with the environmental catastrophe as it has the power to affect our minds and, thus, (re)direct our actions. We are invited to enter the apocalyptic drama with a renewed sense of the material dimensions of human existence. Graham’s radical ecopoetics turns our future absence into our presence by reactivating or cultivating the cognitive, affective, and sensorial means to awaken our sense of interconnectedness with others in nature. Graham’s Sea Change helps us redefine our sense of attachment and connection to the nonhuman. It shifts our sensorial and perceptual coordinates to help us see our existence as fully enmeshed in the material world.

Gi Taek Ryoo is Professor of English at Chungbuk National University, Korea. He has published a number of articles in the field of poetry and science, ecopoetics, and posthumanism. His recent publication includes “The Systemic Nature of Environmental Disaster: Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead” (2021) and “Language and Ecology. The Textual Ecopoetics of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life” (2022). He is particularly interested in the parallel development of poetry and science in the twentieth century.

gtryoo@chungbuk.ac.kr

© by the author, licensee University of Lodz – Lodz University Press, Lodz, Poland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)