It likely got by you in 2016 when a working group for the International Commission on Stratigraphy recommended that the commission vote to accept that we are now in a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene. The debate about this new geological period had been raging for a while however, and the recommendation was no surprise. This new epoch is the result of human influence on the planet’s geology, which is enormous and now a permanent part of the geological record. Climate change, mass extinctions, nuclear testing, hydroelectric dams, and mining of all sorts (the list could go on) have altered, and are altering, our planet drastically, not to mention our psyches, relationships with one another, and our appreciation of nature. John Lane - poet, novelist, essayist and educator – has written a new collection of poems, Anthropocene Blues,(Mercer University Press) that gets at the heart of these issues and by doing so gives us insight into what we are making of the world, and ourselves, in this new troubling epoch.
It's not an easy subject, and writing poetry about it can’t be easy either. And that, in many ways, is what makes Anthropocene Blues unique and without parallel. Arguments about the Anthropocene have been largely academic, with the fallout from these arguments coming largely in debates about how we save nature and ourselves, given our perceived superiority over other species and our perceived role as Lords over the planet. While Anthropocene advocates acknowledge that humans are what got us into this mess, they also advocate that humans can get us out of it. Concepts such as Wilderness and wildness are considered antiquated romantic notions that have no place in this new epoch, as we have outgrown such concepts, and the planet is now ours exclusively. We need to have access to every square inch of it in order to manage it sustainably, restore it to our liking, and mold it to our wills.
So where does art reside in such a world? This is but one of the questions that Anthropocene Blues gets to the heart of. Art has always served the role of transcendence, assisting us in seeing our way through difficult times, both personal and societal, and has always drawn immensely from our appreciation of the natural world. But what is nature in this new epoch, and what is natural anymore? And what exactly are we anymore in this digital age of innumerable platforms of self-aggrandizing social media?
Lane explores these questions deftly in the poem “Erosion,” which, when taken literally, makes one think of geology, deep time, canyons, oceans, and cliffs – images that are used throughout the collection. But erosion in this particular poem is a metaphor for the ephemerality of digital information, and indeed our digital selves, all sliding somewhere into time and the ghost world of data servers. Consider these lines:
The present erodes, each online search, or was there ever
a present to start with? Photos stored off-site, “in the cloud”
as we say (and let me tell you there are enough
clouds to go around these days), no holds, or holds, barred
in the fist fight we call a digital culture, like those photos
on Facebook we wish to disappear:
It’s a shallow, haunted world in this poem, and further on he illustrates the new digital insensitivity to death and tragedy as people post on line stories regarding a paddler’s death on a river, where the videos go viral:
where there is no fog, but these digital ghosts don’t go away,
(at least until the solar flare or the half-mile wide asteroid
predicted by a panel of experts on The Weather Channel)
web pages left up, abandoned like the Bi-Lo grocery,
the roof collapsed, the windows like eyes thumbed shut:
the messages piled up in Gmail, comments, numbers still live
(for dead people) on Skype, these will never compost,
like discarded beer koozies in a black plastic bag,
our digital life built up toward heaven in its ghost mound:
Many of the poems in Anthropocene Blues are written from the first-person perspective of a fictional geologist, one who wrestles with this stratum of human influence now so visible in the geological timeline. In “The Geologist Speaks of Phosphate,” he ponders the record of extraction that transformed the American south:
In that ooze began one of the many new beginnings -
Not an oil strike like Texas, but phosphate, just as rich,
But a short-lived commodity – ancient fish shit
In veins 6 to 36 inches thick, settled in shallows
By oligocene, miocene, and pliocene tides and currents,
a geologic jackpot spread like mayonnaise below,
the buried economic beginning after the end,
at least for farming, as post-war entrepreneurial
clodhoppers donned their slouch hats, abandoned,
40 acres and a mule, dropped their hoes, strode out
of cotton fields and found in rich mineral seams
an extravagance of profit – a future . . .
Such poems ask the questions of where humanity is heading, and what, if anything, does it all mean (or what is meaning in this new epoch?). Rich in language, dark in texture, and filled with insight, Anthropocene Blues is a visionary collection that provides anyone concerned with the fate of humanity an opportunity to explore some of the most profound questions of our time, and to do so while enjoying the great writing that we need in order to explore them, and perhaps even answer them.
Brent Martin is the author of three chapbook collections of poetry - Poems from Snow Hill Road (New Native Press, 2007), A Shout in the Woods (Flutter Press, 2010), and Staring the Red Earth Down (Red Bird Press, 2014), and is a co-author of Every Breath Sings Mountains (Voices from the American Land, 2011) with authors Barbara Duncan and Thomas Rain Crowe He is also the author of Hunting for Camellias at Horseshoe Bend, a non-fiction chapbook published by Red Bird Press in 2015. His poetry and essays have been published in the North Carolina Literary Review, Pisgah Review, Tar River Poetry, Chattahoochee Review, Eno Journal, New Southerner, Kudzu Literary Journal, Smoky Mountain News, and elsewhere. He lives in the Cowee community in western North Carolina where he and his wife Angela Faye Martin run Alarka Institute, a nature, literary, and art based business that offers workshop and field trips. He has recently completed a two year term as Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the West.
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