JOAO PAULO GUIMARAES Reviews
OF SOME SKY by
Joseph Harrington
(BlazeVOX
Books, N.Y., 2018)
In Of Some Sky, Joseph Harrington writes
about the final stages of human life on earth. Everyone seems to know a major
environmental catastrophe is at hand and yet no one does anything about it.
Except talk: people talk about it on television, they confess their culpability,
manifest their indignation and flaunt their newfound perspectives. Some even
write poems. Harrington claims he knows he is complicit in all of this, that he
too adopts an attitude of “comfortable despair” (45) and complacent contemplation,
but he nonetheless preaches his way through the ecological predicament outlined
throughout, suggesting that society’s moral bankruptcy is to blame for the
impending apocalypse.
It may
be true, as the poet points out, that giving “inanimate objects” “a soul” (39) –
perhaps a caricature of New Materialism’s focus on the agency and the hidden
potential of things? – may only succeed in fostering questionable fantasies of
human-nonhuman continuity. As Claire Colebrook points out in her Essays on Extinction, such views
distract us from the problems of the present, prompting us to reject it in
favor of a guilt-free post-human future. I thus appreciated Harrington’s
pessimism and cynicism in this regard, his refusal to romanticize nature and
our relationship with it. However, I fail to see how re-animating language, through
poetic transubstantiation – “If I could make words into gulls . . . it would
solve a lot of problems” (29) – wordplay – “I dare you to mine the gap between
uranium / and geranium” (54) – and surface-level stitch-ups – “Why does one say
she’s hot when what we mean is I am hot for him?” (51) – can more productively
reconnect humans with the natural world. To be sure, people just do not care
enough. Yet, as Harrington himself acknowledges, it is hard to care about the
environment when you are struggling to secure your next meal: “take your eyes
out of the sky / someone is stealing your bread” (96). And even if one does
care, the kind of turn-around that Harrington rightfully defends cannot be brought
about by isolated individuals, something the author seems willing to admit:
“when he came to his senses he became a street sweeper” (94).
Why,
then, insist that “even now somebody’s saying what nobody wants to hear” (97)?
Misinformation and conspiracy theories aside (which the “culture wars” merely
aggravate), the average person knows something must be done about the
environment and many do what they can to ameliorate things. Harrington argues,
however, that nothing short of a revolution (perhaps precipitated by an
environmental disaster?) would suffice to meaningfully alter our relationship
with nature. Slavoj Zizek defends a similar position: maybe it will take a real
catastrophe to make the working class and climate refugees realize that theirs
is a common cause. Harrington’s audience – readers of experimental poetry –
very likely already know all of this. More than as an ecological sermon, Of Some Sky is most effective as an
outburst of confusion, impotence and despair. Something must be done but we
still do not know what.
*****
João
Paulo Guimarães received a Ph.D. in English from SUNY Buffalo in 2017. His
research concentrates on contemporary American poetry, ecocriticism and science
studies. He is particularly interested in the relation between poetic language
and the so-called "languages of nature" (the divine word, the genetic
code, cybernetic information, biosemiotics, etc), a subject he explored in
depth in his dissertation. He has also written on topics like "poetry
and sleep", "escapist experimentalism", "the science of
authenticity" and the "humor of nature" (all his essays are
available on Academia.edu). His
work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Western
American Literature, CounterText and Interdisiciplinary
Literary Studies. He currently works as a research assistant at the Comp
Lit Institute of the University of Porto.
