»After Nature – Imaginations of Nature Poetry«

Nature hasn’t been this ubiquitous in social discourse for a long time. After two centuries where the faith in the unlimited possibilities of technological advancement and the availability of resources made nature seem almost replaceable, the extent to which we are actually part of nature is now dawning on us. Poetry never lost its close relationship to nature over the centuries, but, despite its critical tone, »nature poetry« seemed to be a timeless and therefore not particularly exciting secondary discipline—at least it wasn’t in the gravitational space of literary debates. In the meantime, there is hardly any issue that doesn’t need to be rethought in relation to the climate emergency: love in the age of climate change, big cities, war, work, modest and true happiness—and poetry itself, of course.
What’s the potential of poetic speech given the necessary major changes we’re facing? What imaginative forces are possible for poetry to write »after nature« today when the modal meaning of »after« is increasingly shaded by the temporal one? Or, to put it with a grim sense of humor: what does the heat of poetics discourse actually do for climate change? When a poem takes up the word nature today, it cannot avoid registering the acute state of things—whether that be referring to life after the disaster in Fukushima, to the Caribbean islands being threatened by rising sea levels, to the traditions and political restrictions of Persian nature poetry, or to the exploitation of nature in Latin America from a feminist perspective.
Poetica 9 is concerned with locating poetry’s imaginative power in light of various political and social conditions and local traditions, and to intertwine these distinct subjective approaches into a conversation about what poetically unites them.
»You haven’t thought this through, have you, boys?« is a line from a song by Rou Reynolds, poet and singer of the band Enter Shikari, and it brings levity into the subject matter’s urgency. This is something that all the invited authors are ultimately concerned with: transforming our threatened nature in its diversity into poetry.

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Daniela Danz