Strong ecopoetry has a very eerie temporality (i.e., the way a reader of the poem experiences time). Ecopoetry dwells in a sharply realized present, but one haunted by both ghosts from the past and (paradoxically) ghosts from the future\u2014those beings whose possible future lives and worlds humans\u2019 behavior now has placed in jeopardy. Those future extinctions weigh on the poem\u2019s present. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ecopoetry\u2019s fluid temporality has rightly been called \u201cuntimely\u201d by Margaret Ronda. It\u2019s as unstable as endangered ecosystems (and social systems) are. Strong ecopoems give us a sense of deep time on nonhuman scales, ranging back centuries or eons, or forward to the future, so that we can think and feel like an ecosystem. Yet such poems also make us experience the precarity of Anthropocene time, how fragile are present realities and how unpredictable the future is. We\u2019re haunted by past and present sins but also full of nightmares of the dire future that shadows our Anthropocene present. Future deaths we may be causing uncannily intersect with our present lives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In short, Anthropocene satire in poetry fills us with foreboding and a mix of denial, guilt, rage, fear, despair, and anguish\u2014not to mention less-hard-to-name states such as a haunting sense of malaise or unease coupled with exhaustion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pondering that last point, we also need to acknowledge that many victims of Western colonialism and its successor, neoliberal capitalism, have long had their worlds disrupted. End Times fears and other emotions are hardly new to them. Too much of contemporary apocalyptic rhetoric and the turbulent emotions associated with its uncertainties circulate without awareness that what is new and terrifying to some because of their privileges has been oppressing others for generations. [see footnote 1] <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A Jorie Graham poem published in 2025, \u201cThen the Fog,\u201d is an example of an apocalyptic satire that directs its ire at the privileged elites most responsible for the climate disaster. Her poem is merciless. Using the second person, she addresses and mocks all art, including poetry, as being complicit with the fossil-fuel status quo. Here is her poem\u2019s conclusion:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her poem performs quite a different angelic annunciation to us poor wayfaring strangers from the one depicted in the Bible. We haven\u2019t the foggiest idea what we\u2019ve just heard, or what it all means\u2026 Caison, Gina. 2024. Erosion: American Environments and the Anxiety of Disappearance. Durham: Duke University Press. DeLoughrey Elizabeth, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan, eds. 2015. Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches New York: Routledge. Graham, Jorie. 2025. \u201cThen the Fog.\u201d London Review of Books, August 14, 2025. 34. Horne, Gerald. 2017. The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean. New York: Monthly Review Press. Piketty, Thomas. 2022. A Brief History of Equality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ronda, Margaret. 2018. Remainders: American Poetry at Nature\u2019s End. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 1. On the issue of recent<\/em> Anthropocene apocalyptic perspectives versus arguments for a \u201clong Anthropocene\u201d covering four centuries or more, the following authors are illuminating: DeLoughrey; Caison; Horne (2020 and 2017); Bazan and Barba; and Piketty. They trace how new global manifestations of capitalism, including colonialism and race-based slavery, transformed landscapes and millions of people. They suggest that the first victims of the Anthropocene were predominately peoples of color, plus marginalized populations in Europe, such as the Irish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2. On the Paris Agreement, see the U.N. website given an overview of its declarations: https:\/\/unfccc.int\/process-and-meetings\/the-paris-agreement<\/a>. The same website gives us the calculation that, after 10+ years of increase, all we must do is create an unprecedented 43% decrease in 4 years<\/em> (2026-2030) to make the threshold hold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The source for the 2 million years figure is: https:\/\/www.wri.org\/insights\/1-5-degrees-c-target-explained#main-content\/<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The source for the language assuring us that crossing the 1.5C threshold is not technically doing so due to the math of averages is given by my Google AI summary: https:\/\/www.google.com\/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=paris+agreement+1.5+C+rise&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is a powerful alibi\u2014we tell it again & again\u2014
it is the history of poetry,
a long string of luminous alibis,
though the murder & the theft went on regardless
behind the arras
for all the singing up front\u2014
& the song was necessary, yes, it was soothing & distracting\u2014
it could justify, almost, our sense of
being human\u2014
Call yourself alive?<\/em> the jury-ghosts whisper
loud enough for us to make out.
And we promise again that we did not know, that we are
innocent, that we\u2019re just the
talent, the event planners should be to vouch for us\u2014
our wings are gauze, we\u2019re on guide-wires,
just here to create memories for you,
to accompany you along these few seconds
of time you still have\u2014
to slow them a bit,
to help you linger.
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The italics in this excerpt are Graham\u2019s, as is the use of right-justified margins for her lines. Graham has experimented with this unusual print format in many (though not all) recent poems. Perhaps she\u2019s attracted to it because it\u2019s the mirror opposite of what readers of poetry expect. Right-justified lineation does produce an eerie mirror effect<\/em>. Have we gone through a looking-glass and, turned around, are suddenly hearing angry voices from the future\u2014as well as our anticipatory pleas that \u201cwe did not know\u201d what we\u2019ve done? The voices speak about us and for us, but also castigate us with mocking gestures of comfort.
The vast majority of us Homo sapiens lived complacently through the year (2024) when the climate crossed the 1.5 degrees of Celsius (2.7 F) of increased average warming from pre-industrial atmospheric temperature averages. Upcoming generations\u2014how many of them, though, will there be?\u2014will remember this moment and what we did and didn\u2019t do.
Do you recall the optimism of the Paris Agreement in 2015, when a majority of the world\u2019s nations pledged to work together so that by 2030 we wouldn\u2019t cross the 1.5 C boundary in atmospheric heating? Such a low number, just 1.5 \u2026 it couldn\u2019t be that hard to achieve, right? Yet we did little, other than make promises. Especially the rich nations that pump the most carbon and methane into the air and help make the oceans hotter and more acidic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2024 marked the highest level of carbon in the atmosphere since 2 million years ago. What will 2025 and the years after it bring? There are websites that assure us that the Paris Agreement is legally binding. And that even though greenhouse gas emissions peaked in 2024 (or maybe 2025), things will be fine, at least mathematically, if we can just make carbon and methane in the atmosphere decline 43% by 2030\u2014something, however, that our \u201cadvanced\u201d civilizations have never yet managed to do\u2026. [footnote 2]<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not to worry! My Google AI explains cheerily that \u201cWhile 2024 marked the first year to exceed the 1.5\u00b0C threshold, this limit is defined as a sustained average over 20-30 years, so the target has not yet been breached under the agreement’s definition.\u201d [footnote 2] Phew. Thank goodness. Let\u2019s not even think about warnings that we\u2019re on track to 2 C in average warming (3.6 F) in the coming decades in which our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren will live. [footnote 3]<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our language is arranged to help us shelter. We call dangerous gases \u201cgreenhouse\u201d gases, like everything we\u2019re doing is a kind of beautiful indoor garden for growing things. We talk of \u201cthresholds\u201d \u2014 as if it\u2019s easy, after crossing, to step back. I go in, I go out, what\u2019s the big deal, my freedom\u2019s intact? Yet ecosystem scientists would like a word with us about thresholds. And collapse. \u201cTransgressing a boundary\u201d is a phrase we don\u2019t like to use. Ditto for words like \u201crapid,\u201d \u201cabrupt,\u201d \u201cunpredictable,\u201d and \u201cirreversible.\u201d [footnote 4]
Graham\u2019s poem would also like to have some words with us. It\u2019s like a collect call (remember them?) interrupting our scrolling. She forces us to listen to voices we\u2019d rather not hear, speaking with an intensity that scares. We are free to stop reading at any time. But it\u2019s hard to stop guilt, or a sense of unease creeping in like fog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What unanswerable questions Graham’s poem leaves us with! Is all our poetry just fake angels? Something we make up so we can hide within their wings? Do all beautiful songs just distract us from the sounds of murder?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Other contemporary ecopoets vigorously dissent from Graham\u2019s angry despair.
Read other posts on my free<\/strong> Substack Ecopoetry website<\/a> to learn their names.
But sometimes cold fog may be what we need?
References
Bazan, Giuseppe, and Angelo Castrorao Barba. 2022. Historical Ecology, Archaeology and Biocultural Landscapes: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to the Long Anthropocene. Basel: MDPI – Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute.
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DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 2019. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press.
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Horne, Gerald. 2020. The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.
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Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n