However, just as the sun shines on the godly and the ungodly alike, so does nuclear radiation. And with this knowledge it becomes increasingly difficult to embrace the thought of extinction purely for the assumed satisfaction of—from the grave—achieving revenge. Or even of accepting our demise as a planet as a simple and just preventative medicine administered to the universe. Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it. In any case, Earth is my home—though for centuries white people have tried to convince me I have no right to exist, except in the dirtiest, darkest corners of the globe.

 

So let me tell you: I intend to protect my home.

 

—Alice Walker1

We are now identified as those who are about to die. We who can die tomorrow. And therefore, I think, this is

 

where modern scholarship must come in.

 

—Sylvia Wynter2

Midway through June Jordan’s largely under-theorized reflection on black cognition—or, from another angle, what we might call black thought as such—“A Poem about Intelligence, For My Brothers and Sisters,” the poem’s speaker offers up an extended meditation on Albert Einstein’s role in the invention of the atomic bomb, as well as the symbolic import of that historical truth in a present-day conversation about the socially imposed, ostensibly antonymous relationship between blackness and genius. Jordan writes:

Take Einstein

being the most the unquestionable the outstanding

the maximal mind of the century

right?

And I’m struggling against this lapse leftover

from my Black childhood to fathom why

anybody should say so:

E=mc squared?

I try that on this old lady live on my block:

She sweeping away Saturday night from the stoop

 

and mad as can be because some absolute

jackass have left a kingsize mattress where

she have to sweep around it stains and all she

don’t want to know nothing about in the first place

“Mrs. Johnson!” I say, leaning on the gate

between us: “What you think about somebody come up

with an E equals M C 2?”

“How you doin,” she answer me, sideways, like she don’t

want to let on she know I ain’

combed my hair yet and here it is

Sunday morning but still I have the nerve

to be bothering serious work with these crazy

questions about

“E equals what you say again, dear?”

Then I tell her, “Well

also this same guy? I think

he was undisputed Father of the Atom Bomb!”3

Jordan goes on to further describe the interaction between the speaker and the neighbor they have unwittingly recruited into this conversation about ethics and legible intellect: one which doubles as a critique of the systematic derogation of the inner worlds of black folks, as well as the ubiquitous dis-valuing of the social practices and protocols which constitute the black social scene. Notice as well the way in which Jordan juxtaposes this conversation with the “serious work” that her neighbor is undertaking prior to her interruption. In Jordan’s hands, this becomes a moment of revaluation and repair, an occasion to celebrate the everyday intellectual labor of black women elders who might not have the time to, as my grandmother would phrase it, study—i.e., dedicate not only one’s intellectual energies, but worry or concern—Einstein or his colleagues in large part because they have countless other matters to attend to, many of which are bound up with the care of others. In a number of divergent ways, this ethic of care is embodied at the level of the conversation itself:

“That right.” She mumbles or grumbles, not too politely

“And dint remember to wear socks when he put on

his shoes!” I add on (getting desperate)

 

at which point Mrs. Johnson take herself and her broom

a very big step down the stoop away from me

“And never did nothing for nobody in particular

lessen it was a committee

and

used to say, ‘What time is it?’

and

you’d say, ‘Six o’clock.’

and

he’d say, ‘Day or night?’

and

and he never made nobody a cup a tea

in his whole brilliant life!

and

[my voice rises slightly]

and

he dint never boogie neither: never!”

 

“Well,” say Mrs. Johnson, “Well, honey,

I do guess

that’s genius for you.”4

The stakes of the conflict that Jordan outlines are fairly straightforward. On the one hand, there is a dominant, post-Enlightenment vision of human intelligence—one that Jordan elaborates upon here not only through remarking upon the historical relationship between Albert Einstein and the atomic bomb, but also the sort of casual, everyday thoughtlessness she then ascribes to the metonymic historical figure she has built from the ground up—that is generally exclusionary, and thoroughly anti-black. What’s more, Jordan seems to assert, however subtly, that there is a competing vision of mental acuity that leaves space for high- level cognition in its normative guises, as well as other, less legible, distinctly social forms such as cleaning up the neighborhood, dancing for no clear reason, or making a cup of tea for someone you love. These are examples of intelligence by other names. Brilliance in every shade you can imagine. The varied forms of social and emotional intelligence invoked by Jordan, at least as they appear within the universe of the poem, show up in the world as care, and often operate in meaningful contradistinction to more widely celebrated modes of intellection.

If the sort of brilliance we are inclined, socially and otherwise, to praise in Einstein—which, it bears mentioning, is not reducible to his legacy as an individual historical actor, but in fact represents a more general set of economic and political procedures through which scientific research comes to serves as cog and fuel for state-sponsored war machines the world over—has led to widespread, unchecked devastation by the instruments of American empire, then what other approaches might be available to us? How might we identify, and ultimately celebrate, the modes of creative praxis that Jordan positions against more legible, widely venerated expressions of aptitude, interiority, and intellectual labor?

In one sense, Sonya Posmentier’s stunning monograph Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature is an attempt to wrestle with the irreducibly complex forms of black meditative tenacity, and radical imagination, that appear throughout Jordan’s oeuvre, and are on grand display in “A Poem about Intelligence.” The black optimism that animates Posmentier’s writing is also a prominent feature of the poems, songs, and works of visual art that she takes up as her primary objects of her concern. Yet there is also, alongside this optimism, the ever-present specter of the end of the world—one that operates, always, right alongside the countless new worlds that black art necessarily engenders—which demands our attention. The coda to Posmentier’s text foregrounds this issue with particular clarity and power:

In my discussions of disaster, I have restricted my study so far to catastrophes that nature causes (or at least seems to cause): floods and hurricanes as opposed to acts of terror, holocausts, oil spills, or nuclear accidents. But as Danticat’s book and as Junot Diaz makes explicit in his 2011 essay “Apocalypse” in the Boston Review, the Haiti earthquake and Hurricane Katrina were “social disasters” insofar as they revealed and intensified racial, economic, and global inequities, blurring the boundary between human and natural agency. . . . Can the natural formation of the social and the natural . . . help us to understand disasters we have more commonly understood as “human”? That is, what happens when we think of a political execution, a massacre, or a bombing as environmental experience?5

Following Posmentier’s line of argument, I am led to wonder what alternate, unexpected directions we might take the theoretical instruments she has offered in the text up to this point. What would it look like for us to attend to just the sort of catastrophes that are named explicitly here as those that were, necessarily, set apart from the floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes that take up the majority of the book’s critical landscape? In this vein, I am especially taken by Posmentier’s invocation of the nuclear. In no small part because of her multiple returns to Kamau Braithwaite’s magnetic phrase “nation-language” throughout Cultivation and Catastrophe as a productive shorthand for the simultaneously political and aesthetic projects of writers across the African diaspora. However ambivalently, we are, collectively, working toward a critical lexicon that might best capture, or else set free, the spirit of the spaces we call home. In the US American context in particular, there is no way to approach the possibility of such a language without thinking seriously about the decades- long, ever-expanding shadow of the atomic bomb. Our nation-language is, at its very foundations, apocalyptic.

Thus, any poetics worth its salt, and especially any poetics concerned with black social and political life in the United States, must wrestle with the specter of the end of the world. Not only in some larger, planetary sense, but also with the countless black worlds that are destroyed by the State apparatus on a daily basis. To be black and alive and call this place home is, in some sense, to always be thinking in a moment of danger.6 The persistent threat of an atomic doomsday comes to stand in, metonymically, as a more generally dispersed instantiation of the fear which is foundational to black sociality. Indeed, this is the way of the (anti-black) world: you lose what you love. Posmentier’s daring intervention is to ask what it might mean for us to analyze this ongoing precariousness through the lens of the ecological; to attend to the daily devastation faced by black people all across the globe as “environmental experiences.” For this too is the work of contemporary black poetics, ecological criticism, and literary studies more broadly: the examination of the formal elements of works crafted by those who have faced, or are presently facing, the threat of collective annihilation. This is where one turns for critical instruments in the Anthropocene. To those who have already survived against all odds; those who have already seen the end of the world, and have managed to build new ones in its wake.

On this front, Barbara Omolade’s engagement with the intersections of empire, nuclear proliferation, and American apocalypticism in her 1984 essay, “Women of Color and the Nuclear Holocaust,” is instructive:

For people of color, the world as we know it ended centuries ago. Our world, with its own languages, customs and ways, ended. And we are only now beginning to see with increasing clarity that our task is to reclaim that world, struggle for it, and rebuild it in our own image. The “death culture” we live in has convinced many to be more concerned with death than with life, more willing to demonstrate for “survival at any cost” than to struggle for liberty and peace with dignity. Nuclear disarmament becomes a safe issue when it is not linked to the daily and historic issues of racism, to the ways in which people of color continue to be murdered. Acts of war, nuclear holocausts, and genocide have already been declared on our jobs, our housing, our schools, our families and our lands.7

The critical leap that Omolade makes here is vital. She argues that we must move from simply yearning to survive under the conditions of the present world to asserting the need for a fundamental reimagining of the larger social order. Campaigning for nuclear disarmament alone, she contends, is “safe.” Easy. And this in large part because not all forms of nuclear activism necessarily indict the world we are trying to save. Whose world is this? Omolade’s essay asks. And whose world do we mean when we say world? What worlds merit rescue? Over and against the vigor and endurance of the American death machine, Omolade and Posmentier alike dare to assert a vision of black critical imagination that is invariably bound up with a commitment to care for the least of these, to looking after the most vulnerable forms of human and nonhuman life on our planet. What mitigates the space between cultivation and catastrophe? Cherishment, perhaps: a blackened love that blurs the boundaries between life-worlds, and offers us a more capacious approach to the study of environmental literature, and the humanities more broadly.

In this sense and others, black optimism is inextricable from ecological thought. It is species thinking. Think here of Lucille Clifton’s aptly titled “the beginning of the end of the world,” a poem in which, on the day of the apocalypse, a group of cockroaches marches up out of the drains, not like soldiers, she says, but “like priests” only to be met by the speaker running water from the faucet at full force, “trying to drown them / as if they were soldiers.”8 By the poem’s conclusion, when the end of the world arrives, the cockroaches simply stare at the speaker, “faithless at last, and walk in a long line way.”9 Though the judgmental stare of the cockroaches in the Clifton poem is tied to the fact that they will live on beyond the apocalypse event, what she calls “the bang of the end,” what is also at play, I think, is the same sort of larger, incisive critique of human violence in the defense of private property that we see in the writing of Posmentier, Omolade, and others. Black optimism then, from this vantage, is the practice of envisioning life on earth beyond the limits of human dominion. It is our rehearsal for a world without chains. The end of the world is as close as it has always been. Another is on its way.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History,” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Boston: Belknap Press, 2006.

Dungy, Camille T., ed. Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009.

Jordan, June. “A Poem about Intelligence for My Brothers and Sisters.” In Literature: The Human Experience, edited by Richard Abcarian and Marvin Klotz. 3rd ed. New York: St. Martin’s, 1982.

Omolade, Barbara. “Women of Color and the Nuclear Holocaust.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 12.2 (1984).

Posmentier, Sonya. Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.

Walker, Alice. “Only Justice Can Stop a Curse.” In Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1982.

Wynter, Sylvia, and Wayne J. Pond. “Afro-American Culture and Social Order.” Soundings Project. November 22, 1981. http://www.soundingsproject.org/index.php/1981/11/afro-american-culture-and-social-order/.

In Cultivation and Catastrophe, Sonya Posmentier theorizes a lyric ecology in modern black literature whose form holds the tensions of an environmental awareness of possibility and limitation. The lyric, so oft thought of as an organic form, a poem that is a little world unto itself or a well-wrought enclosure turning in upon itself, is also an opening out to relations outside, a turning that turns out a substance for holding and conveying.

“I sing my song, and all is well,” sang Paul Laurence Dunbar, the African American poet whose career bridges the uneasy subsumption of nineteenth-century slavery into the modern era.1 Of course, all is not well, and his refrain of “I sing my song, and all is well” at the end of each verse in “The Poet and His Song” emphasizes how necessary the artifice of the work-song is to making “well.” In this poem, disaster and tranquility are bound together with a tempo—hours, seasons, and weather—that brings work and song together in an eerily pastoral suspension. Its lullaby rhythm of iambic tetrameter metes out the hardship of toil and sweat, the disasters of drought and blight, with the same cadence as it offers “zest” and “rest,” “spirit’s spell” and “all is well.” How do we read this a tempo that is also a return to the plantation pastoral? Absent the forces that propelled black migration north and into cities, Dunbar’s work of refrain may seem static as his laborers return again and again to the South’s country districts. However, the bareness of and exposure to the land where “Sometimes the sun, unkindly hot, / My garden makes a desert spot; / Sometimes a blight upon the tree / Takes all my fruit away from me” are not the universal effects of an indifferent Nature upon the human, but rather the compounded results of the historical and material conditions of systemic violence and racism, resource exploitation and exhaustion that characterize the plantation economy and its aftermath. But the poet does not give an account of this history, except to give pause to an easy reading of all’s well that ends well. Punctuating a life that follows in the break, Dunbar disrupts the biopolitical bind of the post-plantation: “But—life is more than fruit or grain, / And so I sing, and all is well.”

For the particular historical context of the modern Black diaspora in which the texts examined by Posmentier are situated, environmental awareness is shaped within and without by both the geography and the theories of the plantation zone, the provision ground or plot, the circumatlantic, the regional, and the archipelagic. The slave trade and plantation economy of the previous centuries are the material and metaphorical grounds of this diasporic literature; the seemingly innocent hope of green growing things can never be separated from its history of cultivation within a system of forced agricultural labor, and environmental events from forced displacements to natural disasters that magnify the slow violence of structural inequalities nevertheless yield the fruit of artistic traditions. As Posmentier notes, “cultivation” and “catastrophe” “do not oppose one another but intersect.”2

The question that came to me as I read Posmentier’s own elegantly wrought arguments is whether lyric ecology is able to migrate to other particularities? Or rather, I think what I’m trying to ask is why that migration is so difficult, and in cases, impossible, beset as it is with so many casualties, and how our critique can mark rather than fill in these losses.3 That is, can we understand the theorization of lyric ecology to be a theory of diasporic writing that can resonate with, even as it remains distinct from, other diasporas with their own particularities—oftentimes intersecting and intertwining with the black diaspora? I ask this question even as I already begin to chart out how this happens—reading Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad with a class this semester, I marvel at how this novel’s “plot”—and yes, this is a plot that takes up the jarring dissonance of the plot as a fertile pocket of subsistence amidst the horrors of slavery—intimates the co-constructed natures of African and Indigenous peoples being fed into an American machinery of modern development. For as its protagonist chases the ever elusive freedom, the plot moves slowly and methodically West: the antebellum divide between North and South is tied to the compromises that would turn the western territories into contested grounds of slavery and freedom, and this connects the turning of African peoples into property that must be transported securely and kept from running to the moving and containing of Indigenous peoples into increasingly smaller and smaller spaces.

What I am interested in, while wanting to remain attentive to historical, experiential, and aesthetic specificities, is the diasporic and minor consciousness that Posmentier also chases. In placing her texts, she hesitates to settle on a place, writing, “I don’t call this zone the postocolony. . . . Nor am I describing only a black Atlantic, circumatlantic, or archipelagic region. . . . It is not my goal to establish a fixed geographic region of study but rather to bring into focus a dynamic, cross-cultural, extranational zone defined by the shared processes of growth and destruction to which its inhabitants are subject and in which they participate” (5). In this sense, the geographical and environmental, while very material, also serves as a heuristic for organizing critical thinking around cultural forms. What do we call this zone? What is a term that can be capacious without losing specificity? Perhaps it is not so much a location as a dislocation like “removal” or “fugitivity” or an orientation or style that is “minor,” “diasporic,” “racial.” Posmentier herself leans toward “racial diaspora”—the “constitutive differences” of transnational formations noted by Brent Hayes Edwards—as well as the “minor” of the minor literature theorized by Deleuze and Guattari as a “line of escape” from territorialization. Brian Roberts and Michelle Stephens have positioned the archipelagic as a way to decontinentalize America. What would it mean, as Paul Giles proposes at the end of their anthology on Archipelagic American Studies, to reflect the scrutiny upon interrelations and the irretrievable losses and lacunae of these dislocations back into the American continent itself, to re-view the dispersive and relational exchanges—and casualties—in between continents and islands as animating the interstices within?4 What would it mean, as Edwards proposes at the end of his essay on “The Uses of Diaspora,” to imagine an ecology of décalage, of dislocation or disjuncture, of “that which cannot be transferred or exchanged”?5

This practice of mapping spaces of diminishment, ebb, and flow in the continental mass does not, however, fill in historical and political spaces but rather lets the recesses emanate. The environment brims with both unexcavated and undeveloped spaces; it leaves earth and artifacts to softly erode, it leaves weeds to fill in and bury, it leaves opacities, it leaves the region itself as an opacity, the grasses spreading but also opening to this view. At the beginning of Layli Long Soldier’s collection of poems in Whereas is the invocation:

Now

make room in the mouth

for grassesgrassesgrasses6

Of the grasses, she recounts elsewhere the history of the Dakota 38 hanged on December 26, 1862, for attacking settlers and traders who refused credit to the Dakota people for purchases of food and goods even though they were starving and had no other way to survive after their lands were allotted and reduced to a ten-mile tract: “If they are hungry, let them eat grass” (“38”). The grasses are, then, the sustenance offered by a history and geography of starvation—the grass songs and scent that one swallows “[make] a mind / wide makes it / oceanic blue a field in crests / swirling gyres the moving / surface fastened in June light” while careful of the “grass needle tips / around the edges / of wounds” (“Steady Summer”). The grasses soothe and hush but they also sere and sting; they mark a space boxed in and a space that becomes an opening: a mouth, a window, a plot of land. Even as this history is told, one senses the cry smothered, the grass filling the mouth, the grassesgrassesgrasses.

Perhaps I am tracing a grasslands ecology in the lyric. In Prairie Style, C. S. Giscombe’s poems follow, among the foxes, rivers, vacancies, neighborhoods, tribes and fugitives along the way, the racial tensions and eros crisscrossing the highways of the American Midwest. He researches the Ben Ishmael Tribe of early nineteenth-century Indianapolis, the supposed poor white community that also becomes the imaginary of a nomadic mixed-blood community of Africans, Native Americans, and fugitives from the South. He goes inland and he goes sub rosa. In the wind’s gyre through the grass, what catches and gathers is swept away in susurration even as it begins to define an edge. “The prairie,” he writes, “appeared suddenly, like it was a miracle or a fortification. Trace to predicament. The trees gave way—no surprise but it was further than we’d imagined. Servantless, shoreless, nothing to it when it met the horizon.”7 What do I like about this? The surface tension of the prairie, everything rising but not breaking, held in abeyance.

I am playing too fast and loose with associations—intimations and adjacencies of texts I happen to be reading—in order to pose this question of capaciousness that is also a question of vacancy, and a question of where that feeling of surface tension fits into an ecology. Situating minor Caribbean poems within their publication in a literary journal and also within their geographical history in the former plantation economy of the South Atlantic, Posmentier says this of its environmental form: “I have suggested that we might read a periodical as a partially closed system, a self-sustaining provision ground affording a small degree of freedom within the constraints of the plantation, but looking for a line of escape, we might need to read instead with a broader geography in mind: the archipelago that connects but does not contain the diffuse regional geographies and literary styles” (72). Closed but open; connects but does not contain; cultivation and catastrophe. A lyric ecology of caesura, of tenuous lines of rupture and return; a lyric ecology of diaspora, of precarious intersections and entwinements; and also, a lyric ecology of lacunae, of grasses, of horizon.

Sonya Posmentier’s Cultivation and Catastrophe feels urgent and contemporary even as its turn to black lyric asks readers to pause, sound out, and reflect on a long history of poetic engagement with ecological catastrophe, forced migration, and the afterlife of the plantation. Early on, Posmentier cites Édouard Glissant’s observation that the boundary of the plantation enforces enclosure and captivity but is also its “structural weakness,” and thus, “becomes our advantage” (qouted in Posmentier 19). Posmentier meticulously excavates that history of poetic “advantage,” showing how the boundary, and transgression of the boundary, has been central to black lyric ecologies across the diaspora and in multiple generic forms, from more traditional lyric poems to the flood blues. Moving from plantation enclosure to the environmental disasters they exacerbate under a system of capitalist extraction, accumulation, and exhaustion, Posmentier writes about the hurricane itself as a powerful poetic figure, one that is able to account for both shared histories and forms of difference in the diaspora:

[Hurricanes] play a central role in black diasporic literature, and in this book, because they retrace the motion of the transatlantic slave trade and the violence and loss of the middle passage, forming off the coast of West Africa and making landfall in the Caribbean archipelago and the southern United States, taking different forms as they touch different shores. . . . These storms are an apt figure for an understanding of the black diaspora as constituted by a shared history, on the one hand, and by distinctive, at times uneven, geographic, economic and cultural forms on the other.

The dialectic of cultivation and catastrophe that Posmentier locates across black lyric is navigated deftly throughout the study, not as a pair of terms from which to choose or on which to settle, but as an open question and sometimes as a site of contestation. Beginning with a poetics that values repair, amelioration, and preservation (cultivation), she ultimately moves to the generative possibilities of catastrophe itself. At the same time, Posmentier rightfully recalibrates the kinds of climate change anxiety running rampant today by turning readers to the strophe—the dramatic denouement and overturning—located within catastrophe etymologically and in its attending poetic forms. Indeed, for readers wondering “why poetry?” it seems to me that poetry’s refusal of both fear and anxiety makes it an invaluable mode through which to reckon with environmental degradation and disaster at a diasporic scale.

Posmentier’s meticulous study further shows how lyric’s mode beyond “emplotment” (17) is particularly well suited to grappling with the textures and contingencies of black environmental experience. Moving away from the theory of lyric as overhead speech, she instead encourages readers to think about black lyric subjectivity in terms of “collection,” “archive,” and even as a kind of “symphony.” The book also contains a chapter on mid-century Caribbean little magazines like Savacou and BIM that will be a crucial resource for researchers long into the future. In this chapter, she moves us from the territorialized provision grounds of Claude McKay’s poems to the deterritorialized acts of provisioning in the rich and intertextual ecologies of West Indian periodical poetry, as well as in Phylon and Gwendolyn Brooks’s “In the Mecca” (1968). A chapter on the Mississippi Floods of 1927 dilates black lyric to include a range of verse and song created in the long aftermath of the storm, including Ma Rainey’s “Back-Water Blues.” An extended coda on M. Nourbese Philip’s Zong (2009) is a stunning rejoinder to the recent valorization of ambient poetics in eco-philosophy, while suggesting how black poetics challenges assumptions about what constitutes environmental poetry more broadly.

Posmentier is carefully attentive to how the shift from plantation to post-plantation agriculture shaped and indeed demanded a transformation in literary form, but I wonder if she can talk more specifically about lyric and its relationship to racial capitalism? For example, how does black lyric reflect, deflect, or otherwise interact with the changing forms of appearance (but not modes of production) of capital? She reads in black lyric an expansive dialectic that often moves toward preservation, but in my reading I wondered: does preservation and repair mark a poetics of the dispossessed or a poetics of private property? Insofar as preservation links to survival, collectivity, and community care (as well as care for the earth), it may be a mode that speaks to the conditions and concerns of the dispossessed, but I kept thinking about Fanon’s arguments about how the formerly colonized petit bourgeois continue to reproduce colonial structures through claims to private property and the wielding of colonial norms after independence.1 Here, it’s hard not to think about lyric’s association (even if constructed this way historically by critics) with (en)closure, stasis and resolution, terms that we would be more likely to associate with the protection of property rather than its abolition. How then do we / can we think about the politics not only of race but also class within lyric? Does lyric express the conditions of racialized dispossession or seek to manage them? I love Posmentier’s coinage of colonial lyric shame and I wonder how this concept might speak to such questions about class, property, and precariousness.

Another way to ask this question might be: How do we understand the role or limits of poetry in transforming the material conditions of people’s lives? Posmentier writes about Claude McKay’s disdain for literary elites, embrace of the masses, and staunch Leftist commitments, but I was stopped in my tracks by her citation of Tommy McKay, who once remarked about his brother’s novels: “I have not read them for I am too poor to buy them” (37). Posmentier writes about the crucial role played by Caribbean periodicals in democratizing access to poetry and acknowledges that McKay’s poems were themselves “commodities in their own right . . . circulated within a Jamaican economy as well as a British and American one” (37), but I did here wonder how a language of transnational circulation and even of diaspora itself obscures an opportunity to engage with different types of black labor, subjectivity, and aesthetic expression. Does the turn to diaspora potentially fetishize geography and space at the expense of thinking about other forms of difference, including class, gender, and sexuality? This raises a broader question about alienation. Throughout, Posmentier is interested in how black lyric ecologies mitigate alienation from the land, but this presumes that alienation is an unequivocally bad thing. Indeed, alienation is central to the commodification of land and labor and Posmentier turns and returns to Wynter’s crucial argument about how the enslaved endure a brutal structure of “double” alienation. But we also know that alienation can be, and historically has been, a crucial enabler of organization, resistance, and revolt. Here, I love the moments when Posmentier locates a subterranean refusal of labor in McKay’s poems, but I still want to know how and if black lyric can account for Tommy McKay’s claim that he was too poor to buy his brother’s books.

I also wondered if a legacy around the New School and the academic depoliticization of poetry matters for this project? What about those pesky Southern Agrarians? I would love to hear Posmentier expand a bit on the work she does in her endnotes to talk about how she understands the status of lyric today. How does she understand Cultivation and Catastrophe to be contributing to or possibly challenging a broader critical conversation around lyric? Here, I’m thinking of Jordy Rosenberg’s recent argument about the “becoming-lyric of theory”—the “compression of lyricism and analysis”—which he reads as a “two-for-one kind of efficiency ‘solution’ to the labors of writing and of interpretation that surfaces as a response to an increasingly defunded humanities.”2 What then are the stakes of making an argument for black lyric in 2019? I am convinced by its ecological implications, but I wonder how we might understand it symptomatically in terms of broader shifts in academic labor and disciplinary formations as well as transformations in the market for poetry and poetry criticism?

I am perhaps most compelled by how Posmentier’s study points us to a long history of black poetics that has made a claim to the land even under the most devastating conditions of ecological ruination (the question of the claim to the sea/water is another interesting question that might bring us back to questions about indigeneity and the processes of indigenizing that Wynter discusses). In this way, we might think about the politics of enclosure within black poetics, not as a critical re-territorialization of the land as property, but as a rightful and righteous claim to the commons itself. Today, fear is being constantly deployed to scare people about eco-catastrophe (just open up your favorite social media platform), and, as Sayak Valencia notes, fear is an extremely effective tactic through which states, now under a phase of what she calls “extreme neoliberalism,” declare states of exception.3 These unending and violent states of exception help to justify, among other things, a range of forced migrations (that, I would add, often happen in conjunction with the need to remove people from the last frontiers of resource extraction on earth). In other words, fear is being relentlessly wielded for Trump-era dispossessions by a political regime and media that wants to convince us that the earth is already destroyed, and that the commons are already gone. But as Posmentier’s study shows forcefully and crucially, black (ecological) poetry has long insisted otherwise.