Machines of Process: Energy Systems in Contemporary U.S. Poetry

Modern life has been fundamentally shaped by two centuries of dramatic, unprecedented expansion in energy use. Because much literary criticism seeking to understand and critique modernity through the lens of energy has tended to focus on fiction, in this dissertation, I instead explore how contemporary poetry—especially 21st century poems in the form of book-length, documentary projects—represents energy systems, foregrounding the potentials of poetry and poetic forms for helping us see and think about our social and ecological entanglements with energy. Taking as a starting point Muriel Rukeyser’s influential investigation of the Hawk’s Nest hydroelectric dam in her 1938 poem The Book of the Dead, my study follows Rukeyser’s emphases on visibility and relationality as I examine poetic engagements with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the work of Rebecca Dunham, Juliana Spahr, and Nikky Finney, coal mining in poetry by Irene McKinney, Melissa Range, and Mark Nowak, fracking in Julia Spicher Kasdorf’s project Shale Play, and the electric grid in poems by Jeffrey Yang, Brenda Hillman, and Urayoán Noel. These poems emphasize the difficulties of seeing modern energy systems from the vantage of infrastructures and subjectivities shaped by these systems and draw attention to the ways the extractivism that undergirds our energy systems is obscured by socioeconomic processes, cultural narratives, and industry practices. Working through juxtaposition, association, and a variety of inherited and invented forms, these poems seek to reveal the temporal and spatial continuities of extractive logic, connecting slow violence and disaster on a local and regional level to national histories and narratives and, further, to processes of globalization and planetary ecological crisis.