'The Epochal Heartbeat': Lyric Poetry of The Great Acceleration & In the Methuselah Grove

This thesis examines the ways in which contemporary lyric poetry about place considers and engages with the acknowledged position of human experience within deep time. This enquiry intersects with the multi-disciplinary discourse surrounding the proposed naming of the Anthropocene epoch and the human-effected ecological and systemic changes it acknowledges. The critical thesis of this practice-based research project engages with theories of place including Heidegger's concept of dwelling and Edward Relph's writing on placelessness. The poetic discussion is based in the lyric theory of Jonathan Culler, the poetics of the elegy, and David Farrier's Anthropocene Poetics. Because of the intersection with Anthropocene discourse, the critical element of the thesis takes as its starting point The Great Acceleration, the period beginning with the end of World War II and defined by sharp population increase, rising pollution levels, and the fallout from nuclear detonation. The Great Acceleration has been proposed as a marker of the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch, and using it to frame the work examined in the thesis allows for an exploration of the engagement with the ecological and existential concerns of the Anthropocene before the proposed naming of the epoch. The critical element of the thesis therefore starts by examining the work of W. S. Merwin and Juliana Spahr, both from a coal mining region of the United States who use lyrical elements of elegy and lament to call for ethical response to ecological damage. The next chapter pairs Rosmarie Waldrop's A Key Into the Language of America with Inupiaq-Inuit poet dg nanouk okpik's Corpse Whale to examine the cultural and linguistic 'betweenness' of poetry written about the colonisation of the United States, and considers the differing perspectives of the poetic voice of the immigrant and the indigenous. The final chapter examines the contemporary poetic approach to potential deep futurities by paring J. O. Morgan's The Martian's Regress with Ed Roberson's Asked What Has Changed. Both books elegise the eventual loss of a planetary home, Morgan's by narrating an imagined far-future in which humans have evolved into a different, Mars-inhabiting species, and Roberson's by witnessing to the experience of living with the knowledge that Earth cannot sustain human life indefinitely, and the shift in cognition, vision and poetic approach effected by living with such realisation. The creative element of the project is a collection of poetry titled In the Methuselah Grove. Conceived around the habitat of the world's oldest living tree in California's White Mountains, the poems explore the relationship between place and memory, the tension between recognised and anticipated loss, and the varying scales of place, with a particular concern with the implications and definitions of 'home'. The collection examines various historical and personal places that have been left behind, and the traces that have been left on them. The Methuselah Grove acts as an anchoring point, as a place uninhabited by humans which has sustained one of Earth's oldest living organisms, a witness to and unwitting archivist of human experience and impact.