Introduction: Azaleas and so on

Abstract

[Abstract] Wallace Stevens famously placed flowers amongst the “things that are in the dump [...] and the things that will be,” hoping to find a “purifying change” between “that disgust and this.” In the late twentieth century, we have witnessed a “shift from a culture defined by its production to a culture defined by its waste,” as Cythia Deitering puts it. As garbage and toxicity have become more and more pervasive, the “slow violence” of the environmental degradation has remained strangely slippery, difficult to grasp and reflect in artistic representations. It has thus become an urgent need to explore those narratives that not only attempt to capture the degradation of the environment, but also focus on those human communities that have become residual or waste(d). The poets in this section keenly bring these ubiquitous and polymorphous materializations of waste to the fore, challenging askew narratives of progress fueled by the global capitalist paradigm of growth. In “republic,” D.A. Powell unveils the pernicious consequences of the progressive automation of the countryside. The refuse hidden in our pipelines overflows in Laura-Gray Street’s revision of Darwin’s optimism in “An Entangled Bank.” Craig Santos Perez’s playful “One fish, Two fish, Plastics, Dead fish” addresses the pollution of water and the depletion of the marine wildlife that are consequence of capitalist driven overfishing and global warming. Evelyn Reilly’s “Hence Mystical Cosmetic Over Sunset Landfill” reminds us of the omnipresence of plastic, that hyper-object silently taking over the earth. In “Agents Orange, Yellow, and Red,” Adam Dickinson responds to the results of chemical tests on his blood, while mocking the polarizing politicization of ecological matters. Finally, the violence exerted at the margins of the empire is denounced in Rita Wong’s “sort by day, burn by night,” which exposes the heinous side of technological commodities; and through the lives tragically lost but not forgotten in Martín Espada’s “Floaters.”