On Satiric Ecopoetics

Abstract

To understand contemporary ecopoetry’s power, we need to think historically about genre. This essay primarily focuses on satire. I first give a brief overview of key ideas from the last several decades on genre theory, particularly prose essays that explore what poetic genres are and if they evolve. I then survey ways to understand how the history of satiric poems furnishes valuable perspectives on contemporary developments in ecopoetry, which is defined as poetry linking ecological and social crises. The role of satire in ecopoetry has been too little studied—even though poets themselves, prodded by environmental degradation, have long valued the genre. At the heart of the essay are readings of poems by Jorie Graham, Craig Santos Perez, Evelyn Reilly, Jenny L. Davis, and others. Their work provides test cases for my hypothesis that the climate crisis is causing satiric poetry to adapt, modifying its methods and goals. When elements of a genre are no longer suited for contemporary needs, innovative poets get to work. Yet contemporary innovations paradoxically reaffirm the ancient legacy of satire’s importance.

1. Introduction

Beyoncé [on her Cowboy Carter album (2024)] enlisted Linda Martell—the Black country singer whose 1970 album, Color Me Country, included the first charting country hit by a Black woman, “Color Him Father”—to provide spoken words. For the intro of “Spaghettii”—which features Beyoncé rapping—Martell says, “Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they? Yes, they are. In theory, they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand. But in practice, well, some may feel confined.”1

Ecopoetry is not “nature” poetry. It is poems that link ecological and social crises past and present, exploring their causes and consequences. To understand contemporary ecopoetry’s power, we need to think historically about genre. Three of the most important genres of the lyric that ecopoetry is reworking under pressure from the Anthropocene include the pastoral elegy, the ode, and satire. This essay primarily focuses on satire. Collectively, satiric ecopoetry may be thought of as a Dunciad for the Anthropocene—our contemporary version of Alexander Pope’s comic epic (1728–43) that cataloged examples of human stupidity and its consequences. Satiric ecopoems praise folly in the slim hope that we humans will wake up. Pope’s satire provides a precedent because its targets were more comprehensive than just examples of dullness and poor taste in the arts.

In what follows, I first give a brief overview of key ideas from essays published over the last several decades on genre theory, particularly as they pertain to lyric poetry. I then survey ways to understand how the history of poetic satire furnishes valuable perspectives on developments in contemporary ecopoetry. The role of satire in ecopoetry has been too little studied—even though poets themselves, prodded by environmental degradation, have long valued the genre. I offer readings of recent poems by Jorie Graham, Craig Santos Perez, Evelyn Reilly, Jenny L. Davis, and others; their work provides test cases for my hypothesis that the climate crisis is causing satiric poetry to adapt, modifying its methods and goals. Poets confide in genres and trust them, but they can also feel “confined” by them, as Linda Martell has said. When elements of a genre are no longer suited for contemporary needs, innovative poets get to work.

Three common elements of satire are emphasized, synthesized from prior studies by Griffin (1994), Burrow (2025), Freudenburg (1993, 2001), and others. First, satire uses shock and then laughter to break through defense mechanisms—so that a hidden evil is suddenly exposed to ridicule. What was thought in silence or whispered about suddenly breaks into the open and is spoken. Second, through its verbal pyrotechnics, satire demonstrates how we are imprisoned within linguistic conventions and vocabulary that are revealed to have poisonous effects. Mockery imitates such ways of speaking but also inundates that language with perspectives and an energy that reveals how dangerous they are. And third, pace Burrow, satire involves a wager. It takes risks and gambles that laughter will generate change in both language and behavior—if not right away, then eventually.

In addition, a core chapter of Griffin’s book, “Satiric Closure,” stresses that many satires offer not “closure” or solutions, but endings that are profoundly problematic and ambiguous, often mocking the very idea of conclusions. His test cases for such a claim are the paired dialogs in Pope’s Epilogue to the Satires (1738) and two of Pope’s models, Horace and Juvenal.

For each of the five more modern satiric ecopoets considered in the later sections of the essay, I delineate how their poems use satire’s three identifying elements to place themselves within satiric tradition. This establishes a baseline from which we can measure what elements in the poems appear to be new. For the analyses of specific poems, after stressing their commonalities with the tradition I raise the question of whether the Anthropocene can plausibly explain the presence of the poems’ new elements. I show how all the poems under consideration (1) explore the connection of capitalism and/or colonialism to the climate crisis, and (2) satirize failed efforts to alleviate that crisis and its effects, or to distract us from them. These examples suggest that the Anthropocene is putting pressure on these poems, following the model sketched in Section 2.1 explaining why poetic genres evolve.

Finally, for each of the five recent poets under consideration I look at their poems’ endings, assessing whether they support Griffin’s hypothesis that strong satires tend to end not with a satisfying conclusion, but with still more contention. The evidence suggests that the answer is yes. I then present the case that such endings are appropriate for the Anthropocene’s state of constant anxiety and fears for the future. Paradoxically, this additional instance of commonality with older satires simultaneously gives us evidence that the Anthropocene has introduced something new: the rhetorical violence of these poems’ endings has features marked by Anthropocene anxieties, fears, and exhaustion. Beneath the poems’ irresolution about endings looms the probability that an abrupt End may indeed be coming—if not for all species on Earth, then for many of them, including possibly our own.

2. Discussion

2.1. Recent Lyric Theory: Background and Overview

Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins in their Lyric Theory anthology (Jackson and Prins 2014) have given a cogent summary of recent decades’ scholarly debates over how to understand the function of a major literary genre, the lyric poem, including how it evolves.2 For our purposes here, three critics are especially useful, even though they do not really concentrate on ecopoetics. They are René Wellek, Ralph Cohen, and Jonathan Culler.

Before turning to Wellek and others, I would like first to acknowledge that satire and critique have long been central to ecopoetry’s response. In some ways, the exploration of how to define connections between ecology and literature has not changed greatly since the 1960s and 1970s—except that the topic has become more urgent, due to an accelerating sense in the 2000s that pledges by nations at climate summits to slow and then reduce climate heating seem not to change very much those same nations’ actual behavior. Pledges are only partially fulfilled or completely ignored; scientists issue statistics and warnings; people demonstrate; but quick profits continue to rule the day even as the average global temperature keeps inching up.

As far as imaginative literature is concerned, the central questions have always been whether storytelling might help change peoples’ consciousness about their connections to the Earth in ways that statistics do not—and, if so, how and why. Poetry has always been part of the discussion, in part because it works on readers in such intimate ways, but also because it is adept at being social, not solitary; it helps us imagine new communities. William Rueckert’s influential “Literature and Ecology” essay from 1978 suggested that good ecopoems were like little suns, perpetually renewable sources of energy (Rueckert 1978). He also suggested that they can help break down toxic thinking in our mental ecosystems, including the belief that we hominids were given dominion over the Earth and all its creatures.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Carson 1962) was globally influential, including in Latin America, and sparked actual legislation with productive outcomes. Writers in Chile and elsewhere during the 1960s were already worrying about ecological disasters caused by modernity’s industrial production systems. Sofía Rosa cites Luis Oyarzún’s essay Defensa de la tierra, which was published posthumously in 1973, as a key influence on the next generation, plus Nicanor Parra’s Ecopoemas of 1982. Parra and many other writers understood that poems imagined a new collective “we” that could inspire dissent, mockery, and other forms of political action against industrial modernity. Parra made many Spanish speakers aware of why a neologism uniting eco and poesía was needed, and he coined the word in Spanish before the term ecopoetry became familiar to some English speakers. Further, interviews with the chileña poet Cecilia Vicuña included in her recent bilingual New and Selected Poems (Vicuña and Acalá 2018) suggest that, in the post-World War II era, Spanish-speaking poets may have been in advance of English-speaking poets when it came to making connections between corporate capitalism, environmental destruction, systemic social injustice. They also appear to have firmly insisted that ecopoetry be both profoundly experimental in form and inventively political and interventionist. Google n-gram corpora searches in Spanish compared to British and American English appear to provide evidence for the above hypothesis, though the evidence is complicated.3 Modern poets’ examination of ravaged ecosystems and what forces poisoned them is much more pointed and specific than the Romantics’ unease with the Industrial Revolution.

Attempting to measure recent ecopoetry’s rapid evolution in the post-World War II period, it is important to think historically about theories of how and why lyric poetry evolve. In general, the postwar era rejected Modernism’s illusions of making a complete and liberating break from the past. Instead, new theories of genre emphasized incremental changes and how to chart them. Surveying these briefly is necessary groundwork for my particular focus on how contemporary satiric ecopoetry is evolving.

Working in the 1960s and possibly influenced by Theodor Adorno,4 René Wellek criticized German Romanticism’s and Hegel’s definition of the lyric as the supremely subjective literary form. According to Hegel, the lyric was valuable because it dramatized “self-bounded” subjectivity coming into consciousness of itself and its powers—thus modeling in miniature how an entire society could also realize its destiny. Such a definition furthered Hegel’s vision that true History, at least for the West, realized the possibilities of human freedom and power in social institutions. But Hegel’s key claim that autonomous “self-bounded” agency is the goal of all literary genres, not to mention nations, makes a very problematic assumption, though there is no denying its immense appeal and influence.

Dissenting, Wellek proposed that we focus instead on performing comparative analyses of the evolution of particular genres within the lyric, such as ode, elegy, song, across historical periods, noting similarities and differences and therefore stressing interdependence and incrementalism, not sudden breaks and the illusion of autonomy in the name of the New. Further, Wellek objected to tying changes in genre to a totalizing Hegelian narrative about a single goal determining how History evolves (Wellek 1967).

Decades later, Ralph Cohen offered his own response to Wellek’s call, which he dubbed “a process theory of genre” (Cohen 1986). For Cohen, “genre concepts in theory and practice arise, change, and decline for historical reasons” (p. 53). His “process” theory emphatically rejects the concept of autonomy in genre history. Relations between texts in a genre change based on internal contradiction, expansion, interweaving. Members of a genre need not have a single trait in common[,] since to do so would presuppose that the trait has the same function for each of the member texts. Rather[,] the members of a generic classification have multiple relational possibilities with each other, relationships that are discovered only in the process of adding members to a class. (p. 58)5

Jonathan Culler built on Cohen’s work in the 1980s and after, with notable highlights being his “Lyric, History, and Genre,” published in Cohen’s New Literary History journal (Culler 2009), and Theory of the Lyric (Culler 2015). Culler endorsed Cohen’s claim that “process theory” can offer testable hypotheses regarding why and how different lyric genres evolve. Focusing on comparative analysis makes literary history possible, he argued, in part because it crosses traditional ways of dividing up literary history into allegedly separate or autonomous periods or paradigms. Culler’s lyric theory mediates between Hegel’s assumption that all evolution is explained by a single determining goal, and versions of history that divide time into allegedly separate ages or periods with their own internal logic of development. What if certain elements stay more or less the same, while others are jettisoned or added? How can we explain this, beyond just focusing on the choices made by individual authors? These are key questions for ecocriticism to consider too.

However, in suggesting that history explains how and why lyric genres are revised, Culler makes a further claim that I contest. Reacting against Wellek’s assumption that poetic genres like the ode, elegy, ballad, and other forms are supreme, Culler asserts that many nineteenth- and twentieth-century lyrics “do not seem to belong” to the particular lyric genres Wellek cites as dominant. Modes favored in earlier periods become less dominant in modernism, Culler argues, and literary theory needs to posit why that occurs. He may have a point. But I will argue here that the genre of poetic satire is central to understanding ecopoetry’s adaptations to the Anthropocene. Some lyric modes are profoundly flexible and adaptable in ways that, say, heroic couplets are not. Certainly, some lyric modes may no longer have the cultural status that they once did, as Culler claims. Such developments signal that the old forms and the narratives that went with them no longer work in our era to create major poetry (as opposed to minor, imitative poems). But there is also no denying that some forms that go out of fashion may suddenly re-emerge showing new possibilities when a new generation of poets arrives on the scene, takes up supposedly outdated forms, and makes them new. The revival of the interest in the sonnet among contemporary poets is one such instance.6

To live, poetic genres must be flexible enough to morph to fit new eras. In Wallace Stevens’ words in the poem “Of Modern Poetry,” such lyric resilience and adaptability enact the “poem of the mind in the act of finding/What would suffice.” (Stevens 1954) Lyrics also enact communal values; they create an imagined community. When crises occur, lyrics can explore how best to collaborate to meet the challenge. In the era of the Anthropocene, this entails creating the ability to imagine and sustain more-than-human communities. In the case of satire, this means identifying behavior that is poisonous. My own version of a “process theory” of poetry in this essay shows that satire is being repurposed by ecopoetry under pressure from the climate crisis. This may seem an obvious supposition to make, but it is not often posed, much less tested, by contemporary criticism. Satire’s combustible mix of disappointment, melancholia, fear, and rage makes it well suited to our historical moment of crisis, crisis-denial, and spiraling uncertainty about the future.

2.2. A Survey of Theories of Poetic Satire from the Greeks to the Present

To proceed, I offer first assay a brief overview of the genre of satire—how it has been understood in the past and how it remains relevant for some forms of ecopoetry. Satire is an excellent way to acknowledge volatile emotions caused by climate warming, such as denial, anger, despair, loneliness, and grief. Satire also may show how not to have those emotions consume us. Satire—and the laughter it provokes—break through our defenses and denials, so that we realize what passes for “normal” is obscene. The word obscene signals the strategy behind the satiric poems discussed. The poems go to the root of the word obscene—polluted or filthy, ill-omened and abominable (Latin: obscaenus)—to frame a critique of modernity. Satiric ecopoems—such as Allen Ginsberg’s “Moloch” section in Howl, or W. S. Merwin’s withering “For a Coming Extinction”—identify, imitate, and mock much of our behavior associated with industrial modernity, tracing both its causes and the long-term consequences of such folly (Ginsberg 1955; Merwin 1967). But Anthropocene satire of course also has a (usually implied rather than directly stated) positive goal too. It provokes us to imagine a better way to live. After all, to be truly civilized is not to foul your local nest, nor your planet.

Admittedly, satire is not just deployed by those who recognize the dangers of global heating and pollution. The far right acknowledges satire’s visceral effectiveness too. They celebrate the God-given rights of selfishness, including the freedom to consume whatever you want, and they believe that superior groups should have far more rights and power than others. They do not just mock those who oppose them; they take a righteous, sadistic glee in doing as much harm as possible. Language and the power of laughter are used to punch down, humiliate, and torture. Climate-heating deniers celebrate the creation of a society of haves and have nots and then justify social inequality as natural, inevitable, and divinely sanctioned. Any dream that human society can evolve beyond possessive individualism must not just be killed; we are to enjoy killing that dream; we believe that will liberate us.

Given the stakes involved, it is surprising that satire and apocalyptic prophecy in ecopoetry have been so little studied. Satire as a genre or mode has of course been extensively covered, perhaps most notably by Dustin Griffin’s Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (1994).7 Griffin surveys classical and Renaissance theories, a New Critical consensus that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, and then more recent insights and debates. Griffin stresses that oratorical flair has always been essential to satire, not just an attempt to persuade. Some satires feature a contest of insults—and then they leave it up to the audience to decide who wins, or whether both parties are part of the problem. Rather than affirming clear demarcations between good and evil, dialog and debate “have been prominent features of satire from its pre-Horatian beginnings in Aristophanes, Ennius, Lucilius, and Varro” to Pope in the eighteenth and Byron in the nineteenth century (40). Further, satire cannot really be effective unless there is something outrageous and destabilizing about it. It must receive our attention. Satire that lasts does so because it shows that the problems identified are still endemic and dangerous.

Griffin’s main contribution to the history of satire, however, is to emphasize the importance of play in the genre, and his argument for why such a feature is not at odds with satire’s primary goal of arousing “savage indignation”—Jonathan Swift’s phrase from his tombstone (as translated by William Butler Yeats). Satire has serious goals, but it does not take itself too seriously. In arguing for the importance of play, Griffin is clearly influenced by Homo Ludens (1938), Johan Huizinga’s classic study of the role of play and laughter in literature and culture (Huizinga 1955). But Griffin sees satiric play as more than just self-indulgent displays of wit: satire’s energy poses but also tests ideas and the language that embodies them. It has a powerfully creative function as well as a subversive one. It can also be open-ended: presenting us with a problem, then leaving us with an uncertain outcome. What should we do? As the critic Colin Burrow has noted (Burrow 2025), satire has a poor record of taking down would-be emperors, whether they be Robert Walpole in the eighteenth century or Margaret Thatcher in the twentieth. What satire does successfully do is prepare the ground for future change. Burrow:

humour is often the engine of these long-term revolutions. …Cultural change can happen through the partial agency of literature, but cultural changes on the whole happen very slowly. They can be enabled by literary texts, but usually only when those texts seek to ‘do’ more than address their immediate moment—when they stick like a thorn in the flesh of political configuration, and gradually persuade a generation born after their moment of production that the world ought to be different.

(14)

Following Griffin and Burrow, my focus here is less on past satiric poets historically situated, but more on the commonalities most good satires share. I do this to establish a baseline from which we can measure (1) what contemporary satire shares with the tradition; (2) what elements, if any, might significantly be different; and (3) whether any of those perceived changes can be linked to climate disaster concerns and, if so, what evidence supports such a reading.

How well do the three elements of satire—disruption, play, and a wager about the future—illuminate the workings of contemporary satiric ecopoems? And do those same poems also struggle to create closure, in ways that appear to imitate the experience of living in the Anthropocene? Let us find out.

2.3. Satire in the Anthropocene

“A modest proposal for combatting

climate change: satire.”

—Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (2018)8

What are the stakes for satire in the Anthropocene, when self-centered human This section essay traces imperiled the survival of humans—and many other species as well—on planet Earth? My essay sketches how and why the concept of “nature” poetry has evolved since the Romantics, and the more heightened role that satire has played in ecopoetry since the 1950s, when the rise of ecological science and new understandings of the side-effects of industrial modernism became clear. Modern ecopoets versed in ecology do their own versions of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad in their mockery of our stupidity, including our hubris in thinking we can assert “dominion” over nature without uncontrollable negative consequences. My topics also include how ecopoets past and present have been profoundly interested in how satire can bypass a person’s defense mechanisms.

I must also give credit here to Joyelle McSweeney’s and Craig Santos Perez’s concept of satiric “necropastoralism” as an influence (McSweeney 2014; Perez 2020). Their term emphasizes the longstanding connection between pastoral, precarity, harm, and loss. Both also make the case that the slow violence of modernity has particularly traumatic effects, and that these are unevenly distributed globally and locally due to systemic inequality. Necropastoralism’s special relevance for satire in the Anthropocene is demonstrated by many contemporary anthologies that focus on the apocalyptic imagination of present and impending damage—such as Dark Scenes From Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene (Edwards et al. 2022) or Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field (Hume and Osborne 2018)—as well as books like Mike Davis’ Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (M. Davis 1998), Frederick Buell’s From Apocalypse to Way of Life (Buell 2003), Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology (Morton 2016), and Margaret Ronda’s Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End (Ronda 2018). The poems discussed below could also be called “remainders”—Ronda’s term for books or poems that seem left-behind fragments, texts bearing in their texture scars and wounds from the history that affected them. Yet these poems are tough. They propose survival strategies even as they remember trauma. Below, I offer a reading of Perez’s “Halloween in the Anthropocene (a necropastoral)” highlighting its black humor. For Perez, humor offers one of the best ways of dealing with competing emotions like rage and fear. He focuses his satiric lens on the ways in which consumer culture addicts us to distractions covering up what is really going on—Halloween masks we put on because we are afraid of the dark. He also does not just indict contemporary capitalism; he links it to capitalism’s early modern involvement with global trade, colonization, plantation monoculture, and the slave trade.9

My focus on satiric ecopoetry may seem counterintuitive. In general, when ecopoetry is discussed, it is ecopoetry’s complex relationship to pastoral tradition that tends to be emphasized. On the one hand, ecopoetry finds it hard not to relinquish the tropes associated with Golden Age motifs in pastoral from the Greeks on—the rhetoric associated with imagining an ideal synthesis between nature and culture. That vision is normally placed in the distant past, before the corruptions of modern civilization set in, but it also is understood to be proleptic; that is, to envision a future that is more harmonious and in balance. Ever since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, of course, it has become harder not to see the pastoral ideal as delusional, a pretty picture toward which we humans turn so as to deny the ugly reality we have created. Yet remember that Carson herself used pastoral as a way of guiding how she wanted our civilization to reform itself. The vision of a locus amoenus—a beloved ideal of harmony, pleasure, productive work, and safety—is essential to pastoral, even though actual pastoral poems from Hesiod and Theocritus on also emphasize pain, precarity, and how fragile such a world is, not just for shepherds but for all of us (Hesiod 2018). Nature in pastoral is represented as a powerful, unpredictable force making human life precarious. But pastoral often also presents an analysis of how social inequality can be deadly too.

The Anthropocene has made it much harder to believe in pastoral’s harmonious ideal. Death is always present in traditional pastoral, of course; that is what is meant by the famous motto Et in Arcadia Ego—“I too am in Arcadia.” The phrase is not ancient, though, but modern. It was coined in the seventeenth century as a summary of a theme in Virgil’s Eclogues. Due to ecocide, this slogan now has a ghastly shift in meaning. Death now is not just present in Arcadia; it threatens entirely to kill off pastoral or Arcadian dreams of humans creating a successful synthesis of civilization and nature. Such a vision of Death makes it not “natural” but man-made. The threat of climate catastrophe encompasses not just individual human beings, but entire species—many more-than-human beings and the webs of life sustained within ecosystems. Satiric ecopoetry confronts this contradiction, and the rage and grief it ought to provoke.

There is disagreement over when the Anthropocene began: was it the 1950s, or the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, or during early modernism, with the rise of capitalism, colonialism, and plantation slavery—the last option being the so-called “long Anthropocene” (Ghosh 2021; Zilberstein 2016; Goffe 2025; Piketty 2022).10 Concurrently, there has also been discussion about how and why ecopoetry’s rhetoric swings back and forth between pastoral and apocalyptic modes: imagining a world without end, versus foreseeing violent collapse. Lynn Keller’s Recomposing Ecopoetics gives an adept summary of this central tension in ecopoetry (Keller 2017). Since my topic here is the importance of satire for ecopoetry, I will condense Keller’s synopsis to two brief points. First, apocalyptic rhetoric from Revelations in the bible and after always imagines not just The End but what might come after it. Second, much of the best ecopoetry dwells neither in confident visions of a cure, nor in dark premonitions of despair and damnation. Rather, it “dwells in crisis” (Frederick Buell’s phrase) and tries in small ways to live in a damaged world, ameliorating it a little. It is modest and ironic, not grandiose and hortatory. Many ecopoems best poems avoid or complicate utopic or despairing representations.

A third point follows from these first two. 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—those beings whose possible future lives and worlds humans’ behavior now has placed in jeopardy. Those future extinctions weigh on the poem’s present. Ecopoetry’s fluid temporality has rightly been called “untimely” by Margaret Ronda (Ronda 2018). It is as unstable as endangered ecosystems (and social systems) are. Its poems give us a sense of deep time on nonhuman scales, ranging back centuries or eons, so that we can think like an ecosystem. Yet strong ecopoems also make us experience the precarity of Anthropocene time, how fragile are present realities and how unpredictable the future is. It is 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. In short, Anthropocene satire in poetry fills us with foreboding and a mix of denial, guilt, rage, fear, despair, and anguish—not to mention less-hard-to-name states such as a haunting sense of malaise or unease coupled with exhaustion.

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.11

A Jorie Graham poem published in 2025, “Then the Fog,” 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, it addresses and mocks all art, including poetry, as being complicit with the fossil-fuel status quo. Here is the poem’s conclusion:

•         It is a powerful alibi—we tell it again & again—
•                   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—
• & the song was necessary, yes, it was soothing & distracting—
•              it could justify, almost, our sense of
•                        being human—
•            Call yourself alive? 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’re just the
•        talent, the event planners should be to vouch for us—
•          our wings are gauze, we’re on guide-wires,
•             just here to create memories for you,
•            to accompany you along these few seconds
•                     of time you still have—
•                    to slow them a bit,
•                    to help you linger.12

So is that all poetry’s fake angels can do? Provide a beautiful song distracting us from the sounds of murder? This is quite a different angelic annunciation to us shepherds from the one depicted in the Bible. The other poets discussed below vigorously dissent from Graham’s angry despair But before turning to them, it is useful to make one last swerve to a brief consideration of Hans Christian Andersen’s parable of the emperor’s new clothes. His tale raises important questions about what satire can accomplish.

Although Andersen’s tale is prose and (obviously) written long before the word “Anthropocene” was coined, I choose to focus on it briefly here because it provides a well-known paradigm for how satire supposedly works. Yet it also disturbingly demonstrates why the implied reformist or “moral” results of satire are so impossible to guarantee. The parable mocks humans’ general tendency to willful blindness and conformity. But Andersen’s tale also provides us with two other valuable insights relevant for appreciating satiric ecopoetry. First, it gives us an excellent analogy for climate change denial. Second, its ambiguous ending offers another way to understand the complex forms of closure chosen for satiric ecopoems by Graham, Perez, Reilly, Davis, and others.

2.4. “In Praise of Folly”: On Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” as a Paradigm for Satiric Ecopoetry

–O troubled humanity! O the emptiness of life!

–Who wants to read about that?

—Persius, Satire 113

Satire since classical Greece has been the genre that attacks human idiocy and other vices, rooting out their causes and forcing us to see their consequences. It feeds on inequality and the lies we tell to assure each other that everything is fine. Erasmus in 1509 distilled this tradition’s scathing irony into the memorable phrase quoted in the title of this section.

The outcome of satire’s anger, however, is always precarious. When we look into its cracked mirror, will we recognize what we see and change our ways? Or will we deny the evidence, or even attack the messenger? Satire’s mockery often includes acknowledging that most of its audience will repress what they see, or laugh and assume it applies to others, not them. Satire lives the agony of the Trojan prophet Cassandra, speaking uncomfortable truths knowing that many will not listen. But satire is also stubborn. Perhaps some will hear its voice.

A paradigmatic example of this conundrum is the highly influential tale revised and retold by Hans Christian Andersen as “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (1837).14 This satire has been translated into over one hundred languages.15 It does not just chronicle an unforgettable example of folly and vice; it shows how we often dupe ourselves. Yet Andersen’s story also hints at a way to escape such behavior. In this way, it diagnoses a problem and offers a solution. But what makes his tale unforgettable is its dangerous ambiguity: will the solution it provides be recognized, or attacked? The most effective satire is perhaps that which most unsettles us; it must be profoundly disturbing to be great.

Here is the parable’s gist. Weavers dupe an emperor into believing that the clothes they gift him are made of cloth so fine that only intelligent people can see it. For ordinary morons, the cloth will be invisible. The emperor cannot see their gift but of course will not admit that; he admires the fabric effusively, to prove both to himself and to the con men that he is intelligent. The same thing happens on a broader scale when the emperor appears in public wearing his regular underwear plus the “new clothes.” Apparently needing a crowd’s approval to validate his own self-worth, the emperor displays his gift in front of an assembly that has also heard the rumor that only smart people will be able to see and appreciate the special fabric.

The crowd’s collective spell of self-delusion in Andersen’s story, though, is broken by a young child who has the temerity and innocence to point at the parading emperor and exclaim, “the emperor has no clothes.” With this climatic moment, the tale seems to offer us the comforting illusion that truth will always vanquish lies and delusion. The emperor continues parading in his underwear, but now there are hints in the narrative that he is seen to be a farce. Yet it is not often remembered that Andersen’s version ends ambiguously. The child’s words have infected the crowd: some of them also begin saying out loud “the emperor has no clothes!” In response, the emperor “shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, ‘This procession has got to go on.’ So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.”

Andersen’s ending powerfully raises the question, “what if a majority in the crowd rejects what the child says?” When does a group of people so want to preserve their beliefs that they will either attack or ignore the messenger? That is the paradox of satire. It offers both hope and persuasive reasons to despair. Hope because the child points out that we are living a dangerous lie, and that maybe we do not want to continue being clothed in our own self-deceptions. Despair because we can think of only too many examples of when a mob turns on a dissenter and silences them along with their own inner voices of doubt.

Psychologists and others (such as George Orwell in 1984) have offered powerful names for the kind of mindset Andersen’s parable anatomizes. “Groupthink” and “pluralistic ignorance,” for instance, occur when people decide to conform to what others think by erasing any doubts they may have about what passes for being “true.” This conundrum is also known as the “Abilene paradox.” Jens Ulrik Hansen (Hansen) phrases it this way: “everyone is ignorant as to whether the emperor has clothes on or not, but believes that everyone else is not ignorant.”16

Theodore Adorno can also help us here. His analysis of commodity capitalism stressed that it naturalized itself, so that it seemed inevitable—the only possible way to treat the world and each other. Adorno asserted that the job of social theory—and lyric poetry—was to denaturalize capitalism’s myths about its operations, opening up possibilities for new (and/or older) forms of collective life. Adorno’s compatriot Walter Benjamin believed even more strongly in the latent utopian possibilities repressed within capitalism’s commodity fetishism. If we see the Emperor’s finery is an illusion, maybe we will see that we do not need an Emperor either. Neither Adorno nor Benjamin wrote about ecosystems, or were much interested in nature poetry per se, but their brilliant analyses of the social functions of poetry is enabling for ecocriticism. See in particular Adorno’s essay “Lyric Poetry and the Social” and Benjamin’s “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Both stress how poetic shocks can undo social conditioning.17

Satiric Anthropocene poetry believes that climate heating denial functions in similar ways; it too seeks to naturalize itself and appear inevitable and normal. Satire can be used to rip away protective masks. Dire forecasts about the Anthropocene future are so frightening to many—especially those who are content with their current privileges—that it is easier to join a crowd denying the validity of those forecasts. Counter-evidence is to be avoided at all costs or dismissed. We identify with what wounds us. In the face of such conditioning, satire’s role is to deliver shocks. Satire holds out the hope that, if it points out fraud, others will see the truth and will speak up too; the shock effects will ripple.

Anthropocene satire thus also has a utopian dimension to its mockery. It singles out industrial modernism’s commodification of nature—treating the world as mere material to be used and then thrown away—and understands it to be a death drive, the opposite of utopic dreaming. Adorno and Benjamin understood that manufactured commodities were as much sign and symbol as they were material objects; desired objects possessed an aura of being able to grant its possessor status and power within consumption communities and their social hierarchies. But they also believed that commodity culture had buried within itself utopian possibilities that—at least potentially—resisted the world-building that capitalism produced. This more radical form of utopic thinking was not a death wish but a birth wish. It imagined how a different social order from the past, present, and future that might eventually displace our current world. Benjamin: “In the dream in which each epoch entertains images of its successor, the latter appears wedded to elements of primal history (Urgeschichte)—that is, to elements of a classless society […] as stored in the unconscious of the collective.” Further, Benjamin understood such a subversive dream was not just backward-looking: “each epoch entertains images of its successor” (Arcades Project 4–5).18 In productively different ways, Benjamin and Adorno bequeathed us ways to analyze both the satiric force of ecopoetry and its utopian dimension, which dialectically resists the commodification of nature and seeks to imagine that humans may recognize the gifts ecosystems have given us and the proper ways to honor those gifts. That latter topic is less a focus for satire than the former, for obvious reasons, but it will play a part in some of the satiric poems discussed below.

In sum, fossil-fuel capitalism’s commodity-consumption economy may be our era’s “emperor’s new clothes.” The rage and fear at the heart of many Anthropocene ecopoems occur because their speaking-truth-in-the-face-of-delusion reenacts the moment between when the child makes his comment and before what the crowd decides what to do. What will the outcome be? Will the audience turn on the speaker? Or can a person who questions our ideas of prosperity become the new storyteller, the one who changes what the crowd sees and does?

To describe commodity fetishism, Robin Wall Kimmerer in the “Windigo Footprints” chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass borrows an Anishinaabe, Ojibwe, and Cree word—windigo—to describe an invasive evil spirit that tries to consume anything and everything, leaving a waste-land behind. It is the ultimate death drive, cannibalistic and addictive. Kimmerer is always kind to its readers; she believes stories can change human selfishness and inspire us to dream of different ways of sharing the earth with other species (Kimmerer 2013). That abundance of hope is one reason why it has sold well over a million copies. Satiric ecopoetry, in contrast, works differently. It is usually funny, caustic, confrontational, and provocative. It must be so, to break through our armor and get us to confront the consequences of our behavior.

Like Andersen’s parable, satiric ecopoems ask us to confront the power of collective self-delusion. What are the long-term consequences of our infinite-growth consumption economies and the endless waste they generate? Mock-praise of folly may generate laughter; laughter creates distance; distance may allow critique; critique can spur us to ask why we choose not to live another way on a finite planet. Unease and anxiety are constituent elements of satire too, for they push us to acknowledge different and darker emotions. Defamiliarization and disorientation are key; we must suddenly see how what we take to be “normal” is insane and obscene. All civilizations that collapsed in the past thought they were eternal until, suddenly, they were not. Why should petrostates be different?

2.5. Readings of Modern Satiric Poets: Perez, Sandburg, Reilly, and Davis

As mentioned in Section 2.3, the poet Craig Santo Perez uses a different term to describe our windigo sickness: necropastoral. The word is part of the title for the second poem in Perez’s Habitat Threshold (2020), “Halloween in the Anthropocene (a necropastoral),” to be discussed below. McSweeney’s term stresses the theme of precarity and anxiety long woven into pastoral poetry, including Theocritus, plus Virgil’s Eclogues (especially #s 1 and 9) and his Georgics. Virgil explicitly tied the hardships of rural life not just to nature’s vagaries, but also to Roman senators and others made newly rich by the Roman empire: they bought country estates and displaced the poor from the land. Both Perez and McSweeney update Virgil’s critique to include the threats both to humans and ecosystems caused by colonialism’s constantly metastasizing forms in the past and present.19

A second influence on his anti-colonialist ecopoetics that Perez cites is Gloria Anzaldúa. In her Borderlands/La Frontera (Anzaldúa 1987), she stressed that borderlines—in languages and lives—are dangerous places of crossings and cultural mixture. The job of writing is to trace and illuminate such spaces.

Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and underdetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.

(3)

Anzaldúa allows us to understand a second layer of meaning in Perez’s book’s title, Habitat Threshold. The primary meaning comes from ecology, that point in time after which stressors cause a biome to move from equilibrium to collapse, or a different and more impoverished new “normal.” Anzaldúa suggests another meaning: even seemingly stable boundaries are full of turmoil and boundary-crossing if we look closely. Her vision focuses not on a sudden temporal change, but on spatial arrangements and the illusory power of a “dividing line.” Such a line creates binaries, such as a superior “us” versus an inferior “them.” Anzaldúa is thinking in Borderlands more about colonial histories than ecosystems. She identifies and critiques forms of colonial power, tracing how that power is delusional and leaves destruction in its wake. Colonialism sees movement and mixtures across borders as something negative, a kind of contagion—which is unintentionally ironic, since its own practices are invasive. Its narratives of self-justification seek to rewrite the Native as impure and inferior, the colonial as pure and superior. Conversely, Anzaldúa’s project is to flip the binary and celebrate hybridity (including linguistic) as a force for resistance and transformation. All the above meanings apply to Perez’s poems and their satiric use of binaries, including in his “Halloween” poem. In Perez’s hands, satire confronts not just borders, but the fear and arrogance that creates and polices them.

Donna J. Haraway is a third commentator crucial for Perez’s poetics, and one who is familiar to many in the ecopoetry community. Habitat Threshold may indeed be the most profound poetic response to date to Haraway’s work.20 Perez quotes a powerful passage from Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble (Haraway 2016b) at the head of his book’s table of contents.

Staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or Edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific future, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.

Perez urges his audience to see our trouble we are in and its causes, and to sit with these. He does not want us to turn away, either in denial or despair. The poems by this poet born and raised in Guam seek for neither easy solutions nor simplistic blame; rather, he treats his lyrics as what Haraway calls “configurations” out of which new meanings and ways of living may emerge. Perez knows well the kinds of “contagion” that McSweeney highlighted, for Guam has been polluted by its U.S. military base and is endangered by rising ocean waters. Plus, much of its native population is forced to live elsewhere, since the health of Guam’s economy and its citizens is so fragile. Everything on this tiny but strategically located island in the Pacific—its ecosystem, economy, and culture—has been affected by the U.S. military’s long presence there.21

Perez’s response is to situate Guam’s trouble within the context of global anti-colonial movements past and present. And to use the genre of satire as a way to provoke and educate his readers. Oppressed peoples living within spaces controlled by colonialism and corporate capitalism deal with their predicament through humor and truth-telling. They also understand poetry’s trickster methodology: use multiple voices and perspectives, imitation and parody, as a way of exposing lies and suggesting alternative ways of understanding the reality of what is going on. As with most satire, the poems also do not provide neat solutions; they know you cannot just magically extricate yourself from history. But you have to claim agency and responsibility; passivity and apathy are not tolerated. Satire is subversive because it makes us laugh at how deeply we are stuck—but laughter releases energy, and energy is the opposite of entropy.

Perez’s “Halloween in the Anthropocene” from Habitat Threshold exemplifies all the themes and strategies sketched above. It is one of a number of satiric “praise” poems in the book that reinterpret how holidays like Halloween or Thanksgiving push us to accept the narratives that late capitalism sells us. “Halloween” begins with ominous images invoking fossil fuels, warming oceans, and modern forms of slavery lurking behind our chocolate pleasures. All are knocking, so to speak, as costumed figures at the threshold of our habitat, demanding payment. It opens as follows:

• Darkness spills across the sky like an oil plume.
• The moon reflects bleached coral. Tonight, let us
• praise the sacrificed. Praise the souls of black
• boys, enslaved by supply chains, who haul bags
• of cacao under west African heat. “Trick or treat,
• smell my feet, give me something good to eat,”
• sings a girl dressed as a Disney princess.

“Darkness spills across the sky”: this is an invocation of T. S. Eliot’s notorious opening lines of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” scandalous in its time (1915). Instead of a romantic view of sunset, Eliot gave us a simile of evening “spread out against the sky/like a patient etherized upon a table” for surgery. The surprise turn that happens after Eliot’s line-break brutally introduces us to his world of malaise and sickness no medical operation can cure. If Eliot invoked a fin-de-siècle unease at the start of World War I, Perez’s allusion to “Prufrock” calls up an even worse scenario: the Anthropocene era’s impending Sixth Extinction of unknown numbers of species due to climate change, possibly including most or all of Homo sapiens.

Perez’s speaker also imitates a demonic preacher in love with the end of the world. Such unpredictable shifts characterize Anthropocene satire; it is meant to be unsettling. Some of the poem’s prayers are sardonic, not sincere. In this preacher’s view, deaths in this fallen world are all signs to be praised. The reason is that they predict the arrival of the Second Coming and Judgment Day. Extinctions are all “sacrifices.” Such “reasoning” applies not just to the deaths caused by slave plantations, but also to modern forms of wage slavery under global capitalism, like those children hauling bags of cacao beans to feed the world’s chocolate fetish.

Perez’s black-humor pun on an economist’s complacent clichés about “supply chains” is then followed by a Disney princess at our door demanding Halloween treats. As with “Prufrock” and The Waste Land, this is a poem that works via whiplash juxtapositions that turn out not to be arbitrary. They all give us different glimpses of forces that do not just cause climate heating, but welcome it. Then, surprise, a silly rhyme pops up, a familiar Halloween staple. But given the context Perez gives this ditty, the rhyme quickly morphs from cute to creepy. What is more frightening, a girl dressed as a Disney princess or boys dressed in camo, both demanding treats? Or maybe the real fright-mask in the poem at our door is the Western world asserting its privileges, dressed in these “innocent” disguises. Since when do Disney princesses use body odor or a foot fetish as a threat? This nightmare of a demanding princess at our door soon morphs into a ghastly vision of brown girls—perhaps the very ones in Asian countries who manufacture Halloween costumes for sale cheap in the U.S.—burning to death “as fire unthreads sweatshops/into burned flesh.”

“Halloween” is Marxist in the sense that it exposes the labor behind our shiny commodities and our rituals of demanding treats or giving thanks. Those labor costs (which include workers’ lives at risk) of course do not factor in capitalism’s ledger of credits and debits, nor do most consumers pay attention to them. In Marx’s theory of “surplus value,” workers add value but the vast majority of that value is gobbled up by the owners of the production lines, not those laboring in them. Perez’s satire uses religious end-times rhetoric and mock praise to expose what capitalism’s global production-lines hide from consumers: “Tonight, let us praise the souls of Asian children//who manufacture toys and tech until gravity sharpens/their bodies enough to cut through suicide nets.”22

The poem’s ending is both mournful and desperate. It imitates Catholic prayers to Mary, the Mother of God, to intervene. But the voice seems to know it may already be too late:

• Tonight, let us praise our mothers of extinction,
• mothers of miscarriage, mothers of cheap nature,
• pray for us, because even tomorrow will be haunted…
(12)

The “mother” to whom these pleas are addressed hardly has Mary’s powers. However, is it not strange to ask for a cure for the Sixth Mass Extinction from the being that is called “our mother of extinctions”? When I teach this poem, my students debate about this issue very productively. Many ask if it is wise to petition the cause of a problem to provide that problem’s solution. Perhaps these prayers are not in earnest but are one of the targets of the poem’s satire. Perez’s 2015 version of the poem ended with a prayer to have those “mothers” “leave us.”23 Other students hear a different, non-satiric tone in the poem’s last lines, and I agree with them—while conceding that the skeptics may also be right. Should we pray to neoliberalism or colonialism to solve the problems their profits caused treating both nature and human labor as “cheap”? Or do we need the superpowers of a saint to intervene? The students who hear a more optimistic tone in the poem’s final lines make the following powerful argument to support their case, one that does not deny the validity of the satiric elements in the poem, nor the skepticism I have just summarized. Instead, they suggest that these prayers are not futile; they imagine a force that will counter greed and recognize the damage caused by the global production and consumption systems that “Halloween” maps. I agree with that latter reading, while acknowledging the power of the former. This satiric poem ends with a prayer that is not satirized. Such an interpretation is consonant with a theorist of satire like Griffin, who argues that the genre always posits a virtuous contrast to the vices it attacks, even if that alternative is only implied, not directly described. The endings many satires enact do not resolve contradictions but heighten them.

In short, Perez’s poem does not just anatomize damage; it asks us to consider how vectors of power may have their direction reversed. Reckonings for our current economic system have come knocking on our door, and it is no longer just fun, cute, and fake-scary candy rituals. Created out of Disney princesses, ninjas, and amusing-but-gross Halloween rhymes, the poem dons a fright mask meant to shock and shame us—sort of like that child in Andersen’s “Emperor’s New Clothes” who pointed out that we are being willfully blind to the fabric of the world we live in.

Habitat Threshold is filled with other satiric prayer-poems marking secular or traditional Christian holidays, all linking our current climate crisis to the long history of colonialist plunderings. The poems have titles like “Rainbow after the Massacre,” “Thanksgiving in the Plantationocene,” “Cockroach Ode,” “Christmas in the Capitalocene,” “Good Fossil Fuels,” and “New Year’s Eve and Day in the Chthulucene.” They too invoke the enablers I mentioned earlier, McSweeney, Anzaldúa, and Haraway.

Earlier brilliant satiric poems in Perez’s oeuvre include “SPAM^®’s Carbon Footprint” (2010), which is about the U.S. military’s footprint on the foodways of many nations from the Caribbean to the Asian Pacific and South Korea. All countries that “hosted” U.S. armed forces had SPAM enter their own cuisines. One of my students informed me that in South Korea a popular dish featuring SPAM is called by a name that translates as “military stew”; the name remembers a time of immense hardship during the war, including how families supplemented their meager rations with canned meat. That resilience based on “borrowed” and repurposed canteen food is remembered with pride. Perez acknowledges how popular SPAM is even among those who may have sharp criticisms about the U.S. military’s presence in their nations; and his ode to this industrial food product is a mock praise-poem cataloging many voices and ways of using SPAM. Yet the poem also archives SPAM’s deadly effects on its consumers’ body mass indices and cholesterol levels. This death-obsessed necro-poem is laced with the voices of brainwashed consumers hyping their favorite product—even as occasional doubts about their obsession flit back and forth like ghosts. The ^® symbol is printed in the poem each time the word SPAM appears, to great comic effect. That symbol both marks and mocks the role of global brands of consumer capitalism in invading and colonizing minds and bodies. Also funny and not-funny: how the poem itself squats there on the page like a huge fatty block of text, uncannily designed to look like a rectangular chunk of SPAM^® taken whole out of its patented easy-open aluminum container.

Perez’s smart, scathing, empathic, and quotable poems in Habitat Threshold and his other books make him a leading candidate to be the exemplary satiric poet of the Anthropocene. They never fail to provoke discussion in classes, not to mention mini research projects for students to explore—if a teacher encourages it—on the global network of Disney Princess Halloween costumes manufacture; suicide attempts by sweatshop employees; or why industrial cranberry production for Thanksgiving tables in the U.S. involves the heavy use of both pesticides and fertilizers that threaten nearby ecosystems, including streams, lakes, and aquifers, even though alternative growing methods are available. Perez’s candidacy as a master satirist of the 2020s is reinforced by his lively translation of abstract theoretical concepts from McSweeney, Anzaldúa, and Haraway into vivid practice. His provocations are well suited to open mic and Spoken Word celebrations of poetry’s power performed before a live audience, where both satiric laughter and resistant communities are built. They also exemplify three essential features of satire defined earlier: laughter breaking through denial mechanisms; linguistic brio; and unstable endings mimetic of Anthropocene anxiety (and its roots in the history of capital and colonization).

        ~~~

Let me turn towards a conclusion by commenting briefly on three good satiric ecopoems by other authors. My first example is a surprise, for he is not contemporary at all and is a poet currently rather out of fashion. But Carl Sandburg’s poem “Momus” (1914) gives us a good baseline for how satire functioned over a century ago, especially its contrast between sublime nature and sordid civilization. My second instance turns to the present; I offer a reading of excerpts from Evelyn Reilly’s “Dreamquest Malware,” a long poem in her Apocalypso (Reilly 2012). That is followed by brief remarks on a contemporary Indigenous poet who knows a thing or two about tricksters, satire, and the power of laughter, Jenny L. Davis.

In the pantheon of Greek gods, Momus is the god of satire, laughter, and mockery. (His twin sister, Oizys, is the goddess of anxiety and distress). Never afraid to mock his peers, Momus was eventually expelled from Mount Olympus by Zeus—who later, however, missed Momus’ candor and consulted him about what makes for a just society. Renaissance writers such as Erasmus and Giordano Bruno expanded Momus’ possibilities, portraying his laughter as trouble making but also a necessary check on tyranny and stupidity, especially in rulers.

Sandburg won two Pulitzer Prizes for poetry, but today he is mostly known for a delicate poem about fog, plus a paean personifying Chicago as a kind of Paul Bunyanesque urban superhero. He is generally treated by academics as a second- or third-rate Whitman imitator. But Sandburg’s 1914 poem celebrating the god of satire deserves some respect. Intriguingly, Sandburg associates satire with sublime natural landscapes, such as skies and mountains, as well as with the “shadows of the dead,” our ancestors. Published on the eve of World War I, the poem’s final lines address the god directly:

• You give me the human ease of a mountain peak, purple, silent;
• Granite shoulders heaving above the earth curves,
• Careless eye-witness of the spawning tides of men and women
• Swarming always in a drift of millions to the dust of toil, the salt of tears,
• And blood drops of undiminishing war.24

Nature poetry, Sandburg here implies, must come with a rebuke. With “deep laughter,” and landscapes haunted by ghosts, Nature and Momus are equated. This kind of conjunction is entirely consistent with Jonathan Bate’s reading of Romantic nature poetry in Song of the Earth (Bate 2000). Both look down on humanity’s frenzied strivings and allow us to witness our lives as tragicomic failures. Like the child in Andersen’s fable, Sandburg points a finger and shows us how to see the contrast between the sordid parade of our history and what real greatness looks like. “Ease” is hardly what his poem’s vista gives us.

As her title implies, Evelyn Reilly’s “Dreamquest Malware” occupies a world apart from either early or late Romanticism. Or maybe we could say it lives in the dire future that Sandburg’s Momus prophesies if capitalism wins its “war” and now has almost total control not just of economics, but of entire planets. Apocalypso is in fact dedicated “to the Occupiers,” that is, to the Occupy Wall Street protesters protesting bank bailouts during the Great Recession of 2008–2011.25 “Dreamquest Malware” (Reilly 2012, pp. 7–25) is a poetic sequence chronicling a corporation’s colonization of another planet. The poem focuses not on the Corporation’s moguls, but on its brainwashed and hapless laborers.

Reading the poem in the 2020s, it is hard not to think of Elon Musk’s Space X fantasies that include terraforming Mars for human habitation, strip-mining valuable mineral resources, and other ambitions—all of them assuming that Earth in the future may be uninhabitable for humans and that superior technology will provide solutions to all the problems created by prior technology and the lifestyles that went with it. Musk’s hubris, ironically enough, was shaped by misreading earlier sci-fi authors he admires, including Isaac Azimov and Robert Heinlein.26 Reilly quotes (and mocks) Musk-like techno-optimism, such as an actual statement from the Material Sciences Division of Berkeley’s Lawrence National Laboratory asserting that technological innovation always leads to advances in civilization (7).

Reilly’s poem is constructed using sample reports from workers back to headquarters. Their posts are trapped by the Corporation’s expectation that all company missives must praise the company’s goals and methods. But this “Dreamquest” narrative is impossibly flawed; the corporate software is full of bugs. One of those bugs (or is it a feature?) is the impossibility of acknowledging something has gone wrong. With each of the posts, we can see a repressed tragicomic narrative of frustration and failure emerging, even as the correspondents try to maintain faith that their bosses know best and their communication software is not flawed. A sample:

• The signal is so sticky with procedure dreck
• we grow desperate
• for dislocation lubricant
• Yet today we completed
• 2 fulfillment interstices
• and 6 perfusion upsinks
• after which it took hours to adjust
• the nose cone of rampant grief
(11)

It is fascinating (and moving) how this post tries to be affirmative, but its recycling of corporate jargon becomes contaminated with unauthorized content, including the presence of “rampant grief” and anger. Nose cones are commonly placed on construction sites, to mark danger zones or forbidden areas. But the context here makes it easy to imagine the rather surreal image of the “nose cone” as a clown’s nose, or dunce cap. If so, this clown is crying, not laughing. Both are very human responses to malware, laughter and tears functioning as “dislocation lubricants.” As Andersen’s parable reminds us, satire performs dislocation too, distancing us from accepting expected narratives as naturally “true.”

The second half of Reilly’s “Malware” sequence, revealingly, shifts formats. Early posts are to “The Authorities,” but later ones are to respondents clearly not sanctioned by the Corporation; they include entities such as “The Unanswerers” and “The Unauthorized.” The writers seem to have gone offline and are improvising; they may or may not survive. A representative excerpt:

• (a quest
• that became an anti-
• epic)
• But what lay in the midst
• except the tower itself?
• and fields
• of unintended
• result flowers
(25)27

Reilly adeptly targets corporate capitalism’s addiction to positive-outcome narratives, plus its ties to the discourses of colonialism and resource exploitation. “[W]hat lay in the midst/except the tower itself” has echoes of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Perhaps this utopic Corporate future is ruled by a new Sauron, and the paradise promised us is as barren a waste land as Mordor. Reilly’s poems in Apocalypso also engage with post-2000 digital gaming culture, for its programming has molded assumptions in us that we Earthlings can colonize other planets as well as Earth without unintended consequences. Apocalypso’s sly humor is subtler than Perez’s, but it is effective in its own way. The poetic sequences in Reilly’s book prod readers to question the addictive techno-optimism that created the Anthropocene.

I close this sketch of contemporary ecopoetic satire with Jenny L. Davis, a University of Arizona Press author and associate professor of anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois. She is Chickasaw and Two-Spirit/queer. The poem below can be found in Davis’s Trickster Academy (J. L. Davis 2022). The University of Arizona Press’s blurb for the book rightly calls it a collection whose topics include being Native in academia—enduring land acknowledgment statements, mascots, and displays of Native American bones, not just artifacts, in anthropology and university museums. The book is also organized around the premise of a “Trickster Academy,” a university space run by, and meant for training, tricksters who resist and change those same spaces. In other words, it is a Momus-like poem causing trouble in academe.

In the following poem, Davis assumes the persona of a generic university administrator having a crisis over being asked to make a land acknowledgment statement that does not just follow a preset formula:

• Dear Officially Nondenominational Deity,
•  
• Please let me say these names right, or at least pretty close.
• Why are there so many syllables?
• And so many tribes?
• Why couldn’t they just pick one and go with it?
• Are there any Indians in the room?
• I hope not. They’ll know if I say the names wrong.
• Isn’t there an abbreviated version somewhere? I have a lot
• to get through and last time I forgot to thank
• the provost and she didn’t talk to me for a month. So please
• don’t let me forget again—I’d never hear the end of it.
• Where was I, oh right, the land acknowledgment statement.
•  
• Amen.

The poet vividly embodies the voice and assumptions of what she mocks—so we readers can see and hear it. Yet, of course, most or maybe even all of this monolog would not actually be spoken aloud. It is the speaker’s inner thoughts, objections and panic attacks that the speaker immediately censors and does not share. In reading the poem, we are encountering words that were never meant to be known. Yet someone has leaked this evidence. Further contributing to the poem’s dark humor is this: even as this Higher Ed Administrator goes through the motions of following those pesky DEI (Diversity Equity and Inclusion) mandates, she or he worries they will be fired … or at least required to enroll in a reeducation session run by Human Resources.

Why should having to acknowledge the presence of Native Americans cause such a crisis of identity for non-Native people? Davis’ satire adroitly (and comically) encourages us to deduce a few reasons why. First, note how the poem stresses how “foreign” their Indigenous names are, and that right from the start the speaker has given up even trying to pronounce them correctly. Mocked too is the need to think of Natives as all one Other thing—why are there “so many tribes?” Just as important is the way in which this whole monolog casts the speaker as the victim, the one for whom we should feel sorry. Perfectly capturing this academic administrator’s inner crises, the poem’s Trickster persona holds up a Momus-like mirror to folly so we can recognize it. Land acknowledgement statements recognizing Native history and Native presence are not the problem. Neither are performative DEI statements a magical solution. But there cannot be any progress unless there is an acknowledgement of the broken connections between the land—where we live—and all the people present on that land.

The point is not that land acknowledgment statements are intrinsically bad, for they are better than erasing the history of settler colonialism. That is especially true during times in which the goals of equity and inclusion are being attacked. But many land acknowledgment statements reference just one Nation, whereas several were and may be present. It would be better if institutions named the present relationships they have established with existing Native nations nearby, and what is being carried out to build a new future together.

Mocking the limitations or doublespeak of land acknowledgment statements was an instance of satiric ecopoetry that had to happen. Maybe we did not realize that, however, until Davis did it. And where are we now, where even pallid attempts to recognize Native voices and history are being banned—all in the name of “free” speech?

3. Conclusions: Laugh at the End of the World

Remember Linda Martell: genres are “a funny little concept… Some may feel confined.” Martell’s and Beyoncé’s interventions applied to what’s called “country music” and its history. Their quip is relevant for my project too. To be any good, satiric ecopoetry has to call into question our assumptions about what it means to write “nature poetry” in the midst of the twin disasters of social crises and global heating. Satire should also give us options for how to imagine productively challenging the status quo. The poems considered by Graham, Perez, Sandburg, Reilly, and Davis all perform provocations, trickster rebellions. Ginsberg’s Howl, particularly its Moloch section, applies too, though there is no room here to do more than mention it.

The poems I have read suggest that theorists like Cohen and Culler, though they do not discuss ecopoetics, were right to argue that poetic genres evolve in response to historical conditions. We can use specific adaptations in form and content to do a comparative study and to test the hypothesis that changes in poetic form may be connected at least in part to historical developments. Cohen’s and Culler’s versions of the “process theory” of genre, plus work conducted by other scholars—including the editors of the anthologies The Lyric Theory Reader (Jackson and Prins 2014) and Georgic Literature and the Environment (Edney and Somervell 2023), as well as Griffin’s monograph Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Griffin 1994) and Thain’s The Lyric Poem (Thain 2013)—all demonstrate long-standing continuities maintained even as, under pressure, poetic genres evolve.

Contemporary ecopoetry’s varied ways of reworking satire thus has an ancient pedigree. McSweeney’s and Perez’s theory and practice of necropastoralism emphasize the longstanding connection between pastoral, precarity, and loss, while also making the case that the slow violence of modernity has particularly traumatic effects, and that those effects are unevenly distributed globally and locally due to systemic inequality. Further, necropastoralism and the black humor of its satire has special relevance for cultural production in the Anthropocene, as demonstrated by the proliferation of recent books that focus on apocalyptic views of probable futures. The anthologies and monographs cited near the beginning of Section 2.3 provide one set of examples.

Bill Knott (Knott 2000) suggested once that the task of poetry was to be a “laugh at the end of the world.” Climate heating and plastics pollution may make it impossible for large mammals and many other species to live. But who will point out that inconvenient fact while humans parade around in our finery and take selfies on cellphones? Knott neither denied tragedy nor condoned despair; rather, he implied that to fight back you must first discover that much of what passes for “the good life” is profoundly stupid. The poet Franny Choi adds that “the world keeps ending, and the world goes on” (Choi 2023). But perhaps the future being born will be a world without laughter. Humans need satire’s praise of folly to remind us in advance of that possible fate. Will satire wake us up in time? We do not know.

One thing is certain, though. When would-be emperors collude with corporate titans, more than ever the rest of us must not cower. We need satire’s truculent strategies of resistance. Machines (including AI) are good at predicting the next plausible word in a sentence or pixel in an image. But machine learning—despite its rapid improvement—struggles with what is profoundly different and unpredictable. Humans, however, are good at dreaming up possible worlds that have never before been imagined. Perhaps some of those futurist dreams will be aided by AI. As both human societies and the Earth’s climate alter in increasingly nonlinear ways, we will need both ancient and new modes of storytelling to assist us. Satire’s laser focus on folly and failure will continue to be useful as we humans try to adjust and adapt.