To ‘Outdistance Calamity’: Anxiety and Futurity in Interwar Modernist Ecopoetics

My project examines how American poetry in the first half of the twentieth-century registers and responds to global crises, especially as marked by the First and Second World War. I am interested in how the three poets I triangulate—Marianne Moore, Anne Spencer, and Lorine Niedecker—develop an environmentally-minded ethics of possibility, hope, and renewal in their verse experimentation. How might poetic space be able to map new models of relationality with a world gone awry? What resonances might these poets be able to carry forward in our immediate moment of global ecological and geopolitical precarity?

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