Samia Rahimtoola

This article considers a paradox that structures the internal logic of the ideology of improvement, a central justification for settler colonialism’s strategies of cultural and material dispossession. Far from establishing a limit to settler colonialism as predicted by the writings of John Locke, scenes of ruined, abandoned land are seen to extend settler sovereignty. Specifically, the article examines settler representations of, and encounters with, ruin in the poetry of Robert Frost to argue that irony’s “infinite absolute negativity,” as Søren Kierkegaard states, enables settler subjects to defend against the threat of settler dissolution and magnify settler subjectivity. In a contemporary moment in which damage and devastation have become dominant modes of settler presence on the land, Frost’s poetry prepares us to consider the settler histories of ruin gazing that remain sedimented within contemporary environmental discourse.

This essay reads the poetry of Dawn Lundy Martin and Ed Roberson to pursue modes of place-based liberation beyond those structured by possessive individualism. Along the way, it also treats the salutary pessimism of poetry that refuses legacies of ‘green’ urban improvements and their novel mechanisms for producing and managing race and nature.

A essay on Lorine Niedecker's poetry of the floodplains of Black Hawk Island, and on ways to (not) live with a changing earth.  It takes up open form poetry, resilience, and the limits of the neoliberal environmental demand for flexibility. Included in Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne's anthology Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field (University of Iowa Press).