Poetry in the Laboratory: Metabolism and the Anthropocene

Background/Question/Methods

Anthropogenic pollution is not only rewriting our climate, but also the metabolism of our bodies. We wear the energy systems that power our societies in the form of chemicals in our flesh and in the hormonal messages of the endocrine system. Our bodies house changing communities of microbes that reflect our dependence on industrialized food production. How might we shift the frames and scales of conventional forms of signification in order to bring into focus the often inscrutable biological and cultural writing intrinsic to this Anthropocene moment? One place to look, by way of an expanded notion of writing, is in the metabolic processes of human and nonhuman bodies and their inextricable link to the global metabolism of energy and capital. How can poetry, as an experimental intervention, respond to this metabolic writing? How can poetry make this metabolic writing legible and urgent, and rewrite it as a form of cultural critique, or as re-imagined forms of kinship?

Results/Conclusions

Arguing for the critical and activist potential of a “metabolic poetics” that mixes science and art in a laboratory-based creative practice, I will read from and contextualize some of my recent creative writing that uses my own body as a site of experimental research in order to critically and creatively explore how the “outside” writes the “inside,” and draw attention to the coextensive and interconnected nature of the body with its environment and the consequent implications for linking the human to the nonhuman and the personal to the global in environmental ethics.