Ecology meets Technology: What Comes After the Poetry of Nature?

October 23, 2024, 6:30 pm

Warburg-Haus, Heilwigstraße 16, Hamburg Eppendorf

One of the central insights from Anthropocene discourse is that humans have profoundly changed the planet with their growth-oriented and hyper-digitalized lifestyle. The so-called “nature” of the twenty-first century has been permeated by traces of human technological influence: from cultivated landscapes to microplastics in the oceans and the anthropogenic greenhouse effect. The modern Western domination of the environment has ultimately led to widespread destruction. Amid drought-induced food crises, rising sea levels, migration movements motivated by need, and a rapid decline in biodiversity, humans are having to recognize their vulnerability and their interdependence with planetary ecologies. As a result, the idea of “nature” as something fundamentally different to us is also waning.

In this Poetry Debate, we would like to discuss what poetry “after” nature could look like. While the nature poem has long been a genre for worshipping nature or regretting the loss of our harmonious relationship with it, new poetic approaches to the challenges being posed by the Anthropocene are currently emerging. These often include reflections on digitality and technology. We would like to discuss the following questions: How can the ecological, technological, political, and economic entanglements of the twenty-first century be poetically captured within the smallest of spaces – the poem? How do you criticize them? Do twenty-first-century ecological poems have to be documentary? What role do reading technologies, real materials, and data play here? Poetry after nature could also be poetry that goes beyond the Western logics of domination – how can poems be used to deconstruct the white, Western, male-dominated human standpoint?

With
Carla Cerda (poet and biologist, Berlin)
Prof. Dr. Cornelia Zumbusch (literary studies scholar, Hamburg)

Moderation: Antje Schmidt, M.Ed. (literary studies scholar, PoetryDA postdoc, Hamburg)

Free admission