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Through a comparative examination of two documentary poetic collections, Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead (1938) and Rebecca Dunham’s Cold Water Pastoral (2017), this talk examines the modes through which water is configured as both the ‘tap’ and ‘sink’ of extreme energy frontiers. Following Christian Parenti’s claim that the ‘capitalist state has always been an inherently environmental entity’ and a distinctly ‘territorial institution’, this paper extends his assertion that ‘the preexisting use values of nonhuman nature are essential to capitalist accumulation, and [that] these are found upon the surface of the earth’ (2016), to consider the submarine and subterranean

spatialities of the hydro and petro frontiers. The verticality inherent in these modes of production necessitates that we expand from ‘surface’ to consider the role that depth – or what social geographers have termed, volumetrics –  play in the ability of the State to secure and accumulate capital. If, as Parenti suggests, it is the ‘modern State’s territoriality that delivers nonhuman nature to capital accumulation by way of place-based property regimes, [the] production of infrastructure, and [the] scientific and intellectual practices that make nonhuman nature legible and thus accessible’ (Parenti, 166), how do the multidimensional conditions of volume and atmosphere complicate or disrupt these ‘flat’ conceptions of territory? Furthermore, where the infrastructural mechanisms of pipelines, tunnels, and dams work to filter both oil and water into states of ‘pure abstract flow’ (Blackmore and Gomez, 2021), I consider how the poetic attentions of Rukeyser and Dunham work to reassert to the material liveliness of liquids as substances that leak, overflow, seep, diffuse, and spill and thus supersede these logics of containment. By emphasising water’s material capacities to disrupt, resist and suspend the linear logics of neoliberal progress, this paper examines how poets align the turbulence of liquidity with social conditions of resistance and an outright refusal to ‘go with the flow’.

The lecture will take place on May 5th 2021, at 17.15, on Zoom. To sign up, please send an email to gudrun.jakupsstovu(at)ens.unibe.ch

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