“swallowing the unfathomable / still.” The Precarious Lyric in June Jordan’s Ecopoetry

Abstract

June Jordan’s ecopoetry historicizes the environmental crisis, occupying and unsettling the pastoral Romantic framework in which the landscape of the United States of America has long been glossed. In situating the environmental legacies of settler colonialism alongside the precarity of Black and Indigenous life, Jordan’s work excised her from the existing political and formal conditions of ecopoetry replete with tropes of solitary escape and sublime encounter. By positioning herself as a witness who must hold and record racialised exposure to uninhabitable environments, her poetry widens and lengthens the scene of what constitutes environmental catastrophe, social crisis, and the lyrical address. Crucially, her poems disrupt and deconstruct the ecological racial order inaugurated by settler colonialism.