(Write it!) Like Disaster: Precarious Futures in North American Poetry
(Write it!) Like Disaster: Precarious Futures in North American Poetry

Summary/Abstract: My article describes disaster poetry as a particular mode of engagement with a perceived, negative rupture between present and future. Understanding “disaster” in such abstract and open terms, I argue that this poetry stages a tension of continuity and discontinuity in which the poetic act itself works against the very sundering it still posits. In making this larger point, I contrast two exemplary poems, Walt Whitman’s Civil-War poem “The Dresser” (1865) and Stephen Collis’s “Future Imperfect” (2021). Addressing war and environmental destruction in their social and personal ramifications, both these poems confront a present in which the future itself is precarious or even unimaginable, and they all act in their present to bridge that conceptual gap again in various ways without denying its existence or profound relevance. As such, they provide aesthetic models for a more wide-ranging assessment of how we imagine, speak about, and respond to disaster as a temporal crisis in which the relation between present and future is in question, as they engage with corresponding tropes of fatalism, determinism, uncertainty, agency, knowledge, hope, finality, and beginnings.

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