Poetic Oils: Meaning Making in Caribbean Poetry Público
Fritsch, Joseph (Spring 2022)
Abstract
Poetic Oils: Meaning Making in Caribbean Poetry recovers the poetic response to the emergence of the petroleum industry throughout the Caribbean. Over the course of the twentieth century, as the world grew increasingly dependent upon oil and gasoline, Caribbean poets, overexposed to oil as both a substance and a commodity when compared with their European and American counterparts, incorporated figures of petrochemicals and their byproducts into their poems. At the same time, these ubiquitous substances shaped society and politics, fundamentally altering the trajectory of literary production. Moreover, petrochemicals transformed the surrounding environment, offering up unfamiliar and startling sights and sounds.
Poetic Oils confronts the legacy of petro-modernity, reactivating oil’s provocative potentials. Participating in current discussions within the energy humanities, ecocriticism, poetics, and postcolonial studies, I argue that poetry—with its endless rhetorical and textual effects—unsticks oil in our imagination, defamiliarizing it so that we may see it anew. By using literary analysis and studying publication history, I develop a poetics of oil, creating critical terminology and a framework for reading texts as materials participating in the same globalized networks as petrochemicals.
Chapter 1, “Saint John-Perse and the Petrochemical Sublime,” reevaluates Nobelist and diplomat Saint-John Perse—a poet who Édouard Glissant claimed, “emerg[ed] from the universe of plantations.” I argue that Perse emerged into petrochemical modernity. Chapter 2, “Drumming Up Oil: Kamau Brathwaite, Grace Nichols, and Victor D. Questel,” explores the history and application of an analytic term, associated with petrochemical phenomena, noise. Chapter 3, “Poetic Statecraft and The Production of Cuban Poetry,” analyzes the role that petrochemicals played in Cuban independence and subsequent trade deals with the USSR, into the so-called “Special Period.” I argue that Cuban poets, including José Martí, Nancy Morejón, and Reina María Rodríguez, investigated and reworked the political relationship between poetry and oil. In Chapter 4, “’High-Powered Intellectual Labours’: Tapia Journal and Poetic Production: Lloyd Best, Eric Roach, and Derek Walcott,” I argue that Trinidadian economist and social critic Lloyd Best’s Tapia journal provides an alternative site for imagining resource autonomy. These chapters demonstrate that Caribbean poetry constitutes an invaluable archive of imaginative resource-oriented thinking.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Figuring Oil............................................................................................................1
Chapter 1: Saint-John Perse and the Petrochemical Imagination..........................................20
The Plantation and Petroleum........................................................................................................29
Toward the Petrosublime...............................................................................................................36
Perse in Exile.................................................................................................................................58
Chapter 2: Drumming Up Oil: Kamau Brathwaite, Grace Nichols, and Victor D. Questel...........................................................................................................................................62
Noise and Petrochemical Aesthetics..............................................................................................65
From Drum to Pan…………………………………………………….........................................81
Reading the Pan in Grace Nichols’s “Sunris”................................................................................90
Victor D. Questel and Petropessimism ………………………………………………………...105
Chapter 3: Poetic Statecraft and The Production of Cuban Poetry.....................................111
Accelerating the Revolution with Poetry ....................................................................................121
El Corno Emplumado, Cuban Issues...........................................................................................127
In Praise of Slowness………………...........................................................................................154
Chapter 4: “High-Powered Intellectual Labours”: Tapia Journal and Poetic Production: Lloyd Best, Eric Roach, and Derek Walcott…………………………………………………173
Eric Roach’s Historical Memory……………………………………………………………….182
Walcott in and out of Tapia…………………………………………………………………….193
Appendix A…………………………………………………………………………………..…208
Appendix B……………………………………………………………………………………..209
Bibliography...............................................................................................................................210
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