Anthropocene Blues: Poems

In the story of the earth, geologists tell us that around 12,000 years ago the planet shifted from the Pleistocene to the Holocene. There probably were poets to sing about that change, but of what they sang, we have no records. Even earlier, paintings on cave walls point toward an artistic response from our upstart species. These early artists painted the Pleistocene's last great ice age herds thundering past. Now John Lane's traveling geologist sings a dawning epoch's blues. The Anthropocene is upon us, and his poems show how humans believe they have become "the planet's boss, the big chief, the emperor of air, diesel fuel, /bow thrusters, and tax shelters..." And if you don't believe the times are changing, consider these poems--full of dead-on-the-road groundhogs and radial tires, carbon-spewing adventure travel, masturbating parrots, and mounds and mounds of garbage--as twenty-first-century objective correlatives John Keats might recognize. But all is not collapse out there. The puny human voice William Faulkner praised in his Nobel acceptance speech sings amidst the 6th Great Extinction. These lyrics and narratives deposit the pleasures of contemporary poetry in the carbon record.

Author: John Lane
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Published: 02/01/2021
Pages: 74
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.25lbs
Size: 8.80h x 6.00w x 0.30d
ISBN: 9780881466256

About the Author
Lane, John: - John Lane attended Wofford College, The Breadloaf School of English, and Bennington College. Among his many awards his selected poems, ABANDONED QUARRY, won the Southeastern Independent Booksellers Alliance Poetry Book Award, his nonfiction book COYOTE SETTLES THE SOUTH was named a finalist and a Nature Book of Uncommon Merit by the John Burroughs Society, and his novel FATE MORELAND'S WIDOW was named Independent Publisher Silver Medalist. One of the founders of the Hub City Writers Project, Lane lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

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