The Ghoul Box: An Affective Ecopoetics of The Anthropocene

Abstract

The Ghoul Box is a collection of poetry which explores the complex entanglements and affects of the Anthropocene – a proposed geological age defined by the impact of human activity on the global climate and the biosphere. The collection strives to convey a sense of anxiety related to our increasingly fraught relationship with the environment and a pervasive sense of crisis, while exploring the sources of this anxiety. My reflective essay discusses the development of my collection from my initial interest in shifting concepts of nature and ecology towards a more experimental exploration of energy, complexity, chaos, assemblage, and self-organization. I interrogate ideas of environmental melancholia, negative capability, and affective ecopoetic techniques. My research of nature poetry, environmental poetry, and ecopoetry informed the development of my collection, and I examine this impact at length. The Anthropocene is a relatively recent concept but one with increasing influence. My poetry collection addresses the notion of complex interconnections across time and space, between the local and the universal, the personal and the social, through the frame of the Anthropocene. It offers a new perspective on our modern age – one which mingles memory and myth with technological mediation and immediate experience to form a novel image of our contemporary environmental and existential crisis.