The No-Prospect Poem

Abstract

This essay considers how poems and lyrical prose by J. H. Prynne, Kofi Awoonor, and Natasha Trethewey examine the conditions of possibility for a global subject in the light of finality: that which may no longer be prevented nor undone. Revising the tradition of the locodescriptive lyric and the prospect poem, Prynne, Awoonor, and Trethewey use the hill as a location for staging the ethical dilemmas of the putative “global citizen.” From poetic hills in England, Ghana, and New Orleans, the view stretches to accommodate global suffering, inequality, and the lives of others, who, however far or close, shape the contours, the possibilities and dangers, of the poem's immediate vicinity. Far from offering spectatorial mastery to the poet, however, the hill is transformed into the ground and habitation of precarious life. The hill makes visible an alternative trajectory of contemporary lyric subjectivity in which the lyric's “I” emerges from and is shaped by the collective immiseration of neoliberal globalization.

The true costs of US agricultural dumping

“…Then, in the 1970s, Nixon's Secretary for Agriculture Earl Butz famously exhorted farmers to plant ‘fencerow to fencerow’ and was accused of supporting policies that forced farmers to ‘get big or get out’ (Scholar, 1973). Butz ended the land set-aside policies that were then in place, and moved policies decisively away from supply management toward expanding production and export markets (Hunter, 1989). Already in the 1950s, the US Government had established programs that disposed of cereal surpluses as international food aid, which disrupted local markets in developing countries and created food dependency (Barrett and Maxwell, 2005; Cullather, 2011).…”