Lisa Williams’s poem “Anthropocene” [1] has been helping me answer a vexatious question: How can we talk about the climate crisis and related environmental harms, and the human, Western, white, disproportionate-wealth-having responsibility for those harms? More specifically, how can we talk about these things so they’re bearable to contemplate, and so more hearable? The poem does this by asking that question newly, via syntax and word choice that lean us off kilter, and by using old metrical devices to new ends.

Nicole Seymour, in Bad Environmentalism, argues that “despair and hope, gloom/doom and optimism are often merely different sides of the same coin, a coin that represents humans’ desire for certainty and neat narratives about the future.” [2] Seymour argues for irony as a powerful force to disrupt this binary. It can also be accomplished by just plain strangeness—or intricate, adept strangeness, as in the case of this poem. “Anthropocene” echoes in my mind and expands there, making the familiar knowledge that I am responsible for environmental harm—which is one way of saying I’m human—strange to me and thus perhaps more changeable.

“We gave each thing its morning dew and went our little blade.” With this opening end-stopped line, the poem announces itself as inhabiting a space apart from everyday language. The tense in which it’s cast suggests that the speaker is looking back on the Anthropocene from a future era. But it’s not a single speaker who can be viewed in isolation; the first-person plural pronoun that begins the poem includes the reader—includes a potential infinity of readers, suggesting a grand scale even as the imagistic world of the line is shown close up. The confidence of the syntax gives the line an inevitable feeling. But what is it to give each thing its morning dew? For one thing, it is to assume a greater makerly role in the world than we actually have. We do not give dew; the air does. We could read “give” as “allow”—each thing allowed to be a thing, to exist. Presumptuous of us, the poem tells me, and it is so. And this is only the first half of the line. The verb went is the second clue that syntax will be wily in this poem: it’s made transitive here when it is normally intransitive. If I think too hard, my mind adds an “along with,” or a “with,” after “went,” but those are not there. Without them the verb falls on the blade; we go along, and in our going we cut ourselves, we and the world.

An even stronger force behind the feeling of inevitability in this line is its meter. We could scan the poem simply as iambic heptameter, and indeed the lines are legible as fourteeners. But especially when read aloud, a dipodic rhythm emerges—pairs of feet with one stress stronger and one weaker, so that each line has four strong beats. In the first few lines, the level of stress on every beat feels intense, but as we venture through the poem, the dominance of the first foot in each pair becomes more evident. Below I’ve used Derek Attridge’s notation to mark stronger and weaker beats [3]:

as eyes so small to us knew only stains that we brought down,                    (3)      

      B           b          B           b       B              b                   B       

…

And every name that closed upon was chosen out of ours                            (5)

        B           b             B           b           B          b         B       

Though some of the paired beats feel quite close in stress level, the overall pattern gives a stronger stress to the first beat in each pair and a weaker one to the second. The meter propels us, this way, through each line and on to the next.

Dipodic verse, though familiar in limericks and nursery rhymes, ballads and hymns and rap lyrics, may feel unusual to readers of contemporary poetry in English on the page. In a 2007 post for Harriet—the only essay on dipodic verse I’ve seen outside of scholarly articles and guides to prosody—A. E. Stallings highlights the performative origins and nature of the form:

It is all very well to talk about pseudo-classical iambs, marching daDum, daDum across the page. But in performance, something else can happen in English altogether. Especially in a long (six or seven foot) line, maybe because of breath and pacing, certain strong beats come to the fore, and weaker beats get subsumed. This is often true in lyrics that are sung—or spoken—over a driving rhythm. [4]

As this may suggest, dipodic rhythms were once much more familiar. Mary Kinzie writes in A Poet’s Guide to Poetry, “[Pentameter] is one of the two most prevalent line lengths in English verse; the second is dipodic verse.” [5] Kinzie proposes the term the rule of two to name the “doubled two-stress unit” as “the basic line of English verse.” [6] More generally, the rule describes the tendency of one beat in a set of two to take stronger emphasis than the other. Following Attridge, Kinzie notes that dipodic verse often falls into lines of four and four, or four and three, beats, organized further into stanzas of four lines. Indeed, one of the most prevalent of the stanzas in which dipodic rhythm is likely to emerge—groups of four lines of 4/3/4/3 beats—is common meter or ballad meter.

This is, almost, the shape “Anthropocene” inhabits. Williams chooses to run seven beats along each line, and each pair of lines concludes with a slant rhyme (ours/errors, all/will) or assonantal rhyme (blade/grains); each couplet, if lineated as common meter, would rhyme as it does too: abxb. That she lets the lines stretch so long creates a sense of continuity, even a relentlessness: no break, and in most not even a strong caesura, will give us respite from what each line tells.

Some respite does come thanks to the rhymes, which signal an aural pause even when lines are enjambed. And the choice to include seven beats per line rather than eight creates a further pause or emphasis at each line-end. Attridge’s idea of the unrealized beat is helpful here: as the poem exists in time and in our bodies, in a line of three beats that follows a line of four, we feel the space the fourth beat would have occupied [7]. Or, in the case of “Anthropocene,” with its seven-beat lines, we feel the space of the eighth beat after each line ends. To look again at line 3:

as eyes so small to us knew only stains that we brought down,       

      B           b          B           b       B                 b                    B          [b]

A slight pause, or a slightly greater emphasis on the fourth strong beat, completes the final pair of beats in time, even if that last beat is not realized or vocalized. In this case, the spondee “brought down” is rendered even more weighty by its position in the line.

“Anthropocene” shows some of the nuanced purposes dipodic verse can be put to. To employ an ancient verse form and rhythm for a poem about how humans—and more than most, those descended from the ones who first made ballads—have injured the place we inhabit lends gravitas to an already grave (to borrow the poem’s final word) reminder. Stallings concludes her essay for Harriet with a wish: “Dipodic meter is alive and well in lyrics and performance—I’d love to see more people keeping it alive on the page” [8]. I too would like to see more poems made in dipodic verse, and ones that put it to such effective purpose. More broadly, I’m interested in what metrical work can offer ecopoetic practice. Jonathan Bate, in his 2002 study of Romantic poetry and ecopoetics, writes:

Ecopoetics asks in what respects a poem may be a making (Greek poiesis) of dwelling-place—the prefix eco- is derived from Greek oikos, “the home or place of dwelling.” According to this definition, poetry will not necessarily be synonymous with verse: the poeming of the dwelling is not inherently dependent on metrical form. However, the rhythmic, syntactic and linguistic intensifications that are characteristic of verse-writing frequently give a peculiar force to the poiesis: it could be that poiesis in the sense of verse-making is language’s most direct path of return to the oikos, the place of dwelling, because meter itself—a quiet but persistent music, a recurring cycle, a heartbeat—is answering to nature’s own rhythms, an echoing of the song of the earth itself. [9]

Does meter “[echo] the song of the earth itself”? Some meters seem to. I’d like to see more studies that show us how specific meters relate to or seem to spring from earthly rhythms. In the meantime, we have Williams’s compelling example of metrical prowess employed for ecopoetic ends. And while Bate’s argument may read as quaint to some folks, given that the majority of ecopoetical work being made now is written in free verse or using procedural methods (e.g. erasure), “Anthropocene” bears out its logic. The poem shows us how we might see our home newly, in ways that do less violence to it.  

Meter works in the poem in concert with the uncanniness of the language to defamiliarize something that scares the speaker—and me—and then to refamiliarize us with it. Undergirded by dipodic syncopation, the language of the lines can wind about, and yet keep us with it, more than it might if the poem were made without meter.  That language shows us how humans have shaped the world with our actions and with our naming, and how limited and limiting that naming is. Even though our thoughts are “excellent in errors” (6), “we hold our faces up and reconfigure all / we see as if, in front of us, it dented to our will” (7–8). This is a heavy charge, heavier because it rings true. And yet the poem’s syntax, even as it cuts, creates room to recover from the sharpness of the truth. A glimmer in these lines: “as if.” We reconfigure as if all we see dented to our will. A different kind of little blade, the if cuts a hole in what is, leaves an opening for the knowledge that all we see does not dent, does not follow our will—is more than we see, contains more, and could be, instead of looked-upon unto dentedness, beloved, taken in, listened to in its own glistening.

Having cut this little hole of possibility, the poem comes to its crux. Instead of saying or naming, it asks, in two single-line sentences. The first reads:

“How let | our bo || dy with | its wan || der kill | less than || it can?”               (9)

            b          B            b            B              b      B                   B

To do less than we can possibly do is not a familiar or beloved notion in a capitalist frame; the unfamiliarity of the syntax and phrasing ushers this notion in. The question is also not idealistic; the poem asks not, how can we fix everything, but how can we do less harm? In the line above, the usual pattern of stronger beat/weaker beat is, for the first two dipodic units, reversed, and the iamb that would fall in the penultimate place in the line is substituted by a trochee. Both these effects emphasize the word less, and so the idea that we can do less harm than we’re capable of, if not no harm. This, made new by the poem, is the question I ask myself daily about my own participation in the climate crisis, in climate injustice: how to do less harm?

Even after this Williams raises the stakes, shifts them from action to thought:

“How let | our think || ing be | the wound || world’s | opening || up in?”         (10)

            b          B                b              B                 B        b             B        

In both questions, the syntactic gap between “how” and “let” feels to me like another hole where possibility might come in. The way Williams asks them creates the space in which we might answer, partly by eliding us as the subject. How [can we, might we, should we]? By letting ourselves do as the line models and recede as subject, as actor. Even the verb is indeterminate; there is no should or might or can, just the invitation to go on and do it: and even that is not a definitive action but a “let,” an allow.

Another gap plays a similar part in this second question. A dropped syllable in the line, what Attridge would call an implied offbeat [10]—an unstressed syllable that, were the meter regular, would fall between “wound” and “world”—creates both a gap and a proximity between these concepts: to see the wound is to see the world, its wounds and its opening up. Is to look without determining the object of our gaze, without naming in a predecided way. Is to unfilm the lens (the transparent eyeball not omniscient but bared, at least a little more). If in our thinking, the wound, then in the wound, world opening up. To take the world in while naming it less, asking it less to be a particular thing, is to acknowledge the wound; and in that true looking the world unfolds, becomes more than wound, is itself.

How do we let our thinking be the wound? With the magic of meter, uncanny language, and rhyme, this poem helps me to a little more. But Williams does not let us rest on the hope of asking and allowing answers to those questions. The eleventh line reprises the first exactly, reminding us of what we’ve done and how we’ve been. She lets the line carry over, this time, to the next, to further show how our thinking and acting causes harm:

We gave each thing its morning dew and went our little blade
as every name we settled on was given with a grave.                         (11–12)

That final word is a warning, a reminder of the dire stakes that rest on this work of imagining. The whole poem is a warning too, but in it Williams makes room for us to imagine how we might change, what we might think and be and do differently. This space, this work, is how we can go on, how we can make shift and not succumb to despair. In estranging the more-usual questions of what can be done, Williams creates a space in which we might find our answers for them, without falling into false happiness or unrealistic hope or abject despair. It does make me feel hopeful, but in an even-keeled way—the kind of hopeful you feel when someone tells you the truth.

In her book Recomposing Ecopoetics, Lynn Keller coins the phrase “the self-conscious Anthropocene” to distinguish “the period since the term Anthropocene was introduced when, whether or not people use that word, there is extensive ‘recognition that human actions are driving far-reaching changes to the life-supporting infrastructure of Earth.’” [11]. She dates this period as beginning in the year 2000, when Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer proposed in a newsletter that the Holocene had ended and, in the late eighteenth century, a new epoch, the Anthropocene, had begun [12, 13]. Two years later, Bate wrote of the expressive power meter can offer ecopoetics, and nineteen years later, the poem “Anthropocene” was published—twenty-one years into the self-conscious Anthropocene, after twenty-one years of collective understanding of this struggle, these dangers. The self-consciousness, for many of us, is tinged with what-are-we-doing, and have-we-done-enough, and no. All these complicit hues shimmer in the poem, but with its ancient meter and electric questions, it allows us to consider them without shrinking away, and so creates room for thinking, and acting, differently and anew.






Anthropocene

Lisa Williams


We gave each thing its morning dew and went our little blade.
We put our feet on sand and glided ligaments and grains
as eyes so small to us knew only stains that we brought down,
some haze of malformation dulling from our wake of tons.
And every name that closed upon was chosen out of ours
and every thought that chased a thing was excellent in errors
still—we hold our faces up and reconfigure all
we see as if, in front of us, it dented to our will.
How let our body with its wander kill less than it can?
How let our thinking be the wound world’s opening up in?
We gave each thing its morning dew and went our little blade
as every name we settled on was given with a grave.











Notes

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[1] Williams, Lisa. “Anthropocene.” Ecotone 31, 17.1 (fall/winter 2021): 94. https://ecotonemagazine.org/poetry/anthropocene/

[2] Seymour, Nicole. Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018, 4.

[3] I’ve marked beats in the above lines using Derek Attridge’s notation—B for primary beats and b for secondary ones—but forward slashes for the stronger beats and backslashes for the weaker ones would of course work fine as well. See Attridge, Derek. The Rhythms of English Poetry. London: Longman, 1982, particularly beginning in Chapter 4, “The Four-beat Rhythm,” 76–122. For a briefer introduction to his thinking and this notation, see also Attridge, Derek. Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. And for an even friendlier one, I recommend Ellen Stauder’s freely available INTRA (Interactive Tutorial on Rhythm Analysis): https://www.reed.edu/english/intra/4.3.html.

[4] Kinzie, Mary. A Poet’s Guide to Poetry. 1st ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, 444.

[5] Kinzie, Mary. Ibid, 457. See also the entry on dipodic verse on p. 405.

[6] Attridge, Derek. The Rhythms of English Poetry. London: Longman, 1982, 117.

[7] Stallings, A. E. “Dipodic Verse.” Harriet, Poetry Foundation, November 8, 2007. Accessed June 26, 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2007/11/dipodic-verse

[8] Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002, 75–76.

[9] Attridge, Derek. The Rhythms of English Poetry. London: Longman, 1982, 174.

[10] Keller, Lynn. Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-conscious Anthropocene. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017, 1. Text quoted within this quote is from Lewis, Simon L., and Mark A. Maslin. “Defining the Anthropocene.” Nature 519, no. 7542 (March 2015): 171–80.

[11] Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. “The ‘Anthropocene.’” IGBP Global Change Newsletter 41 (May 2000): 17.

[12] A bit more on the word that makes the poem’s title: In March 2024, three years after the publication of “Anthropocene,” the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) reviewed and voted on a proposal, developed by the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) between 2009 and 2023, to declare this geological epoch the Anthropocene, beginning in 1952 with nuclear weapons testing and the resulting worldwide plutonium fallout. The executive summary prepared by the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Union of Geological Sciences is worth review. (Waters, Colin N., et al. “Executive Summary: The Anthropocene Epoch and Crawfordian Age: Proposals by the Anthropocene Working Group.” Anthropocene Working Group, International Union of Geological Sciences. October 31, 2023. Accessed June 29, 2024. https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/6853/)

The geologists rejected the proposal, though they noted, “The Anthropocene as a concept will continue to be widely used not only by Earth and environmental scientists, but also by social scientists, politicians and economists, as well as by the public at large. As such, it will remain an invaluable descriptor in human-environment interactions.” (See “The Anthropocene.” International Union of Geological Sciences statement, March 20, 2024. Accessed June 29, 2024. https://www.iugs.org/_files/ugd/f1fc07_40d1a7ed58de458c9f8f24de5e739663.pdf?index=true)

Some IUGS members and observers feared that the decision would serve to deemphasize anthropogenic forces as they act on the climate, biodiversity, and other vital areas. Indeed, headlines from the time suggest the potential for confusion and minimization of environmental crises: “Are We in the ‘Anthropocene,’ the Human Age? Nope, Scientists Say” (the New York Times, March 8, 2024); “Is This the ‘Anthropocene’ Epoch? Nope, Geologists Say” (Mother Jones, March 23, 2024); “The ‘Epic Row’ Over a New Epoch” (the New Yorker, April 20, 2024).

Jan Zalasiewicz, a member of the IUGS and chair of the subcommission that formed the Anthropocene Working Group, wrote, “The IUGS ruling means that the Anthropocene will confusingly continue to represent widely different concepts. This has been a missed opportunity to recognise and endorse a clear and simple reality, that our planet left its natural functioning state, sharply and irrevocably, in the mid-twentieth century. A myriad of geological signals reflect this fact.” (See Carrington, Damian. “Quest to Declare Anthropocene an Epoch Descends into Epic Row.” The Guardian, March 7, 2024. Accessed June 29, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/07/quest-to-declare-anthropocene-an-epoch-descends-into-epic-row. See also Carrington, Damian. “Geologists Reject Declaration of Anthropocene Epoch.” The Guardian, March 22, 2024. Accessed June 29, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/22/geologists-reject-declaration-of-anthropocene-epoch)

I’ve dived into this “epic row” because this poem, it seems to me, describes some of the conditions that created it—a focus on naming that draws attention from actual crises. Its critique of humans’ inclinations to and imperfection in naming feels relevant for what we call the age we’re in, for how we frame the myriad crises we are facing and our role in making them.