Kwame Dawes‘s poem, “The Remnant” (from Kenyon Review: Spring 2023) positions his reader in the horrible middle of the Anthropocene, or the horrible middle of life when you’re entering the Anthropocene. And I recognize there are many poets of his generation (Vievee Francis and Jorie Graham, among others) who are writing so directly into this subject, or this location, or this temporality—I’m not entirely sure how to encompass the Anthropocene as something that enters the poet, and accounts for its position as more than just subject. And full disclosure, I’ve been very much in the middle of Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects book, so all I can think about is a lack of language to address something so large it lacks definable boundaries or shape. Because that’s what Morton argues. A rain that is not only gives the impression of rain, but also the feeling of each raindrop as it falls on your body—its size, temperature, and angle of force. To read poems in mind of hyperobjects like the Anthropocene, then, is to know that I will always lack the language for describing the poem’s underlying concern, which, incidentally, is the experience of reading any really good poem. It might even be an ongoing irony.
So when Dawes’s “The Remnant” opens onto a scene of debris scattering, it seems like a gesture to mere circumstances, like he’s noting various circumstances that are part of the current world. But this all transforms with his move to the second stanza: “This is a myth.” Or is it a “biblical calamity”? A new world imagined by the artist to train others’ attention on the apocalypse that will be coming. It’s a big reach connecting the two. But for my reading, the poem’s most salient moment is the associative connection bringing the mythical vision back down to the current world. How Dawes connects “the deafness that is left” after debris has settled this world deep underground and “the space beneath the freeway.” How the poem can inhabit that transition so it contains a great deal of import is where I find a centering. It stresses a paradox between the “myth” he wishes to depict and the freeway he proposes as the setting feels instrumental to the poem. And, for me, it’s this juxtaposition and Dawes’s appeal that in the midst of these two things we “hold ourselves intact” is where I find the most poetic pleasure.