Open Access
Featured Posts
Essays
Poetry
Lectures
Marx and the Climate Crisis #4: Marx and Environmentalism by Sean O’Brien
This fourth and final lecture departs from the current “energy impasse” to ask how a contemporary environmental politics might address the obstacles that stand in the way of human and nonhuman flourishing.
[Digital Poetics 4.26] Live Air (For Peter Gizzi) by Azad Ashim Sharma
A poem written in tribute: ‘I write into your poetry like a seeker watching for the changing nodes of tradition, I’ll be / buried on that horizon, its open sky.’
[Digital Poetics 4.25] Rote Learning by Abeera Khan
A meditation on psychological inheritance and the expanse of memory
Reflections on Archiving Smoke workshop by Alycia Pirmohamed and attendees
Alycia Pirmohamed reflects on a workshop held concerning archives with contributions from attendees produced in the session
Reflecting on 6 years of the87press with Azad Ashim Sharma and Kashif Sharma-Patel
Director of the press Azad Ashim Sharma and Head Editor Kashif Sharma-Patel reflect upon six years of the87press. They touch upon the development of the press within the context of the British poetry scene, the perils of professionalisation, structural problems for independent presses, the embattled problem of representation and much more.
[Digital Poetics 4.24] Extra-Poetic: On Hasib Hourani’s “rock flight” by Tom Branfoot
Tom Branfoot reviews “rock flight” by Hasib Hourani (Prototype, 2024) reflecting on the tension between language and action in the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.
[Digital Poetics 4.23] Four Poems by Clifton Gachagua
Four poems by Clifton Gachagua formed by collages of (mis)rememberings, full of nostalgia, jubilation, music and heartbreak: "I know I have not learnt anything since my reincarnation, / might as well have been sleepwalking, relying on old memories."
Marx and the Climate Crisis #3: Marx and Climate Change by Sean O’Brien
Lecture three now moves to confront what is arguably the greatest issue of our age, the product of a carbon-soaked capitalism, and the terrain on which struggles over energy transition play out: climate change. We’ll begin with a critical account of recent theoretical developments on the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’. We’ll then turn to Marxian counterproposals from environmental geographer Jason W. Moore and ecofeminist philosopher Donna J. Haraway, who suggest we might more accurately name this geological period the ‘capitalocene’. Building on these insights, this lecture concludes by asking where our warming world is headed. What will the political and economic consequences be if we fail to reduce rates of carbon emissions sufficiently to keep future heating levels below the critical 2°C threshold?
[Digital Poetics 4.22] On Beauty: Timothy Thornton’s “Shapeshifting” by John Wilkinson
"Thornton’s poems are set in a specific landscape, of the shingle coast around Dungeness in Kent, characterised by flatness, the interpenetration of water and land, and shingle’s shifting of the coastline’s definition." John Wilkinson reviews Shapeshifting by Timothy Thornton.
[Digital Poetics 4.21] Five Poems by Leo Li
Leo Li presents us with five poems on dichotomies and the possibilities in-between: “Behind us, / the spongiform city where I’d always thought / I belonged mouldered in silent balm.”
[Digital Poetics 4.20] Three Poems by Remi Graves
These three poems by Remi Graves explores homonyms, (mis)gendered bodies, alienation and disappearance: “a boi walks into a wood— / ouch!”
[Digital Poetics 4.19] Fountains and Futility by Rouzbeh Shadpey
Rouzbeh Shadpey’s lyric essay attempts to triangulate thirst, hope, and illness on the page proffering a fragmented meditation on futility and its metaphor: the fountain.
[Digital Poetics 4.18] Antidepressants by Aliaskar Abarkas
An intimate reflection on mental health, identity, and the complexities of antidepressant use, expressed through a blend of prose and poetry.
[Digital Poetics 4.17] Sweat And Stress: On Timothy Thornton’s “Shapeshifting” by Luke Roberts
These are poems of loneliness and sudden, frantic encounter. They tend towards cliff edges, ridges, caves, towpaths, woods. Thornton is a great poet of setting out, and the boyish entanglement of utopia and panic.
[Digital Poetics 4.16] Assemblages by Labeja Kodua Okullu
Assemblages is a provision of space; a space for work, a building of memory, inspirations and ideas where one can create art, where one can escape and where one can host a myriad of philosophies
Marx and the Climate Crisis #2: Marx and Energy by Sean O’Brien
The second lecture extends our line of inquiry into societal nature relations as it pertains to the problem of energy. At the heart of the relation between capital and climate lies energy. Fossil fuels have been the dominant source of energy powering economic expansion since the industrial revolution. This fossil-fuelled economic development, as we now know for certain, has been responsible for the lion’s share of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere, leading to global warming, rising sea levels, ocean acidification and extreme weather events. This lecture draws on work in the Energy Humanities, a cross-disciplinary field of scholarship that highlights the essential contribution that the insights and methods of the humanities bring to bear on the study of our carbon-fuelled modernity and the vital question of transition to cleaner, more sustainable forms of energy. Turning also to recent work on Marx and the critique of energy, including the After Oil collective on ‘petroculture’,Andreas Malm on ‘fossil capital’, and Timothy Mitchell on ‘carbon democracy’, we will develop a theoretical language for the age of carbon modernity.
[Digital Poetics 4.15] Three Poems by Yě Yě
Sometimes the pain, or sadness, is balder than you think. Three new poems from Yĕ Yĕ.
[Digital Poetics 4.14] Four Poems by Tim Tim Cheng
These poems dwell on what comes before and after silence.
[Digital Poetics 4.13] Three Poems by Lola Olufemi
Three poems that argue for literature as a form of political commitment and reflect on the ambivalences of writing from outside the disastrous zone.