Georgics from Below

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the genre of georgic as it generates formal insights into the place of unpaid work and unwaged life alongside waged work within capital’s cycles of accumulation and crisis. The georgic offers key elaborations on the life-worlds and practical activities that subtend the formal economy. Turning to Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead and Cecily Nicholson’s From the Poplars, this essay argues that these poetic works can be read as ‘georgics from below’ in their expanded inquiries into the conditions of labouring life within capitalist productive relations, and their forceful critiques of the risk exposures and rational violence of waged labour. These works consider potential locales of resistance, collective counter-imaginaries, places of rewilding and feral existences.

KEYWORDS:

• Georgics
• ecopoetics
• social ecology
• ecocriticism
• environmental literature

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Nefertiti X. M. Tadiar, Michael Denning, Tania Li, Mike Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Jason Moore, and Jan Breman, among other scholars, offer frameworks for thinking about life beyond the wage. This argument also draws on the key insights of social reproduction theorists such as Silvia Federici and Maria Mies.

2. On the georgic as a measure of climatological change with the rise of industrial capitalism, see Tobias Menely’s Climate and the Making of Worlds (2021).

3. See, for instance: Jacob Taylor’s ‘Pennsylvania’ (1739–40), Timothy Dwight’s Greenfield Hill (1797), Joel Barlow’s The Columbiad (1807), and Philip Freneau’s ‘On the Great Western Canal’ (1822). For a reading of the American georgic tradition, see Timothy Sweet’s American Georgics (2002), which emphasises prose writing and views the georgic as a form of environmental writing intimately tied to early American agrarian-economic discourses and land ethics.

4. Kadue’s phrase evokes the feminist social practice ‘maintenance art’ of Mierle Ukeles, along with other feminist ‘art workers’ of the 1970s who staged feminised unpaid labour in their art pieces.

5. See Martin Cherniack, The Hawk’s Nest Incident: America’s Worst Industrial Accident (1986) and Tim Dayton, Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead (2015) for more extensive description of this event and its aftermath.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Margaret Ronda

Margaret Ronda is the author of a critical study on American postwar poetry and the genres of global ecological crisis, Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End (Stanford University Press, Post × 45 Series, 2018). She is also the author of two poetry collections. Her critical scholarship has appeared in journals including PMLA, American Literary History, Post45, Genre, and English Language Notes, as well as in edited volumes such as Life in Plastic, Prismatic Ecology, Veer Ecology, and Writing Against Capital. She is an Associate Professor in English at the University of California-Davis.