The first word I remember writing was, unsurprisingly, my own name: Zoë. The Greek term zoe, as the widest definition of life itself, has always interested me, and I grew up knowing its Biblical interpretations, ‘eternal life’, or ‘life in all its fullness’ thanks to my clergyman father, who also tried to teach me when I was far too young to write it in Greek, ζωή, the strange forms of the letters escaping into unfathomable loops and scrawls of crayon across the page. I’m not claiming any kind of poetic destiny here, since my father also had a small sailing dinghy called Felicity, and our names were very nearly the other way around. It was much later that I came to Georgio Agamben’s account, particularly relevant to the current state of exception, of the unstable distinction between the bios, the politically qualified life of the citizen and zoe asthe state of ‘bare life’, a non-human status excluded from the body politic. Zoe, in his account, is life in its most vulnerable form, subject to the sovereign’s power over the embodied subject. More recently, Rosi Braidotti has contested Agamben’s emphasis on death, following Spinoza and Deleuze in arguing for an understanding of zoe/life as a generative force, and for a ‘zoe-egalitarian’ politics. In her view, zoe is a productive means of thinking beyond the exclusions that have defined humanism:
‘Life’, far from being codified as the exclusive property or the unalienable right of one species, the human, over all the others […] is posited as a process, interactive and open-ended. This vitalist approach to living matter displaces the boundary between the portion of life – both organic and discursive – that has traditionally been reserved for anthropos, that is to say bios, and the wider scope of animal and non-human life, also known as zoe. Zoe as the dynamic, self-organising structure of life itself stands for generative vitality. It is the transversal force that cuts across and reconnects previously segregated species, categories and domains.
The issue at stake in Braidotti’s argument is that our response to the scale of difficulties facing humans in the present moment should not be allowed to reinforce the structural inequalities that have persisted within humanism. She sees this as a continuation of feminist concerns, writing: ‘my sex fell on the side of ‘Otherness’, understood as a pejorative difference.’ Building on the understanding that the human organism is not completely human, and is continuous with all living beings, she offers a restructuring of ideas about the body and subjectivity, presenting them as wholly interconnected.
I begin autobiographically, that is, with bios, a story of a singular person being made in writing, through her own name. But what does authorship have to do with zoe? What I hope will allay your suspicion of narcissism in this line of enquiry is that zoe breaks the boundaries of the personal. It can’t be owned, just as writing a single line of a poem activates memory of speech, tone, other texts, and etymologies that encode the viral travelling of language from the beginning of human communication. I can’t think of language’s travail without its travel from your mouth to mine; my name is simply one more connective coincidence of the kind that language makes all the time, and which poetry puts under closer examination. A more literal response to Braidotti’s concerns might be Christian Bök’s well-known Xenotext project of enciphering a poem in a bacterium, but all poetic forms offer possibilities for generative life. Recent reframings of lyric acknowledge it to be intrinsically social; a voice crowded with others is what ‘I’ am, while you could be anyone – or anything. The poem is a collaborative space, open, as Denise Riley writes, to ‘the live, the dead who worked through me’. Knowledge of the human microbiome suggests that I’m just a host, or a crowd of guests, which I have to understand as being the same thing, and both hostile and hospitable. It’s in the poem, with its multiplication of meaning, that these structures can be explored, along with their potential for other shapes of living.
To think in terms of zoe, which is borderless, is not to ignore citizenship or its borders, but to enter a contact zone where everything is translation. When etymologies open up, what will be carried across? The simplest thing I want to say involves a mesh of interconnected meanings, echoes and distortions: there is the suggestion of thickening in poetry in German as ‘Dichtung’, leading to Ezra Pound’s well-known connection: ‘Dichten = condensare’. Translation reveals the tendency of language to carry over, adapt and entangle. As I’m listening in that space, time slows down. This is an antidote to the rush of greased memes on social media, which call for split-second identification rather than thinking. Reaching the other side is not the point: it’s only here I can keep moving. The notion of ‘nomadic poetics’ proposed by Pierre Joris is not about romantic individualism in the sense of freedom to travel, but an insistence on poetry’s displacing of boundaries and categories as: ‘a poetry that takes into account not only the manifold of languages & locations but also of selves each one of us is constantly becoming’ . If translation suggests a movement between human cultures and an opening into the unknown, the current ecological crisis requires that this unknown also encompasses the non-human.
Language is tangled up with things and other beings: poetry is the act of attending to that tangle, a form of attention all the more urgent at this point when the impact of humans and their language on the planet has reached a geological scale. As a response to this Anthropocene era, Donna Haraway proposes the term ‘Chthulucene’, which is a compound of kainos, ‘a time of beginnings’, and khthôn, the chthonic. It marks an identification with the underground and the unseen materialities entwined with human existence, as a means of ‘staying with the trouble’. A zoepoetics might therefore be connected with another of Haraway’s terms, a sympoesis, or a making-with. I want to work towards this possibility, but what follows is conjectural rather than a justification of a method.
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A chthulucene perspective recognises the kinship that comes from co-existence rather than birth: lives depend on each other, on multitudinous others, and it’s this fact that the disappearance of a river elides. Just after ‘Teint’ (Footnotes to Water)was published there were catastrophic floods in Paris for which I claim no responsibility (the Bièvre is largely rerouted anyway), but they were a reminder of where we’re heading, and the need to re-articulate relationships with non-human forces. I don’t know how to do this, which is why I write poems. I’m working in the dark, listening to the echoes: that’s also the chthonic work of zoe.
Extract from Atlantic Drift: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics, ed. James Byrne and Robert Sheppard (Arc Publications and Edge Hill University Press, 2017).
