Sledmere, M;
(2021)
I, Cloud: Staging Atmospheric Imaginaries in Anthropocene Lyric.
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, Article 5. 10.14324/111.1755-4527.117.
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Abstract
In Mary Ruefle’s poem ‘Among the Clouds’, an era of ubiquitous cloudiness passes over,sweeping the world’s citizens into a pregnant intensity of ‘mood’ and memory, externalised as a profusion of cloud. The poem begins with looking back — ‘That was the summer’ — and ends,too, with recollection: ‘the familiar cry of that summer comes back to me [...] O Mother, O Father, wherefore art thou? I cannot see to find thee among so many clouds’.2 The poem itself remains ‘Among the Clouds’: a middling, thick, dislocated space of unspecified gathering and drift between times. Cloud writing is a material poetics in which language itself becomes atmosphere, and lyric subjectivity is dispersed in a way that foregrounds ecological entanglements, questioning our assumptions about presence, identity and agency. Crucially it asks, what atmosphere is capable of sustaining its own excess, and how are atmospheres established as shared, in common?
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | I, Cloud: Staging Atmospheric Imaginaries in Anthropocene Lyric |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.14324/111.1755-4527.117 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.14324/111.1755-4527.117 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2021 Maria Sledmere. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) 4.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
| Keywords: | clouds, Mary Ruefle, Among the Clouds, material poetics, language, identity, agency, cloud, data |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10138454 |
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