Planetary Dejection: An Ode to the Commons
Many contemporary Anglophone poets have, in the last fi ve years, turned to the lyric ode as a form through which to process global crisis and catastrophe.2 The appearance of so many odes is part of an emergent social vision for lyric poetry that, I believe, differs in several important ways from previous political projects undertaken by the lyric. The ode, in its structure of approach and withdrawal, depends on a complex and dialectical relation to otherness that cannot be explained adequately by the theoretical model of radical alterity proposed by Emmanuel Levinas. This chapter looks closely at Keston Sutherland's The Odes to TL61P (2013) as a case study in the articulation of a global ethics from within traditional lyric forms. In the ode, the fi rst person "I" is placed in dynamic relation to an other. This relation is not based on an infi nite "responsibility" to the other, as Levinas might have it, but rather on probing, querying, testing, feeling things out a mutable provisionality that holds off certainty as much as it avoids dramatic notions of ineffable otherness and radical alterity (Levinas 1961, 86) Through the ode, poets critique a notion of the "global" predicated on scarcity, in which the ethical fi gures of the "Same" and the "Other" become the allegorical