Content Category
Literary Criticism
Abstract/Description
In Tracy K. Smith’s “Watershed,” the Pulitzer-prize winner and current Poet Laureate of America juxtaposes accounts of ecological violence with individual eschatological experiences. Having been “powerfully compelled and disturbed by a Nathaniel Rich article about chemical pollution that appeared in the New York Times Magazinein January 2016,”1Smith knew that she wanted to compose a found poem using lines of the report, although she didn’t know at the time what form that would take. Later, she “had the idea of marrying the facts from that article . . . with the narratives of near-death-experience (NDE) survivors.” Yet while answering questions at Brigham Young University this year about why she chose to juxtapose these elements, Smith herself admitted, “I like writing poems that I don’t understand.” What implications might this juxtaposition hold?
In my presentation, I investigate how “Watershed” (and Wade in the Watergenerally) coincides with Samuel Scheffler’s Death and the Afterlife,2a philosophical monograph with grand implications towards conceptions of death and wide-spread ecological crisis. Largely venturing into new theoretical territory, Scheffler claims that we widely take for granted that humans will continue to live after us; he asks what impact this taken-for-granted assumption might have on our lives, examining how our behaviors would shift if this assumption were somehow unfulfilled. However, he and other scholars disagree about the place of human egoism in this collective afterlife thesis. I argue that in addition to offering various implications concerning the notion of a collective afterlife, Tracy K. Smith’s “Watershed” contributes to this conversation by proposing not only that human compassion is an integral element in the collective afterlife thesis, but also that only through compassion can humanity respond to and mitigate anthropogenic crisis.
Copyright and Licensing of My Content
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Origin of Submission
as part of a class
Faculty Involvement
Professor Trent Hickman
“All That Was Important In Life”: Toward a Compassionate Anthropocene in Tracy K. Smith’s “Watershed”
In Tracy K. Smith’s “Watershed,” the Pulitzer-prize winner and current Poet Laureate of America juxtaposes accounts of ecological violence with individual eschatological experiences. Having been “powerfully compelled and disturbed by a Nathaniel Rich article about chemical pollution that appeared in the New York Times Magazinein January 2016,”1Smith knew that she wanted to compose a found poem using lines of the report, although she didn’t know at the time what form that would take. Later, she “had the idea of marrying the facts from that article . . . with the narratives of near-death-experience (NDE) survivors.” Yet while answering questions at Brigham Young University this year about why she chose to juxtapose these elements, Smith herself admitted, “I like writing poems that I don’t understand.” What implications might this juxtaposition hold?
In my presentation, I investigate how “Watershed” (and Wade in the Watergenerally) coincides with Samuel Scheffler’s Death and the Afterlife,2a philosophical monograph with grand implications towards conceptions of death and wide-spread ecological crisis. Largely venturing into new theoretical territory, Scheffler claims that we widely take for granted that humans will continue to live after us; he asks what impact this taken-for-granted assumption might have on our lives, examining how our behaviors would shift if this assumption were somehow unfulfilled. However, he and other scholars disagree about the place of human egoism in this collective afterlife thesis. I argue that in addition to offering various implications concerning the notion of a collective afterlife, Tracy K. Smith’s “Watershed” contributes to this conversation by proposing not only that human compassion is an integral element in the collective afterlife thesis, but also that only through compassion can humanity respond to and mitigate anthropogenic crisis.