I have a new paper out! “The Ghosts of Coastlines Past: Eco-Poetry and the Oceanic Ecological Gothic” has been published in volume three of Gothic Nature, which was themed around “Haunted Shores.”
There’s a lot of ways for shores to be haunted. Shipwrecks, for example, and drownings. But I’d been reading a lot of poetry around about the time I sent in an abstract for this, and I was interested in the idea of hauntings that hadn’t yet happened… the hauntings we’re in the process of creating now. That haunting is rather more scientific than spectral. It came out of a news article, too – down in Wellington, where I used to live, are little blue penguins, and they’re lovely wee things. But in a recent breeding season, a third of the chicks died. The cause of death was starvation. The warming waters of the harbour had affected their food supply, and the penguins died. Awful, isn’t it? Climate change is affecting our oceans, so what are our future coastlines going to look like? What absences are we creating, what potential for ghosts?
Some of the poetry collections I was reading addressed this in one or more of their poems, such as Jorie Graham’s Sea Change. Some, like Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué‘s Losing Miami, took a cultural approach, addressing the future loss of entire cities.
The possibilities of future ghosts, I thought, were immense. So I wrote the paper, and the entire issue is free to read online here, should you be so inclined. Thank you to the editors and the poets for their incredible work!
ojcade.com 