Book contents
- American Modernism and the Cartographic Imagination
- Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture
- American Modernism and the Cartographic Imagination
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Maps from Indigenous Territory
- Chapter 2 An Atlas of Energy Poetics
- Chapter 3 Island Periploi
- Chapter 4 Stereophonic Boundaries
- Chapter 5 Phantasmagorical Terrain
- Coda
- Bibliography
- Index
- Series page
Chapter 2 - An Atlas of Energy Poetics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 October 2025
Book contents
- American Modernism and the Cartographic Imagination
- Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture
- American Modernism and the Cartographic Imagination
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Maps from Indigenous Territory
- Chapter 2 An Atlas of Energy Poetics
- Chapter 3 Island Periploi
- Chapter 4 Stereophonic Boundaries
- Chapter 5 Phantasmagorical Terrain
- Coda
- Bibliography
- Index
- Series page
Summary
Chapter 2 turns to loco-descriptive lyric poetry, read in the context of expanding highway infrastructure. It opens with a consideration of oil maps deposited in Ezra Pound’s Cantos, some of which critique the expropriation of former Ottoman territories by Anglo-American cartels. At that very locus, the Iraqi modernist poet Nazik al-Malā’ikah envisioned a very different kind of energy poetics, where the dividing line between oil’s extractive and consumptive spheres is decidedly smudged. In postcolonial counterpoint, the chapter closes by reading the automotive aesthetics in Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. The US highway system provides them with a conflicted linguistic resource, where the trace of oil’s violent extraction is smeared by the exhilarations of their lyrics.
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- American Modernism and the Cartographic Imagination , pp. 68 - 110Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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