It offers an opportunity to evaluate the necropastoral: as an avant-garde movement, as a poetics, and, above all, as a practice of reading.
Published by the University of Michigan’s distinguished (and often conservative) Poets on Poetry series, The Necropastoral is perhaps the most official statement of the group’s priorities and practices to date. It is an aesthetically and theoretically ambitious body of work - though its poetics have largely been theorized in unofficial spaces, like the (now-defunct) blog Montevidayo. Grotesque, verbose, Jacobean, their work relies on linguistic excess to index the violence of contemporary capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. These figures are linked by a coterie style and a set of common interests. The term “necropastoral” emerged in the mid-to-late 2000s to describe figures like Johannes Göransson, Lara Glenum, James Pate, and McSweeney herself. She not only theorizes her own historical dissidence but maps a broad canon of similarly slippery, insurgent figures, naming that canon the “necropastoral.” Her 2015 book of essays, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, supplies a seemingly endless stream of provocations and possibilities.
In that respect, McSweeney has been generous with her readers. To properly evaluate her work and her historical poetics, we need new critical tools, new language. Her work refuses many of the pieties of experimental writing - particularly its monotonous demand for innovation - yet she is a genuinely innovative figure. She thus occupies a strange position in contemporary poetry. In recent years, she has written plays, poems, novels, and a steady stream of essays that theorize the perverse pleasures of her own anachronistic, antigeneric practices.
And generic possibility: though McSweeney began her career as a poet, her work has gradually metastasized, transgressing generic and disciplinary borders.
She finds in it a source of derangement and delight, a pleasure so strange that it fractures the present and releases political possibility. McSweeney’s relationship with the past is hardly pious. “I am a Futurist,” writes Joyelle McSweeney, describing the strange historical allegiances of her work: “But I am a Futurist of 1909 rather than a Futurist who believes or anticipates a Future as envisioned by, say, TED talk panelists or believers in the progressive motion of literature as a reinforcement of political/capitalist bona fides.” As declarations of avant-garde intent go, McSweeney’s is deliciously paradoxical: an anachronistic investment in a movement that militated against anachronism, that made war on the past and its pious preservation.
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