‘Like that of a crab, backward’: the resistant role of poetry in climate debates

This article interrogates the increasingly visible yet theoretically under-examined role of poetry in climate policy discourse. Against a familiar binary that casts narrative as the locus of reason and poetry as the vehicle of feeling, the article argues that poetry recasts policy debates through its resistance to being instrumentalised. It explores how poetic interrogations of plastic – in the context of the policy crisis precipitated by plastic’s ubiquity and durability – offer another way of thinking about what poetry can do. The article examines works, notably Tim Cresswell’s Plastiglomerate (2020) and Evelyn Reilly’s Styrofoam (2009), to analyse poetic engagements with plastic as a ‘hyperobject’. Through these readings, the article considers how poetic form complicates the relationship between knowledge and feeling that frames the assumed intervention of literature in these debates. It understands poetry as a resistant epistemology that inhabits the uncertainties of making policy responding to climate crisis. By refusing to make ecological hyperobjects wholly knowable or narratable, poetic language registers the scale and contingency of this crisis in ways that policy discourses cannot. The article contends that the value of poetry lies in its ability to hold open ambiguity and contradiction, the necessary conditions for reimagining environmental governance.