The publication of Nathaniel Tarn’s Atlantis, An Autoanthropology marks an important event in the history of recent American poetry, completing a project that has spanned forty-seven years. As a work of poet’s prose akin in its imaginative resonances to Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book, Tarn’s autoanthropology charts his biography, his encounters with diverse cultures, and includes his insightful commentaries on poetics. Organized into thirty-three “throws,” the book’s form relates to both craft and movement: “A potter throws, making a pot,” Tarn explains, “not a trip here but the transit from one act to another, a going that always supposes repetition, a succession of goings and returns” (36). These cyclic throws and successive transits make it seem as if Tarn has been everywhere and met everyone in his quest to explore the one and the many, the whole and the part, the totality that binds each individual human to the Earth. His voyages across all seven continents fly from Guatemala to Burma to Alaska and to hundreds of points between, making the spatial geography of the work staggering. The cast of characters is also vast: from Marcel Griaule to Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Duchamp to André Breton, Charles Olson to Nathaniel Mackey, and hundreds more. Tarn’s thoughts on world religions, environmental collapse, anthropology, the dismal state of the poetry business in America, and education appear throughout the work’s global geographies and transits as well. There is so much to say about Atlantis, but since I am a scholar and editor of poetry who is anxious over what climate change reveals about the endangered relations between humans, other species, and the biosphere, I will focus on Tarn’s ethical stance against ecological deterioration. This ethic appears as an envisioned eco-apocalypse in the form of a tragic sparagmos, a detotalization that involves a tearing to pieces of the world’s body. By deploying the image of sparagmos, Atlantis poses an overwhelming eco-poetic question: can human beings find enough hope and connection with exterior reality to take up projects of retotalization, the repair of this fallen world?

Joseph Donahue’s useful preface to Atlantis indicates that “Atlantis gives the book its title but appears nowhere within it” (xiv). This enigmatic absence of the missing eighth continent, the one continent which Tarn has not visited, highlights the significance of the book’s title. Despite the absence of the word, the image of the waves above Atlantis does appear in Tarn’s vision of a watery planet: “Imagine that the Earth is all a sea,” he writes, “that no land whatsoever exists, only weather and wind. Every imaginable thing else is water: there is nothing in existence except water. Anything that can be made has its basis in water. Suppose then that we are waves continually being formed on the water by the action of wind and gravity. The waves come and go eternally, but they do not change the composition of water” (42). This vision of a landless Earth is a meditation on connectivity, but also a vision of all humans and nonhumans transformed into water molecules; it is a vision of totality, but also of individual absence; a vision of oceanic infinity, but also of a very real possibility that humans will face in the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, as radical environmental changes cause the waves to encroach upon the Earth’s great coastal cities, from Miami to Dhaka, New York to Cairo. This vision of the absence of the continents, sunk like Atlantis, relates to Tarn’s interest in sparagmos, the climactic stage of some tragedies when the protagonist’s body is ripped limb from limb. As a bloody violence towards which developed nations are hurling the human species, climate change as tragic sparagmos has haunted Tarn before. In Lyrics for the Bride of God, Atlantis figures prominently as an image of a civilization characterized by destruction: “and my tragedy / or ours / is that of the time / and the time is also of Atlantis” (8).

Still, Tarn’s vision of the Earth as nothing but an abundance of waters does not overtly voice environmentalist concerns and sticks more to his concern with negotiating the philosophical problem of the one and the many. However, when the environmentalist content of Atlantis, an Autoanthropology does appear, it has rhetorical fury:
Tarn’s rhetorical questions should spur despair. The obvious answers argue that self-interest and the impotency of humanity’s social institutions will spell doom for what remains of the wilderness, for indigenous cultures that have the knowledge required to reconstitute the ruined environments of the planet, and for nonhuman species. Simply witness the scientific predictions involving the Sixth Mass Extinction Event or the UN’s cultural prognostications about the number of indigenous languages that the human archive will lose this century, to understand that Tarn’s depressing predictions are accurate. This sense of humanity’s coming termination as well as the possible apocalypse (“the Earth will survive by the skin of its teeth”) fits with other poetries of eco-apocalypse. In her book Recomposing Ecopoetics, Lynn Keller has characterized this apocalyptic strain of Anthropocene poetics as carrying a mixture of “assertive warning and despairing prediction.” “Without some counterforce,” she argues, “such grief and despair can prove paralyzing, both artistically and politically” (98-99). Although Keller rightly asserts that despair can lead to paralysis, Tarn seems to thrive, at least artistically, by meditating on images of apocalypse characterized by the planet’s violent tearing to pieces— tundra melting, ice melting, fires consuming rainforests, seas rising and acidifying.

Note, for example, how Tarn’s grief-stricken meditations lead him to an eco-critical revelation about the misplaced religious energies of the human—species a revelation all the more shocking because he spent the better part of his life studying the complexities of the world’s major religions and indigenous modes of spirituality. “I entered a phase of absolute agnosis,” he admits, just after listening to “a very long multiday session of ‘teachings’ by the Dalai Lama no less” (279). Late in the drama of Atlantis, he replaces this admission of the total loss of faith in any kind of higher metaphysical pattern with the following: “Attention to the planet and our relation to it might have benefited from a lack of attachment to fictions of the invisible. If a divinity is necessary, Gaia, this Earth, is the sole possible candidate. I feel very strongly that if all the work and the expense of energy and of goods could be transferred out of religion — mainly the monotheistic ones — into work and devotion on behalf of Gaia alone, the human race might have the possibility of surviving” (281). A glimmer of hope: human religions reveal that the species is capable of monumental works of devotional energy, but these devotions have been misplaced for millennia. Interested readers can find the same assertions in Tarn’s striking poem “Old Friedrich, Sils-Maria, 06.30.28,” contained in the eco-poetic chapbook, Gondwana, or in that volume’s eponymous poem:
But how do we navigate the challenges posed by the end of the human species and/or this call to transfer all forms of ritual worship to work that constructs an actual Earth of value? Tarn’s description of the relationship between sparagmos and ecclesia opens some potential answers. In Atlantis, he describes sparagmos as “Detotalization: the mental taking to pieces of such systems in ritual and liturgy for dialectical and didactic purposes, normally with retotalization in view.” This process creates the possibility of an “ecclesia” that depends on “a fall or breaking apart of the original unity: a sparagmos,” which sets in motion the processes of detotalization (125). For Tarn, “ecclesia” is a complicated term. Deriving from the Greek ekklesia, it initially meant “to call out” but then came to mean an assembly, a gathering to work out the business of the polis, a council, or a congregation. Tarn associates the term with systems of “heraldry,” classificatory systems that provide a sense of security and order, two things absolutely absent in the present’s attack on the Earth’s ecosystems. Melting glaciers, sunken cities, and millions of climate refugees: the human species has initiated disordered processes of ecological detotalization, a sparagmos that means the end of the mean little civilization that European conquerors have built here in North America. If any hope is possible, it must lie in retotalization, whether in the formation of a better social system for human life after capitalism or in the evolution of new life forms made out of an abundance of water, the Earth’s abiding ecological processes.

The tension surrounding detotalization and retotalization is about survival, and Tarn works up this tension in other contexts as well: between lyric and elegy, anthropology and poetry, religion and the real. The absent Atlantis sunk below the waves indicates much is at stake in these tensions: “I eat the fruit of that tree,” Tarn declares early in Lyrics for the Bride of God in reference to the tree of knowledge, “as the cannibals did in Atlantis” (6). Perhaps in the coming climate conflagrations, human beings will become the cannibals that Tarn envisions in Atlantis, creating a Cormac McCarthyesque reality of a nightmarish post-apocalypse where nothing survives. Perhaps instead, the survivors of the coming sparagmos might learn to take their energies in a different direction, one focused on the retotalization of Gaia as our “sole possible candidate” for divinity. The stakes are overwhelming and terrifying.

Towards his conclusion, Tarn offers one last crucial thought about poetry and hope that has relevance for a civilization moving into the harrowing sparagmos of eco-apocalypse: “[C]an one survive in a mode of ‘as if,’” he asks, “continuing to live as if life had meaning without being able to tell whether it has or not?” Tarn’s answer brings his meditation on survival back to poetics:

In addition to uncountable weeds, there is a considerable field of flowers to be enjoyed. It is for this animal the last manifestation of “hope” in this fallen world. I have always sensed that poetry without “hope” was simply impossible. Which one assumes is what Adorno meant. I write as if hopeful. This, at the very least, continues to compel my interest and speaks to a universe’s trillions of presences way out there. (295)

Calling himself “an animal” and thereby breaking the nefarious binary between nature and culture that has caused so much environmental damage, Tarn also refers to a field of flowers. The field is a well-known metaphor for the flowering of the tradition of the modern poem to which Tarn expresses allegiance, and he claims that these poems allow him to exist “as if” there is hope, as if one individual can speak to and care about the trillions of nonhuman and human presences out there in exterior reality, in the biosphere, our only home. The poems in the tradition of the New American Poetry have vital roles to play in creating the hope implicit in this negative capability — as if dwelling on Earth with a vision of hope. Atlantis is not just an anthropological take on auto-fiction or the documentation of a life’s experiences lived with passion for the great diversity of human cultures and the energies of the written word. It is a vision of profound environmental significance. In its negotiation of the whole and the part, its quest for totality, Atlantis, An Autoanthropology transits consistently out and home, charting routes that lead toward devotion to the great diversity and beauty of our home, the Earth—an act of eco-writing, the work of environmental ethics and pedagogy.

Joshua Hoeynck’s research focuses on the confluences between process philosophy, Black Mountain poetry, and environmental criticism. His work has appeared in The New American Poetry: Fifty Years Later, Contemporary Literature, and The Blackwell Companion to American Poetry. Additionally, in conjunction with the Charles Olson Society, he edited Staying Open: Charles Olson’s Sources and Influences (Vernon Press). As Director of the Olson Society, he organizes annual panels at the Re-Viewing Black Mountain College Conference, The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, and the American Literature Association Conference.