The Whole Earth: Andrew Durbin on the Poetry of Etel Adnan

This week at the New Inquiry Andrew Durbin discusses the poetry of Etel Adnan, whose two volume reader, To look at the sea is to become what one is, was published this spring by Nightboat books. Durbin begins his discussion by considering Stewart Brand's 1966 petition to NASA "to release a then-rumored image it had photographed of the whole earth. He printed the question 'Why haven’t we seen a picture of the whole earth yet?' on a series of buttons and pamphlets and distributed them around the country with the help of Buckminster Fuller." NASA eventually release the photo of the Earth in its entirety, giving earth-dwellers the long sought-after selfie to end all selfies (if only). In the context of The Whole Earth campaign, Durbin writes:

As the 1966 campaign for an image of the whole earth began in the United States, the Lebanese poet, painter, journalist, and novelist Etel Adnan published her first book, Moonshots. In his introduction to Adnan’s newest collection, To look at the sea is to become what one is, Ammiel Alcalay writes that the moon was crucial to Adnan’s early work, particularly for its “virginity”—its remove from the human-caused death and disaster that marked the worldwide 1960s. Cold, beautiful, and lifeless, the moon is a specter that preemptively rhymes with those desolate places effaced by war and colonialism so familiar to Adnan. The moon offers an image of a possible earthly future where competitive forces of violence, particularly the U.S. and Soviet Union arms race, obliterate life on the planet. The moon is both an escape from and a realization of war and desolation, which were Adnan’s primary subjects throughout the 1960s and 1970s, from the Lebanese Civil War to Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the war in Vietnam. Paraphrasing the title of Adnan’s collection, “to look at the whole earth is to become what one is,” means to become big enough to understand one’s smallness, and the precarity of the ecological and political situation that characterizes life on Earth.

Adorno wrote that philosophy lives on because the moment of its realization has passed. The same could be said of poetry. Like philosophy, poetry does not “promise that it [will] be one with reality.” Instead, it is liberated to explore alternatives. This seems to be true for Etel Adnan, at least, whose works have been recently collected in the generous, two-volume set spanning her literary career. Media of any kind “lives on” because that which is more or less generally assumed to be its “task” remains unfinished, compelling it, as Adorno wrote, “to ruthlessly criticize itself.” For Adnan, poetry has been tasked with memory and memorialization, which for her it never seems to get quite right. Someone is always forgotten.

In her later book-length poem, Seasons, Adnan asks what could be called the general question of her poetics: “Is memory’s function to first break down, by its own means, then pick up the pieces and reassemble them, or is it multiplied?” Adnan’s poetry is largely haunted and shaped by what has been forgotten as much as what has been remembered, and as such it is explicitly a poetry of broken and reassembled pieces: places, people, histories. Writing about these pieces has been a particularly generative process for Adnan, one she has centralized in her poetics of vocalization and record keeping. Through memory loss, Adnan “discovered writing without an alphabet,” a writing of traces and of extinction.

Read on at the New Inquiry!