Polytemporal poetics: reimagining deep time

The geologist Marcia Bjornerud has attributed anthropogenic destruction to shallow, linear thinking. ‘Chronophobia’, a pervasive form of time denial, or temporal bias, obstructs a ‘polytemporal’ worldview which acknowledges the connections between past and present, and the dynamic scales through which life has evolved. The poet Emily Berry writes that ‘[a] phobia is a ritual of not-doing’. As a contribution to the University of Leeds’ Extinction Studies Doctoral Training Programme, which holds the twin imperatives of learning from and preventing extinction events, I sought to confront my own chronophobia through iterations of ‘doing’: combining palaeontological study and poetic practice.

This interdisciplinary, practice-led thesis is presented in two parts. The first, a long poem, is the result of my exploratory research – a ‘chronophobic’ reckoning – feeling through Earth’s history as it layers and cycles. A single lyric ‘I’ moves down, through a representational fossil record, from the Cenozoic, Mesozoic, and Palaeozoic Eras to the Proterozoic and Archaean Eons, focusing on episodes of dramatic change that occur at, or alongside, temporal divisions: where one unit of time ‘breaks’ into the next. Mass extinctions, evolutionary radiations, and episodic oxygenation events – major ecological regime shifts – are reimagined through an address that is variously perturbed.

The second part, a critical commentary, demonstrates how the research has been led by, is embodied in, practice. I outline the stakes of ‘not-doing’ and the challenges of a question guided by subjective experience, before redefining discipline and revisiting the ecopoetic intent. I narrativise the methods I used to establish a ‘polytemporal poetic’, from conducting ‘lyric fieldwork’ at geological boundaries to establishing an elliptical sequence guided by chronostratigraphic organisation. I close by recontextualising significance and offering a twofold conclusion: interpreting mass extinction as life taking an irrevocable turn and discovering poetry as a form of ‘turning’ as opposed to ‘making’.