Strange meetings in the necropastoral eat away at the model of literary lineage that depends on separation, hierarchy, before-and-after, on linearity itself released like a rat-body into all edifices of hegemony, the ‘strange meeting’ will emerge as one of the necropastoral’s occult political modes.(3) The necropastoral is the name she gives to a mode of textuality itself - a kind of textuality that has broken loose from the ordinary, linear operations of literary history. We can account for the strangeness of this definition, however, by noting that McSweeney is not defining a genre: rather she is defining a process, a flow, a set of textual operations. One notes how far we are from traditional definitions of the pastoral, which tend to organize the genre around, for instance, the role of the shepherd, or the relative political innocence of pastoral life. … Never inert, the necropastoral is defined by its activity, its networking, its paradoxical proliferation, its self-digestion, its eructations, its necroticness, its hunger, and its hole making, which configures a burgeoning textual tissue defined by holes, a tissue thus as absent as it is present, and therefore not absent, not present. I give the name ‘necropastoral’ to the manifestation of the infectiousness, anxiety, and contagion occultly present in the hygienic borders of the classical pastoral … The term ‘necropastoral’ re-marks the pastoral as a zone of exchange. McSweeney’s critical method refuses the very idea that there is an answer to a question like “What is the necropastoral?” The necropastoral is defined by its capacity to multiply and mutate, to transgress its own borders - to indict the very notion of borders. But McSweeney’s definition defies the proprieties of academic criticism. Given the title of McSweeney’s monograph, one might expect her book to be an extended critical introduction to the movement, or, at least, an extended definition of the necropastoral - and, in a sense, it is. 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.