A Few Observations on the Tenth Anniversary of RENDER / AN APOCALYPSE, by Jennifer Ashton

Readers of Rebecca Gayle Howell’s brilliant lyric work Render / An Apocalypse might find themselves, from the moment they encounter its first poem, a bit puzzled by the book’s professed apocalyptic subject matter. That is, what might count as catastrophic references in the opening poem or the poems that succeed it quickly emerge not so much as a basis for generating fear and despair about a shared fate of destruction, but rather as a means of cultivating a critical distance from that prospect. Another way to put this: If Render / An Apocalypse is poised to offer its readers a myriad means of caring about and tending to the plants and animals that its speaker lives on for sustenance, nevertheless, Howell refuses to capitalize on those affective solicitations. While Render / An Apocalpyse certainly contemplates future calamities from its apocalyptic standpoint, the revelations it delivers to its readers are calculated to compel something quite different from the heavily interested forms of empathetic identification we ordinarily associate with lyric poetry. The lyric speaker Howell gives us performs many careful calculations, to be sure, but they are calculations designed to compel not so much our readerly interest, but our disinterest. That is, these poems, in part through their persistent if often implicit second-person address, deliver an objective rather than a subjective stance on the welfare of other beings and ourselves alike.

The final sequence of the volume makes good on the book’s subtitle, An Apocalypse, and does so, unsurprisingly, by mobilizing the Christian New Testament, and specifically the Book of Revelation, albeit through a formal reversal of the latter’s well-known verse, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last.” Which is to say that the last line (omega) of each of the sequence’s seven sections becomes the first line (alpha) and title of the next section. The penultimate poem of this sequence enacts yet another turn on the very idea of revelation by explicitly identifying a frequent apocalyptic theme—the future collapse of civilization—with present-day human habits of consumption involving unsustainable practices of domestication and slaughter:

Since there’s nothing else to kill

take the slate rock piled out back

and target blue jays as they hawk

grasshoppers on the dirt road

Since there is nothing else to drink

take the beans from the stove

pour off some soup pour it down your baby’s throat

Your milk cake dry your mouth of poke

Since this fencerow is no longer your fencerow

since you scorned this fertile ground

Your homeplace now a mark of what you do not own

The lesson offered here is also a kind of undoing of the destruction of human-owned property by nature’s changing climate, turning that same destroyed material possession into an agent that is itself capable of expropriation. Here the “fertile ground,” which in an earlier poem in the volume, “How to Be Civilized,” becomes a fenced area for keeping the speaker’s animals from wandering away (“because she [a pig] did come // but might go astray / we now keep the pen / keep control // Build it tall with walls”), now stands as a reminder that the pigs that fence once contained were not just food but property.

When the poem ends with the command “As you have been stolen from steal,” the poem’s readerly address is yet another table to turn. That is, the poem’s revelatory “End” also becomes the “Beginning” of Render’s final poem, where the human speaker is no longer seen consuming the spoils of the nonhuman for her own benefit but instead is figured as the one appropriated for consumption:

Tomorrow comes on its own

Call instead to your regrets

your chiggers your ticks Each nail-head body

crawling you, your length a blade of grass

Watch how it labors to bury its biting head

to find the wet night it knows is there

This is your inheritance:

to be the singing blood meal, unaware

Here we have come full circle from “How to Wake,” the opening poem of Render / An Apocalypse, where the speaker invites its human readers to consider how best to appropriate food from another body, a lactating cow:

If you want first milk
first light sweet cream

first chore done
be mean

Shout her name
Force her leg back

Her tail swatting you
Your fist pounding her

Starting with this poem, and throughout the book, readers are confronted with elaborate invocations and solicitations of empathy, only to see them neutralized and rendered (as it were) impersonal. The “you” whom the poems address finds itself in a variety of positions in which it can recognize its own desires in the needs of its nonhuman counterparts, whether in the form of a calf tugging at its mother’s udder (“Learn your lesson / from the calf // Look how he rams / his head into the cow’s sack”) or the chigger and the tick seeking human flesh for their “blood meal,” not to mention the speaker’s own effort to document making a desperate meal from a slaughtered chicken.

By the final poem in the book, the difference between feeling empathy for the cow faced with a calf’s or a human’s aggressive efforts at extracting milk, for the hunger of insects facing starvation, or even the hunger of one’s own starved self, is that the “fertile ground you scorned,” ground that “you” can no longer understand as “your” property, nevertheless has also become a “homeplace,” a destination that is not exactly comforting, for it is simultaneously a final resting place: a deathbed. If my understanding of Howell's project is right, empathy emerges in this work not as a solution but as a non-solution to the kind of apocalypse in which, for humans, “there’s nothing else to kill”—and nothing left to own. Thus in the final poem of Render / An Apocalypse the future absence of any given life form (including humans) becomes indistinguishable from a future without insects: “But what if your absence / were like the absence of gnats?” Howell’s does offer us a solution, but one that is far more plausibly understood as the elimination of ownership than as the elimination of life: a change in “civilization” that would require not just a revelation but a revolution.

Jennifer Ashton, April 2023

For a more developed version of this reading, see Ashton, “Ecology, Ethics, and the Apocalyptic Lyric in Recent American Poetry” in Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture, edited by John Hay (Cambridge MA: Cambridge UP, 2020), 199–211.