A poetic time is needed for planetary life

A few weeks ago, our Planetary Pedagogies group launched a position paper coauthored over the previous twelve months, and a new web platform. The paper begins to frame the multiple ways of thinking the planetary in the context of higher education from the various positions we inhabit within it.

The paper’s coauthors decided to continue its discussion points through a series of solo authored ‘pulses’ on this site about what ‘the planetary’ means for each of us. David Rousell mentions his interest in pluriversality, a concept that expresses the possibility of many worlds within one world. It also interests me because it has both Indigenous and European heritages.

Coauthor Naomi Stead suggests that RMIT, the institution to which all coauthors are affiliated, and like the position paper itself, is a convergence of worlds: we each have our different approaches as educators for addressing the large-scale problems of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, and political incivility.

My interest in the pedagogies that a planetary approach allows is in bringing students into contact with writer-thinkers who show this convergence of worlds through scenarios (fictional and real) and voices (found and invented) expressing the ‘poetic under the historical’: a time that History cannot exhaust or totalise. This time chimes with what Chris Speed notes in his pulse about the multiple timescapes intersecting with the time of European modernity.

Expressions of poetic time loosen the grip the knowing reader-subject has on the immediacy of the present. Poetic time invokes the internal processes of imagining and memory, and in ways that are both with and against historical time’s tendency to spatialise, enumerate and uniformalise. These internal processes have important, action-oriented effects that are not always visible or measurable, but they are essential for re-orientating ourselves to the geological, climatological, biological and political shifts occurring in our worlds.

One of my guides for the poetic time of pedagogic encounter is Waanyi writer, Alexis Wright, whose fictions are planetary in theme and scale. Reading them becomes an event of poetic time: we are pulled away from preconceived schemas regarding ‘what is to be done?’ for characters struggling with multiple crises they did not create and without a Plan B while being pulled toward and guided by a world called Country that is greater and older than any one of us.