But I want to draw attention to how Apocalypse prominently foregrounds the process of writing an epic and creates an argument for the values-and limitations-of epic vision. No brief introduction can do justice to the satisfyingly complex plotting of the poem, or to its rich array of characters who manage to be both individuals and archetypes, or to the nimbleness of its cultural commentaries on our past and present and our possible futures. There is a thirty-year gap between Turner’s first two epic poems and his third, and Apocalypse, while continuing his project to move the subject of epic into the future, is a noticeably more complicated creation, often conceptually challenging (it includes explanatory endnotes) and a tour de force of storytelling. Epic poetry isn’t in Kansas-or in Troy-anymore. When later regenerated, the AI revolutionizes the understanding of time and inspires scientists to discover the means to resurrect dead people. The other epic hero is a benevolent Artificial Intelligence named Kalodendron who in 2072 erupts from the world-wide Web, a futuristic deus ex machina, to initiate a golden age of science and culture, bringing the world to the verge of utopia before being assassinated by agents of the Vatican and the C.I.A. Later, in the early twenty-second century, this same group of unconventional heroes will launch an extraterrestrial expedition to try to stabilize the black hole and avert global apocalypse. One set of heroes is a ragtag, multiethnic collection of scientists, artists, and technicians described as a “techno-geek and eco-wonk brigade” working to reverse the warming of the planet and facing fierce resistance from a military-industrial-religious-nationalist complex hostile to science, and to geoengineering in particular. Depicting the inside of a gigantic spaceship turned into an arcadian human habitat, Turner’s poet-narrator unobtrusively slips in a line from Paradise Lost (“A happy rural seat of various view”), only to take back the force of that allusion a few lines later to say that this futuristic fabrication “sometimes looks like a corny view / Of Paradise.” Turner’s poet likes to get fancy with metrical and rhetorical legerdemain: making perfect iambs out of the reaction of sulfur dropped into ocean water (“It doesn’t turn to H 2SO 4 ”), likening the poem’s composition to the working of 3-D printing software, abruptly showing a character to the exit according to the protocols of medieval Icelandic narratives (“He takes no further part within our saga”), creating comic chaos out of proliferating institutional acronyms:īeachers and Islanders they now will joinĮven more remarkable than the events and inventive poetics of Apocalypse is Turner’s choice of epic heroes. Some of the events of Apocalypse are strikingly, even shockingly, unprecedented for epic: a papal suicide, the availability of a medical treatment to extend human longevity, the construction of a space elevator to the outer solar system. But once a reader enters Turner’s world it is clear that the traditional epic is in for a makeover. The poem chronicles the heroic responses to, in fact, two crises: the human-made scourge of global climate change and its consequences, and an unanticipated cosmic threat from a runaway black hole on track to devour Earth. And like most epics Apocalypse has at its center a defining cultural crisis. There are battles of Homeric scope and brutality descriptive passages of Virgilian luster a Miltonic sense of paradise squandered and human frailty. It makes extensive and often extravagant use of many conventions of epic narration: an invocation, extended similes, catalogues, an “angelos” who bridges the human and the divine. Apocalypse is, structurally and metrically, almost obsessively traditional with its ten thousand lines evenly divided among ten books. Like Turner’s two earlier epics, The New World (1985) and Genesis (1988), this poem glories in-and rehabilitates-a form of heroic poetry that had been largely regarded as extinct.
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