' - if / this is prophecy it's underwater, self-consuming': Exploring Jorie Graham's Poetics of Futurity Through the Materiality of the Sea

This article takes a phenomenological posthuman perspective, drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and Rosi Braidotti's posthumanism as its critical context to focus on one marine poem from Jorie Graham's latest collection, Fast (2017). It suggests this poem is a co-worlding of an embodied lyric 'I' and the ocean's uninhabitable-to-human nature, which subsequently demands a divestment of a singular selfhood. My critical approach flows within the framework of the Blue Humanities to place the marine world as central to a reworking of our ontological understanding required in the resource-centric world of the Anthropocene. Through modes of duration that include ocean circulation and planktonic reproduction, the article unfolds the relationship between physicality and imagination. Setting the form, language and imagery of this marine poem alongside the embodiment of oceanic flux enables a reading that does not reinforce a sense of human control over the ocean; rather it offers a poetic process that is an embodied occasion unfolding in deep or distant ocean. By proposing that this marine poem operates as a site of continuing revelation and concealment, a more objective sense of hope might be found in facing the unknown, an optimism that is not reliant on familiar narratives of human endeavour and perseverance.