"allergically pastoral”: chronodiversity in three contemporary queer poets

‘In contrast to biodiversity’, argues Karlheinz A. Geißler, ‘“chronodiversity” is terra incognita’. This paper takes up the challenge to explore chronodiversity (the extent to which individuals have differing experiences of temporality) in a queer ecological context. Following Catriona Sandilands’ call for queer ecology to stress ‘an articulatory practice in which sex and nature are understood in light of multiple trajectories of power and matter’, I will look at contemporary poets whose negotiation of pastoral and lyrical modes offers a temporal experience of embodied difference. I am concerned with how queer poetry intervenes in modes of temporalisation which bind existence to a standardised temporal logic of consumption, expenditure, reproduction and labour. While pastoral is often associated with nostalgic and reactionary structures of feeling, I consider poets whose engagement with pastoral tendencies constitutes an ‘allergic’ aesthetic/ethic. Given that ‘allergy’ is rooted in both allos (‘other, different, or strange’) and ergon (‘activity’), it is fruitful to examine how poets reactivate pastoral modes through a queer and critical reimagining of desire and time. Reading poems by Sophia Dahlin, Callie Gardner and Caspar Heinemann, I consider formal strategies such as complex sentences, lists, imagery, lyrical present tense, citation and space, to dramatise the emotional and temporal conundrums of queer pastoral. I argue that these poets explore the possibilities of ‘queer asynchronies’ (Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds) to rethink environmental consciousness in terms of (allergic) pastoral erotics which variously reflect and refuse the organising logics of heterocapitalist chrononormativity.