ABSTRACT
Tracking the expansive, yet obscured networks of mining, refinement, and salvage associated with copper extraction economies from one copper mill on Long Island to their source in the Peruvian Andes and beyond, this essay develops the concept of a critical geopoetics, arguing for the value of combining geographical research with poetic composition as a means of unearthing and sounding the origins and far-reaching environmental consequences of the global network and cloud computing. Through the image of the “copper lyre”—an imagined yoking of telecommunicative infrastructure into a poetically resonant instrument—it explores the ability of lyrical forms to sound the subdued externalities of the global village by making visible, and literally by “airing,” material archaeologies eclipsed by the etherealized image of the cloud.
