Getting started with ecopoetry « Thread Started on Oct 14, 2008, 12:38pm »
Ecopoetry
Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, both members of WOM-PO, are coediting an anthology of contemporary ecopoetry in English, titled "Earth's Body." To spur interest in and thought about this vital topic, we have created EARTH'S BODY: THE SUDDEN INSPIRATION WRITING GALLERY.
This is a forum for you: post your own poems, post poems by others, enter into dialogue with others, just as you like.
(Please note that participation in this gallery does not constitute submission for the anthology. Send us up to six poems plus a short bio by email or snail mail by December 15, to submit to the anthology.)
Our working definition of "ecopoetry" is flexible; it includes not only what might be called nature poetry, and not only poetry that focuses on environmental issues, but also experimental poetry--poetry that explores language in its relations with the other-than-human. We welcome work by emerging as well as established poets. We welcome serious poems, playful poems, poems in open or traditional forms. We welcome not only short poems but also poems of several pages.
Re: Getting started with ecopoetry « Reply #1 on Nov 1, 2008, 8:44pm »
I'll jump in here with some thoughts and a couple questions. I'm in the midst of writing my analytical thesis (for my MFA) about contemporary women "eco-poets," including Linda Hogan, Mary Oliver, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Sherri Benning, and Pattiann Rogers. I find that women seem to take a different stance toward nature than many male poets. I'm investigating what that is but not really looking for a single answer that applies to all. We're too varied for that!
So, here are my questions: Who do you think are the influential contemporary women eco-poets? Do you think that women inherently have a different relationship/stance regarding the natural world than men - or are we all just individuals in the big scheme of things?
Looking forward to hearing from all of you - and looking forward to Earth's Body.
Re: Getting started with ecopoetry « Reply #2 on Nov 7, 2008, 6:53pm »
including Linda Hogan, Mary Oliver, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Sherri Benning, and Pattiann Rogers. I find that women seem to take a different stance toward nature than many male poets. I'm investigating what that is but not really looking for a single answer that applies to all. We're too varied for that!
So, here are my questions: Who do you think are the influential contemporary women eco-poets? Do you think that women inherently have a different relationship/stance regarding the natural world than men - or are we all just individuals in the big scheme of things?
I am so embarrassed to be slow answering this first post. That's because I didn't realize you had to log in, in order to get a "reply" possibility. SO I kept reading Erin's message and not knowing how I could answer it. Sorry, Erin.
What Laura-Gray Street and I are finding as we work on our ecopoetry anthology, Earth's Body, is how truly plenteous and varied are the poems that fit within that category. Of course, we have announced that we want a variety of types of poems; as we write in our Call for Submissions, "Our working definition of "ecopoetry" is flexible; it includes not only what might be called nature poetry, and not only poetry that focuses on environmental issues, but also experimental poetry--poetry that explores language in its relations with the other-than-human. We welcome work by emerging as well as established poets. We welcome serious poems, playful poems, poems in open or traditional forms. Depending on limitations of space, we will consider not only short poems but also poems of several pages." Therefore, to come up with a list of important contemporary ecopoets depends very largely upon how broad, how flexible, one's definition of "ecopoetry" is -- and how broad one's knowledge of contemporary poetry is, too. This is what's so fascinating and rewarding about our anthology project -- and also what is going to be so challenging, when we struggle with selections and with writing the introduction!
Erin asks about "influential contemporary women ecopoets." My list would include all the poets on her list --Oliver, Deming, Rogers, Hogan, Benning. I'd also add many other poets, but not necessarily in all of their work: Jane Hirshfield, Brenda Hillman, C.D. Wright, Di Brandt, Pamela Banting, Lola Haskins, Judy Jordan, Camille Dungy, Cynthia Hogue, Harriet Tarlo, and so many more. One exciting aspect of the field is the great range of young and therefore mostly not-yet-well-known poets whose writing is grounded in the far-ranging concerns that ground ecopoetry. Another exciting aspect of the field is the way in which writing about environmental issues or environmental damage is often inseparable from writing about human issues and human damage; for instance, Patricia Smith's recent book Blood Dazzler, which is about Katrina, is a powerful work of ecopoetry in its concern with environmental justice.
So any list of names is both helpful and misleading. Helpful, because it can get us started. Misleading, because it can't help but close down possibilities.
Now, to the next question that Erin asks: Do women inherently have a different relationship to nature from men? This question is huge and has been argued back and forth for years; it was at the center of feminist discourse, as it now is at the center of ecofeminist discourse. One terrific essay that foregrounds it is Sherry Ortner's 1974 essay "Is female to male as nature is to culture?" (Pp. 67-87 in Woman, Culture and Society, edited by M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.) As she points out, cultures have traditionally made this analogy -- but whether it is accurate, whether it is innate, is a different matter.
Joined: Aug 2008 Gender: Female Posts: 23 Karma: 0
Re: Getting started with ecopoetry « Reply #4 on Nov 8, 2008, 3:05am »
"...writing about environmental issues or environmental damage is often inseparable from writing about human issues and human damage; for instance, Patricia Smith's recent book Blood Dazzler, which is about Katrina, is a powerful work of ecopoetry in its concern with environmental justice."
Yes and I would say the same about (wompo) Allison Hedge Coke's Blood Run: a powerful verse play about the great mound city that continues to be destroyed. The land as sacred being, rather than commodity.
Thanks for this forum. I look forward to your anthology! Best--Kim
Re: Getting started with ecopoetry « Reply #5 on Nov 10, 2008, 10:30pm »
Hi, I see that this forum has had 119 readings, which is great. Now, I welcome you all to take the conversation in any direction you would like it to go, and/or to post suggestions for ecopoems, short ecopoems, questions, whatever. Sorry I was slow to figure out how to participate! -- but now I know which buttons to click.
Re: Getting started with ecopoetry « Reply #6 on Nov 11, 2008, 9:02am »
True Nature
I have a constant ache for Mother Earth, so burned, depleted, burdened, pierced, and razed, by those who lack the sense to know her worth. The activists seem weak, a little dazed, and can’t protect her water, soil, and air from ghastly, greedy, guzzling, global glitches of corporation rapist-billionaires. It hurts to think of landfills, oceans, ditches, replenished constantly with toxic trash; the city-dwellers sick from cars and smoke; to know that even boatloads full of cash, with good intentions, sink like a bad joke. Then how can we begin to do our part? The answer lies in purity of heart.
This sonnet was published in Sinister Wisdom in 2004. I just remembered I wrote it. I think it's my only ecopoem, in the sense of focusing on environmental issues. I'm intrigued by your concept of "poetry that explores language in its relations with the other-than-human." From that perspective, it seems every poem I've written, with anything from nature in it, is an ecopoem (see example below). But then, I'm a nature lover
Comfort Song
In the town She heals with words, She wears a gown Of berry birds.
In the city She flies around, She dons a pretty Breeze she found.
How I miss Her leafy park And tulip kiss In my cold dark.
Re: Getting started with ecopoetry « Reply #7 on Nov 11, 2008, 5:52pm »
this is fascinating, and I'm realising I've also a poem that could fall within the ecopoetry definition tho' I'd never realised there was such a 'thing' ...
Re: Getting started with ecopoetry « Reply #8 on Nov 11, 2008, 11:36pm »
Well, Moi, I hope you will post it. And thanks to those of you who did post poems since yesterday.
The boundaries of "ecopoetry" are flexible and very much in process. That is what is so rich and fascinating -- and so important -- about it. When I teach environmental literature, like for instance my ENVS 101 class which is called Classics of Modern Environmental Literature and is the gateway course to our new ENVS minor, I talk about the first, crucial paradigm shift from an anthropocentric, anthropomorphic view of and attitude toward nature, to a more biocentric, deanthropomorphized view of nature. In this, nature is not just the backdrop for human affairs, but becomes real in its own right; it is not just a timeless essentialized "other" but is actual, shaped, molded by human intervention -- and shapes human intervention. Once this paradigm shift takes place, it's true, much of the poetry that one writes could be considered to be ecopoetry. Some more than others, of course. I certainly wouldn't call all the poems I write ecopoems -- though some of them are.
Re: Getting started with ecopoetry « Reply #9 on Nov 11, 2008, 11:46pm »
Found it! Iy's one of those danged fancy-formatted pieces that don't translate well into html, but here goes ...
moi
one shooting star
her terror a thirst too dry to slake (the lump in her breast in her stomach in her throat)
one shooting star ten thousand wishes trail its wake
h5n1 silent flocks of gulls decay on the beach of a lake “off with off-off with all those heads!” the queen a card with no heart (their terrors thirsts too dry to be slaked)
the virus we do not name for the shame it will make ... he loves me yes he loves me no he kills me yes he kills me not
one shooting star ten thousand wishes brake its wake
down the drainforests biodiversities trickle away (orchards of apples genetically modified eva eats the treats) her terror a thirst too dry to be snaked
another year and another peaced treaty to create and re-break t-rex & dodo make space for the homosaps in their boat
one wishing star ten thousand shots in trail of its wake
planet earth crumbles into chunks all abouterspace on day six of the re-creation She stops at the beasts Her terror a thirst too dry to be slaked by one shooting star, its trail a wake for ten thousand wishes
the first, crucial paradigm shift from an anthropocentric, anthropomorphic view of and attitude toward nature, to a more biocentric, deanthropomorphized view of nature. In this, nature is not just the backdrop for human affairs, but becomes real in its own right; it is not just a timeless essentialized "other" but is actual, shaped, molded by human intervention -- and shapes human intervention.
That's quite a mouthful. Is this new paradigm like animism? I'm used to thinking of Mother Nature, Mother Earth, as a real entity in her own right, though I never pictured her in a particular way, in a human form. It sounds, in a way, like the point is to remind people that nature is alive? and not like a cardboard backdrop to a play or a postcard picture.
Joined: Aug 2008 Gender: Female Posts: 13 Karma: 0
Re: Getting started with ecopoetry « Reply #12 on Nov 15, 2008, 6:37pm »
[Found it! Iy's one of those danged fancy-formatted pieces that don't translate well into html, but here goes ...
moi one shooting star
I like! This reads a little like a pantoum to me... ]
It's a villanelle! I didn't realize until I was well into it (fancy formatting dissimulation successful!).... Very wonderfully playful (and dead serious) use of the form. Also loved the elided coinages: drainforests, abouterspace.
Thanks for posting it!
P.S. How do you put the clipped parts of posts into those nice boxes?
Re: Getting started with ecopoetry « Reply #15 on Nov 17, 2008, 8:53pm »
Hi everybody,
Yep, it's a mouthful -- my sentence about deanthropocenticizing, etc., and paradigm shifts, and all. The term "paradigm shift" comes from Thomas Kuhn. It is such an important concept because it doesn't involve just changing an idea or two, but rather stepping into a different conceptual framework. From that, everything changes. Here is a bit from online: skepdic.com/paradigm.html:
"T.S. Kuhn in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) used the term 'paradigm' to refer to the conceptual frameworks and/or worldviews of various scientific communities. For Kuhn, a scientific paradigm includes models—like the planetary model of atoms—and theories, concepts, knowledge, assumptions, and values. The concept of a scientific paradigm was essential to Kuhn's argument that the history of science is characterized by conceptual frameworks giving way to new ones during what he called scientific revolutions.
Kuhn believed that during periods of "normal science" scientists work within the same paradigm. Scientific communication and work proceeds relatively smoothly until anomalies occur or a new theory or model is proposed which requires understanding traditional scientific concepts in new ways, and which rejects old assumptions and replaces them with new ones.
A paradigm of a scientific revolution in Kuhn's sense would be the Copernican revolution. The old model of the earth at the center of God's creation was replaced with a model that put Earth as one of several planets orbiting our sun. Eventually, circular orbits, which represented perfection and God's design for the heavens in the old worldview, would be reluctantly replaced by elliptical orbits. Galileo would find other "imperfections" in the heavens, such as craters on the moon.
For Kuhn, scientific revolutions occur during those periods where at least two paradigms co-exist, one traditional and at least one new. The paradigms are incommensurable, as are the concepts used to understand and explain basic facts and beliefs. The two groups live in different worlds. He called the movement from the old to a new paradigm a paradigm shift."
So, this connects with ecopoetry, I would say, because ecopoetry is situated in a biocentric paradigm, not an anthropocentric paradigm. Of course, people argue about this -- and there are degrees to which that statement would be true for any given poet or poem. But the basic tenet of ecology, and hence of ecocriticism, and hence of ecopoetry, is that things do not exist in isolation, but in interconnected and interdependent systems. This includes human beings. And this is a profoundly different assumption from several other assumptions that seem pretty dominant in our culture: 1) that humans are the center and purpose of existence; 2) that the non-human world exists only in order to serve us, in terms of resources for our profit; 3) that the non-human world does not possess meaning in and of itself.
Sorry to sound so academic -- but it's what I do!
Thanks, everybody, for taking part in this exchange. And thanks for your poems.
So, this connects with ecopoetry, I would say, because ecopoetry is situated in a biocentric paradigm, not an anthropocentric paradigm. Of course, people argue about this -- and there are degrees to which that statement would be true for any given poet or poem. But the basic tenet of ecology, and hence of ecocriticism, and hence of ecopoetry, is that things do not exist in isolation, but in interconnected and interdependent systems. This includes human beings. And this is a profoundly different assumption from several other assumptions that seem pretty dominant in our culture: 1) that humans are the center and purpose of existence; 2) that the non-human world exists only in order to serve us, in terms of resources for our profit; 3) that the non-human world does not possess meaning in and of itself.
This is very clear - thanks! I couldn't agree more about human/nature interconnectedness and interdependence.
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Re: Getting started with ecopoetry « Reply #17 on Nov 20, 2008, 9:52pm »
"that things do not exist in isolation, but in interconnected and interdependent systems. This includes human beings. "
Includes is the operative word. Been awhile since I studied Hebrew, but the translation I like best (Everett Fox, I think) is that humans are to "serve and preserve" nature, not "have dominion over" (if one is coming at this from a Judeo-Xn point of view.) Thanks for this discussion. I published a poem recently that I suppose is an eco-poem of sorts. It's called "Cedar Says" and is at Autumn Leaves. I'll paste it below. Best--Kim
Re: Getting started with ecopoetry « Reply #19 on Nov 21, 2008, 8:28pm »
I have a question! Many eco-artists (for example Andy Goldsworthy) try to capture the ephemeral in their art. I wonder if this is something that eco-poets are interested in, and if anyone is trying to capture the ephemeral in ways other than describing it? Maybe something as literal as composting poems? --Athena
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Re: Getting started with ecopoetry « Reply #20 on Nov 23, 2008, 10:41pm »
First, thanks to whomever commented on my poem. I am not good at attaching monikers to faces. Secondly, I found the question about ephemera to be interesting, b/c I guess I come at it (writing about nature) with the sense of me being the ephemeral component and nature being timeless. My work has been influenced to a great extent by my home in the mountains of NC and so when I write about the land, I am very aware of its outlasting me and yet at the same time, I am painfully aware of destruction to the land that could cause it to be more ephemeral than myself. Best--Kim
Re: Getting started with ecopoetry « Reply #21 on Nov 24, 2008, 10:52pm »
Hi Kim, I get your point about feeling, as an observer, as a blip in geologic time, ephemeral. On the other hand, the act of writing is inherently an act of permanence, isn't it? Well, maybe I'm just out in left field here, but I'm enchanted by eco-artists who build works that they know will dissolve/breakdown/disappear/degrade. Is it even possible to imagine poetry that somehow becomes part of the process it is praising? Of course, there's a photographic record of the art, so in some sense, it does have permanence. Your last three lines, in "Cedar Says" do, I think, get at the ephemeral...the sound changing, with an implication that there's more change to come after 'soughs'. So: play with words can point toward the ephemeral? Just thinking out loud here. --Athena
I have a question! Many eco-artists (for example Andy Goldsworthy) try to capture the ephemeral in their art. I wonder if this is something that eco-poets are interested in, and if anyone is trying to capture the ephemeral in ways other than describing it? Maybe something as literal as composting poems? --Athena
What an intriguing question Athena.
One thought that came to me was the act of imbibing nature simply by being in its midst. Nature being the life outside. That led to the thought of breath, and the absorption of nature through the act of breathing. That led to the thought of speaking poetry, which requires breath, and the act of transferring the breath of nature through the breath of the spoken word. Maybe those examples are too ephemeral? I'm still not quite sure I understand your question but am enjoying it anyway!
Re: Getting started with ecopoetry « Reply #23 on Nov 25, 2008, 4:37pm »
Hi TA, Oh yes, reading aloud a poem is ephemeral. We're left with only the memory of it. That's cool. There's a Dutch artist who builds sculptures out of dried manure. Her idea is that over time, the manure will break down, settle into the soil, and serve as fertilizer...art as fertilizer. Steal this poem!
Here's a poem I wrote recently, trying to get at the ephemeral:
Declaration
I want to write a poem in birdseed, spend a morning under a blue sky spelling out in millet and sunflower seeds my words, stem, desire, prospect,
and then I'd spend all afternoon at the window watching as sparrow, nuthatch, chickadee peck and peck serif by cross stroke, syllable by syllable, until nothing remained, not even hunger, and the evening wind would sweep away the birds' tenuous marks.
Re: Getting started with ecopoetry « Reply #24 on Nov 25, 2008, 7:20pm »
Hi everyone and hi Athena in particular, who has asked this great question about the ephemeral nature of poetry itself, and whether or how poets have embraced that. I think it is such a great question. It flies in the face of much that we are taught about the power of art to outlast time -- as, for instance, pre-eminently in Shakespeare's sonnets. "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of time" will hold up against the deathless sonnet, etc. In graduate school I read Proust, and I remember it came, literally, as a visceral shock to high-Modernist me when somewhere near the end of the seven enormous volumes Marcel insists that no literature, not even Remembrance of Things Past, is immortal.
So. To create poetry that would be by its very nature ephemeral (rather than ephemeral because no one reads it!) -- what an act of courage and trust. What a laying-down of ego. And how deeply that would fly in the face of the fame game. How could you tenure someone whose poems had all disappeared? Yet, something like that was part of the aesthetics of Happenings, for instance.
Athena, you remember Jessica -- she was teaching a workshop at Berkeley last year, and one assignment she gave was for the students to carry the text of poems out into the community, into the non-linguistic world, in some way that they could devise. So, one kid wrote part of the text of Wallace Stevens's "Study of Two Pears" on a pear, and left it on a table in a cafe. One bite, and the poem changes! Three bites, and it disappears!
I love this idea, the compostible poem/the poem that plays with and dances in the space between word and world.
Re: Getting started with ecopoetry « Reply #25 on Nov 25, 2008, 7:20pm »
Quote:
"that things do not exist in isolation, but in interconnected and interdependent systems. This includes human beings. "
Includes is the operative word. Been awhile since I studied Hebrew, but the translation I like best (Everett Fox, I think) is that humans are to "serve and preserve" nature, not "have dominion over" (if one is coming at this from a Judeo-Xn point of view.)
From a Sufi view, everything-- and again, "includes human beings" is the operative part-- is an expression of the Divine, literally part of God. So to wantonly damage the environment (ie. more than necessary for one's own sustenance) can be seen as an offense against the Divine.
I posted a sonnet over at the sonnet thread that qualifies as an ecopoem; here's a piece that I think also qualifies, but in a more kind of tangential way:
well
cold black air rises from an open well and there's a giant down there breathing breathing water sound echoes mossy hair on the backs of his hands gleam of water on the curved surface of his eyeball splash of the bucket breaking through the cornea draw it up full of aqueous humor drink from a tin dipper and listen to the breathing
Re: Getting started with ecopoetry « Reply #26 on Nov 25, 2008, 8:36pm »
I love the eaten pear/poem! In fact I was thinking of that: etching a poem into an apple and then tossing it out for the deer. My words, sustenance, the body... but of course I'd have to write the poem down, revise, make it worthy, use up ink and paper. So I'm effectively stymied!
I so love your description of a poem as something that "plays with and dances in the space between word and world." I guess that's how I think of every/any poem. That is, the poem moves beyond, or away from, the act of naming, the act of describing. There needs to be "wildness" in the poem--thus the play.
I find myself thinking of the ephemeral because I think it's in that realm that mystery lies...and I so love the mystery of the wild, find that mystery to be what really matters in our relationship with nature. So, how to capture that sense of mystery, of wonder, in the face of the sheer magnitude of nature's cycles? The act of making art is not humble, is it? and yet it requires humility to get the mystery. There's the rub...
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Re: Getting started with ecopoetry « Reply #27 on Nov 27, 2008, 3:41pm »
Athena, thanks for your thoughts about my little Cedar poem. I am enjoying hearing everyone's ruminations on the permanent vs. the ephemeral in poetry. Altho maybe not versus, but an "and."
Ann, your poem, "Sweetgum Country," seems to me a good example of holding it all in tension: the description of nature, the eco-implications of human action on the land and water and in turn, the impact of sullied water on humans: "They fish for buffalo, catfish, bass, despite the fish advisories, the waters laced with mercury." You could have written a simple pastoral, but chose the truer path. "Early evening sun pours down on the cypresses and sweetgum" sounds beautiful, and *is,*but you examine the reality beneath outward appearance. So as poets we are also warriors, I think. Bearing witness. Bearing in mind not only ourselves, but the seventh generation and beyond. My own philosophical musings this morning!
Re: Getting started with ecopoetry « Reply #28 on Nov 28, 2008, 8:53pm »
Thank you so much for liking "Sweetgum Country," Kim.
What a huge (and important) topic that is -- the whole business of beauty and damage, in the world and also in environmental literature. For about 15 years I've been very involved in the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, which is by now a 1000-member international association of academics and non-academics interested in -- you guessed it -- all the possible permutations of the relationship between literature and the environment. It used to be that "env. lit." connoted wilderness literature, the literature of pristine places and/or of solitary escape into nature; this is the whole Thoreauvian tradition (though Thoreau himself was a more complicated writer than that makes him sound). You could go to ASLE conferences and hear a lot of papers about mountain-climbing. Then the questions would always arise, "What about urban environmental literature? What about, say, Southern environmental literature -- where there are not the same kinds of magnificent mountain/ocean/redwood forest landscapes, and where the whole terrain is scarred and marked by poverty, racism, and environmental damage? What about environmental justice issues? What, for instance, would be the ecopoetry of the maquilladoras?" This is the understanding of env. lit. that is deeply exciting to me -- and it is what informs that poem "Sweetgum Country." The beauty of the land is very real, but so are the poverty and history of racism, and also the shabbiness of that beauty.
Athena I completely COMPLETELY agree with you about mystery.
This discussion is so interesting, to me -- I wish it were going to continue longer! Maybe we can all throw more energy into the GreenPo list...
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