Ecopoetics

"When Ezra Pound quipped in a letter to R.P. Blackmur in 1924 that ‘one can no longer put Mt Purgatory forty miles high in the midst of Australian sheep land’, he was of course mocking the medieval cosmography of Dante’s La Divina Commedia, which locates Mount Purgatory in the Antipodes..."

Anima de Wajdi Mouawad nous offre l'occasion d'explorer la question de savoir ce qui se produit lorsque l'écopoétique s'intéresse à un texte qui n'est pas ostentatoirement environnementaliste. En effet, hormis ses animaux narrateurs, Anima semble être un texte à priori dépourvu de richesse écopoétique évidente. Pourtant, l'étude proposée va permettre de montrer, d'une part, que la sensibilité écopoétique ne se consacre pas uniquement à l'environnement, mais également à la notion plus vaste d'oikos ; d'autre part, que les techniques narratives du roman mettent en place une déconstruction du propre de l'homme.

Brenda Hillman’s 2018 collection, ​Extra Hidden Life Among the Days​, is rich with many
lives—bacterial, human, arboreal, fungal. A multi-media, mycelial entanglement of elegies, personal photographs, and journal meditations, Hillman’s linguistic materials take the viewer from her family’s home in Tucson to the White House Lawn, weaving contemporary political struggles into her own observations of human-nature relationships, as well as the agency of forests and lichen. How might one describe Hillman’s work? To simply call it ‘ecopoetics’ does not do her experimental storytelling justice. Rather, we might better understand Hillman’s reconfiguration of Romantic, timeless environmental writing into a timely, expansive bio-cultural ecology as ‘political-pastoral,’ a type of poetic writing that embraces humanity’s impact on landscapes, that imbues the natural world with political symbolism.

The paper deals with the topic of ecologically oriented poetry of Krystyna Miłobędzka as a vital tradition for 21st-century Polish ecopoets. The author tries to trace the changes in the poetic canon after 1990 and shows the increasing interest in Miłobędzka’s poetry among modern poets. By analyzing mainly meta-poetic texts, the paper contrasts Miłobędzka’s posthumanistic, “event-driven” way of writing with the humanistic lyrical subject of Wisława Szymborska’s poetry. The author presents the former as more influential and more productive for modern, ecopoetic styles, including elements such as: waking the awareness, organic perspective of language, an egalitarian way of life and thinking about relations in categories of space and adhesion rather than domination.

Comparative analyses of poetry by German Sarah Kirsch, Emirati Ahmed Rashid Thani, and St Lucian Derek Walcott identify three distinct ecopoetic elements their work has in common. The three poets, born before the origin of ecocriticism, favour metaphors that represent natural landscapes. These metaphors express a certain "nature-centrism," and explicit references to environmental threats provoke approaches informed by ecocriticism to the oeuvres of all three poets alike. While the analyses highlight stylistic and culture-related differences, they manifest the urgency of an awareness for the global in the context of sustainability.

This book asks what it means to write poetry in and about the Anthropocene, the name given to a geological epoch where humans have a global ecological impact. Combining critical approaches such as ecocriticism and posthumanism with close reading and archival research, it argues that the Anthropocene requires poetry and the humanities to find new ways of thinking about unfamiliar spatial and temporal scales, about how we approach the metaphors and discourses of the sciences, and about the role of those processes and materials that confound humans’ attempts to control or even conceptualise them.

Poetry and the Anthropocene draws on the work of a series of poets from across the political and poetic spectrum, analysing how understandings of technology shape literature about place, evolution and the tradition of writing about what still gets called Nature. The book explores how writers’ understanding of sciences such as climatology or biochemistry might shape their poetry’s form, and how literature can respond to environmental crises without descending into agitprop, self-righteousness or apocalyptic cynicism. In the face of the Anthropocene’s radical challenges to ethics, aesthetics and politics, the book shows how poetry offers significant ways of interrogating and rendering the complex relationships between organisms and their environments in a world increasingly marked by technology.

This thesis will explore the work of performance poet, Kate Tempest, and the status of her poetry as an empowering mode of Foucauldian counter­-conduct. It will outline the urban, impoverished demographic Tempest speaks for and its implications for the motifs of alienation, apathy and frustration in her work, and how certain traits of her poetry attempt to offset these negative phenomena of modern consciousness. Firstly, Tempest’s particular brand of hip hop will be considered in relation to Jonathan Bate’s theory of ecopoetics, the poetic creation of a dwelling  place.  This consideration will be assessed alongside her other form of poiesis, the creation of myth, and the way these two modes work in conjunction to create an empowering discursive space for her audience to authenticate and ground themselves. Finally, this thesis will discuss the ways in which Tempest’s oral context fundamentally enriches the democratic, communalising and dissident elements discussed above.

This article begins with a climate poem and ends with a climate poem. In between, I explore what it means to do climate geopoetics. The first section addresses recent literary work that engages with climate change and the Anthropocene and outlines the geopoetic field as it is currently emerging as a subfield of the geohumanities. Next, I turn to examining climate narratives and frames; following the lead of many human geographers and environmental humanities scholars, I approach climate change as a social and cultural issue. I then discuss the methodology of this particular climate geopoetics project, commenting on and contextualizing some of my writing and thinking process for the climate poems that are woven throughout the article. By centering this article around three poems, I explore what it means to do climate geopoetics, the curious nature of the Anthropocene/Anthroposcene as a concept that both centers and de-centers the human, and the tensions on textual form that geopoetic practices create. It is my hope that this project may offer a fresh and unconventional approach to examining the multiple ways that climate change is framed, engaged, and contested.

"The tradition of Transatlantic Romantic poetry claims nature as a key figure. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s early work, Nature, published in 1836, he writes that “Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf,” and “[t]he world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty” (NCE 28, 34). He even feels the idealistic erasure of his subject position in Nature when he famously writes,” I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all” (29). However, according to Mary Chapman, “Emerson experience[s] a melancholic impasse after Waldo’s death,...[and in attempt] to reconcile...the calamity” (76), he philosophically wavers. I posit that his philosophy of idealism with regard to the natural world begins to vacillate, rather than stagnate, after Waldo’s death. Some theorists, such as Gyula Somogyi, argue that Emerson’s “Threnody,” “offer[s] only a hollow repetition of poetic conventions delivering no real consolation for the trauma” (317), and I agree that Emerson never completely achieves consolation, but his poetic conventions are substantive and the genre of poetry allows him to explore options of relief that weren’t fully available in his journals or letters. In a journal entry from 1857, Emerson claims, “My philosophy holds to a few laws, [one of which is]…Flowing” (JMN 14:191), so I analyze “Threnody” as it exists in contradistinction with Nature and some of Emerson’s journals from around the time of his son’s death to show how they begin to depict nature  as frequently divided and indifferent while always ideologically fluctuating. I propose that Waldo’s death, as elegized in “Threnody,” actually inspired Emerson toward a more postmodern understanding of reality and the environment through a queer  ecopoetics  of destabilization."

Le roman Les Sept Solitudes de Lorsa Lopez installe son lecteur dans un présent ressenti comme « le temps de la fin2 » dont parle Bruno Latour
à propos de notre Anthropocène, porteur d’une charge géologique aussi intense qu’irrémédiable et marqué
par la présence de « Gaïa3 ». Il s’agit de comprendre quels liens le présent de la fiction de Sony Labou Tansi entretient avec un avenir qui n’est
plus à venir. Aussi l’écrivain congolais élabore-t-il une poétique de la finitude du présent, loin de toute tentative de maîtrise du temps. Cette fragilité est prise en charge par le style d’écriture sonyen qui prend le temps de nommer la contradiction d’un présent humain à la fois limité et ouvert sur l’infini géologique. Mon hypothèse est que le présent dans lequel Sony Labou Tansi installe sa fiction coïncide de façon troublante avec l’Anthropocène, vécu comme l’âge de l’intrusion de la Terre dans l’histoire humaine.

Robert Duncan’s poems and essays are essential to the projectivist ecopoetics developed by Black Mountain and other New American poets in the 1950s and 60s. Projectivist ecopoetics focus on re-positioning the human in complex, planetary systems and thus put the accent on participation and possibility rather than decline and apocalypse. In their commitment to embodiment and the “felt world” as much as in their linguistic experimentation, projectivist ecopoetics guide today’s ongoing ecopoetic efforts. To the projectivist focus on participation, Duncan contributed playfulness and fictionality, vulnerability, and a syncretic myth-making that embraces science while rejecting rationalism and fatalist despair.

In The Opening of the Field and his essays, Duncan revises Olson’s ecological “objectism” by showing that the poet must be willing to be vulnerable and receptive—qualities Duncan figures as queer, feminized, and Romantic—to enter the “field” of composition as just another object among objects. Duncan theorized vulnerability through his reading of H.D.; in The H.D. Book, Duncan picks up on a H.D.’s image of the shell-fish to imagine how the dialectic of limit and emergence that fosters this “vital weakness” connects matter, life, and poetry. In the essay “Towards an Open Universe,” Duncan writes a syncretic myth of ecopoetic origins that fuses science and religion to imagine poems and embodied human life as part of these planetary—earthly and cosmic—rhythms. As in the poem “Poetry, A Natural Thing,” Duncan counters narratives of doom—Freud’s death drive and the thermodynamic concept of entropy in Frost’s “West-Running Brook”—with a vision of poetic participation that  is at once cosmic and playful.

Accretion, articulation, exploration, transformation, naming, sentiment, private and public property these are just a few of Juliana Spahr's interests. In this, her third collection of poetry, we find her performing her characteristic magic, turning these theoretical concerns into a poetic odyssey.

From her first poem, written in Honolulu, Hawaii, to the last, written in Berkeley, California, about her childhood in Appalachia, Spahr takes us on a wild patchwork journey backwards and forwards in time and space, tracking change in ecology, society, economies, herself. Through a collage of ''found language'' a deep curiosity about place, and a restless intelligence, Spahr demonstrates the vibrant possibilities of an investigatory poetics. This verse is more inclusive than exclusive; consistently Spahr includes grape varietals, the shrinking of public beachfront in Hawaii, endangered plant, fish, and wildlife species, the melting of the polar ice caps, and comparative poverty rates in her eclectic repertoire. She also knows how to sing in the oldest tradition of poetry of loss, and her lament for nature is the most keen.

During the last decades, ecology has become a global socio-political stake, but also a recurrent literary theme. The recent research field of ecocriticism is rooted in the US, but is rapidly spreading across the scientific and cultural worlds, diversifying its interests and methods. Scholars all over the world particularly stress the importance of developing a comparative ecocriticism that internationally explores ecological discourses in different languages and cultures. According to the book’s aims, this paper compares three works of literature, which address environmental problems and/or try to develop an ecological sensibility, trespassing not national, but linguistic borders.
The study of children’s literature has not been waiting for ecocritical theory to attest the importance of ecology as a main theme in texts addressing children. In many ways, education and consciousness-raising of the younger generations are supposed to be crucial, because these future adults will be even more concerned with climate change and will have to offer creative solutions to the environmental crisis. Yet, excessive pedagogy, enforcing awareness or even guilt, of both environmental writings and didactical children’s literature, has been a central aesthetical problem. This invites us not to limit our conclusions to an evaluation of the texts’ ecological substance and correctness, but rather to describe the multiple bonds between nature, aesthetics and narratives. We thus choose three works in three different languages which represent three different literary genres, namely crime fiction, fairy tale and poetry, to suggest that this poetical diversity of languages, motives, themes and narratives has to be seen as literature’s stand for nature’s protection in a multicultural landscape.

Anger, Resistance and the Reclamation of Nature in Audre Lorde's Ecopoetics

Hadeer Abo El Nagah
Department of English and Translation, Faculty of Humanities
Prince Sultan University, Saudi Arabia




Abstract:
After decades of literary criticism that is solely focused on one dimensional reading of literary texts, some of the relatively recent studies are turning towards a more comprehensive analysis that lies at the intersection of numerous literary theories. Eco criticism and post-colonial analysis for example can form a dual prospective that open the doors for a deeper understanding and appreciation of literary texts that can never be reached via the traditional one dimensional reading. Post-colonial theory, for instance, provides very specific critical tools that help to explore the ways in which black literature as an example, addresses the intersection between racial oppression and the exploitation of nature. Nature is usually pictured in literature as a place of pose and meditation, yet due to the long history of discrimination and abuse it is represented differently in African American Literature. However, recent analysis of African American poetry like Katherine Lynes' (2015) for instance, refers to the ecopoetics of nature reclamation. Selected examples from African American poetess Audre Lord are to be examined here via this particular scope. Black dragon fish, angry trees, shattered branches, black unicorns and buried diamonds are only few examples of Lorde’s ecological angry "others" and ecopoetics of reclamation.  What is the role played by nature in the African American struggle of self- definition and liberation? How does ecocriticism as a form of literary critique respond to the post-colonial interrogation of equity and sustainability? How can literature and poetry in particular enable African American poets to reclaim their voice and textual authority over nature? Thesearethe questions that come at the core of the ecopostcolonial dual critical reading employed in this study.
Keywords: African American poetry, Audre Lord, ecocriticism, Ecopoetics, post–colonial poetry, reclamation of nature

This ecocritical book traces the environmental sensibilities of two Anglophone poets; Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), and British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (1930-1998). Drawing on recent and multifarious developments in ecocritical theory, it examines how Hughes's and Heaney's respective poetics interact with late twentieth century developments in environmental thought, focusing in particular on ideas about ecology and environment in relation to religion, time, technology, colonialism, semiotics, and globalisation.

Cet article propose une relecture de l’ouvrage de Friedrich Dürrenmatt Minotaure (1984) à la lumière des approches éco-, géo- et zoopoétique, afin de montrer que deux thématiques centrales de l’œuvre – l’espace labyrinthique et la relation homme-animal – préfigurent les problèmes écologiques d’une époque où la littérature se trouve confrontée au défi majeur d’écrire dans un monde en danger. La mise à mort du minotaure apparaît dans cette perspective comme la préfiguration du déni actuel de la souffrance animale et d’une impossible entente interspécifique, et le labyrinthe, lieu inhabitable par excellence, comme le symbole de l’inhabitabilité d’une planète à la dérive. Grâce à la danse et la poésie, une réconciliation entre les animaux humains et non humains, entre l’homme et la nature, semble toutefois possible, montrant la voie hors du labyrinthe de nos vi(ll)es modernes.



In diesem Artikel werden die Forschungsansätze des Ecocriticism, der Geopoetik und der Zoopoetik gekreuzt, um Friedrich Dürrenmatts Minotaurus (1984) neu zu erschließen. Es wird gezeigt, dass zwei zentrale Themen des Werkes – der labyrinthische Raum und die Mensch-Tier-Beziehungen – die ökologischen Probleme einer Zeit vorwegnehmen, in der die Literatur mit der großen Herausforderung konfrontiert ist, in einer gefährdeten Welt zu schreiben: Die Tötung des Minotaurus erscheint in dieser Hinsicht als Präfiguration der gegenwärtigen Verleugnung tierischen Leids und einer unmöglichen zwischenartlichen Verständigung; und das Labyrinth, der unbewohnbare Ort par excellence, steht für die Unbewohnbarkeit eines treibenden Planeten. Dank des Tanzes und der Poesie scheint eine Versöhnung zwischen menschlichen und nicht-menschlichen Tieren, zwischen Mensch und Natur, dennoch möglich, wobei ein Weg aus dem Labyrinth unseres modernen Lebens angedeutet wird.

This article proposes a rereading of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Minotaur (1984) in the light of eco-, geo- and zoopoetic approaches, in order to show that the two main subjects of the novel – the labyrinth and the man-animal relationship – foreshadow today’s ecological issues, when writers are faced with the daunting task of writing in an endangered world: the killing of the minotaur appears in this respect as a prefiguration of the current denial of animal suffering and the impossibility of inter-species communication, while the labyrinth, an inherently uninhabitable space, could symbolise the uninhabitability of a planet that has lost its bearings. Thanks to dance and poetry, reconciliation nevertheless seems to be possible between human and non-human animals, between man and nature, pointing to a possible way out of the labyrinth of modern life.

Este ensayo explora la obra poética de Issa Kobayashi, considerado uno de los grandes maestros del haiku en Japón. Se enfoca en los poemas que el haijin oriundo de la provincia montañosa de Shinano escribió contemplando las vidas de los pequeños seres: los insectos y otros animales domésticos como perros y gallinas. Explora una lectura ecopoética de estos haikus de Issa a partir de la lente de una "mística campesina" que puede contribuir a dar forma a una espiritualidad ecológica moderna. Se incluyen haikus selectos sobre estos pequeños seres traducidos por el autor y fotografías del templo Entenji, en la metrópolis de Tokio, que está dedicado al poeta.

Poetry and Essay. Just as Sinclair exposed humanity's lack of humanity in The Jungle over a hundred years ago, Gudding creates, in LITERATURE FOR NONHUMANS, a vivid lyric investigation of our society's current slide from an age of destruction into a new age of extinctions. In this multidisciplinary & interdisciplinary text, Gudding notches every inch between lament and manifesto and intersects every topic from here (piglets, zombies, Illinois) to heaven where, upon arrival, we find 'Christ as an anal robot-king we've set narratively running at the edge of history to serve as a reparator by vicarious redemption.' Prepare to be horrified, crackled, poem-ed. Prepare to be schooled." - Amy King"

This essay is an extract from my Master's dissertation; a comparative analysis of the poetical works of Ted Hughes and Jibanananda Das, in terms of theme imagery and diction. The representation of animals in the poems of Hughes and Das is the chief focus of the essay. The theoretical framework for this analysis is the concept of totemic animals, and their relationship with humans in existing indigenous cultures. The theories on Carl Gustav Jung, Mircea Eliade and Alan Bleakley are taken into account in this context. The essay establishes that the works of both Das and Hughes express anti-anthropocentric sentiments in their poems through the representation of animals. In doing so, they show some striking similarities in terms of imagery and diction. Both their poems display a clear Jungian influence and Shamanistic elements, although Hughes's works show the latter traits more visibly.

The philosophy of biomimicry, I argue, consists of four main areas of inquiry. The first, which has already been explored by Freya Mathews (2011), concerns the “deep” question of what Nature ultimately is. The second, third, and fourth areas correspond to the three basic principles of biomimicry as laid out by Janine Benyus (1997). “Nature as model” is the poetic principle of biomimicry, for it tells us how it is that things are to be “brought forth” (poiēsis). “Nature as measure” is the ethical principle of biomimicry, for it tells us that Nature places ethical limits or standards on what it is possible for us to accomplish. And “Nature as mentor” is the epistemological principle of biomimicry, for it affirms that Nature is the ultimate source of truth, wisdom, and freedom from error. Within this overall framework, I argue that seeing Nature as physis – understood as “self-production” or “self-placing-into-the-open” – constitutes the requisite ground for the poetic, ethical, and epistemological principles of biomimicry, and that biomimicry thus conceived involves a new philosophical paradigm, which I call “enlightened naturalism”.