On her book Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene
Cover Interview of January 14, 2018
In a nutshell
Recomposing Ecopoetics examines 21st-century poetry
by a dozen Americans and Canadians who are engaging in their poems with the
environmental challenges we currently face. It is, then, a work of
environmental literary criticism—or ecocriticism, as it is called in academic
circles.
Earlier ecocritical work on poetry focused almost
exclusively on nature writing. In the contemporary American context, it
attended to poems by Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, and others that depict
a seemingly timeless solace found in tranquil rural landscapes or sublime wild
ones. Such poetry can connect readers with natural realms that we should indeed
value—places worth preserving for their aesthetic or spiritual value as well as
their biological importance. However, such poetry’s vision of an essentially
unchanging natural world to which one may always escape is in crucial ways
inadequate to our present situation of dramatic and often irreversible
environmental transformation.
Consequently, my ecocritical study focuses not on soothing
or celebratory nature writing but on poetry that reflects a keen awareness of
human impact on the planet and of nature’s entanglement in culture. The poetry
examined here confronts the homogenization of landscape by extraction
industries across the world, explores the impact of toxic chemicals on human
and non-human animal bodies, considers the emotional and intellectual
challenges of coming to grips with human-induced climate change, attempts to
approach the perspectives of the nonhumans with whom humans share an
increasingly uninhabitable planet, reminds readers of the inequitable
distribution of the benefits and costs of environmental changes associated with
industrialization, or juggles a fear of impending environmental apocalypse with
hope for its prevention.
Much of this poetry is experimental in its approaches to
poetic form and language. Its experimentalism reflects the poets’ hopes that
expanding the conventions of literary form or linguistic intelligibility may
help push us toward new conceptual structures alternative to the ways of
thinking that got us into the environmental mess in which we find ourselves. If
I have a particular gift as a literary critic, it is in reading difficult poetry,
and my hope is that this book will make difficult yet intellectually and
emotionally rich poems accessible to my readers, generating in them an
appreciation for this poetry that mirrors my own.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Recomposing Ecopoetics examines 21st-century poetry by a dozen Americans and Canadians who are engaging in their poems with the environmental challenges we currently face. It is, then, a work of environmental literary criticism—or ecocriticism, as it is called in academic circles.
Earlier ecocritical work on poetry focused almost exclusively on nature writing. In the contemporary American context, it attended to poems by Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, and others that depict a seemingly timeless solace found in tranquil rural landscapes or sublime wild ones. Such poetry can connect readers with natural realms that we should indeed value—places worth preserving for their aesthetic or spiritual value as well as their biological importance. However, such poetry’s vision of an essentially unchanging natural world to which one may always escape is in crucial ways inadequate to our present situation of dramatic and often irreversible environmental transformation.
Consequently, my ecocritical study focuses not on soothing or celebratory nature writing but on poetry that reflects a keen awareness of human impact on the planet and of nature’s entanglement in culture. The poetry examined here confronts the homogenization of landscape by extraction industries across the world, explores the impact of toxic chemicals on human and non-human animal bodies, considers the emotional and intellectual challenges of coming to grips with human-induced climate change, attempts to approach the perspectives of the nonhumans with whom humans share an increasingly uninhabitable planet, reminds readers of the inequitable distribution of the benefits and costs of environmental changes associated with industrialization, or juggles a fear of impending environmental apocalypse with hope for its prevention.
Much of this poetry is experimental in its approaches to poetic form and language. Its experimentalism reflects the poets’ hopes that expanding the conventions of literary form or linguistic intelligibility may help push us toward new conceptual structures alternative to the ways of thinking that got us into the environmental mess in which we find ourselves. If I have a particular gift as a literary critic, it is in reading difficult poetry, and my hope is that this book will make difficult yet intellectually and emotionally rich poems accessible to my readers, generating in them an appreciation for this poetry that mirrors my own.