In an attempt to save a little bit of paper, we're going to try an experiment: rather than using photocopies each week, we'll look at poems on a projected screen. (Paper copies will also be available if need be. I’ll distribute all readings as printable PDFs, and a hard copy will be available at the Poetry Center.) In addition, we'll read some work available online, such as Jonathan Skinner's journal ecopoetics or How2's Ecopoetics feature.

We'll look at the non-linear evolution of ecopoetry and its adaptations (with connections to oral tradition spells and chants, haiku, ethnopoetics, lyricism, poetry of place, experimental and language poetry, and more). Each class meeting will start with a theme to ground our discussion. We'll begin with Ground Setting & Forerunners, then move on to other concerns of ecopoetics, such as Speaking Nature // Addressing the Non-Human Other; Place, Landscape, & Ethics; Working in Language; and Science, Mysticism, & the Body.

Through it all, we'll examine the idea of wilderness in poetry. In the introduction to the seminal Poems for the Millenium, Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris include in their emphases of modern/postmodern poetics: "a widely held belief that poetry is part of a struggle to save the wild places—in the world and in the mind—and a view of the poem itself as a wild thing and of both poetry and poet as endangered species." I like the idea of wild places both "in the world and in the mind," and would argue that they are not separate. Nothing is separate in ecological thinking.

The Taxonomy of Ecopoetics

Eric Magrane discusses taxonomy, interrelationships, and his upcoming Ecopoetics class.

In a recent New York Times excerpt from "Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science", Carol Kaesuk Yoon argues for the importance of the declining field of taxonomy. By learning the names of organisms, she writes, "you can't help seeing life and the order in it, just where it has always been, all around you." Here we come to a dichotomy of language: by using language to order the world, we make distinctions between one thing and another, in a sense fragmenting the world; however, making those distinctions also helps us to see connections.

If we were to create a Taxonomy of Ecopoetics, we'd have to reconcile a number of terms: "Ecopoetry" vs. "Nature Poetry" vs. "Pastoral" vs. "New Nature Poetry" vs. "New Pastoral." One can get caught up in the terms, however, and lose sight of the connections. (I'm starting to think that "Permaculture Poetics," with a sustainable system focus, might be a useful term.) In our Ecopoetics class at the Poetry Center, we'll touch on the distinctions, but focus more on the interrelationships through close reading of individual poems and their concerns. As a sneak peak, here is a sampling (definitely not all) of the books from which we'll read selections:

          A.R. Ammons: Garbage
          Alberto Blanco: Dawn of the Senses
          Jack Collom: Red Car Goes By
          Alison Hawthorne Deming: Science
            and Other Poems
          Marcella Durand: traffic & weather
          Linda Hogan: The Book of Medicines
          Brenda Iijima: Around Sea
          Lisa Jarnot: Night Scenes
          W.S. Merwin: The Rain in the Trees
          Simon Ortiz: Woven Stone
          Saigyō: Poems of a Mountain Home
          Juliana Spahr: The Transformation
          Gary Snyder: No Nature
          Arthur Sze: The Redshifting Web
          Ofelia Zepeda: Jewed ‘I-Hoi/Earth Movements