Poetry

Juliana Spahr’s poem “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache” is composed of sprawling lists. The lists expand in a choreography of names. In a repeated refrain at the center of the poem Spahr writes, “Gentle now purple wartyback, narrow-winged damselfly, spruce, pirate perch, threehorn wartyback, sumac, don’t add to heartache. / Gentle now pine, stonecat, kidneyshell, plum, midge larva, eastern sand darter, rose, don’t add to heartache.” The poem opens with an image of a memory of a stream, and the lists fill the stream with plants and animals. Reading the poem, especially out loud, or listening to Juliana Spahr reading it out loud, is a performance of paying attention to each name. It is jarring when, in part four of the poem, Spahr shifts to listing heavy metals and pollutants, chemicals and products, all that we let in, knowingly and unknowingly, into the streams. The poem twists into a lament. Still, the rhythm and repetition of names are lulling. When you read the poem, it is so easy to let your eyes just sweep over these blocks of names, to tune them out, like landscape. But the radical act of attention comes with reading each name out loud, feeling them take shape in your mouth, not letting them recede into the background. It’s a collective accounting offering a way of being that is more tuned in to all that surrounds us, to the entanglement of our being in poetry and in the world. As Spahr writes near the end of the poem, “I didn’t even say goodbye elephant ear, mountain madtom, butterfly, harelip sucker, white catspaw, rabbitsfoot, monkeyface, speckled chub, wartyback, ebonyshell, pirate perch, ohio pigtoe, clubshell.”

“Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache” is a celebrated example of a genre called ecopoetry. The Poetry Foundation offers this definition of the genre: “Ecopoetics places emphasis on drawing connections between human activity - specifically the writing of poems - and the environment that produces it.” Emerging in the late twentieth century, ecopoetry is not synonymous with nature poetry and pastoral poetry, though it draws out of those traditions and reckons with their histories. As poet Forrest Gander writes, “Whereas ‘nature poetry’ often takes for its themes the so-called ‘natural world’ as though it were separate from the human world, ecopoetry asks how we are involved in - and a part of - all that surrounds us.” Instead of centering the human “I” or the human eye, an innocent observer writing about untouched nature without affecting it, ecopoetry foregrounds the poet’s enmeshment with the environment. As poet Jane Hirschfield puts it, ecopoetics describes a poetry that is “no longer innocent and unquestioning.” As the Poetry Foundation’s definition makes clear, the writing of poetry is itself a human activity with impacts on the environment. Poetic acts of description, naming, and listing, like Juliana Spahr’s poem shows, frame what we see, how we see, and therefore, how we act.

For poet Brian Teare, ecopoetics is both a theory and an active practice. His essay/manifesto “En Plein Air Poetics: Notes Towards Writing in the Anthropocene,” alternates between describing his active praxis of walking, naming, description and attention, and his theory of ecopoetics which involves writing while walking, poetry as a kind of field research. Writing becomes haptic, an embodied intimacy with the human and nonhuman. The poems no longer privilege vision. For poet Camille Dungy, ecopoetry necessarily involves attending to the histories of an environment: “It is dangerous to separate my own needs and pleasure from the needs of any other living being, either through erasure, as is the case when we remove indigenous people from our stories of particular landscapes, or omission, as is the case when we fail to consider the histories and realities of people who work the land - i.e. when we imagine the pasture part of the pastoral without adequately imagining the sharecropper, the conscripted prisoner, the migrant farmer, the enslaved.” There is erasure in ecopoetry too, when anthologies and panels center white American poets, despite the fact that climate change will disproportionately impact indigenous people, people of color, and populations living in low and lower-middle income countries. As Dungy writes, “It’s imperative that a truly diverse representation of people speak to the current situation on the planet so that a truly diverse set of ideas towards action can be put forward to do work in the world.”

“What do we make of poetry in a time of collapse?” asks poet Nicodemus Nicoludis in his essay “From Rock into Bread: A Taxonomy of Today’s Ecopoetry.” This is the question ecopoetry is always asking. Skeptics of the genre may question whether poetry has a place in a time of collapse at all - whether this question is worth posing, or simply produces more empty language without action. But at the heart of ecopoetry is Audre Lorde’s famed assertion that poetry is not a luxury. “Landscape was a metaphor of a tamable land, a mysterious expanse to be conquered. Always just outside the ontological being of the human viewer, nature became its own being, uniquely separated from our humanness yet subjected to our every material whim,” writes Nicoludis, “We do not have this luxury of distance anymore.” Ecopoetry rejects its classification as luxury and rejects the luxury of distance. This is ecopoetry as a political practice, as a performance of “bold linkages that it would take reams of academic argument to plot,” as Mei Mei Berssenbrugge writes in her ecopoetry collection A Treatise on Stars. As Nicoludis argues, “In order for ecopoetry to bring us to the brink of transformation, these poems must point to the locations and processes of climate change, not by lamenting into known consequences, but by diving into root causes: the extirpation of resources, the history of slavery, colonization, fossil capitalism, waste, overproduction, pesticides, the history of farming, war, and so on. In a sense, this kind of ecopoetry is writing toward the long chains of history deposited both in the soil and in the atmosphere; the ghosts of our past and phantoms of our future.”