Liza Wolff-Francis: “Exploring Ecopoetry: Changing Definitions”
EXPLORING ECOPOETRY: CHANGING DEFINITIONS
I’m in a camp cabin in the Adirondacks at a writing workshop. The mid-May sun rose at 5:30 a.m., came right up over the trees on the other side of the lake. Sun streaked the water, peering into it like a flashlight. Writing about this place today, the silence it holds, the sweatshirt temperatures, the queep call of Bicknell’s Thrush, thick patches of swarming mosquitoes, an eagle outside the dining hall flying from the top of an American Birch tree to the top of a pine, clouds heavy with rain, the ripple of the water on a lake once called Niiohehsà:ne in the language of the Mohawk people, renamed Beaver Lake, the deep brown wet dirt color of ground, is poetic. To describe it out loud or on paper is poetry, maybe even ecopoetry. The question: “What makes a poem a poem?” is not new. Nor is the question: “What distinguishes nature poems from ecopoetry?” Ecopoetry is a way to engage people with the planet, solutions for the climate crisis, and to address grief. The definition of ecopoetry has changed over time and will continue to change as the climate crisis unfolds.
Over time, ecocritics, literary critics, ecopoets, and poets have shaped and re-shaped the meaning of the term “ecopoetry.” It has adapted with the emergence of more poetry that addresses the relationship between humans and the planet, the Anthropocene, and the climate crisis.
For me, eco-poetry is one small way to express my own sense of urgency, grief, and anger and to call out to other humans that we can act and still hold hope. As a poet visiting this place in the Adirondacks, I’m thinking about ecopoetry and its meaning. This place is new to me and yet, I feel a connection to it. It breathes around me and with me. I want it to survive and I realize it’s just one place that we’ve set up to die. That’s depressing, for sure, but I’m pendulating from hopeless to hopeful, so stay with me. The hopeful part is that I believe we can change things for the better. It’s our responsibility, as a collective, to fix the climate crisis. Not the responsibility of those who are more-than-human and not mine alone, but it’s mine. Ecopoetry, I hope, can convey that.
For ecopoetry, the term “more-than-human” is an elevation of the natural world rather than an othering of it and is meant to give power to species that have been at the mercy of humans. This term is meant to intentionally refer to more-than-human species, so we don’t view the exploitation of them and of the planet as our inherent right or even our obligation.
In The Ecopoetry Anthology (2013, 2020), Anne Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street write that ecopoetry has “no precise definition.” They say that “generally this poetry addresses contemporary problems and issues in ways that are ecocentric and that respect the integrity of the other-than-human world.” This is where it may diverge from nature poetry of the past because the integrity of nature is not acknowledged when humans are centralized and all things are in relation to humans. They write that ecopoetry “challenges the belief that we are meant to have dominion over nature.” This belief that it is our right to use whatever the Earth has for the good of humanity has been a driving force pushing a separation between humans and the natural world that leaves the natural world (ourselves included) in jeopardy. Ecopoetry can change the way we view the world, ourselves in the world, and our understanding of our responsibility to it.
“Some of it (ecopoetry),” Fisher-Wirth and Street write, “is based in the conviction that poetry can help us find our way back to an awareness that we are at one with the more-than-human world.” This oneness has been seen to be a defining factor of ecopoetry, but even if that’s not obvious in a poem, an ecopoem may remind the reader that we are one with the natural world and may nurture a love for nature. It may also help us take note of human-caused disturbances of the natural world, question the role humans play in the climate crisis as well as encourage solutions to reduce the impact of the crisis.
In his book, The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry, J. Scott Bryson says ecopoetry goes beyond traditional nature poetry in three ways. First, he writes that it’s “an ecological and biocentric perspective recognizing the interdependent nature of the world.” To understand biocentric, it’s good to be able to juxtapose it with anthropocentric. “Anthropocentric concerns for the environment are narrowly aimed at preserving the welfare of humans, while biocentric concerns are oriented toward protecting non-human organisms and nature as a whole.” While ecopoets today may have concerns beyond the welfare of humans, like all other more-than-human entities, the reality is that if we don’t act in time, even if it’s not in great shape, the planet itself will continue to survive the climate crisis, but humans won’t.
At this point in the crisis, there’s no way for ecopoetry to only be in defense of the planet and more-than-human species because ultimately, bettering the climate crisis means, as humans, we must also focus on saving ourselves. Ecopoetry can bring us to see how we are interconnected and must act for the good of all (human and more-than-human). Not that ecopoetry is the answer to all of our problems, but it can be part of the pathway to the solution.
Bryson writes that the second way ecopoetry goes beyond traditional nature poetry is that it has a “deep humility with regard to our relationships with human and non-human nature.” Humility has not often been the attitude of the larger Western world toward the natural world. A poem may invoke consideration of a deeper relationship between humans and the more-than-human world. This also leaves us with an understanding of an interconnectedness, or might inspire a reader to see themselves as part of the natural world, rather than separate from it.
The third way ecopoetry goes beyond traditional nature poetry, Bryson writes, is by bringing “an intense skepticism toward hyperrationality, a skepticism that usually leads to a condemnation of an over-technologized modern world and a warning concerning the very real potential for ecological catastrophe.” In 2005, Bryson could already see, reflected in ecopoetry, the rise of an over-technologized world and the myriad ways it’s influencing the climate crisis. Technology has risen, boomed, and settled-in to stay much more than most people would have been able to imagine in 2005, especially with the internet; and with that, there are still discrepancies in access. Not everyone has internet access and ecopoetry won’t be available to everyone. Many of the people who don’t have that access are the same people who are more at risk of suffering the consequences of the climate crisis sooner.
This leads us directly to eco-justice or environmental justice which has grown over the years, in large part, out of concern for those who are being, have been, and will soon be adversely impacted by actions that continue to add to the crisis (like oil pipelines running through communities, oil spills, rerouting of rivers, mining practices destroying communities, mass floods, etc). As we see more populations ultimately at risk of permanent erasure and more people displaced, hurt, or killed, some ecopoetry reflects the fact that marginalized communities will be affected at higher rates than non-marginalized groups and more urgently, as the crisis will eventually affect everyone. Definitions of ecopoetry must include environmental justice. Even if an ecopoem doesn’t address eco-justice directly, the fight is connected.
In April 2022, at Indelible’s 2nd Festival of Literature, in a session titled “The Fragile Earth,” Dr. Roula-Maria Dib, editor of Indelible, gave a definition of ecopoetry, saying that ecopoetry “is not an extension of romanticism and it does not concentrate on the utopian visions of nature or the imaginative quality of people in nature, but what it does is attempt to locate us or to help us locate ourselves as humans in the world in our environment.” In many ways, technology separates us from the natural world. Poetry has the power to re-situate us.
Dib said ecopoetry has the “intention” of focusing on ecology. The word “intention” is key because this may look different from what we imagine. Dib continued, saying ecopoetry “investigates how the human is situated within its home and how this home is perceived, how it is built through poetry, through imagination.” What does it mean for human beings to be situated in their home? Is our home the nature around us? As poets, we help define our sense of home in our writing, specifically locating ourselves as creatures of Earth and in the human-named place of Earth from which we come and how we interact with that home.
“Most importantly,” Dib said, ecopoetry “navigates the borders between us as nature and non-human nature, whether there are borders that exist between us or not, how images, places and spaces, memories, how they all assist our desire to explore this relationship of the self with the world.” One joy of eco-poetry is that it explores that relationship that we, as humans, have or don’t have with the natural world and the borders we have created to impact the idea that we have control over it. Ecopoetry makes us question whether we are truly part of nature if we act so egregiously toward an extension of ourselves.
Dib continued: “Ecopoetry therefore uses a more critical lens in viewing humanity’s relationship with the planet instead of merely focusing on unfolding scenes of nature through verse.” It has been said though that people are more likely to care for the Earth if they love it and feel connected to it. Unfolding scenes in nature in a poem today may inevitably be ecopoetry if the poem inspires a love for and connection with the planet.
Ecopoetry, Dib said, “does not give us this observer status all the time because an observer status could make us disconnect from nature, that, on the contrary, it shows how we are nature and it highlights the complexities of our relationships or interrelationships within the environment and our responsibilities toward it.” This is a common reasoning as to how nature poetry and ecopoetry are distinguished, not othering nature by merely observing it. As a poet, I use sight to observe, but it’s also important to experience the natural world, with intentionality, using all of my senses. As an ecopoet, I observe the world, but I also am of the Earth and have a responsibility to Earth that comes from not just observing at a distance.
Right now, ecopoetry is written in a time that’s different from any other time in history. Its definition and meaning will shift as people push for larger system changes, as individuals adapt to a new world shaped by climate chaos, as some continue to deny there’s a problem and as attitudes shift and changes are made by entire societies either out of a concerned vision of impending doom or actual immediate necessity to adapt because of symptoms of the crisis, like storms, fires, drought, rising temperatures, and lack of water and food.
Ultimately, every poem about nature or directly indicating the natural world that does not celebrate its destruction saying “Burn baby burn” may now possibly be considered ecopoetry because it’s all within a context of the Anthropocene and growing climate crisis. It’s possible that there’s no way to write a poem about the natural world that’s not ecopoetry, unless you are saying nature is dumb and ugly, and even then, your words may be interpreted to be commentary on environmental destruction. The singular difference might be the intention, though even if a poem is not written with the intention of being ecopoetry, if it’s read as ecopoetry or affects the reader in a way that contributes to their love of the planet, intention of the poet may not matter.
Centralizing the more-than-human is key for ecopoetry, and at the same time, for humans, all ecological concerns inevitably have at their base, the preservation of humanity. The climate crisis has already begun to make animals, plants, trees, sea life, and the entire ecosystem suffer. The ecosystem of the planet is being disrupted, but the human concern for the planet is ultimately that humans will not be able to survive without centering the natural world and humans as a part of it and without a fundamental change in living that works with the Earth’s systems rather than exploiting them. Ecopoetry has the ability to call on humans to fix the climate crisis in a way that is not didactic, but in which the reader is moved and says, “Yes! I will fight for our home!”
As I look around this camp retreat here in the Adirondacks, I hate to imagine a world without these trees, their gnarls, their bark, without this forest, the creatures within it, including myself. It’s not only terrifying, it’s deeply sad, to think places and homes to so many would be uninhabitable. Unfolding news about the climate crisis can feel overwhelming. Ecopoetry, for those who want to write poetry and need a space to express their voices, might be a way to express grief about the unfolding disaster in a way and that’s cathartic and is a simultaneous call to action.
In the preface, the editors Fisher-Wirth and Street write that as they were editing The Ecopoetry Anthology, they became “ever more convinced that the environmental crisis is made possible by a profound failure of the imagination.” Poetry can encourage a revival of that imagination. Ecopoetry is also a method of accessing a populace. Though many people may not see themselves as poets or even as lovers of poetry, a poem may offer a way to see things that is not as threatening, confusing, or overwhelming as propaganda from political candidates, government, or news media. It can be direct, but doesn’t have to be and is probably most effective if it’s not.
We are entering an age in which, unless it is truly anti-Earth or completely othering of Earth, all poetry about nature is an access point to the natural world. Fisher-Wirth writes that in editing the anthology there were poems that were “important in awakening my awareness of the natural world.” If a poem awakens a person’s awareness of the natural world, it’s ecopoetry in action. We need poetry like that right now.
What has been seen as nature poetry written from a distanced view of nature, a pastoral view that “others us,” may be different from this point forward. If I were to write a poem about this place in the Adirondacks, I would say the air smells like wet earth newly rained on, there is a great silence here broken by the call of birds, that I touched lime green moss today that was an inch tall and its fluffiness made me smile, the land is thick with trees all the way to the water’s edge. The water isn’t as cold as I thought it would be when I stick my fingers in it. In a poem about this place, I am of the place, a part of the natural world, and I want my reader to join me and want to be there too. The job of ecopoetry is not simply to say, look how beautiful the natural world is, especially because that might seem to other it, but in the context of the natural world being in danger, the consequence of seeing it as beautiful should be that we want to save it. First, we must love it.
Leaning toward ecocentrism, ecopoetry is poetry about nature, humans as a part of nature not supreme to it, and the interrelationship of humans and the more-than-human world with a recognition of the Anthropocene and also an understanding of the responsibility humans have to the unfolding crisis. Ecopoetry has the power to put solutions forward and alter the dialogue about the unfolding ecological crisis. It discourages exploitation of the natural world and that which might lead to exploitation through the othering of nature (through human supremism, some particular anthropomorphism that leaves more-than-human species important only if valuable to humans, and increased technological separations from the natural world). Given that the lifespan of the planet and of many other species is much longer than the human lifespan and equally, the lifespan of some species is much shorter, ecopoetry explores deep time. It inspires wonder. It may notice the beauty of nature and may inspire people to love nature, to want to more fully connect with nature and to see themselves as members of and protectors of the natural world. Ecopoetry may directly or indirectly advocate for environmental-justice and eco-justice. It may raise awareness about injustices toward marginalized communities or eco-concerns of those communities. It may raise consciousness about the impact of the climate crisis and about the mistreatment of more-than-human species. It may also offer solutions or even the imaginings of a new world.
As ecopoetry changes and as the term ecopoetry changes with the climate crisis, the way we see the natural world must also change in order for us to make the world sustainable for all of nature, including humans. Ecopoetry has the power to move us through a changing world for the highest good of all. The challenge to us as ecopoets: write poetry to move all forward.
Sources:
Ecocriticism (1960-Present)
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_in_literature/literary_theory_and_schools_of_criticism/ecocriticism.html
Ecojustice Definition: https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/eco-justice
Roula-Maria Dib, editor of Indelible. Indelible’s 2nd Festival of Literature, introduction to session about ecopoetry titled “The Fragile Earth,” April 4, 2022. https://indeliblelit.com/indelible-festival-of-literature-2022/
The Ecopoetry Anthology. Edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street. Published by Trinity University Press, 2020, 2013.
The Principles of Environmental Justice—created at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit held on October 24-27, 1991 http://www.ejnet.org/ej/principles.pdf
The West Side of Any Mountain: Place Space and Ecopoetry by J. Scott Bryson. University of Iowa Press, 1st Edition, 2005.
Liza Wolff-Francis is a poet and writer. Beginning in January 2023, she will be the Poet Laureate of Carrboro, North Carolina. She has an ekphrastic poem published in Austin’s Blanton Art Museum and was co-director for the 2014 Austin International Poetry Festival. Her writing has been widely anthologized and her work has most recently appeared in Silver Birch Press, Wild Roof Journal, SLAB, and eMerge magazine. She has written reviews of poetry books that have been published on Adroit, Compulsive Reader, and LitPub. Her chapbook, Language of Crossing, was published by Swimming with Elephant Publications in 2015.