Recently, I completed my comprehensive exams towards my PhD in English. The process for our exams follows a portfolio method; we compile two lists of about 40 books each, then develop portfolios around those lists before taking an oral capstone. Throughout the months I worked on these portfolios, stacks of books followed me around my apartment. My head grew full of the poets I was studying—Arthur Sze, W.S. Merwin, Lucille Clifton, Natalie Diaz, Ada Limón. For both of my lists, I focused on ecopoetry—first taking a general look at the field, and then focusing more specifically on contemporary women writers.
A few things emerged as I read. The first was an interest in time—that is, memory, mortality, and the way perceptions of time continue to shift as technology grows, the world becoming more connected in some respects and less connected in others. As I studied contemporary women poets, I became interested in thinking about how women writers address desire in their work, especially in how it connects with the natural world while resisting dominant narratives of femininity and nature. Place, as well, became a thread spiderwebbing through the works, inextricable from ideas of identity and culture as well as relationships to the natural world.
I’m finished with my portfolios now, but I’m still thinking about many of the questions that came out of the time I spent with these books. Today, my social media feeds are filled with images of houses being carried downstream by floodwaters, whole towns swept away, while people along the coastlines keep their eyes on new storms brewing in the Gulf. I am under no illusion that reading or writing poetry will alone shift the dial on the enormous political and capitalist forces which place us in the climate crisis we are now vividly witnessing and experiencing. And yet, I am comforted by the intelligent, empathetic, and deeply caring writers who are making meaning out of rising sea levels, storms, and wildfires. In her introduction to The Ecopoetry Anthology, Ann Fisher-Wirth writes that coediting the anthology “has been a labor of love against despair.” And her coeditor, Laura-Gray Street, writes that “Maybe one day we won’t need a term like ecopoetry because all poetry will be inherently ecological. […] But in the meantime we will continue to need green lenses like The Ecopoetry Anthology. We will need to keep following green things—all things strange and wild and small—listening to and learning their songs/psalms and singing back out own.”
Here is a list of all of the books I spent time with for the last year+; below are just a handful that stood out.
Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead, West Virginia University Press, 2018
Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, originally published as a long sequence in her 1938 collection U.S. 1, is an account of the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster in West Virginia in the 1930’s, in which hundreds of miners (many of them African American) died of lung disease due to inadequate safety measures while excavating rock containing high levels of silica to build a three-mile tunnel through Gauley Mountain. Based on Rukeyser’s own research, including a visit to Gauley Mountain, the series of poems is presented as a hybrid text, incorporating documents such as court testimony, medical reports, and letters written from the workers to the company running the excavation.
Shara Lessley and Bruce Snider (editors), The Poem’s Country: Place and Poetic Practice, Pleiades Press, 2018
A wonderfully diverse collection of essays which are tied together by their consideration of place and poetry. Essays that stood out include “Place in Mind” by Peter Streckfus, which describes the power of concrete detail to connect us to place in writing, allowing us to “take on a bodily point of view” (170). Elizabeth Bradfield’s “Fluid States: Ocean as Place & Poetic” points to poetry’s ability to “make vivid the impossible,” saying that “there is something in the suspended state that a poem conjures that allows us to consider the strange,” ultimately allowing us to come closer to nature (38). And Nick Lantza, in “Ghost Towns,” considers place through the context of loss, writing that it is “often what is missing from a place—the juxtaposition of endurance and loss—that makes it ghostly” (85).
Min Hyoung Song, Climate Lyricism, Duke University Press, 2022
At the center of the arguments within Climate Lyricism, Song makes a case for reading creative work within the context of climate change even when it isn’t explicitly engaged with the subject. “Climate change,” Song writes, “operates in a temporality that is not synchronous with human habits of thinking about time and in a space that is not commensurate with human inhabitation. It is occurring everywhere and nowhere in particular and in both short durations and impossibly long expanses of time” (3). In response, Song proposes ways of holding attention, singling out the lyric because of its compression of expression, use of apostrophe, attention to observation and language, and an investment in questions of what makes us human. (Song’s emphasis on reading climate within all creative work also made me think of this recent interview with Grady Chambers, who says “I think concerns about climate tend to enter my work incidentally rather than intentionally. […] I’m realizing how distressing that is: the effects of human-induced global warming are becoming so constant that they make their way into my writing regardless of whether I intend for them to. Which is scary.”)
Gary Soto, The Elements of San Joaquin, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977
In Soto’s remarkable first collection, he centers the Californian San Joaquin Valley and the immigrant agricultural laborers who work there. The poems revolve around a cast of real people who Soto sometimes writes for or writes to; at other times, he writes poems out of their voices. The book’s title poem is composed in eight sections, with each section title corresponding to a natural element or place—Field, Wind (the only repeated section title, which gets two distinct sections), Stars, Sun, Rain, Fog, and Daybreak. Under these umbrellas, Soto describes the turning of the seasons with the sharply observational eye of someone who has worked the land. The work of hoeing runs like a seam through the collection—a laborious task requiring skill, stamina, and patience—but the payoff of the work, as Soto depicts it, is merely survival: the pay minimal, the workers hungry despite laboring to grow food, the harvest “that was not mine” (“Harvest”).
Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler, Coffee House Press, 2008
Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler was one of the first collections that came to mind as I was considering these lists. In many ways, it does what Smith does best: it’s deftly musical, inventive, poignant. It’s also a brilliant work of preservation and witness, revolving around the devastation that Hurricane Katrina left upon New Orleans. In its subject matter, it is a deeply ecopoetic project, taking a hard and critical look at how the effects of climate change and natural disaster are impacting marginalized populations at a much higher rate. What is perhaps most startling about this collection is its use of persona, taking on voices such as the voice of Ethel Freeman, a woman whose body sat in a wheelchair outside the New Orleans Convention Center for three days after her son Herbert was forced to leave her there. Smith also takes on the voice of the storm itself, personifying Katrina as a woman who is “restless,” “hungering,” “frantic”—a woman with an aching desire in a world that suppresses women’s desires. In the last of a series of “Katrina” poems scattered throughout the collection, Smith writes, “I was a rudderless woman in full tantrum, / throwing my body against the worlds I wanted. / I never saw harm in lending that ache” (4-6).
Taneum Bambrick, Vantage, Copper Canyon Press, 2019
The poems in Vantage tell the story of a town under ecological devastation following a dam collapse. The speaker is the only woman on an all-male labor crew. The poems are sharp and imagistic, and the images that shape this collection are not flowers and birds, but trash: discarded condoms, Pepsi cans, the rotting carcasses of dead animals. Violence runs like a seam through the collection, coloring the conversations the speaker of the poems has with her work crew. The speaker is someone who seems to want to be able to look in the face of the violence and environmental devastation around her as the men do, without reacting, but she often finds herself unable to stop herself from reacting—as in “Biological Control Task,” in which she cries while looking at a heron that had been shot, a hole blown out if its chest so that you could see through its body. Her crying makes the men “comfortable,” like she could be “a daughter, wife or something they knew how to see.” The gender dynamics of the crew become further complicated when the speaker finds herself feeling attracted to her boss, Park. All the while, the poems paint an atmosphere of decay and destruction: a startlingly specific vision of the United States that smells of rotting fish and “the rose deodorizer of a clean outhouse.”
Belonging: A Culture of Place by bell hooks, Routledge, 2008
Definitions of home, community, and belonging are the issues bell hooks explores in this essay collection, which tackles issues of race, gender, and class and their linked relationships with place, land, and land stewardship. At the heart of the essays is hooks’ experience of leaving her childhood home in Kentucky, only to return to it later in life, exploring how her own definitions of “home” have changed through her experience with the world. What hooks is especially adept at in her critical work is her synthesis of many sources, making each essay a way of thinking through a question through multiple voices, each of them propelling her inquiry further. One example early in the collection comes in her essay “Kentucky Is My Fate,” in which she quotes from Carol Lee Flinders’ Rebalancing the World to define a culture of belonging in which there is “intimate connection with the land to which one belongs, empathic relationship to animals, self-restraint, custodial conservation, deliberateness, balance, expressiveness, generosity, egalitarianism, mutuality, affinity for alternative modes of knowing, playfulness, inclusiveness, nonviolent conflict resolution, and openness of spirit” (13). This working definition is one she comes back to multiple times, using it to build her consideration of her own personal geography as well as broader considerations of what belonging means within the system of dominator culture.
Alison H. Deming and Lauret E. Savoy (editors), The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World, Milkweed Editions, 2011
From the editors’ introduction: “If what is called ‘nature writing’ aims to understand how we comprehend and then live responsibly in the world, then it must recognize the legacies of the Americas’ past in ways that are mindful of the complex historical and cultural dynamics that have shaped us all. Perhaps some would say this isn’t a goal of writing about nature or natural history. But if such writing examines human perceptions and experiences of nature, if an intimacy with and response to the larger-than-human world define who or what we are, if we as people are part of nature, then the experiences of all people on this land are necessary stories, even if some voices have been silent, silenced, or simply not recognized as nature writing. What is defined by some as an edge of separation between nature and culture, people and place, is a zone of exchange where finding common ground is more than possible; it is necessary.”