Ecopoetries in America

Selby, Nick ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5255-0421 (2013) Ecopoetries in America. In: The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945. Cambridge Companions to Literature . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 9780521147958

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Abstract

Abstract: 'Land', 'Nature', 'Wilderness' and 'the pastoral' all figure largely in conceptions of the American imaginary. They are also key terms in the conception of an ecopoetics. After a brief examination of the history of ecopoetry in America (from Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman through Frost, Berry and Merwin etc), and discussion of why an American poetics might be especially concerned with ecopoetry, this paper will examine in closer detail examples from the work of Gary Snyder, A. R. Ammons, Lorine Niedecker and Lisa Jarnot. It will argue that to read poetry in a post-pastoral age (as Terry Gifford has called it) requires a delicately poised ethics of close-reading, of response and responsibility to the local conditions of the poem. The paper's impulse is therefore to read against, or beyond, the overly romanticising impulse of much contemporary ecocriticism (whilst recognising, as many ecocritics do, the imperatives of asking how ecopoetry might constitute some sort of ecological praxis). If ecopoetry in America has a particular poetic and ethical force then this is because of its ability to draw upon a poetic tradition in which questions of pastoral vs urban space, of open field composition, of ideas vs things, of suspicion about the role of metaphor within a culture that privileges metaphors of space, identity and settlement, haunt the Emersonian proposition that America's very nature is poetic, that 'America is a poem in our eyes'. Ecopoetries in America, then, expose us to the precarious nature of our engagements with the world as both text and real space. They remind us that poetry, like America, involves human uses and transformations of nature, that to read poetry is to act, and that to act is always culturally and ideologically determined.

Item Type:	Book Section
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Art, Media and American Studies (former - to 2024)
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > American Studies
Depositing User:	Sarah Burbidge
Date Deposited:	06 Jul 2011 09:01
Last Modified:	24 Sep 2024 07:36
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/32552
DOI:

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