Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field (Contemp North American Poetry)

Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field makes a formidable intervention into the emerging field of ecopoetics. The volume’s essays model new and provocative methods for reading twentieth and twenty-first century ecological poetry and poetics, drawing on the insights of ecocriticism, contemporary philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, black studies, Native studies, critical race theory, and disability studies, among others. Contributors offer readings of a diverse range of poets, few of whom have previously been read as nature writers—from midcentury Beat poet Michael McClure, Objectivist poet George Oppen, and African American poets Melvin Tolson and Robert Hayden; to contemporary writers such as Diné poet Sherwin Bitsui, hybrid/ collage poets Claudia Rankine and Evelyn Reilly, emerging QPOC poet Xandria Phillips, and members of the Olimpias disability culture artists’ collective. While addressing preconceptions about the categories of nature writing and ecopoetics, contributors explore, challenge, and reimagine concepts that have been central to environmental discourse, from apocalypse and embodiment to toxicity and sustainability. This collection of essays makes the compelling argument that ecopoetics should be read as “coextensive with post-1945 poetry and poetics,” rather than as a subgenre or movement within it. It is essential reading for any student or scholar working on contemporary literature or in the environmental humanities today. Contributors: Joshua Bennett, Rob Halpern, Matt Hooley, Angela Hume, Lynn Keller, Petra Kuppers, Michelle Niemann, Gillian Osborne, Samia Rahimtoola, Joan Retallack, Joshua Schuster, Jonathan Skinner. Contents Acknowledgments Ecopoetics as Expanded Critical Practice: An Introduction / Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne Part 1. The Apocalyptic Imagination 1. Making Art “Under These Apo-Calypso Rays”: Crisis, Apocalypse, and Contemporary Ecopoetics / Lynn Keller 2. “The Idiot Stone”: George Oppen’s Geological Imagination; Or, Objectivist Realism as Ecopoetics / Rob Halpern Part 2. Embodiment and Animality 3. Visceral Ecopoetics in Charles Olson and Michael McClure: Proprioception, Biology, and the Writing Body / Jonathan Skinner 4. Playing in the Planetary Field: Vulnerability and Syncretic Myth Making in Robert Duncan’s Ecopoetics / Michelle Niemann 5. “Beyond the Vomiting Dark”: Toward a Black Hydropoetics / Joshua Bennett 6. Writing with the Salamander: An Ecopoetic Community Performance Project / Petra Kuppers Part 3. Environmental Justice 7. Toxic Recognition: Coloniality and Ecocritical Attention / Matt Hooley 8. Toward an Antiracist Ecopoetics: Waste and Wasting in the Poetry of Claudia Rankine / Angela Hume Part 4. Beyond Sustainability 9. “Hung Up in the Flood”: Resilience, Variability, and the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker / Samia Rahimtoola 10. Reading the Environs: Toward a Conceptual Ecopoetics / Joshua Schuster 11. Hard Days Nights in the Anthropocene / Joan Retallack Notes Permissions Index "Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field makes a formidable intervention into the emerging field of ecopoetics. The volume's essays model new and provocative methods for reading twentieth and twenty-first century ecological poetry and poetics, drawing on the insights of ecocriticism, contemporary philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, black studies, Native studies, critical race theory, and disability studies, among others. As a volume, this book makes the compelling argument that ecopoetics should be read as "coextensive with post-1945 poetry and poetics," rather than as a subgenre or movement within it. It is essential reading for any student or scholar working on contemporary literature or in the environmental humanities today"--Back cover