Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street Editors Preface

Editors’ Preface
Some lines from William Carlos Williams’s beautiful late poem “Aspho-
del, That Greeny Flower” have become practically a mantra for those who
would affirm the centrality, the urgency, of poetry to contemporary life:
Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Attentiveness, precision, tenderness toward existence—these are some

of the qualities Williams is invoking, and his lines grow more prescient
as the world hurtles toward environmental disaster. During the past few
years, as we have been coediting The Ecopoetry Anthology, we’ve become
ever more convinced that the environmental crisis is made possible by a
profound failure of the imagination. What we humans disregard, what we
fail to know and grasp, is easy to destroy: a mountaintop, a coral reef, a
forest, a human community. Yet poetry returns us in countless ways to
the world of our senses. It can act, in Franz Kafka’s phrase, as “an ice axe
to break the frozen sea inside us,” awakening our dulled perceptions and
feelings. This is the power of all poetry. With regard to the environment, it
is particularly the power of ecopoetry.
x xvii
Nature poetry has existed as long as poetry has existed. Around 1960,
however, public attention increasingly turned to the burgeoning environ-
mental crisis, and nature poetry began to reflect this concern. In recent
decades, the term “ecopoetry” has come into use to designate poetry that
in some way is shaped by and responds specifically to that crisis. The term
has no precise definition and rather fluid boundaries, but some things can
usefully be said about it. Generally, this poetry addresses contemporary
problems and issues in ways that are ecocentric and that respect the integ-
rity of the other-than-human world. It challenges the belief that we are
meant to have dominion over nature and is skeptical of a hyperrationality
that would separate mind from body—and earth and its creatures from
human beings—and that would give preeminence to fantasies of control.
Some of it 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.
As J. Scott Bryson points out in Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction, “eco-
poets offer a vision of the world that values the interaction between two
interdependent . . . desires, both of which are attempts to respond to the
modern divorce between humanity and the rest of nature.” Ecopoets work
to “create place, making a conscious and concerted effort to know the more-
than-human world,” and they “value space, recognizing the extent to which
that very world is ultimately unknowable.”
In terms of poetry written since the rise of environmentalism in the
1960s, we have come to envision contemporary American ecopoetry as
falling loosely into three main groupings. The first is nature poetry. In
Wendell Berry’s words, this is poetry that “considers nature as subject mat-
ter and inspiration.” As shaped by romanticism and American transcen-
dentalism, it often meditates on an encounter between the human subject
and something in the other-than-human world that reveals an aspect of
the meaning of life. But not all nature poetry is environmental or ecological
poetry, and not all nature poetry evinces the accurate and unsentimental
awareness of the natural world that is a sine qua non of ecopoetry. Think
of Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees,” lifting their “leafy arms to pray,” for an egregious
example of anthropocentrism. Thus, according to this formulation, ecopo-
etry is neither a subset of nature poetry, as Bryson suggests, nor a term
encompassing all nature poetry. Though some believe that traditional
nature poetry can no longer be written, many ecopoets continue to write it
very well, as this anthology reveals.
Juliana Spahr writes in “Things of Each Possible Relation” that nature
poetry tends “to show the beautiful bird but not so often the bulldozer
x xviii Editors’ Preface

off to the side that [is] about to destroy the bird’s habitat.” Environmental
poetry, our second grouping, emerges historically and philosophically out
of nature poetry. This is poetry propelled by and directly engaged with
active and politicized environmentalism. It is greatly influenced by social
and environmental justice movements and is committed to questions of
human injustice, as well as to issues of damage and degradation to the
other-than-human world. If activist poetry sacrifices art and complex-
ity for propaganda, it is, of course, simply agitprop. But powerful activist
poems continue to be written—and are included here—even though the
deconstruction of concepts such as “wilderness,” “nature,” and “environ-
ment” distinctly complicates the straightforward activist urgency of much
environmental poetry. Also, postcolonialism and environmental justice
issues continue fruitfully to blur the already shifting boundaries between
human and ecological perspectives and concerns.
The third grouping, ecological poetry, is more elusive than the first two
because it engages questions of form most directly, not only poetic form
but also a form historically taken for granted—that of the singular, coher-
ent self. The term “ecopoetry” is often used to refer to this kind of work, but
we argue for a more inclusive sense of ecopoetry and therefore distinguish
this subset as ecological poetry. This poetry can look strange and wild on
the page; it is often described as experimental; and it tends to think in self-
reflexive ways about how poems can be ecological or somehow enact ecol-
ogy. Of the three groupings, ecological poetry is the most willing to engage
with, even play with, postmodern and poststructuralist theories associated
with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and the avant garde. The poet Forrest
Gander argues that it thematically and formally investigates “the relation-
ship between nature and culture, language and perception.” If the weak-
ness of some nature poetry is sentimentalized anthropomorphism and the
danger of some environmental poetry is that it becomes agenda-driven
propaganda, the risks for ecological poetry include hyperintellectualism
and emotional distance or detachment. But as the poems in this anthol-
ogy demonstrate, there is great power in poetry informed by a biocentric
perspective and by ecological interrelatedness and entanglement.
Each of these groupings is helpful as a starting point. Taken together,
they are some of the many planes that meet at various angles to create the
larger whole that is ecopoetry. The thinking about ecopoetry has contin-
ued to change since the term entered the conversation in the 1990s. We
prefer to see that change not as teleological but as a shifting landscape in
which all forms of poetry have bearing and legitimacy, their presences and
Editors’ Preface xxix

purposes ebbing and flowing in different communities and contexts. We
acknowledge some conflicts between the categories we describe, but we
see good reason for allowing them to interact. For example, to dismiss the
complex traditions of British romanticism and American transcendental-
ism, to dismiss traditional nature poetry, is too easy. The concept of self
that romanticism espouses is problematic, but day to day we still have
selves. This is not a flaw or a moral failing but something we can observe
and ponder. Our vision and hearing and sense of smell are limited when
compared to that of insects or bats or dogs, but our neocortex gives us—the
animal that is Homo sapiens sapiens—a compound eye–like capacity for
simultaneous multiple perspectives. As poets and poetry readers, we can
engage in and slide between contemplation, activism, and self-reflexivity.
We believe any definition of ecopoetry should allow for this capacity.
While the definitions of ecopoetry are fairly clear cut, the poems them-
selves are less easily categorized. Like ecological entities—species, water-
sheds, habitats, and so on—the categories that ecopoems fall into are
overlapping, various, discontinuous, and permeable. A single poem may
participate in multiple categories. Shifts in understanding as fundamental
and mind-boggling as Copernicus’s heliocentric universe, Darwin’s theory
of evolution, and Aldo Leopold’s land ethic—which all move human beings
from center stage and adjust our lens from an anthropocentric to an eco-
centric view—contribute to the new sensibility that informs this poetry.
The poet Ed Roberson sums up ecopoetry beautifully: “[It] occurs when
an individual’s sense of the larger Earth enters into the world of human
knowledge. The main understanding that results from this encounter is the
Ecopoetic: that the world’s desires do not run the Earth, but the Earth does
run the world.” Ecopoetry enacts through language the manifold relation-
ship between the human and the other-than-human world.
When The Ecopoetry Anthology was in development, Robert Hass sug-

gested we begin the book with a historical section, designed to give read-
ers a sense of American poetry that predates the 1960s environmental
movement but that presents the relations between humans and natural or
built environments in striking and memorable ways. “Just thirty pages,” he
said. “Put together a selection of a few great poems beginning with Walt
Whitman that could easily be detached for classroom use.” As we dived
into this section, so splendid were the choices that it grew, and grew, and
grew. It is now well over 100 pages long, with thirty-one poets included.
Some—Robinson Jeffers, Lorine Niedecker, Kenneth Rexroth—are often
x x x Editors’ Preface
rightfully discussed as precursors of American ecopoetry. Others—espe-
cially, perhaps, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Stephen Vincent
Benét, Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes—are not usually considered in
this context, but to do so is refreshing and revealing. The historical section
of the anthology is arranged chronologically by the poets’ years of birth,
from Whitman to James Schuyler.
The contemporary section includes 176 poets, arranged alphabetically
from A. R. Ammons to Robert Wrigley. It happens to begin with one of
the seminal works of American ecopoetry, Ammons’s great poem “Corsons
Inlet.” (That the eloquent colloquy of “Corsons Inlet” echoes Whitman’s
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” in the historical section—both sea-
drenched poems, the latter quintessentially romantic, the former quintes-
sentially postmodern—is also serendipitous. These are the coincidences
that keep editors in love with their work.)
Every step of the way, The Ecopoetry Anthology has been a genuine col-
laboration between us, its two coeditors, and also between us and the poet
Barbara Ras, who is the director of Trinity University Press. When we began
this project we had no idea how many hundreds of poets were address-
ing the environmental crisis in their work and writing about the complex
interrelations between human and other-than-human worlds. Each reader
will probably say at some point, “Why isn’t so-and-so included?” The more
we found, the more was left to find, and poets have inevitably been left out.
This abundance of material is heartening, but it has made the selection
process arduous.
There is a lot of variety in The Ecopoetry Anthology. Nature poems, envi-
ronmental poems, ecological poems—in every case, our primary criterion
was the excellence of the work as poetry. We believe you will find much
to love here. In William Carlos Williams’s sense, we believe you will find
the “news.”
Editors’ Preface xxxi

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Editors’ Preface

Attentiveness, precision, tenderness toward existence—these are some

x xviii Editors’ Preface

Editors’ Preface xxix

When The Ecopoetry Anthology was in development, Robert Hass sug-

Editors’ Preface xxxi

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