Angela Hume, Gillian Osborne, and Margaret Ronda

'Between that disgust and this': Trash talk at the Conference on Ecopoetics

by Angela Hume

Trash. Garbage. Junk. Waste. Refuse. Rubbish. Detritus. It was on everyone’s mind at the Conference on Ecopoetics. The dreaded contradiction: With a gathering of 250 of even the most environmentally minded poets, scholars, educators, and activists comes, by the end of a long weekend, a heap of trash — empty cartons and wine bottles; used paper cups, napkins, and towels; soggy tea bags and even some food waste (in the English lounge, we ended up with one to two large bags of trash by the end of each day, excluding recyclables). As we all know, it’s impossible to travel, convene, eat, and live in our society while not, at the same time, creating waste. And despite a 50-year-old modern environmental movement, today we send greater amounts of rubbish to landfills and incinerators than ever before.[1]

That said, Conference on Ecopoetics participants made an admirable effort to keep waste to a minimum. Almost everyone drank their water, coffee, and tea from reusable water bottles and travel mugs. If anything, trash was of foremost concern — and this fact was certainly reflected in panel, roundtable, and seminar presentations and discussions.

'grasses' meet 'monster owl': On the UC Davis Satellite Event with Jonathan Skinner and Brian Teare

by Gillian Osborne

Angela Hume, Gillian Osborne, and Margaret Ronda

In the UC Davis Arboretum, common yarrow (Achillea millefolium), a “companion” plant, has many uses and many names. Along a sculpted river topped with scum, warblers disappear and reappear in native and non-native shrubs and branches. Brian Teare and Jonathan Skinner are talking about ecopoetics: the poems of Ofelia Zepeda, “emergency,” and Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. We stop to smell the sages and the yellow puffs of acacia.

The 2013 Conference on Ecopoetics began at a satellite event hosted by the Davis Humanities Center. Jonathan Skinner, editor of the journal ecopoetics, and author of among other books, Warblers, published by Brian Teare's micro-press Albion Books, sat at a table with his publisher and fellow-poet, whose most recent collection, Companion Grasses, will appear in print April 1. A selection of this same volume, “Transcendental Grammar Crown,” can also be found in the newly released Arcadia Project, edited by Joshua Corey and G.C. Waldrep.

The Conference on Ecopoetics convened at the University of California, Berkeley, February 22-24, 2013, and was co-organized by Angela Hume, Gillian Osborne, and Margaret Ronda. The conference brought together poets, scholars, artists, and activists from around the country and world for presentations, excursions, readings, screenings, conversations, a tree walk, and a service project. This spring, the conference organizers are reporting and reflecting on some of the ideas, questions, collaborations, and poetry that went into and have come out of this event. These "Field Notes" provide an informal record of conference proceedings, a series of returns to and departures from a particular weekend.

If you participated in the conference and have essays, images, audio or video files, or poems to share from the weekend, please do send them our way: ecopoetics.conference@gmail.com. We'll do our best to make this a meeting ground and archive (hopefully one of many) of the event.

Angela Hume is the author of the chapbooks The Middle (Omnidawn, 2013) and Second Story of Your Body (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2011). Her critical work has appeared in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Evental Aesthetics, and The Volta. Currently she is writing a dissertation on lyric, dialectic, and ecology at University of California, Davis.

Gillian Osborne a graduate student in the English Department at UC Berkeley, and a faculty member for Bard College's Language and Thinking Program. Her essays have appeared in The Believer, The Boston Review, and The Emily Dickinson Journal. Recent poems can be found on xpoetics and MiPOesis, and in the spring 2013 issue of The Cincinatti Review.

Margaret Ronda is Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, where she teaches courses on modern and contemporary poetry. Recent critical work has appeared in PMLA, Genre: Discourse and Culture, and Post45: Contemporaries, and an article on radical eco-activism, co-written with Tobias Menely, is forthcoming in the edited volume, Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green. Her book of poems, Personification, was published by Saturnalia Books in 2010.

Jacket2Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.

Conference on Ecopoetics