Linda Russo | Jacket2

Place-relation ecopoetics: A collective glossary

A work in progress

Linda Russo

Northwestern U.S. Forest Fire Smoke Sunset, 8/24/15 (Pullman WA). Photo by Linda Russo

As I write this, the largest fire complex in Washington State history is burning about 160 miles to my northwest, and several other large fires burn in bordering states and Canadian provinces.

Of the relational local (2 of 2)

A petri dish of ecopoetics, continued

Linda Russo

http://nordiksimit.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/1.jpg — https://www.pinterest.com/richardruddick/petri-dish-art/

Neither a survey of contemporary practice, nor a conference report, this ‘plenary’ is a petri dish of ideas occasioned by the 2015 convening of ASLE ( limited by my own ability to digest the conference offerings).

Of the relational local (1 of 2)

A resurgent ecopoetics post-conference ‘plenary’

Linda Russo

In “Gentle Now, Don't Add to Heartache,” Juliana Spahr offers a narrative of the displacement of human imagination defined by creaturely and vegetal affiliation and transelemental immersion in the natural world. Lists of nonhuman species imply an abundant, connective world, and these same are beseeched not to “add to heartache,” prior to their replacement by chemical-industrial products later in the poem. “We come into the world / and there it is” – the poem’s opening lines prompt.

"Exquisitely marginal, folded into place, and revelatory"

Introductory note to a resurgent ecopoetics post-conference ‘Plenary’

Linda Russo

“The feral lives among us almost as if it belongs” (331), writes ecocritic Anne Milne in the course of arguing for the value of a feral bioregionalism.

Ecopoetic resurgence: Feral/interdisciplinary/bioregional

Notes on ecopoetries from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Conference (June 23–27, 2015)

Linda Russo

investigating the feral at the ASLE 2015 conference, "Notes from Underground: The Depths of Environmental Arts, Culture and Justice." Photo by Heidi Lynn Staples.

In their plenary at the recent conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing oriented us toward the concept of a multi- species world-making based on the ecological process of resurgence. Resurgence, they clarified, is the response to a “disturbance” – any quick ecological change, such as farming. They explained that in our management of ecosystems, we block resurgence – even though an ecosystem (and we humans) can’t survive without it.

To be local is to be emplaced, to pertain to a particular site, to have spatial form. To “be a local” is to be from a here, but to be “local to” is to create a relation to a place, to create a notable here anywhere. “Local” from the Latin locus, meaning “place.” What lines of thought does poetry course along when written through/as relation(s) to place? How do poems articulate (conceive of, imagine, recreate) place as a site of relations? What forms of “local” do poems take?

Much of what might be gathered under the unfurled and unfurling banners of ‘ecopoetics’ expresses the complexity of speaking of (from/with) the human impacts on our (our/their) un/natural environments/ecologies. I’m interested in the gestures that relate poetries to places, and in how poets can help us comprehend and redefine our placed-ness and place-making practices. This commentary will index and explore more-or-less contemporary instances of emplaced poesis – of poetry as a form of inhabitance.

Linda Russo is the author of two books of poetry, most recently Meaning to Go to the Origin in Some Way (Shearsman Books, 2015); The Enhanced Immediacy of the Everyday (Chax Press) and a collection of lyric essays, To Think of her Writing Awash in Light, selected by John D’Agata as the winner of Subito Press inaugural lyric essay/creative nonfiction prize, are forthcoming. Her poems have appeared in the anthology Make It True: Poetry from Cascadia, and in magazines such as Interim, Journal of Poetics Research, Omniverse, and elsewhere. Her scholarly essays have appeared in Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry (University of Iowa Press) and other edited collections, and as the preface of Joanne Kyger's About Now: Collected Poems (National Poetry Foundation). She lives in the Columbia River Watershed, teaches at Washington State University, and undertakes fieldworks and inquiries, documenting these at inhabitorypoetics.blogspot.com.

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.