Linda Russo

Emplaced and local to

Place-relation ecopoetics: A collective glossary

A work in progress

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

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’

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’

“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)

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.