The damage humans have perpetrated on our environment has certainly affected a poet’s means and material. But can poetry be ecological? Can it display or be invested with values that acknowledge the economy of interrelationship between the human and the nonhuman realms? Aside from issues of theme and reference, how might syntax, line break, or the shape of the poem on the page express an ecological ethics?
To answer these questions, poets Forrest Gander and John Kinsella offer an experiment, a collaborative volume of prose and poetry that investigates—both thematically and formally—the relationship between nature and culture, language and perception. They ask whether, in an age of globalization, industrialization, and rapid human population growth, an ethnocentric view of human beings as a species independent from others underpins our exploitation of natural resources. Does the disease of Western subjectivity constitute an element of the aesthetics that undermine poetic resistance to the killing of the land? Why does “the land” have to give something back to the writer?
This innovative volume speaks to all people wanting to understand how artistic and critical endeavors can enrich, rather than impoverish, the imperiled world around us.
The author of numerous books of poetry including Core Samples from the World, Eye against Eye, and Science & Steepleflower, novels (As a Friend), and essays (A Faithful Existence), Forrest Gander is the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University. A United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and 2011 recipient of the Witter Bynner fellowship from the Library of Congress, he has also won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim, Whiting, and Howard Foundations. John Kinsella is the author of more than thirty books and has won many prizes, including the Grace Leven Poetry Prize, the John Bray Award for Poetry from the Adelaide Festival, the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award, and the Western Australian Premier's Book Award for Poetry. He has also published novels, collections of stories, verse plays, criticism, and autobiography. He is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia and also 2011/2012 Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University, where he is also a Fellow of Churchill College.
