Poet and Swamp: Wetlands in Australian Verse

Abstract

Ecopoetry - which I define as the practice of writing, reading, and critiquing poetic works that thematize the natural world and issues of sustainability - is limited by one conspicuous shortcoming: its usage of the term environment as an undifferentiated category. As typically invoked in the field, the designator tends to cover ecology, nonhuman life, oceans, rivers, rocks, animals, plants, forests, fungi, and so on without distinguishing adequately between these diverse animate and inanimate elements in the context of their interrelationships. In this regard, J. Scott Bryson, for instance, characterizes ecopoetry as a poetic mode that "while adhering to certain conventions of traditional nature poetry, advances beyond that tradition and takes on distinctly contemporary problems and issues." Leonard Scigaj, moreover, highlights ecopoetry's prevailing emphasis on "human cooperation with nature conceived as a dynamic, interrelated series of cyclic feedback systems." These assessments and others, however, often skim over the specific forms of nature that engender the making- the poiesis-of specific forms of poetic expression. Nonetheless, with the emergence of critical studies of animals3 and plants-coupled to theoretical advances in the geo-humanities and, broadly, the environmental humanities[ a movement toward greater nonhuman heterogenization within ecopoetic scholarship is emerging slowly. Encouraging precision beyond nature and environment as catch-all descriptors, these frameworks have compelled recent formulations of zoopoetics, phytopoetics, and bioregionalist poetics that aim to particularize the natural phenomena and subjects narrativized in poetry.