Ecopoetry

Catalog description

This is an advanced undergraduate comparative literature seminar in ecopoetry: poetry that attends to environments and more-than-human life while confronting the histories, infrastructures, and crises that shape "nature" today. Moving from nineteenth-century lyric and American nature writing to contemporary transnational and Indigenous poetics, we will ask how poems make place - through attention, description, voice, and form - and how they scale outward to the planet: extraction and labor, war and displacement, toxicity and illness, extinction and climate change. Each week pairs poets in conversation across languages, regions, and lineages ( for instance, Dickinson with Thoreau; Moore with Ponge; Heaney with Neruda; Sachs with Celan; Berssenbrugge with Merwin; Adnan with Jarman; or Vicuna with Harjo). Alongside close reading and comparative analysis, we will study lyric compression, "thing" poetics, documentary and archival methods, and research-/field-based long poems that compose with ecosystems. Students will develop a vocabulary for ecopoetics and produce writing that links poetic technique to ecological thinking and human-nonhuman relations. Students will keep a weekly hand-written journal/herbal that combines responses to the assigned poems with ongoing observations of their own environments (weather, plants and animals, built spaces, seasonal change, soundscapes). The course treats the journal as a method of ecological attention: a practice that links poetic technique to lived experience of place. Attendance is mandatory. If you wish to join the course after week 1, email Professor Regina Pieck ([email protected]) for permission.