Abstract
This chapter focuses on the classroom-based use of ecopoetry to promote learning about environmental issues and practices to promote sustainability. Ecopoetry is defined as a set of poetic practices related to, but distinct from, nature and environmental poetry. Ecopoetry also relates to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and visual poetry, as reflected in formal characteristics of linguistic experimentation and formatting. This chapter argues for ecopoetry’s rich pedagogical benefits but observes that ecopoetry can present challenges for learners unfamiliar with its devices. The chapter therefore presents strategies to support classroom-based engagements with ecopoetry, including ideas for exercises involving both reading and writing ecopoems. Focal areas include, one, using ecopoems to stage pedagogical encounters via which learners expand conceptual limitations and, two, using typeless space to represent extinction, depletion, and more.
The most important thing:
This chapter was written on the lands of the Kaurna people. I pay my respect to Kaurna elders, past and present, and to all first nations’ peoples.
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Notes
- 1.
Accessible at the following links: https://ecopoetics.wordpress.com/; https://plumwoodmountain.com/; http://www.bomb-cyclone.com/.
- 2.
Examples of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and visual poetry influences in ecopoems may be observed in ecopoetics, Plumwood Mountain, and Bomb Cyclone. See links in endnote one.
- 3.
I have also given focused discussion to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry techniques in ecopoetry in my free-to-access review of Kristin Lang’s Weight of Light (Walker 2018).
- 4.
To strict Deleuzians, “plane” might seem more appropriate, but “space” is a term I use because I feel it more pertinent to ecopoetry as a practice strongly concerned with spaces, physical and mental.
- 5.
A valid argument-in-waiting is that all poems stage encounters because readers and writers mentally confront the poem’s subject matter. However, not all encounters are pedagogical encounters, which crucially require Deleuzian openness to Otherness and becoming-Otherwise (Davies 2009). Ecopoetry’s connections with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and visual poetry facilitate this kind of openness through linguistic strategies that reposition the “I” and/or unsettle received textual habits. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, visual poetry, and ecopoetry can thereby all facilitate pedagogical encounters, but, of these three, ecopoetry, with its environmental focus, is most likely to facilitate encounters and prompt becomings that extend knowledges about sustainability.
- 6.
I have deliberately listed “rhizomatic” systems in a nod to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome as exceeding linear and “arborescent” models of cognition (1987, 23).
- 7.
For extended discussion of how space operates in Kinsella’s and Armstrong’s poetries, see my online-accessible review of their collections (Walker 2019).
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Acknowledgements
I thank my workshop participants: Dashielle Alain, Jessica Monck, Heather Taylor Johnson, Mike Hopkins, Virginia Barratt, Chloe Cannell, Pam Makin, Shaine Melrose, James Parker, Anna Canturias, Belinda Harrison, Surabee Sukha, Aisha Sultan, Sarah Jane Justice, Francesca Da Rimini, Jessica Liebelt, Janmesh Pandya, Belinda Cole, and Janet Wu.
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Appendix: Sample Ecopoem with Holes
Appendix: Sample Ecopoem with Holes
Verse
Verse The day they took the plants Today they took our plants away I was at my desk No knock just the door, opening and then the bluster: bodies, two bodies barging in and marching over scooping up our pot-bound fern and taking it —Where are you taking that? I asked —Cost cutting —So … whoever waters it is out of a job? Silence. The closing door. Now I’m staring at where the plant isn’t: Turns out it was hiding some hideous stains
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Walker, A. (2022). Ecopoetry, Pedagogical Encounters, and Holding Absence Present: Ideas for Classrooms. In: Kleppe, S.L., Sorby, A. (eds) Poetry and Sustainability in Education. Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95576-2_9
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