Abstract
This chapter inquires into Juliana Spahr’s ecopoetics to tease out entanglements on the level of form and language. First‚ it examines the tangle of various genres and literary traditions that comprise her work. Then it focuses on thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs‚ and “Unnamed DragonFly Species” and “The Incinerator” from Well Then There Now, to explore Spahr’s connective reading methodology that interweaves the material and the semiotic, the personal and the political, and the local and the global. Spahr forges a posthumanist poetics that embodies the collective voices of human and nonhuman beings and the dynamic relationalities emerging from the ecological text. Foregrounding three concepts central to Spahr’s work—dis/connection, complicity, and accountability—Ergin highlights the entanglement of local and global ecologies and politics, thereby reconfiguring our understanding of temporal and spatial scales.
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Notes
- 1.
When Bate writes about “walking” and “ecopoetic consciousness,” he restricts his discussion primarily to J. J. Rousseau’s solitary reveries, not touching upon the relationship between walking and ecopolitical commitment, a predominant theme in Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001).
- 2.
In “Documentary Poetics,” Spahr’s friend and collaborator Mark Nowak defines documentary poetics not so much as a movement as “a modality within poetry whose range I see along a continuum from the first person auto-ethnographic mode of inscription to a more objective third person documentarian tendency (with practitioners located at points all across that continuum)” (2010). As Nowak further remarks, documentary poetry “tends to pack a lefter-than-liberal, social-Democratic to Marxist political history (grounded largely in WPA-era poems ranging from Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead to Langston Hughes’ ‘Johannesburg mines’ and photo-documentary texts such as Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices)” (2010).
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Ergin, M. (2017). Intimate Multitudes: Juliana Spahr’s Ecopoetics. In: The Ecopoetics of Entanglement in Contemporary Turkish and American Literatures. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63263-6_4
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