Celebrate Earth day with Wesleyan University Press’s EcoPoetic publications! Poets consider ecological and social collapse and our shared responsibilities in the contemporary moment.
Collected from contributors including Brenda Hillman, Eileen Tabios, and Christopher Cokinos, Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene compiles terms—borrowed, invented, recast—that help configure or elaborate human engagement with place. Each entry is a work of art concerned with contemporary poetics and environmental justice backed with sound observation and scholarship.
In his newest collection Asked What Has Changed, Ed Roberson confronts the realities of an era in which the fate of humanity and the very survival of our planet are uncertain, speaking life and truth to modernity in all its complexity and giving us a new language to process the feeling of living in a century on the brink. His previous book, To See the Earth Before the End of the World, raises searing questions about the natural world and our place in it.
Brenda Hillman’s tetralogy on the elements includes Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days. Embodied in syntax as unpredictable as the earth’s movements, these poetic forms speak to and query the landforms as the line between faith and science blurs.
Angrily Standing Outside in the Wind
from Extra Hidden Life, among the Days by Brenda Hillman
—kept losing self control
but how could one lose the self
after reading so much literary theory?
The shorter “i” stood under the cork trees,
the taller “I” remained rather passive;
the brendas were angry at the greed, angry
that the trees would die, had lost interest
in the posturing of the privileged,
the gaps between can’t & won’t…
Stood outside the gate of permissible
sound & the wind came soughing
through the doubt debris
(soughing comes from swāgh—to resound…
echo actually comes from this also—)
we thought of old Hegel across
the sea—the Weltgeist—& clouds
went by like the bones of a Kleenex…
it’s too late for countries
but it’s not too late for trees…
& the wind kept soughing
with its sound sash, wind with
its sound sash, increasing
bold wind with its sound sash,
increasing bold—
Related title: American Poets in the 21st Century: The Poetics of Social Engagement, a collection that emphasizes the ways in which innovative American poets have blended art and social awareness, focusing on aesthetic experiments and investigations of ethnic, racial, gender, and class subjectivities.
