photo credit: karolina grabowska
Many know intellectually that our relationship with the ecosystems that hold us, how we use and conserve natural resources, needs to shift. This knowing, absent of tangible action, is at the heart of ecological grief. The pandemic and subsequent stay-at-home orders caused us all to pay more attention to the natural world and writer Helen MacDonald asks the question, “What is it that we are desperate to see in the natural world right now, and why?”
Embodied ecopoetics, an integration of creative writing, science, and somatic psychology, may aid in this shift by creating new opportunities to feel, in every inch of our bodies, why the earth matters and why, as humans, we must change our destructive patterns with great urgency. Walt Whitman wrote, “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.”
By cultivating a deep empathy for nature using the poem body as a vessel, we can better explore how emotions, scientific ideas, and spirituality overlap and more important how this alchemy can move individuals from a place of inaction to action. Ambivalence to what Kathleen Dean Moore describes as, “a culture of caring.”
I am not recommending that poetry become prescriptive or overly dogmatic, however I think it is important to acknowledge the experience and impact of embodied ecopoetics. I keep this in mind within my own writing process.
Here are some definitions/quotes to consider:
Embodiment: a tangible or visible form of an idea, quality, or feeling
Bodily context, vessel through which we perceive the world and take action
“Embodiment also as a state of embrace in which one can journey through the landscapes of the body mind, and (re)discover the stories, memories, emotions stored and hidden in the deeper tissues of the body.
-Camille Litalien
Ecopoetics: ecological poetry traversing nature as subject to environmental activism to explorations of interdependence
“Poetry informed by a biocentric perspective….”
-Laura Gray-Street
An intersectional paradigm for evaluating the unevenly distributed effects of environmental degradation. Both creative and critical branches of ecopoetics depart from nature writing.
-Jean-Thomas Tremblay
“The damage humans have perpetrated on our environment has certainly affected a poet’s means and material. But can poetry be ecological? Can it display or be invested with values that acknowledge the economy of interrelationship between the human and the nonhuman realms?”
-Forrest Gander
How does embodied ecopoetics show up in your work?