Studying Lorine Niedecker's Ecopoetics

Edge Effects contributor, Steel Wagstaff, explains the origins of the term "ecopoetics" and brings Lorine Niedecker's ecological writing practice into focus. From Edge Effects:

I’m currently writing a dissertation for the English department at UW-Madison, in a subfield called environmental criticism or ecocriticism. When I describe my work to others within my field, I often use the term ecopoetics. The word itself is an amalgam of two Greek words: oikos [household or family] and poïesis [making, creating, or producing], so that ecopoetics quite literally means the creation of a dwelling place, or home-making. The term came into special prominence after the influential British literary critic Jonathan Bate published The Song of the Earth in 2000. There, Bate defined ecopoetics as a critical practice in which the central tasks are to ask “in what respects a poem may be a making … of the dwelling-place” and to “think about what it might mean to dwell upon the earth.”

Poetry, because of the attention it gives to “the little words” which would otherwise pass invisibly beneath our notice, is ideally suited to helping us explore our relationships with and responsibilities toward the myriad other entities who share our planet. When it comes to planetary home-making, these little words matter quite a lot: consider how different dwelling in, on, or upon the earth feels from dwelling with it. In the former instances, our places are too often seen as blank slates to be filled or occupied as we desire, while the latter contains at the very least an awareness of other modes of being than our own.

This notion of dwelling with our home places should not be entirely unfamiliar; after all, it has been more than sixty five years since Aldo Leopold urged us to adopt a “land ethic” by “enlarg[ing] the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” Concerned that we too often view land as mere property, Leopold invited his readers to treat land as an organism made up of “all of the things on, over, or in the earth,” and transform our role “from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen.”

Lorine Niedecker and Dwelling With

Since I moved to Wisconsin in 2007, one of my goals has been to learn how to dwell with this place—that is, to better understand the panoply of organisms and entities that make up my land-community. One of my greatest guides in this pursuit has been the poet Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), a woman who spent most of her life living in a tiny cabin on rustic Blackhawk Island, a small, marshy peninsula which juts into Lake Koshkonong on the Rock River just outside of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. [...]

Continue reading at Edge Effects.