Redstart: an Ecological Poetics
/ with John Kinsella
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? Aside from issues of theme and reference, how might syntax, line break, or the shape of the poem on the page express an ecological ethics?
To answer these questions, poets Forrest Gander and John Kinsella offer an experiment, a collaborative volume of prose and poetry that investigates—both thematically and formally—the relationship between nature and culture, language and perception. They ask whether, in an age of globalization, industrialization, and rapid human population growth, an ethnocentric view of human beings as a species independent from others underpins our exploitation of natural resources. Does the disease of Western subjectivity constitute an element of the aesthetics that undermine poetic resistance to the killing of the land? Why does “the land” have to give something back to the writer?
This innovative volume speaks to all people wanting to understand how artistic and critical endeavors can enrich, rather than impoverish, the imperiled world around us.
Contents
- Prefatory Note
- The Future of the Past
- The Carboniferous and Ecopoetics
- Codex for a Protest
- A Note on Ecopoetics
- Redstart
- The Movements of the Yellow-Rumped Thornbills: Twittering Machines
- A Note on the Collaborative Process
Buy
Reviews
at Isola Di Rifiuti by John Latta
at Colorado Review by Jake Oliver
at The Conversant by Andy Fitch
at New Pages by Patrick James Dunagan
David Northwick at Earthlines Magazine
at KCET TV (Australia) Building Community through Poetry
Plumwood Magazine: an Australian Journal of Ecopoetry & Ecopoetics
“Reading this book is enormously exciting amidst current explorations of language and other natural phenomena within ecopoetics and ecocriticism. It should and does raise important questions about poets’ ventures into textual and extra-textual ecologies. The kind of work that Gander and Kinsella do in Redstart is particularly important at this dire, edgy, near-catastrophic moment in the history of human v. everything else on the planet. It is an evocative investigation of our limitations and our possibilities as the poetic species.”