Botoman 1 Eleonor Botoman Advanced Poetry May 6, 2019 Pastoral Made Political: Embodying Social Justice Through Ecopoetics "I can only pray: / That you'll never ask for the weather, earth, / Angels, women, or other lives to obey you…" - Minnie Bruce Pratt, ​Crime Against Nature ​(1989) Introduction There is no clear definition of ecopoetics. As a poetic subgenre, it operates between many scales from the peaks of mountains and whole continental climates to bacterial organisms and local ecosystems. While ecopoetics has been commonly associated with the pastoral tradition—meditations on life in remote, rural places untouched by human intervention—contemporary ecopoets embrace the ambiguous, permeable divide between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural.’ In the face of global climate change, massive quantities of pollution, mass extinctions, and geopolitical unrest, these painfully human elements of life become integrated into these poetic ecosystems. Moreso, they do not just document environmental motifs, but actively integrate their bodies into these natural-cultural landscapes. Brenda Iijima asks, “How can poetry engage with a global ecosystem under duress…​ Can innovating languages forward the cause of living sustainably in a world of radical interconnectedness? (5). By beginning with Mark Doty’s early framework for queer ecopoetics, then moving to Tommy Pico’s Indigenous reckonings with nature, Marcella Durand’s post-industrial landscapes, Donika Kelly’s wrestling with mental illness and sexual violence, and Brenda Hillman’s restorative eco-justice, one can see how the broad umbrella of ‘ecopoetics’ becomes a site for political discourse deeply embedded in each poet’s body. Act 1: Mark Doty Botoman 2 Mark Doty’s early years as an out gay man in New York and Provincetown abruptly careened into darkness with the AIDS crisis, culminating in the death of his partner’s death from the illness in 1994 (Poetry Foundation). The year after his death, Marky Doty would publish Atlantis​, an elegiac collection set in Cape Cod. Doty’s writing is that of the queer pastoral. As Mei Mei Evans writes, "What is 'natural,' he seems to ask repeatedly in this volume, and what is 'unnatural'? Who gets to say what belongs and what does not?” Homosexuality is oftentimes deemed ‘unnatural’ by society. Doty challenges this norm by placing his portraits of men in the throes of the AIDS crises alongside aberrations of climate—early blooms, sudden hurricanes. In “Grosse Fuge,” Doty asks, “What does it mean, chaos / gathered into a sudden bronze sweetness, an October flourish?” before jumping to “MRI: charcoaled flowers, / soft smudges, the image that is Bobby,” a friend who comes to live with them after his diagnosis alienates him from his family (22). Perhaps he is, as Evans says, trying to “understand the design of life and death in which he is immersed and recover a sense of order in the face of epidemic loss” (30). But there’s not really a sense of order in the biological and ecological storms brewing in his poems. Rather, the natural world is itself a site of pure chaos, unpredictability akin to the virus itself. Doty’s poems ‘queer’ nature, resisting the expectation of heteronormative social constructions of masculinity through peculiarity of a bloom in October by projecting this emotional turmoil on to the surface of the land. His work presents a deeply connected ecology of nature and culture. The MRI room becomes bounded together to the fields of Cape Cod. There are the bodies of flowers, rising up and defying seasonal norms, the individual bodies of ill young men who have been flung out of the logical progression of death in old age, and the body of a broader community attempting to survive both the impending winter and the ‘winter’ of death amongst each other. Botoman 3 Act 2: Tommy Pico Tommy Pico tends to self-identify as a queer “NDN”—short for American Indian—originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation in southern California. Like Doty, Pico is concerned with life as a gay man, yet his poems are sites that reckon with the complicated entanglements of navigating both homophobia and the generational trauma due to America’s legacy of colonial genocide. His 2017 book-length epic, ​Nature Poem​, opens with a biting self-indictment of perpetuating Indigenous stereotypes: "I can't write a nature poem / bc it's fodder for the noble savage / narrative. I wd slap a tree across the face " (2). Indeed, Pico’s nature poetry is unconventional, preferring New York City streets, pop cultural references, and text message abbreviations over exalted, ‘timeless’ Romantic formal language. “Winter is a death threat from nature, and I don’t respond well to predation—,” he writes, alluding to the Trail of Tears’ forced northward migration of tribes who were not slaughtered, “it’s not like summer, death in the form of barking men / taking issue w/ the short shorts” (5). Pico’s resistance to Romantic nature writing is unsurprising. Melissa Tuckey tells us that “the empty wilderness, with its romanticized natives, presented a vision to those with utopian dreams as well as an excuse for expansionist exploitation. And yet, this romantic vision was also a source of resistance to social injustice." (8) Despite attempting to keep the realms of the political and the ecological separate, the two perpetually tangle together across his ‘other-ed’ body. As Pico reflects on his alienation both within the gay community as a non-white person and from the reservation and traumatic childhood he left behind, Pico moves away from dissecting himself from nature to subsuming his Millenial urban life, as well as the endemic poverty and high overdose and suicide rates on reservations, into a new type of nature; no longer solely about flora and fauna but about Botoman 4 contemporary political struggles and humanity’s inherent nature to destroy and survive. After writing about learning about several overdose deaths in his family, Pico turns to his own necro-pastoral form, one of the few moments of calm in his bombastic text, “Everyone remembers the weather when discovering a body. / I think it’s perfectly natural to look skyward” (37). The Indigenous bodies in ​Nature Poem ​have been traumatized by centuries of colonialism, continue to be objects of fascination for white gazes. Yet they are bodies that are resilient, that contain storms within them. When a man interrogates him about his nationality in a gay bar and Pico struggles to define his identity, he turns to nature to escape this creeping oppression: “In order to talk about a hurricane, you first have to talk about a preexisting disturbance over the ocean, so you first have to talk about a preexisting disturbance over the ocean, so you have to talk about the mean ocean temperature, so you have to talk about human industry and sun rays…" (9). Act 3: Marcella Durand Marcella Durand’s landscapes reflect the continued destruction of industrialization on the once pristine wilderness of North America, producing a new kind of wilderness where flora and fauna. Her long-form poem, “Anatomy of Oil,” describes “a few feathers behind / to be later crystallized into a profit / mineralized and pumped up between it… / Distilled, enhanced, / combusted” (65). Durand’s poetic body becomes fragmented, an ecofeminist confrontation of the price the environment has paid for capitalism’s demand of resources. Locating herself on the periphery of urban life, she describes “this beast, lies across / the highway and its claws leave / deep ruts our wheels bounce / and we are trapped in shimmering / light and visions of trucks and / more trucks as they approach / the undulating city of the coastal / plain” (68). Not only does she Botoman 5 witness urbanization’s deadly effect on animals attempting to maneuver around human structures, but she herself becomes an animal caught in the headlights of industrial life. Cole Swensen, in his review of Durand’s 2008 collection ​Traffic & Weather​, describes Durand’s act of presenting “the city as an organism, often breaking down and always vibrant” (1). Durand’s body is not bound to human anatomy. She acknowledges the precariousness of green spaces in cities, not only the relief they bring to locals but their perpetual endangered state. She calls a makeshift park in an abandoned lot “green and excavated. It was preserved, by chance or on purpose, but may not be there ultimately, and may be replaced with a doorway” (56). Durand embodies ecology not through metaphors that compare limbs to trees but drawing the reader into a sensory-rich narrative of experiencing the ‘city as organism.’ She describes the scents of the city as “wood smoke, smoke. Burning plastic. Deep timbre of urine / when passing an alley… / shadows of clouds move over the area—but plumes of construction or actual / weather?” (58). While Romantic pastoral traditions call for pristine wildernesses, Durand creates a new ‘wild’: a renegade tree in an empty lot, weeds in between, the frenzied bodies of construction workers and those tending to oil rigs on the city’s outskirts. The toxicity of industrialization and hyper-capitalist expansion permeates both human society and the fields in the urban margins. The implicit connection between poverty and exposure to sickening pollution bears a physical weight. “What is oil?” Durand asks, “but millions / of creatures crushed / one into another / shoulder / to soldier.” Her eco-poetics calls for solidarity amongst those humans and ecosystems that have fallen prey to centuries of socioeconomic exploitation. Act 4: Donika Kelly Donika Kelly’s first full-length book, ​Bestiary​, is a menagerie of birds, dogs, and mythological creatures. While the other poets in this essay project their marginalization onto Botoman 6 expansive landscapes, Kelly’s experiences as a mentally ill black woman, the victim of sexual abuse both as a child and in later toxic relationships, are subsumed into feathers, fur, and soil. In her poem “Love Letter,” Kelly describes self-harming: “In the hours before I sleep, / I drag canyons into my forearms, dredge / the little tributaries of mud and fish. / These pits and hollows make a mess of everything / they touch. I am reeling, spooling / away from what holds muscle to bone” (47). This connection of cutting her arms as a temporary release from trauma to the depths of canyons “reveal histories stored in various natural bodies…explore sources of connection to, but also alienation from the land” (Dungy xxii). Her body both takes on environmental attributes and finds kinship in the lives of animals affected by humanity’s inflicted violence. In “Little Box,” the human/ecology divide is further muddied. As Kelly describes her therapist who resembles the woman she loves, she tells herself, “You will be matter of fact. You will think / of the seal, a mother perhaps, how she might be lonely / for a lost pup. But there will be another, and she will forget / the one that was eaten by an orca or polar bear or neglect” (49). This image of an aquatic mammal reappears in “Sanctuary” when Kelly imagines a young girl (possibly herself) watching “wounded sea lions” in an enclosure at an animal rehabilitation center: “How the girl wishes this measure of salvation for / herself: / to claim her own barking voice, to revel / in her own scent and sleek brown body, her fingers / woven into the cyclone fence” (1). Dungy notes in her anthology of African American ecopoets that “they form alliances with plants and animals as often as they question those alliances” (xxxiv). The young girl sees herself in brown bodies of the sea lions, yet she also encounters a troubling contradiction. She not only seeks out care, self-rehabilitation, but her position of marginalization also makes her vulnerable to entrapment in broader social systems of racism and misogyny. Act 5: Brenda Hillman Botoman 7 Brenda Hillman’s work as a political activist and her working-class childhood has deeply shaped her poetic practice. For Hillman, the personal is not just political, as the saying goes, but the ecological is also political. Yes, Hillman’s work does reckon with political oppression and injustice, but it points to the potential of ecopoetics as a place for individual and social healing. In “A Poem for a National Forest,” Hillman describes the bodies of disenfranchised campers finding relief in the woods, “People who had lost their jobs / gathered in tents & sealed their Pringles from / bears… / they / brought mute dreams into tents with beer / & shadows & flashlights in their phones, they / stared with awe into the pines” (138). Although all of them come from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, there is a sense of relief amongst these families who cannot escape this social turmoil. This sense of bodies clustering together to resist and be resilient to injustice is echoed in “Day 9”: “Protestors have a right / to lie down, to decompose, to be a form of life, to die / or pretend to die to die beside other forms—” (Hillman 69). She connects the to the mycelial networks of fungi, their ability to flourish in harsh weather conditions, their ability to withstand storms. Melissa Tuckey writes that this “shift from romantic notions of nature as a pristine wilderness outside of ourselves, toward recognizing the environment as home: a source of life, health, and livelihood.” (1). While Hillman does describe going out into nature, her inherently political poems do not free themselves of civilization, rather they embed themselves deeper into natural and cultural social fabrics. Her poem, “The Seeds Talk Back to Monsanto” playfully describes “engineered seeds on faraway farms” that “hear / of the free seed movement. They want no part of Genetic / Use Restriction Technologies turning farmers / into serfs” (Hillman 38). “Eco-terrorist seeds won’t sprout for Monsanto,” she says (38). Echoing Tuckey’s view of political ecopoetics, Hillman’s bodies are not only that of protestors emulating fungi. Her use of personification adds greater Botoman 8 agency both to the farmers resisting corporate agriculture, as well as to the non-human species that get caught up in these conflicts, in these exploitative practices. The bodies of lichen, of members of the ‘free seed movement,’ of #BlackLivesMatter protestors fighting against, all come together in Hillman’s poetic forest, a complex biome of the marginalized and the voiceless rich with resilience and hope in the face of social and eco-crisis. Conclusion Camille Dungy tells us that “it is the task of eco-poetics…to write about history, economics, politics, social justice, and the environment all at once…Environmental and social crises are mutually and equally devastating” (xvii). Each of these poets do just that, entangling their experiences as marginalized members of society with the topography of Cape Cod, zoos, gardens, outdoor protests, and urban streets, the location of ‘nature’ is as complex and multifaceted as their own lives. These authors locate their bodies in spaces not only to escape from alienation, but to wrestle with their trauma. To describe an ‘ecosystem’ is to describe a whole host of interconnected relationships among species, among flora and fauna, and humanity’s position in this era of the Anthropocene can no longer exist as separate or outside of these botanical spaces. What we do to the environment has, time and time again, come back to affect our physical bodies and psyches, a symbiosis that no amount of artificial construction can ever fully break. Ecopoetics is a valuable contemplative tool for raising awareness about histories of social injustice on national and social scales, along the lines of race, gender, class, sexual orientation. Yet, is also a site of hope, a way for writers to not only mend their relationship to the natural world but to find greater interconnectedness amongst each other. Bibliography Dungy, Camille T., “Introduction,” ​Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Botoman 9 Poetry​. Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2009. Durand, Marcella. ​Traffic & Weather​. New York, Futurepoem, 2008. Evans, Mei Mei. “Queer(y)Ing ‘Nature.’” ​Interdisciplinary Literary Studies​, vol. 7, no. 1, 2005, pp. 27–35. ​JSTOR​, ​www.jstor.org/stable/41209927​. Hillman, Brenda. ​Extra Hidden Life Among the Days​. University of Wesleyan Press, 2018. Hillman, Brenda. “The Seeds Talk Back to Monsanto,” ​Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology​. Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2018. Iijima, Brenda. ​)((Eco(Lang)(Uage(Reader))​. New York, Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2010. Kelly, Donika. ​Beastiary​. Seattle, Graywolf Press, 2016. Kelly, Donika. “Sanctuary.” ​Poetry Foundation.​ 2019. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/148205/sanctuary-5bc8e3630195d Pico, Tommy. ​Nature Poem.​ New York, Tin House Books, 2017. Poetry Foundation, “Mark Doty.” ​Poetry Foundation​, ​www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/markdoty. Swenson, Cole. “Traffic and Weather, Marcella Durand,” ​Futurepoem​. Fall 2018. https://www.futurepoem.com/books/traffic-and-weather Tuckey, Melissa. “Introduction,” ​Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology​. Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2018.