Arcadiana

A Blog about Literature, Culture and the Environment

Tag: ecopoetics

  • t4t as a model of eco intimacy and kinship in Oliver Baez Bendorf’s “T4T”

    t4t as a model of eco intimacy and kinship in Oliver Baez Bendorf’s “T4T”

    T4t stands for “trans for trans” and originated in the early 2000s within Craigslist personals to describe trans individuals choosing to pursue relationships and/or sex with other trans people. t4t as a model has been problematised because it might risk epitomising cis/trans binaries and “distract[ing] us from or cover[ing] over the significant axes of difference, race chief among them, that characterize and trouble trans affinities and solidarities”(Awkward-Rich and Malatino 3). In this way, t4t needs to be reframed through a more expansive approach, one which, as theorised by Black feminist Amira Lundy-Harris, could describe more accurately and comprehensively the different connections between trans people and explore “the relationship between Black feminist thought and trans studies, as part of a larger structure of thinking Blackness and transness in relationship to one another” (89). Expanded in this way, t4t would be a useful and joyful ideal. There is, after all, a great and hopeful resistance in actively choosing only people within your own trans collectivity, outside the borders of which there is a much higher chance of rejection, misidentification, and a forceful need for explanations and justifications. t4t could then summarise and stand for the intricate nets of “recognition, attraction, solidarity, and support” within trans circles described by Hil Malatino (SA).

    Much of the trans experience is based on such exchanges – on webs of relationality and connections with others, which are essential to resistance (Edwards 324). As analysed by Malatino, webs of care, collectivity, and kinship among queer and especially trans individuals arise in a system built on types of collectiveness that are cisheteronormative and centred around the nuclear family, thus leaving no space for trans and queer individuals (TC). These trans counter systems of care contrast both the ways in which care and kinship are “steeped in forms of domesticity and intimacy that are both White and Eurocentered, grounded in the colonial/modern gender system” and “the mythos of neoliberal, entrepreneurial self-making” (TC). The trans self is relational rather than self-sufficient and the webs of collectivity, care, and kinship on which it depends for survival configure a type of care that evades established heteronormative structures. “Subjectivity and dependency” (TC) are then inextricably linked, which is further augmented by the fact that an act of care in trans circles is never a linear, unidirectional exchange; instead, in these webs, any act of care towards another is an act sustaining and supporting those same networks of care you are part of (TC). The trans self that emerges from this analysis is then interconnected and relational, contrasting the “capitalist […] ideology of individualism” (Drucker 56) and the neoliberal idea that the individual must be self-sufficient and self-reliant.

    Starting from the t4t experience, poet Oliver Baez Bendorf shows how this relationality can expand towards a similar interrelationality and kinship with nature and our surroundings. Bendorf’s poem “T4T” opens mid-scene and mid-action, with an “And” that signifies that what is written on the page continues something that is left unwritten, left unseen. 

    And I think he must be drunk, from the sweet way he.

    Brother. I think about his XX all the time. It’s like a joke,

    that we’ll start dreaming of men once we. […]

    Not only does the poem open as if halfway through an already-started action, story, or scene. It also opens by declaring a sense of inebriation. The t4t encounter is then immediately portrayed as belonging to a different state of consciousness, one where “his XX” does not require any further words but can immediately move to being an inside joke shared only between the two men. It is never revealed what the lover is doing that shows a drunk-like state, as some lines abruptly halt and break mid-sentence, so that the reader is left only knowing about a “sweet way” and not what this sweet way is applied to. These unfinished sentences consistently happen after the use of a pronoun referring to either the speaker, the lover, or both together. The actions, descriptions, and definitions of the speaker and the lover are left unsaid, because interrupted or unsayable, so that their identities remain nebulous, interrupted, unfinished. However, their identities are built throughout the poem in the exchange(s) between them. The self is then (partly and) intimately constructed from an encounter with and recognition of the similar, exemplifying how t4t can become “a site of identity formation” (Adair and Azura 46). The sites of the interruptions also become the sites of the constructions, so that what is left unknowable for an external reader is a site of becoming for the two trans men. 

    Identity is built through and within an ‘other’ which is other but is also same, through a process of recognition of similarities and recognition of differences, embodied in the poem by the “brother” address, isolated as a single-word sentence. The use of the term brother pulls the reader into a system of relationality that borrows terminology from the standard heteronormative family just to subvert it and build a different type of kinship and bonds that can only exist outside such family. Further, the term “brother” in the context of sex also creates an immediate connection to incest. According to Lee Edelman, incest, because it confounds and destabilises sameness and difference, threatens the stability of culture as opposed to nature and, as it is in culture rather than nature that meaning is produced, it also disrupts the stability of meaning itself (BE). If “the incest prohibition is the fundamental social rule” that culture is articulated around and depends on (Ramadanovic), the “brother” address interrupts culture and disrupts a clear, singular, and stable presence of meaning – as articulated in the unfinished sentences. It declares its disassociation from culture as opposed to nature and reinforces the t4t encounter as a webbed exchange of sameness and difference belonging to an alternative space. In this way, nature (as opposed to culture) becomes part of what makes these expansive movements of encounter & recognition and similarity & difference possible.

    This expansiveness and enmeshment also directly extends to the non-human, so that t4t evades separatism by merging with what goes beyond the human. Natural imagery is scattered throughout the poem. It starts from being in the surroundings – a place which is already intertwined with the two men and their actions. They eat “citrus on river rock / while others swam out”, in a way that denotes a singularity of interconnectedness with the natural: while “others” swim out, preparing themselves to leave such a space, the two men remain there and eat. Such interconnectedness is then furthered through the t4t encounter so that nature moves from being in the background to becoming part of their sex and intimacy. In the image of their “clothes scattered around pine root” the trees and the ground become what creates the time and space for their nakedness and sex. Nature is also co-creative of their own bodies, as the root of the pine also becomes the root of the lover, the root which the speaker, if given “the chance”, would “go right to”, wanting to reach not only the lover’s deepest core but also the core of the nature around them. The t4t erotic recognition and suspension creates a reaching towards an erotic similarity and intimacy with the non-human, so that the two become intertwined with each other, and one happens through the other, in a process that is reminiscent of the principles of the Ecosex Manifesto, formulated and written by Elizabeth M. Stephens and Annie M. Sprinkle. 

    The Ecosex Manifesto rejects the image of Earth as a mother to instead think of Earth as a “lover”, to be “madly, passionately, and fiercely in love” with, in a relationship to be renovated and continued every day and that can become “more mutual and sustainable” only through a collaboration with nature. The relationship with nature is erotic, sensory, and physical, made of “shamelessly hug[ging] trees, massag[ing] the earth with our feet, and talk[ing] erotically to plants” and, ultimately, “mak[ing] love with the Earth through our senses”. The relationship with nature articulated in the manifesto is an enmeshed and mutual one furthered through physical exchanges and love. In Bendorf’s poem, a similar relationship with nature is depicted, and it is in this fusion with and commitment to nature that queer love, sex, and intimacy can find further fulfilment. 

    The identity formation that happens through t4t intimacy and sex in Bendorf’s poem is, thus, an identity formation that also happens with and through nature. Here we see the trans self is not interconnected and relational only because it belongs to a trans collectivity, but also because – in its t4t exchange – is located within and existing in nature, with which it merges and mingles, in a continuous exchange akin to the one that happens within trans circles of care. This merging with the surroundings intertwined with the merging between the two men’s bodies culminates in the acknowledgement that “there’s something happy and right about us mating”. 

    The word “mating” clearly carries an animal-like connotation. This evocation of non-human animals in the context of t4t sex disrupts even further the social and cultural boundaries that the term brother has already eroded. Going beyond the human as an exclusive subject of love, sexuality, and inter-subjective co-creation, Bendorf shows the happiness and rightness of a t4t encounter bleeding into the happiness and rightness of an inter-nature encounter. This poem thus offers a powerful example of how the potentially problematic or overly simplistic characterization of t4t can be eluded: by showing the body and self are interconnected not only with more, different bodies and selves, but also with the (natural) spaces that allow for those bodies to meet. 

    Works Cited

    Adair, Cassius, and Aizura, Aren. ““The Transgender Craze Seducing Our [Sons]”; or, All the 

    Trans Guys Are Just Dating Each Other”. TSQ: Transgender Studies 

    Quarterly, vol 9, no 1, 2022, pp 44–64. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-9475509.

    Awkward-Rich, Cameron, and Malatino, Hil. “Meanwhile, t4t”. TSQ: Transgender Studies 

    Quarterly, vol 9, no 1, 2022, pp 1-8. DOI: 10.1215/23289252-9475467

    Bendorf, Oliver Baez. “T4T”. Poetry, 2020. 

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/151771/t4t.

    Drucker, Peter. Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism. Brill, 2015.

    Edelman, Lee. Bad Education. Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing. Duke University 

    Press, 2022.

    Edwards, Kari. In Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, edited by 

    Trace Peterson and TC Colbert, Nightboat Books, 2013.

    Malatino, Hil. Trans Care. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

    —. Side Affects: on Being Trans and Feeling Bad. University of Minnesota Press, 2022.

    Lundy-Harris, Amira. ““Necessary Bonding” On Black Trans Studies, Kinship, and Black 

    Feminist Genealogies”. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol 9, no 1, 2022, pp 

    84-100. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-9475537.

    Ramadanovic, Petar. “The Non-meaning of Incest or, How Natural Culture Is.” Postmodern 

    Culture, vol 20 no 2, 2010. doi: 10.1353/pmc.2010.0004

    Stephens, Elizabeth M. and Sprinkle, Annie M. “Ecosex Manifesto”. 

    https://sprinklestephens.ucsc.edu/research-writing/ecosex-manifesto/.

  • Challenging Mother Nature through the Feminised Imagery of the Moon: An Ecofeminist Reading of Ann Radcliffe and Sylvia Plath

    Challenging Mother Nature through the Feminised Imagery of the Moon: An Ecofeminist Reading of Ann Radcliffe and Sylvia Plath

    Photograph taken by Artist on Unsplash

    This essay explores the ecofeminist characteristics of Ann Radcliffe and Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Employing an ecofeminist lens offers a novel approach to studying their shared vision of nature across literary movements. This essay centres on how the poets challenged the essentialist link between nature and women through Radcliffe’s “Sunset” (1791) and Plath’s “The Moon and the Yew Tree” (1961). Both poems explore empowerment and control of the environment through the feminised imagery of the Moon.

    While critics such as Jane Stabler and Alison Milbank have started to unpack the impact of Radcliffe’s poetry, the ecofeminist characteristics of her verses have remained relatively unaddressed in recent scholarship. In his eco-critical reading of Radcliffe’s novels, Christopher Hitt states that “the visionary is apprehended only in fleeting glimpses, obliquely and indefinitely” (139). The feminised Moon in Radcliffe’s verses, especially the “pale orb” in “Sunset”, is one such example of a “fleeting” and “oblique” symbol of motherhood and the natural world. “Sunset” is a poem narrated by the heroine Adeline in The Romance of the Forest.The twenty-two line single verse poem begins with the onset of Twilight, a soft, obscuring and nurturing female force, characteristic perhaps of an “Edenic Evening” (Milbank 147). The first twelve lines of the poem are devoted to establishing “Ev’ning’s dome”, a space seemingly constructed by female figures who control the transition into the night (Radcliffe 297).

    The appearance of the Moon contrasts with the shadow-casting of Meek Twilight. Countering the gloomy “purple” and “gray” hues, the Moon relights the earth by “throwing her radiance wide” (Radcliffe 297). Her power is concentrated in a sharp and bright “line”, which is at odds with the inky “curling tide”. The “pale orb” ushers in an unpredictable flow of syllables, couplets, and a triplet: 

    Or the Moon’s pale orb appear,
    Throwing her line of radiance wide,
    Far o’er the lightly-curling tide,
    That seems the yellow sands to chide. (Radcliffe 297)

    The unbalanced succession of ‘-ide’ rhymes speaks to wildness in nature. The water commanded by the gravitational force of the moon “chides”, or rather “scolds” the sand, suggestive of raising a child (Johnson 365-6). Radcliffe gives the impression that the guiding hand of the maternal Moon shapes the coast, but this mother figure is not necessarily a gentle force. Her “chiding” juxtaposes the sweep of Meek Twilight’s “shadows” over the landscape. However, the final disruption of the scene comes not from the stars, Moon, or shadowy female figures who have established a silence, but from the distant activities of sailors and oars on the surface of the water. These sounds, which ride the “dying wave,” hail in a masculine gothic presence, immiscible with the evening space (Milbank 147, Passey 194).

    Like Radcliffe’s poetry, ecocriticism remains an under-researched area in Plath’s work, with only a handful of critics, such as Tracy Brain, Scott Knickerbocker, and Irena Ragaišienė, engaging with the ecological aspects of her writings. The figure of the Moon in Plath’s “The Moon and the Yew Tree” challenges the essentialist link between women and nature. Plath wrote the poem in October 1961 in Devon. She reflects on a tree growing next to a churchyard, visible from her office window. The material existence of the tree that still stands in the village of North Tawton highlights that without the natural tree, there are no “trees of the mind” that dominate the speaker’s imagination (Plath 172). “The Moon and the Yew Tree” not only rejects the essentialist view of ‘Mother Nature’ but removes the dominant structure of patriarchy altogether. The four seven-line stanzas are characterised by gothic imagery and isolation. In this ambiguous, feminised landscape, the Yew appears as a death-tree, and the Moon represents the antithesis of the nurturing Christian mother. Christina Britzolakis argues that Plath “inverts Romantic lunar symbolism and refuses empathetic identification” (126). Other critics like Judith Kroll noted the influence of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess in Plath’s Moon-Muse, particularly the Moon as a Triple Goddess, such as Hecate (Kroll 44).

    The use of the female pronoun personifies the Moon and singles it out as the only living subject. The Moon “is bald and wild. / And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence” (Plath 173). Here, Plath portrays the Moon as a violent supernatural entity that humans cannot control. Escaping from a male-dominated society symbolised by the physical presence of the church, the speaker desires the ambiguous maternal Moon and the ominous presence of the yew tree. The poem contrasts the Christian religious setting of the churchyard with a pagan Moon-mother, which challenges anthropocentric views of nature: “The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. / Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. / How I would like to believe in tenderness –––” (Plath 173). Here, the Moon signifies the freedom of nature as she’ releases’ the flying creatures into the night. The speaker longs for a mutually respectful and intimate connection, similar to what she perceives to be between the Moon and nature. She questions the legitimacy of the Christian mother figure and prefers the non-hierarchical and authentic maternalism of the Moon, suggesting an ecofeminist reading of the human and nonhuman relationship.

    In Radcliffe and Plath’s poems, the “pale orb” or “White as a knuckle” face of the Moon represents an empowered female force in a gothicised landscape. Although these poets are part of different literary movements, both use a maternal Moon figure to symbolise a challenge to patriarchal structures. Radcliffe achieves this through an environment under female control, where the Moon relights and reshapes the darkened earth. On the other hand, Plath expresses an interest in nature without a dominant human presence, counters the simplicity of a ‘motherly’ Mother Nature, and presents the ambiguous Moon and the deathly Yew as independent entities.

    Works Cited:

    Brain, Tracy. The Other Sylvia Plath. Harlow: Longman, 2001.

    Britzolakis, Christina. “‘Gothic Subjectivity’.” Sylvia Plath. Edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2007. 115-146.

    Hitt, Christopher. “Ecocriticism and the Long Eighteenth Century.” College Literature, vol. 31, no. 3, 2004, pp. 123–47, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25115211. Accessed 19 Apr. 2022.

    Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language: In Which the Words Are Deduced from Their Originals, and Illustrated in Their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers. To Which Are Prefixed, A History of the Language, and An English Grammar. 3rd ed., vol. 1, London: Various, 1765, https://link-gale-com.liverpool.idm.oclc.org/apps/doc/CB0131375552/GDCS?u=livuni&sid=bookmark-GDCS&xid=4e749f2d&pg=365.

    Knickerbocker, K. ““Bodied Forth in Words”: Sylvia Plath’s Ecopoetics.” College Literature 36.3 (2009): 1-27.

    Kroll, Judith. Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2007.

    Milbank, Alison. “Milton, Melancholy and the Sublime in the ‘Female’ Gothic from Radcliffe to Le Fanu.” Women’s Writing, vol. 1, no. 2, 1994, pp. 143–60.

    Passey, Joan. “Sound and Silence: The Aesthetics of the Auditory in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe.” Horror Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, Oct. 2016, pp. 189–204, doi:10.1386/host.7.2.189_1.

    Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Edited by Ted Hughes. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.

    Radcliffe, Ann. The Romance of the Forest. Edited by Chloe Chard, Oxford University Press, 2009.

    Ragaišienė, I. “‘I am not a Tree with my Root in the Soil’: Ecofeminist Revisions of the Tree/Root Dialectics in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry.” Journal of Ecocriticism 1.2 (2009): 31-41.

    Stabler, Jane, ‘Ann Radcliffe’s Poetry: The Poetics of Refrain and Inventory’, in Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, ed. by Angela Wright and Dale Townshend (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 185–202 <https://doi.org/DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139507448.015>

    Authors:

    Dorka Tamás has submitted her PhD thesis at the University of Exeter, which explores the supernatural themes in Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Her research interest includes literary representations of magic and witchcraft and the relationship between the natural environment and supernatural subthemes across literature and culture.

    Roslyn Irving is a PhD candidate co-supervised by the University of Liverpool and XJTLU. Her research centres on Ann Radcliffe’s third novel, The Romance of the Forest and the author’s eighteenth-century socio-political environment.

  • Αρκαδία, Here We Go Again: A Journey from ‘Pastoral’ to ‘Post-Pastoral’. And Beyond.

    Αρκαδία, Here We Go Again: A Journey from ‘Pastoral’ to ‘Post-Pastoral’. And Beyond.

    Image by Judith Prins on Unsplash

    “Small pleasures must correct great tragedies”

    V. Sackville-West, The Garden, 1946

    It has not been long since I first decided to devote (at least) three years of my life to the study of pastoral poetry. I remember that I was reading The Land (1926), the delightful – and often disregarded – poem by Vita Sackville-West (1892 – 1962) when I started pondering what was so intriguing about the rural world, which she described so elegantly through her verses.

    In my hand was a 1928 reprint of the original, a yellow stained booklet that smelled like a mixture of camphor and tobacco. The perfect condition for a book of pastoral poems, I thought, considering the démodé aura that often accompanies this subject in and out of academia. Barrell and Bull have put it quite clearly in the preface of their seminal pastoral poetry anthology: the pastoral primarily works “to decorate the shelves of tasteful cottages [and] to furnish nostalgia” (Barrell & Bull 1974, 432).

    Often referred to as bucolic and idealized, the pastoral has also usually been associated with the idea of enhancing pleasant feelings, inspiring quietness and ensuring tranquility in its readers. This conviction is so rooted in Western culture that the notion of the pastoral locus amoenus, the pleasant place par excellence, has made the concept of the ‘environment’ overlap with the visual legacy of a golden (c)age pastoral idyll. The result is evident in the fact that thinking of ‘nature’ as a pristine, virgin natural landscape still dominates the contemporary ‘environmental imagination’, as Lawrence Buell would say. Alan Ruff has effectively expressed the sense of innate familiarity of the Western world with the pastoral traditional landscape by saying that it seems as if “we have all dwelt in Arcadia” (Ruff 2015, 1). This awareness not only contributes to highlighting the extent of this idea in our culture, but it should also become, I suggest, a warning about the necessity of approaching such a perpetuating narrative in a more critical way, especially when we live in a time called the Anthropocene.

    Since I delved into the reading phase of my PhD, I soon realized that the pastoral was much more than sheep and shepherds. Likewise, my escapist perspectives towards a peaceful, Edenic universe inhabited by herds grazing in boundless meadows abruptly shifted when I understood how early ecocritics had tackled this topic. By sweeping away the widespread idea of the pastoral as a (mere) nostalgic retreat to an idealized natural setting, the “mature environmental aesthetics” (Buell 1995, 32) that appeared in the 90s promoted a revisionist stance (Clark 2011, xiii) which, hand-in-hand with a critical reconceptualization of ‘nature’ as a complex, intricate net of human and nonhuman entities, has led the pastoral to be regarded along a similar trajectory. Taking a famous line from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, I would say that that was the very moment when “everything began to change” (1964, 9) in pastoral theory. Not only have notions such as the human-nonhuman continuum (Massumi 2002), intra-action (Barad 2007), and mesh (Morton 2010) led the pastoral to become a fertile terrain from which to dig up valuable considerations about the human-nonhuman relationship; but the hermeneutical complexity advocated by the Environmental Humanities has also contributed to eroding the equation of the pastoral with “any literature that describes the country with an implicit or explicit contrast to the urban” (Gifford 1999, 2).

    The shift in my perspective about the pastoral naturally allowed for an evolution in the way I approached Sackville-West’s poem. Suddenly, from the seductive verses that had titillated my escapist impulses, an array of surprising narratives started exploding from the text, which transferred my attention from the fashion of pastoral clichés, to the issues of human and nonhuman relationality that they entail. The overlooked classical poem, which caused the writer to be remembered primarily as a traditionalist, conservative author, suddenly became visible as the intersection of multiple discourses populating current ecocritical scholarship: in her verses, there are not only flocks and shepherds, but also the features of their entanglement; not only the sentimental celebration of plants and flowers, but also references to how these entities interact with the human, among many other ‘but also(s)’ that offer to this poem fresh flavor. In alignment with what Gifford described when he introduced the notion of “post-pastoral”, my perspective had departed “beyond the closed circuit of pastoral and antipastoral to achieve a vision of an integrated natural world that includes the human” (1999, 148).

    And then came that moment, a mix of epiphany and frustration, when young scholars realize that their brilliant ideas are, in fact, not that brilliant – or original – considering that an array of critics have already developed similar considerations in the field of pastoral theory. In the last three decades, a number of publications on the pastoral have sealed a point of no return in this scholarship. Neologisms including ‘toxic pastoral’ (Farrier 2014), ‘necropastoral’ (McSweeney 2015), and ‘dark pastoral’ (Sullivan 2017) have transformed the subject into an effective navigation tool for exploring human-nonhuman entanglement in the many pastoral manifestations that Western culture presents. Instead of conceiving widespread interest as a negative aspect, one should reflect on how it represents further proof of the relevance of the topic in today’s world: the time has come to pull our pastoral poetry books off the shelves of our cottages, dust off their covers, and read – and re-read – them again, while shedding light on how they can contribute to tackling the challenges of our epoch. That, I think, is what it is (also) like to study pastoral today.

    The idea that the pastoral represents “a species of cultural equipment that western thought has for more than two millennia been unable to do without” (Buell 1995, 32) helps us understand the extent of this subject over time, as well as the importance of regarding the pastoral as an ongoing cultural narrative in need of ever-renewing critical perspectives. And while its gradual resurfacing in critical theory during the last years has gone hand in hand with its reappearing on the shelves of our stores (Corey and Waldrep 2012), many other new versions of pastoral are visible in a variety of cultural contexts, including advertisements, movies, videogames, and even blogs, as the title Arcadiana reveals.

    Hence, one can conclude that not only “have [we] all dwelt in Arcadia” (Ruff 2015, 1), but also that Arcadia is still here, and together with us it has entered the Anthropocene. Here we go again, after more than two millennia, relying on such ancestral imagery to reflect on our relationship with the environment. Perhaps Vita Sackville-West was aware of this when, during WWII, she first drafted the opening of her celebrated poems in The Garden (1946): “Small pleasures must correct great tragedies”, a line that, in 2020, reveals some unexpected ecocritical, modern vibes that resonate with the urgencies of current ecological – among many others – crises.

    Works Cited

    Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

    Barrell, John and John Bull. The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse. Middlesex, England; New York: Penguin Books, 1982 [1974].

    Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham. Duke University Press Books, 2009.

    Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University PressHarvard University Press, 1995.

    —. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.

    Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring, Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1964.

    Clark, Timothy. 2011. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Corey, Joshua, and G. C. Waldrep. The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 2012.

    Farrier, David. “Toxic Pastoral: Comic Failure and Ironic Nostalgia in Contemporary British Environmental Theater.” Journal of Ecocriticism, 6.2, 2014, pp. 1-15.

    Gifford, Terry. Pastoral, London: Routledge, 1999.

    Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movenment, Affect, Sensation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

    McSweeney, Joyelle. The Necropastoral. Poetry, Media, Occults, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015.

    Ruff, Allan R. Arcadian Visions: Pastoral Influences on Poetry, Painting and the Design of Landscape, Oxford: Windgather Press, 2015.

    Sackville-West, Vita. The Land. London: W. Heinemann, 1926.

    —., The Garden. London: Michael Joseph, 1946.

    Sullivan, Heather I. (2014). “Dirty traffic and the dark pastoral in the Anthropocene: Narrating refugees, deforestation, radiation, and melting ice”. Literatur für Leser, 14, 83-97. Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang.

    Author: Stefano Rozzoni is a PhD Candidate in “Transcultural Studies in Humanities” at the University of Bergamo, Italy, in cotutelle with Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Germany, where he is a member of the International PhD Programme “Literary and Cultural Studies”, and an affiliate member of the European doctoral program PhdNet. He is also a member of the Research Group “Oikos. Ecology and the Study of Culture” at the Graduate Center for the Study of Culture (GCSC) in Gießen. His research interests focus on Ecocriticism, Posthuman Studies, English Modernism, Virginia Woolf, and pastoral poetry. His dissertation project proposes an ecocritical reading of English Georgian pastoral poetry (1911-1926) for a critical reevaluation of this trend.

  • “Where are you from?” Making Ecopoetic Homes

    “Where are you from?” Making Ecopoetic Homes

    Image by Corina Rainer on Unsplash

    From nowhere, I’m from nowhere, I fell down when the pinnacle of the TV tower pierced a grey cloud and unfolded on the bony grounds, unfolded over two snails and a plastic film

    From the street crossing the forest, I ran away, mouths full of wild bear leek, feet furry in moss green pools, margins so damp, so wound, I jumped over the crying sirens into rubber gloves

    From the volcanic earth, I ate truffle and mussels at the rim of champagne and lava bread, toes blackened in the richness how my liver bubbled in the heat

    From the tiny blood seed that travels through arteries that travels through vessels that travels through fat cells that clings on to water that enters the plumbing

    From the bar where I had three gins and whisky and vodka, everything, careful not to step into any stereotypes here, to drink myself into global anaesthesia

    From other places, which I left behind now to PET sculptured trees and pretend I speak / don’t speak / listen to everything, pretend we all love and laugh and laaf all the same, pretend we all don’t do it similarly / differently, holy fck, does it really

    Matter

    We’re moving. Blood streams through our bodies. Breath moves in and out, connecting us to the surroundings. Every day, the earth turns around its axis, around the sun, and is circled by the moon. The universe is in motion.  Why is there such a fixation on permanence, on static localities, on being based, rooted somewhere? Where are you from? Surely not from here?

    In and outside geographical Europe, borders are thickening, passport photos are scrutinised.
    Racist attitudes have always been spreading quicker than COVID-19. We stand together – until we run out of toilet paper. Near where I’m currently, partly at home, the chef of a renowned restaurant has recently proclaimed that customers of Chinese descent are no longer welcome. My home, my rules. Solidarity is a nice enough word, but scapegoating is much easier. You look/speak/smell differently… But where are you from originally?

    People have been on the move, physically, for centuries. With airplanes, high speed trains, Uber, and city scooters, it’s possible to move quicker than ever now. This is only true for some, though, and it happens at the cost of others; others including the more-than-human world that gets squashed by carbon footprints. Still, all of us are moving, not with the same speed, but we are; on foot, in wheelchairs, in strollers, in cars, in boats, in the arms of someone else.[i] From the world inside the womb to the world outside the womb, from the bathroom to the living room, from there to here. The anthropologist Tim Ingold suggests that human existence “unfolds not in places but along paths”, and that places are knots, where different paths meet and entwine: Places are meeting places.[ii] They weave together different experiences and perspectives, stories, and memories. They are not flat and unified but dense and multi-layered; not static but stretching in different directions, connecting them.
    Home, as an absolute singular, becomes a problem when it closes off place as an exclusive territory separating here from there and them from us. Collapsed with identity, place is pictured as a homogenous entity, when it is actually manifold and encompasses more variances than the word skin-coloured. People experience place differently, depending on age, gender, ethnicity; social, economic, and cultural context. Place is a multiplicity, it contains many different places. No matter how many borders and fences and walls, places are connected by global exchanges of air streams, weather, money flows, power lines, pipelines, toxins. Bodies are connected by oxygen, water, microplastics, bacteria, and viruses. In the past six or so months, depending where you currently are, the corona virus and its associated region-specific policies have once again unearthed and amplified the disparities that exist across continents, countries, cities, across schools and families. It’s easier to #stay at home if home is a sheltered location with a roof and functional heating/air con, Netflix, delivery service, and internet. Home is where the Wi-Fi connects automatically. If you can connect, Zoom in on the difference between a shared living room and living in a shared room. Home is imbued with new meanings; the place where five siblings sleep in one bed, where no one hears the bruises, where one is alone for 24/7, hell, or refuge. Beyond the European land frontiers, the paths of many people are cut before they can intertwine with others here. Their lost lives are less often featured in the daily news. Are you trying to take away something that’s mine, my home?


    I turn to ecopoetics as practice of making (poiesis) relationships across boundaries, with a shared home, the oikos, the planet earth. I want to think we not as an extension of I but as a chance for welcoming meeting places with the other, unknown paths. Far too often, the “where are you from?” question assumes fixed categories. Where do you belong? Which toilet door do you use? What religion do you practice? Which Hogwarts house are you in?
    As an interdisciplinary edge, a “passionate, a necessary interest”, as Evelyn Reilly and Marcella Durand phrase it, ecopoetics challenges boundaries and hierarchies. [iii] It can be poetry, it can be art, it can be something else entirely. A mode that acknowledges the masked ramifications of an “everything is interconnected” mantra. I want to think place in plural and home as a verb, as an active making of a here for all its participants. If paths are moving, if they are in process, they can be shaped and entwined differently. They can be changed. We all are from planet earth, “the only home our species currently knows”, one that has been moved to the brink of becoming uninhabitable for humans.[iv] Where do we want to go from there, from here?

    [i] Pointing out the persisting inequalities (“power-geometries”) along a global-local axis, the geographer Doreen Massey outlines how control over mobility both reflects and reinforces power: in-between all the movement of faxes, e-mails, financial flows, satellites, airplanes, ships and trains, lorries, cars, buses, “somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, there’s a woman on foot who still spends hours a day collecting water.” “A Global Sense of Place”, Marxism Today (1991), p. 25.  

    [ii] Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 148-149.

    [iii] See “Spatial Interpretations: Ways of Reading Ecological Poetry,” p. 201 and “Eco-Noise and the Flux of Lux,” p. 260 in Eco Language Reader, ed. Brenda Iijima (Brooklyn: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs and Nightboat, 2010).

    [iv] Jonathan Skinner, “What is Ecopoetics?”Jacket 2 (2011).

    Author: Katharina Maria Kalinowski is a bilingual poet and EUmanities fellow at the Universities of Cologne and Kent. Her creative-critical PhD project focuses on ecopoetics, the Anthropocene, and expanded forms of translation. Her publications include Magma, Epizootics, and the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.