Chapter 3 - Poetry

Summary

This chapter examines how contemporary poetry is responding to the cognitive, representational and ethical questions of the Anthropocene. Rather than focusing on work that extends the traditions of nature poetry, it examines an alternative legacy: that of post-war ‘open-field’ poetics as developed by writers such as William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. Through techniques such as the decentring of the lyric persona, collage and spatial composition, as well as emphasis on the poem as a field of energies and exchanges, open-field poetics provokes a rethinking of relations between figure and ground, subject and object, human and non-human entities. After outlining ‘open-field’ poetics and its implications for ecological thinking, the chapter discusses poems by three contemporary writers – Ed Roberson, Evelyn Reilly and Stephen Collis. These poets rework open-field poetics in the context of ecological crisis.