This chapter argues that ‘address’, one of poetry’s most fundamental — if sometimes overlooked – dimensions, offers insights into the concepts, affects, and scales surrounding our planet’s intertwined economic and ecological systems. Analysing work by Jorie Graham, Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover, Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Stephen Collis and Adam Dickinson, it explores poems that address a variety of subjects and entities. These include poems addressed to future generations, to geographical places, to online communities, to the human species, to the planet, and from the non-human to the human. In doing so, I show how understandings of globalization and the Anthropocene have caused a recalibration in the form as well as subject-matter of environmentally engaged poetry. This has implications for how we negotiate questions of climate change, temporality, extinction, technology, activism and agency. Now, more than ever, it matters not only what poems speak about, or even who (or what) is speaking, but to whom (or to what) they speak

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.