This chapter begins by scrutinizing The Dharma Bums through the lens of the Romantic/Transcendentalist models that inspired the novel’s re-enchantment of nonhuman material creation. A second part turns to Kerouac’s haiku and The Scripture of the Golden Eternity to show how the concept of Buddhist “Emptiness” considerably enriches his Romantic/Transcendentalist sense of “field-being.” This section argues that the embeddedness of the human mind in the nonhuman combined with a serene acceptance of the latter’s elusiveness actually constitutes one of Kerouac’s important, if paradoxical, contributions to an understanding of the web of environmental continuities. By contrast, the third part moves from Kerouac’s ecospiritual holism to his deep-seated ecophobia: as found in “Desolation Journal,” Desolation Angels, and “Desolation Blues.” A fourth anddiscusses how, despite his environmental angst, Kerouac nevertheless experiments considerably at the level of ecopoetics, probing into a wildness of form that compensates, on the one hand, for the fear that untamed nature instills in his fiction and poetry, and on the other, for the limited presence of any wilderness in his city-inspired texts.

This chapter argues that the nocturne poem, a quintessential genre of the 1890s, attunes itself to the decade’s changing relationship between the human and the natural, the aesthetic and the artificial, with some poets representing an urban, bright, smoky night sky and others presenting visions that blur city lights and starlight, or surreal representations of forests. This chapter approaches the nocturne as a transnational genre, treating British poets Mathilde Blind and Arthur Symons, alongside E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), an Indigenous Canadian poet, and Yone Noguchi, a Japanese poet who launched his career writing poetry in English in San Francisco in the 1890s. Noguchi and Johnson both play into European stereotypes that writers of color offer a premodern mystique; yet both also resist that stereotype by fully engaging with the artistic and poetic trends of the 1890s in their nocturnes and by offering alternative visions of modernity. The nocturne illuminates how transnational poets understood the night sky in the wake of industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels.

This chapter explores transformations in the creation, transmission, and reception of Latin American poetries after 1980. One of these is ecopoetics, stimulated by shifting perspectives of both readers and writers living in a world in which we are increasingly aware of environmental change. Authors include Mexican Homero Arjidjis, Brazilian Astrid Cabral, Nicaraguan Esthela Calderón-Chevez, and Mapuche Elicure Chihauilaf. Other changes have to do with varying means of circulating poetry: through performance or electronic or multimedia presentations that expand what can be included in a poem, how it is constructed, and how it is received. We see this in Chilean Luis Díaz-Correa’s clickable poems, Argentine Belén Gache’s digital poems, and Uruguayans Juan Angel Italiano and Luis Bravo’s performative poetry. There are also contemporary approaches to reading Latin American poetries. Opening to transcontinental perspectives creates dialogues between North and South in Harris Feinsod’s and Charles Perrone’s approaches. Interdisciplinarity is a key feature of poetry considered in terms of health/illness, and looking at the work of Mexican Claudia Hernández del Valle Arizpe, Chilean Enrique Lihn, and Peruvian Victoria Guerrero Peirano demonstrates how lyric poetry is particularly suited to convey the body–mind collaboration or rebellion of serious illness.

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

Elizabeth Bishop loved Florida, the “state with the prettiest name.” She settled for a time in Key West, on the southernmost archipelago of the continental United States, delighting in the vivid birds and bright fishes of its tropical environment. The shifting seascape of coral islands and submerged reefs resonated with Bishop’s deep sense of contingency and flux. The Keys is a place of hybridity; of silt, shadows, and salvage. Its soft and balmy climate belies a complex and traumatic history of colonial struggle, racial violence, and loss. This chapter explores Bishop’s affective response to and relationship with place through the complex interwoven histories of racial and cultural identity of Southern Florida. It argues that the ‘Bone Key’ became a proving ground for much of the poetry that made up Bishop’s first collection, North & South (1946), shaping and animating the imagined South that forms one of the volume’s poles.

Over many decades, the poetry of Paula Meehan has given a voice to urban (Dublin) working-class experience, and in doing so, to paraphrase Yeats on Synge, expressed a life that had never before found expression in poetry. This is Meehan’s world, yet her world contains so much more too, in poems that encompass Buddhism, environmental concerns, and the classical world. Class consciousness is an intrinsic aspect of Meehan’s artistic vision, rather than a thematic add-on, and critical engagement with her work requires a decisive reorientation of conventional aesthetic categories. A key piece of revisionism present in the poems is Meehan’s critique of domestic space: as against convention, it is often public spaces that are welcoming, where domestic spaces are fraught with tension and violence. To her critique of domestic spaces and class politics, Meehan has notably added in her recent work a sophisticated strain of ecopoetics, taking us beyond human exceptionalism and into a deeper realm of connection with the natural world.

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.

This chapter explores expanded forms of psychoanalytic methods that produce developmental accounts of perception and affect in relation to the external world. It turns to Melanie Klein’s ideas of object relations and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s redirection of Klein’s work through affect theory as particularly fruitful sites for ecocritical theorizations of affect in an era of generalized biospheric crisis. These theories and the associated affects they consider—particularly depression and dread—offer powerful conceptual tools for reading recent poetic representations of the disturbing affects associated with ecological relationality under crisis conditions. The chapter offers extended readings of the poetry of Inger Christensen, Jorie Graham, and Craig Santos Perez as examples of ecopoetics texts that portray the complex ways environmental relations shape subject formation and affective experience in a time of pervasive biospheric transformations.