Judith Rauscher, Ecopoetic Place-Making: Nature and Mobility in Contemporary American Poetry

The planetary poem and ecopoet(h)ics of mobility 1The current proliferation of studies focusing on ecopoetics testifies to the urgency and increasing traction of the term within the vital fields of ecocriticism, planetarity and poetry studies.Its richness, both conceptual and thematic, is best exemplified by the most recent and wide-ranging theoretical and critical overview of the fields in The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics (2023), as well as numerous earlier attempts at exploring and defining ecopoetic practices and their aesthetic diversity.The latter include Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street's Ecopoetry Anthology (2013), Scott Bryson's The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry (2005)), Scott Knickerbocker's Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language (2012), Lynn Keller's Recomposing Ecopoets: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene (2018), Margaret Ronda's Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End (2018), and Kate Rigby's Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonisation (2020).The attraction of ecopoetics is that it successfully fuses experimental ecoethical artistic practices and environmental critique, demonstrating that poetry has always been invested in the questions of nature-culture and human-non-human mobility, as well as in the issues of space, climate, home, community, displacement, environmental justice,