“Ecopoetics trades an Emersonian or Thoreauvian attention to sublime, untouched nature for sites of extraction, chemical spills, and other manifestations of ecosystemic violence.”
–Jean Thomas Tremblay
In 1990 Jack Collom published his long documentary ecopoem entitled “Passages” about the passenger pigeon, once so numerous “they blotted out the sun,” and their extinction at the hands of humans. From the first documented sighting in North America to the last, he gathers dozens of eyewitness accounts and juxtaposes their language in a dramatic, tragic poem that was best heard as performance. It is a groundbreaking work that influenced a generation of ecopoets afterward.
During the late 20th century, aware of the destruction, aware of the power of poetry to witness and to explore the boundaries of language, there was still some hope. Now more than a generation later, in an era where a climate change denier was elected president of the United States, that hope of poetry as a force for environmental recovery is largely gone. What is the role of ecopoetics now?
In her sixth book, Rewild, Meredith Stricker’s spare volume of equally spare and readable poems contrast their messy subject matter, the mess left in the wake of industry, capitalism, and war. Rilke an antisemite? Heroes will be exposed. Opportunities to shop? As numerous as the stars. The first atomic explosion in New Mexico? A witnessing general accuses poets of failure to witness the beauty of it. A newspaper in January? Perished children beside an ad for a silver cocktail shaker. The poet’s incisive attention is unwavering. Her wide-ranging documentation takes a page from Jack Collom’s treatise that “poetry is everywhere.”
“The Thin Line” opens with:
Every morning opening the newspaper, I am faced
with the thin line that divides disaster and deprivation
from a world of luminous wealth …
The poet reminds us what perhaps we have stopped seeing in our privileged everyday routines. An ad for luxury goods, that silver cocktail shaker, beside an article about the deaths of children in Lagos, fleeing a weapons factory explosion, laying in a canal. Then the reporter’s poetic detail, lifted from the article itself:
Parts of the canal were blanketed with hyacinths.
A woman’s pink shoe, a baby’s slipper and a bright orange
And red skirt floated among the plants.
The poem worries that thin line and ends “We are its eyes.” Could we be anything else, when bad actors have taken over? Is the poetic endeavor of witnessing itself an act of hope?
In “Human Words” Stricker wryly questions the images she has gathered, the small and forgotten weighed beside the aspirational status symbol again:
is heaven a chain link fence for a luxury car lot
or the crook of a sleeping woman’s arm …
what would you leave out,what scrap heaped
holy, outmoded wreckage, what useless, unloved
pile of bones
and skin
doesn’t belong
The lines are linguistically delightful, in contrast to their dark imagery and unpunctuated questions. For my generation, the Gen X who witnessed the dawn of the internet and An Inconvenient Truth, they stopped being questions that could ever be answered. It is an uncomfortable place, this in between, these philosophical choices that are not choices. We will morally struggle with passing over the drunk in the doorway, then do our work at university or not-for-profit, and be OK with driving a nice car. Is it enough? We all are indicted. There is no way out of it.
As is my nature, I searched for redemption, hope, or variation in tone or subject matter, and could not find much relief. The philosophical and the ecopoetic are on a singular mission, and it can only end one way. Still the parting salvo is a shock to the system. Stricker takes a long quote by John Berger, asserting that the represented image is lie, and the material world shall get a chance at revolt:
imagine an uprising of the represented
The imagining is not just imagining an empty lot taken over by dying weeds, it is a place where the act of writing, or any artmaking, itself has been obliterated. It produced a state of vertigo in me, a reader and a writer, someone with the luxury of living in the represented world, of creating it. Same is true for the author, and that is a form courageous questioning with its own dark and playful irony.
Chosen by Maggie Smith for the Dorset Prize for Poetry, Rewild is unlike anything I have ever read in its singularity of purpose. Its title is the same as the name of a local organization in my county that encourages people to replace their lawns with native pollinator plants, a small hopeful act. The ecologist Doug Tallamy writes that if all people (with the privilege to have one) rewilded their yards, it would be the largest national park in the country. Stricker sees this wild place coming either way. Shouldn’t we have a hand in making beauty in it, like Joan Mitchel’s cobalt cover art, or in the gorgeous “Undertow,” addressed to us:
give me hidden in ragged cloak, an island, an indigent a “you” without proof Rewild, by Meredith Strickler. North Adams, Massachusetts: Tupelo Press, September 2022. 86 pages. $21.95, paper. Karin Falcone Krieger’s recent reviews, stories and poems are in The Decadent Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Lit Pub, Santa Fe Writers’ Project, The Literary Review, Tofu Ink Arts Press, Viewless Wings Podcast, and in the anthology, A physical book which compiles conceptual books (Partial Press, 2022). She taught writing as an adjunct instructor for 20 years, and was an adjunct union representative. She earned an MFA at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa, and published the zine artICHOKE from 1989-2008. She occasionally types poems made to order in public space. When not writing, she is probably organic gardening or cooking. Links to these and other projects can be seen at karinfalconekrieger.com. Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
an alternate reading, the other story
back behind clouds
a wild animal, deep spring, a solace …
without evidence
unseen across these words
Heavy Feather Review 