Forrest Gander has a very powerful poem, "Line of Descent." To say that it is rooted in the landscape is inadequate. Instead I would say that it rises out of and falls into the landscape, as it captures a moment of immense beauty and wrenching danger.
Ecopoetry is not nature poetry. It has little connection to the pastoral, but it does honor landscape. Ecopoetry is environmental, which expresses a shift from anthropomorphic to earth-centric perspectives. It aims to shift the consciousness away from human dominion over animals and the earth toward a more comprehensive awareness of the birthing, growing, diminishing and dying world that we participate in. It acknowledges the immensity of our surrounding landscape. It yields an understanding of resilience and fragility as our environment is altered by extraction, contaminants, and unsustainable practices. It gives us the ability to vision survival, renewal, and honoring of the waters, the plants, the animals and birds, the fields and slopes, the stones and the air. We eat it and we breathe it. Our environment enters, changes, leaves, and still remains in our bodies.
Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert and lives in California. With degrees in geology and literature, he taught at Harvard University and Brown University. Gander is a translator and the author of many books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Besides the Pulitzer Prize, he’s received the Best Translated Book Award and fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, Whiting, and United States Artists Foundations.
In The Creative Independent interview, he says
...in Arkansas, where I lived in a very rural place, if you’re walking with someone down a dirt road with a hump in it, you’re separated, there’s a caesura between you. You’re looking at them, but behind them is a screen of trees, and behind the trees there’s a mountain, and those ways of conversing and seeing I think do affect our language.
Heiddeger has that nice short little book called Conversation on a Country Path where he talks about how walking with someone, you literally are sharing a vision and the pace, and that kind of walking changes if you’re in the city or if you’re in the country. I think an attentiveness to the way that place influences and is a part of human perception is something that we haven’t always taken into account.
There’s the tradition of Sangam poetry in southern India, which means convergence. And one of the two poetries that developed from that, called Akam, is this big body of poetry in which it was considered not only unethical, but really impossible to write about human subjectivity or your feelings without taking into account the world immediately around you, which was influencing you in all sorts of ways that you might not have wanted to admit.
The writing that we need is writing that opens our minds and makes us value the ground beneath our feet. Ganders' "Line of Descent" creates that moment between a child and his father and life and death in that last line. It suspends us -- we don't know the outcome.
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