“A Touch of Recognition”: Wetlands in Australian Poetry

Abstract

Ecopoetry—the practice of writing, reading, and critiquing poetic works that thematize the natural world and issues of sustainability—is hampered by its reliance on the terms “environment” and “nature” as undifferentiated catch-alls. As typically invoked, the terms tend to cover ecology, nonhuman life, oceans, rivers, rocks, animals, plants, forests, fungi, and so on without distinguishing sufficiently between these diverse animate and inanimate agents in the context of their material interrelationships. In this regard, J. Scott Bryson, for instance, characterizes ecopoetry as a poetic mode that “while adhering to certain conventions of traditional nature poetry, advances beyond that tradition and takes on distinctly contemporary problems and issues” (2). Leonard Scigaj, moreover, highlights ecopoetry’s prevailing emphasis on “human cooperation with nature conceived as a dynamic, interrelated series of cyclic feedback systems” (37). These assessments and others, however, often skim over the “specific” forms of “environment” and “nature” that engender the making—the poiesis—of “specific” forms of poetic expression. Nonetheless, with the emergence of critical studies of animals (McCance) and plants (Gagliano, Ryan, and Vieira)—coupled with theoretical advances in the geo-humanities (Dear et al.) and, more broadly, the environmental humanities (Emmett and Nye)—a movement toward greater more-than-human heterogenization within ecopoetic scholarship is slowly evolving. Encouraging precision beyond “environment” and “nature” as blunt descriptors, these interdisciplinary frameworks have compelled recent formulations of zoopoetics (Moe), phytopoetics (Ryan Plants), and bioregionalist poetics (Lynch, Glotfelty, and Armbruster) that aim to particularize the natural phenomena and subjects narrativized in poetry.