Ecopoetry and Environments

Ecopoetry is a subgenre in poetry that has been gaining popularity over the last decade where poetry has a strong connection to the environment. The poet chooses to give an ecological message throughout his poem while also intertwining it with his emotions. Ecopoetry has to be descriptive and it has to fully connect to the environment if the poet chooses to write ecopoetry. Anything connecting to the environment should be fully shown throughout the poem to allow the reader to visualize what is happening as much as possible. Poets also merge the environment into their poems to relate it to some personal experiences that they have gone through. An example of this is from the poem On a Day, In the World by Brenda Hilman where Hilman uses ecopoetry in her poem to connect to her feelings. She relates her feelings to the humans around her environment “We had a grief we didn’t understand while standing at the edge of some low scrub hills as if humans were extra or already gone” (Hillman 1). Hilman connects her grief to her environment where she discusses the low scrubs and how it represents the humans around her. This allows her to paint a picture within the reader’s minds in an effort to show her grief. Ecopoetry is beginning to be used by more poets because it gives the author a platform to express their feelings within their poems by connecting it to nature which in result allows the readers to better understand the ideas that the poet wants to convey. 

Multiple factors play into what makes a good example of ecopoetry, According to the article “Why Poetry” the author John Shoptaw states that ecopoetry has to “ be about the nonhuman natural world-wholly or partly, in some way or another, but really and not figuratively” (Shoptaw, 395). The poem that Brenda Hilman wrote has all the features that would make her poem ecopoetry because she uses the environment around her within her poem to produce a feeling that she wants to convey to the audience. Hillman does this throughout her poem and does not use the technique figuratively as some other poems do. An example of her doing this in her poem is when she starts to talk about love and connects it to her love and emotions “beyond them love, as of a great life going like fast creatures peeling back marked seeds, gold-brown integuments the color time will be when we are gone” (Hillman, 4). This quote displays a strong connection that Hillman made between her love and seeds because she uses the peeling seeds to represent how love fades. This is how she used her environment within her poems and formed it into an ecological poem. 

Another way that shows that the poem On a Day, In the World is an ecopoem is that the author begins describing her emotions while using different forms of figurative language to connect it to nature and her environment to construct a poem. Instead of breaking down her raw emotions, she uses her words to allow her reader an opportunity to visualize and form a mental image of what she feels like by using words that allow them to be with nature around her. This poem by Hillman represents a clear example of what ecopoetry is and that could be seen when Hillman connects to her environment within her poem in the third stanza. She writes “when I think of time on earth, I feel the angle of gray minutes entering the medium days yet not “built-up”:: our work together: groups, the willing burden of an old belief ” (Hillman 3). Hillman brought in the environment when she discussed her “time on earth” and “gray minutes entering the medium days” which to me meant that time was passing very slowly and that her surroundings were dull. Hillman did this by also talking about the things that built up to those emotions and how it connects to the earth. 

The essay titled Nature and Panic by C.K. Williams had discussed the beginning of art and how nature played a role in altering the work that us humans produce and created over time. Williams stated in the essay “The climate, as I mentioned, often dramatically changed in those epochs. There were long droughts and, at some point, the almost total dying off of reindeer, which had been humans’ primary food-with what precise consequences we probably will never know, beyond that humans somehow adapted, and survived” (Williams 2). This shows a relationship to nature because it highlights how artworks such as drawings or poems are molded into the way they are because of the environments around them that constantly change which imposes new emotions and thoughts within the author. Williams, later on, provided an example of ecopoetry where he said “The earth-land and sea-is black with soot and ash, utterly silent except for the wind, some mysterious intermittent explosions, and the several words, most of the threats, humans beings till manage to pass between them, before, in many cases, they devour each other” (Williams 3). This quote from the essay supports Hillman’s poem being ecopoetry because of the strong similarities that they both hold since they both use descriptive words to describe their surrounding environments but they also relate it back to their sensations and the issues they want to see be resolved. 

Ecopoetry is a fusion between someone’s grasp on their surroundings along with the challenges that they want to overcome. The article Why Ecopoetry by John Shoptaw had stated “This is not to say that ecopoetry is merely nature served uncooked on the literal page. In Redstart: An Ecological Poetics, Forrest Gander declares himself ‘less interested in ‘nature poetry’-where nature features as theme-than in poetry that investigates-both theoretically and formally-the relationship between nature and culture, language and perception”(Shoptaw 395). This quote illustrates how ecopoetry is not centered around the literal definition of nature but instead means that ecopoetry incorporates nature by using figurative language to describe the culture and emotions that revolve around the life of the author. This is seen back in the poem I chose by Hillman because she uses metaphors and personification to highlight the relationships between her grief and “low scrubs”. That instance in the poem On a Day In the World supports the claim by Shoptaw in his article Why Ecopoetry because Hillman executes her ideas and feelings without actually discussing the literal meaning of nature but instead finding a middle ground where Hillman is allowed to discuss nature’s presence within her feelings. 

In conclusion, the poem “On a Day, In the World” by Brenda Hilman is a good example of the use of ecopoetry because of how nature was absorbed into her writing. These authors successfully used ecopoetry in their writing to describe their environments around them in order to connect and explain their emotions differently. By doing this we were able to successfully use descriptive words without constantly using figurative language. Finally, ecopoetry is now becoming popular in modern poems as it’s an easy method for poets to use in their writing, poems like “On a Day, In the World, have shown other poets how flexible it is to merge ecopoetry into their writing.

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