Verge conference -- poetry, art and the environment
 

The annual VERGE conference is coming up in Canada, BC in October—sponsored by Trinity Western University/School of the Arts, Media and Culture—a good place for poets to be as well as artists. This year’s theme is arts and the environment. Here’s a link to the conference schedule and my abstract/presentation (A Strain of the Earth’s Sweet Being: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Vincent van Gogh in Conversation) and others.

If any of you have good books to recommend on ecopoetry I’d appreciate—I’m developing a bibliography. Join us if you’re in the area.

http://www.twu.ca/academics/samc/int...dule-2015.html

I really loved D. R. Goodman's Greed: A Confession (Able Muse Press, 2014). It's full of well-crafted and startlingly original poems featuring nature, particularly birds. (I almost said "about nature," but poems are rarely "about" their subject matter.)

You can find four examples from the book are here, although I like many others better. The last line of "Owls in the City Hills" still blows me away every time, but there's another owl poem in the book that makes my spine tingle from start to finish. And oh, she's got this Petrarchan sonnet, full of off-rhyme and enjambment and a volta in not quite the right place, which contrasts a pigeon's slovenliness with its unexpected ability to see the stars in the daytime (sort of like the unexpected elegance of the Petrarchan form itself, in such a setting); by the end of the poem, the human observer seems the lower lifeform.

As long as I'm plugging Able Muse Press stuff, I may as well take another opportunity to rave about Richard Newman's All the Wasted Beauty of the World. Many of his poems feature nature in an urban setting--messy mulberry trees, possums, overgrown lots, cemeteries--and he finds a lot of genuine, unsentimental beauty among the decay and debris. Brilliant craftsmanship, too, in both formal and free verse.

[Edited to say: On second thought, it would be a pretty big stretch to characterize Richard Newman's entire book as "ecopoetry"; but a good portion of D. R. Goodman's book relates to nature in some way.]

A friend recently introduced me to Orion magazine. It's not a poetry journal, but an environmental magazine that publishes some poems. I don't know that every poet they publish is exclusively or primarily an "ecopoet" (although my initial impression is that that's the case with Teddy Macker, who wrote "The Otters and the Seaweed") but if you check the contributors' bios, you might find the sort of books you're looking for.

https://orionmagazine.org/poetry/

Thanks Chris and Julie--very helpful and I do plan to order Greed

I'm reading Earth Songs -- A Resurgence anthology of contemporary eco-poetry and discovered Resurgence magazine--looks open to poetry and articles on poets--I need to explore the site more but it seems an excellent resource

http://www.resurgence.org/magazine/i...s-of-hope.html

In the preface to The Ecopoetry Anthology, the editors write:
“What we humans disregard, what we fail to know and grasp, is easy to destroy – a mountain top, a coral reef, a forest, a human community. Yet poetry returns us in countless ways to the world of our senses. It can act, in Franz Kafka’s phrase, as “an ice axe to break the frozen sea inside us.” awakening our dulled perceptions and feelings.”