Ecopoetry: The Web That Connects
By Laurel Maxwell, written December 2024
As humans we are part of an interconnected web just like the mycelium that snake underneath the soil. As writers we have found ways to write about this connection we feel to the earth, what makes us pause in delight. We know how to select the right words to write about a bee tumbling inside the lip of a poppy. Writing about nature has gone by different names over the course of history. Today we know it as ecopoetry, or ecopoetics. This form of poetry focuses on how humans interact with the world around them, the observations they make, and the natural world itself. It runs deeper than personifying a tree, it is seeing that tree surrounded by forest and wondering what the forest will look like in 10 or 20 years. Ecopoetry works as a way to understand and untangle our thoughts on how humans can harm something beautiful while simultaneously striving to protect it. It can also serve as a call to action to protect all that is already disappearing.
One of the first poems I fell in love with was Mary Oliver’s Spring Day. The iconic line “what will you do with your one wild and precious life” set something free in my soul. Since reading those words I have slowly gravitated toward poets who use nature to make sense of the world. Over time I found myself writing in the same vein. It wasn’t an intentional change, there was suddenly more to write about as climate catastrophe became front and center in my personal life. Months of extreme smoke kept me indoors during summer, and flooding disrupted daily life in the winter. But ecopoetry can also be a love poem. Writing about the way a hummingbird dips into a flower or a honeysuckle vine tangles in a chain-link fence. How nature is resilient in the face of its own destruction in the way humans are not. Years after a massive fire swept through a state park I returned to visit with my mom and husband. Yes, tree bark was blackened, but there were also tufts of green sprouting above our heads.
Ecopoetry isn’t a new form of poetry, think of those early contemporaries Henry David Thoreau and Walden. It does seem ecopoetry has taken on a sudden sense of urgency as the world tips and spins with an increase in natural disasters. It has heightened our awareness of being on this marble in the universe. In my quest to learn more I searched in the scraps of time before dinner, in a few silent morning moments for poets who were writing now. Isabella Zapatas’ Una Ballena es Un Pais (A Whale is a Country) showed me it was possible to write about ecological concerns in a way free of scientific jargon. I loved the creativity she used to discuss animals in their habitats and her perspective on the way humans interact with them. Wound Is the Origin of Wonder by Maya C. Popa was the second book that shook me awake to what writing to the natural world could look like. What made her work different was that she wrote from the lens of loss, to an environment that is all too quickly disappearing. Mary Oliver is the queen of writing toward what is outside our window from geese to grasshoppers. Maria Popava writes at the intersection of science, the environment and wonder. Rebecca Elson used her background in astronomy to write clearly crafted scientific prose while boldly coming to terms with her diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in Responsibility to Awe. Newer publications that give a nod toward women writers and the environment are Poetry in the Natural World edited by Ada Limon and Leaning Towards the Light, an anthology of poems geared toward gardeners. All these writers are playful and serious while grasping the fragility of humanity.
I didn’t see the turn in my own work toward ecopoetry until I submitted a series of poems for critique. The reader pointed out how often I returned to interweaving actions between humans and the environment. Within this larger theme I was also seeking to gather a sense of self. He gratefully pointed me toward writers who “document human interaction with the landscape.” I began to become aware of the poems I was drawn toward and found they all touched on nature with a hint of science to provide a sense of grounding. “Write about your obsessions,” Ellen Bass said in a workshop. I’m obsessed with this earth, its changing, and my place in it, the harm humans have caused. How destruction brings about beauty. And this is the root of ecopoetry: work that focuses on the natural world and how humans interact with the spaces they inhibit.
As writers we are often keen observers of the world. We don’t have the luxury of being Walden and spending years at a pond, but we can look outside the front door, at the spider web stranded between two porch beams, a flower sprouting in an unexpected location. This sense of observation lends itself to ecopoetry which places nature at the center rather than humanity. This written word helps to weave our existence within that of the natural world. How many times have I written about the waves in some sense? Their meditative fall and retreat? Or that waves always return to where they started. Smoothing eons of mountains to sand. One of the things I love about ecopoetry is that it can bring our world into focus with something as small as an ant; does the ant know the size of the leaf it carries across the foundation of the world? Or as large as the cosmos.
If you are interested in submitting, there are a variety of publications that are looking for pieces which focus on the natural world. These include Fly Away Literary Journal, Kelp, Tiny Seed, Canary, and Ecotone, among others. The website Poets for Science explores the connection between science and poetry. This well-curated site has ways to advocate for the environment as well as opportunities to share your own work.
In this world of uncertainty I know that I can write what I see as I walk to the store, as I move between classes where I teach. I have my favorite tree whose leaves alert me to the season’s changing well before the air cools. For me, when I write about the environment it helps to keep me rooted. It also helps me pay attention, which in turn provides me with more to sift through as I put words on the page. I hope that you, too, can find joy in the small moments of the natural world to keep yourself moving forever forward.
“What Needs Care”
By Laurel Maxwell
This warming cracked, catastrophically changed planet.
Even though it may be too late to reverse course.
Except right now there is a squirrel with a yellow nut in its jaws skimmering across the patio.
Buttercup blooms on the yarrow plant daring the sun to emerge.
On Thursday I swam out in the ocean.
Investigated a log surfing the currents.
Head in the murky wet I didn’t notice the seal patrolling close to shore.
Today Ruth brought a bounty of pears from her garden.
We handled them like treasures.
The once burned landscape is beginning to care for itself.
Regrowth slow, but there all the same.
The birds which are inhabiting the charred branches, hip high weeds marking the trail.
People tentatively stepping into a brighter landscape than the one they knew.
Who will care for the coral bleached of their colors?
The rising tide battering roads.
Floods that disappear whole towns.
Seeds whose DNA have been so altered whole plant species are disappearing.
What needs care are these bodies we forget
as we hurtle through time.
Their age insignificant as space dust on this
billion-year-old planet.
If interested in learning more about ecopoetry or writing your own, check out Writing Ecopoetry with Joanne Durham, which starts on March 5. In this workshop, participants will read and discuss poetry that spans a wide range of relationships between people and the rest of the natural world from anthologies such as Poet Laureate Ada Limon’s 2024 You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, Camille Dungy’s Black Nature, and Bradfield, Furhman & Sheffield’s Cascadia Field Guide. Learn more about the class at yellowarrowpublishing.com/workshop-sign-up/p/writingecopoetry2025.
Laurel Maxwell is a poet from Santa Cruz, California, whose work is inspired by life’s mundane and the natural world. Her work has appeared at baseballballard.com, coffecontrails, phren-z, Verse-Virtual, Tulip Tree Review, and Yellow Arrow Vignette SPARK. Her creative fiction was a finalist for Women on Writing Flash Fiction Contest. Her piece “A Still Life” was nominated for Best of the Net by Yellow Arrow Publishing. She has a chapbook forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2025. When not writing, Laurel enjoys putting her feet in the sand, reading, traveling, and trying not to make too much of a mess baking in a too small kitchen. She works in education. You can find her at lgtanza.wixsite.com/writer or on social media @lomaxwell22.
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