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Coffee Maker Alone, one can but toy with imagery. --James Merrill, 'Hourglass' Sobriety kicks me out of half-slept sleep again. Unbound and starved for a routine that favors day, I'm [...]

Pink Salmon Adult pink humpback salmon lose their sheen as they prepare to spawn. As they leave the ocean, the river strips the metal in layered rips from their sides--a [...]

The poem "Mother Language" by Cecily Parks is presented. First Line: Mother alkali; Last Line: Motherwort.

The inclusion of excerpts from Muriel Rukeyser’s long poem ‘The Book of the Dead’ (1938) in the ‘Historical’ section of The Ecopoetry Anthology (2013) testifies to the eco-ethical prescience of Rukeyser’s poem, which links working class and racial oppression to environmental damage, and demonstrates how poetry can be held responsible for social and environmental justice. However, Rukeyser’s eco-ethical concerns in her work after ‘The Book of the Dead’ have been largely neglected by literary ecocriticism. This paper proposes that The Life of Poetry (1949) deserves a foundational place in what we now, after the rise of environmental activism in the 1960s, call ecopoetics. In Rukeyser’s literary-activist essays, the rhetorical use of natural world imagery to illuminate poetry’s ability to effect social and political change reinforces an environmental context for poetic responsibility. Furthermore, Rukeyser’s argument for the treatment of poetry as a ‘resource’ anticipates contemporary environmental discourse on consumption and sustainability and situates poetry squarely within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

End of August Afternoons are unpredictable: clouds streak the sky, flour thickening as the wind slides off its rocky tabletop, rifles the aspens and lodgepole pines, grows cold. Willows click, [...]

Sometimes the requester wants the poet, like a physician, to prescribe an older, famed poem for love or grief, as if the poet could say, Read this and call me in the morning. People have been drawn to poetry because, no matter when it was written, poetry holds space for uncertainty, even finds small joys in it. Sometimes, the requester wants the poet herself to write the poem for the specific occasion. [Extracted from the article]

Drawing on evidence from Emily Dickinson's herbarium, letters, prose fragments, and poems, this article draws attention to the importance of bogs, swamps, and woodland pools to Dickinson's lifelong conversation with the natural world. Adopting a methodology that combines contemporary thought about gender with an ecocritical concern for how swamps shaped Dickinson's work, this article argues that wetland places emerge as indispensable to Dickinson's environmental epistemology and to her poetic explorations of what it feels like to experience the natural world in a fluidly gendered body. Though Dickinson shares her fascination with the swamp with other nineteenth-century writers of the American landscape--including Susan Fenimore Cooper, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry David Thoreau--her creation of multiply-gendered speakers in her swamp-inspired poems offers a provocative revision of the masculine natural historical tradition that her contemporaries write within, particularly that tradition's reliance on the female body to understand the natural world. These poems do not describe swamps; rather, they describe what it feels like to be a woman nature poet who admires the natural world at its most liminal, illegible, and wild extremes, but feels deep ambivalence toward projecting herself onto it or being identified with it. In doing so, Dickinson's poems model a radical ecofeminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poem "Love Poem" by Cecily Parks is presented. First Line: I begin on an uncertainty of asphalt. Last Line: I love exhaustion. I love it again.

Presents the poem 'Severance.'