AustLit

'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”. Leonard Scigaj, moreover, highlights ecopoetry’s prevailing emphasis on “human cooperation with nature conceived as a dynamic, interrelated series of cyclic feedback systems”. 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.' (Introduction)

'In her 2015 novel Wave, the Vietnamese Australian writer Hoa Pham creates a world in which fantasy is constitutive of reality. Enshrouded in lyricism and a faint veil of racial melancholia, the novel portrays how a lesbian Asian couple, Midori and Âu Cô, coping on the margins of contemporary Australian society find belonging in an imagined nonhuman identity, as dragons-in-love. Both characters are migrants who embody different subversions of inculcated dragon stories. Midori’s early sexual experiences in Japan involve enacting secret dragon performances with her girlfriend. Âu Cô’s sexual orientation defies the expectations of her Vietnamese name, which means a mythic mountain fairy married to the dragon king. The strategic trope of queering the dragon in the story comes to highlight the couple’s desire to reclaim a functional self in the face of new racial and sexual stereotypes in Australia. In a more radical manner, the Indigenous Australian writer Ellen Van Neerven’s 2014 speculative eco-novella “Water” queers the nonhuman in ways that challenge cultural essentialism and human exceptionalism. At the heart of the novella’s futuristic vision is a newly-discovered species, the plantpeople, who are sentient beings capable of reading, speaking, and, most importantly, adapting to a changing environment. As the novella connects the plantpeople to Indigenous Australian inscriptions of land, the homo-erotic love between the Indigenous protagonist and the leader of the plantpeople dismantles heterosexual norms while exposing colonial claims of history and sovereignty that suppress an Indigenous multispecies ontology.' (Introduction)