With the assistance of funding from the Biodiversity and People Network, RENEW Postdoctoral Research Fellow Lucy Mercer chaired the Literature X Ecology Series: seven online public conversations with internationally significant poets about their work, and on the relation of poetry to ecology.
The poets participating in the conversations were:
Each conversation opened with poets reading from their most recent collection and was followed by a discussion of their work, such as Legris’s The Principle of Rapid Peering (New Directions/Corsair, 2024), the title of which comes from a phrase the nineteenth-century ornithologist and field biologist Joseph Grinnell used to describe the feeding behaviour of certain birds.
Topics included discussing the term ‘ecopoetics’ and whether this was useful, and how specific places, biodiversity, environmental degradation, and climate crisis informed and were refracted within poems. You can watch recordings of the conversations with Brenda Hillman, Anthony V. Capildeo and Rachael Allen here.
The Literature X Ecology series was accompanied by three RENEW creative workshops run by Lucy oriented around Grass, Fields and Meadows, Ponds, and Trees. Drawing from a wide array of poems, RENEW team researchers discussed different techniques and approaches to writing poems about the natural world, whether drawing from direct observation, using creative methods in scientific research, or experimenting with form.
The workshops also explored wider questions: for example, we considered the function and the symbolic significance of grass in poems, how it can help a reader think about point-of-view and scale, how poem-grass might differ from real grass, and what a deeper ecological understanding of the natural world can bring to poems about biodiversity. Within and outside the workshops, participants wrote creative work that was workshopped and discussed.
By both hearing experienced poets talk about their writing practices and reflecting on how ecology and biodiversity intersects with and shape their work, as well as trying out new approaches to writing and thinking about poems, RENEW team members developed both critical and practice-based creative approaches to thinking about biodiversity.
Fungal Haiku
Growth within the rot,
hyphae branch through softened earth.
Infinite genders.
