New Song for Ourselves—Contributions of Gary Snyder’s Poetics of Place to Current Ecopoetics

Abstract

I propose that Gary Snyder’s bioregional project can contribute to recent ecopoetic thought with its argument for poetry as embodied practice and with its definition of community as place-based, transnational, and multi-species. I start by showing continuities between bioregionalism and ecocriticism with the concept of place. I then turn to Snyder’s conceptualization of place as a dialectics between the biotic and sociopolitical dimensions. For Snyder poetry is a situated and embodied practice of investigation and creation of place. It therefore relates with recent discussions on ecopoetics as a critical and poetic practice extended to ecologically oriented forms of community action and activism (Hume and Osborne 2018, 2). As an example of how current ecopoetry practices a poetics of place I briefly discuss Allison Cobb’s Plastic: An Autobiography (2015).

Keywords

• bioregionalism
• ecocriticism
• ecopoetics
• gary snyder
• allison cobb