Workshop: Tracking the Ecopoem in the Anthropocene
“If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.”- Rachel Carson “I need the botanist’s leaf more than the poet’s flower.” - Theodore Roethke
“If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.”- Rachel Carson
“I need the botanist’s leaf more than the poet’s flower.” - Theodore Roethke
Through a close examination and discussion of a few recent poems, we will explore the nature of ecopoetry. As we do so, we’ll try to define this new-old genre and share methods for making our own ecopoems so that they feel fresh and compelling and maybe even urgent.
About Derek Sheffield: Derek Sheffield is the author of Not for Luck, selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, and Through the Second Skin, runner-up for the Emily Dickinson First Book Award and finalist for the Washington State Book Award. He is a co-editor of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy. His awards include a special mention in the 2016 Pushcart Anthology and the James Hearst Poetry Prize judged by Li-Young Lee. Derek lives with his family on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains in Central Washington and is the poetry editor of Terrain.org.