Ecopoetics in Splinter

Abstract

In recent conversations about ecological grief, the history of poetic elegy has provided rich examples of interrelation between experiences of loss, consolation, memory, and anticipation. Yet this discussion’s emphases risk cementing a contradiction that lurks in the idea of ecological grief more generally, implying a psychological anthropocentrism that may, even in attempting to motivate environmentalist action, blunt attention to the interconnectedness always implicit in grief. Ecopoetics can, however, also afford another kind of attunement to the horizons of ecological loss, one that is less about interiority than about a spatial situatedness alive to the links between political and environmental violence. This essay finds such an attunement in the interstices of twentieth-century poet Denise Levertov’s investigations of personal loss, ecological precarity, twentieth-century warfare, and poetic form—and, more specifically, in a trope of splintering that is not only about fractured ecosystems or violent social ruptures but also about the sources of our grief in regenerative, place-based processes of loss and flux. Situating ecological grief in this way means taking the modifier “ecological” not as grief’s object but as its origin.