Seminary Co-op's Open Stacks Episode #48 is All Things Poetry: Places

Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstore has an occasional podcast called Open Stacks, and its newest episode is "All Things Poetry: Places," featuring Andy Fitch, Miquel Àngel Llauger, Joshua Beckman, and Patrick Morrissey. Naturally, place in relation to poetry lends itself to ecopoetics; a quote from Jonathan Skinner explains:

For some readers, ecopoetics is the making and study of pastoral poetry, or poetry of wilderness and deep ecology. Or poetry that explores the human capacity for becoming animal, as well as humanity’s ethically challenged relation to other animals. For others, it is poetry that confronts disasters and environmental injustices, including the difficulties and opportunities of urban environments. For yet others, ecopoetics is not a matter of theme, but of how certain poetic methods model ecological processes like complexity, non-linearity, feedback loops, and recycling. Or how “slow poetry” can join in the same kind of push for a sustainable, regional economy that “eating locally” does. Or how poetic experimentation complements scientific methods in extending a more reciprocal relation to alterity—ecopoetics as a “poethics.” Or even how translation can diversify the “monocrop” of a hegemonic language like English. “Greener than thou” claims finally are the least interesting dimension of ecopoetics, especially given the ease of “greenwashing.” Rather than locate a “kind” of writing as “ecopoetic,” it may be more helpful to think of ecopoetics as a form of site-specificity—to shift the focus from themes to topoi, tropes and entropologies, to institutional critique of “green” discourse itself, and to an array of practices converging on the oikos, the planet earth that is the only home our species currently knows.

They also look at the work of Craig Santos Perez, Cole Swensen, and others. Have a listen!