🌿Wild Poetics #5: An Ecopoetry Newsletter
Arthur Rimbaud, the ecopoet? + more!
Hi everyone, welcome back to Wild Poetics, an ecopoetry newsletter by me, Gavin Lamb, sharing my journey learning about the world of ecopoetry with updates on poems I’m reading, and news, ideas and research in ecopoetry. If you’re new, welcome! You can read more about why I started Wild Poetics here. Sign up here to get these digests in your inbox:
What is ecopoetry? It’s a basic question that led me to start this newsletter as a self-conscious ‘beginner’ to the world of ecopoetry. Who are counted as ecopoets, and what are counted as ecopoems? Who gets to decide? For example, is this poem, Sensation, by the 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud, an ecopoem?
Par les soirs bleus d'été, j'irai les sentiers,
Picoté par les blés, fouler l'herbe menue:
Rêveur, j'en sentirai la fraîcheur à mes pieds.
Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue.Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien:
Mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'âme,
Et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,
Par la Nature, - heureux comme avec une femme
And the English translation by Jethro Bithell:
In summer evenings blue, pricked by the wheat
On rustic paths the thin grass I shall tread,
And feel its freshness underneath my feet,
And, dreaming, let the wind bathe my bare head.I shall not speak, nor think, but, walking slow
Through Nature, I shall rove with Love my guide,
As gipsies wander, where, they do not know,
Happy as one walks by a woman's side.
Daniel Finch-Race, an environmental humanities scholar at the University of Bologna, writes that, yes indeed, this is an ecopoem, and Arthur Rimbaud was an ecopoet. This poem and others of Rimbaud’s like ‘Ma Bohême,’ writes Finch-Race, “point to sixteen-year-old Rimbaud as an ecopoet because they draw attention to the importance of the non-human world amid the escalating metro-centrism of France in the era of Haussmannisation.” As Finch-Race goes on to argue:
“The attentiveness to environmental elements in Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘Sensation’ and ‘Ma Bohème’ of 1870 contrasts with mid-century accounts lauding the scientific and technological wonders of urban society. The fantastical pieces of verse evoke personal and poetic satisfaction resulting from communion with a kind of nature that is characterised as a grand counterpoint to the narrator’s impoverished circumstances…The ecological framework of the narratives ultimately provides an insight into the peculiar identity of a tensioned borderland between the city and the countryside.”
In trying to make sense of what ‘it’ is, I’ve been drawn to ecopoetry scholars responding to questions about the role of poetry in a time of immense ecological crisis. For example, in a past edition of this newsletter, I cited a passage from the introduction of the anthology, Modern Ecopoetry (2020), edited Leonor María Martínez Serrano and Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández. There, the authors write,
“At a time of worrying environmental degradation at a global scale, it is therefore of the essence that we, humans, turn to poetry to see how this ancient mode of thinking is responding to one of the most worrying problems that human societies are facing worldwide. After all, poetry represents a powerful inquisitive tool to explore and interrogate the nonhuman world, to understand how Homo sapiens relates to other species and the nonhuman world, and to figure out alternative ways to dwell responsibly on Earth.”
I’m thinking about Arthur Rimbaud, and whether he was an ecopoet, because I happened to pick up a copy of A Season in Hell while visiting the Shakespeare And Company bookstore in Paris last winter.
Born in Charleville, France in 1854, Rimbaud ran away to Paris as a teenager where his entire work of poetry was written before the age of twenty, when he apparently decided to quit writing poetry altogether! In 1875, after giving up his literary career, he traveled first with the Dutch Colonial Army to Indonesia as conscript seeking free passage. But he soon deserted back to France, and eventually somehow finding himself working as a foreman for a stone quarry construction company in Cyprus. He would make his way to Yemen and then Ethiopia for another ten years or so until returning to France to treat a worsening illness which would turn out to be cancer. Rimbaud died in Marseille on November 10th, 1891 at the age of 37.
In their essay, The Ecocritical Stakes of French Poetry from the Industrial Era, French ecocriticsm scholars Daniel Finch-Race and Julien Weber make an interesting case for considering Arthur Rimbaud as an ecopoet:
“Rimbaud’s ecopoetic adventures of 1870 narratively and structurally create places of communion with the non-human world, and valorise spaces that are creatively and ecologically fruitful beyond the precincts of metropolitan industry. The youthful poems evoke the worldliness of poetry, and the poeticity of the world, at a key moment in the environmental and sociocultural evolution of modern France.”
💬Quote I’m thinking about
“According to certain ecocritics, a poem can be perceived as an environment, meaning that its form is analogous to the interwoven systems of nature. Extrapolating Ingold’s concept in Lines that ‘the lines of the meshwork are the trails along which life is lived’ (2007: 81), prosody can be treated as a movement between places in a poetic system determined by particularities that allow us to trace vectors in the environment of a text. From an ecopoetic perspective, the structures of poetry can be understood as metamorphic figurations of the changing circumstances of a poet’s world. If we consider the intensity of a poetic experience to be based on temporal, spatial, and relational anchors that are amplified by the form of a piece, it is stimulating to consider the resemblance of poetry to an ecosystem.”
– Daniel A. Finch-Race & Julien Weber, in ‘The Ecocritical Stakes of French Poetry from the Industrial Era,’ in the Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, (2015, p. 163)
📚🌱New Ecopoetry Books
“With poems written for vast and inspiring vistas to poems acknowledging the green spaces that flourish even in the most urban of settings, this anthology hopes to reimagine what ‘nature poetry’ is during this urgent moment on our planet.”– Ada Limón
Here was an interesting discussion and poetry reading with some of the contributing authors from the book for its launch on April 4th, 2024. And below is a short video of Ada Limón introducing the ‘You are Here’ poetry project:
Thanks so much as always for your interest in my work, and if you found this ecopoetry digest useful, please consider sharing with others who might find it interesting too😊 I'd also love to hear from you. Leave a comment to let me know what you think about this digest, what areas of ecopoetry interest you, or anything you’d like to see more of in Wild Poetics🦭
Ecopoetry, as a more contemporary movement, often looks back at historical figures like Rimbaud to find precursors to its themes. Scholars and poets today might interpret
Rimbaud's work through an ecological framework, focusing on how his poetry reflects or anticipates concerns about the human impact on the environment.
🙏👍🌲👏