Ecopoetic Practice

Abstract

In this article the author discusses the experience of poetic writing as a form of autoethnographic practice. Poetic writing, more than other textual forms, offers considerable potential to represent the journey toward “empathetic insidedness” between author, culture, and a sense of place. The author draws examples from his recently published collection of poems titled The Song of the Wounded River. The poems were first drafted on a long canoe journey down the river to the old farm pioneered by the author’s ancestors over a century ago. In an ecopoetics of place the writer strives to reconcile differences between past, present, and future and between their experiences of inner and outer landscapes. In an echo of Romanticism the ecopoet writes to heal the world’s wounds through singing the land. Seen in this light poetry and empathy provide the counterbalance to science and rationality. Both are needed to sustain the human relationship with the Earth. Humans damage places not because they fail to understand them, but because they are yet to feel for them, like kin. This article draws together and discusses the physical search for place, the act of poetic writing, and the cultural significance of this kind of work.