The Environment
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“Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours,” wrote the poet Carl Sandburg, evoking the lyric’s entanglements with the natural world. Speaking stones, rivers, plants, animals—these are commonplaces of lyric, but also characteristic markers of its peculiar mode of address. Lyric’s animating power, its ability to ventriloquize the non-human, to name the precise connections between humans and their environments appear across the world. Through anthropomorphizing speech, precise evocations of place, and the imaginative blurring of boundaries between human and non-human, lyric offers an alternate mode of thinking about our relationship to the world around us. |
featured titles
Cultivation and Catastrophe
by Sonya Posmentier
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Lyric poetry often voices the entanglements of the natural world with human culture; Posmentier’s book explores how it becomes the form of Black literary response to environmental change, whether the legacy of enslaved labor, forced and free migration, or the destruction and displacement brought by natural catastrophes. Tracing the links between poetry, African-American and postcolonial studies, this is a probing study of literature, environmental and racial politics.
3000 Years of Black Poetry
by Alan Lomax and Raoul Abdul, editors
Dodd, Mead & Co, 1970. Ethnomusicologist, folklorist, archivist, and political activist, best known for his extensive recordings of blues music, Alan Lomax teamed up with Raoul Abdul, classical singer and literary assistant-friend of Langston Hughes, to publish this important, controversial anthology. Including Black poets from Akhenton in ancient Egypt to Amiri Baraka, this volume sketched out the contours of the long, transnational history of Black poetry.