Resisting Nature Poetry in the Anthropocene: On the Ecopoetics of Brian Teare and Juliana Spahr

Abstract

This paper attends to the ecologically committed work of Brian Teare and Juliana Spahr, two poets whose ecopoems respond to the nature poem, a genre of poetry that often supplants ecological specificity with a generalized nature, ultimately fetishizing a nonexistent agrarian ideal and alienating readers’ experiences of place. By performing close readings of these poets’ work and situating their poems alongside contemporary philosophies of the Anthropocene, I examine not only how Teare and Spahr attempt to reproduce the fragmented experience of living in the Anthropocene but also how their poems encourage the mobilization of reading publics by combatting anthropocentrism and imagining potential futures, futures predicated on livability and equity across species.