Our language for the dynamism of ecosystems has been impoverished.
Robert Hass, Introduction (The Practice of the Wild, by Gary Snyder)
What is a connectome? I will explain in a moment. But first: this essay makes the case that learning to think like a network is a skill that lyric poetry is well versed to teach us. Ecosystems are networks too, so ecopoems may be one way to train humans to accept (and maybe even revel in) the fact that our lives are dependent on the health of the biodiverse ecosystems within which we live. How ecosystems and humans respond to damage in the Anthropocene that includes the sixth mass extinction is not just a topic explored by scientists but also a drama staged by some of the best contemporary ecopoems. Such poems, I show, can help us humans confront our complicity in creating the Anthropocene and other atrocities and—just as important—imagine how to change our behavior. The best stories push against our tendency to see the world in pieces, with everything separate and connections broken.1
Before developing the above claims about poetry, it is best to contextualize them by reflecting briefly on the history of how networks have been defined by scientists and cultural historians. I sketch this impossibly large topic briefly here, emphasizing concepts that help us appreciate the cultural work that good ecopoems may accomplish. When readers read or hear a strong poem, they enter and experience—both viscerally and mentally—the story world and music the poem unfolds. As Blake famously said, a poem is a universe in a grain of sand; that is, it teaches us how to link micro- and macroscales in space-time. Since Romanticism, lyric poems are often thought to be primarily suited to representing a single, subjective point of view. But Theodor Adorno, for one, argues that the “universality of the lyric’s substance . . . is social in nature. Only one who hears the voice of humankind in the poem’s solitude can understand what the poem is saying” (38). What if we were to expand Adorno’s concept of the “social” to ask how well a lyric can represent networked consciousness or thinking in action by, for instance, expressing or exploring connections between humans and more-than-human beings, including ecosystems? Arguably, to be successful, an ecopoem must at the very least seek to imagine such a broader form of consciousness and connectivity. As we see in the poems by A. R. Ammons, Arthur Sze, and Rickey Laurentiis discussed below, deep-time temporalities far beyond those of a single human life may actively become present for a poem’s audience.
To answer such questions, let us first consider how networks have been understood by scientists active during Romanticism—that era in the early nineteenth century when evidence mounted that Earth was eons old. Alexander von Humboldt suggested that Earth was a single living organism and that the fates of all beings were interconnected. Ralph Waldo Emerson, inspired by Goethe, realized it was faulty to focus on anatomizing the parts of a plant without also studying how an organism was more than the sum of its parts. “[N]ature strives upward” toward “a new and finer form of the original.” So too the writer, Emerson asserted.2 Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) ended with this magnificent periodic sentence explaining how the law of evolution that he had expounded could—over millennia—generate many life-forms out of just a few, or even one:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
In 1866, the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel created the word English translates as “ecology” to denote the study of how living creatures interact with their changing environment. The word “ecosystem” dates from 1935, coined by the English botanist Arthur Tansley. He favored the study of communities, not just individual species, and considered the dynamic exchange of materials and energy between living and nonliving components and how ecosystems come in a variety of scales. Further, Haeckel and Tansley were aware of how fragile life systems are in the face of rapidly expanding industrial capitalist networks. They believed their new names, concepts, and methodologies were necessary for scientific advances but simultaneously hoped that good science might teach humans how to live less destructively, with more appreciation of what Darwin called “grandeur.”3
By the 1950s, cybernetics was influential in the study and mathematical modeling of how systems regulate themselves via circular processes like feedback loops. It was also designed to study how systems can break down. Though the word “cyber” comes from the Greek for “helmsman,” since the 1950s, it quickly became associated with human-designed artificial systems, including computer networks, and also with machine-organic hybrids, as with the word “cyborg.” Building on the work of their predecessors, today’s scientists increasingly investigate how networks in nature communicate and show adaptive intelligence—for instance, by transferring carbon or other nutrients. Not only do biologists like Lynn Margulis, Donna Haraway, or Suzanne Simard use such terms, so do some geologists.4 Holobionts (e.g., lichen) have also drawn much attention. They are assemblages in which the components gave up some of their autonomy over the course of their mutual evolution to combine into different, joined organisms, in some cases sharing genetic material across species. Humans, animals, and plants are all holobionts. There are networks of different beings inside us (in our gut biome, for instance). We are also part of ecosystems, affected by and affecting them, for better or for ill. Nodes in networks, it turns out, have networks inside of them. And all these networks constantly evolve; they’re not static.5 As early as 1968, the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, channeling Goethe and others, argued for creating a general system theory, defined as the interdisciplinary study of those elements of systems that are not understandable by investigating their respective parts in isolation.6
In this context, it is worth mentioning how today’s neuroscience studies neuron networks. This rapidly developing field has given us new keywords, such as “club hubs” (the brain’s sharing system), “integrators” (neurons that receive a huge number of messages from other cells), and “broadcasters” (neurons sending signals to a large audience). “In the brain or in neural systems, communication is not just sending a UPS package around with the content of the package remaining the same,” one neuroscientist has commented. “Data from different regions are always being combined and coordinated” (qtd. in Siegfried). In 2005, “connectome” was invented by neuroscientists, formed from “genome”: it is the study of how brains work as an assemblage of different networks that interact. In 2024, neuroscientists announced the mapping of the largest connectome to date, that of the fruit fly’s 54.5 million neuron links. “With a neuron population of roughly 85 billion, each maintaining thousands of connections, the [human] connectome comprises an unfathomably vast network, with hundreds of trillions of links” (Siegfried). Mapping the human brain and those of many other species is foreseeable; the Human Connectome Project was launched by the National Institutes of Health in 2010.7
Might the concept of the connectome be used responsibly as a metaphor for what some poems do? Stay tuned for test examples below. But first, let us move away from networks as scientists study them to consider influential recent work by cultural studies theorists on networks built by humans and their ethical implications. Their standards for what is “true” are not quite the same as those of scientists. Instead of “falsifiable” criteria testing to determine what is true versus what is speculation, these thinkers focus on the value of analogies or metaphors drawn from science to describe other kinds of networked interdependencies. They are aware of the dangers of this mode of thought, but they also stress the benefits of so-called weak ontology—including how it may provide a humanist language of ethics arising out of systemic complexities, including ambiguity and imperfect knowledge. As suggested above, many scientists rely on the power of weak ontology to inform at least some of the conclusions they are willing to posit from their data. When it comes to recent cultural systems theorists and their use of what we might call the “connectome” analogy, key influencers come to mind right away:8 John Rawls, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, Timothy Morton, the aforementioned Haraway, and perhaps (before all of them) Aldo Leopold, who wrote the famous claim noted below in the “Land Ethic” section of Sand County Almanac.9 I discuss most of these figures briefly below since all are relevant for imagining poems as forms of connectome intelligence. But let us consider Leopold first.
Leopold’s “land ethic” is well known, but I am striving to put his understanding of eco-ethics in a slightly different context, that of how our concepts of connectomes and networks have evolved both in science and cultural studies since the 1940s. From loving attention to one tiny area in rural Wisconsin, plus his experiences beyond the Midwest, Leopold evolved a capacious vision of both ecosystem dynamics and our ethical responsibilities to help them thrive. He understood biodiverse ecosystems as having value in their own right, but also as providing humans with an ethics that contested possessive individualism: “All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively the land” (Leopold 186).
Further, as noted by Curt Meine, one of his biographers, Leopold did not focus exclusively on preserving wilderness: “He worked to integrate land protection with care for more populated landscapes, from farms, forests and rangelands to whole watersheds and urban neighborhoods. He acted to repair damaged ecosystems and rebuild depleted wildlife populations,” providing useful real-world models for the growing fields of ecological restoration and conservation biology (Meine, “In a Time”).10
The dynamics of (and threats to) biodiverse ecosystems is a primary topic of interest these days in environmental studies, including the environmental humanities. “Multispecies” and “intelligence” are words often used to describe ecosystemic connections, but “more-than-human” over “nonhuman” is also growing in frequency. These three terms attempt to decenter humans—even as they of course use human techne, language, to attempt that displacement. Such a development does not and must not deny that humans have left their marks on every ecosystem on Earth. But the key point is this: intelligence is now often (sometimes controversially) ascribed to biodiverse connectomes, not just individual brains or species, and the data assembled generally support the claim that such systems evolve and are more than the sum of their parts. They seem to blur the divide not only between organic and inorganic but also between energy transfer and sentience.11 Many examples could be cited across a wide range of disciplines of interest in seemingly intelligent multispecies systems. For instance, ASLE (the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) in 2026 offers online panels discussing “Decolonizing Environments” and “Multispecies Connections.”12
Good versus Bad Interconnectedness and the Question of Ethics
Interconnectedness must be understood as dangerous too. Scientists have a term—“ecosyndemic”—for describing how poisons or disease may rapidly circulate through linked systems. As Paraskevi Begou and Pavlos Kassomenos note, “global environmental change contributes to local-scale, regional-scale and global-scale alterations of the Earth’s systems. These changes have their root causes in the way that people interact with the physical, chemical, and biotic factors of the environment.” Feedback loops multiply and spread the effects, as with a pandemic. Many other instances of ecosyndemic spread are made invisible. Farmworkers in the Coachella Valley in California, for instance, brave clouds of pesticides to put food on the table for others, hydrating with bottled water because the local water is too polluted. What are the long-term effects of such working conditions on their bodies? For partiers at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival just a few miles away, those workers’ lives are invisible.13
In Silent Spring (1962), Rachel Carson traces how ecosystems efficiently disperse human-made pollutants, with both predictable and unpredictable effects. Digital networks can be syndemic, too, with some for-profit algorithms functioning not unlike viruses or long-lived hidden poisons. Users can be incentivized to attack others and rapidly spread disinformation, bullying individuals and groups and endangering democracy itself—while also allowing a site’s owners to charge its advertisers more. In the name of protecting free speech and creating “engaged” users, for-profit companies controlling much of contemporary social media have evolved ways to monetize “response-ability”—also known as “viral” sharing.14 Dangerous networks offering affordances to evil have long been anatomized in speculative fiction, from Sauron’s in Lord of the Rings to the aptly-named Hexcore network in the Netflix show Arcane (2023–2024), which connects living beings but treats their differences as imperfections to be whited out into Sameness and returned to the void.
Ecosyndemic patterns thus raise ethical questions. If we are all connected, what collective responsibilities do humans have toward others? Why are so many of us attracted to toxic behavior that benefits a few at the expense of many? Can we create a global paradigm change in civilization and energy sources like the one that occurred after the last Ice Age, ca. 11,500 BCE, an era that also saw many species extinctions? Let us consider briefly a few unusual ways to answer those questions, for that will allow us later to mark how some poems (either explicitly or implicitly) explore ethical questions—an activity Joan Retallack has memorably called the “poethical wager”—and spatiotemporal networks operating at multiple scales.
Rawls’s A Theory of Justice is not usually cited as applicable to ecocriticism. Rawls focused on liberal democracies organized around the principle of “reciprocity,” how fairness and the notion of a common good can be crafted by institutions and culture and bequeathed to future generations. He was not much interested in worlds beyond the human (unlike his contemporary Carson), but his principle that a just society would be built on reciprocity and fair opportunities for all certainly has relevance for indexing how ecosystems with healthy biodiversity function. In biology and social theory, those systems with high biodiversity are the most resilient in containing damage, though they are not invincible.
Rawls’s arguments for reciprocity and ethical responsibilities may validly be expanded to include human-ecosystem interdependence. The concept of ecocriticism was named in the 1970s, by William Rueckert, as a method of assessing how imaginative literature could revivify connections to and responsibility for ecosystem health. Yet as far as I can determine, the term ecopoesía was common in Spanish—promoted in the 1970s by the Chilean poets Nicanor Parra and Cecilia Vicuña—approximately a decade before the term “ecopoetry” became familiar in English.15
I value the above insights. But we also must emphasize how concepts of network reciprocity and ethics are ancient, including valuing kinship bonds between humans and more-than-human beings as central to the idea of being “civilized.” We need to expand our network of examples to include contemporary Indigenous elders and many others less famous (at least within academic circles) than the names mentioned above. Ancient and contemporary Indigenous understandings of the web of the world believe that it generates an ethic. Humans have to treat other beings as family; if we do not act in accordance with such wisdom, we cannot be properly civilized or even human. Language and storytelling are primary means to pass on such knowledge and the cultural practices that put that knowledge into action. These Indigenous networks generally emphasize mutual interdependence but also foster individuality among the connected beings and do so for the same reasons that healthy ecosystems have the greatest biodiversity. Ancient knowledge systems would be aghast at the application of a term like “weak ontology” to ethics. For them, kinship bonds between humans and other beings are strong ontology—they keep the whole connectome healthy. Further, imaginative storytelling and sustainable ways of living within networks go hand in hand, and they are in no way incompatible with modern science: both are ways of knowing that must be intertwined with an ethic for civilized behavior. The Sámi artist and architect Joar Nango has dubbed this “indigenuity” (Zeiger). The subtitle for Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass famously demonstrates the point: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants treats plants as active teachers and bearers of knowledge.16 Braiding hair and braiding sweetgrass teaches how to braid diverse ways of knowing and living. It is a calculated undoing of the Cartesian binary of human knower versus the material objects known.
In what ways do such non-Cartesian modes of knowing affect language use and vice versa? That is, can revitalized language transform our living understanding of human and more-than-human connectomes? That is a vital topic too huge to explore adequately here. But I can give one intriguing example as a possible answer and prelude to the poems below. In Choctalking and Other Realities, the Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe offers a fine example of the entanglement of words and worlds.
I want to tell you a Choctaw story. My tribe’s language has a mysterious prefix that, when combined with other words, represents a form of creation. It is nuk or nok, and it has to do with the power of speech, breath, and mind. Things with nok or nuk attached to them are so powerful they create. For instance, nukfokechi brings forth knowledge and inspiration. A teacher is nukfoki, the beginning of action.
(15)17
This is inspiring. The superpower syllables nok or nuk are performative in linguist J. L. Austin’s sense of the term. Strong ecopoems do something remarkably similar, both within the minds of their readers and in history itself. Ecopoetry’s powers, admittedly, are not distilled into a single miraculous syllable. Nor can they guarantee sudden change. But they seek to set a process—an emergent strategy18—powerfully into motion. It is for us, not the poem, to fulfill the dream or vision a poem performs. The lyrics discussed later in this essay do not just reference or envision a living network but also perform and bring into being the possibility of a new “we”—a new imagined community in which human and more-than-human beings are interdependent while also individuated. In the process, they also offer a deep-time understanding of history past, present, and future.
Words can be what Howe calls “the beginning of action” because we humans must realize things in the cognitive sense before we can build them in real life. Strong ecopoems thus hope to be transformative, turning “refuse” (both verb and noun) into compost, something fertile that may feed sustainable growth. Still, it is sad that English does not have a syllable like nuk to knock on our thick skulls, reminding us of the potential so often left unrealized in the words we use. It is a poem’s dream not only to remind us of that power but also to show us that we do not own it.
In Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry, the author stresses the abundance and generosity of a gift economy that cycles between—and unites humans with—an infinitude of other beings inside and beyond us, both in the present and across vast stretches of time.19 Kimmerer’s radical optimism has proven effective in inspiring people to make changes in their own and their community’s ways of living.
As the poet Robert Hass laments, our language to describe the dynamism of both ecosystems and poetic tradition has become impoverished under the pervasive influence of for-profit capitalism. Dynamic ecopoetry seeks to provide ways not just to imagine a web connecting human and more-than-human but also to recognize a necessary limit on certainty so that new ways of knowing are combined with caveats and humility that respect mystery. Recently, several authors—most notably the biologist Scott Gilbert and the anthropologist Anna Tsing—have argued that our concepts of systems wrongly assume they are mostly homogeneous and predictable. They propose instead that systems are heterogeneous like holobiont DNA but operate on larger scales as distinctly different assemblages linked to each other. In addition, Gilbert (“Holobionts”) endorsed the word “feral” to describe how human-designed systems are often colonized by creatures and used in ways that humans cannot anticipate or control. Humans’ “utopianism itself encourages feral effects by ignoring and overwriting the presence of local communities, human and nonhuman” (Tsing et al., Field Guide 42). Tsing and her coauthors propose the word “patchy” to define heterogeneous networks and “feral geographies” at small or large scales that are stimulated by human infrastructure and actions but cannot be completely controlled by humans. Their book
singles out imperial and industrial infrastructures, rather than all human infrastructures, to explain the Anthropocene. We argue that the scale of imperial and industrial infrastructure building in the last five hundred years has caused more systems ruptures—that is, state changes—than ever before in human history.
(44)
[T]he Anthropocene emerges in irony: Humans are creating a world for the agency of feral nonhumans. Those nonhumans capable of thriving with imperial and industrial infrastructure have taken the reins of history. The world we are building hardly belongs to us anymore; it belongs to them.
(167)
Bill McKibben,20 Tina Young Choi, Barbara Leckie, Camille Dungy,21 Yvonne Reddick,22 Tsing,23 and Haraway—to mention just a few—have also shaped our understanding of the affordances networks use to confront toxic anthropocentric thinking and behavior with a counterforce: ecocentric network consciousness.24 For instance, Haraway, borrowing from Buddhist meditation practices, terms this “staying with the trouble”—and it is decidedly not an exercise in passivity and unquestioning acceptance of things as they are. She offers holobionts—multigenomic beings—as a model for understanding complexity, including shared agency, within networks (Haraway, Trouble). A holobiont is an integrated organism made up of a host and a population of constantly evolving symbionts. Humans, animals, and plants are all holobionts. There are networks of different beings inside us (e.g., in our gut biome) as well as networks outside of our bodies connecting us to others. Nodes in networks, it turns out, also have networks inside of them.
The authors named above are interested in “abundance and reciprocity,” Kimmerer’s twin themes, but are more temperate in their claims about how transformative it can be to “think like a network” (to adapt Leopold’s phrase about trying to “think like a mountain” or any other ecosystem [129]). Like Bennett writing on the value of “weak ontology,” these commentators stress the ecological ethic of living with limits, uncertainties, and precarity. They also explore the dangerous results of our addiction to the rhetoric of individualism. When mapping the interactions of nature and culture, they follow Deleuze in stressing how such complex systems are layered and full of tensions or crosscurrents not fully predictable. Leckie’s work explores how complexity allows for nonlinear experiences of time that resists linear “progress” narratives. Leckie also stresses the importance of “slow causality”—how stories may take place over time scales that are vastly larger than human lives. Haraway and others, including the aforementioned Simard and Margulis, are interested in analyzing how different species thrive through exchange networks and boundary crossings. Haraway offers the concept of sympoiesis, meaning both “making with” and “kin-making,” to critique the assumption that complexity in nature or culture is primarily defined by “autonomous” or “self-organizing” systems and to model how reciprocity rather than rapaciousness can govern some forms of connection (Trouble). The most famous instances of such a system in nature are climax forests characterized by fungi’s mycelial networks interacting with trees and other plants, and with microbes and other animals, so that minerals and nutrients are constantly cycling within the network.
Leopold’s warning to us, however, is even more relevant today than it was in the 1940s. If we do not respect ecosystems, we will get biblical End Times of fires and floods: “Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea” (129).
Can lyric poems evoke ecosystemic consciousness, allowing us to experience complexity, vastness, and mystery? Min Song thinks so: his concept of “shared agency”—both within poems and within readers’ interactions with poems—is central to his Climate Lyricism. Can poems surprise us with deep-time connections, an emergent connectome among beings that is both revelatory and feral—that is, half-hidden, in motion, unknowable but powerful? Can poems be patchy and feral in their own way and, like mushrooms, recycle toxins, allowing beings and connections to be imagined? Even more fundamentally, can experiencing the powers of complexity in a poem spark an ethic of trying to live more responsibly? Does the journey on which a strong poem takes us remain essentially private, or does it (pace Adorno and Benjamin) offer the potential for reimagining what a more perfect social collective might be? Further, in the case of ecopoems, does the connectome envisioned honor more-than-human beings living alongside and within us sometimes obtuse Homo so-called sapiens? Might we learn how to use some of that nuk superpower that Howe celebrates?
Watch and decide for yourself, using the examples below. Sadly, however, it is no accident that questions like the ones being asked above arise when complex ecosystems are globally endangered. Simultaneously under assault is the right to even ask such questions. (And I am hardly alone in feeling surveilled.) The value of the humanities—especially the study of languages and the arts, plus philosophy and religion—and the liberal arts-and-science education model itself have both been placed before a firing squad. Or, just as horrific, they are being silently, systematically degraded and defunded. What is the value of imaginative storytelling in a liberal democracy in crisis—and why are its powers so threatening to would-be totalitarian potentates and the minions who serve them?
Humans have created the Anthropocene but cannot control it (even though some of us think we can). Nature’s gifts to us arrive with a warning: you humans shall neither presume nor possess. We had better revise our reading of Genesis 1:28 about humans exercising righteous “dominion” over all other created beings.25 Do we really want to rely on artificial intelligence to guide us about how to adapt to climate change—while also willfully ignoring its energy demands as a primary climate destabilizer? We cannot stop the unfolding sixth mass extinction unless we honor how human and more-than-human beings have their fates interwoven in a network of mutuality that is both feral and interdependent. More than ever, we need to call on the powers that Howe called nuk nok agency.
The Tao of Ammons
Network thinking in poetry—whether we are talking about new work or older texts such as Pope’s An Essay on Man (1734) or Romantic literature—describes dangers as well as opportunities. Pope eloquently warned humans they had to accept limits to knowledge, whereas the Romantics tended to enshrine Nature as a mirror for the Imagination’s infinite powers. I have room here to survey only selected contemporary developments that engage with both Pope’s wariness and Romantic ambition. I have chosen three poets—Ammons, Sze, and Laurentiis—to emphasize both the profound individuality within recent ecopoetry and some shared assumptions that unite their innovations.
Ammons’s most famous nature poem about an ecosystem, “Corsons Inlet,” is well known,26 so I choose to focus on two other poems. This pair of later lyrics provides fascinating new variations on Ammons’s central theme: poems should enact the discovery of human-nature interconnections because, in doing that, they give us fresh figures for feeling the presence of the sacred. They offer us mirrors for our minds’ capabilities—but also our limits. One of these poems literally has a web at its center; the other explores the relevance of Taoism for Ammons’s understanding of ecopoetry.
Ammons’s “Identity” (Collected Poems 114–16) hints that it was inspired by meditating on a spiderweb found strung between plants in the poet’s garden. The poem announces its project in a Wittgensteinian way, through two numbered propositions to be tested and elaborated: “1) an individual spider web / identifies a species,” and “2) the possible settings / of a web are infinite.” A complication is then introduced: a spider must be able to place its particular web form in an unpredictable, entropic world where suitable attachment points for the web’s anchor-strands are different in any location.
if the web were perfectly pre-set
the spider could
never find
a perfect place to set it in: and
if the web were
perfectly adaptable,
if freedom and possibility were without limit,
the web would
lose its special identity:
the row-strung garden web
keeps order at the center
where space is freest (interesting that the freest
“medium” should
accept the firmest order)
and that
order
diminishes toward the
periphery
allowing at the points of contact
entropy equal to entropy.
(Ammons, Collected Poems 115–16)
Order coexists with improvisation. The spider’s signature web design floats in the space between garden plants. But its anchor-points are unique to this instantiation, adaptable to the unpredictable shapes of nearby plants.
Ammons’s poem mimics such a web. For those who know his work, this voice is immediately recognizable as Ammons’s in its mixture of close observation, careful reasoning, and philosophical play. As Stephanie Burt mentions in an essay on the Ammons collection A Coast of Trees, Ammons’s poems mix diction from three levels of English rarely found together—standard English; folk speech, demonstrating his fondness for his rural North Carolina roots; and Greek and Latinate diction derived from the natural sciences, information science, and other fields.27 Rarely, perhaps, but there are precedents: both Whitman and Dickinson exhibit similar linguistic adventurousness.
Each Ammons poem is also a miniature demonstration of how both nature and poems build things. His rangy syntax is like a tensile thread, thought reasoning out general propositions from particular data points. But these stanzas also have no regular form: each line’s indentation is unpredictable. Order and entropy, the linear and the nonlinear, are woven together.
In the poem’s middle, its web’s center, so to speak, Ammons places a meditation that is even more meta than what comes before and after. As Williams did in “Spring and All” (whose irregularities of invention this poem also honors), Ammons asserts that when studying the beauty of nature’s infinite forms, we must also keep in mind that the generative force behind all those forms can never be directly seen or known. Ammons calls this hidden creative force “the underlying.” His “I will show you” also echoes Williams’s “I must tell you” from “Young Sycamore,” another poem that uses a revelation inspired by nature to find its form:
I will show you
the underlying that takes no image to itself,
cannot be shown or said,
but weaves in and out of moons and bladderweeds,
is all and
beyond destruction
because created fully in no
particular form:
(Collected Poems 115)
The “kelson of the creation is love,” Whitman sang in section 5 of “Song of Myself,” celebrating the universe as a handmade boat with a guiding keel (kelson). He then descended from such lofty rhetorical heights to find more down-to-earth examples of love embodied in “mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.” Ammons found his own parable for what Tsing called patchy identity in a garden spiderweb. Form is part programmed, part constructed on the fly. In “Identity,” Ammons offers his own version of a species-specific web pattern: it is unmistakably an “Ammons” poem. But “Identity” is also not quite like any other poem in the Ammons canon: its touchpoints and lineation are unique, caused by Ammons’s careful attention to the physics and metaphysics of web building. The poem’s form dazzles because it is multifarious, neither absolutely free nor fixed.28
In the context of my thesis that an important element of many ecopoems is to render the experience of thinking like a network or connectome, “Identity” engages with my claim in at least two ways. First, it stresses that networks combine a mix of programming and contingency: some patterns are stable and central, others are part of the web but must be adaptable to local conditions. Second, living networks are emergent, not static: a spiderweb and a brainweb must constantly be repaired every day; they’re always in process. A poem can vividly express the “how” and “why”—and the wonder—of this. Ammons’s is just unusual in how it puts this theme front and center. Neuroscience reminds us too that our neural connectomes are constantly changing.
“Identity” also exemplifies how many ecopoems enact a retelling of Genesis. In Ammons’s case, he revises Genesis for a post-Whitman, post-Darwin age. Instead of denominating the species that are separately created, as Genesis does, and instead of giving naming rights for all species to a single superior creature (Adam), Ammons’s poem gives us an extended analogy for understanding identity as a web of connection. It gives us something different from the “dominion” and “rule” of Genesis 1:26–28 that stress human exceptionalism and superiority. Its creation story instead stresses how much we can learn about ourselves from studying other beings. “Identity” models not anthropocentrism but radical openness—“radical” as in humans finding themselves rooted in otherness, absorbing its energy and reciprocating it. The poem also reminds us to be humble. Forms give us only intimations of the creative force behind them. We can sense but never directly name the “underlying,” as Ammons calls it.
Ammons’s “Identity” dates from the early 1960s. “Coast of Trees,” from two decades later, gave the title to Ammons’s award-winning volume of 1981. The poem is a rare instance of Ammons directly acknowledging the influence on his work of Taoist Buddhism. At the poem’s core is a Zen koan: the paradox that if you seek to use a particular method to encounter the sublime, that insistence will assure that you fail. You cannot will revelation to occur. Ammons puts it this way in the poem: “The reality is, though susceptible / to versions, without denomination” (1). “Denomination”: the act of naming, designating, classifying. The word is also associated with rival religious sects, stamps or money, and card playing. The Latin root mixes de (to take from or away) and nominare (to name). To denominate literally means to engage in an act of naming that separates or distinguishes one thing from all others (as with Adam in Genesis).
How can a poem resist “denomination”? As with a Zen koan, the goal of “Coast of Trees” is not to provide an answer but to allow us to meditate on paradox. How might a poem suggest the presence of an infinitude of possibilities beyond all the words it deploys? That tactic is not unlike how Buddhism teaches us, when contemplating a particular entity, to meditate on the void out of which all forms emerge and into which all forms return. (Consider the Heart Sutra, for instance, famous for the phrase translated as “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”) We must “see” transience and absence, not just presence, when we focus on the world before us. Ammons’s diction is purposely mixed—drawn from technology, religion, philosophy, and what can perhaps best be called a recognition of our comic failures (“shambles”)—in order to suggest that an inconsistent method may work when consistency will not. The poem teeters on the edge of antinomy, aporia, oxymoron, and repetitive gibberish. It also partakes of the vatic mirror reversals of “form/emptiness” or “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14):
if the name nearest the name
names least or names
only a verge before the void takes naming in,
how are we to find holiness,
our engines of declaration put aside,
helplessness our first offer and sacrifice,
except that having given up all mechanisms of
approach, having accepted a shambles of
non-enterprise, we know a unity
approach divided . . .
(Ammons, Coast of Trees 1)
Syntactically, this is quite strange: “if” we do all these difficult, even impossible things, “then” we may “know” a unity we could not find any other way. Wallace Stevens seems to be the poet’s main muse here, but hidden behind or within Stevens is also a Zen sensei winking at us, playing with us. The poem’s ending tosses us the most challenging, maddening riddle of all; it is disguised as a moment of enlightenment:
we realize
that whatever it is it is in the Way and
the Way in it, as in us, emptied full.
(Coast of Trees 1)
Through paradox, this mode of ecowriting models how to live and work calmly amid radical uncertainty. Its signature mix is humility in the face of the sublime.
Buddhism is one lens through which to bring into focus the poem’s meta meditations. Network theory is another—particularly, say, Leckie’s and others’ claim that temporality in imaginative literature often mixes an intensely felt present moment with a transcendental one covering vast spans of time. Forms created in this world are (in the poem’s language) denominated, either by an act of God, as in Genesis, or by the laws of evolution. They have shape, location, and history—and they are interactive, not autonomous. The poem under discussion is about seeing a coast and trees pressed right up to the shore. But calling this border between land and water a “coast of trees” does not quite make sense, especially if you drop the article (“a” coast? “the” coast?). Strictly speaking, trees do not constitute a “coast”: they are part of a land-based ecosystem. Further, the creative powers of denomination itself remain difficult to name or know directly (that is why Ammons uses the word “it”). Words also are destructive: they empty and invent the new out of the recycled old—just like that hybrid forest/marine ecosystem signified by the “Coast of Trees” title, and just like the Emptiness in Taoism out of which all beings come, and to which all beings return.
Networks are emergent, self-revising, never fully knowable. Their self-reflexive meta element allows us to think critically about process itself: what can be known versus what remains always immanent and not fully unknowable. “Coast of Trees” is unusual in Ammons’s oeuvre for so constantly working at a high level of abstraction. But, in that regard, perhaps that poem can be thought of as coming as asymptotically close as any of his poems to the hidden creative force that all Ammons poems seek. In certain asymptotic functions in math, the limit case approached but not reached may be infinity itself. The themes enacted in “Identity” and “Coast of Trees” may be shown to function in most other Ammons poems, not to mention in work by many other ecopoets.
The Art of Sze-ing
If all events are related, then what story does a volcano erupting in Hawaii, the birth of a woman’s second son near Gallup, and the shoulder bone of earth made of a mythic monster’s anger construct? Nearby a meteor crashes. Someone invents aerodynamics, make wings. The answer is like rushing wind: simple faith.
Joy Harjo and Stephen Strom, Secrets from the Center of the World
Sze (whose last name is pronounced “see”) was named the poet laureate of the United States in 2025. His aesthetic is somewhat close to that of the Ammons poems discussed above in that it substitutes larger-than-human patterns of action for human psychological drama as the lyric’s main field of interest. Ammons’s meta level is called Tao in “Coast of Trees”; Sze’s is called yi in the poem considered below, from the “Before Completion” sequence in The Redshifting Web. Ammons’s and Sze’s texts both hint at processes moving beneath and beyond a poet’s power of naming and listing, what Ammons in “Identity” calls “the underlying that takes no image to itself” (Ammons, Collected Poems 115).
Sze’s poems differ from Ammons’s in that they pay little attention to linguistic crises over language’s inadequacies. They also lack moments of high Romantic irony, such as the dramatic resolve expressed in “Coast of Trees” to do the impossible, to “put aside” the “engines of declaration,” even as the poem plays with the irony that a machine made of words can never do such a thing. Coming a generation, more or less, after Ammons, Sze is more aware of the precarity of Earth’s ecosystems than Ammons was—even the Ammons whose best long poem is called “Garbage.” At first glance, Sze appears to be a poet of abundance. He builds poems out of lists, lots of lists. His catalog rhetoric is both like and unlike Whitman’s in ways I will try to define. Sze’s model for the long lyric poem is an archipelago, or a red-shifting web. His works seek to broaden our awareness of space and time to create a “landscape” spanning many different locations and discrete moments separated by days or eons—all somehow interconnected through invisible energy. We are to hold all of these moments in our mind together, without deciding that some are of more interest or importance than others. Sze’s poems thus may also be understood as exercises in Zen equanimity through meditation. The world that his lists create is not really a catalog of fragments shored against the ruins of a master narrative (to invoke T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land). Instead, in the words of both Zhou Xiaojing and Sze, invoking the I Ching:
Sze’s metaphorical “throw” of images at the reader here incorporates a series of empty spaces that enhance the significance of each phenomenon taking place in its own time-space. Sze again creates a poignant sense of coexistence and connection among all things through collage juxtaposition of multiple temporalities [that eventually culminate in] “a resonance and erasure of time.”
Sze’s is thus a tender, meditative poetics of openness, infinitude, mystery, and awe. Yet what is the fate of such a poetics in an emergency? Despite meditation’s powers, our lives are simultaneously enmeshed in evil, including social injustice and climate disaster. This is a frightening question that any reading of Sze must face. His work gives us many paths toward acknowledging the tragic paradox of a poetics of abundance crossed with one that sees and does not look away from human-caused extinction events. Sze’s catalog rhetoric seeks a different Way forward than Whitman’s ecstatic plenitude or Eliot’s rubble. He takes a cue from Ammons’s underlying weave—and then adds his own deep understanding of both Tao’s powers and contemporary cosmology’s posit that quantum entanglement is real. Tao and quantum physics spin around each other like a spiral helix.
Here is the magnificent first poem of a six-poem sequence called “Before Completion” that opens The Redshifting Web. Sometimes poems in this collection are lists of sentence fragments widely spaced in the field of the page. In the example below, complete sentences each function as a tiny kosmos (Whitman’s word) defined by specific actions that occurred, without awareness of what was going on in other universes. But Sze’s poem sees them all together, not separate. They’re linked via periods, commas, semicolons, or one dramatic colon coming at the end. Sze’s transcendent awareness bundles all the particles together into a single force field:
I gaze through a telescope at the Orion Nebula,
a blue vapor with a cluster of white stars,
gaze at the globular cluster in Hercules,
needle and pinpoint lights stream into my eyes.
A woman puts a baby in a plastic bag
and places it in a dumpster; someone
parking a car hears it cry and rescues it.
Is this the little o, the earth?
Deer at dusk are munching apple blossoms;
a green snake glides down flowing acequia water.
The night is rich with floating pollen;
in the morning, we break up the soil
to prepare for corn. Fossilized cotton pollen
has been discovered at a site above six thousand feet.
As the character yi, change, is derived
from the skin of a chameleon, we are
living the briefest hues on the skin
of the world. I gaze at the Sombrero Galaxy
between Corvus and Spica: on a night with no moon,
I notice my shadow by starlight.
(Sze, Redshifting 3)
This is a network poem that requires us to be nimble, able to jump between huge spatial and temporal scale shifts. Galaxies and constellations spread across the sky; microscopic pollen drifts on night wind. Needle pinpoints of light strike our retinas after traveling not just over vast regions of space but also over vast amounts of time measured in light years. (Some of that starlight, of course, may also come to us from stars long since burned out.) Animals go about their business on this fertile planet of ours, some of them perhaps even joyriding (that snake).
The poet and his partner think about tomorrow’s garden spadework, very aware that their day’s labor will also be part of an ancient stream, thousands of years during which Homo sapiens have planted, irrigated, and harvested corn and other plants in the Americas, using techniques passed down by previous generations. At the time of this poem’s writing, the poet and his family lived in Pojoaque in Santa Fe County, New Mexico. Pojoaque, the Spanish for Po’su wae geh, means “water-gathering place.” Sze taught creative writing at the Institute for Native American Arts in nearby Santa Fe. The reference to fossilized pollen high in the mountains opens another time window: cotton is native to New Mexico and many other parts of the world, but this reference may very well be to archaeological evidence of cotton growing at a much higher elevation than normal. There is archaeological evidence that cotton was irrigated and cultivated by Native Americans five thousand years ago or more, including at high elevations. Most of the world’s cotton comes from a single tetraploid species, Gossypium hirsutum, also known as upland or Mexican cotton, that was hybridized naturally around 1.5 to 2 million years ago.30
Other events that the poet asks us to meditate on are less inspiring. When the poem asks us to shift our gaze from the heavens to human beings on Earth, the first thing we see is an instance of misery. Not just the baby crying but also a mother so desperate and lost that she disposes of her child in a garbage bag. The poet gazes steadily on this event, asking us to pause for a moment on it. There is no commentary on how to interpret it, and it is certainly not an element in a Whitmanian catalog of miracles to be praised. But like Whitman, this poem too says that harm done to another person is harm done to the poet, and to us; catalog rhetoric emphasizes connection and a communally shared body, not separateness. The poem also wants us to name human heroism, not just our despair: a random passerby decides not to pass by but to intervene.
And then there is the equally stunning next line: “Is this the little o, the earth?” This seems a reference to the photos given to the world by astronauts of Earth as a tiny blue sphere floating against the blackness of space. But “the little o” must surely also signify the small sound of the abandoned baby’s cry; the immediate referent for “this” is “cry.” A poem is “the cry of its occasion,” Stevens said. Here we need to hear both the baby’s voice and the mother’s agony, juxtaposed against the silence of the night sky. All are a part of the poem’s news for us.
My favorite lines in the poem shape a different portal, one that perhaps cannot be measured simply in spatial or temporal terms. They open a new conceptual window in the poem, rather like the windows described in Jane Hirshfield’s Ten Windows. These lines come immediately after the details on ancient cultivation of cotton:
As the character yi, change, is derived
from the skin of a chameleon, we are
living the briefest hues on the skin
of the world.
(Sze, Redshifting 3)
“As” here sets up a comparison: as A is, so is B. It is a simile, therefore, suggesting that the Chinese character yi (易) gives us insight into our existence on Earth. When defining yi, online dictionaries conventionally stress that it means “change” and also—depending on context—“exchange,” “easy,” “light,” or “to tend” (as in to tend, or cultivate, a plant). Some also associate this character with the Chinese name for chameleon, as Sze does.31 Chameleons and other kinds of lizards are kept in some Chinese households as pets and a means of keeping the home free of flies. Sze’s simile sees a more sacred significance: the chameleon’s famously variable skin becomes a figure for our own brief existence on Earth. How beautiful this poem’s hues are, even as they change.
Sze’s long lyric sequences do not change this method of construction; they simply multiply it on a different scale, the way fractals work similarly both in micro and macro scales. The macro catalog poem that gives Sze’s 1998 collection its title, “The Redshifting Web,” describes its ordering concept this way: “near and far: / a continuous warp” (as in woven textile). That poem also makes a connection between Chinese calligraphy, the drawing of figures with an ink brush, and poetry writing. Both must proceed from a contemplative and conscious mind-set, one that is unhurried yet resolute: “Pausing in the motion of a stroke / two right hands / grasping a brush” (Redshifting 233). That last detail brilliantly hints at something else: “two right hands” on a brush means a master is teaching a student. That is not unlike what all of Sze’s poems do, as we see with his eyes and meditate with his motions of mind.
As they contemplate landscapes, the poets considered so far all employ strategies close to what Haraway proposes in When Species Meet: make “semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings co-shape one another” (4). Their poems are also “feral” and calculatedly decenter the human, equalizing it as just one of many nodes on an ever-shifting network. They honor mystery. They know that knowing must always be accompanied by a recognition of what we do not know. As noted by Zhou Xiaojing, when Sze visited the famous Zen rock garden at the Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto, he
was struck by the fact that as he walked back and forth along the walkway, he could not see all fifteen stones at the same time. “The stones are positioned into clusters and at such angles that the totality can never be seen at once.” The configuration of the stones resembles that of an archipelago, consisting of a cluster of apparently separate islands, which are in fact part of the same submarine land mass and of the earth’s crust. Sze realized that he “could develop a book” by creating “a series of poems where each poem resembled a rock in a garden. . . . The archipelago is thus the “one and the many.”
In sum, strong ecopoems do not have to be about a crisis of language, even though they respond to crises our ignorance and selfishness have caused. They demonstrate instead how poems can perform all things being connected and interdependent via the ensō of life (fig. 1). Ammons rejects that art should aspire to give “Overall” meaning (Collected Poems 148); Sze calls this resisting the temptations of “totality.” The ensō uniting all is always emergent, or in process, for both poets. Further, as Kenneth Burke would say, the “equipment for living” they give us is not solely an aesthetic or philosophical act.32 It is also a political one because it involves a power shift. The webs, networks, and ensōs in the landscapes of these mini connectome-poems challenge us. They disorient and reorient. They also start us on a new journey that it is up to us to continue—as Sze’s title “Before Completion” reminds us. Yet the ensōs themselves are not to be doubted. Neither is network thinking. Nor should we doubt the paradox that poems, as meditative acts, can make things happen in the world if—and it is a dangerous “if”—we choose to act on new awareness.
Ensō, meaning “circular form,” symbolizes Buddhist enlightenment.
Muddy Waters: Rickey Laurentiis
Black poets have a long and productive history of writing nature poems that use landscape tropes to reveal new ways to understand history, including buried stories that need to be exhumed and honored. Think of Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Sterling Brown’s more sinister “Riverbank Blues,” or Bessie Smith’s song inspired by Southern floods, “Backwater Blues.” Two fine contemporary examples would be Natasha Trethewey’s “Elegy for the Native Guards,” which resurrects memories of Black Civil War veterans, and Kevin Young’s elegy to Emmett Till, “Money Road.”
A Laurentiis poem that adds important new elements to this essay’s theme of network ecopoetry is “Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta,” from Boy with Thorn (56–57). As its subtitle notes, it is an instance of poetic ekphrasis—Laurentiis’s response to a monumental multipanel painting of the same name by Jean-Michel Basquiat that dates from 1983, when its creator was twenty-three years old and had quickly rocketed to fame. Laurentiis’s astute reading of one of Basquiat’s masterpieces demonstrates how literary landscape traditions may be creatively repurposed for understanding Black Atlantic history, and how that history can revolutionize our understanding of contemporary ecopoetry set by the juncture of land and water. Laurentiis’s poem, unlike Ammons’s, would not normally be called an ecopoem. But I would like to challenge any boundary guarding what does and does not “count” as an ecopoem. For if ambitious ecopoetry must include history due to the origins of the Anthropocene and the capitalist commodification of people and landscapes, then “Undiscovered Genius” presents one model for how to do that. Both poem and painting excavate the deep history of what is buried in Mississippi delta mud.
Reproduced in color on the Wikipedia page devoted to Basquiat’s painting and in Shafrazi et al. (25, 196–97), Basquiat’s work is a sardonic response to capitalism’s intersection with racism and Southern history. The scrawled words “Mississippi,” “Mark Twain,” and “Negroes” are repeated multiple times, with roman numerals marking some of the iterations. Below “Negroes,” other writing is present but has been overpainted and made illegible. All this is juxtaposed with the word “Cotton” and images of pigs, cattle, and a man’s head dismantled into pieces, with its nostril, jaw, teeth, ear, and larynx (“side view”) all displayed for sale, juxtaposed with “per Lb. 49 ¢” and a cow with the registered trademark “®.” Basquiat’s visual and verbal language pointedly aligns the nineteenth-century discourse of slave auctions—where slaves standing on auction blocks had their body parts and demeanor publicly displayed as an auctioneer took bids—with that of twentieth-century industrial food production (“A Diet Rich in Pork Products” is noted, then crossed out). Basquiat underlines the continuities, more than the differences, between past and present forms of capitalism.33
The panel farthest to the left contains both a self-portrait and the painting’s title. Basquiat’s portrait wryly comments on his sudden fame and marketability by placing “FIG 23” next to a self-image that seems to have been scrawled on or defaced. “FIG 23” alludes not just to Basquiat’s age but also to the fact that he has become an illustration or example in someone else’s narrative: he is the New York art world’s New Thing, an “undiscovered genius of the Mississippi Delta.” Rather than being complimentary, such a phrase is redolent with condescension. It treats Basquiat as an untrained native genius whose true worth can only be recognized by others. He is also a locatable, “authentic” primitive—of the Mississippi mud and “The Deep South ©”—a label that completely ignores Basquiat’s Brooklyn, Haitian, and Puerto Rican roots. Used this way, “Genius” serves not to suggest autonomy and complexity but to memeify him for the art market’s investors. Basquiat was aware of the brutal ironies involved in how he was singled out by some as the new star in American painting while most Black artists were being treated by the same system as beneath notice or as a threat. Another work from 1983, Defacement, commemorates the murder of Michael Stewart by a New York City transit policeman for the crime of painting graffiti.34
Laurentiis’s response to Basquiat’s painting is not the kind of ekphrastic poem that recreates a painting’s images in the mind’s eye. Rather, it performs a reading of the painting, reflecting on its methods of fragmentation, commodification, and satire. The poem splits itself into two irregular columns standing left and right on the page. We should think of these twin towers of text, one italicized and the other not, as creating a powerful dialectic or force field. Picking up on Basquiat’s Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage and his knowledge of the practices of vodun, Laurentiis’s poem also channels the powers of orishas or loas—African diaspora gods—to counter the powers of enslavement, dismemberment, “discovery,” and enclosure.
Laurentiis’s right column opens with an italicized blues moan repeating Mississippi Mississippi as Basquiat does, adding “This / is the song // we’ve always known” while also making a statement that could be a question: “Finally // we’ve reached // the end // of narrative.” Does this evoke how the market “narrated” Basquiat and drove him to drugs and eventually death by heroin overdose at the age of twenty-seven? Or suggest that the market’s “end,” or goal, was just to make millions from sales of the newly discovered “primitive genius” arising from Mississippi mud? Or perhaps some grisly combination of both these motives? A definitive answer to such questions is impossible; the goal of Laurentiis’s poem is to raise them.
The left column is another blues poem. Like Hughes and Sterling Brown before him, Laurentiis equates Black creative power with a river while also reflecting an awareness that America’s brutal history flows continuously, too:
So we see here this
river making away
itself, perverting
to its many tangents—
Are not sad
(“Undiscovered Genius” Boy with Thorn, 56)
Can talent, like a river, be diverted, corralled, or diminished—either by engineers creating levees or marketers “owning” the rights to an artist’s work? The poem’s unspoken answer is yes. In response, it uneasily offers a prayer that “The genius might be / to remain unfound, / unfounded, / outside the reach of the West / for as long as one can …” (56; Laurentiis’s ellipsis).
Inspired by Basquiat’s work, Laurentiis’s poem asks, what if a boy genius could look into the mirror of Mississippi water and see himself “uncombined,” “unsatisfied,” and uncontained? Could that genius resist being “set” or placed by others, able to “lay there in the middle of things” and become the river and its delta, flowing and constantly in motion? Here are the poem’s final stanzas shown as two curvilinear streams of text:
Who was designed a slave,
beast of burden, he says
he was—that his blood and sweat, oh
every inch is Finally
this Republican land
*
The genius might be
that he was still unsatisfied, we’ve reached
would not be set—
but lay there in the middle of things,
uncombined
*
So he’s been sinking then
this whole time, his whole the end
body consumed
by that mud—till what remained: a figure,
the singing, singular head …
of narrative
(57)
Laurentiis’s last two lines on the left column reference the moment in Orpheus’s story where, after he is dismembered by the Maenads, his head floats down the river Hebrus to the sea and then to the isle of Lesbos, singing all the way in defiance of dismemberment. Similarly, Laurentiis imagines Basquiat as unkillable. They place Basquiat (and Laurentiis) within the long, winding river of Black diasporic genius that Hughes celebrated in his famous “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” But this new version of Orpheus’s death adds a key change: capitalism’s market forces are the Maenads.
A poem about Basquiat, Orpheus, and the dismemberment of Black creativity—and then the ways in which Black creatives seek to sing their diasporic powers back to life—is obviously not a traditional ecopoem. In fact, given the history of racist discourse equating Black creativity with something “natural” like river mud feeds into obvious stereotypes, but this is in fact the kind of equation Laurentiis offers, calculating precisely both the damage that trope does and its potential for imagining alterity, what they call an “unfounded” and ungrounded figure for Black genius challenging all the forces that try to contain or narrate it. For Laurentiis, a true understanding of genius always already escapes the powers of capitalist and racist discourse—even when (as Basquiat’s angry title highlights) capitalism believes it can not only brand genius but also define where it comes from and what it means.
Laurentiis’s poem exemplifies a crisis of representation in contemporary ecopoetry because it engages with fallen human history. How can a poem both critique the language of “natural genius” marketed by capitalism and offer an alternative notion of creativity embodied by both Black tradition and Orpheus? So confronting such a dilemma, Laurentiis chooses to place various languages and narratives in agonistic combat, facing off against each other. A reader’s job is perhaps not to synthesize but to experience the existential struggle that such a conflict generates.
Basquiat was fully aware of the relevance of the Delta blues tradition to his painting Undiscovered Genius, and so is Laurentiis. The connection is even clearer in one of Basquiat’s preparatory drawings. At its center—opposite the severed head—is placed the figure of a blues guitar player.35 Basquiat calls him a “GRIOT,” the poet-singer in West African tradition who kept archived in song the whole history of a people. Juxtaposed with the blues hero figure, however, are the implements of dismemberment—not just sickles, axes, and a slave ship with a copyright sign but also the lingo of commodity markets (“meat, flour, sugar, alcohol, tobacco, corn”) marking how Black bodies and their labor were treated as objects of exchange during both the slavery and postslavery eras.
When Basquiat reworked this sketch into his painting, this figure of the bluesman/griot was replaced with a cow’s head, and the artist added the sardonic comment that “the ‘cow’ is a registered trademark ®.” Both painting and sketch are full of such cross-outs and cancellations, enacting how the market cancels beings and turns them into commodities that, once sold, are crossed off its ledger of accounts. Laurentiis captures such forces of negation too, via the Mississippi blues moan on the right side of his poem, where the Orphic song of Black genius is juxtaposed with the stark threat of “the end of narrative.”
Blues musicians are of course particularly associated with the crossroads and Papa Legba (who also goes by Elegua and many other names)—the dangerous trickster god of the crossroads who walks with a limp but who also is empowered to journey between sacred and profane worlds delivering messages.36 So too does Basquiat’s work, as Laurentiis helps us see it. Note how, in the drawing, the word “DELTA” is highlighted by a rectangle drawn around it. It lurks just next to the blues musician’s right arm holding the guitar. Mississippi delta country is the resistant ground nurturing Black blues genius, not just cotton plantation masters’ profits. And that blues genius can never be fully captured or represented: its spirit remains “undiscovered,” resistant, free. As the lyrics to “Joe Turner’s Blues” put it, “been here and gone.”37
A further witty flourish celebrating uncontainable Black creativity is the fact that Basquiat draws a triangle-delta around a large “S” that he has borrowed from the word “Mississippi.” This sign for genius also floats in the drawing’s space right next to the bluesman. Anyone literate in comics knows immediately what is referenced here: Superman’s logo. This is not the commodified enclosure power of the copyright symbols “©” and “®” that capitalism so fetishizes. It is an uncontainable superpower.
Yet, ironically, that fertile Delta in Basquiat’s drawing was erased—at best has just a ghostly presence—within the painted version of “Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta” that Basquiat placed for sale on the market. Only if we know Basquiat’s preparatory drawing that he made before the painting—as well as Black diasporic history and its hidden codes—can we intuit the invisible superpower presences of Black genius haunting landscapes that have forever been scarred by the cross-outs and enclosure moves that remain capitalism’s and racism’s ongoing legacies.
In sum, both Basquiat’s Undiscovered Genius and Laurentiis’s poem have hidden meanings encoded with the antiracist, spirit-possession language and rites associated with both Afrofuturism and vodun.38 Opening oneself to their powers of spirit possession can create a kind of counterspell to the fukú of dismemberment and what Bob Marley (invoking Frantz Fanon) called “mental slavery.” The bloody, muddy legacy of the Atlantic slave-trade triangle is overlaid by a Black mystical Delta—a geometrical but also symbolic figure repeated frequently in Basquiat’s sketch. This Delta provides fertile ground—Afrofuturist ground—for postslavery and postcolonial Black identity creation and resistance. “Undiscovered Genius” is an ecopoem that shows how both the history of violence and traditions of creative resistance can be found in fertile river delta mud.
Borrowing Tsing et al.’s (Field Guide) terms and applying them to Basquiat and Laurentiis, we can say that Laurentiis’s is a “new nature” visual and verbal poetics that is politically engaged but also attentive to irony, erasure, antithesis, incompletion, and reinvention. Its broken or “patchy” form bears the marks of history but also enacts the feral emergence of something new. Both painting and poem confront capitalism’s inscriptions on landscapes and beings—dramatically embodied by all those scratched-out erasures of texts and images in Basquiat—and then “overwrite” those markings with new meanings and possibilities, often by invoking the undead power of older Black diaspora creators. Basquiat’s and Laurentiis’s fecund Mississippi delta mud, like any biodiverse wetland ecosystem, builds new connectomes of its own, constantly morphing its course to survive.39
Conclusions
Laurentiis’s “Undiscovered Genius” is a model for how ecopoetry can return to and reinvigorate ancient landscape poetry’s “genius loci” traditions—now infused with African diasporic, more than Roman, symbolic meanings.40 Their poem also demonstrates how contemporary ecopoetry may engage creatively with the three deadly c’s—colonialism, capitalism, and commodification. Juxtaposed with Ammons’s and Sze’s poems, we can now triangulate three ways in which ecopoetry reads landscapes while simultaneously confronting human history’s long-term marks on those landscapes.
Early in his career, Ammons was confident that nature’s fecundity would always exceed humans’ preference for borders and categories. Nature for Ammons reaffirmed the powers of the human imagination in a very Wordsworthian way, but he also knew that our vision of nature’s potency had to be updated to reflect modern ecosystem science and the recognition of chance (indeterminacy) within biodiverse systems. Sze, not unlike Whitman, seeks to imagine what can unify the fragmented moments of space-time he gathers into lists. Reaffirming Buddhism, his practice sees whatever unities there are as mysterious, emergent, and not easily codified (or, to use Ammons’s word, denominated) by language. “The totality can never be seen at once” is the great lesson Sze took from the Ryoanji Temple rock garden. Further, Sze and Laurentiis both burrow into haunted, hidden prophecies about the troubled histories buried in the North American continent’s soil, waters, and trash bins.
As mentioned near this essay’s beginning, “connectome” was coined in 2005 as a name for a map of neural connections within a brain. The shape and complexity of the connections constrain what interactions can occur, but they also recognize that cognition is shaped by the dynamic interactions of all its parts. Connectomes constantly cleanse and update their networks. A map is useful, but a static map cannot easily delineate what networks generate when active or vital—as both Bennett and Kevin Quashie affirm.
I have offered “connectome” as a working analogy or metaphor for how four ecopoems also demonstrate, in their own ways, network dynamism. I sketched several ways in which “thinking like a network” (my play on Leopold’s advice to “think like a mountain”) has been explored in many different fields over the last few decades. I also made two broader claims, with my selected poems offered as evidence: (1) that ecopoetry sometimes models its sense of complexity or richness based on an author’s understanding of what was and is occurring in the sciences, and (2) that as our knowledge of how ecosystems function has evolved, so too has ecopoetry’s aspiration for a dynamic, perhaps even feral and nonpoliced, interaction between poem and reader. Many contemporary ecopoets insist that, due to the Anthropocene, they can also use ecosystems’ struggles to understand human history, both its poisons and its elixirs.
No short paper can prove such claims. Instead, I presented testable hypotheses for reading other poems and for positing a way to think about possible connections between individual poems, readers’ experiences of them, and broader ways in which poems that we take to heart may change how we think, feel, and act in the world beyond the poem. We humans need to undertake many different types of actions amid the spiraling global pollution disaster we have caused. The title of Frank O’Hara’s poem “Meditations in an Emergency” assures us that poetry has and always has had a crucial role to play during times of crisis.41
Aside from tech interventions, reforms to our global food system, a green energy revolution (which will have to include solving plastics and pesticide problems), and many other changes, what the world needs now is better storytelling that reconnects our human fate to the thriving of more-than-human beings and biomes. Stories (and language itself) may be the oldest techne we have after all—perhaps even older than fire. Words helped Homo sapiens survive in the past; perhaps they will do so again now that the threat is fire, not ice. As this essay makes clear, we also need generative PI—poetic intelligence. A single AI-assist to write an email consumes enough electricity to drive a two-ton vehicle half a mile; ten ChatGPT answers require about two liters of water (Leffer).42 What are reliable, renewable energy sources for PI? One of them is our ever-morphing, networked literary traditions—our connectome.
Or might we call it a “connect-home”? “Eco” in “ecology” comes from oikos (home), and “ecology” means “the study of our home.”
Acknowledgments
Arthur Sze, excerpts from “Before Completion” from The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998. Copyright © 1998 by Arthur Sze. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
“Identity” excerpted from Collected Poems, 1951–1971. Copyright © 1963 by A. R. Ammons. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
“Coast of Trees” excerpted from A Coast of Trees. Copyright © 1981 by A. R. Ammons. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
“Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta,” from Boy with Thorn, by Rickey Laurentilis. Copyright © 2015. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Footnotes
↵1. For a particularly eloquent discussion of fragmentation as the paradoxical result of the era of digital information streams, see the novelist Olga Tokarczuk’s 2018 Nobel Prize speech: “Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and sameness between us. It is a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself.”
↵2. On von Humboldt’s life and work, see Wulf’s biography, with its revealing title: The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. An online version of Emerson’s Goethe essay is available at emersoncentral.com/texts/representative-men/goethe-the-writer.
↵3. For brief summaries of the ecosystem concept historically considered, see Chapin; Reddick. Willis F. Stuart Chapin notes that by the 1960s, “[s]ystems theory, control theory and simulation modelling have all helped to elucidate the control points for fluxes of matter and energy and to estimate difficult-to-measure fluxes. The laws of thermodynamics have been increasingly invoked as a basis of ecosystem theory” (270).
↵4. Vitalist assumptions about “intelligence” or purpose in nature have drawn criticism; for one summary focusing on critiques of Simard, see Irwin; for geologists’ understanding of organic/inorganic systems, see Bjornerud. Jane Bennett argues that vitalist approaches in tension with materialist assumptions have a long history in science and have been central to its progress (see, for instance, her chapter “Cross-Species Encounters” from Enchantment).
↵5. See also Gilbert; Gilbert and Tauber; Gilbert et al. The following quotation is notable: “the recent recognition of the ubiquity of symbiosis has challenged the traditional notions of biological individuality and requires a shift in the metaphysics undergirding biology, in which a philosophy of the organism must be characterized by ecological dialectics ‘all-the-way-down’” (Gilbert and Tauber 839). For an assessment of Haraway, see Derra; on the matter of sharing genetic material across species, see Margulis and Sagan; for a survey of such research and some of the legal issues raised regarding collective modes of being, thinking, and acting in the Anthropocene—including discussion of the work of Margulis, Haraway, and Gilbert and Tauber on the concept of holobionts—see Petersmann (“Sympoietic”).
↵6. For excerpts from von Bertalanffy’s book, see www.panarchy.org/vonbertalanffy/systems.1968.html.
↵7. See Sanders; Siegfried; van den Heuvel and Sporns.
↵8. For an accessible introduction to “weak ontology” contrasted with the “strong ontology” of materialist science—plus the ethical possibilities generated by such forms of speculation—see Bennett (160–66). The concept is most associated with the political theorist Stephen White. My list of culture-network theorists is hardly meant to be definitive; it should serve as just a preliminary sketch for mapping humanities research within the field of ecocriticism. I do not have room here to discuss Latour’s, Deleuze’s, and Haraway’s relevance for ethical network thinking embracing both human and more-than-human beings. Good overviews of their careers are plentiful elsewhere. I especially recommend Deleuze (56–60); Latour; Latour and Truong; for sympoiesis, see Haraway (Staying 58–98). Although Haraway is often credited with coining the term “sympoiesis,” its provenance is not certain. According to Petersmann (“Sympoietic”), it was used as early as the mid-1990s by the biologist-in-training M. Beth L. Dempster (94–95); see also Petersmann (“Response-ability”).
↵9. This was reprinted in 2013 as A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation.
↵10. For more on Leopold’s land ethic, see www.aldoleopold.org/about/the-land-ethic. Meine’s essay deals with the controversial question of Leopold’s mixed legacy regarding Native Americans and the land as well as the broader history of anti-Indigenous racism within environmental movements: “It’s true that Leopold did not fully acknowledge the historic trauma of Native American dispossession and genocide, or explicitly recognize how the impacts of land exploitation fell disproportionately on the poor and on Black and Indigenous people and people of color” (Meine, “In a Time”). On models of how networks can be used in literary criticism both as a subject and as a method for research, see Caroline Levine (112–31), who traces how networks are represented in classic novels; see also Min Song’s “shared agency” in lyric poetry, a concept that revises our assumptions that lyric poems are primarily first-person subjective.
↵11. “More-than-human” may have first been used by David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. Note how Abram’s title weaves together perception and language, suggesting the two are entangled and constantly evolving. The words we use affect what we see and imagine; changing understandings of the world require language to evolve, too. “Spell” references both the components of words and the effects words may create. My hypothesis is that poetry, chants, and other performative language use, including stories written or oral, are the forge within which language is most dramatically remade. Google’s n-gram viewer shows the dramatic rise of the “more-than-human” compound in the 2000s.
↵12. See, for example, Fisher-Wirth and Street; Martínez-Serrano et al; McIntyre-Mills and Corcoran-Nantes.
↵13. On ecosyndemics, see also Tallman et al. Facts about the working conditions of Coachella Valley farmworkers are from Jiren Deng’s investigative reporting.
↵14. The term “response-ability” was developed by others but received wide circulation through Haraway’s When Species Meet. Haraway criticizes “responsibility” as too androcentric, proposing instead “response-ability” as recognizing that humans act within networks; see also Giraud; Petersmann. In a 2024 essay in the New Yorker, however, Lepore rather cheekily appropriated “response-ability” and uses the term ironically, suggesting it applies best to social media titans whose media sites are designed to promote the highest numbers of responses (views and shares). They proudly ignore demands for curbing malicious or false speech and monetize viral distribution surges—all redefined as free speech rights; for more on social media and tech titans, see Risse.
↵15. On ecopoesía versus ecopoetry, see Google’s n-gram viewer, which shows that a sharp rise in use among English speakers occurred in the late 1990s, more than a decade after the publication of Parra’s Ecopoemas; on Parra’s evolution, see Araya Grandón. Vicuña’s pioneering poems and projects from the 1970s and after, created in Chile and the United States, should also be recognized as groundbreaking in the history of ecopoetry; see also Vicuña and Acalá. I underline the importance of Jonathan Skinner’s interview with Vicuña in the first issue of ecopoetics, the first journal in the English-speaking Americas devoted to the field. Skinner should receive a great deal of credit for prodding Anglo poets and Anglo ecopoetics to pay attention to developments in Latin America. My hypothesis about Latin America’s importance for the history of ecopoetry should not be taken to ignore the prominent role that the Beat poets, especially Gary Snyder, and anthologies such as Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred played in recognizing poetic innovations beyond the Western and English-speaking world as well as the ways in which capitalism’s endless appetites are endangering peoples, cultures, and the planet itself.
↵16. Kimmerer also has several chapters on how the Third Kingdom, mycelial fungal networks, may instruct us, too.
↵17. Howe’s title, Choctalking, puns on Choctaw, Howe’s Native nation.
↵18. For a definition of the term “emergent strategy” in connection to social justice eco-activism, see adrienne maree brown, who draws inspiration from many sources, including Grace Lee Boggs, Octavia Butler, and scientific studies of complexity; see also commonslibrary.org/emergent-strategy. One poet influenced by brown is Tamiko Beyer. I highly recommend her collection Last Days and her workshops exploring connections between the poetic imagination and social justice activism. Beyer’s book tests different strategies for extending a poem’s voice to include more-than-human beings. She also depicts postclimate apocalypse societies ruled by authoritarians and contested by underground resistance networks.
↵19. Kimmerer would probably not condone Morton’s mechanistic analogy of a “slider” between a “correlator” and “correlatee” or his endorsement of gleeful anarchy—though as a writer, Kimmerer mixes playfulness with profundity, as Thoreau aspired to do. Morton’s “slider” analogy features in Humankind; see also Morton (Dark Ecology; The Ecological Thought; Hyperobjects).
↵20. McKibben looks at examples of successful balances struck between human economic activities and ecosystem restoration in the United States, Brazil, India, and elsewhere and uses the term “living lightly” for this humbler version of progress.
↵21. All Dungy’s books provide examples, but the poems in Trophic Cascade have been particularly inspirational and influential for poets and readers.
↵23. Tsing and Ericksen trace economic and biological networks that thrive amid capitalist ruins and envision new (and old) kinds of markets (e.g., for wild-gathered mushrooms) emerging in forest ecosystems devastated by unchecked profit-taking in lumber; see also Tsing (Field Guide); Tsing et al.
↵24. For the theory and practice of “affordances” of networks as portrayed in the novel, see Levine, whose work overlaps in fascinating ways with that of both Bennett and Leckie; see also Müller and Pusse.
↵25. The Hebrew word radah, which is most often translated as “dominion,” generally evokes a sovereign’s righteous power to rule subjects and subdue enemies. It is profoundly hierarchical, as is the idea of human exceptionalism relative to all the other beings in Creation (e.g., see Genesis 1:27–28). Alternatively, radah in some contexts means something quite different. In Psalm 72:8–14, the radah of God’s power may be translated more accurately as “lovingkindness” toward other beings: “For he will deliver the needy who cry out, the afflicted who have no one to help. He will take pity on the weak. . . . He will rescue them from oppression and violence” (NIV). Though stressing God’s infinite powers, this passage nonetheless is powerfully nonhierarchical in its prophesy of the overturning of social hierarchies.
↵26. For two commentaries on “Corsons Inlet” (whose title sometimes has an apostrophe but often not), see Klink; Scigaj (83–127). Scigaj discusses the poem in the context of Ammons’s entire career.
↵27. Stephen’s first name is now Stephanie.
↵28. For another poem on spiderweb building, see Kay Ryan’s “Spiderweb,” which emphasizes the spider’s daily heavy labor: “always / hauling coarse / ropes, hitching / lines to the / best posts / possible.” Ryan’s spare style, influenced by Williams, Niedecker, Neruda, and perhaps Rae Armantrout, often distills a moral for a poem’s conclusion. This poem ends with the lines “It / isn’t ever / delicate / to live.”
↵29. For a discussion of the whole of Sze’s career that celebrates the 2021 publication of The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (also from Copper Canyon Press), see deNiord, who offers a distinct definition of Zen Buddhism and its relevance for Sze’s poetry and practice. I also recommend Rauscher on Sze. Sze’s essays, interviews, and new poems appear in The White Orchard.
↵30. On the history of cotton and its domestication in the Americas, see Senchina et al; Viot and Wendel.
↵31. For yi defined as “to change” or “easy,” see dictionary.hantrainerpro.com/chinese-english/translation-yi_easy.htm. For the chameleon connection, see yijing.nl/moon.html. A different yi (pronounced with a different inflection and represented by a different character) means “resolute” or “firm.” That meaning is also arguably important for Sze’s poem; for the second meaning, see dictionary.hantrainerpro.com/chinese-english/translation-yi_resolute.htm.
↵32. See in particular Burke’s “Literature as Equipment for Living” in The Philosophy of Literary Form.
↵33. Many books cover the history of slavery in the Americas, including the role of slave sales. For a recent history of broader cultural practices and assumptions driving slave auctions—including placing slaves on blocks above the crowd and delineating their assets—see McKittrick. I also recommend the materials assembled by the National Humanities Center: nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/enslavement/text2/text2read.htm.
↵34. Shira Wolfe’s commentary on Basquiat’s artistry and his critique of the art market is juxtaposed with a statement from a Sotheby’s vice president commenting on the painting as a high-value “masterpiece.”
↵35. There are many versions of Basquiat’s original sketches for Undiscovered Genius available online.
↵36. For the best representation of Elegua and his many disguises in US literature, see Marshall.
↵37. For a history of the “been here and gone” phrase’s deep-rooted connection to Delta blues tradition, see Ramsey.
↵38. I thank my Swarthmore colleague Marshall Lee Smith III for this idea, which was mentioned in a talk on Basquiat, vodun, and other topics that he gave at Swarthmore College in February 2022. Smith is not responsible for any misinterpretation that I may have made of vodun tradition or its relevance to Basquiat. Smith’s talk did not cover Laurentiis’s poem.
↵39. Laurentiis’s “Undiscovered Genius” syncs up with many older and recent works honoring subversive Black creativity resisting forces that would contain it, including the legacies of colonialism and slavery; see, for example, Glissant; Quashie; Sharpe; the movie Sinners. Glissant’s “poetics of relation” concept—and his stress on the importance of “archipelago” network-thinking as an anticolonialist act—was one of the inspirations behind this essay.
↵40. The ancient belief that a landscape is more than geography is embodied in the concept of a “genius loci,” which means “the spirit(s) of the place.” For a survey of this motif with a focus on Roman poetry and its legacy in Europe, see Hunt.
↵41. Admittedly, O’Hara professed to hate “nature” poetry; he was a lover of cities. But pastoral motifs and references (some of them parodic) abound in his work, perhaps never more delightfully than in his Mayakovsky tribute poem, “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” (O’Hara 146–48); see also “Meditations in an Emergency” (O’Hara 66–67).
↵42. Leffer is quoting Shaolei Ren, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside.
This open access article is distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) and is freely available online at: https://cl.uwpress.org.
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