Farmer poet writes thesis on ‘ecopoetry’

Published date15 January 2021
Date15 January 2021
Publication titleHorowhenua Chronicle
Farming and writing poetry were not typically associated, despite poets writing about nature for millennia, evoking its power and beauty, its metaphors for the human condition.

But an era of climate change crises and biodiversity loss has spawned a new twist in the nature poetry genre — ecopoetry — and Newman discovered that New Zealand writers were redefining it.

As a farmer, poet and Massey University graduate, she explored local versions of this new global poetry trend for her doctoral thesis, titled Imagining Ecologies: Traditions of Ecopoetry in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Newman, who graduated late last year at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ ceremony with a Doctor of Philosophy in English, wanted to find out more about ecopoetry in New Zealand — even though the term is not widely used here.

She said European settler and indigenous perspectives on nature had forged a specifically Kiwi version of ecopoetry.

Ecopoetry blends ecology with poetry. It was the term given to “new nature poetry written in opposition to human denigration of nature”, she said.

“It arose from the mid-20th century environmental movement during a time of protest and political activism.”

She said ecopoetry, which emerged in the 1990s, “empathises with the natural world and relates different ways of conceiving the relationships between nature and culture”.

While there is not a single definition of ecopoetry that all critics agree upon, most definitions concur that “ecopoetry portrays nature with humility rather than a sense of superiority or domination”.

“Ecopoetry neither subjugates nor idealises nature,” she said.

Newman’s main supervisor at Massey University was Professor Bryan Walpert with co-supervisor Associate Professor Ingrid Horrocks.

It was viewed by some as an offshoot of nature poetry, and by others as a separate field. Either way, it “values nature not as a resource for human exploitation but rather as an interconnected part of human life”.

New Zealand literature is awash with nature poetry — often in the tradition of romanticising the grandeur and diversity of our unique landscapes. That includes more recent poems that serve as vehicles to express environmental activism, messages and causes.

“Ecopoetry has its genesis in a desire for poetry to act as a catalyst for social action towards political change in order to protect the environment from further human degradation,” she said.

Newman chose three contemporary poets as the focus of her research, on the...

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