Ecopoetic practice : Writing the wounded land

Wattchow, Brian

Title: Ecopoetic practice : Writing the wounded land
Creator: Wattchow, Brian
Date: 2012
Type: Text; Journal article
Identifier: http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/163119
Identifier: vital:12786
Identifier: https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708611430482
Identifier: ISBN:1532-7086
Abstract: In this article the author discusses the experience of poetic writing as a form of autoethnographic practice. Poetic writing, more than other textual forms, offers considerable potential to represent the journey toward "empathetic insidedness" between author, culture, and a sense of place. The author draws examples from his recently published collection of poems titled The Song of the Wounded River. The poems were first drafted on a long canoe journey down the river to the old farm pioneered by the author's ancestors over a century ago. In an ecopoetics of place the writer strives to reconcile differences between past, present, and future and between their experiences of inner and outer landscapes. In an echo of Romanticism the ecopoet writes to heal the world's wounds through singing the land. Seen in this light poetry and empathy provide the counterbalance to science and rationality. Both are needed to sustain the human relationship with the Earth. Humans damage places not because they fail to understand them, but because they are yet to feel for them, like kin. This article draws together and discusses the physical search for place, the act of poetic writing, and the cultural significance of this kind of work. © 2012 SAGE Publications.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Relation: Cultural Studies - Critical Methodologies Vol. 12, no. 1 (2012), p. 15-21
Rights: This metadata is freely available under a CCO license
Subject: 1303 Specialist Studies In Education; 2001 Communication and Media Studies; 2002 Cultural Studies; Ecopoetics; Empathetic insidedness; Human geography; Phenomenology; Place
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