CONFERENCIA PLENARIA

“Think!—the splendor of our life!”: Taking to Heart the Poetry of Sustainability

Scott Slovic
University of Nevada, Reno, USA.

The concept of “eco-poetry” means different things to different people. For some, this phrase is
simply another way of saying “nature poetry” and implies poetic texts that represent natural
phenomena, such as animals, natural forces (wind, water, climate, and so forth), and particular
places or landscapes. Other poets and scholars imagine eco-poetry to refer to stylistic experiments
(“ecopoetics”), by which familiar human language is changed in order to reflect exposure to specific
places (such as William L. Fox’s desert poems in the book Reading Sand) or as a way of indicating
the writer’s effort to stretch the limits of human consciousness (such as Michael McClure’s “beast
language”). However, yet another way of interpreting the phrase “eco-poetry” is to associate this
genre with the goal of using literary expression to clarify and intensify modern readers’ appreciation
for the practical aspects of our lives in relation to the natural world, including the impacts of our
lifestyles on local and planetary ecology. This latter perspective links the reading and writing of
poetry to the so-called “sustainability movement,” the trend in contemporary environmentalism to
consider seriously whether how we live in the world today can be continued without irremediably
damaging the biosphere, making it impossible for the continued survival of other species and,
perhaps, endangering our own long-term survival.
American ecocritic Leonard Scigaj established an explicit connection between contemporary
poetry and the idea of sustainability in his 1999 book Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets
(in which he offers extended commentary on the work of A.R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, W.S.
Merwin, and Gary Snyder). In this study, Scigaj defines the “sustainable poem” as “the verbal
record of an interactive encounter in the world of our sensuous experience between the human
psyche and nature, where nature retains its autonomy—where nature is not dominated, reduced to
immanence, or reduced to a reliably benign aesthetic backdrop for anthropocentric concerns” (80).
What seems particularly important in Scigaj’s definition—helping to distinguish the “sustainable
poem” from the traditional “nature poem”—is the idea of the non-human world as autonomous,
independent from human wishes and needs. The world, in other words, exists for its own sake within
a truly sustainable poem, even though the poem itself must of course come from the mind of a
human being, a poet. In a sense, then, the writer of a sustainable poem seeks to place him- or herself
(and the human species more generally) in a proper ecological relationship with the rest of nature,
not making human concerns the central issue of the text.
One of the poets studied in depth in Sustainable Poetry, Hawai‘i-based W.S. Merwin,
commented at length in a 1988 interview on the relation between basic human attitudes toward
nature and the tendency of human civilization to exert a callously destructive force on the planet.
Highlighting the importance of cultivating a “feeling of awe” toward nature, Merwin stated:

…the cause of [my] anger is, I suppose, the feeling of destruction, watching the
destruction of things that I care passionately about. If we’re so stupid that we choose

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 to destroy each other and ourselves, that’s bad enough; but if we destroy the whole
life on the planet! And I’m not talking about a big bang; I’m talking about it—the
destruction of the seas, the destruction of species after species, the destruction of the
forests. These are not replaceable. We can’t suddenly decide years down the line that
we made a mistake and put it all back. The feeling of awe—something that we seem
to be losing—is essential for survival. (Qtd in Scigaj 187)

The poet here makes it clear that his purpose in writing poetry in today’s world is to forestall the
further erosion of this “feeling of awe,” using poetic language to revivify our relationship to the vast
and mysterious and wonderful planet. In a sense, this means recreating through poetry what it feels
like when a person perceives some aspect of the world for the first time. An “ah-ha” moment—a
sense of delighted discovery. Scigaj observes that this poetic sense of “seeing for the first time”
helps to cleanse readers of jaded indifference and “refurbishes our relational bond with nature”
(186).
Much of the writing about sustainability reaches out toward environmental scholars and
activists and toward the general public in a tone of urgent seriousness, imploring people to consider
making fundamental life changes: eating local foods (and eating lower on the food chain—that is,
avoiding meat, imported goods, and other resource-intensive products); driving and flying less;
building more energy-efficient homes and work places; and using fewer natural resources in general.
The practical suggestions about lifestyle reform that come from the sustainability movement are
intended in a spirit of helpfulness and altruism, but such pronouncements and calls to action tend to
strike readers as puritanical and threatening, as they seem to require a diminishment in pleasure, in
quality of life—as if we’re all now expected to cinch tight the belts on our pants and prepare to go
hungry. Because of this apparent message of austerity, many members of the general public tend to
shy away from the language of sustainability in books and magazines and newspapers. The public
would rather dream of opportunities for greater success and happiness, even if such dreams call for
the use of additional natural resources during a time of ecological decline. There is a strong
tendency for people to ignore ecological reality until confronted by absolute and immediate changes
in the physical world: lack of drinking water, food shortages, impossibly high fuel prices,
unbreathable air, etc.
So what I would like to do in the remainder of this paper is point to some interesting
examples of sustainable poetry that explore human perceptions of the world and seek, along the
lines of Merwin’s comments above, to resuscitate our capacity for awe and wonder, inspiring
readers to seek new consciousness not merely as a way of avoiding ecological destruction but in
pursuit of enriched and intensified imaginative lives. Using examples of poetry that my colleague
John Sagebiel (an atmospheric chemist who specializes in the study of air pollution) and I teach in
our university course on “The Literature of Sustainability,” I would like to show that sustainable
poetry can help readers appreciate such essentially practical themes as food, water, architecture,
transportation/energy, and ecology/pollution (the basic themes emphasized in my class) without
being off-puttingly negative and discouraging. I believe the inspiring beauty of these poetic texts
helps readers and listeners to “take to heart” the messages of sustainability. Because my spaced here
is limited, I will move directly into my examples at this point.
Gary Snyder’s famous poem “Song of the Taste” first appeared in his 1969 collection
Regarding Wave, during the early years of the modern American environmental movement. The first
Earth Day event took place on April 22, 1970. American readers had become newly sensitized to

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serious environmental issues with the publication of Rachel Carson’s dark expose of the dangers of
agricultural pesticides in her 1962 book Silent Spring, and Paul Ehrlich’s dire forecasts of hunger
and disease resulting from human overpopulation were expressed in The Population Bomb in 1968.
Snyder ecological vision in “Song of the Taste,” however, celebrates the essential delight of eating,
associating nutrition with sexuality. He writes:

Eating the living germs of grasses

Eating the ova of large birds

the fleshy sweetness packed

around the sperm of swaying trees

The muscles of the flanks and thighs of

soft-voiced cows
the bounce in the lamb’s leap
the swish in the ox’s tail

Eating roots grown swoll

inside the soil

Drawing on life of living

clustered points of light spun
out of space
hidden in the grape.

Eating each other’s seed

eating
ah, each other.

Kissing the lover in the mouth of bread:

lip to lip. (No Nature 169)

This poem bursts forth with the sense of fertility, opening with paired references to grass seed
(“germs”) and bird eggs (“ova”), implying a commonality between plant life and animal life and
suggesting that every living being, plant or animal, is “drawing on life of living,” one life building
itself out of other lives. But in spite of the sense of joyful abundance in this poem of eating, the form
of the text itself does not imply lavish excess, a mindless exploitation of resources beyond what is
needed to sustain life. The relatively short lines and the stanzas consisting mostly of couplets and
tercets point toward moderation of language and moderation of physical consumption. Joyful and
healthy life, the poet seems to say, does not require an orgy of over-eating, but rather a conscious,
delicate tasting of each seed, each grape, each “mouth of bread.” The phrase “eating / ah, each
other” startles readers with the ecological idea that the eater is also destined to be eaten—this is the
place of all living creatures in the organic world. The poem’s final line, “lip to lip” (in fact the entire
last stanza) links the process of eating with the process of sexual reproduction, but the deliberateness
of phrasing implies that this process, to be most mindful, should take place in a controlled, careful

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way, not with mindless abandon. Published shortly after the appearance of Ehrlich’s jeremiad on the
subject of overpopulation, Snyder’s “Song of the Taste” realistically represents sexuality and the
consumption of food as processes that celebrate life while exercising appropriate discipline.
Ask contemporary scholars what they consider to be the single most pressing ecological
concern in the world today, and many will answer: “water.” To some extent today’s water issues are
the result of global, anthropogenic climate change, which means changing weather patterns in many
regions of the world, such as desertification in western China and flooding in southeastern China.
Concerns about water resources also result from recognition that human population growth has
greatly increased the need for food production, but in many parts of the world there is no longer
sufficient water for agriculture and the raising of livestock—one sees this problem concretely in
India today. Here in North America many city-dwellers are oblivious of the need to use water
consciously. Most people can turn a faucet in their homes and water will immediately appear, as if
by magic. It is common for people to live in single-family homes to have large areas of green grass
in their gardens, requiring lots of water—this is even true in desert regions. In teaching my students
to read poetry that encourages greater sensitivity to the fundamental preciousness of water, I like to
refer to a small work by Native American author Ofelia Zepeda, who comes from the Tohono
O’odham tribe in southern Arizona, down on the border with Mexico. Zepeda was raised in a
farming community in the Sonoran Desert, an extremely arid part of the United States. Her poem “It
Is Going to Rain” first appeared in the 1997 book Jewed ‘I-Hoi / Earth Movements:

Someone said it is going to rain.

I think it is not so.
Because I have not yet felt the earth and the way it holds still
in anticipation.
I think it is not so.
Because I have not yet felt the sky become heavy with moisture of
preparation.
I think it is not so.
Because I have not yet felt the winds move with their coolness.
I think it is not so.
Because I have not yet inhaled the sweet, wet dirt the winds bring.
So, there is no truth that it will rain. (What’s Nature Worth? 143-44)

This brief poem treats the mundane, unremarkable subject of whether it will rain or not on a
particular day. For the average city-dweller, especially someone living in a non-desert region, this
may seem to be an insignificant issue—if it rains, one might carry an umbrella, and if not, one won’t
need to think about the umbrella. I don’t mean to trivialize the subject of whether or not it will rain,
but merely to suggest that rain (or water in general) takes on a special significance, even implying
the difference between life and death, for someone who resides in a very dry place and who makes
his or her living as a farmer. In Zepeda’s poem, an anonymous speaker says casually that “it will
rain”—perhaps this speaker is a weather forecaster on television. It seems to be someone who is not
really part of the community where the poem’s speaker, the “I,” lives. The speaker then very
carefully assesses the prediction of rain against her own local knowledge of what happens when it is
about to rain—the way the earth trembles, the air becomes heavy, the wind cools down, and the air
takes on a sweet smell. (I refer to the speaker as “her” because of the poet’s gender.) Briefly, the

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poem suggests first and foremost that whether it will rain or not is an extremely important question
because water itself is such a precious, life-sustaining phenomenon—it is not a casual question.
Even the way the speaker gives four examples of what happens before it rains evokes a feeling of
sacredness in Native American poetry because it implies connections with the four cardinal
directions (North, East, South, and West)—Native ceremonies often begin with an acknowledgment
of the four sacred directions. There is certainly much more that one could say about this subtle
poem, but I think what makes it an especially interesting example of sustainable poetry is how it so
clearly demonstrates the speaker’s refined knowledge of her physical environment and her
passionate concern for the importance of water/rain. Readers of this poem who really take time to
think about it, to take it to heart, come away with a new sense of what water means, how vital it is to
the sustaining of life.
In the course on sustainable literature, we next turn our attention to sustainable building,
with a particular focus on green architectural theory from William McDonough and popular writing
about architecture as represented by Sarah Susanka’s The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the
Way We Really Live (2001). At the beginning of each new unit (each new theme) in the course, we
present the students with a brief poem that accentuates the upcoming topic before we move into
longer, more complex prose treatments of the subject. The vivid poems seem to help students
appreciate in a particularly powerful way some of the essential aspects of the topic. For instance,
when we turn our attention to architecture, we read aloud in class the two-page poem by the
eccentric, wandering Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki called “Specification for Mr. Nanao Sakaki’s
House,” which appeared in his 1987 collection Break the Mirror: The Poems of Nanao Sakaki. This
poem is a bit too long to present here in its entirety, but I will quote a small passage from it, in
which the author’s strong ecological sensibility, his sense of living within the complex and
exhilarating planet Earth, is manifest:

Round-based conical house like a bird nest—

For example, American Indian tipi or Mongolian yurt;
Both buildings have no trouble with earthquake & typhoon.
Materials for construction should be plentiful & easily available.
For example—bamboo, cedar, clay, coral limestone, basalt.
For the cement—sweat, wisdom & friendship.

A microcosm—
Height 100M, radius 100M.
Bamboo & cedar for framework,
Lava & clay as basement
Blue columbine carpet,
Bougainvillea ceiling.
Pampas grass roofing;
Alive, breathing statues as wall—winter wren, golden eagle,
Sea plankton, spermwhale, dinosaur, salamander,
Myself, the representative of terrestrial mammals
Standing in a corner as keyboard;
Me, & all the creatures in unison
Pulsating heart rhythm

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 Swirling breath melody—a life-proving song—
The whole dome sounds bamboo pipe organ. (69-70)

Saksaki’s sense of himself as a global citizen, not a resident in a single, specific place or an insular
representative of a single culture, or even a single species, gives this poem an expansive sense of
belonging. One of the elements of green, or sustainable, architecture is the idea of biomimikry,
whereby human constructions imitate the processes and materials found in the natural world. The
poet’s “house,” as imagined in this celebration of planetary inhabitation, is to be made of “plentiful
& easily available” materials, such as dirt and flowers and grass, with various animals (including the
poet himself) constituting the “wall” of the dwelling as “breathing statues.” What one realizes in
reading the poem is that the poet is not imagining an actual, realistic human dwelling in a specific
place, but rather celebrating the possibility that the entire planet might be thought of as our “house.”
After imagining the extraordinary “specification” for his house, poet concludes his meditation by
feeling renewed wanderlust, with his wandering lifestyle indicating a new way of belonging to the
world rather than rootlessness—“My heart starts burning for an unknown land,” he writes at the end
of the poem (70). At a time when citizens in many parts of the world are becoming increasingly
mobile and may be losing a strong sense of what it means to be truly “at home,” Sakaki’s poem
helps us to understand the physical and psychological aspects of dwelling in and on the Earth.
One of the important themes of the sustainability literature course is the fourth unit on
energy and transportation issues. We actually begin this discussion by presenting three poems to the
students: William Carlos Williams’s “Overture to a Dance of Locomotives,” Gary Snyder’s “Oil,”
and William Stafford’s “Maybe Alone on My Bike.” I would like to offer a brief discussion here of
Stafford’s powerful lyric narrative of the experience of cycling home, using the technology of the
bicycle as a means of augmenting and intensifying his contact with nature and his appreciation of
his very presence in the world rather than the more typical use of technology in order to insulate the
human self from worldly engagement. This poem so explicitly and keenly expresses the joy of
sustainable energy usage (bicycling home rather than driving an automobile) that I have quoted from
it in my title for this paper. It demonstrates the visceral sense of awe toward the world that Merwin
and Scigaj attribute to the genre of sustainable poetry. Here’s how it goes:

I listen, and the mountain lakes

hear snowflakes come on those winter wings
only the owls are awake to see,
their radar gaze and furred ears
alert. In that stillness a meaning shakes;

And I have thought (maybe alone on my bike, quaintly on a cold

evening pedaling home) think!—
the splendor of our life, its current unknown
as those mountains, the scene no one sees.

Oh citizens of our great amnesty:

we might have died. We live. Marvels
coast by, great veers and swoops of air
so bright the lamps waver in tears,

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 and I hear in the chain a chuckle I like to hear. (Smoke’s Way 29)

Recall that Scigaj defines a sustainable poem as “the verbal record of a percept, of the poet’s
originary perception” (80), and think of how Stafford, the Oregon poet who first published this work
in The New Yorker in 1964, celebrates the essential perceptibility of the world—and the world’s
own alertness to perception—that comes to him by way of the act of bicycling alone on a wintery
evening. Far from the sense of diminishment that ordinary citizens might associate with the act of
biking home after work rather than driving an automobile, the “quaint” (old-fashioned) activity of
riding a bike becomes an opportunity to really think, to register, the feeling of “the splendor of our
life.” The way Stafford says “our life” rather than “our lives” implies that we are all in this life
together—that even though he might be “alone on his bike,” he experiences an overwhelming sense
of life’s magic that envelopes and includes all beings—fellow humans, creatures of flight and
sensation like owls, and even “mountain lakes” which come alive in the opening lines of the poem
and “hear snowflakes come.” Reading this poem makes me want to get on my own bicycle in
pursuit not only of ordinary transportation, but in an effort to perceive the “meaning [that] shakes”
in the still, cold air through which the pedaling poet moves and also in an effort to achieve the
friendly bond with technology indicated in the poem, which concludes by mentioning with powerful
repetition “I hear in the [bike’s] chain a chuckle I like to hear.” This work powerfully illustrates the
kind of language that makes it possible for the general public to take to heart the messages of
sustainability.
Before turning to offer a few concluding reflections on the eco-poems of contemporary
Chinese writer Hua Hai, I would like briefly to mention one of the poems John Sagebiel and I use in
conjunction with the final unit of our class devoted to ecological literature. This work—which we
also use at the very beginning of the class—is Robert Hass’s “State of the Planet,” published in his
2007 collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005, which received last year’s National Book
Award. This poem covers more than seven pages and is too involved to discuss in full detail at this
point in my brief essay, but I would like to point to a few brief passages in which Hass shows how
we human beings are inextricably ensconced in the natural world (part of the world) and how we
tend to stand back and over-think our relationship with the planet in a Cartesian, hyper-rational way.
The opening section of the poem goes as follows, presented from the perspective of someone
(presumably an adult American) sitting in an automobile during a rainstorm, watching a schoolgirl
walk along the street:

October on the planet at the century’s end.

Rain lashing the windshield. Through blurred glass
Gusts of a Pacific storm rocking a huge, shank-needled
Himalayan cedar. Under it a Japanese plum
Throws off a vertical cascade of leaves the color
Of skinned copper, if copper could be skinned.
And under it, her gait as elegant and supple
As the young of any of earth’s species, a schoolgirl
Negotiates a crosswalk in the wind, her hair flying,
The red satchel on her quite straight back darkening
Splotch by smoky crimson splotch as the rain pelts it.
One of the six billion of her hungry and curious kind.

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 Inside the backpack, dog-eared, full of illustrations,
A book with a title like Getting to Know Your Planet. (49)

This one particular girl in a particular place in North America participates almost unconsciously in
planetary processes, wetted by a Pacific storm, walking beneath trees whose species originated in
the Himalayas and Japan. She is one of six billion human beings on this planet, and yet the fact of
her numerous “hungry and curious kind” is nearly impossible to get her mind around, to truly
understand. We tend to live our individual “hungry and curious” lives without thinking categorically
about the implications of our vastly populous species, becoming more populous every day. Rather
than simply existing in the world, like the speaker of William Stafford’s poem discussed above,
fully sensate and alert, we tend to hurry through the rain to our places of work or study, carrying
with us books that might help us abstractly “get to know our planet.”
“Poetry should be able to comprehend the earth,” Hass begins section two of his poem.
Dating back two thousand years, Latin poet Lucretius in De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of
Things) sought to describe, as Hass explains, “Something of the earth beyond our human dramas”
(50). But the contemporary poet then suggests that a Lucretius-like poet today would have to
describe a very different planet than the one that “teem[ed] with life” two millennia ago. Hass
writes:
Topsoil: going fast. Rivers: dammed and fouled.
Cod: about fished out. Haddock: about fished out.
To Kamchatka to Seattle and Portland, flailing
Up fish ladders, against turbines, in a rage to breed
Much older than human beings and interdicted
By the clever means that humans have devised
To grow more corn and commandeer more lights.
Most of the ancient groves are gone, sacred to Kuan Yin
And Artemis, sacred to the gods and goddesses
In every picture book the child is apt to read. (50)

The early passages in this poem suggest ironically that we are indeed very much a part of nature, but
we tend to keep our minds at a distance from nature. We allow ourselves to think in a detached way
about the world we inhabit, and in doing so adopt a mechanistic and utilitarian attitude toward other
beings, such as the fish we hunt in seas throughout the globe. In our “hunger and curiosity,” we
outsmart ourselves, overbreeding and overconsuming, growing more corn and building more dams
for more electricity (in order to “commandeer more lights”), not quite realizing the distant
ramifications of our cleverness. At this point in the poem, it might seem as if Hass is initiating a
kind of jeremiad in the mode of Carson and Ehrlich, a critique of human destructiveness. But the
poem turns in a new direction in its tenth and final section, as Hass asks “What is to be done with
our species?” He, being a poet, suggests that we are an entire species of dreamers, inclined to use
our imagination to transcend our involvement in the natural world rather than to engage ourselves in
the exercise of healing and nurturing the planet. “Because / We know we’re going to die, to be
submitted / to that tingling dance of atoms once again,” he writes, “It’s easy for us to feel that our
lives are a dream” (55). But then, in the final lines of the poem, he proposes a different use of the
imagination:
So easy, in imagination, to tell the story backward,

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 Because the earth needs a dream of restoration—
She dances and the birds just keep arriving,
Thousands of them, immense arctic flocks, her teeming life. (56)

Sustainable poetry—like eco-poetry more generally—cannot tell us how precisely to achieve

ecological restoration, but this poetry can inspire us to yearn for renewal and restoration, for newly
vivid consciousness of our actual place in the world. The concluding hopefulness of Hass’s extended
meditation on the “State of the Planet” belongs among my examples of sustainable poetry that can
readily be “taken to heart” because it shows his work not to be mired in dire predictions, despite its
realistic assessments. Unlike the potentially caustic moralism of Silent Spring and The Population
Bomb and various other examples of apocalyptic environmental writing, Hass’s work, like so many
other examples of sustainable poetry exemplifies the hopeful state of mind that is a prerequisite to
any positive actions by human beings toward sustainable living.
In conclusion, I would like to turn my attention to two eco-pems by Hua Hai, one of the
leading contemporary Chinese eco-poets. The first brief poem has been translated into English with
the title “The Little Sea.” This poem represents a beautiful and familiar scene of young children at
the beach, filling a hole they’ve dug in the sand with sea water in the hopes of creating a new
ecosystem in which a beached jellyfish can start a new life. I read this poem as a small parable about
the efforts of human beings to use their ingenuity to correct destructive forces in the world, whether
caused by human technology or simply the result of genuinely natural processes. These efforts, from
Hua Hai’s perspective, are doomed to failure. In the case of “The Little Sea” recreated by children
on the beach, the sandy bottom proves to be a “leaking sieve,” unable to keep the water from
draining back into the true sea. This realistic representation of the limitations of human ingenuity to
correct the destructive forces of nature and of our own species reminds us of humanity’s small place
in the world, correcting our hubris—in this sense, this poem tells us of our true ecological niche, not
as master’s of the Earth but as humble members of the Earth’s diverse community. I have also read
another interesting poem by Hua Hai titled “The Red Light on the Cliffs,” which is intriguing and
surreal, and which I believe represents the urgent, unstoppable desire that human beings often assert,
the desire to achieve whatever they wish to achieve. Perhaps I misread the poem (I am reading it in
translation), but when I look at lines such as “Because you are the world / The world is you / Your
Express is so powerful / That it doesn’t care it has crashed my light / The trees, the birds, all the
other creatures and I / Have to stand on the other side of the world,” I see human desire being
represented as a powerful “express train” tearing across the surface of the planet in pursuit of its
destination, whatever and wherever that may be. This poem implies the tendency of human beings to
exaggerate the importance of their own desires, failing to put them into the proper perspective, to
appreciate ourselves (individually and collectively) as a small portion of the planet’s living
community. Perhaps by reading and thinking about works like these, we can do a better job of
appreciating our proper place in the world.
I have closed with several poetic examples by Robert Hass and Hua Hai that seem somewhat
explicit in their communication of moral advice to readers, and perhaps it is inescapable, especially
at this time in history, that ecologically attuned poets will articulate moral arguments in their work,
in addition to working to revivify “our relational bond with nature,” to re-use Scigaj’s phrase, and to
re-instill us with the “feeling of awe” toward the larger world, as Merwin stated his own objective.
But even in the sometimes hortatory lines of sustainable poetry, there is, on a deeper level, an effort
to help readers explore with innocent wonderment the true meaning of our existence as living

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animals. In his study of English nature poetry, Song of the Earth (2000), Jonathan Bate asks the
fundamental question, “What are poets for?” To which he responds:

They are not exactly philosophers, though they often try to explain the world and
humankind’s place within it. They are not exactly moralists, for at least since the
nineteenth century their primary concern has rarely been to tell us in homiletic
fashion how to live. But they are often exceptionally lucid or provocative in their
articulation of the relationship between internal and external worlds, between being
and dwelling. (251-52)

This is what I’ve been trying to describe in the pages above, suggesting further that the specific
category of eco-poetry that we might call “sustainable poetry” celebrates the revelatory aspects of
alternative (and often counter-cultural) lifestyles, making it possible for mainstream readers,
currently living highly unsustainable lives of overconsumption, to take difficult messages to heart.
Making it possible for re-imagine what they eat, how they use water, where they live, what kind of
transportation they use, and the far-reaching impacts of their lives on the planet. This is what
“sustainable poetry” is for.

Works Cited
Bate, Jonathan. Song of the Earth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000.
Hass, Robert. “State of the Planet.” Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. New York: Ecco, 2007.
Hua Hai. “The Red Light on the Cliffs” and “The Little Sea.” Unpublished manuscripts of Zhang
Bigui’s English translations from Chinese.
Sakaki, Nanao. “Specification for Mr. Nanao Sakaki’s House.” San Francisco: North Point Press,
1987. 69-70.
Scigaj, Leonard M. Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets. Lexington: UP of Kentucky,
1999.
Snyder, Gary. “Song of the Taste.” No Nature: New and Selected Poems. New York: Pantheon,
1992. 169.
Stafford, William. “Maybe Alone on My Bike.” Smoke’s Way: Poems from Limited Editions 1968-
1981. Port Townsend, WA: Graywolf Press, 1983.
Zepeda, Ofelia. “It Is Going to Rain.” In What’s Nature Worth? Narrative Expressions of
Environmental Values. Ed. Terre Satterfield and Scott Slovic. Salt Lake City: U. of Utah P,
2004. 143-44.

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