The New Pastoral

“We can tread softly because our bodies can wonder about what it would be like to feel as another does—a radical shift of frame. In witchcraft, environmental activism is about acknowledging that there are stories we can never know, stories which can never be told in ways that we could understand.”—Sabrina Scott, Witchbody

Guys, I love nature. Trees? I’m into it. Flowers? Sign me up. But after eight years spent studying and teaching poetry in institutions, I have to admit that I’m thoroughly unconvinced by nature poetry. From the Romantics onward, nature poetry has celebrated the awe-invoking grandeur of the natural world, nature’s ability to awaken transcendental states in those who gaze upon it—and in so doing, nature poetry has failed to actually see the natural world.Nature does not exist in order to inspire humans. It is not sending us messages from the Universe. It is not a metaphor. It just is.Enter eco-poetics. It picks up where transcendentalist rhetoric trails off, exploring the mucky hybridity of our world, our shared experiences with human and non-human life. See Patricia Lockwood’s “The Whole World Gets Together and Gangbangs a Deer,” or Juliana Spahr’s “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache.” They ask us to question what we mean when we speak of capital-n-nature. They ask us why we think our lives are somehow different, more significant, than the lives of squirrels, grass, rivers, or pavement.While author-activist Bill McKibben heralds “the end of nature,” I sit on my balcony, typing on my laptop, watching the breeze glimmer through my neighbours’ poplar, tiny petals drifting into their acid-teal above-ground pool. Birds chirping, trucks rumbling through the ruelle, housecat curling around my calf. This is the new pastoral, in all its failure to be ideal.It is not, as it may seem, that we are simply city dwellers taking what we can get in scraps of "Nature"—unabashed raccoons and empty parkettes—suburbanites with our patchwork lawns and rows of saplings, or residents of rural farmhouses with our flat screens and high-speed connections. Rather, I invite all of us to see the richness of the natural world as it is and as we are a part of it. Without asking it to be idyllic, without seeing ourselves as outside of it (Scott).

When I look around, I see all of us seeking to understand—we are reaching farther, 'smashing together.'

As the guest editor for June on the Town Crier, I’ve asked people what our world, the hybridity of these landscapes, looks like to them. What does "nature" mean to you? How do we exist globally, within nature and with each other, through ongoing legacies of colonialism, through human exceptionalism and the exploitation of non-human life upon which our society is based? How do we reinstate the value of that which and those who have been deemed undesirable?In 2015, Jacob McArthur Mooney wrote of emerging poets in Canada shifting away from a national identity:

…there’s a bigger world out there. I think that this group is so used to the repetitive smashing together of cultural products: near and far, high and low, old and new, that the reach of their metaphors can be so much more ambitious and natural than for poets born even a few years earlier. A lot of this is the internet but it’s also the Internet of Thoughts, you know.

While Mooney is speaking culturally here, I think the same applies to the hybridity of our developing understanding of nature. When I look around, I see all of us seeking to understand—we are reaching farther, "smashing together." It’s not that there’s been a conscious decision in the collective minds of writers and artists to create hybrid works, but rather we are striving to represent our strikingly hybrid world as we experience it.I’ve used the term eco-poetics rather than poetry because this collective thinking spreads far beyond the realm of line breaks. This month, we’ll experience groundbreaking memoirs, photography, graphic novels, theory, and hybrid works that defy definition. In my curation, I’m striving to amplify the variance of voices I hear all around me—different nationalities, cultures, genders, sexualities, races, spiritualties, and so much more, in all their intersections. In just one month, I won’t be able to be comprehensive, but I want to at least attempt to represent a cross-section of the way people are thinking together and expressing ourselves. I don’t claim to be an expert on this topic, but I wonder, should we trust anyone who does? I believe that our existence in this world, our lived experiences, and the questions we ask, gives legitimacy to every voice, and I’m looking forward to listening to anyone who chooses to speak.

"NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down"

—Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letters

Jessica Bebenek is a writer and transdisciplinary artist currently living on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory. Next month she will be leading her research-creation workshop “Garden as Metaphor: Creative Responses to Bioregionalism” at the new Schole in Montreal. Her latest chapbook, Fourth Walk, was released from Desert Pets Press in Summer 2017 and k2tog, her collection of knitting patterns for poems, will be released from Berlin’s Broken Dimanche Press this summer.www.jessicabebenek.art @notyrmuse