Reading List
In preparation for the workshop, we will send you a reading list...
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We think that one of the exciting parts about having such a workshop is attempting to de-fine (de-find) what we mean exactly by ecopoetics. Notions of ecology, nature, and environment are far-reaching conceptual models for how we conceive of the present, the human/nonhuman relation, and being in the world as a thing at all. One problem with “nature”/“ecology” is what appears to be their ontological self-evidence as things apart from the human, so unearthing and thinking through what we might mean by such a configuration is important, especially given human-made environmental catastrophe.
The critical theorist in us always starts with definitions. The poet in us always ends by ensuring definitions have been properly unravelled and pulverized so that they might be re-created, expanded, shifted, and reconstituted.
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Our reading list hopes to facilitate this process of definition and pulverization; thinking within, and from.
The list will includes excerpts from theoretical work by major Western experimental poetic, philosophical, and ecological thinkers:
Fred Moten, Percy Shelley, Joan Retallack, Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Povinelli, Timothy Morton, Lewis Hyde, Anna Lownhaput Tsing, among others.
It will include poetic texts by:
Myung Mi Kim, Susan Howe, Craig Dworkin, Jen Bervin, Christian Bök, Emerson, Wordsworth, Thoreau, Whitman, Lorine Niedecker, Francis Ponge, Lisa Robertson, Clark Coolidge, Layli Long Soldier, among others.
We will look at land-art texts by:
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Agnes Denis, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, James Turrell, among others.
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And think about music by:
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Hiroshi Yoshimura, William Basinski, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Hauschildt, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, among others.
2019 Reading List
Here is a 22-page reading list we compiled ahead of Ecopoetics Workshop 2019. The list for 2023 may look similar to this, with additions, subtractions, and curations. Note that we "require" that a very short list of texts be read by everyone, and that individuals browse the others as their interest dictates.
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