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Denaturalizing Nature Poetry & The Geography of Ecopoetics:
A Workshop on Thinking and Doing

Sarah de Leeuw and Eric Magrane will be reading their work for the Edge Reading Series at Casa Libre on April 17 more info...

Saturday, April 20
10 am to 1 pm
Cost: $40
To register please email casakeepers@casalibre.org

Poets have, for a very long time, focused much of our work on the ‘natural’ world. Of recent (roughly the last two decades), however, romanticization and aesthetically-beautiful poetic renderings of pastoral landscapes are being destabilized.  In a time of climate change and human-induced environmental damage, divisions of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are increasingly questioned and movements like ecopoetics are demanding from poets (as well as other creative writers and artists) social and ecological responsibility, insisting that artistic and poetic representations of nature must at the very least gesture towards the increasingly inalterable human presence and beingness in the world.

This workshop, led by two geographer-poets, will explore the expanding geography of ecopoetics. Through multiple exercises that involve disruptions of ordinary and ‘naturalized’ word-representations of nature and human emotion/relationship with ecosystems and the environment, the workshop will offer practical ways to write within and about human-nature relationships in fresh and ecologically attuned ways. We will also provide a working bibliography of ecopoetics, including a roster of experimental, feminist, and critical ecopoets, as well as outlets for publishing ecopoetry. Expect it to be interactive in style, ensuring room for discussion and sharing of poems produced during the workshop.

Teacher Bios

Sarah de Leeuw, a creative writer and geographer, is an assistant professor in the Northern Medical Program at UNBC, the Faculty of Medicine at UBC in British Columbia, Canada, where she teaches and does research about creativity, the humanities, and human health. The author of three books (two creative non-fiction and one poetry), and a two-time recipient of a CBC Literary Prize in creative non-fiction, her poetry appears widely in journals and anthologies across Canada. Her scholarly research work is focused primarily on ways to redress social injustices, especially those resultant from colonialism, many of which, especially when involving Indigenous people, also involve land and territory.

Eric Magrane is Poet in Residence at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. He is the founding editor of Spiral Orb, an experiment in permaculture poetics, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Geography at the University of Arizona, where he works on the intersections of art, science, and environment for the UA’s Institute of the Environment. In the past he has worked as a hiking guide and naturalist and has taught ecopoetics seminars for the University of Arizona Poetry Center multiple times, first in 2004. His poetry has appeared widely in journals and his book Shadow Lift will be published by JackLeg Press in 2014. You can find his permanent mirror-poem installation only mountains in the courtyard of Casa Libre.