Ecocentric Inclusiveness: A Review of “Poetics for the More-Than-Human World”

“Poetics for the More-Than-Human World” is an anthology of poetry and commentary with a title that encompasses much: a refutation of Anthropocentrism (to remind us that our world isn’t just made to support human life, that natural resources should serve interests beyond human industry or needs). It also signals that the pages include non-human voices as well as work from some rather renowned humans: four poems by Rae Armantrout, three by Jane Hirshfield, and three by John Kinsella.

Poetics for the More-Than-Human World: An Anthology for Poetry and Commentary. Editors: Newell, Quetchenbatch, and Nolan. Dispatches Editions, 2020. 546 pages. $40.

In their introduction, editors Mary Newell, Bernard Quetchenbatch, and Sarah Nolan explain that “More-Than-Human” means a broad representation of human cultures, but that the text is also distinctly located in the 21st Century. “Ecopoetry” takes many forms, but here it means “ecocentric inclusiveness.” This includes aural samplings from the world beyond humans—geology, insects, and animals. Nothing should feel “foreign,” the editors explain. Every reader made of stardust is invited to feel wonder, though this is not a collection of romanticism for a pristine world. The more-than-human world is complicated and nuanced, after all, and perhaps can only be understood through a chorus of voices.

The anthology opens with Juana Ardcock’s “Steller’s Use of Verbs When Describing the Sea Cow, Hunted to Extinction within 27 Years of Its Discovery by Europeans. De bestiis marinis, 1751.” A kind of erasure and found poem hybrid, Ardcock’s poem highlights the struggle and tragedy of this mammal hunted to extinction for its blubber by European fur traders, reminding us that we have all of us inherited the historical precedent of misuse or overuse of earth’s resources. The poem “Dead Pregnant Whale Found with 48 Pounds of Plastic in Stomach, April 2, 2019,” by Stacey Balkun, illustrates how we are all implicated today:

I was adopted, bottle-fed limp formula, the plastic

nipple tossed once I was grown, thrown

to the ocean and lodged in the belly

of this whale. Everything I’ve held

turned weapon against her, baby

bottle to ballpoint pen

Have humans accepted their introduction of toxic byproducts into the environment and the damage this causes our species? Have we already begun myth-making to understand—or even, unthinkably, to celebrate this? 

Maybe, suggests Rae Armantrout, when their poem “Whistle” asks:

In how many Recent Films 

does the hero get his power

from venom, radiation, or exposure
to chemicals?

If an anthology is a choir, some sing the part of despair. It’s here in “As If Hearing Heavy Furniture Moved on the Floor Above Us,” when Jane Hirshfield describes numbering the last of near-extinct animal species on earth “as if eating the last burned onions and carrots from a cast iron pan.”

But the chorus also includes an array of non-human voices: “The Folk” by Jeffrey Bean is told in the collective voice of a bee colony. “Frog Medley” by Michael Basinski is exactly that—a recording of frog calls throughout different phases of their life cycle as if it was an original movie score.

Of course, any more-than-human voice was imagined, created, or at least transcribed by a human. Other poets remind us that while humans may be shaping the planet now, much of the world existed before humanity and could certainly exist when humans are gone. In “Walking Over Ice to Valcour Island,” Joseph Bruchac suggests that while army aircrafts may seem the loudest sounds in our current time, there are forces older and more enduring: 

The rumble of an army bomber

throbs overhead practicing war. 

It passes as quickly as all human sounds 

while the lake’s thrum continues.

This more-than-human choir sings the story of humans as they take, consume, and transform  

(and also when they leave detritus behind). Microplastics are broken down and woven throughout the words in this book, as they are in our waterways. “And You Shall Know Us by Our Trash: An Ecopoetics for the Moon” by John Bradley is a list of garbage left on the moon by American astronauts. Is trash to be humanity’s lasting legacy throughout our galaxy? It certainly is on our home planet.

Even if we turn this ship around, if we radically change how we consume resources and dispose of waste, human consumerism has already shaped the environment—with what are certain to be lasting effects. “‘No Direct Water Contact Activities’” by John Kinsella follows one bird along a riverbank, noting the “infections” like a broken beer bottle that it encounters:

Fledged little pied cormorant 

is a telepath—conveys—just

enough of where it has come from

and where it will be going in its dive

through our short-term memories, 

the broken beer bottle in the silt 

we cut our feet on—river infections 

that crawl up the leg, beautiful 

inflections of what’s been done.

Still some voices in the chorus are cautiously optimistic that a new covenant can be made between humans and the rest of the planet. “Touch of Water” by Elena Rivera suggests a future where humans observe more than they interfere:

How can we navigate our way? Is it about how things were 

done or how things can change in the future, the future is
daring if we invent it and pay attention to the touch 

of water, earth, air, paying attention to our gestures
even if we are all only weeds listening to ice melt, Pop!

The anthology concludes with thirteen essays and critical responses, which interrogate and reimagine the ways humans interact with the planet beyond them. The questions raised are existential: What is the poet’s obligation to the more-than-human world (“Three Approaches …” by Tyrone Williams)? Is it possible for poets to inspire a complete rejection of the Anthropocene and start a revolution (“Entangling the World: The Connective Poetics of Juliana Spahr’s ‘If You Were a Bluebird’” by Pauw Vos)?

Other critical essays offer different ways of looking at, or revising, or revisioning humanity’s relationship with the world. Jonathan Skinner includes his responses to 10 student questions regarding his collection, “Birds of Tiff,” (Blazevox, 2011), which catalogs the flora and fauna around a reclaimed industrial site. At certain points, he explains the differences he’s noticed between American and British environmentalism, and describes unlearning a sense of American exceptionalism when it comes to environmental policy as well.

Not one poem or essay in the anthology offers a certain prescription to heal our ailing planet, or even our own ailing species. But all of these voices from the more-than-human world sing of earthlings in the broadest sense: where we are, where we’ve been, and what may be possible in our future.