ASLE Conference Presentation

Embodied Ecopoetics: Writing for Real Change

Many know intellectually that our relationship with the ecosystems that hold us, how we use and conserve natural resources, needs to shift. The pandemic and subsequent stay-at-home order caused us to pay more attention to the natural world and writer Helen MacDonald asks the question, “What is it that we are desperate to see in the natural world right now, and why?” Embodied ecopoetics, an integration of creative writing, science, and somatic psychology, may aid us in this shift by creating new opportunities to feel, in every inch of our bodies, why the earth matters and why, as humans, we must change our destructive patterns with great urgency. Walt Whitman wrote, “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.” By cultivating a deep empathy for nature using the poem body as a vessel, we can better explore how emotions, scientific ideas, and spirituality overlap and more important how this alchemy can move individuals from a place of inaction to action.