Farmer poet writes thesis on ‘ecopoetry'
Poetry acting as a catalyst for social action
Koputaroa woman Janet Newman laughingly describes herself as a ‘weird farmer poet’. Farming and writing poetry were not typically associated, despite poets writing about nature for millennia, evoking its power and beauty, its metaphors for the human condition.
But an era of climate change crises and biodiversity loss has spawned a new twist in the nature poetry genre — ecopoetry — and Newman discovered that New Zealand writers were redefining it.
As a farmer, poet and Massey University graduate, she explored local versions of this new global poetry trend for her doctoral thesis, titled Imagining Ecologies: Traditions of Ecopoetry in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Newman, who graduated late last year at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ ceremony with a Doctor of Philosophy in English, wanted to find out more about ecopoetry in New Zealand — even though the term is not widely used here.
She said European settler and indigenous perspectives on nature had forged a specifically Kiwi version of ecopoetry.
Ecopoetry blends ecology with poetry. It was the term given to “new nature poetry written in opposition to human denigration of nature”, she said.
“It arose from the mid-20th century environmental movement during a time of protest and political activism.”
She said ecopoetry, which emerged in the 1990s, “empathises with the natural world and relates different ways of conceiving the relationships between nature and culture”.
While there is not a single definition of ecopoetry that all critics agree upon, most definitions concur that “ecopoetry portrays nature with humility rather than a sense of superiority or domination”.
“Ecopoetry neither subjugates nor idealises nature,” she said.
Newman’s main supervisor at Massey University was Professor Bryan Walpert with co-supervisor Associate Professor Ingrid Horrocks.
It was viewed by some as an offshoot of nature poetry, and by others as a separate field. Either way, it “values nature not as a resource for human exploitation but rather as an interconnected part of human life”.
New Zealand literature is awash with nature poetry — often in the tradition of romanticising the grandeur and diversity of our unique landscapes. That includes more recent
poems that serve as vehicles to express environmental activism, messages and causes.
“Ecopoetry has its genesis in a desire for poetry to act as a catalyst for social action towards political change in order to protect the environment from further human degradation,” she said.
Newman chose three contemporary poets as the focus of her research, on the basis that each had a significant body of work offering various examples of local ecopoetry, although none of them identify specifically as being an ‘ecopoet’ and not all of their work falls within this field.
South Island poet Brian Turner, Nga¯puhi poet and academic Robert Sullivan and Whanganui-based poet Airini Beautrais together “reveal changing and uniquely New Zealand ecopoetical responses to cultural and ecological tensions here”, she said.
In her exploration of Aotearoa’s ecopoetry traditions, Newman said
she hadn’t expected to find they were so distinctive and completely unique.
“They are characterised by tension between European and Ma¯ori perspectives of how we look at the landscape.”
That local perspective — specifically the tension between European notions of ecology and belonging, and Ma¯ori embodiment of culture in nature — is important, “because that challenges the way ecopoetry is viewed by critics in the US and UK who have a tendency to globalise their definitions of ecopoetry, and by doing so, characterise it as Eurocentric”.
“They [critics] do that by saying ‘nature is that place we can go to away from the urban world’, or saying it’s a separate place. In New Zealand — especially from a Ma¯ori perspective — it is completely foreign to say that.
“There seems to be a gap in New Zealand poetry about farming in the 21st century, within an approach that recognises that the land is colonially violated, while at the same time sensing a connection to it.”
Meanwhile, Newman discovered a love of poetry early in life, despite the incongruity. “Growing up on a farm and you’re sitting around reading a book — there’s that look, like you’re not doing anything.”
After working as a print journalist, she undertook creative writing papers at Victoria and Massey universities and started seriously writing poetry.
Hers often portrays her rural environment and the beef farm she runs part-time. A collection of original poems is part of her thesis and will be published as a separate collection next year, including a series about her late father, titled Tender.
Is poetry about farming a niche branch of ecopoetry? Newman said her writing expresses her awareness of the rural landscape as a constructed entity, rather than as part of nature or the wilderness.
Drenching, dehorning, loading animals on trucks to be sent to the slaughterhouse are part of the reality.
And the contention of being a farmer is that; “you’re always in the land, relating to the land, caring for land — but it has been violently changed. You’re caring for animals but you’re taking them to slaughter. How do you deal with these conflicting things you are doing and the emotions?”
While aiming to convey the reality of farm life and “how things really are”, she is also concerned about “how we can be more sensitive and respectful towards animals”.
Part of her doctoral research focused on studying ecopoetry anthologies published in the UK and US. So far, there is no anthology of New Zealand ecopoetry — and that could well be her next project.
Newman felt there would be more ecopoetry written as awareness of climate change impacts and degradation of the environment is at the forefront of our minds.