Phytopoetics

Abstract

World literature features poems centering on the political, moral, aesthetic, and spiritual virtues of plant life including trees, shrubs, vines, flowers, herbs, and other botanical forms. In contemporary plant-focused poetry, however, climate disruption, biodiversity decline, and related factors have prompted a dramatic shift toward the uncertainties of species survival on a planet undergoing unparalleled change. Yet, alongside these threats to ecological vitality lies a body of empirical research into plants’ capacities for behavior, communication, and intelligence. In this dynamic context, the concept of phytopoetics arises from the perspectives: poetry, praxis, and poiesis. As a botanically attentive ecopoetics, phytopoetics denotes poetic makings that focus on the botanical domain, the lives of plants, human–flora relations, and threats to biodiverse futures. Not delimited to poetry, though, phytopoetics more broadly signifies a social, cultural, psychological, or metaphysical praxis that integrates specifically vegetal modes of being. At the same time, phytopoetic work foregrounds the potential for human creativity to synchronize with the poiesis—the dynamic transformation—of plants over time, across seasons, and in places. This chapter delineates five varieties of phytopoetic practice. An Indigenous phytopoetics narrativizes First Nations’ perceptions of—and interactions with—plants while works of literary ethnobotany disseminate traditional cultural, social, and spiritual understandings of vegetal life. An entheogenic poetics is written about, or after having consumed, plant-based psychotropic substances whereas an arboreal poetics remains steadfastly attuned to arboreality, forest ecologies, and human–tree interactions. The fifth variety, collaborative human-plant makings, integrates the voices of plants as sapient interlocutors exerting their own agencies, desires, and strivings.