The introduction to the Oxford Book of Nature Writing claims that "the most convincing nature writing is… a history of our views about ourselves." This is most certainly true; however, the prevalence and scope of Black writing with nature as a core theme has been generally underestimated. Many poems by Black American writers incorporate treatments of the natural world that are historicized or politicized, thus inclining readers to consider these poems political poems, historical poems, protest poems, socio-economic commentary, anything but nature poems. This is particularly true when the definition of what constitutes literature about nature or the environment is limited to poems that address the pastoral or the rugged, spaces and subjects removed or distanced from human contact. Such compartmentalization excludes African American nature poetry, which frequently engages contemporary and historic concerns within social, political, and cultural contexts. The result of such assumptions is that lists of American nature writers rarely include many African American names.
As guest editors for the journal, we’re making a call for poems by Black poets about and engaging the natural world. Editor-in-Chief David Gessner says this about Ecotone’s mission:
Much of our best writing grows out of the land. More specifically, it grows from rich, overlapping areas, those unstable, uncategorizable places that aren’t one thing or another. Biological ecotones are areas of great species diversity and biological density, of intense life and death; literary ecotones are the places where words come most alive. These edges—between genres, between science and literature, between land and sea, between urban and rural, between the personal and biological, between the animal and spiritual—are not only more alive, but more interesting and worthy of exploration.
Black poetry in America has recorded perspectives on the natural world as different as the Black perspective on this country. We’re looking for poems that reimagine the boundaries of the genre, poems that remind readers that we are always part of the natural world, even when we feel most alienated from it.
Please submit up to four poems by
February 15, 2008, for an Ecotone feature issue on nature poetry by Black American poets.
Please include your name, genre, and contact information on all entries. All manuscripts and correspondence regarding submissions should be accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope (S.A.S.E.) for a response; no replies will be given by e-mail. For further information, e-mail [poetry@ecotonejournal.com] or read the general
submission guidelines.
Please mail submissions to:
Ecotone
c/o Guest Editors
P.O. Box 9594
Asheville, NC 28815
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