158 contemporary poetry
of ‘nature’ now has ‘a suspiciously retro, neo-Victorian ring, even
when the argument is recast to emphasize not just love of nature
but proto-ecological knowledge and environmentalist commit-
ment’.^57 Buell proposes that this is a problem which has troubled
ecocriticism from its inception: ‘the suspicion that it might not boil
down to much more than old-fashioned enthusiasms dressed up
in new clothes’.^58 Jonathan Skinner’s magazine ecopoetics attempts
to address these problems. Skinner asks: ‘I wonder at the value of
the term itself “nature writing”, doesn’t all writing have nature in
it?’^59 He recognises that ‘obviously there is a value and a need for
writing focused specifi cally on the so-called natural world’ (p. 127 ).
Importantly, he notes the difference between nature writing and
ecopoetry: the former for Skinner indicates empathy for the envi-
ronment, while the latter suggests how economic forces create and
impact on the environment. He admits that he is suspicious of the
term ‘ecopoetry’ since it duplicates ‘the “eco” already built into the
ecology’ especially if its premise is based on turning us ‘away from
the tasks of poetry, to more important or urgent concerns’ (p. 127 ).
Instead he proposes a conceptualisation of ecopoetics as a plurality
of different artistic creations. Ecopoetics becomes in this way ‘a site
for poetic attention and exchange, where many different kinds of
making (not just poetry or even just writing and certainly not just
ecopoetry) can come to be informed’ (p. 128 ).
Usefully, Skinner differentiates between four approaches to
the umbrella term ‘ecopoetics’. The fi rst is topological, referring
beyond the poem to a specifi c space or ‘natural topos’ (p. 128 ).
Secondly, he identifi es a tropological poetics, which indicates a
hybrid fertilisation of the language of environmental sciences
performing as ‘exercises in analogy, casting poems as somehow
functioning like ecosystems or complex systems’ (p. 128 ). Next is
an entropological poetics that is a practice ‘engaged at the level of
materials and process, where entropy, transformation and decay
are part of the creative work’ (p. 128 ). Finally, ecopoetics may
also practise in an ethnological way. Ethnological poetics neces-
sitates looking beyond Western languages and cultures to provide
an understanding of environment. As Skinner states: ‘whether
nature contains the human or humanity contains nature is impos-
sible to conclude. What we do know is that humans have been