Entropy Announces 'Plant Poetics and Beyond'

Following this summer's Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) Conference at UC Davis, Janice Lee and Andrea Quaid present a selection of papers and poems from the conference, and invite Entropy readers to send their own work on plant poetics. Not sure what exactly "plant poetics" means? Here's more from Lee and Quaid: 

Sites of inquiry included vegetal feminist experimental creation (Organizers Caitlin McIntyre and Kellie Sharpe) and the neglected lives of micro-matter (Organizers Agnes Malinowska and Joela Jacobs). There were discussions of aesthetics, literature, and the work a microbial does in a paragraph and in a body and in an ecosystem. People presented creative and critical writing about indigeneous plant medicine and spiritual practices. Others explored plant poetics and healing modalities (Organizer Megan Kamisnki) and what an ecopoetics of contact (Organizer Mandy Bloomfield) may reveal about plant communication and cognition.

In another sense, the writing collected here emerges from multiple locations and ongoing engagements. It comes from conversations taking place as other conference panels at different events, as poetry readings, as small, mobile reading groups, as writing collaborations, as discussions, as chats, as communications with ancient beings, as silence when walking together, as collective telepathic communiques with plant neighbors. We share book lists. We share poems. We share a political urgency to think our relationality – human to human, human to nonhuman others – in more life-affirming ways.

Read selections from the conference by Megan Kaminski, Brenda Iijima, Sonnet L’Abbé and more at Entropy.