"I call to the earth and sea" | NFC Doctoral Lecture, Bill Kroeger

"I call to the earth and sea": self-in-relation and calls to ecological conscience in Whitman, Oliver, Harjo, and Graham

About the talk...

Walt Whitman is famous for foregrounding the “I” of the self – the poetry of body and soul – and for problematizing the terms of that expression – social and individual, material and spiritual, interior and exterior. For Whitman, this self emerges as a self-in-relation: with a multitude of individuals and an expanding America, as well as with the flora, fauna, and elements of the earth. Focusing on relationality in Leaves of Grass, I re-examine the Whitmanian self-in-relation as it is generated in various calls to ecological conscience, before tracing evolving senses of self and conscience in the contemporary ecological poetry of Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo, and Jorie Graham. Considering the affordances of poetry for expressing diverse approaches to subjectivity and ecological responsibility contributes to a broader conversation about relations with the other-than-human world, environmental crisis, and ecological conscience.

About the speaker...

Bill Kroeger (he/him) is a PhD candidate of English (including a collaborative specialization with the School of the Environment). He studies calls to ecological conscience in different literary genres – from novels and poetry to films and protest documents. Engaging with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass as origin story, science writing, ecological theory, and personal memoir, he focuses on ethics of ecology and relation in contemporary novels such as The Overstory and Barkskins, the poetry of Walt Whitman, Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo, and Jorie Graham, films (both documentary and narrative), and local environmental protest literature defending U of T’s own “Back Campus.” Bill’s work with Earthsongs, a community gardening and poetry project, seeks to mix material experiences of plants, soil, and food with poetic re-imagination of earth-relations, stewardship, and, interspecies communities.

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