"A ROSE IS EROS": FORREST GANDER AND THE ECOPOETICS OF LISTENING

The aim of my paper is to analyze the work of Forrest Gander in the context of contemporary discussions of ecopoetics. I understand ecopoetics as an interdisciplinary field, an ecotone (to use Jonathan Skinner's term) between poetry and science, writing and activism, aesthetics and ethics. I look at Forrest Gander's reflections on poetics presented in Redstart: An Ecological Poetics (a mixed-genre book written collaboratively with the Australian poet John Kinsella) and in his novel, As a Friend, whose main character, Les, is a poet. Subsequently I perform a close reading of selected poems from Core Samples of the World (2011) in order to demonstrate ecopoetics in practice. The combination of poetic imagination and hard science (Gander holds a degree in geology) results in an extraordinary insight into the workings of non-human nature, the place of human beings among other creatures, and the role of perception in the shaping of reality. In my analysis I attempt to demonstrate that Gander devises a poetics of hospitality, perceptive openness to human and non-human otherness. Listening (to other people's voices, to other languages and cultures, to the messages coming from the non-human nature) constitutes the essence of Forrest Gander ecopoetic endeavor.