Lucy Burnett: An Eco-poetic Sensibility

Lucy Burnett, author of Leaf Graffiti

An eco-poetic sensibility: some positive reasons why I’m not an eco-poet

Over the last decade or so the term ‘eco-poetry’ has acquired currency to describe poetry broadly concerned with environmental issues. The term has also come to be attached to my own work, no matter how much it (and worse, the epithet ‘eco-poet’) cause me to squirm in my seat.

In truth, if there were a candidate for the title of ‘eco-poet’, perhaps it might be me. I’ve been interested in environmental issues since an early age. At university I became involved in environmental politics, before working as a lobbyist for the Ramblers, Friends of the Earth Scotland and the Association for the Conservation of Energy.

Artwork by Lucy Burnett

When I decided, aged thirty, to take time out to focus on my poetry by completing an MA in Creative Writing, it was only a matter of time before I started exploring environmental questions. In turn, my Creative Writing PhD at the University of Salford began as a broad enquiry into ‘eco-poetics’ before more specifically enquiring into how literature might engage with climate change. Over the last few years I have been an Executive Committee member of the academic Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.

Leaf Graffiti by Lucy Burnett
Available now

In my poetry I have explored these environmental interests in a range of ways. ‘Variations on an urban monotone,’ the opening sequence of Leaf Graffiti, attempts to capture the ecological connections of the world through variation and repetition. The third section of my collection explores how language and the world are in a constant process of making and unmaking themselves – an idea captured most clearly in ‘Uncompletement’. Towards the end of Leaf Graffiti the poems engage with specific environmental issues such as pollution, genetic engineering and climate change. I have applied similar principles in a visual form for the book designs I made for both Leaf Graffiti and for the Scottish Poetry Library's Best Scottish Poems 2012: layering images and ideas as a means of altering and complicating our conventional perspectives on the world.

Yet still, I maintain, I am no ‘eco-poet’, and my writing is not ‘eco-poetry’. Certainly my resistance partly stems from my dislike of the reductive nature of labels of any kind. But it is far more than this. In fact I am even unsure what the ‘eco-’ prefix might mean. I would resist the suggestion that any writing is any more ecological than any other, on account of either its form or its theme, for surely every facet of the world and language is equally part of the ecological compost heap as any other? Yet I would even more strongly resist the definition of ‘eco-poetry’ as work presenting an environmentalist perspective on the world.

Even as a campaigner I felt uncomfortable persuading people of a point of view, since my own perspective and interest has always been located in the murky grey spaces between the black and white contours of political debate. I was never, therefore, going to be comfortable compromising my creative aesthetic for didactic purposes.

Furthermore, my own environmental perspective has become increasingly unconventional over recent years – for example, far from viewing poetry as one means of persuading people of the need to ‘solve’ climate change, my writing seeks to participate in an on-going process of renegotiating climate change’s meaning, and working from there. But if I disagree with the mainstream agenda on climate change would this disqualify me from being an ‘eco-poet’, and who decides?

'Seaweed' by Lucy Burnett
You can find out more about Lucy's art on the
Scottish Poetry Library website

Exploring eco-poetic themes through formal means is a key strand in my writing, albeit that my perspective and my approach may not be environmentally ‘conventional’. Yet while my environmental interests contribute to Leaf Graffiti, they are neither definitional of it, nor of me. Equally significant in this collection are a series of love poems, an exploration of an ovarian cancer scare I suffered a number of years back, my love of playing with language, and a quest for a sense of ‘home’ (geographically, emotionally and poetically).

If there is a quest behind my writing, this is not informed by an environmental agenda, but rather by a curiosity and a fascination with the world which is fundamentally epistemological: interested not in what we know but the fun we can have in coming to know it. It is this journey on which Leaf Graffiti invites readers to join me.


Lucy Burnett was born in Dumfries in 1975 and worked and lived in Edinburgh for many years before moving to the Manchester area. Leaf Graffiti is her first book.


The Blog Booksale
Every week on the blog, we'll be offering 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors. Just go to www.carcanet.co.uk and use the code 'BLOG' to get your discount. The book(s) on offer will change each week, so watch this space!

This week, it's Leaf Graffiti by Lucy Burnett. Click here to start shopping!


i.
like these words
    forever fragments
        uncomplete
themselves once
more

     a single bud
of spring becomes
the first      no longer
       unfurling leafs
a slightest

variation     another
year to autumn
       ends recede to increments
and a single leaf
uncurves towards


from 'Uncompletement' by Lucy Burnett, published in Leaf Graffiti (Carcanet, 2013). Copyright © Lucy Burnett 2013.