Eco-poetical Trees

Posthuman & Vegetable Intra-actions

Abstract

The article offers fifteen Italian translations of US poems to or about trees. The selecting principle has been the ecocentric positioning of the lyric “I.” Thus, the little anthology covers poems that signal the emergence of a “new nature poetry” – such as Emily Dickinson’s and later on Robert Frost’s – and of “ecopoetry” proper, such as Gary Snyder’s and W. S. Merwin’s. The spectrum of tree poems represented includes various inflections, ranging from William Carlos Williams’s voice to Denise Levertov’s and Mary Oliver’s, to culminate with the contemporary statements of Cynthia Zarin and Christian Wiman. The translations are introduced by the author’s attempt to provide an understanding of the term and concept of “ecopoetry” within the theoretical frame of a posthumanist perspective, and to retrace the development of US poets’ consciousness of the posthuman.