""Cagan and I stayed the night with a well-to-do farmer and his wife who lived near the field station. On learning that I was a writer, the wife gave me a volume of poetry written by her uncle during the end stages of his struggle with cancer. I opened it with some trepidation. The poems were about how interesting it is to be alive, about how you're never sure what nature is telling you, but it's definitely telling you something. There was a poem about the Aras River in spring, when the black stones tumble over like ghosts, and another about street vendors. The vendors shout, "There are tomatoes!" and "There are carrots!" They shout about the existence of many vegetables, and this annoys a woman in a late model car."
Batuman categorizes this as "eco-poetry", that represents humans and nature as "a dynamic, inter-related series of cyclic feedback systems, in contrast to traditional nature poetry , in which nature is merely a kind of backdrop to human activity. In fact, the very idea of "nature"-- implying something exterior to humanity and human culture-- may be inimical to true ecological thinking, which presupposes the interconnectedness of all things."
(by Elif Batuman, "Natural Histories: A journey in the shadow of Ararat." The New Yorker, Oct 24, 2011, 65)
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