Berkeley English Faculty

John Shoptaw

John Shoptaw

Continuing Lecturer

Wheeler Hall, room 476
on leave, 2023
jshoptaw@berkeley.edu


Professional Statement

For the past several years I've been writing and teaching ecopoetry and ecopoetics.  In the spring of 2024 I'll be teaching a research seminar on Emily Dickinson.

Keats:  "The poetry of earth is never dead."


Books
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Near-Earth Object

A book of environmentally attuned poems with a foreword by Jenny Odell.   ....(read more)

Times Beach
Times Beach

“Times Beach is, like most interesting American books, an original. It’s about a place, the watershed of the Mississippi River, and it is an ecopoetics. Best, perhaps, to think of it as a hybrid of Hart Crane, the depression photographs of Dorothea ....(read more)

FIELDS:
On the Outside Looking Out:  John Ashbery's Poetry
On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery's Poetry

A study of Ashbery's books of poems from Some Trees through Flow Chart.....(read more)


Selected Publications and Papers Delivered

--"Whoa!" (long poem), Arion:  A Journal of Humanities and the Classics (Spring/Summer 2019)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/arion.27.1.0001?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

"Whoa!" reprinted, along with an essay on Ovid and the poem, in Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Environmental Imagination, eds.Giulia Sissa and Francesca Martelli (Bloomsbury Publishing, summer 2023).

--"The Tree in the Midst" reprinted in Tree Lines:  21st Century American Poems, eds. Jennifer Barber, Jessica Greenbaum, Fred Marchant (Grayson Books, 2022).

--"A Climate-Changed Ecopoetics" (essay):  Natur in der Lyrik und Philosophie des Anthropozäns, eds. Kirstin Zeyer, Kenricke Stahl, Harald Schwaetzer (Aschendorff Verlag, Trier, Germany, 2022).

--"Ecovaluation" (essay), Evaluations of US Poetry Since 1950, eds. Robert von Hallberg and Robert Faggen (U of New Mexico Press, 2021).  

--"The Tree in the Midst" and "For the Birds" (poems), Poetry Magazine (April 2020).

--"A Tree's Shade Speaks of its Shadow" (poem), Kenyon Review (May/June 2019).

https://www.kenyonreview.org/journal/mayjune-2019/selections/

--"Pangolin Scales" (poem), Republic of Apples, Democracy of Oranges:  New Eco-poetry from China and the United States (Manoa Journal, 2019)

https://manoaecoissue.poetry.blog/?q=shop

--"Round County Almanac" (poem), The Wallace Stevens Journal (Spring 2019)

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/719196--"Near-Earth Object" (poem) Poetry Magazine (2019):  

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/148679/near-earth-object 

on the poem:  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/148856/how-far-weve-come

--"Why Ecopoetry?" Poetry Magazine (Jan 2016)  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/70299/why-ecopoetry

 --"Least Concern" (poem) Poetry Magazine (September 2016) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/90296

--"Dickinson's Civil War Poetics" The Emily Dickinson Journal (2010) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/408845/summary

--"Listening to Dickinson" Representations 86 (Spring 2004) https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2004.86.1.20?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

--"Lyric Cryptography" Poetics Today 21 (2000) https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-abstract/21/1/221/20669/Lyric-Cryptography

 


Current Research

"The Poems of our Climate" (essay).


English Department Classes