John Shoptaw

Title: 
Continuing Lecturer
Biography: 

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."

Current Research: 

I'm writing a book of essays with chapters on ecopoetics ("Why Ecopoetry?"), climate poetry ("The Poetry of our Climate"), animals, things, and the future.  

I'm also writing a book of environmental and climate poems.

Role: 

Books

John Shoptaw
Poetry, 2024
John Shoptaw
Poetry, 2015

Selected Publications

"The Poetry of our Climate" (essay) American Poetry Review (July/August 2023). 

"Near-Earth Object" Chrysalis podcast discussion of poem (May 2023).

"Why Ecopoetry?" (essay) Poetry Magazine.

"Near-Earth Object" (with a discussion guide), "Least Concern," "For the Birds" and "The Tree in the Midst" Poetry Magazine.  "The Tree in the Midst" is reprinted in Tree Lines:  21st Century American Poems, eds. Jennifer Barber, Jessica Greenbaum, Fred Marchant(Grayson Books, 2022).  

"Whoa!" (long poem), Arion:  A Journal of Humanities and the Classics (Spring/Summer 2019).  "Whoa!" is reprinted, along with my essay on Ovid and the poem, in Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Environmental Imagination eds.Giulia Sissa and Francesca Martelli (Bloomsbury Publishing, July 2023).

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

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

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

"Blues Haiku" The New Yorker (2011).

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

"Dickinson's Civil War Poetics" The Emily Dickinson Journal (2010).

"Listening to Dickinson" Representations 86 (Spring 2004).

"Lyric Cryptography" Poetics Today 21 (2000).

Contact

Wheeler Hall, room 476

Spring 2024 Office Hours

MW 2:10 to 3:10pm, & by appointment, Wheeler 476.