SR : Your poem “Sheen” occurs in multiple places: a Dillard’s, a high school dance. It should be obvious by now, but nobody has a corner on writing from or about place. One of the things that excites me most in my work on the magazine is making more room for work that considers place in relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, and other aspects of who we are, and for work from writers historically underrepresented in this part of the literary world. Responses from our contributors-Anna Maria Hong, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Lesley Wheeler among them-have each surprised and delighted me in their thinking through landscapes and people’s effects on them. I wanted to give writers the chance to focus on the ecological and cultural places a beloved poem evokes, as well as on their own experiences of reading the poem in place. On becoming editor of Ecotone some years back, I created a new department for the magazine, Poem in a Landscape.
It taught me a lot of what I know about poems. It’s ambrosia, an embrace, a planty everything. You cannot beat the smell of the air in spring in the piedmont. That many of those living systems are under deep threat-from climate crisis, development, overuse and underappreciation-makes it all the more important to let place into creative work, to acknowledge both a source and a debt.Ī lot of the poems in Ornament try to give thanks to the place that raised me, by showing a little of what it can feel like to be in the woods there. And our bodies are sustained, both physically and otherwise, by living systems and landscapes. As the editor of Ecotone, a magazine that explores the many facets of place, what draws you most to the potential of place? How do places live in your own poetry?īell: When we say a poem aloud, we recreate it with our bodies it becomes part of us. SR : In your first book, Ornament, many of your poems are closely intertwined with a sense of place. We asked Bell about her poems “Sheen” and “Against Stoicism” from the Fall 2019 issue, about poems as “notes to self,” and about how her work as an editor responds to our debt and responsibility to place. In addition to climate, the effects of anthropogenic disturbances on subalpine forests should be considered in adaptive forest management and in projections of future forest changes.Anna Lena Phillips Bell, editor of Ecotone and author of the poetry collection Ornament, recently spoke to us about the significance of place in creative work, especially those places under threat of environmental degradation. In the future, broadleaved forests could expand more rapidly than evergreen needle-leaved forests under moderate warming scenarios. Shifts in these foundation species will have profound impacts on ecosystem functions and services. Thus, moderate disturbances shifted forest composition through a gradual loss of resilience of spruce-fir forests. By strongly altering site conditions, disturbances in concert with climate warming reshuffle community composition to warm-adapted broadleaf-pine species.
Such a turnover in species composition mainly occurred in the 1994–1998 period. Based on the analysis of 3145 forest inventory plots at 4- to 5-year resolution, we found that spruce-fir forests shifted to pine and broadleaved forests since the early 1970s. Thus, they provide an excellent setting to test whether disturbances and climate warming led to changes in forest structure. Before the 1970s, subalpine forests on the southeastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau mainly experienced logging and fire, but afterwards they were more impacted by climate warming. Despite vulnerability of subalpine forests to warming climate, little is known as to how their community composition has responded to disturbances and climate warming over decades. A better understanding of the structure and dynamics of disturbed forests is key for forecasting their future successional trajectories.
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