My work addresses ecopoetry written in the US and Pacific that is specifically attentive to the acceleration of slow violence and climate change, as well as the long histories that have culminated in their disproportionate impacts on disabled people and people of color, disabled and nondisabled alike. I argue that contemporary ecopoetics remains focused on creating or articulating new ways of writing poetics of relation connected to nature which elide the works of authors whose methods work ecologically with a less direct focus on the more-than-human world. Crip Planet is a methodological survey of the work of Larry Eigner, JJJJJerome Ellis, Douglas Kearney, Craig Santos Perez, Selina Tusitala Marsh, and Tusiata Avia. With the exception of Perez, these authors are rarely included in ecopoetry anthologies unless they are collections specifically attentive to race, gender, disability status, or other markers of identity; I argue for their inclusion in the field of ecopoetics precisely because their methodologies attend to vast networks of culture, nature, violence, and temporality. These authors disrupt the trend in ecopoetics to frame their writing in “an absolute break with the past,” instead bringing attention to long histories that offer contexts. Repeated calls from Black poets and poets at the heart of crip of color critique call for a move from a noun state–what Nathaniel Mackey calls “the confinement to a predetermined status”–to a verb state–the “domain of action and the ability to act.” The ecopoets here are actors within a mess, offering critical methods–verbs–for those who have been pushed out of what is considered orderly towards treatment as garbage and those who take the literal and figurative garbage of the present and transform it into a tool for survival. By attending to ecopoetic methods of the present, their places, and how they form connections, I show some ways to build strange affinities with those who have been forced into similar, messy situations. It is a methodological study that looks to poets writing now who utilize temporal care work, mess, and recycling as critical practices for surviving this moment of ecological collapse.
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