Enaiê Mairê Azambuja  The Zen of Ecopoetics: Cosmological Imaginations in Modernist American Poetry

This paper delves into the complex interrelations between the avant-garde movement in American modernism, ecocriticism, and East Asian religions such as Zen Buddhism and Taoism, as articulated in my recent publication titled The Zen of Ecopoetics: Cosmological Imaginations in Modernist American Poetry. Focused on the Zen-inflected poetic imagination of key modernist poets William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and E.E. Cummings, the study introduces the concept of “cosmopoetics” to articulate their poetic intersections of materialism and spirituality, challenging assumptions of exclusive secular materialism in modernist poetics. The term entails a poetics that disrupts the dominance of the logical and the conceptual, paving the way for new ways of resignifying the interplay between human consciousness and non-human agency within contemporary ecocritical debates. It emphasises the contemplative and spiritual qualities of the poetic imagination, weaving consciousness into the landscape, earth, and Cosmos through poetry. By employing an interdisciplinary approach drawing on Eastern and Western philosophies, including Zen, Taoism, posthumanism, and new materialism, the study advocates for the inclusion of the relationship between materiality and spirituality to further contemporary debates on ecocriticism and ecopoetics.

Enaiê Mairê Azambuja. Research Associate in Environmental Humanities at Lancaster University. She has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Surrey with a thesis entitled “Cosmological Imaginations: Zen and material ecopoetics in William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and E. E. Cummings”. This doctoral project, funded by the AHRC TECHNE Doctoral Training Partnership, was a study of the impact of Zen on twentieth-century American poetry and its contribution to debates on material ecocriticism and current definitions of ecopoetics. Her first book The Zen of Ecopoetics: Cosmological Imaginations in Modernist American Poetry was published by Routledge Environmental Literature, Culture and Media series (2023). Her research and teaching interests are ecocriticism and ecopoetics, Modernist poetry, intersections of literary and religious studies, and creative writing. Follow her work on the website: https://enaieazambuja.com/