Anyone who looks out from the inscape of the self and asks how they are connected to the world—air, trees, water, concrete, beetles, stars, seasons—in a full way is writing ecopoetry.
Introduction
Photo by Lisa Sette.
I was reminded of this adage while reading Elizabeth Bradfield’s new collection of poetry SOFAR (Persea Books, 2025) and her previous collection Toward Antarctica (Boreal Books, 2019). As Bradfield sees, we see. If her vision is obscured, so too is ours. And as she reimagines the world in a far-reaching way, the reader, too, experiences deeper perceptions. In Bradfield’s poems, what is on the surface of a life may appear more knowable than what is contained in the depths, but as the poet investigates the self in relation to the greater wild world, often in seemingly pristine locations, as she listens for what is truly heard, individual beings are illuminated in the vast layers of interconnectedness, and as narratives interweave, the quest for self is innate.
Poet and naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of five collections of poetry. She is also the editor or co-editor of several anthologies including Cascadia Field Guide (Mountaineers Books, 2023), winner of a Pacific Northwest Book Award. Bradfield works as a naturalist and field assistant on Cape Cod, directs the Poetry Concentration for the low-residency MFA at Western Colorado University, and edits Broadsided. When asked about her multiple interests, she says, “I am an aspiring generalist. Forever queer, forever curious.”
Writing is listening for me, it’s true. It’s listening to the world, to the past, to my body and memory and trying to really hone in on what the true resonance is.
Interview
Elizabeth Jacobson: In Toward Antarctica, the lyricality of the poems is both ethereal and at the same time firmly rooted in the landscape and its creatures. You write in the preface, “I had knowledge of seals and whales and birds and oceans and the world of being a naturalist guide…. I am interested in the early confusion that occurs when a dreamed-of place becomes overwritten with tasks and routines—when work and all its systems, dynamics, economics, and complications come into play.”
How did the “confusion” of this new place resonate for you, propel you into your writing, and also ground you in the more concreate schedule of your job as a naturalist on an expedition ship? And will you backtrack a bit and share how you became a naturalist?
Elizabeth Bradfield: I wrote about this a bit in the introduction to Toward Antarctica, but one of the big propulsions for the writing of this book, in addition to the personal and emotional charge of at last getting to experience a place I’d read about and imagined myself into for decades, was the “downtime” involved in such a long voyage. Even with all the duties I had as a member of the expedition team—from cleaning gear to giving presentations to writing up reports to wildlife spotting to driving boats to leading walks—there is still more downtime in a trip that lasts three weeks than on one that lasts seven days. The contracts I’ve worked as a naturalist in which the trips have been just a week each mean that there is a lot crammed into a short time span. Every day is full. But on a longer trip, the guests are able to enjoy a bit more downtime, and on trips to a place as remote as Antarctica, there are quite a few “sea days” in which the ship is traveling from one point of land, like Argentina, to another, like Antarctica. It was a new experience for me, while working as a naturalist, to have time and space to wonder and dream and think like a poet.
Read an excerpt of Toward Antarctica, including photos by Elizabeth Bradfield, in Terrain.org.
I became a naturalist through apprenticeship. I grew up on the water in Tacoma, Washington, and boats were always part of my life. In college, at the University of Washington in Seattle, I worked for Argosy Tours, deckhanding and narrating trips from Elliott Bay into Lake Union. People I met on those boats told me there were jobs on boats in Southeast Alaska, and so I applied. I wanted to spend more time at sea and I wanted to see Alaska, so a week or so after graduation, I flew up to Ketchikan and started my first six-month contract as a deckhand with Lindblad Expeditions.
What I found when I arrived was that there were these naturalists aboard, these people who knew so much about bears and muskeg and birds and nudibranchs and glaciers, who knew how to bushwack a trail without a map or drive a Zodiac through wild currents. And they did it with such a palpable love of place! I knew then what I wanted to be when I grew up. So, I studied them. And when my contract as a deckhand was over, I volunteered at biology centers and helped with field work, took more science classes, and started the years-long process of working my way up the ladder and back to those boats and places. I had amazing teachers along the way, and I was dedicated and determined. I was privileged in all of that, but none of it was something I saw or even knew existed when I was growing up. A “naturalist” or a life dedicated to studying biology was completely beyond the realm of my imagination as a kid (though I did, indeed, want to live in an underwater city).
First Landing: Brown Bluff
dream, story—supplanted
three rocks, gold with lichen
my unmarked marker
Elizabeth Jacobson: You have transformed the traditional narrative haibun—short prose blocks interspersed with haiku—into stunning, organic, lyric explorations throughout Toward Antarctica. Within the form, haibun offer a way to both document experience and consider the emotionality that these experiences evoke. Did you have a previous relationship with the haiku poets before writing this book or with the haibun form, in particular with Bashō, who is attributed with its invention? Do you see a correlation between Bashō’s spiritual and creative path and your own?
Elizabeth Bradfield: Over the years I had read and considered classical Japanese and Chinese literature, from a college course centering Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book to a study of the Chinese “garden poets” as part of a larger survey of what we then called “nature poetry.” Living on the west coast of North America meant that East Asian cultures felt a little closer than not; my high school had a large Cambodian population, Japanese was the language I studied in high school, and my father’s work took him to Japan and Korea. Looking back, I can see that those cultures felt like part of the larger world I was connected to as a kid. But I didn’t study haibun or, really, haiku until I was in my 30s.
My friend Sean Hill introduced me to the haibun form through his poem “Milledgeville Haibun” in Blood Ties and Brown Liquor. That was my first encounter with the form, and I wanted to learn more, so I read Bashō’s Back Roads to Far Towns (Cid Corman translation). I was taken with the idea of rendering a journey’s various layers in this way—Bashō, of course, invented the haibun form as a way of writing about his long, long foot journey into remote Japan. When I was offered the chance to work in Antarctica as a naturalist after studying and yearning for the place for many, many years, it did feel like an opportunity to consider the trip as a pilgrimage as well as a reckoning.
What I appreciate about Bashō is the way his haibun hold the pragmatic and logistical details of his trip as well as human connections and personal emotions. It just seemed like his form was the perfect solution to such a complicated emotional, logistical, geographical journey. I am not a religious person—I was not raised in any religion or church, though I knew that Catholicism, Christian Scientist, and Unitarian churchgoing were part of my grandparents’ lives—but the idea of traveling with the land and with awareness of history and story and community and the ways these layers fold together like a fan (to borrow an image from Bashō) and touch each other, making a new pattern, is deeply meaningful to me. Spiritual, I suppose. I don’t know that Bashō and I have a lot in common in our creative paths other than this—but this intersection is profoundly meaningful to me.
Whether we are listening or using any of our other senses, that moment when we become aware, which often only can happen upon some sort of disturbance (physical, emotional, intellectual), that’s the important moment. It’s when the real work begins.
Elizabeth Jacobson: In your poem “In the Fjords, Isla De Chiloe” you quote, in the footnotes, 19th-century naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt: “Nature must be experienced through feeling.” Certainly, this is what the reader discovers in your work. How is this process of observation transformed into lyric expression? How does a fixed destination become a mystery?
Elizabeth Bradfield: When I learned of Humboldt, I was so happy, because his travels and writings seemed like a corrective to the extractive, imposing, colonial “exploration” that centered a European male traveler who ventured forth sure of his cultural superiority. Humboldt was humble (in my admittedly shallow understanding—I have not done a deep study of his work) and curious, respectful of traditions and knowledge that grow from a place, eager to enthuse about natural history and human cultures that were new to him.
More and more writers in the sciences like Robin Wall Kimmerer and Zoё Schlanger are pushing back against the culture of “objective, unfeeling” observation and advocating for an integrated approach to learning and knowing. If I want to write truly and honestly about what I see and what I know, how I feel has to be part of that. If I’m cold and cranky and stressed out, my experience and even my ability to experience will be impacted. If I’m with a dear friend whose joy amplifies my own, the same.
But as for how a fixed destination becomes a mystery… well, it just does. If we truly open ourselves, a walk around the block at home can become a mystery—it really can! The layers of what is known, unknown, sensed, remembered, wondered, associated and the way those bits of experience clink against each other as we turn the kaleidoscope of our understanding, peer through, consider the patterns and associations.
I take the hydrophone, that silver bob,
marshmallow-sized, and lean
over the harbor, pay out
the black cord yard by fathom.
Tide and current vibrato it. I can’t,
from here, drop far enough to reach
that perfect depth, that sound channel,
not in this water, or with this, but
I’ll listen to what I can.
Elizabeth Jacobson: The poem above, the preface poem to the first section of SOFAR, asks the reader to drop underneath the surface to the unknowns below, to listen for what one cannot hear, or almost cannot hear. Throughout this collection, your speakers are listening for what is unexpected, listening to what is already known, for sounds of who the self is, for what is enigmatic yet familiar, listening to the past for answers to current circumstances, and to other beings as a way not only to know them, but to hear ways into the self. How does the act of writing work for you as a life practice and as an investigation into understanding the self?
Elizabeth Bradfield: Thank you for this question—and I want to mention that I consider this poem to be one long, episodic poem continued through the entire book, picking up and carrying on at the start of each section. You describe the listening of the book so beautifully, thank you. Writing is listening for me, it’s true. It’s listening to the world, to the past, to my body and memory and trying to really hone in on what the true resonance is. I spend a lot of time, in revision as well as in drafting, asking myself, “Wait, is this really true? Is this thought/description/assertion really true? And, if it’s true, what does that mean? How does that truth shift my understanding of the world?” This is why I write poems, because it’s the only way I know to do that work, and those questions feel vital to the project of living.
A Map, A Body Afloat
Elizabeth Jacobson: I love the way the structure of “A Map, A Body Afloat” conceptually and enchantingly opens by placing me at the surface of the sea, then in the next section, I am just under the surface, and finally, in the last section, I am in the darkest depths where I can only see a few “glint(s)” of light. How do you experience diving and writing as a way to listen to your internal and external worlds? How does listening enable one to see more clearly where one cannot see? What are the deepest oceanic zones to the poet—a place where we might escape our personal and human-inflicted global disasters?
Elizabeth Bradfield: Of course I think of Adrienne Rich and her poem “Diving into the Wreck,” and this poem shadows her, though it leaves the human self at the surface, at the interface. I think the truth is that, even in the deepest zones, we do not escape anything. Those spaces are part of the world, too, though the way we see things from those depths are necessarily different. For me, it’s that glint—the little flash that captures attention and awakens us to presence, quite literally in the case of bioluminescent plankton, more figuratively in regard to knowledge or memory—that is important. Whether we are listening or using any of our other senses, that moment when we become aware, which often only can happen upon some sort of disturbance (physical, emotional, intellectual), that’s the important moment. It’s when the real work begins.
Erratic
glacially deposited rock differing from the size and type of rock native to the area in which it rests. From the Latin errare (to wander).
I come upon them sometimes
like today beside a favorite trail
in a month without leaves and before
snow which is to say now an unpredictable
time in a time when I too am unpredictable but
there it hunkers gray and strange in this land ground
into being by glaciers and deposited at their now-gone
feet I know something of where it came from
and how it got here but even though this is a daily
walk I’d not noticed it before and probably
wouldn’t have noticed it until now
when my own body is in retreat
from its decades
of advance
the change
it’s called and it’s as unexpected
as a boulder in an easy trail which your
strolling self must swerve around or
clamber over as you puzzle as you hitch
your pace for it is hard and inscrutable
mysterious in its looming strangeness
(why here? why the trail here, around it?)
strange and insurmountable as my adolescent
surging self was to myself then as this new
self is to me now surging and in retreat
this self which feels like a remnant
of that great transformation
and seems just as capable
of damage as any
ungiving thing
Elizabeth Jacobson: In “Erratic,” the speaker finds herself in a mid-life body, observing an erratic span of rock, “gray and strange,” “an unpredictable time in a time when I too am unpredictable” The “unpredictable time” here refers to both to the body and the planet. What do you hear in this geological formation that communicates truths about yourself in relation to the environment in which you have chosen to live? Who are you now in comparison to who you were when you first arrived on Cape Cod? How has your listening, your vision, transformed?
Elizabeth Bradfield: It is indeed an unpredictable time, isn’t it? Ecologically, politically, and for me, a menopausal queer woman, in my body. The metaphor of a glacial erratic—a rock carried into a new land that would not have created it—feels true to my own presence in this place, on Cape Cod. I live here. I have lived here now, for the most part, since the late 1990s. I was in my late 20s, newly in love, completely geographically centered in the Pacific Northwest (I lived in the same house in Tacoma all my childhood until I went away to college) when I came here.
And I came here because I wanted to live geographically close to someone I loved (and still love), but of course there was also a part of me that was curious about where and how I could find and build a complete life away from the geography and ecology that shaped me. Maybe that’s a queer curiosity, in part, a question that comes from having to build a sense of family and community outside of the norms you are raised in.
Cape Cod was different in so many ways from the place I grew up—one of my friends lived in a house built in the 1700s!—and the colonial presence, the lack (back in the late 1990s) of an Indigenous presence visible to a newcomer, the proximity of a different ocean, the stretch of the continental shelf so far from shore, the lack of mountains, the lack of islands compared to the Salish Sea… I could go on. Nearly 30 years later, I know a lot more about the ecology of this place as well as the complicated human histories here, maybe even more than the place that raised me. I’ve had time to get underneath the veneer. I realize that every place is complicated. Every place has an underbelly. But I think that what all this time on the Outer Cape has meant is that I’ve forged a bond with this place that is deep. I know its seasons and patterns, both ecologically and socially; I see its contradictions and struggles, its beauty and community. I’ve also gotten to watch change sweep through, which changes both how I see it now and, when I look back, how I understand what I thought when I first arrived.
That was a complicated question! My listening and vision are transformed by the layers of time and experience that have built up as the Outer Cape has become home to me: the years watching the shore erode and accrue, businesses begin and end, economics shift, patterns of weather change, people attach and disperse, crops like cranberries and beach plums boom and bust. I’ve been here since 1998, which is a lot less than a lot of people, but it’s not nothing. I hear more, because I can hear harmonics… I can hear melody and harmony, cacophony, counterpoint. And I’ve changed in my time here—I’ve become more fully myself as a writer and naturalist, more complicatedly whole in my queer self, more aware of the ways that a tourist economy limits what community can be, both more pragmatic and more hopeful, more caring and more willing to shrug and move on to support who I love and what I can change.
On Reality
I got there before even the surfers—
did you know there are still surfers?
There are. And rabbits. There are
still rabbits, though so many people
don’t think to look for them. Don’t even
see them scrunched on the grass, still
but for their working jaws, working
noses. The undertow was strong.
Big waves from some offshore system
even though the sky was calm. I felt
the ocean want to pull me out
and north; I stood and leaned against
That and the cool made me feel strong.
I felt strong again. As if I might deserve
some luck or love. There are also, still,
huge schools of pogies that, when seen
from any height, look like cloud shadows
darkening the sea. Today, someone
posted a photo I was in—the whole team
grinning as we headed to port—and I didn’t
recognize the wild joy on my face. There are
still cobblers (both kinds) and jackalopes.
As much as there were ever. Proof of some
dream we keep sharing. Some strange dream
we tell someone we love about
hoping they’ve had it, too.
Elizabeth Jacobson: Your writing is embraced by many who enjoy environmental poetics, offering a reader an occasion for inquiry and close examination of diverse wild habitats and the role of the human, who is included as well. In both Toward Antarctica and SOFAR, your speakers are in awe of place as they struggle with watching the world that they love become despoiled by human activity. What are your characterizations of environmental or ecopoetry? How do you see your work included in this subgenre?
Elizabeth Bradfield: I think that a poet who acknowledges the more-than-human-world as a primary influencer on their emotional and pragmatic lives writes ecopoetry. Anyone who looks out from the inscape of the self and asks how they are connected to the world—air, trees, water, concrete, beetles, stars, seasons—in a full way is writing ecopoetry. We are in and of the world, and our bodies are subject to all the planet is subject to. However, I also feel that, because my life has been dedicated to studying and learning natural history and biology, because my “day job” has included a lot of time helping scientists gather and communicate data, I have a specific and particular perspective I can share, and I hope that sharing it helps bring other people into curiosity and care. Working as a naturalist, an occasional field assistant, and a scientific educator in the field has been as much my lifework as writing, and I hope my longstanding connection and dedication comes through in my poems.
The beings who don’t have a voice in our language have needs and stories, too, and I feel a calling to help their stories be shared.
Elizabeth Jacobson: Elizabeth, thank you for this provocative and thoughtful conversation. Will you share what is next for you?
Elizabeth Bradfield: This past August, I turned in a manuscript for a new “feel guide,” created with Ian Ramsey and Samaa Abdurraqib and modeled after Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, that focuses on the ecoregion where I now live: the Gulf of Maine, which is the bioregion from Cape Cod up and around to Nova Scotia, including Boston, Portsmouth, Bar Harbor and Acadia, and New Brunswick. Writing the being stories for North Atlantic Right Whale, King Bolete, Sweetfern, Atlantic Puffin, Hognose Snake, Slipper Limpet, and all the other beings, as well as finding the poets and poems to include, the visual artists to create work, has occupied a lot of my creative mind for the past couple of years. The book is slated to be published in the spring of 2027, and once the edits for that are complete, I have a few projects I’d like to turn to (or, in one case, return to) and I also look forward to some undirected drifting, reading, and poeming.
I have a LOT of ideas for things I’d like to focus on, but I also am happy to hold ideas as time moves around me, if that makes sense. I like having a project, and I like things sneaking in around the edges of that focus. The most pressing project, however, which I really want and need to give myself to, is a general interest, nonfiction book about my work for the past 15 years with gray seals as they have repopulated their former range after many decades of absence. I can’t wait to immerse myself, and of course I’m nervous about diving into a project in a new genre, that will ask new things of me. But… it feels important. There is so much in our world now that is urgent, and a part of me thinks that giving myself to such a book is out of step with the human crises that are so dire, but the beings who don’t have a voice in our language have needs and stories, too, and I feel a calling to help their stories be shared. This project has been put on the backburner for a long time, and now I really want to dive in.
Elizabeth Jacobson’s third collection of poems, There Are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral, was published in January 2025 (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press). Her previous book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch (FVE/Parlor Press, 2019), and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. Her other books include Her Knees Pulled In (Tres Chicas Books, 2012), two chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press, and Everything Feels Recent When You’re Far Away: Poetry and Art from Santa Fe Youth During the Pandemic (2021), which she co-edited. Elizabeth was the fifth poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She is a reviews editor for Terrain.org. Find her recent work at linktr.ee/ElizabethJacobson.
Read poetry by Elizabeth Jacobson appearing in Terrain.org: the Letter to America poem “America, Here We Go Again!”, “Allegory with Fiestaware”, and “Landscape with Ordinary Things”.
Header photo by ZacksPhoto, courtesy Shutterstock.
