“a responsibility to something besides people”: African American Reclamation Ecopoetics

In this article, I focus on new directions in twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American poetry, which lead to environmentalism (a call for the protection of non-human nature); however, this call does not abandon the idea of the human in the landscape, as social and environmental justice issues are never far away. I address poetry by George Moses Horton and Paul Laurence Dunbar to demonstrate the lineage and ultimately move to Lucille Clifton and Indigo Moor as representatives of African American reclamation ecopoetics.