ABSTRACT
This essay considers Frederick Law Olmsted, the “park maker” widely credited as founder of landscape architecture, to be one of the major American poets of the nineteenth century, a poet whose “distant effects” we live with today, as they continue to evolve in city-scale works across North America. Olmsted’s “landscape architecture” arguably orients the human sensorium, psychology, and society to dimensions of “Earth magnitude” or geopoetic scale. Geopoetics then comes into focus when we read Olmsted’s works as we might read poems. We might consider how Earth magnitude unmoors our inherited sense of poetry, as a “literary” kind of making, to rethink the materials, sites, and scope of poetic practice as “ecopoetics.” Ecopoetic practices, such as walking and assembling textual materials and genre hybrids in pursuit of edge effects offer means to a practice of “wreading” through the social and environmental effects of Olmsted’s earthworks. To learn from Olmsted, I suggest that as (geo)poets we might write in and with his parks. The essay concludes with “The Unbending of the Faculties,” a poem written in and through a visit to Buffalo’s Delaware Park.
