ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests the science of vegetal, zoological, and human bodily affinities has provocative resonances in the work of Mary Oliver who is widely regarded as one of the foremost ecopoets in contemporary American literature. Indeed, science is increasingly confirming Oliver's poetic insights into vegetal life garnered from her practices of walking, sensing, and writing. Oliver's spiritual realizations in nature are the opposite of Romantic transcendence, which in her view positions the terrene body and earthly desires as inferior to the rarified ideals of spirit and mind. The plant Bauplan of Oliver's poetry is neither overlooked as passive background nor consumed as dispensable matter but, instead, engaged with as material presence. Oliver implies vegetal olfaction in the drawing of organic bodies into the corpus of the skunk cabbage. Oliver's poetic intercorporeality recognizes vegetal embodiment as provoking sensory experience while possessing internal sensory ability.
