Halk Çevreciliğinin Ürettiği Yeni Bir Şiir Türü: ‘Ekoaktivist’ Şiir
‘Ecoactivist’ Poetry in the Turkish Grassroots Environmentalism

Summary/Abstract: Environmental movements are closely linked with literature, and nature writing and activists often voice their resistances through various art forms, mainly visual and literary works. Similarly, there is also a close relationship between poetry and social action and poetry plays a crucial role in the reflection of social reality. Poetry serves as a means of social participation to voice opposition against the socioecological injustices. The poet seek to call and encourage people to join the protest movements through their creative efforts. This study examines the poetical language of enviromental protests in contemporary Turkish folk poetry: ecoactivist poetry. The paper proposes an analysis of ecoactivist poetics of popular or grassroots environmental struggles in Turkey against the destructive penetration of industrial capitalism. It is seen that the main distinctive characteristics of ecoactivist poetry is of voicing the environmental protest and raising awareness and sensitivity of social and environmental issues among the general public. Engaging in political ecology, ecocriticism and using ecopoem analysis, this article demonstrates that ecoactivist poetry is a political practice, as well as a political art. In the paper eight ecoactivist poems, collected through virtual snowball technique from different localities in Turkey, analysed by interpreting the underlying ecology political messages within each of the selected poems.

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