Planetary gardening via female-led anthologies of women’s poetry in French

Abstract

This article showcases the fruitfulness of cross-fertilizing geographical and literary methods to address the complexities of women’s poems being compiled into an anthology – a process of negotiation compounded by male domination of the canon. Inspired by Gilles Clément’s reflections on the ‘planetary garden’, we radically posit female-edited poetry anthologies as a prism for rethinking ecosystem management. Focussing on three landmark collections of French-language women’s writings, we illustrate how a wide variety of cultural production is essential for a flourishing future, just as greater biodiversity enhances an ecoregion’s resilience in the face of stressors like air pollution or heat shock. Within this experimental interdisciplinary framework, two main questions are explored: first, how an appreciation of anthologies through ecopoetics propels scalar thinking about issues to do with the climate crisis and social justice; second, what happens when a poem is transplanted into an anthological milieu, where a plurality of distributed agencies gives a collective sense of becoming more than just a sum of distinctive parts. Proposing an innovative model whereby a ‘poem-flower’ takes root in an ‘anthology-garden’, our article ultimately argues that paying attention to female-led anthologizations’ diversifying role can enhance thinking about ecological sustainability as much as social inclusion.