菲比·扬尼西的生态诗学：质疑人类与自然分离的观念

从神话到细胞

菲比·扬尼西的身份横跨诗人、古典学家、表演者、建筑师与环保主义者。她的生态诗学不靠数据说话，而是从“喀迈拉”这一神话怪物出发：狮子、山羊与蛇的混合体。在她2024年的同名诗集中，这个形象被接到现代遗传学中的微嵌合现象上——一个有机体的细胞可以长期存活在另一个有机体内部。于是人类不再是站在自然之外的主宰或拯救者，而是由不同基因编码拼合而成的身体。伤害景观，等于撕裂自己这个多物种的身体。

多声部的诗

她的诗放弃孤独的叙述者，让人类与非人类声音获得同等分量。2022年的《蝉》以昆虫为主角，把柏拉图、阿尔基洛科斯与松尾芭蕉的文本叠在蝉的生命周期与求偶鸣声之上，让虫鸣成为一种要求被倾听的非人类语言。2025年结集的《山羊之歌》延续这一方向。在《喀迈拉》中，她追踪希腊北部弗拉赫牧羊社群随季节在山谷与山地间迁徙的传统，不把牧歌生活浪漫化，而是把国家档案、地方口述史和自己的田野录音重新组装成一份共同生存的档案。

语言作为可走的路

建筑学的训练让她把语言当作可以行走、品尝和触摸的物理路径。2017年在希腊阿姆菲萨的帕努尔吉亚斯博物馆，她把诗句刻在半透明的羊皮纸上，一面画传统迁徙路线，一面写诗行，文字与地理在动物皮上彼此映照。表演时她常用布或篮子遮住自己的视线，主动把自己的人类凝视去中心化，以打开一种脆弱而感官化的周遭关系。她的诗里充满泥土味、海盐的刺痛与动物分泌物的气味。

政治与想象

这种写作带有微妙的政治锋芒：她把作品定位为对“公地”的辩护，即那些正被经济利润拆解的共享资源。她参与包括海洋声景在内的合作项目，见证气候变化与工业扩张造成的生物多样性丧失。作者劳拉·扬森在文中提到，今年晚秋这场关于环境记忆的表演将来到布里斯托大学，她将与扬尼西及其诗人译者布莱恩·斯尼登同场，看古代纹理如何在新建筑空间里回响。文章认为，度过生态危机需要新的想象框架：世界不是可供开采的资源，而是每一声鸣叫都在为整体注入生命的连接之网。

For decades, data has told the story of our ecological crisis. Scientists track carbon emissions, map deforestation and log biodiversity loss. Yet data alone cannot make humanity feel the reality of a changing planet. True impact hinges on a shift in language – a vocabulary that dissolves the border between the human and the living world.

Phoebe Giannisi embodies this shift. Poet, classicist, performer, architect and environmentalist, Giannisi has produced one of the most radical bodies of eco-poetry in contemporary literature. Her work blends ancient Greek myth, site-specific performance, video poems and field recordings to offer a long-lasting lesson in what it means to coexist on a vulnerable earth.

Giannisi’s environmental message is anchored in the chimera. In classical mythology, the chimera was a fire-breathing monster, part lion, part goat, part serpent. For Giannisi, this creature is not a monstrous abstraction but a biological and ethical reality.

In her collection Chimera (2024), Giannisi bridges ancient myth with modern genetics, drawing a line from Homer’s legendary she-goat chimera to the scientific phenomenon of microchimerism – the way cells from one organism can live permanently inside another. Humans are, her poetry suggests, inherently collaborative creatures. As she writes in the poem Chimera II:

Call me Chimera.

A being composed of

other beings

A being with different genetic codes

incorporated.

Various genes connected

in one body.

Multiple body.

Giannisi’s poetry challenges the delusion that humans stand apart from nature, either as masters or saviours. Instead, she invites her readers to recognise that we are composite creatures, physically and ecologically tangled with the world around us. To harm the landscape is to tear apart our own multi-species body.

This philosophy comes to life through Giannisi’s use of multiple voices. Her poems, now collected in Goatsong (2025), abandon the solitary narrator to thrive as living ecosystems where human and non-human voices hold equal weight. In her second poetry collection, Cicada (2022), the protagonist is the eponymous insect. Giannisi layers ancient texts by Plato, Archilochus and the Japanese poet Bashō, alongside observations of the insect’s life cycle and its droning mating calls. Its song becomes environmental testimony – a non-human language demanding the reader’s attention.

Giannisi’s focus deepened in Chimera, her third collection. In it, she tracks the ancient traditions of northern Greece’s Vlach herding communities, who move their livestock seasonally between mountain and valley pastures.

Rather than romanticising pastoral life, Giannisi constructs an archive of shared survival, reassembling state archives, regional oral histories and her own field recordings. In her live performances, Giannisi loops the cries of shepherds alongside the bellowing of the herd, the roar of a passing motorcycle and the grinding crunch of a cement mixer.

This acoustic space forces listeners to inhabit the modern industrial world and the ancient, animal landscape simultaneously. It is an ecology of sound that captures both the beauty of shared life and the vulnerability of an environment under threat.

Language as a material path

Trained as an architect, Giannisi conceives of language as a physical path to be walked, tasted and felt. When I hosted Giannisi at the Center of Hellenic Studies, Harvard in October 2023, I watched this spatial approach to poetry take shape in the room. There is an intimate, architectural precision to how she moves language off the page and into a shared physical space.

For her 2017 installation Aigis II at the Panourgias Museum in Amfissa, Greece, Giannisi inscribed her poetry onto semitransparent goatskin parchment. On one side, she traced traditional migration routes and on the other, she wrote lines of verse. As I observed viewers handling the parchment, the written word and the geography of the earth ghost one another through the animal hide.

In this method of composition, the human body becomes the primary medium for environmental memory. In her performances, Giannisi routinely blocks her own sight with a cloth or basket, intentionally de-centering her own human gaze to open up a vulnerable, sensory relationship with her surroundings. Her poems are filled with the taste of an earthy cicada, the sting of sea salt and the pungent smell of animal secretions.

This late autumn, that physical performance of environmental memory is coming to the University of Bristol. I will join Giannisi and her poet-translator, Brian Sneeden, to see how these ancient textures resonate inside a new architectural space, letting our contemporary landscape and classical myth collide once again.

Grounding her poetry in these realities allows Giannisi to create a space where human and environmental forces spill into one another. This strategy carries a subtle political edge, positioning her work as a defence of the “commons”, the shared resources currently being dismantled by economic profit. Her collaborative projects, including acoustic explorations of marine soundscapes, bear witness to the devastating loss of biodiversity driven by climate change and industrial expansion.

In the boundary crossing tradition of poet and translator Barbara Köhler and the 2026 Nobel prize winner Anne Carson, Giannisi dissolves the divisions between myth, scholarship and creativity, turning them into vital tools for navigating our difficult era.

Surviving the ecological crisis requires an entirely new framework of imagination. We are called to view our world not as resources to exploit, but as a vast, connected web where every creature’s song breathes life into the whole.

Laura Jansen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.