Modern Ecopoetry Reading the Palimpsest of the More-Than-Human World (Nature, Culture and Literature) 9004445269, 9789004445260

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Modern Ecopoetry

Nature, Culture and Literature General Editors Hubert van den Berg (Palackj University in Olomouc) Axel Goodbody (University of Bath) Marcel Wissenburg (Radboud University Nijmegen)

Advisory Board Anabela Carvalho (University of Minho) Heinrich Detering (University of Gottingen) Robert Emmett (Virginia Tech) Marius de Geus (Leiden University) Adrian Ivakhiv (University of Vermont) Richard Kerridge (Bath Spa University) Michiel Korthals (Wageningen University) John Parham (University of Worcester) Tarla Rai Peterson (Texas A&M University) Ulrike Plath (Tallinn University) Luis Pradanos (Miami University) Kate Rigby (Bath Spa University) Piers Stephens (University of Georgia) Arran Stibbe (University of Gloucestershire) Bronislaw Szerszynski (University of Lancaster) Nina Witoszek (University of Oslo)

volume 16

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ncl

Modern Ecopoetry Reading the Palimpsest of the More-Than-Human World Edited by

Leonor María Martínez Serrano and Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: River Nile, Sudan. Photo by USGS on Unsplash.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Martínez Serrano, Leonor María, editor. | Gámez-Fernández, Cristina M., editor. Title: Modern ecopoetry : reading the palimpsest of the more-than-human world / edited by Leonor María Martínez Serrano and Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2021] | Series: Nature, culture and literature, 1572-4344 ; volume 16 Identifiers: LCCN 2020050747 (print) | LCCN 2020050748 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004445260 (hardback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9789004445277 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Nature in literature. | Human ecology in literature. | Environmentalism in literature. | Poetry, Modern–20th century–History and criticism. | Poetry, Modern–21st century–History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN1065 .M63 2021 (print) | LCC PN1065 (ebook) | DDC 809.1/936–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050747 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050748

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issn 1572-4344 isbn 978-90-04-44526-0 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-44527-7 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com.

This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Notes on Contributors vii Introduction: Finding a Compass to a Commonwealth of Breath 1 Leonor María Martínez Serrano and Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández

PART 1 Belonging: The Sacred Sense of Place 1 The Roots and Affinities of Dylan Thomas in the Works of Claudio Rodríguez: Sacred Nature in the Poet’s Imagination 25 María Antonia Mezquita Fernández 2 The Wisdom of Birds in Robert Bringhurst’s Poetry 43 Leonor María Martínez Serrano

PART 2 Stubborn Materiality and Environmental Poli(e)t(h)ics 3 The Agentic Power of Matter in Lorine Niedecker’s “Wintergreen Ridge” and “Paean to Place” 67 Matilde Martín González 4 Of Lyric Temporality and Materiality: Alice Oswald’s Environmental Poetics 91 Heather H. Yeung 5 The Political Is Personal: Juliana Spahr’s Political Ecology 111 Esther Sánchez-Pardo

PART 3 Postcolonial Resistance and Neoliberal Toxicity 6 Development as Deformation: Postcolonial Ecopoetics in Zulfikar Ghose’s Poetry 133 Rabia Zaheer and Aamir Aziz

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7 Meena Kandasamy’s Contestation of Inherited Cultural Landscapes in Touch 151 Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández 8 “Just Junk in a Safeway Cart I’m Pushing Down to the Recycling Center”: The Aesthetics of Ecology in Michael Robbins’s Poetry 171 Stephen Hock

Coda Against Use: (The Difficulty of) Writing Nature Poetry in an Age of Environmental Crisis 189 Catherine Woodward Index 207

Notes on Contributors Aamir Aziz has a PhD in English Literature from LUCAS Institute Leiden University, The Netherlands in 2014. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible under the supervision of Professor Frans Willem Korsten. He is currently a tenured Assistant Professor in English Literature at the Department of English Language and Literature University of the Punjab Lahore Pakistan. He has published a collection of English poems, Poetic Palpitations from Pakistan (2014). His research articles have appeared in New Theatre Quarterly (2016), American Book Review (2017), English Studies (2018), and The Journal of South Texas English Studies (2018). Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Córdoba. She has spent research periods at Stanford University and Wheaton College (USA) and Trinity College Dublin (Ireland). One of the Founders of AEEII (Spanish Association for India Studies), she was Secretary-Treasurer (2007-2009). She guest-edited two issues in the Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies (2012) and the Journal of Contemporary Literature (2015), respectively. She co-edited India in the World (2011), Tabish Khair: Critical Perspectives (2014) and Shaping Indian Diaspora: Literary Representations and Bollywood Consumption away from the Desi (2015). She has recently co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2020). Stephen Hock is an Associate Professor of English at Virginia Wesleyan University. He is the coeditor (with Jeremy Braddock) of Directed by Allen Smithee (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), and his work has appeared in journals and edited collections including Contemporary Literature, Italian Americana, Literature/ Film Quarterly, Michael Chabon’s America: Magical Words, Secret Worlds, and Sacred Spaces (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), The Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary Novel (Lexington Books, 2016), and Pynchon’s California (University of Iowa Press, 2014). Matilde Martín González is an Associate Professor of American literature at the University of La Laguna (Tenerife, Spain). Her fields of research are within women’s literature and feminist literary criticism and theory. Her publications include chapters in books such as “Beyond Mainstream Presses: Publishing Women of Colour as

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Cultural and Political Critique” (Race, Ethnicity and Publishing in America, Palgrave 2014); “Addressing Identity through Multigeneric Experimentation: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dicteé” (Genres/Genre dans la literature anglaise et américaine, Michel Houdiard, 2015); “Caring for People, Caring for Nature: A Deconstructive Ecofeminist Reading of Sylvia Watanabe’s Fiction” (The Ethics and Aesthetics of Eco-Caring, Routledge 2019). Leonor María Martínez Serrano works as a Lecturer in the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Córdoba, where she pursued her doctoral studies and gained a PhD in Canadian Literature. Her research interests include world poetry (European, American and Canadian poetry), Canadian Literature, High Modernism, Ecocriticism, First Nations and Oral Literatures, Literary Translation, and Comparative Literature. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia (Canada), the University of the West of Scotland (UK), the University of Bialystok (Poland) and the University of Oldenburg (Germany). María Antonia Mezquita Fernández holds a PhD in English from the University of Salamanca (Spain) and teaches at the University of Valladolid (Spain). From 2012 to 2015, she was Assistant Editor of the journal ES. Revista de Filología Inglesa (University of Valladolid). Being a member of the GIECO Research Group (Franklin-UAH), her current research interests particularly address issues of Ecocriticism in Comparative Literature and Popular Culture, with an emphasis on sense of place. In 2008, she published the book entitled William Blake y Claudio Rodríguez: visones luminosas (IEZFO). In 2016, she and Dr. López Mújica edited the volume Visiones ecocríticas del mar en la literatura (Franklin-UAH). Esther Sánchez-Pardo is Professor of English at U. Complutense, Madrid. She is the author of Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia (2003), and Antología Poética, Mina Loy (2009). She has published four critical editions and edited (or co-edited) seven books; among the latest, L’écriture désirante: Marguerite Duras (co-edited with A.M. Reboul, 2016), and Women Poets and Myth in the 20th and 21st centuries. On Sappho’s website (co-edited with R. Burillo and M. Porras, 2018). Prof. Sánchez-Pardo has published over seventyfive articles and book chapters and serves on the editorial board of several national and international journals.

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Catherine Woodward is a feminist modern lyric poet, a Creative Writing teacher, and a graduate of The University of East Anglia. Her PhD is in robot and lyric voice and her doctoral research was funded through a CHASE studentship. Her first collection of poetry, Sphinx, was published by Salò Press in 2017. In 2018 she won the Ivan Juritz Prize for creative experiment. Her second collection Blood. Flower. Joy! was published by Knives, Forks and Spoons in 2019. Imitations, her most recent project, is funded by an Author’s Foundation grant awarded by the Society of Authors. She is currently a resident artist at Cove Park, Scotland’s international artist residency centre. Heather H. Yeung is a poet, theorist, and critic. She teaches in the School of Humanities at the University of Dundee. She is the author of Spatial Engagement with Poetry (2015). The archive of her poetic work is held in the Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh. Rabia Zaheer is the Head of the English Language and Literature Department at Kinnaird College for Women Lahore Pakistan. She is a PhD scholar, writing her dissertation on the Pakistani poetic discourse in English. Her research interests include Postcolonial and South Asian poetry. Her research on Pakistani poetry was presented at various national conferences in 2018, while her recent research paper on Zulfikar Ghose’s dialogic discourse was published in the Journal of Research (Humanities) Punjab University in 2019.

introduction

Finding a Compass to a Commonwealth of Breath Leonor María Martínez Serrano and Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández

Abstract This introduction is divided into three sections and endeavours to situate the present volume within recent theoretical advancements in the field of ecopoetry, whilst underscoring its contribution to the existing body of criticism on ecopoets. The first section, “Ecopoetry: Words in Space and Poets as Place-Makers”, looks into the main focus of attention of this volume in the area of ecopoetry, leaning on the main theorisations to date by some of the major ecocritical scholars. Section II, “Can Poetry Really Save the Earth?”, makes use of the title of John Felstiner’s eponymous book (2009) to reflect on the usefulness of poetry in the face of the rampant destruction impending on the planet in the geological epoch of the Anthropocene. This introduction closes with the section “The Fractal Structure of Modern Ecopoetry and Its Contribution to Ecocritical Studies”, in which the structure of the volume is described according to two different yet overlapping concepts—that of fractals and that of palimpsest—and describes the niche that this volume comes to fill.

Keywords Introduction – ecocriticism – ecopoetry – palimpsest – fractal – Anthropocene

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Ecopoetry: Words in Space and Poets as Place-Makers

In Can Poetry Save the Earth? (2009), John Felstiner quotes Keats’s (1816) dictum “[t]he poetry of the earth is never dead” and continues thus: “the poetry of earth has lived up to this claim” (xiii). Since the very cradle of civilisation, nature, “that totality of being of which we in some sense conceive ourselves as forming a part” (Soper, 1995, 21), has been one of the secular concerns of literature. Nature was especially pervasive in European Romantic poetry, but its presence has continued unabated in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, particularly in poetry concerned with the possibility of coming to © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004445277_001

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dwell on the earth in a relation of duty and responsibility. While poetry has thrived and evolved over time, the Earth has had to cope with an accelerating destruction at Homo sapiens’ hands, mainly since the beginning of the geological epoch called the Anthropocene. At a time of worrying environmental degradation at a global scale, it is therefore of the essence that we, humans, turn to poetry to see how this ancient mode of thinking is responding to one of the most worrying problems that human societies are facing worldwide. After all, poetry represents a powerful inquisitive tool to explore and interrogate the nonhuman world, to understand how Homo sapiens relates to other species and the nonhuman world, and to figure out alternative ways to dwell responsibly on Earth. Hence the persistence of poetry amid the destruction of the world, and poets’ examination of the more-than-human world time and again, essaying variations on the pristine encounter between the observing human subject and the observed natural world—until the thought or insight dawns that humans are tiny elements in the living mesh of things, members of the “Commonwealth of Breath” (2014, 313) in David Abram’s memorable phrasing. In this respect, with intellectual alertness and lucidity, Stacy Alaimo posits the notion of “trans-corporeality” in pondering the “‘contact zone’ between human corporeality and more-than-human nature” (2008, 238), which brings to the fore how, in a world of fleshy beings, “the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world” (238) and “the corporeal substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’” (238). In a predatory capitalist system, Jane Bennett advocates “the vitality of matter” in Vibrant Matter, seeks to counteract “the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter [that] feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption”, and encourages humans to open themselves to “a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies” (2010, ix), as the nonhuman world has agencies of its own. In Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978, Seamus Heaney stated that “environmental issues have to a large extent changed the mind of poetry” (1980, 68). However, poetry has been conversing with nature for a long time now. Nihil novum sub sole. Ecopoetry is not new, as the line of nature poetry has a long pedigree rooted in a centuries-old tradition in Western and Eastern lyric. Recent critical work in the field of ecocriticism has attempted to define this “new brand of nature poetry” (Bryson, 2005, 1) which seeks to capture Keats’s poetry of the earth (Earth’s poesy, in Herder’s denomination)1 or the song of 1 As Kate Rigby claims, “[i]f, as ancient tradition has it, human speech first took the form of song, then, Herder [...] speculates, this must have comprised a ‘concerto,’ composed out of the diverse vocalizations of other creatures… [...] The human poesy of words is thought to have enjoyed its first flowering as a mode of participation in the polyphonic song of the Earth” (2016, 54).

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the earth (Bate, 2000), and has been variously referred to as “green poetry” (Gifford, 1995), “environmental poetry” (Scigaj, 1999), “ecological poetry” (Gilcrest, 2002), “Anthropocene lyric” (Bristow, 2015), and “ecopoetry” (Scigaj, 1999; Bryson, 2002 and 2005). Ecopoetry seems to be the most widely used term now by ecocritics,2 though some scholars (Lidström and Garrard, 2014) identify distinct categories under this umbrella term, as we shall see below. Terry Gifford uses the term green poetry to refer to “those recent nature poems which engage directly with environmental issues” (1995, 3). In Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets, Leonard Scigaj draws a distinction between ecopoetry, “poetry that persistently stresses human cooperation with nature conceived as a dynamic, interrelated series of cyclic feedback systems” (1999, 37), and environmental poetry, which “reveres nature and often focuses on particular environmental issues, but without the ecopoet’s particular concentration on nature as an interrelated series of cyclic feedback systems” (1999, 37). In Greening the Lyre: Environmental Poetics and Ethics, David Gilcrest uses the term ecological poetry in contradistinction to Romantic poetry and contemporary nature poetry, and ascribes to it a critique of the current environmental crisis, “an ecocentric ethic of interconnectedness, reciprocity, and, in some instances, radical egalitarianism” and “an appeal to revolutionary transformations” (2002, 24) in the light of the insights of ecological science. J. Scott Bryson (2005) has possibly offered the most comprehensive definition of ecopoetry to date: [E]copoetry is a mode [of nature poetry] […] marked by three primary characteristics: an ecological and biocentric perspective recognizing the interdependent nature of the world; a deep humility with regard to our relationships with human and nonhuman nature; and an intense skepticism toward hyperrationality, a skepticism that usually leads to condemnation of an overtechnologized modern world and a warning concerning the very real potential for ecological catastrophe. (2005, 2) Heir to a long line of nature poetry, ecopoetry has emerged as “a historical phenomenon arising from particular circumstances” (Bryson 2005, 3) closely related to the current unprecedented environmental crisis, and it is new in that it “seeks to stir readers to action in new ways” (3). Most importantly, ecopoets embrace “a poetics that presents the world community as just that, a community, rather than a world of creatures and natural beings with whom the 2 We follow closely in the steps of Bryson, who, in his preface to The West Side of Any Mountain (2005), offers an enlightening, succinct history of the way “ecopoetry” has been defined by some influential ecocritics in recent years.

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privileged human self interacts” (3). Abram also dwells on this idea in Becoming Animal: “After three and a half centuries spent charting and measuring material nature as though it were a pure exterior, we’ve at last begun to notice that the world we inhabit (from the ocean floor to the upper atmosphere) is alive” (2010, 81). Nature is not a shell or exterior to humans; rather humans are part of the allness of creation or “the ‘spider-webbed’ quality of the world” (Bryson 2005, 12), where everything is connected to everything else along a democratic continuum of existence. In Bryson’s view, cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s place versus space dichotomy can prove extremely useful in critically accounting for and comprehending what ecopoets do in their work (9). As Tuan claims in Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, “‘space’ is more abstract than ‘place’. What begins as an undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (1977, 6). Space is associated with the elementary power to move and with freedom. While space is “that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place” (1977, 6). In other words, “enclosed and humanized space is place” (1977, 54). Drawing on Tuan’s view of place versus space as interdependent concepts, Bryson claims that the project of ecopoetry has a twofold purpose: (1) to create place, making a conscious and concerted effort to know the more-than-human world around us; and (2) to value space, recognizing the extent to which that very world is ultimately unknowable. [...] Most of the project undertaken by contemporary ecopoets falls somewhere within these two objectives, to know the world and to recognize its ultimate unknowability. (2005, 8) Ecopoets are thus place-makers: in writing ecopoems that direct readers’ attention to the complexities of the more-than-human world, they cultivate Tuanian topophilia, i.e. “the affective bond between people and place or setting” (Tuan and Schoff 1988, 4) and “move their audience out of an existence in an abstract postmodernized space [...] and into a recognition of our present surroundings as place and thus as home” (Bryson 2005, 11). Consequently, ecopoetry might ultimately help us grasp humanity’s position in the larger scheme of things by underscoring “the interdependent nature of the relationship between people and the worlds they inhabit” (Bryson 2005, 11). In short, ecopoets “encourage us to discover and nurture a topophiliac devotion to the places we inhabit” (Bryson 2005, 12), helping us navigate space and make it place, oikos or home. The ethical implications thereof are profound. In creating place-worlds that

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reorient us within our world, ecopoets help us “move into an awareness not only of the interanimation that exists between ourselves and the rest of the world, but also of our own ignorance concerning our multifaceted need for it” (15). In addition, “the more we view the rest of our world as place and home, the more care we will take not to damage it” (15-16) and stop viewing the environment as a commodity, as a portfolio of resources to be used and exploited in manifold ways (16). According to Tuan and Schoff (1988, 52), space is inextricably linked to motion, spaciousness and the sense of being free, and the power of transcendence. However, “the more we move into space, the more we realize its vastness as it expands before us, helping us to understand our own smallness and producing an attitude of humility” (Bryson 2005, 17-18), which reminds us of the epistemological limits intrinsic in the desire to know the places where we dwell. This awareness of the final unknowability of “an evolving world that lies beyond the grasp of language” (Gilcrest 2002, 148), i.e. of the ungraspable spaciousness of what-is, is the necessary antidote to ecopoets’ place-making process, which might result in them thinking that they are owners or literal creators of the surrounding landscape (Bryson 2005, 18). Knowing, not owning, for we do not own what we know. Hence an essential humility is central to ecopoets’ self-imposed mission. A deep sense of humility prospers in the face of an ultimately unknowable and incomprehensible world which it is our mission not to master but to steward and protect instead (Bryson 2005, 21). Ultimately, the locus where poetry takes place is in “the harmonization of place and space”, in which “attention to the finitude of place synchronizes with the boundlessness of space” (Bryson 2005, 21). That location where place meets space is exactly where the place-spaciousness consciousness cultivated by ecopoetry comes to flourish, often through “an immersion of the self in the natural community” (Bryson 2005, 22). After all, we are plain citizens in Aldo Leopold’s landcommunity (1949), where we belong even if we cannot fully understand it. In a joint article entitled “‘Images adequate to our predicament’: Ecology, Environment and Ecopoetics”, Susanna Lidström and Greg Garrard identify two kinds of ecopoetry and draw a distinction between ecophenomenological poetry, which focuses on “descriptions and appreciation of non-human nature with roots in Romantic and deep ecology traditions, aiming to heighten individual readers’ awareness of their natural surroundings” (2014, 37), and environmental poetry, which seeks to “grapple with the changing relationship between human societies and natural environments” (2014, 37). The former focuses on “observation or recognition of the natural world for its own sake” (43) and is concerned with “the relationship or interface between the human and the natural world as separate spheres” (47); whereas the latter, they claim, addresses

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complex questions regarding human-environment relations involving “scale, justice, and politics” (35), “governance and access to resources” (43), concerns closely associated with the broader field of environmental humanities. In The Anthropocene Lyric (2015), Tom Bristow, drawing on Sarah Whatmore’s and David Abram’s eco-philosophical thought on a more-than human world,3 looks at the kind of poetry that encourages us to see “the human as one part of the more-than-human world, which is to think of us not within the world but of the World” (2015, 2), a position that counteracts human instrumentalism and “shifts focus from the significance of human species to transcorporeality and personhood” (2015, 2). Acknowledging the importance of the more-thanhuman world in the age of the Anthropocene and its centrality to his own critical endeavour, Bristow claims that “[e]copoetics [...] is a synonym for contemporary poetry that exhibits a profound sense of selfhood as Worldliness” (2015, 6). As Bristow observes, Sarah Whatmore4 first coined the term more-than-human as “a focal alternative to the prevailing human/non-human perspective in bio (life) and geo (earth); it celebrates the ‘livingness’ of the world, in which life is technologically molten” (2015, 6). The implications are far-reaching, since the concept of “more-than-human” gestures towards a view of human beings within the larger context of interconnectedness. It is, in fact, part of the more-than-human world, or enworlded (2015, 129). The Cartesian split is blurred or cancelled. As a result, Bristow argues, “‘human-nature relations’ is thus considered a false critical compound: ‘more than human worldliness’ replaces this episteme as we move towards a progressive lyricism of the Anthropocene” (2015, 7). The Anthropocene lyric is sensitive to “the fragility, beauty and indifference of flora and fauna, climate and season—the morethan-human world” (2015, 7), aspects which it incorporates into poems as vessels of meaning and contested spaces for the representation of the world. In The Anthropocene Lyric Bristow proposes three anchor points as useful conceptual tools for the study of the Anthropocene lyric. First, place perception, closely related to “the politics of representation in the lyric, dominated by human perception and feeling looking out on a world” (2) and, drawing on Bryson’s 2005 view of poetry as place-making, to “the way poetry implicitly articulates the significance of the experience of place to human emotions” (5). Second, more-than-human world, a concept whereby Bristow revisits Cartesian ontological dualism (mind versus body, or res cogitans versus res extensa) 3 Bristow defined more-than-human like this: “a general term reminding us that the non-human world (on which humans are absolutely dependent) has agencies of its own” (2015, 126). 4 See her 2006 article “Materialist Returns: Practising Cultural Geography in and for a MoreThan-Human World”, Cultural Geographies, 13(4), pp. 600-609.

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to transcend it and “highlight human and nonhuman interdependency” (2). And third, Anthropocene emotion, which “offers a fresh perspective to twentyfirst century critical reviews of space, personhood and place” (2). As poetry cultivates in humans a form of sensitivity to what Bristow calls “perilinguistic wavelengths” (3), the Anthropocene lyric draws readers’ attention to “the plight of biodiversity loss and species extinction, supervened by humaninduced climate change” (3), awakening humans’ awareness of the escalating damage inflicted upon the biosphere. This brief review of the most salient trends within ecopoetry concludes with Unnatural Poetics (2017), in which Sarah Nolan draws our attention to what she calls “the unlikely environments of ecopoetics” (3).5 Unnatural poetics is inspired by Donna Haraway’s materialist concept of “naturecultures” and the blurred boundaries between binaries such as nature and culture, between natural and human spaces, objects, thoughts and agencies, or, between the human body and the world as embodied in material spaces or objects, a crucial dissolution posited by Material Ecocriticism. Following closely in the steps of Brenda Iijima in The Ecolanguage Reader (2010) and Scott Knickerbocker’s Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language (2012), Nolan (2017) moves ecopoetics away from entirely natural environments towards built spaces in the face of the increasingly unnatural state of the contemporary world. Her notion of unnatural poetics is an outgrowth of third- and fourthwave ecocriticism, as it “elucidates poems where naturecultures are made tangible through overtly textual spaces” (10). Everything around us reveals itself to be environments, ranging from our bodies to “the digital and textual places that we construct” (20). As a consequence, unnatural poetics seeks to “become truly expressive of the multifaceted material and nonmaterial elements that compose environments” (18), while foregrounding “the limitations of language and form” (18).

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Can Poetry Really Save the Earth?

Living things sharing the biosphere form a symposium of the whole or, in other words, a community of beings embedded within the webbed natural world. Moving beyond the Cartesian dualism between spirit and matter, mind and body, body and world, internal reality and external appearance, ecophilosopher David Abram has emphasised in The Spell of the Sensuous (1996) and

5 This is the title of the introduction to her volume.

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Becoming Animal. An Earthly Cosmology (2010) that humans are just embodied minds deeply and sensuously immersed in the larger mesh of things, both living and nonliving. Language is a membrane mediating our confrontation with reality at large, and air is the medium of communication and the dwelling of what he terms a “Commonwealth of Breath” (2014, 313). Human and nonhuman animals are mutually dependent members of what Leopold (1949) called a vast biotic community, which has agentic powers of its own, and so the human body is co-extensive with the world. It comes as no surprise that Biosemiotics emphasises the semantic agency of matter, for there are in the Book of Nature earth scripts, signs and languages other than the purely verbal ones from humankind. Earth is a many-voiced or polyphonic dwelling of vast proportions where everything exists in a state of permanent flux and interpenetration. The latest developments of Material Ecocriticism and the contributions of eminent ecocritics like Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann elaborate on notions such as trans-corporeality, porosity and the physicality of what-is, expressive of the interconnectedness between the human and nonhuman worlds. Matter has been shown to be agentic, to have a life and language of its own, capable of triggering complex processes. “All matter [...] is a ‘storied matter’”, claim Iovino and Oppermann (2014, 1), and humans live in “a hybrid, vibrant, and living world” (2014, 3), for agency is not the prerogative of human beings, but rather “a pervasive and inbuilt property of matter” (2014, 3). At this point the crucial question to pose is, with John Felstiner (2009), whether poetry can save the earth. The opening lines of his preface read: “Poetry has been changing over the centuries, and so has the earth. While poetry thrives, homo sapiens has slowly and not so slowly been abusing the physical world surrounding us” (2009, xiii). But he also points to the capacity of poetry to lead to action, to change “the natural world we’re both part of and apart from” (xiii) for the better, for, as he contends, “[i]f poems touch our full humaneness” they might ultimately “quicken awareness and bolster respect for this ravaged resilient earth we live on” (xiii). So, “the will to act may rise within us” if poetry unleashes its potential in cultivating our environmental consciousness and then gently (or not so gently) stirring our conscience, renewing “our saving touch with the earth” (8) in the process. Felstiner’s approach is that of a collector of the best poems produced in poets’ engagement with nonhuman nature, and so his book is a sort of field guide to poems chronicling the evolution of the encounter of the human imagination with the nonhuman world. What all of these poems have in common is that they connect “human experience to a vast nonhuman world” (xiv), they display an astonishing “alertness to nature” (2) that captures the “sensory shock of things” (2) and seeks to grasp “an interconnected whole, embedding

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us in its midst” (2). In so doing they elucidate our relations with the Earth. Felstiner writes: [P]oems have shaped our changing consciousness of the world around us. While earth remembers the balance and harmony sustaining it for so long, even with humans present, what’s neglected in a time of crisis are those centuries of poems [...] reminding us how connected we are. (4) Felstiner has powerful reasons to record how imagination has responded to the nonhuman world over time: “poetry more than any other kind of speech reveals the vital and warning signs of our tenancy on earth” (4). Confronted with the “organic wholeness of all things” (5), Felstiner urges humankind, “a recent arrival”, to “refigure its place on earth, much as the Copernican revolution upset our geocentric universe” (5). We need to re-learn the elementary lesson that we are an integral part of an environment conceptualised by ecology as being “a biosystem of interacting organisms needing ‘preservation’ for the sake of the whole” (5). The word “environment” itself betrays human presence: it suggests that our surroundings inevitably point to a human standpoint, that everything is measured in terms of humanity. “Egocentric versus ecocentric: nature poetry lives by the tension” (6), affirms Felstiner. Poems that engage with the nonhuman world might make us see again or with greater lucidity what we have already seen superficially: a “moment of recognition” (6) unexpectedly happens all of a sudden. Back to the question again: Can poetry really save the Earth? The litany of environmental woes is endless in Felstiner’s phrasing: What can poetry say, much less do, about global warming, seas rising, species endangered, water and air polluted, wilderness road-ridden, rain-forests razed, along with strip mining and mountaintop removal, clearcutting, overfishing, overeating, overconsumption, overdevelopment, overpopulation, and so on and on? Well, next to nothing. [...] Yet next to nothing would still be something. (7) What is at stake in the face of the current environmental crisis is whether “we will subsist on a livable or steadily degraded planet” (7-8), based on the choices we make or fail to make as (local and global) communities and individuals. Policies do play a crucial role in this context, but Felstiner insists that it is the individual that makes a world of a difference. First consciousness, then conscience to act and change the state of affairs in today’s ecologically threatened world. Epistemology and ethics go hand in hand in ecopoetry as a

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mode of knowing and rethinking our relationship with the more-than-human world. Felstiner follows closely in the steps of first-wave ecocritics like Buell or Glotfelty, who understood ecocriticism as developing a cultural critique of literary texts overtly marked by a deep sense of engagement, commitment and denunciation of practices that are damaging to the more-than-human world. To Buell, ecocriticism is the “study of the relation between literature and environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (1995, 430; our emphasis). In turn, Glotfelty claimed that “literature does not float above the material world in some aesthetic ether, but, rather, plays a part in an immensely complex global system in which energy, matter, and ideas interact” (xix), anticipating a basic premise of Material Ecocriticism. Years later, Rob Nixon, convinced that “human rights are indissociable from environmental justice” (2011, 265), also conceptualised postcolonial ecocriticism as a mode of cultural critique that seeks to make slow violence visible and instil a sense of the urgency to rethink our relationship with the natural world. Incidentally, in Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Huggan and Tiffin do not hesitate either to highlight “the capacity of poetry to counteract the instrumentalism of hyper-rationalist and materialistic values and to celebrate ‘the totality of nature’ by engaging with human feelings and sympathies in a broadly intersubjective, mutually beneficial way” (2015, 104). According to Felstiner, God’s command to have dominion over the creatures of the earth in the Book of Genesis has been widely misinterpreted. He quotes from George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864), where Marsh “spoke against environmental recklessness” in a prescient premonition of what would subsequently come to be called “Anthropocene”: “[C]onsidering the biblical command to replenish the earth and subdue it, [Marsh] found that ‘Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste’” (10). Man is “everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords. [...] Indigenous vegetable and animal species are extirpated” (Felstiner 2009, 10-11). Marsh wrote amid the American Civil War, aware of how human heedlessness and greed were responsible for havoc and destruction—“for the exhaustion and erosion of soils, for deforestation, for destruction of plants, trees, insects, birds, fish, whales, whole habitats” (11). In much the same way science or philosophy are committed to discovering and illuminating the truth, the aim of poetry is also to shed light on areas of life that need elucidating, even more if such areas have to do with vital issues like the health or survival of the earth and its human and nonhuman dwellers. “As long ago as we know, poetry has aimed to enlighten and delight” (14), writes Felstiner in words reminiscent of Horace’s

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docere et delectare. The mission of poetry is not just to entertain but also to teach, for “poems make a difference by priming consciousness” (14), sharpening our attention and “shaping life” (14) through the music and rhythm of words, making us “grasp things anew” (15). Poets catch a slice of life between their teeth and turn it into audible and enlightening music for whomever might care to listen. Felstiner’s eulogy of poetry is moving and celebratory at the same time: “Imagination, momentarily grasping things in flux, admits in the same moment that nature itself is ungraspable. […] Poems shaping nature make it at once strange and vital” (15). This is how poetry can help us save the world in a time of alarming attention deficits: by gently pushing us to look and listen one more time to the details and threads in the carpet of life, which is larger than each of us as individuals or as members of a global community. Felstiner concludes: “Can poetry save the earth? For sure, person by person, our earthly challenge hangs on the sense and spirit that poems can awaken” (357). So, can poetry really save the earth? Yes, it can. It has always done so, now more than ever before, in the midst of an unprecedented climate crisis. Poetry has the potential to help us save ourselves and the world we are a part of. This is why it demands our attention, here and now, in a world that constantly bombards us with superfluous stimuli that accomplish nothing but a state of perpetual anaesthesia and solipsism, rampantly insensitive to the specifics, details and matters of real concern which should always be treated seriously.

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The Fractal Structure of Modern Ecopoetry and Its Contribution to Ecocritical Studies

Bryson commented in the preface to The West Side of Any Mountain that ever since the emergence of Ecocriticism as a mode of reading literary texts, “poets writing from an environmental perspective [had] received relatively little critical attention” (2005, 1). Since 2005 the situation has changed, of course, with the pioneering work on contemporary nature poetry by John Elder, Terry Gifford and Patrick Murphy being followed up by more recent studies. Modern Ecopoetry: Reading the Palimpsest of the More-Than-Human World seeks to make a contribution to the ongoing study of ecopoetry, a burgeoning field in the wider framework of environmental humanities, which is concomitant to and continues the focus of some of the key theorizations published over the last few years about poetry from an ecocritical viewpoint. This volume brings together contributions that explore how modern poetry addresses human beings’ relationship with the natural world, mirroring some of the most salient ecopoetic approaches to date. Modern Ecopoetry fills crevices and liminal

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spaces, drawing attention to poetry which has emerged in less mainstream cultural contexts. The essays in this collection derive from different corners of the globe. While they continue to focus on the greening of poetry, they expand the scope of existing research by examining poets who do not necessarily belong to the literary canon, setting them side by side regardless of their cultural background. The whole can be greater than the sum of its parts, though. Echoing a term developed by Sarah Dillon, this volume aims at a palimpsestuous pattern of analysis for poems written in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from different locales, with a shared, yet evolving—Lawrence Buell (2005) would also say waving—concern for the depth, limits and new possibilities of ecopoetry. Palimpsestuousness is understood by Dillon as “a simultaneous relation of intimacy and separation” (2007, 3). Distinguishing between “a palimpsest” as a palaeographic artefact and “the palimpsest” as a metaphorical construct, Dillon enhances the meaning of the concept. The salient feature of the palimpsest is that it retains the earlier writing, as it is often imperfectly or only partially erased. The concurrent relation between the different layers of writing creates a tension between affinity and difference, and it is within the range between these two ontological and epistemological extremes that ecopoetry can be meaningfully explored. This volume provides particular examples of what Buell termed the first and second waves of ecocriticism in The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005) and Scott Slovic recently described as the third in “The Third Wave of Ecocriticism: North American Reflections on the Current Phase of the Discipline” (2010) and fourth in his “Editor’s Note” (2012a and 2012b), respectively. Indeed, Buell himself preferred the metaphor of the palimpsest to that of the wave. Therefore, Modern Ecopoetry cannot but be diverse, for ecocriticism is a gigantic work in progress that mimics the protean complexity of ecopoetry, whilst ecopoets worldwide pay attention and keep on conversing with nature. After all, according to Felstiner, this is “poetry’s perennial job” (2009, 29): to enter into an endless dialogue with the nonhuman world through —and in— rhythmic form. A second metaphor akin to the trope of the palimpsest, one based on nature’s recursiveness, can serve to describe the potential of this volume in relation both to itself and the realm of ecopoetry. The chapters in this collection proceed fractally, exhibiting repetitive patterns as the volume unfolds. Fractals are characterised by their infiniteness, and their never-ending complex patterns feature self-similarity, i.e. an expanding or unfolding symmetry. This means that they replicate with exactly identical characteristics which manifest at varying scales. Their creative power lies in the looping repetition

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of a simple process or pattern. These patterns recur time and again and emerge as dynamic entities which appear in living and supposedly inert elements of nature. Palimpsestuous and fractal structures systemically relate to each other in their metaphorical application to and exploration of ecopoetry. This is because the kaleidoscopic poetic variation—inherent in rewriting the nature-human relationship—creates self-generating ecopoetic possibilities. Modern Ecopoetry: Reading the Palimpsest of the More-Than-Human World is divided into three subsections and a coda. Pertinent themes are fractally braided into the chapters making up this volume. Readers can discover in a sequence of their choice representations of nature in modern poetry written in English in the postcolonial, global world; poems and poets dwelling on the lessons learnt from the green world in the vein of the Romantics and the Transcendentalists or against them; nature as a polyphonic place and poetry as a space for multiple discursive voices; reflections on anthropocentrism versus biocentrism; challenging poetic considerations about nature as a nonhuman entity in opposition to nature as a perceived cultural construct; anxious portraits of environmental Armageddon and of a planet threatened by global warming and climate change; and political and societal implications of the overexploitation of the natural world, commodified in late capitalist societies and neoliberal economies. Part 1, entitled “Belonging: The Sacred Sense of Place”, explores different modes of belonging experienced in our postcolonial world. It actively shifts between notions of dwelling in a place which shapes it as sacred, worth the human effort to commune with it in the Romantic sense, and understanding of that place, as well as traversing it both physically in the present and mentally in the past—i.e. historically—as a multilayered or polyhedral dimension to such belonging. The poets in this section either invite readers to commune with an earth which is trying to reveal its secrets, show a way to look, listen and “dwell in the natural world” (Bate 1991, 4), or problematize such a communion for different reasons in a global world. These chapters echo the Romantic concept of belonging to a place by inhabiting it. The poets discussed come from different cultural and historical backgrounds: Claudio Rodríguez, a Spanish poet who grew up during the Spanish Civil War and died on the verge of the twenty-first century; and Robert Bringhurst, a well-established Canadian poet known for his wide knowledge of classical (Greek, Latin and Arabic) and modern languages and literatures. The first chapter in Part 1, “The Roots and Affinities of Dylan Thomas in the Works of Claudio Rodríguez: Sacred Nature in the Poet’s Imagination”,

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investigates the influence of Dylan Thomas in the poetry of Claudio Rodríguez, a Spanish poet who belonged to the Generation of ’50.6 María Antonia Mezquita Fernández compares three poems by Rodríguez in order to trace the influence of Dylan Thomas. These are accessible to an international readership thanks to existing translations into English of Rodríguez’s poetry. Readers will discover how Rodríguez found in Thomas a poet with whom, although he wrote in another language and belonged to a different landscape and literary tradition, he had much in common when creating his own poetic universe. Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst receives the critical attention of Leonor María Martínez Serrano in “The Wisdom of Birds in Robert Bringhurst’s Poetry”. Focusing on his poetics of hearing, Martínez Serrano analyses the poems “Finch” and “Birds on the Water”, from his Selected Poems (2009). She contends that in Bringhurst’s effort to mimic the polyphony of a many-voiced earth, these two poems, modest as they appear, probe human perception of the nonhuman animal as other and, following Huggan and Tiffin (2015, 208), deconstruct the privileged status of human over nonhuman others as agents in the world which is constitutive of the prevailing Western worldview. Part 2, entitled “Stubborn Materiality and Environmental Poli(e)t(h)ics”, marks the transition toward an ecopoetry with a strong “material turn” (Iovino and Oppermann 2012, 75) which approaches “matter and material relations [...] coupled with reflections on agency, text, and narrativity” (75). This section delves into the poets’ endeavour to deal with the material world in their poetic formulations. It studies the agency of the material world to narrate its own stories and examines the sonic materiality of poetic language. But it also looks into the ontology of language as carrier of ideas and conceptualisations about the natural world and a new Weltanschauung. Thus, environmental politics— and its sometimes wilfully forgotten or naively ignored ethics—also find echo in these pages. These chapters enact a thought-provoking progression from sharply examining the agency of matter in human life in Niedecker’s poetry, through testing the strong ethical thrust of Oswald’s poetry, and to dissecting the conformation of political and communal elements in Spahr’s verse. In the opening chapter of Part 2, “The Agentic Power of Matter in Lorine Niedecker’s ‘Wintergreen Ridge’ and ‘Paean To Place’”, Matilde Martín González draws on material ecocriticism to scrutinise poems in which Niedecker displays her understanding of poetry as a place where nature’s agentic power can be both discovered and linguistically constructed. Following the biosemiotic turn, Martín González explains that these poems portray the relationship 6 This Spanish literary movement is also known as “the children of the civil war” because the poets included in it were born during or shortly after the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and started publishing in the mid-twentieth century.

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between human and nonhuman entities and how deciphering is part of that process. She looks into the bidirectional effects of physical phenomena and the human race on each other, and how human emotions are portrayed as an integral part of the natural world. Heather H. Yeung’s “Of Lyric Temporality and Materiality: Alice Oswald’s Environmental Poetics” surveys the British poet’s lifelong engagement with environmental issues in poetry which is characterised by the materiality of the poetic voice and time on the page. Yeung studies the conformation of the landscape as something composed by voice, on the one hand, and vision, on the other. With Oswald’s claim in mind that she is not a nature poet, Yeung affirms that readers are presented with a rich spatial presence, beyond nature or landscape, in poetic events posited as ethical problems, given spatial entity by the conformation of voice and textual display. The last chapter in Part 2, Esther Sánchez-Pardo’s “The Political Is Personal: Juliana Spahr’s Political Ecology”, studies the collective voice—we—in Spahr’s Well Then There Now (2011) in relation to the term “connective reading”, coined by Spahr herself in 2001. Local and global dimensions receive Spahr’s poetic attention in her support for local species against planetary neoliberal practices. Moreover, in line with previous Yeung’s piece, critical approaches to Spahr’s linguistic, material facets disclose the intertwined nature of politics and poetic ethics in her understanding of collectivity. Sánchez-Pardo demonstrates that the materiality of language and its contextual production of meaning, alongside with geographical and historical setting, create in Spahr a sense of ethical responsibility as a shared communal identity. Sánchez-Pardo’s essay provides a bridge between Part 2 and Part 3, which is entitled “Postcolonial Resistance and Neoliberal Toxicity”, because it serves as a threshold opening up space for commentary on the environmental destruction and human exploitation brought about by the machinery of capitalism. This last section responds to one of the recent turns in the field of postcolonial ecocriticism, which borrows the terms coined by Lawrence Buell, “toxic gothic” and “toxic discourse”, in his 2001 Writing for an Endangered World. Toxic gothic refers to the environmental pollution described in traumatic narratives of contaminated communities in what is codified as a post-pastoral world, whereas toxic discourse refers to an interconnected set of topoi which gain force from the anxieties caused by late industrial culture and “from deeper-rooted habits of thought and expression” (Buell 2001, 30). The three chapters trace an arc from longing for and recreating a landscape where life is possible to dismantling that need and embracing a new culture of ecology in which environmental deterioration is not a cause of anxiety. Rabia Zaheer and Aamir Aziz open Part 3 with “Development as Deformation: Postcolonial Ecopoetics in Zulfikar Ghose’s Poetry”, in which they study

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two poetry collections that span twenty years, namely Selected Poems (1991) and 50 Poems (2010). The critics ponder the real significance of the term development in Ghose’s poetics, revealing that the concept bears a destructive, suppressive burden in the neoliberal world and postcolonial environment. Zaheer and Aziz state that Othering becomes a practice which both reinforces the binary between human and nonhuman and allows for the subjugation of othered people (likened to animals) and nature. This practice of othering through violence and the subsequent trauma experienced by communities and the landscape, already hinted at in Ghose’s ecopoetry, are looked into as well by Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández in “Meena Kandasamy’s Contestation of Inherited Cultural Landscapes in Touch”. This 2006 poetry volume challenges the landscapes and narratives inherited by Kandasamy in her native Tamil Nadu. The poet portrays a history of sustained violence against Dalits, which Gámez-Fernández analyses following the distinction created by American cultural geographer John Brinkerhoff Jackson (1984). Jackson distinguished between landscapes associated with an intimate relationship of individuals and communities with the land, known as vernacular landscapes, and landscapes emerging from imperial and colonial practices, termed official landscapes. Gámez-Fernández argues that Kandasamy’s poetic space in Touch resists such received history, trauma and landscape through these two types of landscapes which hold an unequal relationship to each other. Stephen Hock, in “‘Just Junk in a Safeway Cart I’m Pushing Down to the Recycling Center’: The Aesthetics of Ecology in Michael Robbins’s Poetry”, selects poems from Robbins’s recent collections Alien vs. Predator (2012) and The Second Sex (2014) to observe the poet’s engagement with ecology. Hock states that Robbins’s ethics of recycling falls far from Romantic imaginings of the environment; instead, ecological recycling represents a propagation of the environmental disaster fostered by capitalist consumerist practices and commodification. Amidst such a convoluted maelstrom, Hock delineates what the figure of the poet is like for Robbins, no other than a bricoleur who creates poetry out of whatever is found at hand in one’s environment. This notion echoes early twentieth-century Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, which select an objet trouvé (literally, “found object”), to create poetry from objects— linguistic fragments for Robbins—that acquire new, unusual meanings in the poetic cosmogony generated with this recycling ethos. Fractal patterns emerge at many points of Modern Ecopoetry and can be found by readers throughout—for instance in affinities including the conception of the role of the poet as interpreter mentioned by María Antonia Mezquita Fernández and Matilde Martín González, and in the references to

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the conflicted relationship between death and love of life in Martínez Serrano and in Zaheer and Aziz. What has led us to place these chapters in different sections is their main theoretical approach. Many contributors draw on the same sources and evoke the same conceptualisations. Complementary poetic visions are enacted in turn by Bringhurst and Oswald, since the former is primarily committed to the task of listening, whereas the latter explores the contours of the poetic voice and poetic time. Concomitant argumentations about the self-other divide reverberate in Spahr, Bringhurst, Oswald, and Kandasamy, and affiliations across differences are explored by Sánchez-Pardo, Mezquita Fernández, and Yeung. Dealing with the emotions of witnessing or experiencing violence, either in one’s own body, in one’s community or in one’s natural means of survival and cultural development, invariably attracts the critical attention of scholars in this volume. Coping with trauma, personally outlived or communally inherited, awakens a variety of affective responses, which ultimately seem to lead to the need to raise readers’ awareness of such practices and their unsustainability. Calls to action of course are also hinted at, even openly verbalised, quite frequently disrupting readers’ familiarity with the linguistic and ideological entanglement of the politics of devastation. Against such a comfortably naïve connivance, ecopoets either seek to reveal the impossibility of disentanglement from neocapitalist machinery, avowing that their sole aim is to create out of such chaos; or deploy an ecopoetics of denunciation, through the creation of newer poetic spaces to explore self-awareness, community consciousness and the nonhuman-human divide. Their ecopoetic undertakings oscillate between hopelessness and despair—in eroded landscapes full of the debris of past violence and present technological rampaging of natural assets—and the conformation of new material and/or ideological possibilities or alternative futures which survey and test spaces of regeneration, justice, survival and active un-othering. Other threads connecting the essays remain to be discovered by the reader. The chapters making up this volume adopt different critical stances under the overarching umbrellas of Ecocriticism and Postcolonialism. They emphasise the notions that nature is not a linguistic construct—“it is not language that has a hole in its ozone layer” (1995, 151), claimed Kate Soper—or just an object for contemplation, in much the same way as poems are not “freefloating aesthetic objects”, but “have a social materiality, they carry ideological freight” (Bate 2015, 81). Modern Ecopoetry interrogates how humans’ relation to and confrontation with the nonhuman world is captured in and through poetry. It also serves the purpose of awakening readers’ consciousness about the human race’s urgent need to address and redress the consequences of its

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desire to consume the products of the Earth in one way or another. Lawrence Buell was right in pointing out that “aesthetics can become a decisive force for or against environmental change” (1995, 3), for as Laurence Coupe also insisted, the ultimate objective of ecocriticism as a humanist and politically charged project should be to encourage resistance rather than conservation, “resistance to planetary pollution and degradation” (2000, 4). The contributors to this volume are from very different geographical, cultural and academic backgrounds and the chapters collected here focus on postcolonial poets writing in English who are responding to the environmental issue in idiosyncratic ways. The majority of the poets studied in these pages do not normally appear under the label of postcolonial or even ecopoets, yet the critical tools employed to approach their work represent the blend enacted by environmental humanities and allow for a reconsideration of the traditional categorisations appended to them and their work. The poets gathered span the time from 1906, the year when Lorine Niedecker was born, to 1986, the date when Meena Kandasamy, the youngest in the group, was born. Together with Niedecker, Claudio Rodríguez (and Dylan Thomas) did not outlive the twentieth century; as for the rest, Ghose is in his eighties, followed by Bringhurst in his seventies, Juliana Spahr and Alice Oswald in their fifties, Michael Robbins in his late forties, and Kandasamy in her thirties. Their geographical and historical background points toward multiple directions, but all of them can be described as citizens from the western world, with the only pseudoexceptions of Indians, the male Zulfikar Ghose and female Meena Kandasamy, who were born in Sialkot (in the Punjab province in India before the partition in 1947; nowadays Pakistan) and Chennai (the capital of Tamil Nadu, a state in the south of India), respectively. Both writers have changed their place of residence, Ghose having moved to Austin (Texas, USA) fifty years ago, and Kandasamy to East London (UK) only a few years ago. The overall picture is thus a mosaic-like whole that tessellates complementary viewpoints on the morethan-human world. Such is the capacity of poetry to articulate the nonhuman environment that we cannot simply afford to turn our backs on its insights and findings in the era of the Anthropocene, when “climate change, ocean acidification, effects of overpopulation, deforestation, soil-erosion, overfishing and the general and accelerating degradation of ecosystems” (Clark 2015, 2) pose a huge challenge to humankind. However, one poet in this volume is given room to speak for herself without the mediation of critical attention: the coda which closes Modern Ecopoetry: Reading the Palimpsest of the More-Than-Human World embodies this discourse. Academia’s publishing codes do not usually blend together artistry and criticism, particularly in edited collections. This accentuates the divide between

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the direct experience of poetry and the eventual reflection on poetry for readers, in contrast to other academic practices such as creative writing programs, which actively invite poets to combine the academic and creative dimensions in their artistic, teaching and research endeavours. We believe that these two practices can and need to be approached together, bridging the gap between the embodied experience of reading poetry and the intellectual understanding of it provided by a critic (or, sometimes, by poets themselves). We therefore explore in this volume the possibility of disclosing new connections, synergies and subsequent mutually enriching negotiations between reading the work of poets next to approaching it through the vicarious, informed eyes of critics. This creates constellations of perceptions and insights about such poetry and engages in a more fruitful dialogue with both the work of the artist and that of the critic. We allow readers the opportunity to expand and multiply a poetic experience in unexpected, more organic—and certainly more fractal and palimpsestuous—ways. In “Against Use: (The Difficulty of) Writing ‘Nature’ Poetry in an Age of Environmental Crisis”, Catherine Woodward, a young practising poet from the UK, voices her inner doubts about the role of nature poets in the age of environmental crisis. At the same time, she echoes long-held views, and addresses some of the most important questions posed by ecocritical scholars equipped with their analytical tools and tenets. Woodward probes the relationship between self and nature and challenges traditional understandings of the role of poetry and poets against the backdrop of natural destruction. In her essay, she also scrutinises her own verse, opening up new perspectives on an undertaking that reveals itself as a tripartite conjunction between poetic time and space, combining affect with embodied experience and cognitive enquiry. The tension between these three elements (affect, embodied experience and cognitive enquiry) comes to epitomise the palimpsestuous relationship Dillon sees between separation—alienation in Woodward’s enquiry—and affinity. Fractal contours and shapes are partially envisioned in the chapters in Modern Ecopoetry, for each essay provides a finite detail of the ever broadening creative field of ecopoetry. However, those same details echo throughout the volume, with recurring elements which endow these pages with striking associations, dialogues and tensions between the coexisting perspectives. Readers can actively create their own fractal envisioning by finding out in which shapes, concepts and similar topoi the self-replicating field of ecopoetry can create greater, more elaborate patterns that ultimately also expand humans’ insight into our place in this dying nature as we know it nowadays. Hopefully, by listening closely to ecopoets’ precious insights into the more-than-human world, we may learn to live with a modicum of grace in the age of environmental crisis.

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Works Cited Abram, D. (1996). The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-ThanHuman World. New York: Vintage Books. Abram, D. (2010). Becoming Animal. An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Vintage Books. Abram, D. (2014). “Afterword: The Commonwealth of Breath.” In: S. Iovino and S. Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 301–314. Alaimo, S. (2008). “Trans-corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature.” In: S. Alaimo and S. Herkman, eds., Material Feminisms, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 237–264. Bate, J. (1991). Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. New York: Routledge. Bate, J. (2000). The Song of the Earth. London: Picador. Bate, J. (2015). “The Economy of Nature.” In: K. Hiltner, ed., Ecocriticism. The Essential Reader, London: Routledge, pp. 77–96. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Bringhurst, R. (2009). Selected Poems. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press. Bristow, T. (2015). The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place. Houndmills, UK; New York, NY: Palgrave Pivot. Bryson, J.S. (2002). Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Bryson, J.S. (2005). The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Buell, L. (2001). Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Buell. L. (1995). The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Buell. L. (2005). The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. Clark, T. (2015). Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Coupe, L., ed. (2000). The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. London: Routledge. Dillon, S. (2007). The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Felstiner, J. (2009). Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gifford, T. (1995). Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Gifford, T. (1999). Pastoral. London: Routledge. Gilcrest, D.W. (2002). Greening the Lyre: Environmental Poetics and Ethics. Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press. Glotfelty, C. (1996). “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis.” In: C. Glotfelty and H. Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, Athens: University of Georgia Press, pp. xv-xxxvii. Heaney, S. (1980). Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968–1978. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Huggan, G. and Tiffin, H. (2015). Postcolonial Criticism. Literature, Animals, Environment. London and New York: Routledge. Iovino, S. and Oppermann, S. (2012). “Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency and Models of Narrativity.” Ecozon@ 3(1): pp. 75–91. Iovino, S. and Oppermann, S. (2014). “Introduction: Stories Come to Matter.” In: S. Iovino and S. Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 1–17. Leopold, A. (1949). A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lidström, S. and Garrard, G. (2014). “‘Images adequate to our predicament’: Ecology, Environment and Ecopoetics.” Environmental Humanities 5, pp. 35–53. Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Harvard University Press. Nolan, S. (2017). Unnatural Ecopoetics: Unlikely Spaces in Contemporary Poetry. Nevada: University of Nevada Press. Rigby, K. (2016). “Earth’s Poesy: Romantic Poetics’ Natural Philosophy, and Biosemiotics.” In: H. Zapf, ed., Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 45–64. Scigaj, L. (1999). Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press. Slovic, S. (2010). “The Third Wave of Ecocriticism: North American Reflections on the Current Phase of the Discipline.” Ecozon@ 1(1), pp. 4–10. Slovic, S. (2012a). “Editor’s Note.” ISLE 19(3), pp. 443–444. Slovic, S. (2012b). “Editor’s Note.” ISLE 19(4), pp. 619–621. Soper, K. (1995). What Is Nature? Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Tuan, Y.F. (1977). Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Saint Paul: University of Minnesota Press. Tuan, Y.F. and Schoff, G.H. (1988). Two Essays on a Sense of Place. Madison: Wisconsin Humanities Committee. Whatmore, S. (2006). “Materialist Returns: Practising Cultural Geography in and for a More-Than-Human World.” Cultural Geographies, 13(4), pp. 600–609.

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PART 1 Belonging: The Sacred Sense of Place

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ch apter 1

The Roots and Affinities of Dylan Thomas in the Works of Claudio Rodríguez: Sacred Nature in the Poet’s Imagination María Antonia Mezquita Fernández

Abstract This chapter focuses on the roots and affinities of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) and how they are reflected in the works of the Spanish poet Claudio Rodríguez (1934-1999), who shared a similar vision of nature. Although García Jambrina mentions Rodríguez’s interest in the works of the Welsh author, no in-depth study comparing these poets has been published to date. Thus, reading Rodríguez’s poetry and Thomas’ verse side by side to explore the parallels between them can potentially open up new perspectives and reveal any influences there may be. This study will examine how Thomas’s influence shaped the compositions of Rodríguez and analyse the affinities existing between the two. It will demonstrate that both authors share a very similar view of nature and an ecocritical perspective will be used to examine how the natural world is represented and dealt with by them. Analysis of several specific themes in three poems by each poet will illustrate how Rodríguez echoes and pays homage to his predecessor. Comparison of the works will uncover how nature is depicted with religious tones and how both poets regarded their role as that of a visionary. It will show how imagination, particularly the imagination of children, plays a key role as a force that transforms reality. Finally, the analysis will describe how humans are inextricably connected to nature and its unending cycles in the view of both poets.

Keywords Claudio Rodríguez – Dylan Thomas – nature – imagination – sense of place – ecopoetry

© koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004445277_002

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Since the emergence of Ecocriticism in 1970, academic interest in literary works focusing on the kinship between people and nature has become more commonplace and there is now an abundance of literature on nature and its processes. Today, ecopoetry—or nature-oriented poetry—makes use of biocentrism to raise awareness of how the world’s environment is being devastated and eroded by the effects of human domination. This chapter specifically focuses on the roots and affinities of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) and how they are reflected in the works of the Spanish poet Claudio Rodríguez (1934-1999), who shared a similar vision of nature. Although García Jambrina mentions Rodríguez’s interest in the works of the Welsh author, no in-depth study comparing these poets has been published to date. Thus, reading Rodríguez’s poetry and Thomas’ verse side by side to explore the parallels between them can potentially open up new perspectives and reveal any influences there may be. For Thomas and Rodríguez, place was conceptualised as emotional and sentimental and can be seen to have had an impact on their development as poets. Landscape, particularly, is a factor that conditions their poetry. They were closely related to what would today be referred to as “green issues”, in which they showed an abiding interest, possibly because they saw preservation of the environment as a guarantee of their well-being. Indeed, the prevalence of nature above all else, especially compared to the way they deal with industrialisation and modern society, shows how strong their environmental awareness was. This study will examine how Thomas’s influence shaped the compositions of Rodríguez and analyse the affinities existing between the two. It will demonstrate that both authors share a very similar view of nature and an ecocritical perspective will be used to observe how the natural world is represented and dealt with by them. Analysis of several specific themes in three poems by each poet1 will illustrate how Rodríguez echoes and pays homage to his predecessor. Comparison of the works will uncover how nature is depicted with religious tones and how both poets regarded their role as that of a visionary or interpreter whose task was to help reveal the hidden secrets of nature to their readers. It will show how imagination, particularly the imagination of children, plays a key role as a force that transforms reality. Finally, the analysis will

1 The poems are those that follow: “Song I”, “Ode to Childhood” and “Solvet Seclum”, by Claudio Rodríguez, and “Author’s Prologue”, “Fern Hill” and “And Death Shall Have No Dominion”, by Dylan Thomas. In order to observe Thomas’s roots in Rodríguez, we will analyse Rodríguez’s poems first.

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describe how humans are inextricably connected to nature and its unending cycles in the view of both poets. The two poets have a strong attachment to the natural world—the focus of their sense of place—with which they share an affectionate relationship. In common with the field of Social Ecology, the poets believe that industrialisation has corroded our environment. It is through poetry that they express the union of man and nature and offer solutions to any dichotomy that also exists between the two. The idea of a natural world in which every element is necessary to complete the life cycle, including death and regeneration, is a prevailing theme and this chapter also aims to highlight this in their work. Over the years, Ecocriticism has opened up new debates and provided global perspectives on the environment while at the same time broadening the fields of study in the humanities. The current ecological crisis has led to an urgent need for a less anthropocentric stance and a more sustainable way of living, one which protects all species on the planet. That need is seen by some as increasingly urgent if we are to limit the malign effects of technological progress and industrialisation on the natural world. Raymond Williams, who denounced the harmful effects produced by mechanisation, was critical of the “the destructive impact of industrialised societies on the natural environment” (Ryle 2011, 43). The field of Social Ecology has been devoted to “redress[ing] ecological abuses that the prevailing society has inflicted on the natural world by the domination of [it]” (Bookchin 2006, 46) and it appeals for social regeneration based on environmental care. Environmental narratives and environmental poetry are the product of contemporary environmental issues and they allow an understanding to be developed of the emergent relationship between humans and the natural world as something essential and inherent in our culture and existence. Thus, a commitment to nature’s well-being is now evident in the literary arts, where works often explore what could be called the ‘kinship’ between man and nature (Bookchin 1994, 90). For Weik von Mossner, such narratives are those of any type “in any media that foregrounds ecological issues and human-nature relationships, often [...] with the openly stated intention of bringing about social change” (2017, 3), while in Bate’s view, “[e]copoetry is not a description of dwelling with the earth, not a disengaged thinking about it, but an experience of it” (2001, 42). When it comes to place-attachment, the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan maintains that “[t]o understand a person’s environmental preference, we may need to examine his biological heritage, upbringing, education, job, and physical surroundings” (1990, 59). Similarly, place-attachment to the natural world also involves a search for our “ecological roots”, which lead to ecological identity.

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Thomashow concurred that “[s]ense of place is a search for ecological roots. [...] It is through the place we live that we construct our personal identities, relate to the landscape, and determine what is important in our lives” (1996, 193-194). We shall see from their work that this is true for both poets studied in these pages. The comparison of the two authors and their interconnections can be partly justified by the admission of Rodríguez that he was deeply interested in the poetry of Thomas. The Spanish author affirmed that, despite being separated in both space and time, similarities emerged due to what he called, quoting Goethe, “elective affinities” (García Jambrina 1999, 20). The Spanish author was only eighteen years old when he published his first collection, and at that time he knew little about poetry written in English. In an interview in 1971, Rodríguez, by then an acclaimed author, stated that he had never read any poem by Thomas before writing his first book (Campbell 2004, 224). His fascination with Thomas’s works would come later. From 1958 to 1964, he was a foreign language assistant in Spanish at the universities of Nottingham and Cambridge. The six years he spent in England gave him the opportunity to read English poetry and become familiar with English Literature. He was an avid reader and it was probably during his time in England that he purchased several volumes of poetry and criticism which he analysed thoroughly.2 It was some years later, however, that he admitted his fascination for the Welsh poet.3 Romantic notions can be seen to pervade the works of both poets. The feeling of calm experienced by the Romantics when physically close to nature has resurfaced in modern works, perhaps as a result of increasing ecological awareness and ecocritical analysis. “What people expect, want, value in life connects intimately with what they understand their place in the universe to be” (Roszak 2001, 40). According to Rigby, “[s]ome aspects of contemporary ecological understanding and sensibility have their roots in this romantic 2 Rodríguez’s own library—which I had the opportunity to visit in his own house in Madrid, by courtesy of Rodríguez’s wife, Clara Miranda, and some years later by the “Jorge Guillén” Foundation, in Valladolid—contained some books by and on Thomas. The books are the following: John M. Brinning, Dylan Thomas in America, The Harborough Publishing, 1960; G. S. Fraser, Dylan Thomas, Longmans Green & Co., 1957; T. H. Jones, Dylan Thomas, Oliver and Boyd, 1963; Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, The British Publishers Guild, 1956; Dylan Thomas, Adventures in the Skin Trade, The Harborough Publishing, 1961; Dylan Thomas, El visitante y otras historias, Nostromo, 1975; Dylan Thomas, Bajo el bosque lácteo, Fontamar, 1979; Dylan Thomas, Poemas, edited by Esteban Pujals, Visor de poesía, 1976. The fact that some of the books were translations into Spanish proves his interest in the Welshman and leads us to think that Rodríguez purchased several books after his stay in England, once already settled in Madrid. 3 See both Federico Campbell’s and Juan Carlos Suñén’s interviews.

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rethinking of nature” (2004, 1). The two poets clearly reflect diverse Romantic notions in their works, particularly those concerning nature and imagination, often the way children imagine and view the natural world. These discernible similarities with the Romantic Movement led Allen Ginsberg to claim to Berkeley students in the sixties that Thomas was “too romantic” (Simpson 1979, 37). Rodríguez was also thought to have followed Romantic themes and ideas about the creative process (García Jambrina 1999, 102-104). Thomas and Rodríguez both grew up in post-war periods. They found in their respective cities a dispirited society that was unequal and sometimes impoverished, both economically and sentimentally. Rodríguez’s childhood in the harsh aftermath of the Spanish Civil War was not easy and his family suffered further hardship after his father’s sudden death. Searching for peace of mind and inspiration, young Claudio took refuge in a country house his family owned in Zamora. “There he was in direct contact with nature, with a sense of a rhythm in life that originated from observing the cultivation of the fields, the steady and the yearly sowing, watering, fertilizing, growing and harvesting of grain” (Ingelmo and Smith 2008, 13). He felt at ease there and found tranquillity in taking walks and writing as he did so. His first poems sprang from his contact with the geography, the people and the reality of Zamora (Rodríguez 1984, 14). Like Thomas, who was born in the complex social setting of Swansea at the outset of the First World War, Rodríguez was conscious that his vocation for writing about nature, derived from his passion for the natural world, allowed him to avoid the social and political unrest of the times. He was also aware that the Castilian landscape would become a prominent theme in his works and would have an enormous influence on his poetry. This is particularly noticeable in his first collection (Rodríguez 1984, 14). The childhood walks of Thomas are also significant. His walks through Cwmdonkin Park and the memory of the games he played there as a youngster are implicitly present in every poem. There is no doubt that his personal identity was deeply anchored to Wales and it was rural Wales that he worshipped most. “Thomas’s poetic talents were nurtured by a childhood rich in the experience of Wales and its traditions” (Moynihan 1968, 11) and were also fed by the experiences on a farm his aunt had in Carmarthenshire. “The interplay between the nature he was born with and the surroundings he was born into may have done its work when he was a child” (Ferris 1978, 87). Additionally, “[r]ustic and sea-beset Wales saturated Thomas’s imagination and eventually provided a symbolic resolution for the complexities that were slowly denying him life” (Moynihan 1968, 15). Such is also the case of the Spanish author, as his identity was marked by his birthplace, Zamora, and more importantly by the countryside in the surrounding province. Zamora and Swansea, together with the neighbouring countryside,

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were the places they loved, and those geographical areas would constitute— owing to each writer’s personal upbringing—the focus of their Sense of Place. Indeed, what makes Thomas and Rodríguez “ecopoets”, according to the definition provided by Bate (2001, 42), is that the majority of their works are the product of their passion for walking and contemplating nature in solitude; nature and their interaction with nature were their source of inspiration. Most of their poems emerge from the direct link between nature itself and the capacity it has to evoke memories. Places, therefore, become emotional and remain inherent in memory through their power to call past experiences to mind; they are defined and shaped through the contact and involvement people have with them. Rodríguez’s first poems entail the union of man and nature and his first volume, Gift of Inebriation (1953),4 depicts a natural universe far from the industrial city he refused to accept. He wrote the entire collection while on his walks and, over time, he came to understand that contemplation would be an integral theme in his works. He was not, however, initially aware of any ethical aspect to such activity as, in “A manera de comentario”, he declared he did not know contemplation entailed morality (Rodríguez 1984, 15). His contemplation while walking helped shape the entire collection, which represents the unity of the poet with all the elements of the natural world in an effort to transcend reality and join with nature in a process of inebriation. In Rodríguez, as in Thomas, there is a desire to secure the ephemeral through contemplation (Yubero Ferrero 2004, 14). They both had a passion for nature; however, Rodríguez confessed that what interested him most about Thomas was “the unconscious emotion which annihilates reality” (García Ortega 1983, 4) and the ecstatic perspective or inebriation (Campbell 2004, 224). In “Song I”, from the first book of Gift of Inebriation, the poet, endowed with powerful imagination, celebrates the glory of nature and creation. This is evident in the opening lines and it can also be assumed that imagination pervades the composition. It is the poet’s intention to illustrate that clarity is a gift bestowed on us in nature: Clarity always comes from the sky; it is a gift; it is not found among things but very high up and it occupies them making that its own life and labours. (Rodríguez 2008, 33) These lines speak of light coming from the sky, covering and occupying all the elements of the natural world. The veiled religious reference in these lines is 4 In 1953, Thomas published his Collected Poems in America. He died the same year.

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something found in the work of both poets. As with Thomas’s poetry, this religious tone can be noted from the beginning of the composition. By covering and penetrating all the elements of nature, clarity allows it to be viewed in a new light, never before contemplated. The poet experiences a kind of communion with the natural world and waits to be blessed with clarity. Rodríguez aspired to fulfil his own communion with nature; that is to say, the communion of man and nature. As previously mentioned, Rodríguez had never read Thomas’s poetry, though the first poem included in Gift of Inebriation encapsulates the same “unconscious emotion” derived from the union of humans and the natural world found in the work of Thomas. In this case, it is the emotion of someone who hopes to fuse with nature. Oh, clarity thirsty for a form, for a matter to dazzle it burning itself on completing its work. Like me, like everything that waits. (Rodríguez 2008, 32) The religious and imaginative tone of these lines is reminiscent of the “Author’s Prologue” (1952), which was written to introduce Thomas’ Complete Poems. Thomas “looked forward to a new generation of poets who would express their emotions and adopt a prophetic stance” (Simpson 1979, 37). Something similar could be said of Rodríguez, who was highly suspicious of any pure logic in poetry, as logic invalidates both emotion and freshness in poems (Campbell 2004, 224) and, therefore, he felt closer to Thomas’s poetry in that respect. In Rodríguez’s view, the works of the Welsh poet lack any logic, even though his poems were written with striking and original geometry. For Rodríguez, Thomas’s delirium in certain poems is indicative of great control and harmony, and this control can be evinced in the magical and fanciful content of his compositions (Campbell 2004, 222). It is the same disciplined enthusiasm that “Song I” distils. The Spanish author thus finally accepted that his magical and irrational vision of reality was comparable to that of Thomas (Campbell 2004, 222). Gift of Inebriation was a turning point for the Spanish poets of the 1950s. The tone of exaltation in the works was not characteristic of the period and had greater connections with the poetry of the Romantics and also with that of Thomas. These poems are adorned with an irrational tenor and the poetic subject is not specific, so the reader is not necessarily able to discern the real meaning hidden inside (Rodríguez 2015). Nature, for Thomas, was suffused with holiness and contained a sacred element. He “called himself a ‘holy maker’, whose poems were written in ‘praise of God’” (Tindall 1996, 8). The “Author’s Prologue” conveys, without being overtly

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religious, a sense of nature as something that is sacred, created by God: “This day winding down now / At God speeded summer’s end” (2004, 1). These first two lines are highly significant to the extent that they present the idea of God and a religious universe. The compositions “Song I” and the “Author’s Prologue” begin with religious references—clarity coming from the sky and God—which will prevail in the works of both poets. The “Author’s Prologue” is a concise illustration of nature as the poet’s home, in which all the natural elements join with the joyful poet to glorify creation and to honour the splendour and brilliance of nature. Profuse in its use of adjectives, the poem has a rich imagery of what is presumed to be the Welsh landscape, where elements of the sea are drawn upon to show the author’s background and his rejection of industrialism in favour of the beauty of the natural world. However, every image is embellished with imagination: In the torrent salmon sun, In my seashaken house [...] Gulls, pipers, cockles, and sails, Out there, crow black, men Tackled with clouds, who kneel To the sunset nets, Geese nearly in heaven [...]. (Thomas 2004, 1) Sacred connotations of the union between man and nature can be observed in the lines “men / Tackled with clouds, who kneel / To the sunset nets” (1) and the “Geese nearly in heaven” (Thomas 2004, 1). They depict a consecrated natural world like the one in the work by Rodríguez. Religious overtones are also apparent in the line “In the religious wind” (1) and it is the poet, or the bard, who must sing the glory of nature to ordinary men: “At poor peace I sing / To you, strangers [...]” (1). And he exalts God’s creation: “How, I, a spinning man, / Glory also this star, bird” (2). Animals and elements of nature are emblematic of such creation and imagination colours every image, filling the piece with splendour and originality. Images like “the torrent salmon sun”, “starfish stand[ing] with their finite cross” or “clouds [w]ho kneel to the sunset nets” follow on from each other as a result of the poet’s wit when mixing imagination and reality. Light is another pertinent aspect in the poem in the form of the light of the stars, the sun or the moon. Both natural light and radiance coming from heaven imbue the piece with additional religious tones. Such light brings to mind the “clarity” in Rodríguez’s work. The lines “In the torrent salmon sun” (1), “You king singsong owls, who moonbeam / The flickering runs and dive” (2), “Work art

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and the moonshine” (3) or “Under the stars of Wales” (3) exemplify the fact that light illuminates men and nature and its clarity is transmitted to brighten the world. Undoubtedly, this same concept of clarity is drawn upon in “Song I”. Birds and fish bathed in light reflect the sacred connotations of the entire universe. As in Rodríguez’s poem, clarity emanating from light transfigures reality and it seems as if the sun plays with all the creatures on earth, bringing them closer to God with the purpose of glorifying his magnificence for having created the universe—a magnificence conveyed by the poet to ordinary mortals. The works of both men are an illustration of poetry written by visionaries capable of contemplating what is not within the reach of all humans. They share the idea of a gifted poet, as a visionary or a bard, who stands before his peers to lift the veil of hidden reality and to transmit or interpret the real truth not revealed to ordinary people. According to Rigby, the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth endeavoured “to relocate the divine outside the confines of the church within the natural world” (2004, 48), and the same can be said of these poets, since their visions transformed the natural world into a holy and precious realm. Rodríguez’s lines from “Song I” “And yet—this is a gift—my mouth / waits, and my soul waits, and you wait for me, / inebriate pursuit, clarity alone” ( 2008, 33), are evidence of a poet who is longing to bring a message that will unveil and reveal what the external appearance of objects hide. Rodríguez glorifies God’s creation in the following lines: “And this is a gift. Who makes beings / less created each time? What high vault / contains them in its love?” (33).5 The relative pronoun “who” likely refers to the Christian God and the word “vault” also has definite religious connotations. Finally, the poem reflects the one by Thomas as it abounds with images of light illuminating the landscape surrounding the poet and bestowing magnificence: “Thus day dawns; thus night / encloses the great dwelling of its shadows” (33). Imagination, particularly that of children, is a theme touched on by both men. In the works of Rodríguez, creative, poetic imagination provides charm and gentleness. He once stated that Thomas was very similar to him in terms of his magical and non-rational vision of reality (Campbell 2004, 224) and “Fern Hill” was one of his favourite poems.6 Like Thomas, Rodríguez recognised that childhood was a synonym for exultation and imagination. With the publication of the volume Conjurings (1958), common elements in Rodríguez’s poetry were bestowed with charm, granting them an extraordinary perspective

5 As in Thomas’s lines “How, I, a spinning man, / Glory also this star, bird” (2004, 2). 6 I was provided with this information by Clara Miranda and also by his friends Antonio Pedrero and Tomás Crespo. Rodríguez knew “Fern Hill” by heart and recited it frequently.

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similar to that in the works of Thomas. In his copy of Dylan Thomas by T. H. Jones, Rodríguez marked page seventy-one, which referred to “Fern Hill” and the idea of the fascinating perspective children have on the world. This is similar to his own perception of children’s imagination: “[i]n fact, children, who do not make the rigid adult distinction between the literal and the metaphorical, accept the images of this poem quite happily and do not find anything strange in them” (Jones 1963, 71). This quotation proves that not only was Rodríguez interested in Thomas’s poetry, but that he also detected and affirmed the affinities between them. Rodríguez’s famous poem “Ode to Childhood”, included in the volume Alliance and Condemnation (1965), portrays the magical perspective children have of the simplest things. And this is your welcome, March, to leave home happily: with the damp and cold wind of the plateau? Always now, at the door, and much to our sorrow, here returns, returns this childhood fate that explodes everywhere: [...]. (Rodríguez 2008, 237) That “childhood fate” refers to what Rodríguez remembers despairingly as something that can no longer be experienced. March symbolises the month when spring begins and when the countryside blooms: new flowers grow and the leaves on the trees turn green once more. Like Thomas, Rodríguez alludes to industrialisation and the contemporary, advanced world by mentioning towns, factories, streets, districts and neighbourhoods, which have clearly emerged from socialisation and modern society as opposed to the wild and free life of the natural world. The growth of society and its devastating effects on the environment shown in the composition link it to the precepts of Social Ecology. In the poem, society produces nothing more than fear and confusion: Always so, diminished, only for a fear of certain punishment, of a certain combat, now we make a confused shouting through towns, through factories, through districts of neighbourhoods. (Rodríguez 2008, 237) Rodríguez avowed that the city was not a place where human beings lived freely and in harmony. In urban society, they were bound by social laws and

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rules which, on many occasions, distorted life. However, there is a certain hope in the composition, given that innocence is found in childhood and the poet is sure that this age will remain with him forever: “Then / there is nothing that take[s] us away / from our deep dedication to innocence” (Rodríguez 2008, 237). If any doubt struck the poet’s mind, he would appeal to the memories of childhood and the possibility of recovering this innocence when passing the market, barracks or factories of the modern world, since “everything is childhood” (Rodríguez 2008, 241): What this market through which I am passing now, the barracks, the factories, the clouds, life, air, everything, without the squall of our childhood that raises a wave forever? (Rodríguez 2008, 239) In “Fern Hill”, included in Deaths and Entrances (1946), Thomas reveals the joy felt in the countryside, far from the social problems which concerned human beings. A new brighter landscape—never beheld before—becomes apparent when the force of imagination takes on a magical dimension which renders the poem more wonderful and enthralling. The poet takes obvious delight in remembering those moments and expressing them in his poems whenever he feels exhausted or overwhelmed. He recalls the joyful experience of being in communion with nature, especially on the farm, which was also his home. The adjective “famous” refers to the summers he spent in the countryside and the popularity he enjoyed among the farmers. There, time allowed the boy to run and amuse himself far from the industrial world and the line “be golden in the mercy of his means” expresses how fortunate he was to be young in the green country: And I was green and carefree, famous among the barns About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home, In the sun that is young once only, Time let me play and be Golden in the mercy of his means [...]. (Thomas 2004, 134) This idea returns in the line “And green and golden I was” (Thomas 2004, 134), where the poet uses the adjectives as a metaphor for youth. “Green” refers to being young and “golden” to the fact that this age is almost considered a treasure. Rodríguez paid homage to “Fern Hill” in his poem “The Noise of the Duero”,

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included in Conjurings, by beginning the composition with the lines “And as I saw / I was so popular among the streets” (Rodríguez 2008, 97), which is reminiscent of Thomas’s line “And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns” (2004, 134).7 This further reaffirms the thesis that the Spanish author was clearly influenced by “Fern Hill”. Moreover, the following explanation was found on the page that Rodríguez had singled out in Jones’s study: “there is the kind of image he had made peculiarly his own, consisting of a familiar phrase given a surprise twist: “happy as the grass was green” (Jones 1963, 71). Rodríguez coincides with Thomas in furnishing common elements with charm, as in “the spring sun of innocence is reborn” (2008, 245) or in “with the damp and cold wind of the plateau” (237). Rodríguez, like Thomas, depicts children as blessed, carefree creatures who engage in playful recreation in the countryside. The terms “sky blue trades” and “green and golden” imbue them with holiness and youth and give them “the surprise twists”, as we can observe in the following lines of “Fern Hill”: And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows In all this tuneful turning so few and such morning songs Before the children green and golden Follow him out of grace. (Thomas 2004, 135) In the poem, Thomas uses a comprehensive catalogue of jobs, natural elements and animals from the rural world such as “stream”, “foxes”, “huntsman” or “herdsman”, which leads one to think that he had a broad knowledge of the countryside. He paid close attention to the smallest detail: “And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves / Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold, / [...] In the pebbles of the holy stream” (Thomas 2004, 134). Thomas clearly had a passion for nature rather than the industrialised city and the pleasure he experienced when in the countryside is evident: “I ran my heedless ways, / My wishes raced to the house high hay” (135). The house he mentions is part of the human-made world in nature; it is a human construction which constitutes a symbol of civilisation. The purity and innocence of the natural world is embodied “[i]n the pebbles of the holy streams” (134), in “the birth of the simple light” (135), “in the lamb white days” (135) and “[i]n the moon that is always rising” (135). However, Thomas is not completely content as he knows that time annihilates everything: “Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea” (135). The simplicity and beauty of these images, described in uncomplicated language, was 7 Thomas referred to the Welsh barns and Rodríguez to the streets of Zamora.

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appreciated by Rodríguez, who marked another part of Jones’s criticism on “Fern Hill”: “[a]gain, in harmony with its evocation of childhood, the poem employs an extremely simple vocabulary; there is in it not a single “difficult” or unusual word” (1963, 71). As far as the first-person narrative is concerned, both poets scrutinised and penetrated the natural world with the purpose of subjectivising landscape and transferring the amalgamation of their thoughts and feelings to it. By appreciating the natural world, they came to understand themselves and this is a correlation which is still relevant today. Cameron reaffirms the relationship between discerning nature and therefore comprehending the mind and suggests that “to write about nature is to write about how the mind sees nature and sometimes about how the mind sees itself” (as cited in Slovic 1996, 351). Thomas and Rodríguez believed that the processes of our minds are reflected in nature and the separation of man and nature would lead to disaster. In Ecological Literary Criticism, Kroeber explains this separation in the following way: “[t]he separation is disastrous because the natural environment is both the source and the primary sustainer of our singularly human power of consciousness, supremely manifested in our imagination” (1994, 138). Both poets advocated for humans to be a part of nature instead of separate from it, a thesis dating back to Plotinus. Thomas’s and Rodríguez’s works embrace a cosmogony based on human beings and other species in which the natural or telluric takes precedence over other notions which support socialisation and industrialisation. For both men, people are faced with a hostile, modern environment when they are not close to the natural world. Palpable in their work is the sense that “[their] understanding of a particular place is determined by personal experiences” and “[their] perception of space and the representation of space do not involve the same thing” (Westphal 2011, 1). As previously highlighted, in their poetry, nature—though tinted with imagination—is the place they feel biographically, and inextricably, attached to. “Solvet Seclum”, which was included in the last volume published by Rodríguez, Almost a Legend (1991), contains the idea of death as necessary in the cycle of life. For that reason, death has positive connotations and it is not regarded as a negative part of life. Among the images depicted in the poem is that of a skeleton, which is reminiscent of the naked man and the bones Thomas portrayed in “And Death Shall Have No Dominion”, in the phrase “when the bones are picked clean”. It was Thomas’s capability to use words and generate images—from what seemed to have no harmony at all—which fascinated Rodríguez (Campbell 2004, 224). In the poem, the world of opposites—mainly light and shadow—harmonises life on earth; a life where “death is already nameless” (Rodríguez 2008, 51):

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The skeleton amid lime and silica and the ash of cowardice, the servitude of the speaking flesh, on the wing, of the bone about to be a flute[.] (Rodríguez 2008, 405) The inclusion of religious references in their works, mentioned in general terms above, can also be seen when both poets touch on the inevitable and relentless cycles to be found in nature, and humanity’s place within those cycles. The word “skeleton” has religious connotations of destruction and regeneration underlying it. Rodríguez’s title “Solvet Seclum” comes from the Dies irae, a hymn taken from the Vulgate Bible inciting us to contemplate Judgement Day and this is reminiscent of the line in the poem “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” “though they sink through the sea they shall rise again” (Thomas 2004, 56). Rodríguez’s line mixes words such as “liturgy”, “creation”, “miracle”, “calyx” and “ossuary” with “light”, “vineyards”, “grape” and “honeycomb” to focus on the sacred act of rebirth that takes place in the natural world every spring. When asked about this cycle, the poet himself admitted that spring implied resurrection (Suñén 2004, 236): the deep-sea liturgy of the body in the hour of the supremacy of a flash of light, of a vault in flame, spaceless with the putrefaction that is pure love, where death is already nameless... (Rodríguez 2008, 405) Rodríguez’s phrase “where death is already nameless” is extraordinarily similar to Thomas’s “And death shall have no dominion”, as the hidden meaning of both lines is that regeneration and resurrection will reign in the world. Rodríguez chooses the metaphor of the vineyard to explain the process and to reveal a vein of hope. Such a metaphor is unlikely to have been chosen without some thought, since it was the poet’s intention to highlight that renewal occurs in nature. What is more, vineyards produce wine, an essential element that lies at the heart of the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist. Once more, the religious connotations emerge. Death appears but vanishes with the dawn, giving way to new life: The country plain, gently sloping, bold with vineyards... How the sun enters the grape and trembles, becomes light in it,

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and they ripen and come away, yielding beauty and opening to their future death... It’s all perfectly clear before dawn! (Rodríguez 2008, 403) The poem “And Death Shall Have No Dominion”, included in Thomas’s TwentyFive Poems (1936), celebrates the triumph of life over death and how it will reign forever to secure regeneration. With a religious tone, the poet is like a preacher who “is conducting a service for all the dead in certain hope of glorious resurrection” (Tindall 1996, 122). He claims that death will not reign in this world and the vital anxiety underlying it can be extinguished with the process of regeneration in which “dead men naked they shall be one” (Thomas 2004, 56): And death shall have no dominion. Dead men naked they shall be one With the man in the wind and the west moon; When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone, They shall have stars at elbow and foot; Though they go mad they shall be sane, Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion. (56) These lines, like Rodríguez’s poem, depict many religious connotations within natural elements. Firstly, the title of the poem is closely connected to The Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans 6:9 (Tindall 1996, 122). The “naked man” symbolises a corpse resurrected from darkness with the effects of “the wind and the west moon”. Light is a significant feature again. In this regard, salvation is not only provided to humanity by God, but also by the natural world and particularly by the sea—a symbol of life and resurrection—returning the dead. This image is emblematic of Judgement Day and other biblical references. In this composition, nature contributes to giving life and to taking it away, following its natural cycle which includes birth and resurrection to fulfil the whole process. Rodríguez, like Thomas, chose to incorporate elements of nature to emphasise their importance and to focus on the fact that the natural world is where the process of regeneration takes place: No more may gulls cry at their ears Or waves break loud on the seashores; Where blew a flower may a flower no more

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Lift its head to the blows of the rain; Though they be mad and dead as nails, Heads of the characters hammer through daisies; Break in the sun till the sun breaks down, And death shall have no dominion. (Thomas 2004, 56) By repeating the line “And death shall have no dominion”, the poet is insisting that life will not always be defeated by death. Thomas manifested disconsolately how “where there blew a flower may a flower no more” or no more “waves break loud on the seashores”; however, deep down inside he knew resurrection would triumph over death and it “shall have no dominion”. Hence, the repetition of this line is meaningful and makes the reader realize that life and regeneration will prevail, although both—life and death—are necessary opposites that complement one another. In the works of both poets, we can sense the impression that life and death are necessary to continue with the process of regeneration in the natural world. Holistic philosophers openly acknowledged that the universe was a whole where all the parts were indispensable to its proper working order and opposites completed the universe. As Ackerman writes, “the fact the processes of life go on, that the process of regeneration in man and nature never fails, and that the seasons change, is itself witness of some beneficent will at the heart of the universe” (1991, 44), and thus Thomas’s words can also be applied to explain the renovation in Rodríguez’s works. Although death appalled both poets, as time went by they accepted that it was a primal factor for regeneration. They learnt that dying was also part of the totality of the universe required for a proper order of existence and, on certain occasions, their attitude towards death was festive and joyous. “In this [Rodríguez] [wa]s [...] like Dylan Thomas” (Ingelmo and Smith 2008, 27). In conclusion, despite not coinciding in either space or time, the poetry of Claudio Rodríguez shares some essential features with that of Dylan Thomas. Although Rodríguez had not yet read Thomas’s works when Gift of Inebriation was published, it has been demonstrated by comparing some of their compositions that not only is there a level of affinity in the creative process and the poetry, but also Thomas’s influence actually shaped some of Rodríguez’s later poems. The main example is the way “Fern Hill” and “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” inspired Rodríguez. Furthermore, the resemblance between the “Author Prologue” and “Song I” is worthy of note. Dylan Thomas is particularly well-known in the critical tradition of Ecocriticism and, in the light of the previous pages, Claudio Rodríguez can be also analysed through the ecocritical lens. Childhood memories were crucial in their understanding of nature, and also in their process of writing poetry, to the extent that children were, in their

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eyes, gifted with the force of imagination. Their compositions shed light on how the cycle of nature, including birth and regeneration, must take place to complete the whole process of life in the natural world and to provide human beings with the hope that death will not triumph over life. Rodríguez’s works, like Thomas’s, emulate the movement of a pendulum with nature at its core. Imagination endows both works with a brilliance that only the most delicate artists possess. This allows them to portray a sacred universe which differentiates them from their contemporaries and brings them closer to the Romantic ideas and visions of a sacred nature. Even though Rodríguez never admitted to having been influenced by any author, the thesis that Thomas’s works inspired him is sufficiently proven in this chapter. Reading Rodríguez’s poetry against the works of Thomas’s evinces the connections between them and shows that Rodríguez was, indeed, influenced in some ways by the Welsh poet. It has been shown that certain themes used by Thomas resound in the works of Rodríguez: nature as sacred; the power of imagination; poets and children as visionaries; humanity’s place in nature; and the essential cycles of life and rebirth. The devotion of both authors to the natural world—conceptualised as emotional and sentimental—conditioned their works and led to them become poets of nature par excellence.

Works Cited Ackerman, J. (1991). Dylan Thomas. His Life and Works. Basingstoke: Macmillan Academic and Professional LTD. Bate, J. (2001). The Song of the Earth. London: Picador. Bookchin, M. (1994). The Philosophy of Social Ecology. Essays on Dialectical Naturalism. Montreal: Black Rose Books. Bookchin, M. (2006). Social Ecology and Communalism. Oakland: AK Press. Campbell, F. (2004). “Claudio Rodríguez o la influencia del todo.” In: F. Yubero Ferrero, ed., La otra palabra. Escritos en prosa, Barcelona: Tusquets, pp. 217–228. Ferris, P. (1978). Dylan Thomas. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. García Jambrina, L. (1999). Claudio Rodríguez y la tradición literaria. Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León. Consejería de Cultura y Turismo. García Ortega, A. (1983). “Todo lo que hace el hombre es moral.” El País, Dec 11. Ingelmo, L, and Smith, M. (2008). “The Poetry of Claudio Rodríguez. An Introduction.” In: Collected Poems, by Claudio Rodríguez, translated by Luis Ingelmo and Michael Smith, Exeter: Shearsman Books, pp. 13–29. Jones, T.H. (1963). Dylan Thomas. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd. Kroeber, K. (1994). Ecological Literary Criticism, Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Moynihan, W.T. (1968). The Craft and Art of Dylan Thomas. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Rigby, K. (2004). Topographies of the Sacred. The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Rodríguez, C. (1984). “A manera de comentario.” In: Desde mis poemas, Madrid: Cátedra, pp. 13–21. Rodríguez, C. (2008). Collected Poems. Translated by Luis Ingelmo and Michael Smith, Exeter: Shearsman Books. Rodríguez, C. (2015). “Claudio Rodríguez en tertulias de autor con J. Benito de Lucas y Manuel López Azorín.” Canalnortetv website, Nov 24. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1bqCR2hx1ro. Accessed May 3, 2019. Roszak, T. (2001). The Voice of the Earth. An Exploration of Ecopsychology. Grand Rapids: Phanes Press. Ryle, M. (2011). “Raymond Williams: Materialism and Ecocriticism.” In: A. Goodbody and K. Rigby, eds., Ecocritical Theory. New European Approaches, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, pp. 43–54. Simpson, L. (1979). Studies of Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Slovic, S. (1996). “Nature Writing and Environmental Psychology. The Interiority of Outdoor Experience.” In: C. Glotfelty and H. Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader. Landmarks in Literary Ecology, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, pp. 351–370. Suñén, J.C. (2004). “Claudio Rodríguez: el hombre no puede ser libre.” In: F. Yubero Ferrero, ed., La otra palabra. Escritos en Prosa, Barcelona: Tusquets, pp. 229–238. Thomas, D. (2004, 5th impression). Collected Poems 1934–1953. London: Phoenix. Thomashow, M. (1996). Ecological Identity. Becoming a Reflective Environmentalist. Cambridge: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. Tindall, W.Y. (1996). A Reader’s Guide to Dylan Thomas. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Tuan, Y.F. (1990). Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia University Press Morningside Edition. Weik von Mossner, A. (2017). Affective Ecologies. Empathy, Emotion and Environmental Narrative. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Westphal, B. (2011). Geocriticism. Real and Fictional Spaces. Translated by Robert T. Tally Jr., Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Yubero Ferrero, F. (2004). “Introducción.” In: C. Rodríguez, La otra palabra. Escritos en prosa, Barcelona: Tusquets, pp. 9–26.

chapter 2

The Wisdom of Birds in Robert Bringhurst’s Poetry Leonor María Martínez Serrano

Abstract Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst has spent a lifetime listening for whatever lessons the natural world and nonhuman animals have to teach him. Throughout a literary career spanning well over 40 years, he has composed poems for solo and multiple voices that seek to mimic the polyphonic texture of the world. In fact, he conceives of his poems as being primarily born in the voice and as recordings of his encounters with the nonhuman that he then transposes to the blank page. If, as Lawrence Buell contends, “environmentally oriented” writing is that which is primarily concerned with the representation of the nonhuman environment and the relations between human and nonhuman beings (1995, 7-8), then Bringhurst’s poetry is primarily environmentallysensitive poetry. This chapter focuses on two poems from his Selected Poems (2009), “Finch” and “Birds on the Water”, which, despite their deceptive simplicity and linguistic transparency, problematise the way humans perceive the animal as “other”. Bringhurst unveils lessons of wisdom that he unearths in his encounter with these creatures dwelling à la Heidegger on this all-too-mortal Earth. A close reading of both poems discloses an ecocentric ethics at work in Bringhurst’s poetics, which celebrates the richness inherent in biodiversity, affirms the intrinsic value of all natural life, and counteracts the nonsense of speciesism’s assumption that it is only in relation to human beings that anything else (both animate and inanimate) has value.

Keywords Robert Bringhurst – Anthropocene – ecopoetry – wild – biodiversity – animal being – Derrida – biocentrism – sense of place – ethics

© koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004445277_003

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A Biocentric Ethics and Poetics, or Lyric Responding to Nature in the Anthropocene

Canadian poet, translator and typographer Robert Bringhurst has spent a lifetime listening for whatever lessons the natural world has to teach him. He embraces a biocentric ethics that is sensitive to the nonhuman environment and the creatures dwelling in it. Throughout a literary career spanning well over 40 years, he has composed poems for solo and multiple voices that seek to mimic the polyphonic texture of the world. Polyphony is a quality of the world, he claims, as the Earth speaks multiple languages. As he puts it in “Licking the Lips with a Forked Tongue”, the afterword to his New World Suite No. 3. (2005), “[p]olyphony is the sound of the coexistence of species, which is what every ecology, global or local is all about” (8). This sensitivity to the verbal and nonverbal codifications of meaning in the world at large comes as no surprise. Given his poetics of hearing, he conceives of his poems as being primarily born in the voice—as recordings of his elemental encounters with the nonhuman that he then transposes to the blank page. If, as Lawrence Buell contends in The Environmental Imagination, “environmentally oriented” writing is that which is primarily concerned with the representation of the nonhuman environment and the relations between human and nonhuman beings (1995, 7-8), then Bringhurst’s poetry (and non-fiction, for that matter) is primarily a kind of environmentally-sensitive, non-anthropocentric poetry that responds with lucidity to the inescapable materiality of what-is. Uninterested in the petty egotism and preoccupations of humans, his poetry and essays are largely concerned with “nature and natural elements (landscape, flora, and fauna, etc.) as self-standing agents, rather than support structures for human action, in the world” (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, 13). Bringhurst’s metaphysics is ultimately physics deeply rooted in the tangibility of what can be perceived by the self in its sense-mediated confrontation with the nonhuman environment at large. From this (sensuous) ontic domain where Bringhurst’s poetic persona dwells emerge poems that demand intensity of attention from its potential readers— attention as an act of will that is rare in a digital age marked by alarming concentration deficits. His ecopoems are thus acts of paying attention to the more-than-human world. An overwhelming sense of ontological humility flourishes in his poems, which result from his profound dialogue with the world. What he learns from such confrontations with the real is that the Earth speaks the language of being and that poetry is an attribute of reality that poets seek to capture in the best way they can through the medium of words. This has been the ancestral

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mission of poetry since the cradle of humanity. Poetry precedes the inexhaustible artefacts and the news that stays news that poems are. As the poet claims in his essay “The Persistence of Poetry, the Destruction of the World”, “[p]oetry is the language of being: the breath, the voice, the song, the speech of being. It does not need us. We are in need of it. [...] In the present day, poetry survives in the voices of humans, just as it does in the voices of all the other species in the world” (2006, 44-45). Homo sapiens happens to be just one more species among manifold other species sharing the same biosphere, on a par with the nonhuman other. Like Heidegger, for whom “Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being” (1993, 245), Bringhurst is well aware that humans situate themselves along a continuum of life ranging from mountains and woods to rivers and trees, stones and a myriad of living forms. Stretching back to Aldo Leopold’s insight in a classic of nature writing, A Sand County Almanac (1949), Bringhurst’s deep conviction is that humans are just simple citizens of the biotic community. “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community” (1970, 262), Leopold claimed. At a time of worrying environmental degradation, Bringhurst turns to look at the destruction of the world in what Rob Nixon calls the “high age of neoliberalism” (2011, 17) and at the possibility of composing poems that imaginatively posit a way of dwelling on Earth and relating to the nonhuman with responsibility. He is emotionally and intellectually alert to what humans are doing to the nonhuman world in the age of the Anthropocene, which he defines in his essay “The Mind of the Wild” as being “an episode in geologic time during which the wild is subverted by the tame” (2018, 17), or, to put it differently, “a human-dominated geological epoch; [...] a geological event: a momentary though possibly momentous blip in the earth’s biography” (17). In the same essay, the poet-philosopher explores the concept of the wild, “a self-integrating system whose edges are everywhere and whose centre is nowhere” (33). He further dwells on the wild vs. tame dichotomy in these lines: The wild is everything that grows and breeds and functions without supervision or imposed control. It is what lives in the long term without being managed. Oceans and rivers and forests and grasslands are naturally wild, while orchards, gardens, trout ponds, salmon farms, and berry farms are tame. [...] The wild is not a portfolio of resources for us or our species to buy and sell or manage or squander as we please. The wild is earth living its life to the full. The earth’s life is much larger than our own lives, but our lives are part of it. If we take that life, we take our own. (12)

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Given the capitalist logic of mass consumption and rampant overexploitation of natural resources that sees the Earth as a replenishable commodity, it is crystal clear that “the dominant human culture is increasingly toxic to the wild” (20), one that is responsible for “the mass extinction we have recently put in train, by overbreeding, overbuilding, overexploiting, overhunting, overfishing, and by relentlessly consuming fossil fuel” (19), contends Bringhurst in the same essay. He feels that it is a moral imperative to imaginatively propose ways of dwelling responsibly alongside nonhuman beings on our planet. In Bringhurst’s view, the wild always takes precedence in the wild-tame dichotomy.1 “The wild is the only place to go to calibrate your mind” (2018, 31-32), he writes, and so he spends much of his time in the company of trees and birds, mountains and rivers, in his home on Quadra Island, a small island off the coast of British Columbia. Long before him, Thoreau had a similar intimation that he captured in his essay “Walking”, posthumously published in The Atlantic in 1862, a month after his death from tuberculosis: “in Wildness is the preservation of the World” (1894, 224). Among other things, “Walking” extolled the virtues of immersing oneself in the wild in memorable words. Like Thoreau in Walden Pond more than a century ago, what Bringhurst finds in the wilderness—the place to go to so as to restore one’s own equilibrium—is precisely earth living its life to the full, the main characteristic of which is a tremendously rich biodiversity and an extreme vulnerability in the face of humans’ greed, mismanagement and capacity for destruction. As the poet writes in “The Mind of the Wild” with regard to biodiversity loss, [t]he wild is various and rich, yet 98% of documented species are extinct, and our documentation cannot be complete. The real figure has to be 99% or more. So the wild is not only rich and complex but at the same time economical and lean. If Homo sapiens followed this model, there would be fewer than a billion of us now, instead of seven billion and counting. (14)

1 In the same vein, Snyder claims in “The Etiquette of Freedom” that wildness is ubiquitous: “it is everywhere: ineradicable populations of fungi, moss, mold, yeasts, and such that surround and inhabit us. [...] Exquisite complex beings in their energy webs inhabiting the fertile corners of the urban world in accord with the rules of wild systems, the visible hardy stalks and stems of vacant lots and railroads, the persistent raccoon squads, bacteria in the loam and in our yogurt. [...] Civilization is permeable, and could be as inhabited as the wild is” (1990, 14-15). Our bodies are wild, and so are our embodied minds: “the depths of mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas” (16). And so is language, as he argues in “Tawny Grammar”: “The grammar not only of language, but of culture and civilization itself, is of the same order as this mossy little forest creek, this desert cobble” (76).

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Even if life were going to live forever—which it isn’t—all forms of life are mortal. Few, if any, animal species have survived for half a billion years. No species of placental mammal has lived more than a few million. (29) The fruits of Bringhurst’s encounters with the wild and the nonhuman in the woods are his accomplished ecopoems, which “depict life that slips outside of an autobiographical framework” and offer “glimpses of the connections between human subjectivity and more-than-human world” (Bristow 2015, 3). Thus, the last section of Bringhurst’s Selected Poems (2009) brings together nine poems under the overarching heading “The Living”, including “Finch”, “Birds on the Water”, “The Flowers of the Body”, “Giotto’s Bones”, “The Focal Length of Fuel”, “So Do We”, “The Living Must Never Outnumber the Dead”, “At Last”, and “For the Geologist’s Daughter”,2 which celebrate the sacredness at the core of what-is. The whole section “The Living” is preceded by an epigraph lifted from Jan Zwicky’s “Beethoven, Op. 95”, a central piece included in her poetry book Songs for Relinquishing the Earth (1998): “For still, that is / earth’s definition: / whatever it knows, / that is enough” (64). The quotation sheds light on Bringhurst’s poems collected under this section, for most of them are concerned with the pure physicality of what it means to be alive in a tangible world we can perceive and enjoy through the senses. Human knowledge comes ultimately from the raw data provided by the senses3 absorbing a cornucopia of stimuli bombarding the perceiving self from all directions. Like Bringhurst’s, Zwicky’s poems are firmly rooted in the real and show a sense of gratitude in the face of the grandeur of life, which transcends human limitations and the greed of instrumental rationality. The quote lifted from Zwicky’s poem reveals much of this: the Earth is a sacred place that speaks its own language, and it thinks into being every single creature of the many that populate this world. This intimation is part of her lyric philosophy, one that is sensitive to resonance and subtle interconnections in the universe.

2 Of these nine compositions only two had been previously published in book form in poetry collections by Bringhurst—i.e. “The Flowers of the Body”, a long poem included in the section “Their Names” in The Calling: Selected Poems 1970-1995 (1995), and “The Focal Length of Fuel”, another long poem in several sections based on the seven-part poem entitled Elements (1995), an extended meditation on the four classical elements (earth, water, air and fire) out of which the world is made. Five of the remaining poems had been previously published in scattered periodicals or books, and one would be later published in Lyric Ecology, a collection of essays to honour the work and thinking of Canadian poet-philosopher Jan Zwicky. 3 Erwin Schrödinger is clear in this respect. In Mind and Matter (published alongside What is Life? and Autobiographical Sketches in a single volume), he writes: “all our knowledge about the world around us [...] rests entirely on immediate sense perception” (2013, 153).

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Bringhurst’s poems in “The Living” constitute a moving song and tribute to the living, while they are a sober reminder that the real also includes, in the poet’s view, what remains invisible to human eyes—not just the roaming, homeless gods we no longer seem to be able to perceive, but also the dead, whose presence may turn to be overwhelming at times. In this respect, Bringhurst has re-created the lessons of ancient sages in poetry books like The Old in their Knowing, on the thinking of the Pre-Socratics, and The Book of Silences, on the wisdom of Oriental sages and Buddhist wanderers-monks. His meditations on the nature of reality stem directly from a humble attentiveness to the morethan-human world around him, which he feels is a much more complex and interesting place than personal relations or even history. In “Art and Nature, Body and Mind”, a review of Selected Poems published in the Globe and Mail on 11 July 2009, Fraser Sutherland dwells on the impersonality and a-historicism of Bringhurst’s poems: Only a few poems, such as “The Beauty of the Weapons” and “For the Bones of Josef Mengele, Disinterred June 1985”, allude to recent history. With the exception of “These Poems, She Said”, his poems seldom venture into personal relations. He prefers the company of the wilderness. For Bringhurst, universal, enduring truth locates itself in the four elements and humours: “Air, earth, water, fire, be here / to rebuild what we destroy,” he declaims in Ursa Minor”. (2009, F12) In his search for permanent forms of truth, Bringhurst goes to the wilderness to keep on conversing with the nonhuman world. His poems are transcriptions of what he has seen and heard outdoors, sensuously immersed in the currents animating mountains and trees, stones and rivers, winds and birds. Given his love of intellectual precision, it is only natural that he should be endowed with an exact knowledge of flora and fauna, and that all this botanical and zoological, ornithological and ethological knowledge should find its way into the making of his own poems. In this respect, “Finch” and “Birds on the Water”, two poems from “The Living” section included in his Selected Poems and the main focus of this chapter, are just only two instances that exemplify Bringhurst’s attempt to radically re-imagine the relations between human and nonhuman animals, while positing a new way of living responsibly in this world. Despite their deceptive simplicity and linguistic transparency, these companion poems problematise the way humans perceive the animal as other, while subtly pointing to “the plight of biodiversity loss and species extinction, supervened by human-induced climate change” (Bristow 2015, 3). Intent on capturing the pluriform, protean texture of biodiversity, Bringhurst listens to birds

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and unveils lessons of wisdom that he unearths in his encounter with these creatures dwelling à la Heidegger on trees, in the air and on the water. Seeing birds with nonhuman or rather with more-than-human eyes, Bringhurst learns from them that there is an uncomplicated way of being-in-the-world which is authentic and non-damaging to the environment, for birds have a wisdom that is deeply ingrained in their instinctive living to the rhythms of the natural world.

2

“Finch”: The Encounter with the Animal “Other”

“The Living” opens with two closely related poems, “Finch” and “Birds on the Water”, which bear imaginative witness to humans’ relations with the nonhuman as embodied by birds. Both poems show Bringhurst apprehending animal being and implicitly contesting “[t]hose forms of instrumental reason that view nature and the animal ‘other’ as being either external to human needs, and thus effectively dispensable, or as being in permanent service to them, and thus an endlessly replenishable resource” (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, 4). Traditionally, birds have been a prominent literary theme in the Western (and Eastern) lyric tradition and, more often than not, they have been anthropomorphised, made into vehicles that communicate something beyond themselves. A passionate lover and observer of birds himself, Bringhurst’s attentiveness to these living creatures in these two poems is not unique. Rather, he is following closely in the steps of such Modernist masters as Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, the example of Ted Hughes,4 and of earlier Romantic poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley (“Ode to a Skylark”), John Keats (“Ode to a Nightingale”) and John Clare, who wrote a myriad of poems on birds, on their habits and on their habitats. As South-African novelist J. M. Coetzee observes in The Lives of Animals,5 “we can embody animals—by the process called poetic

4 See Scott Ellis’ “Review of The Calling, ‘Where the Music Goes’”, published in Books in Canada 24.5: “If there’s a good summary word for a poet like Bringhurst, it’s “bracing”. In a poetry scene overrun with slack confessional verse and semiotic object lessons, he brings to mind someone like Ted Hughes, whose territory his overlaps, though without the British laureate’s density of word-play or syntactic piling on. [...] He shares Hughes’s quick eye for life in the wild and his metaphoric suppleness” (1995, 31). 5 The Lives of Animals consists of two lectures originally delivered at Princeton University in October 1997, “The Philosophers and the Animals” (pp. 15-45) and “The Poets and the Animals” (pp. 47-69), which address controversial issues like animal rights and the way humans treat animals. They were later incorporated into Coetzee’s academic novel Elizabeth Costello (2003).

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invention that mingles breath and sense in a way that no one ever will” (1999, 53). Since birds, like trees, have important lessons to teach, Bringhurst spends much time outdoors, seeking their company to observe their mode of being in the world and to capture their nonverbal wisdom in his poems. In the wilderness, the sense of sublime grandeur and beauty transcending the human scale is simply inescapable. Alert to the subtle nuances of the natural world, the poet cannot but produce poems like “Finch” and “Birds on the Water”: a direct emanation from his pristine encounter with and active listening to the material texture of what-is. And birds are an essential part of what-is, no doubt. As Chris Dafoe claims concerning his poetics of listening in “Robert Bringhurst: in Ink and Paper”, an enlightening meditation based on an interview with the poet conducted in Vancouver in April 1995, with reference to The Calling, if you ask Robert Bringhurst to describe what he does, chances are he’ll say that he listens. Not only to the voices of other people, but also to trees, birds, the Earth. [...] Bringhurst is an avid outdoorsman and the wild is where he goes to hear his poetry. “Poetry is still an outdoor activity for me,” he says, “and it really does have to do with listening. That’s not so unusual. We expect people who paint to look at things, and when you write poetry you listen to the world and you hear things and you try to translate that into English or French or whatever.” “I know a lot of 20th-century literature is about the human world—it’s part of that feedback loop—but that can turn into an ugly hum pretty quickly; and it seems to me that if you open a window and stick your ear outside, you can hear some pretty interesting things. I can learn a lot about poetry by listening to birds, for example, or by listening to trees. They speak ancient languages. And if I can’t exactly transcribe them word for word, at least I can make some kind of counterpart in my own language. It’s not that I want to escape from the human world, it’s just that I don’t want to be confined to it”. (1995, C1-2)6

6 In the preface to his 1948 collection The Double Axe and Other Poems, another ecopoet, Robinson Jeffers, identifies a new quality and “inhuman” attitude in his own verse which prefigures Bringhurst’s: “a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence” (xii).

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The poem titled “Finch”7 is descriptive and meditative in nature, and stems directly from Bringhurst’s first-hand observation of the world. To a certain extent, it also does tell a simple story in eight stanzas: the story of a finch badly wounded, “who must have tangled with a predator, / or maybe with a truck” (2009, 247), with one eye missing and a stump for a beak.8 The poet keeps a bowl with birdseed in his garden for birds to eat from. The variety of birds gathering round this bowl every day is expressive of the rich diversity of the natural world at large: siskins, finches, crossbills, cowbirds, chickadees and blackbirds all come together to feast in his garden. Among them is a female finch that is a true survivor. Out of his love of scientific accuracy and respect for the real, Bringhurst invokes its Latin name in the poem: it is a Carpodacus mexicanus, he says tentatively. Incidentally, the poet might also be essaying a second act of creation reminiscent of Adam’s naming of animals into existence in the Book of Genesis with God’s attentive gaze in the background. However, Bringhurst’s naming shows no traces of domination like those implicit in God’s injunction addressed to Adam and Eve to take dominion over all the living creatures populating the brand-new Earth just created ex nihilo. “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, conquer it”, says God in the Biblical story. Most importantly, in “Finch” Bringhurst draws readers’ attention to the embodied existence of the finch, or, in other words, to the material existence of its body (the animal body) within the wider material world, while exploring the physical activities of these birds and articulating a sense of what cultural ecophilosopher David Abram calls “the primacy of the sensuous cosmos that reigns underneath all our theories” (2014, 313). Animals are, as Gary Snyder observes, “free agents, each with its own endowments, living within natural systems” (1990, 9). What is remarkable about the presence of this finch among the other healthy birds is that none of them seems to care in the way humans would under the same circumstances: Not one among the others acts concerned. No one seems, in fact, to notice the black cavity that once was her right eye, the shattered stump that used to be her upper beak.

7 “Finch” was originally published in Onearth (New York) 28.2 (Summer 2006): 28, and three years later it was reprinted in Selected Poems. 8 According to Greta Gaard, there is by now sufficient evidence that “[o]ther animal species, plants, and insects may experience pain and suffering as well—we know that; to the best of their abilities, they move away from or repel predators, suggesting that they do not want to become food for other beings, but rather prefer to be subjects of their own lives” (2014, 300).

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And no one gawks or whispers at the awkward sidewise motion that enables her to eat. And no one mocks, crunching a sunflower seed, her preference for millet. (2009, 247) From the whole scene presented in these stanzas, the poet learns a fundamental lesson: whereas humans would show concern or unhealthy curiosity in the presence of a handicapped fellow human being, these birds simply keep on eating birdseed absolutely unconcerned, as if the wounded finch belonged among them naturally. Concepts of unnatural or abnormal are actually of no use in this situation. There is no room for what we would view as genuinely human feelings such as empathy or compassion in the face of the other’s pain: “Where ostracism, charity or pity / might have been, there is reality / instead” (247). Bringhurst resists the lure of anthropomorphism and seeks to present the whole scene of the finch eating alongside other birds with utter detachment. Self-absorbed as we tend to be, humans might think that there is something cruel about the birds’ not caring about the ugly deformity in the wounded finch’s anatomy, but the poet tells us that “their superlative / indifference is a kind of moral / beauty, as perfect as the day” (247). This is not amoral behaviour, but a form of natural morality that takes for granted the profound bonds uniting all living creatures in general and these specific birds in particular. Thus, if other animals (the red-tailed hawk or the neighbour’s cat) come near the bowl half full of birdseed, they simply have a look at the scene, exchange a couple of words and are gone. There is no cruelty at stake in this scene of bird conviviality: animals acknowledge one another’s presence and seem to be grateful for the simple fact of being alive on Earth as part of a community of sentient beings. They do speak a language of their own, but they do not gossip, they do not whisper pain-inflicting words, they do not hurt each other in the way humans oftentimes do. This is the poet’s meditation on birds and on the lesson they teach us all: But I never hear them talk of one another. They speak of what they are, not who they do or do not wish to be. That is a form of moral beauty too, as perfect as the day. Which is to say they sing. By nothing

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more than being there and being what they are, they sing. They sing. And that is that. (2009, 248) The tone of these lines is conversational; they possess a freshness of their own that emulates the naturalness with which birds live and sing their songs. In singing, birds celebrate their being alive and the plenitude of what-is. They do not pretend to be what they are not; they talk to one another of what they are instead. They are grateful and respectful to the real and to being, of which they are a tiny but indispensable part. One cannot help thinking of desire, which is the driving force and motivation for humans at every step they take in their lifetime. It is as if birds had no desire other than the wish to be themselves and to keep on living, flying and singing in the world. Like thánatos, eros is universal, which is to say that all living creatures want to live, one might think, but, unlike humans, birds live in a natural way that complies with the flux of life implicit in the world. They let themselves go, they do not force any kind of situation. They simply exist. “And that is that” (248), concludes the poet, as if there were nothing else to be said once one stumbles upon this simple fact. This is a form of gratitude rarely found in the company of other human beings, and so the poet seeks the company of birds instead. He is interested in exploring how nonhuman species have an agency of their own and interact with the environment (their Umwelt), whose materiality they modify themselves, by singing, leaving tracks, building nests or excavating burrows, for they are also semiotic creatures. These are the earth scripts left by the presence of the animal other, for in nature there are signatura rerum, signs needing no verbal tradition. A vision of the world without us—a world that is not in need of Homo sapiens—is what Bringhurst appears to be ultimately offering us in “Finch”, where the finch and its fellow birds compose a symphony of the whole where there appears to be no human trace whatsoever. The love of a thing is a knowledge of its details (and perfections), Spinoza is known to have said, and we humans understand better “by immersing ourselves and our intelligence in complexity” (Coetzee 1999, 62). Bringhurst is interested in specifics, not in abstract generalisations, for we cannot experience abstractions. This is also part of the material embeddedness or worldliness of his metaphysics. Once the conquering gaze has been set aside, he presents the eponymous finch of his poem as a specific being, not as a generic being or homogenised species, neither subordinate to nor less important than Homo sapiens. This poetic gesture can help us stop perpetuating the humananimal and nature-culture dualisms firmly ingrained in the Western mindset.

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Ultimately, we as readers are witnessing an act of self-presencing whereby the finch asserts its power of manifestation, disclosing itself to the human other, which is embodied in the poet’s gaze, for no poem is completely pure of human subjectivity. It remains, however, unclear whether the poet’s gaze is returned by the finch. The observer cannot be dissociated from the observed and consciousness remains integral to the universe.

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“Birds on the Water”, or the Living Flesh of Birds

“Birds on the Water”9 is the companion poem of “Finch” and another tribute to the singing of birds that evinces the amazement with which Bringhurst views these creatures. Thus, the words “There are birds on the water, / birds in the air” (or the other way around) punctuate the whole composition as an incantatory refrain. The piece consists of six six-line stanzas of perfect symmetry and three movements for the mind. In the first part (stanzas 1 and 2), the poet celebrates the ubiquitous presence of birds everywhere one turns to look in the world: birds are creatures that populate water, air and trees, dwelling “on the snags, in the conifers” (2009, 248), and they are also to be found “flying down to the lakefloor” (248), on the ice “melting away at the foot of the world” (248) (i.e. possibly in the South Pole, due to the effects of global warming), and on the ground, “overturning the layers / of last summer’s leaves” (248), as if birds could actually read and decipher the scripts written in the book of Nature. The crucial image is found in the second stanza: “There are birds who are building invisible, audible nests / in the bare-naked limbs of the alders in winter” (248). In these lines Bringhurst charges the natural world with music, or rather captures the music of what-is through words and reverberating phonemes. These two lines are a jewel-like technical accomplishment on the part of the poet: to the euphony of dexterously arranged sounds (notice the alliteration of /b/ in birds, building and bare, or the repetition of /l/ in building, invisible, audible, limbs and alders) one must add the captivating idea of birds building invisible but audible nests. This is a complex image isolated in time and in space in what looks like an autonomous haiku-like composition within the framework of “Birds on the Water”. This poetic vortex harmonises what the master poet-technician Pound (for whom technique was the test of a poet’s sincerity and commitment to a century-old art form) called melopoeia, phanopoeia and

9 Originally published in Words on the Water: Campbell River Writers’ Festival, Campbell River, British Columbia: Words on the Water Festival Society, 2006, p. 2.

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logopoeia,10 and suggests that birds build their nests in the upper branches of alders. They are invisible to the naked human eye, but they remain audible to the human ear, for the laborious birds keep on singing their melodious songs while accomplishing the architectonical deed of nest building. The second part of the poem (stanzas 3 and 4) deals with the relationships between birds and human beings. In these stanzas we observe not just Bringhurst’s awareness of and appreciation for the spaciousness of the world, but also an emphasis on the absence of animal arrogance. Whereas birds are shown to be endowed with a sort of proverbial wisdom and generosity in that they come close to humans, “storing food in their ears” and “bringing mosses and twigs to their half-zipped pockets and palms” (2009, 248), giving us food for thought and their songs, humans are shown to be somewhat egoistical and opaque creatures: Birds break their necks flying into your eyes in the perfect belief that the brilliant interior world is as spacious and seamless and real as the world outside. (2009, 249) Birds are used to navigating the open, vast expanses of air and sky of the world outside, where threats might be posed by potential predators. As material embodied beings themselves, deeply embedded in the fabric of life, birds also transform the very texture of the surrounding environment through nesting, flying and singing. By contrast, the “brilliant interior” is possibly a reference to the inner geographies of the human psyche or soul, which turn out to be not as diaphanous, vast and real as the realm of water and air populated and instinctively known by birds happens to be. Birds sacrifice themselves, flying unafraid into humans’ eyes, unaware that the space humans hide inside themselves might be an obscure territory. Labyrinthine and convoluted, complex and difficult—this is what the interior spaces in humans look like, or so seem to imply these lines. The spontaneity of birds is thus placed against the deceptive nature of appearances surrounding human beings and their will to 10 In the essay “How to Read”, Ezra Pound dwells on the well-known division of poetry into three distinct kinds: “Melopoeia, wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning. Phanopoeia, which is a casting of images upon the visual imagination. Logopoeia, ‘the dance of the intellect among words’” (1968, 25).

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conquer or dominate nature. Birds simply give in or give up, not pretending to be what they are not, and they are ready to die. Hence, in the third movement of “Birds on the Water” (stanzas 5 and 6) the birds are ominously seen lying dead at humans’ feet. These birds never feared “that your eyes might not mean what they’re seeing, / your mind might not mean what it hears” (249). Once again, as in many other Bringhurst pieces, the senses and the mind are invoked as the tools by means of which humans come to terms with the real in their tireless attempt to understand the more-thanhuman world. All knowledge comes through the senses; cognition is ultimately sensuous and feeds on the vibrant matter of the world. Wrongly assuming that human eyes do mean what they actually see, as if they were but a mirror held up to reality, birds fly directly to their secure death, unaware that the senses and the mind are not completely reliable and might be deceptive. And where do birds go once they die? Is there a special heaven or hell awaiting them? Or do they share the same heaven and hell with humans? In the closing stanza of the poem, the lyric subject does not hesitate to give a forceful and conclusive answer: birds populate the air and the water, but there are no birds in heaven or hell. This is to say that there is no blueprint or duplicate for this Earth, no afterlife, no other world that can sustain life as we know it to be in the biosphere we are intent on annihilating through the self-suicidal practices of global capitalism. In the poem we read these sparse lines rich in parallelism and alliteration: There are birds in the air, birds on the water, but no birds in heaven and no birds in hell and no one to tell them the difference, not here and not there. (2009, 249) Because birds commit no crimes and they remain content to lead a life of simplicity, flying and singing their own existence into bloom, there is no punishment for them in the terrific hell in flames envisioned or postulated by Christianity. There is no reward for them either in heaven, for they enjoy an untroubled life of natural acquiescence with the world. They do not pretend to be what they are not, they do not think or talk of “who they do or do not wish to be” (2009, 249), as the poet claimed in “Finch”. Not even humans are in a position to tell them the difference between heaven and hell, possibly because they coexist here and now, upon this Earth of ours. Not even the gods are able to tell the difference either. And yet, as Abram has convincingly argued, humans and birds share what he terms a membership in the “Commonwealth of Breath”

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(2014, 313): “The sun-infused air is our common medium, a broad intelligence that we share with the other animals and the plants and the forested mountains, yet each of us engages it with the particularities of our own flesh” (2014, 305).11 Like birds and other nonhuman animals, humans inhabit the world in their living flesh, which is breathing flesh, and so air is the medium where this Commonwealth of living creatures and breathing bodies dwells. As Abram puts it in The Spell of the Sensuous, air is “the sensuous but unseen medium that continually flows in and out of the breathing body, binding the subtle depths within us to the fathomless depths that surround us” (1996, 255). The Earth is a vast breathing being. Ultimately, Bringhurst can be seen as acting as a place-maker in “Birds on the Water”, in Bryson’s conceptualisation of the term in The West Side of Any Mountain, where he draws on Yi-Fu Tuan’s place vs. space dichotomy as a highly productive construct to shed light on contemporary ecopoetry. He argues that ecopoems encourage us “to slow our pace and view our own surroundings as places rather than empty, spacious, unknown locations” (2005, 11), populated by birds and a myriad of teeming living forms. This is the case with Bringhurst’s poem, which becomes a model of the physical world—a place carved out of infinite space—and of how we can relate to the more-than-human environment. It also conveys a sense of epistemological limits when it comes to fully grasping space, place or animal being. This is how it should be: instrumental reason cannot exhaust what-is for good. Uttering the Latin name of the finch in “Finch” and observing birds’ uncomplicated being-in-the-world in “Birds on the Water” might be interpreted as being gestures reminiscent of the talented naturalist, painter and writer John James Audubon’s taxonomic impulse at work in his drawing and labelling of birds that led to his monumental work of natural history The Birds of America (1827), depicting over one thousand individual birds. This is knowing, not 11 Regarding “the primacy of breath in oral traditions” and fluid air as “the implicit intermediary in all communication, the very medium of meaning” (2014, 308), Abram invites readers to ponder for a moment “the etymology of the common English words “spirit” (from Latin spiritus: a breath, or a gust of wind) and “psyche” (from the ancient Greek verb psychein: to breathe or to blow, as a wind). Consider the Latin word for the soul, anima (from the older Greek anemos, meaning wind), from whence derive such terms as “animal” (an ensouled being) and “unanimous” (being of one mind). Or consider the term “atmosphere,” from the Greek atmos (vapor), itself cognate with the Sanskrit word atman, which signifies the soul (whether of the cosmos or of a person). Analogous associations are found in many other languages. Such etymologies offer no proof, yet they suggest that the common notion of mind as an entirely immaterial and nonsensuous dimension has been derived, by a gradual process of abstraction, from our ancestrally felt sense of the invisible but nonetheless tangible medium in which we found ourselves materially immersed and participant” (2014, 313). Air is thus what unites human and nonhuman worlds as part of a more-than-human world and a “Commonwealth of Breath”.

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owning: knowing as a way of acknowledging a communion with the nonhuman (animal) world, rather than a form of taking dominion over reality through the act of naming as epistemological conquest. Botanist William Bartram, ornithologist Alexander Wilson and painter John James Audubon were the true precursors of Thoreau’s nature writing, as Michael Branch suggests: “early romantic natural history introduced a number of ideas that are essential to the post-Thoreauvian literature of nature” (1996, 283). All three introduced “a pattern of ecological thinking in American culture” and initiated “a tradition of environmental concern into American intellectual history” through “emphasis upon a feeling of membership in a natural community and upon the morally regenerative qualities of nature” (286). Audubon in particular “traveled thousands of wilderness miles in order to discover, study, and document native species” (292) and contributed to our understanding of “the nesting, mating, feeding, and migration habits of birds” (295). Aware of the swift destruction of wild nature and native species as he was, he became a staunch advocate of government intervention to protect the wilderness. Like his literary precursors, the early Romantic naturalists on American ground, Bringhurst might be following in their steps by proclaiming the self-sustaining autonomy of birds qua birds, as being neither inferior nor superior to human beings, but simply on the same scale, as part of a greater living spaciousness. Being face to face with birds, Bringhurst finds out that “their whole being is in the living flesh” (Coetzee 1999, 65), which is no negligible lesson for humankind in the age of the Anthropocene.

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The Lessons of Birds, or against Anthropomorphism

“Finch” and “Birds on the Water” show Bringhurst “conversing with the physical world” (Felstiner 2009, 29; italics in the original) and grasping the world in rhythmic form, which has been “poetry’s perennial job” (29) ever since antiquity. Poetry is indeed one of “the instruments of mental production” (Frye 1970, 1) whereby the human mind seeks to apprehend and make sense of reality. What is more, in these two ecopoems on birds Bringhurst sets about deconstructing “seemingly obvious claims about the privileged status of the human, in contradistinction to the animal, as the source of agency in the world” (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, 208; italics in the original). As a result, an essential humility flourishes all of a sudden, a sense of what Diane Bonds calls the “ownerlessness” of the world (qtd. in Bryson 2005, 19). Bringhurst’s poems are an imaginative and salutary reminder that humans are not at the very centre of creation, even if they betray human presence, a recording consciousness that is part of—not apart from—what is being observed and woven into the fabric of the poems for posterity. Thus, Bringhurst’s ecopoetry denies human beings

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the sovereign, central position they have held in anthropocentric conceptions of the world, particularly in the Western Weltanschauung. In short, humanity is placed on the same continuum as other animal species. Most of the time, his poems deal with the realm of the nonhuman, which is larger and of greater interest to the poet. Bringhurst’s primary concern is getting at a profounder apprehension of being and, by spending time in the wilderness, he has come to learn a new way of looking at the world—one that is less egoistical, less selfish, less egocentric. Being means “largesse” in his ecological conception of reality. So he goes to the wilderness and he comes back whole, with a bundle of poems born in the voice, informed by the music of all the life forms that populate the woods, away from the hectic city life in industrial societies. The vividness and earthiness of his poems on birds are sufficient evidence of this biocentric attitude. As Iain Higgins claims a propos Bringhurst’s poems in “Many Mansions”, a review of several books, including The Calling: [A]n eco- rather than a socio-poet, raising his exquisitely chiselled and stunningly spun word-dwellings within a radically different conception of the spacetime of history and tradition… [...] [Bringhurst’s poems] pointedly neglect to centre themselves in the lyric ego, or even sometimes in the human sphere; whereas many of us habitually truncate the phrase “human being” to “human,” Bringhurst effectively truncates it to “being,” and his poems haunt an ontic domain unconstrained by the anthropic… [...] The result of this anti-Viconian and stateless independence is a book of fiercely intelligent poems that regard their readers as certain birds do their watchers: like northern flickers, they are at home in the air, the trees, and on the ground, refusing to be known except in motion and only then if you dwell with them as they go. (1997, 200) Tweaking Descartes’ I think, therefore I am, Jacques Derrida wrote an influential essay in 2002 entitled “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”,12

12 In trying to grasp animal being and its place in human experience and thought in his posthumously published “The Animal That Therefore I Am” (2002), Derrida is not an island in European philosophy. Questions of animal being, animal rights and the ethical implications of human relations with animals have been a major concern of twentieth-century European philosophical thinking. Theodor Adorno, whose thinking can be traced back to Schopenhauer’s, claims in Negative Dialectics (1973) that animals should be in themselves objects of ethical consideration. In “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights” (1990), Emmanuel Levinas sees the animal as a possible manifestation of the ineluctable “other”, and Giorgio Agamben has addressed, in response to Levinas, the question of animal being in The Open: Man and Animal (2002). It is within this larger philosophical context that Derrida’s thought on animal being is to be considered.

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which shows the French philosopher “following the traces of this wholly other they call ‘animal’” (383), taking the Genesis story of the creation of the Earth and its living forms by Elohim as his starting point. To Derrida, an animal is “an existence that refuses to be conceptualized” (379) and “the absolute other” (380). He further dwells on the nakedness of the animal other: “The property unique to animals and what in the final analysis distinguishes them from man, is their being naked without knowing it. Not being naked therefore, not having knowledge of their nudity, in short without consciousness of good and evil” (373). Seeing himself seen naked under a cat’s gaze that Derrida characterises as being vacant, bottomless, perhaps sensitive, “uninterpretable, unreadable, undecidable, abyssal and secret” (381), the French philosopher ponders the sense of otherness experienced by humans when confronted with such an impenetrable gaze. Being seen through the eyes of the animal other is an uncanny experience, and yet the point remains that animals have their own vantage point, they can see us and reciprocate our often inquisitive gaze. “The gaze called animal offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human” (381), concludes Derrida. This raises “the unsettling question, not of how we see animals, but of how they see us” (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, 218). The experience of the seeing animal, of the animal that looks at humans or can return the human gaze, appears to have gone unnoticed to Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan and Levinas, says Derrida, as if they “had never been looked at, and especially not naked, by an animal that addressed them” (383). The discontinuity Descartes saw between human beings and animals, which he conceived of as being just biological automata or machines, stretches back through Aquinas and Agustine to the Stoics and Aristotle (Coetzee 1999, 67). As Huggan and Tiffin claim, Descartes’ cogito ergo sum expressed the division between mind and body with great linguistic economy, but “such a separation was already part of the west’s philosophy and religion in the works of Aristotle and in early Christian thought. To become fully human was to transcend one’s animality, one’s earthbound substance” (176-177). Cartesian dualisms of mind and body, thinking subject and inert matter, observer and observed have thus traditionally perpetuated the logic of human exceptionalism—of humans as rational beings and of animals as being lesser or inferior for lacking reason and speech—and justified humans’ treatment of the animal other. As Huggan and Tiffin put it, this Cartesian construct has been “historically instrumental in claims to racial, gender and species superiority, and has underwritten the separation of (human) being from (extra-human) environments as well” (2015, 177). It is this construct that Coetzee addresses in The Lives of Animals, where he has Elizabeth Costello affirm the indissoluble embeddedness of mind in body, or, in other words, the sensation of “fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of

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being [...] a body with limbs that have extension in space, of being alive to the world” (Coetzee 1999, 33), and oppose the view of animals as being secondclass just because they do not do “what we call thinking” (33). Bringhurst’s poetic project of a lifetime amounts to an investigation of what it means to be part of a more-than-human world, countering human exceptionalism and “a dualist sense of nature as something external to humans” (Bristow 2015, 125), while emphasising human and nonhuman interdependency. Nature is not external to humankind, but coterminous or co-extensive with it, and so, in the end, Bringhurst embraces Snyder’s pan-humanism, “an ecological understanding of the complexities of the natural world [which] requires a revitalized or, perhaps better, a re-extended form of humanism which, reaching out beyond the western boundaries of humanist philosophy, enthusiastically accommodates the non-human within humanistic thought” (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, 229). In apprehending animal being or the animal “other” in “Finch” and “Birds on the Water”, Bringhurst is feeling his way toward a different kind of being-in-the-world and giving voice to experiences that at first seem impervious to human understanding, while essaying new ways of thinking (and feeling) about the human and beyond the human in an ecologically threatened world. His approach is that of an embodied mind, a body literally responding to a more-than-human world of which it is but a tiny element. In “Finch” and “Birds on the Water”, Bringhurst counteracts the Cartesian dualisms through the representation of birds as birds. Both poems are the record of an engagement with birds and are coloured with human empathy for our earth others, though. And yet he avoids the pitfalls of anthropomorphism. As Huggan and Tiffin observe, “while literature has certainly dealt with the fates and even the psychologies of animals, these have—at least until recently—been highly anthropomorphised, acting more often than not as a staple of fiction for children rather than adult readers” (2015, 16). In their close observation of birds qua birds, and not as anthropomorphised creatures symbolic of specific human traits, “Finch” and “Birds on the Water” are a reminder of “the need to revive atrophied kinships between human beings and other living creatures” (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, 66), for “the price for the violation or neglect of environmental duties is loss” (66). Ultimately, the idea, implicit in pastoral, of “a sacred interconnectedness between human and animal lives [...] presents a viable alternative to the crude instrumental rationalism with which animals are treated, and with which people are treated as animals” (126). This is at least the conviction informing Bringhurst’s poems about the wisdom of birds. By embracing a biocentric ethics in depicting birds in their purely being-in-theworld and by grounding human identity in the very indifference of the birds to our existence, the Canadian poet gestures towards a world that does not even

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acknowledge our presence—a world that does not need us—but also a world where we humans are no longer defined in opposition to others, the animal other, and we no longer define ourselves by the animals we are not.

Works Cited Abram, D. (1996). The Spell of the Sensuous. Perception and Language in a More-ThanHuman World. New York: Vintage Books. Abram, D. (2014). “Afterword: The Commonwealth of Breath.” In: S. Iovino and S. Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 301–314. Adorno, T. (1973). Negative Dialectics. Translated by Ernst Basch Ashton. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Agamben, G. (2002). The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Branch, M. (1996). “Indexing American Possibilities: The Natural History Writing of Bartram, Wilson, and Audubon.” In: C. Glotfelty and H. Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader. Landmarks on Literary Ecology, Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, pp. 282–302. Bringhurst, R. (1995). The Calling: Selected Poems 1970-1995. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Inc. Bringhurst, R. (2001). The Book of Silences. Los Angeles: Ninja Press. Bringhurst, R. (2005). The Old in Their Knowing. Berkeley, CA: Editions Koch. Bringhurst, R. (2005). New World Suite No. Three. New York: Center for Book Arts. Bringhurst, R. (2006). “The Persistence of Poetry, the Destruction of the World.” In: The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, pp. 40–45. Bringhurst. R. (2006). “Birds on the Water.” In: Words on the Water Festival Society, Words on the Water: Campbell River Writers’ Festival [festival programme], Campbell River, BC: Words on the Water Festival Society, p. 2. Bringhurst, R. (2009). Selected Poems. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press. Bringhurst, R. (2018). “The Mind of the Wild.” In: R. Bringhurst, and J. Zwicky, Learning to Die. Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis, Saskatchewan: Regina University Press, pp. 7–39. Bristow, T. (2015). The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place. Houndmills, UK; New York, NY: Palgrave Pivot. Bryson, J. S. (2005). The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Buell, L. (1995). The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coetzee, J. M. (1999). The Lives of Animals. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Coetzee, J. M. (2003). Elizabeth Costello. London: Secker and Warburg. Dafoe, C. (1995). “Robert Bringhurst: In Ink and Paper.” Toronto: Globe and Mail, Jun 24, pp. C1–2. Derrida, J. (2002). “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Critical Inquiry 28(2), pp. 369–418. Ellis, S. (1995). “Review of The Calling, ‘Where the Music Goes.’” Books in Canada 24(5), pp. 30–31. Felstiner, J. (2009). Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems. New Haven: Yale University Press. Frye, N. (1970). The Stubborn Structure. Essays on Criticism and Society. London and New York: Methuen. Gaard, G. (2014). “Mindful New Materialisms: Buddhist Roots for Material Ecocriticism’s Flourishing.” In: S. Iovino and S. Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 291–300. Heidegger, M. (1993). Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell. London: Routledge. Higgins, I. (1997). “Many Mansions.” Canadian Literature 154, pp. 197–203. Huggan, G. and Tiffin, H. (2015, 2nd edition). Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. London and New York: Routledge. Jeffers, R. (1948). The Double Axe and Other Poems. New York: Random House. Leopold, A. (1970). A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River. New York: Ballantine. Levinas, E. (1990). “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights.” In: Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Sean Hand, London: Athlone, pp. 151–153. Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Pound, E. (1968). “How to Read.” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, pp. 15–40. Schrödinger, E. (2013). What Is Life? Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Snyder, G. (1990). The Practice of the Wild. San Francisco: North Point Press. Sutherland, F. (2009). “Art and Nature, Body and Mind.” Toronto: Globe and Mail, Jul 11, p. F12. Thoreau, H.D. (1894). “Walking.” In: The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. Vol. V. Excursions, and Poems, Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., pp. 205–248. Zwicky, J. (1998). Songs for Relinquishing the Earth. London, ON: Brick Books.

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PART 2 Stubborn Materiality and Environmental Poli(e)t(h)ics

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ch apter 3

The Agentic Power of Matter in Lorine Niedecker’s “Wintergreen Ridge” and “Paean to Place” Matilde Martín González

Abstract Throughout her writing career, Niedecker aimed at examining the effects of physical phenomena on human life and vice-versa, showing her engagement with the portrayal of those human emotions essentially integrated with the natural world. Her compositions trigger a definite conception of the poetic act in terms of an “objectivist environmentalist awareness” (Caddel 1996, 286). Accordingly, Niedecker’s writing can be construed in the light of Serenella Iovino’s and Serpil Oppermann’s argument that “the world’s material phenomena are knots in a vast network of agencies, which can be ‘read’ and interpreted as forming narratives, stories” (2014, 1). In other words, material reality constitutes discourses that project multiple meanings regarding the bond between human and nonhuman elements. From this interrelationship emanate narrative articulations of the poet’s mind along with literal accounts of life events. In this essay, I analyze “Wintergreen Ridge” and “Paean to Place”, as exemplars of the material-narrative stance articulated by Iovino and Oppermann, based on exploring “the way matter’s (or nature’s) nonhuman agentic capacities are described and represented in narrative texts” (Iovino and Oppermann 2012, 79). This method will allow me to focus on the material elements figuring both in the texts and as texts, especially evident in the stanzaic patterns used.

Keywords agency – ecocriticism – environmental awareness – Serenella Iovino – Lorine Niedecker – Serpil Oppermann – “Wintergreen Ridge” – “Paean to Place”

Lorine Niedecker’s oft-quoted statement from her letter to Louis Zukofsky—“The Brontës had their moors, I have my marshes” (qtd. Penberthy 2002, 1)—highlights the relevance of the natural surroundings to her poetic career. © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004445277_004

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She spent most of her life in Black Hawk Island (1903-1970), near the town of Fort Atkinson (Wisconsin), and her work integrates human life into that natural and rural context. Cid Corman views Niedecker’s poetry as “permeated by a profound sense of De Rerum Natura: of nature’s things” (1996, v). Indeed, her earliest texts already convey the workings of seasonal changes on human beings, animals, and plants. As a matter of fact, the first poem she ever published, “Transition” (1928), depicts the passing from one season to another in her typically condensed manner: “Colors of October / wait with easy dignity / for the big change—/ like gorgeous quill-pens / in old inkwells / almost dry” (Niedecker 2002, 23). Likewise, other compositions, such as the well-known “My Life by Water”, engage with an “objectivist environmentalist awareness” (Caddel 1996, 286), through which she elaborates on the particular places relevant to her life and her role among them.1 Niedecker’s poetics addresses the interconnection between human life, nonhuman things, and the sociopolitical forces acting upon them. Some of her poems can be construed in the light of Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s elaborations on the agentic potential of matter, that is to say, “the idea that matter possesses agency” (2012, 77). Iovino and Oppermann dismiss the description of the material world as “passive, inert, unable to convey any independent expression of meaning” (2014, 2). Instead, they bring to the forefront both the narrative and the agentic potential of matter: “capable of producing its own meanings, every material configuration, from bodies to their contexts of living, is ‘telling,’ and therefore can be the object of a critical analysis aimed at discovering its stories” (2012, 79). In other words, material reality is inherently meaningful per se and does not actually require human intervention to become intelligible. Rather, it helps in fathoming the significance of the human-nature relationship. This notion obviously entails the need to modify the traditional meaning ascribed to “agency” in the understanding that it “is not to be necessarily and exclusively associated with human beings and human intentionality, but it is a pervasive and inbuilt property of matter, as part and parcel of its generative dynamism” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014, 3). Hence, it is crucial to articulate a theoretical framework on which to ground the consideration of the agentic power of nature/matter in its narrative dimension. Iovino and Oppermann see material ecocriticism as an appropriate methodology for this type of analysis:

1 As she remarked in a letter to Kenneth Cox: “I spent my childhood outdoors—red-winged blackbirds, willows, maples, boats, fishing (the smell of tarred nets), twittering and squawking noises from the marsh” (qtd. Penberthy 2002, 2).

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Material ecocriticism proposes basically two ways of interpreting the agency of matter. The first one focuses on the way matter’s (or nature’s) nonhuman agentic capacities are described and represented in narrative texts (literary, cultural, visual); the second way focuses on matter’s ‘narrative’ power of creating configurations of meanings and substances, which enter with human lives into a field of co-emerging. (2012, 79) This essay will analyze Lorine Niedecker’s poems, “Wintergreen Ridge” and “Paean to Place”,2 in terms of the first approach suggested by Iovino and Oppermann, delving into the co-existence of human and nonhuman elements, and exploring how this relationship reveals a narrative dimension whereby the “stories of matter” can be effectively ascertained in the texts. Thus, they can be said to attest to Iovino and Oppermann’s insight that nature constitutes “a material mesh of meanings, properties, and processes, in which human and non-human players are interlocked in networks that produce undeniable signifying forces” (2014, 1-2). Niedecker’s account of her role as a human being embedded in the vast territory of the natural world bears out her limitations in deciphering all the meanings within and beyond the natural world. The magnificence of nature’s infinite narratives is a key issue in these poems and both illustrate Iovino and Oppermann’s belief that material elements occur both in the texts and as texts. This new interpretative method “reads world and text as an agentic entanglement” (2014, 10) disconnected from the traditional dynamics of seeing “how texts ‘reflect’ the worlds’ phenomena—natural life or a society’s cultural practice” (2014, 10). Iovino and Oppermann advocate “a reconceptualization of both the idea of text (as distinct from other nontextual material formations) and the idea of the world (as the ‘outside of text’)” (2014, 10). Therefore, the strict divide between the inside and outside of the text is undermined, being rather seen as interdependent entities involved in an active process from which “reality emerges as an intertwined flux of material and discursive forces” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014, 3). The two poems under consideration illuminate Niedecker’s engagement with the material context and the poetical rendition she derives from that material flux, especially as far as the narrative potential of nature is concerned. Written in 1967, during a trip with her husband to the Ridges Sanctuary (Northeastern Wisconsin),3 “Wintergreen Ridge” is neither Objectivist, nor 2 Both poems were originally published in her book North Central (1968). 3 Margot Peters gives important details of the place: “The Ridges is a uniquely preserved succession of curved swells and hollows, remnants of original beaches laid down by wind and sand and thatched with boreal plants that create a living museum of change and succession from the Ice Age to the present” (2011, 222).

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Imagist, nor Surrealist—labels conventionally applied to her work—but reflective. Niedecker herself used this concept in explaining in a letter to her neighbor Gail Roub the changes in her way of writing during the 1960s: Much taken up with how to define a way of writing poetry which is not Imagist nor Objectivist fundamentally nor Surrealism alone—Stella Leonardos [poet] of Brazil sensed something when I loosely called it “reflections” or as I think it over now, reflective, maybe. (Niedecker 1986,9) She goes on to specify that the poems of this decade have a feature in common: “The basis is direct and clear—what has been seen or heard etc… but something gets in, overlays all that to make a state of consciousness” (1986, 9). Indeed, readers are drawn to perceive a “state of consciousness” in Niedecker’s elucidation of things and places, of natural and nonhuman elements alike, and are provided with her reflections about everything she observed during that trip. Michael Heller argues that the main characteristic of the poem is “its impassioned propulsiveness” (2005, 102), developed through a long sequence of ninety-four tercets with no punctuation and an extensive use of enjambment. On the other hand, the presence of enjambment might be construed as Niedecker’s attempt “to embody something of the geology of the region” (Davidson 2011, 85), thus evincing the intimate connection between language and nature or, following Iovino and Oppermann’s view, between text and matter. Regardless of her intention in the use of this device, it certainly manages to carry meaning along the stanzas as if propelled forward through the different stages of her journey. The initial lines mark the beginning of the trip, with terms like “lead”, “road”, and “signs” explicitly linking the literal and the poetic journey. After all, words are nothing but “signs” that read as sounds and graphs on paper: Where the arrows of the road signs lead us: Life is natural in the evolution of matter (Niedecker 2002, 247) At the same time, the trip brings together the human imprint on the landscape—“the arrows of the road”—and the author’s insight into how matter

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is involved in the natural evolution of life, for both human and nonhuman entities: Nothing supra-rock about it simply butterflies are quicker than rock Man lives hard on this stone perch by sea imagines durable works in creation here as in the center of the world let’s say of art (2002, 247-48) Placing “butterflies”, “rock”, and “man” at the same level evokes the notion that “the human agents co-exist and co-act with biological organisms that exhibit agentic capacities” (Iovino and Oppermann 2012, 84). Both the rock and the butterflies have, so to speak, the ability to act and not merely be acted upon. They allow human beings to create and reflect on works of art that are as enduring and eloquent as the stone or the rock. Niedecker’s poem offers proof of this, in so far as readers can perform “an act of intellection upon the data” (Heller 2005, 103), and matter appears invested with a dynamic dimension in a community comprising humans, animals, and plants: “Every creature better alive than dead,

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men and moose and pine trees”. (2002, 248) At one point in the course of this journey into Wintergreen Ridge, the travelers come across a sign reading: “Flowers / loveliest / where they grow / Love them enjoy them / and leave them so / Let’s go!” (2002, 249). In these lines, the flowers enact a kind of agency that is different from the human one but significant enough in the narrative ability they display. The wooden sign that protects them from deterioration attests to Oppermann’s insight that “matter emerges in meaningfully articulate forms of becoming that can be interpreted as storied matter” (2014, 29). The material and symbolic existence of the flowers constructs a story about fragility and delicateness. Though impersonal agents, the flowers claim the right to assume autonomy and suggest that something in their essence, or inner life, must have contributed to creating a discourse on their vulnerability, and therefore on the need to be safeguarded. Jim Cocola persuasively accounts for the author’s intention in this poem by saying that “[r]ejecting the thoughtlessness of casual tourism, Niedecker reports from a pilgrimage devoted to the conscious experience of place” (Cocola 2016, 74). Significantly, this consciousness is environmentally concerned and points to one of new materialism’s crucial beliefs: “things (or matter) draw their agentic power from their relation to discourses that in turn structure human relations to materiality” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014, 4). Accordingly, the material world itself plays a part in the human forging of ideas and discourses about the natural surroundings. Nonhuman or material agents enforce their presence somewhat on the human perspective, reminding readers of the interplay between the two. As Iovino and Oppermann argue: “every living creature, from humans to fungi, tells evolutionary stories of coexistence, interdependence, adaptation and hybridization, extinctions and survivals” (2014, 7). In other words, living things are enmeshed in a network of relations with others more or less near them. Nothing and no one is qualified to thrive in complete isolation. The continuity of life depends on the success of this mutual connection, which incidentally triggers the necessary evolution of matter: Evolution’s wild ones saved continuous life through change (2002, 249)

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In the saving of life participated “Women / of good wild stock” who “stood stolid / before machines” and “stopped bulldozers” (2002, 249). Interestingly enough, the alliteration of the harsh sounds /s/, /t/, and /l/ in these lines evokes the disturbed mood of the women involved in the social activism in defense of the environment. The author is referring to a women’s protest movement in 1936 that prevented the transformation of Wintergreen Ridge into a park.4 Niedecker might have heard something about this during the trip, and her words prefigure the materialist ecocritical argument that “literature can be used as an effective discourse crucial to enhance moral and environmental imagination” (Iovino and Oppermann 2012, 87). By giving voice to these women, the text contributes to reinforcing the need to preserve nature, while also calling into question the anthropocentric paradigm that deems it merely “a lifeless mechanism” (Oppermann 2014, 23). More importantly, these lines address “the capitalization of local ecosystems in the name of economic progress” (Oppermann 2014, 23), and disclose the unethical stance of capitalist society toward the exploitation of nature. The interaction between human and nonhuman elements that characterizes this poem helps readers appreciate the long list of plants mentioned below “as central characters who exhibit agentic capacities and appear to be endowed with consciousness and thought” (Iovino and Oppermann 2012, 82). From this perspective, Niedecker’s poetics subscribes to material ecocriticism’s integrative thinking: and here it is— horsetails club mosses stayed alive after dinosaurs died 4 The following extract explains the struggle for preserving the Ridges Sanctuary: “In 1935, Albert Fuller, then Curator of Botany at the Milwaukee Public Museum, began spending a great deal of time traveling between Milwaukee and Door County, studying the rare flora which flourished on a parcel of land in Baileys Harbor. What began as research quickly developed into an important conservation initiative. Fuller discovered that the parcel was leased to the county by the U.S. Lighthouse Service and that the county planned to develop a trailer park there. Thus began a two-year period of education and advocacy. Fuller gave countless presentations—often with his friend and fellow conservationist, Jens Jensen—to many residents of Baileys Harbor and the surrounding area, including Emma Toft and Olivia Traven. In 1937, these citizens and others formed The Ridges Sanctuary, Wisconsin’s first land trust, to protect the original 40 acres” (The Ridges Sanctuary website, n. pag.). See further details at http://www.ridgessanctuary.org/land-preservation/founders/. Accessed Jun 26, 2019.

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Found: laurel in muskeg Linnaeus’s twinflower Andromeda Cisandra of the bog pearl-flowered Lady’s tresses Insect-eating pitcher plant Bedeviled little Drosera of the sundews deadly in sphagnum moss sticks out its sticky (Darwin tested) tentacled leaf toward a fly half an inch away engulfs it Just the touch of a gnat on a filament stimulates leaf-plasma secretes a sticky clear liquid (2002, 250-251) The natural elements pertaining to this wide ecosystem constitute knots that “can be ‘read’ and interpreted as forming narratives, stories” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014, 1). They execute a given function within the natural cycle, and each develops a vital rapport with the others. Niedecker characterizes these plants as organic entities with whom “[w]e have a lovely / finite parentage / mineral / vegetable / animal” (2002, 252), thus implying a balanced identification of human and nonhuman elements. In this affiliation between the natural and the human, the former achieves agentic power so

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as to resist the threat of annihilation brought about in the context of the Vietnam War:5 Unaffected by man thin to nothing lichens grind with their acid granite to sand These may survive the grand blow-up the bomb (2002, 253-254) However, the organic essence of nature eliminates the threat of destruction and restores the natural harmony: white bunchberry under aspens pipsissewa (wintergreen) grass of parnassus See beyond— ferns algae water lilies Scent the simple the perfect

5 Although Niedecker does not refer directly to the Vietnam War, we may speculate that she had this war in mind since, by the time she wrote this poem (1967), the participation of the American troops in the war had become very intense. Margot Peters provides the exact date of composition for this poem: “In late November 1967 Lorine completed the 282-line poem, ‘Wintergreen Ridge’, inspired by her visit to the Ridges Sanctuary on the Lake Michigan side of Door County Peninsula” (2011, 222).

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order of that flower water lily (2002, 254-255) The internal life of the Ridges Sanctuary landscape is enhanced by the simplicity of the natural order, which presents itself at several points throughout Niedecker’s poetic (and literal) journey. Niedecker’s advocacy of simplicity agrees with her way of writing, which Basil Bunting qualified as “austere, free of all ornament, relying on the fundamental rhythms of concise statement, so that to many readers it must have seemed strange and bare” (qtd. Penberthy 2002, 11). The above-quoted verses testify precisely to the features mentioned by Bunting: the sparse and brief lines appear in unison with the unpretentious water lily, ferns, algae or aspens. The human eye is bedazzled by natural beauty, but we cannot overlook the cultural connotations present in the “grass of parnassus”, a flower that symbolizes wilderness and at the same time bears the effect of culture on nature.6 Amid this entanglement between nature and culture, human action is visible in the buildings Niedecker encounters along her journey: as we drive towards cities the change in church architecture— now it’s either a hood for a roof pulled down to the ground and below or a factory-long body crawled out from a rise of black dinosaur-necked blower-peaked smokestack— steeple (2002, 255) 6 The term “parnassus” recalls Mount Parnassus, a literal mountain of limestone, located in central Greece. It also contains cultural connotations associated with Greek mythology, which turned it into the home of the Muses. Niedecker’s fragment explicitly connects natural— mountain, grass, flowers—and cultural elements—architecture, factory, mythology, and poetry itself.

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With reference to these lines, Michael Davidson concludes that “where religious buildings had once aspired to the sky, they are now imitating plants and animals” (2011, 89). In other words, traces of human intervention become animalized and significantly reveal what Iovino and Oppermann term “materialdiscursive agency” (2012, 87). Niedecker wrote down her observations in a notepad she always carried with her on her trips, where she “recorded details of rocks, botany, geology, parks, wildlife and scenery” (Hayes 1996, 71). Her eyes are those of the botanist, philosopher, and naturalist, emphasizing “the oneness of all life, human, animal and vegetable, and its processes both creative and destructive” (Cox 1996, 305). Niedecker’s philosophical mind figures in those parts of the poem which conflate socio-political and natural concerns: the news of the war that “cannot be stopped” read in a newspaper “left at the church” along with the “ragweed pollen / sneezeweed / whose other name / Ambrosia / goes for a community” (2002, 256). The fact that the name of the town they see ahead is also the name of a plant—and the food of the ancient Greek gods in Olympus—allows for establishing a close bond between human community, the natural milieu, and culture. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “Ambrosia literally means ‘immortality’ in Greek; it is derived from the Greek word ambrotos (‘immortal’), which combines the prefix a- (meaning ‘not’) with mbrotos (‘mortal’)”. Thus, the Greek etymology of the word is significantly premised on the continuity of natural life, its everlasting presence, and its effects on human beings. This is what we have “ahead” of us: the permanence-immortality of organic life in one way or another, either in fossils or in the ground where “[i]t rained / mud squash / willow leaves / in the eaves / Old sunflower / you bowed / to no one / but Great Storm / of Equinox” (Niedecker 2002, 257). These last lines make clear Niedecker’s privileging of the natural through the image of the old sunflower, which proudly asserts its grandeur in yielding to no one but a great event such as the equinox. “Wintergreen Ridge” falls under Wendy Wheeler’s “biosemiotic” concept, whereby the “the natural world is perfused with signs, meanings, and purposes which are material and which evolve” (2011, 279). Furthermore, all material manifestations become indeed part of a “web teeming with meanings” (2011, 270). Inevitably, this is the process of interaction in everything that Niedecker describes and reflects upon. Interestingly, readers learn about organic life and its connection with human life from a non-anthropocentric perspective. Lee Upton qualifies the stanzas of this poem as “sliding”: “worked over to appear swayed by currents of meaning” (2005, 36). Certainly, the lines figuratively intersect the human logos (poetic language) and the natural world, reenacted as a meaningful and active entity. Definitely, Niedecker’s poem narrates the story of her journey in

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its convergence with the immanent and contingent elements, deeming both equally significant. According to Iovino and Oppermann: The emerging dynamics of matter and meaning, body and identity, being and knowing, nature and culture, bios and society are therefore to be examined and thought not in isolation from each other, but through one another, matter being an ongoing process of embodiment that involves and mutually determines cognitions, social constructions, scientific practices, and ethical attitudes. In this perspective, there is no simple juxtaposition or mirroring between nature and culture, but a combined “mesh”. (2014, 5) In other words, the mutual interdependence of social discourse and biological condition is embodied in the material reality surrounding us, whether in the form of plants, mountains, oceans, or animals, and all are relevant for our intellectual and emotional understanding of life. Lorine Niedecker’s poetry exemplifies this idea quite thoroughly, although we also come across it in some of her prose texts, for instance in the handwritten notes she drafted while researching for her poem “Lake Superior”,7 where we can read the following self-explanatory excerpt: A rock is made of minerals constantly on the move and changing from heat, cold and pressure. The journey of the rock is never ended. In every tiny part of any living thing are materials that once were rock that turned to soil. These minerals are drawn out of the soil by plant roots and the plant used them to build leaves, stems, flowers and fruits. Plants are eaten by animals. In our blood is iron from plants that draw it out of the soil. Your teeth and bones were once coral. The water you drink has been in clouds over the mountains of Asia and in waterfalls of Africa. The air you breathe has swirled thru places of the earth that no one has ever seen. Every bit of you is a bit of the earth and has been on many strange and wonderful journeys over countless millions years. (1996, 311) Niedecker elaborates on the active and agentic power of nature, of material beings ranging from rock to plant, from animal to human being. The 7 This poem was first published with the title of “Lake Superior Country” in the journal Arts in Society in 1967, and later included in her book North Central (1968).

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interconnectedness among them implies an interdependence as well, including with human life, which would be impossible without the resources found in nature. Hence, the natural things she mentions are endowed with a dynamic capacity that is converted into a narrative dimension when these elements are assessed with a conscientious mind. Ultimately, Niedecker’s examination of the course of nature’s evolution provides insights into the human presence on this planet, and the role humans play within the biological mesh. Similar features illuminate the next poem under consideration in this essay. Written in the mid-1960s, “Paean to Place” exemplifies remarkably well Niedecker’s engagement with the narrative power of nature. As a matter of fact, this poem tells the story of both her own and her parents’ lives. Described by Niedecker as a “kind of In Memoriam of my father and mother and the place I’ve never seemed really to get away from” (qtd. Penberthy 1993, 78), the poem’s autobiographical tone is introduced in the first stanza. The poetic voice refers to the watery element as essential to her life, and the relevance of water is immediately revealed in the epigraph that begins the text: And the place was water Fish fowl flood Water lily mud My life (2002, 261) Niedecker’s contextualization of her life within the natural environment marks the poem’s adherence to the concepts of cycle and recurrence, typical features of water itself. Iovino and Oppermann’s material-narrative perspective sheds light on this poem’s account of how nature can significantly and actively determine someone’s life. Beyond a teleological view, the poem presents the physical context in terms that resonate with material ecocriticism’s emphasis on the internal relations among all living things and this reciprocity foregrounds the narrative agency of nature, which is translated into specific formal features in the poem. For example, its five-line stanza pattern resembles the flowing of water, which is mentioned directly 13 times throughout the poem. According to Jenny Penberthy, the five-line technique emphasizes that “the elements of the poem only acquire full meaning in relation to one another as the parts begin to coalesce” (1993, 77). It is precisely the watery element as a material reality that projects the expressive dimension of continual flowing in the poem. Filled with terms related to water—such as flood, swale, swamp, marsh, lake, afloat, waterglass, streams,

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to name just a few—this composition equates human life process, movement, and evolution.8 Thus, these concepts appear in the text and as texts, mirroring the flowing of water in a similar manner to the way the lines run over from one stanza to the next. Elizabeth Robinson points out that this poem is “patterned by a recurring movement of rises and sinkings” (2008, 125), and we might add that this feature resonates with the author’s life experience. By tying together life and landscape, Niedecker declares agency a property inherent in nature, and in so doing she rejects the human hubris implicit in placing human subjectivity above nonhuman existence. On the contrary, her text acknowledges the inexorable influence of the physical surroundings on the life of human beings. Hence, accounting for someone’s life without referring to the environment’s effects on it proves to be an incomplete task. As Robinson argues: “Though she is divulging autobiographical material, Niedecker is also continually subverting the usual hierarchies of subject and object, especially when the landscape becomes the agent which acts upon its hapless inhabitants” (2008, 126). This transgression of the power structure—subject over object—suggested by Robinson is clearly conveyed in the following stanzas, where Niedecker addresses the environmental determinism of Black Hawk Island on both her parents and herself: in the leaves and on water My mother and I born in swale and swamp and sworn to water My father thru marsh fog sculled down from high ground saw her face at the organ bore the weight of lake water and the cold— 8 Margot Peters offers important information to understand the relevance of water in Niedecker’s life: “Blackhawk Island is not an island but a peninsula accessible during Lorine’s childhood by a single dirt road. On the north side, farmland gave way to frog swamp, then Mud Lake. On the south, farms sloped to the Rock River, which widened upstream, eating away at low banks until the peninsula became a point where the river flowed into Lake Koshkonong. Just as Blackhawk Island is not an island, Lake Koshkonong is not a lake but 10,460 acres of river spilling over its flood plain, at a maximum depth of eleven feet” (2011, 8).

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he seined for carp to be sold that their daughter might go high on land to learn Saw his wife turn deaf and away She who knew boats and ropes no longer played (2002, 261-262) Niedecker’s elliptical constructions and linguistic economy9 largely evoke the stark life both she and her parents led, spent on the verge of economic need, with scarce resources and a meagre budget, always fearing the potential flooding of the lake and the destruction of their home. The author’s spare punctuation and the obvious use of enjambment might also be interpreted as further reminders of the unpredictable character of the natural surroundings. These provided very little income to the family, despite her father’s efforts to earn money so that his daughter could go to school or, more importantly, just move to solid ground where life was stable and safe. And yet, Niedecker’s attitude is serene and peaceful, without resentment. In this sense, Robinson observes that “Paean to Place” shows Niedecker “ever at work to create a precarious equilibrium within an unsteady world” (2008, 125). Likewise, Rachel B. DuPlessis holds that “for [Niedecker] the triumph lies in being precisely in nature and making a spiritual adjustment to its designs” (2008, 167). Rather than resisting and fighting against the threatening natural milieu in Black Hawk Island, Niedecker’s recollection shows a placid acceptance of the power of nature to impose its conditions. Thus, her poem reveals that the material world she describes is both agentic and self-representational, not dependent on human intervention to make sense out of it. Niedecker seems to subscribe to Wendy Wheeler’s theory that “[m]atter [...] is not merely a passive substratum, but a meaningbearing field of agency” (2014, 70). In other words, the physical environment contributes to articulating her life in terms that also serve for its poetical reenactment. Moreover, Niedecker’s memories display an emotional response 9 They are especially visible in the omission of some grammatical terms such as “were” before “born” or that of “he” before “bore” and “saw.”

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to how life within this natural context affected other people, for example her mother: I mourn her not hearing canvasbacks their blast-off rise from the water Not hearing sora rail’s sweet spoon-tapped waterglass— descending scale— tear-drop-little Did she giggle as a girl? (2002, 263) Niedecker’s mother’s deafness and resulting incapacity to hear the sounds of nature—along with the emotional wound provoked by her estrangement from her husband—further narrate the story of her precarious life, both materially and emotionally. Her father’s life was equally conditioned by the physical surroundings, which achieve narrative significance beyond the literal: He could not —like water bugs— stride surface tension He netted Loneliness As to his bright new car my mother—her house next his—averred: A hummingbird can’t haul (2002, 264) It is well known that Niedecker’s parents had an unhappy marriage. Rachel B. DuPlessis defines it as an “atrophied, angry bond” (2008, 162), and goes even further to hold that the second stanza above contains a metaphorical reference to the lover of Niedecker’s father: “[t]he father is criticized (in the mother’s voice) for his hummingbird-like useless car, a car that is a trope for his other woman, part of the Niedecker family ruin and hurt” (2008, 168). This veiled allusion to the family problems, despite the pain involved, shows Niedecker’s frustration at the almost squalid conditions of her life. However, her

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standpoint is not that of the creator placed above and in control of the circumstances. As Rachel B. DuPlessis observes, this poem is “a critique of the romantic lyric and a critique of sublimity” (2008, 169), containing “a refusal of the romantic ego position” (2008, 170). Hence, it could be argued that she proposes a non-anthropocentric paradigm: rather than locating herself over the natural world, she construed her life and poetry on an equal standing with the physical surroundings, inserting them into her poetical consciousness and recognizing the inspirational impulse behind them. Likewise, the text reveals that “materiality projects a lively impetus” (Oppermann 2014, 29) to her work and is closely integrated into her poetical outlooks. In this sense, Niedecker’s poetics agrees again with Wendy Wheeler’s conceptualization of biosemiotics, especially with respect to the following statement: [A]ll life, not just human life and culture, is semiotic and interpretive. Not only does this put humans and human poiesis and techne back in nature where they belong as evolutionary developments, but it also erases the false sharp modern distinction between mind and body, nature and nurture, and materialism and idealism. (2014, 69) In many of Niedecker’s poems readers find the blending of mind and body, while nature and culture are simultaneously conceived as mutually enlivening entities, and, ultimately, there is no functional distinction between material reality and the ideas that humans attach to it. The poet’s position as an individual woman within this realm reinforces the notion of a human-nature dynamics that comes into being as “an ongoing process of intra-acting agencies” (Oppermann 2014, 26). It is no wonder, then, that this text is entitled “Paean to Place” since the word paean is etymologically related to a song of triumph, praise, joy or thanksgiving dedicated to Paean—known in Greek mythology as the healer of the gods. Eventually, the word became associated with Apollo Paion, god of poetry, prophecy, and light.10 Thus, Niedecker is clearly paying 10 In A New Classical Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, Mythology, and Geography we read a useful definition of “paean”: “Paean, that is, the healer is, according to Homer, the designation of the physician of the Olympian gods, who heals, for example, the wounded Mars (Ares) and Pluto (Hades). After the time of Homer and Hesiod, the word “paean” became a surname of Aesculapius, the god who had the power of healing. The name was, however, used also in the more general sense of deliverer from any evil or calamity, and was thus applied to Apollo and Thanatos, or Death, who are conceived as delivering men from the pains and sorrows of life. [...] From Apollo himself the name Paean was transferred to the song dedicated to him, that is, to hymns chanted to Apollo for the purpose of averting an evil” (Smith 1862, 608).

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homage to her place, celebrating its deep beauty and regenerating energy. The bond between poet and place reveals an intense reciprocity and allows for a more nuanced expression of Niedecker’s self. As Patrick Barron argues: “Physical surroundings, the act of perception, and concentrated reverie or meditation, begin the poetic process, from some intersection of the natural and built world, to the interiority of the poet, and back again to surroundings” (2016, 30). Niedecker’s self-portrait is embedded in the physical context that witnessed her growth as woman and poet. Her subjective perception was never detached from the outside world and this rationale lies behind some formal aspects of the poem, with the heavy use of alliteration as a case in point. For instance, the following lines evoke Niedecker’s outdoors locations, where natural sounds occur everywhere: I grew in green slide and slant of shore and shade Child-time—wade thru weeds Maples to swing from Pewee-glissando sublime slime— song Grew riding the river Books at home-pier Shelley could steer as he read I was the solitary plover a pencil for a wing-bone From the secret notes I must tilt upon the pressure execute and adjust In us sea-air rhythm

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‘We live by the urgent wave of the verse’ (2002, 264-265) The alliterative expressions with the /s/ sound in the first stanza—“slide”, “slant”, “shore”, “shade”—along with those with /s/ and /l/ in the second stanza—“sublime”, “slime”—and with those of /r/—“grew”, “riding”, “river”— and /s/—“Shelley”, “steer”—in the third stanza, mark the human presence in fusion with nature. Penberthy claims that Niedecker’s work “is distinguished by its attentive use of sound, a consequence perhaps of her poor eyesight and her experience of her mother’s deafness, but also of her immersion in the rich soundscape of Black Hawk Island” (2002, 2). It is precisely her mother’s incapacity to hear the birds’ sounds—see lines above—that made Niedecker reflect on the importance of sound in life, and, more importantly, in her poetry. The allusion to Shelley’s ability to steer and read concurrently introduces the topic of poetry, which is further developed in the next stanza through Niedecker’s self-description as a “solitary plover”, who sings secretly and modestly, which might refer to her relative anonymity as a poet throughout her lifetime. Rachel B. DuPlessis notes that the plover, “whose name comes from pleuvier—rain-bird or weeping one [...], has a short tail, rounded body and [...] is very pale and undistinguished in color” (2008, 168). She also points out that “[i]t is not hard to see these traits as mini-allegories for the poet herself” (2008, 168). Indeed, Niedecker seems to offer a self-deprecatory portrait that brings to mind Emily Dickinson’s lines “I was the slightest in the House / I took the smallest Room / At night my little Lamp and Book”, as well as “I never spoke—unless addressed / And then ‘twas brief and low” (Dickinson 1951, 234). Both poets developed a tendency to belittle themselves, and yet they found in poetry the means to achieve selfconfidence.11 In Niedecker’s case, her self-effacing stance is dubious, for she asserted herself in writing and shaped a poetic universe ruled by her singular sensitivity. Despite the pressures received, Niedecker always managed to detect the right sound and address the right thought. She was able to execute and adjust her verses by means of a naturally infused rhythm, projecting the urgent and, consequently, vital impulse of poetry. DuPlessis identified, via Penberthy,12 the origin of Niedecker’s lines “[w]e live by the urgent wave / of the verse” (2002, 265) as a phrase modified from a sentence in Robert Duncan’s essay “Towards an Open 11 For further details about the parallels between Emily Dickinson and Lorine Niedecker, see Marjorie Perloff’s 1990 essay “Canon and Loaded Gun: Feminist Poetics and the Avant-Garde”. 12 DuPlessis thanks Penberthy for providing her with this information: “Jenny Penberthy identified the source in Duncan for me; I am very grateful to her for this help” (DuPlessis 2008, 178).

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Universe”.13 Niedecker’s lines are significantly altered to convey a more intimate harmony between body and mind, poet and nature. This is confirmed by a new alliterative expression, this time with the sound /w/—“we”, “wave”, “verse”— which reinforces the sounding quality of Niedecker’s poetry as an echo of its impregnation in the environment. A further remark by Robert Duncan in the same essay seems to fit in with Niedecker’s poetics: “The materials of the poem— the vowels and consonants—are already structured in their resonance, we have only to listen and to cooperate with the music we hear” (Duncan 2008, 7). From this point of view, Niedecker’s self emerges in complete affinity with the physical place—no matter how detrimental or adverse—and she accepts it in full: O my floating life Do not save love for things Throw things to the flood ruined by the flood Leave the new unbought— all alone in the end— water (2002, 268) Again, the watery element metaphorically echoes Niedecker’s imbalanced and precarious life in Black Hawk Island, where she had few things to hold on to. Being always exposed to varied menaces—flooding, loss or ruin of things, loneliness—her life was as unpredictable as water. Despite the fact that she was hardly buoyed up by its scarce resources, Niedecker found in her place the élan vital she needed for the configuration of her particular poetics: “I possessed / the high word” (2002, 269), she claims in another line, showing that she was at least certain of her art’s worth. The concluding stanzas foreground once more to what extent Niedecker’s life was coupled with water: On this stream My moonnight memory washed of hardships maneuvers barges thru the mouth 13 Robert Duncan’s exact words read: “Amoebic intelligences, dwelling in the memorial of tidal voice, they arouse in our awake minds a spell, so that we let our awareness go in the urgent wave of the verse” (2008, 2).

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of the river They fished in beauty It was not always so In Fishes red Mars rising rides the sloughs and sluices of my mind with the persons on the edge (2002, 269) These last lines hint at the narrative power of nature both literally and figuratively. As DuPlessis states, “[t]he ‘stream’ [of the first stanza] is both the literal river, and, figuratively, the poem written as a stream” (2008, 164). Thus, this river-text is endowed with a narrative agency that links the human presence to the natural surroundings and produces multiple meanings with literal and metaphorical connotations. The author’s memory, qualified as “moonnight” rather than the expected “moonlight”, works hard to emerge against life’s hardships, which might also be construed literally as “hard ships” in connection with “barges”. The “mouth” of the river might also refer to Niedecker’s literal mouth, in turn a synecdoche for her poetic voice. Indeed, Niedecker’s remembering process cannot be dissociated from the idea of suffering, but just like the other members of her family, she tried to find beauty in nature. She aspired to no more than to grasp something that could make up for her material deprivation. The tone in the last two stanzas betrays, if not outright anger, uneasiness by means of her allusion to Mars—the Roman god of war— taking hold of (riding) her mind and rebelling (rising) against her reality. She is merged with those other persons “on the edge”,14 probably a reference to her parents or other people, and especially to her own experience of vulnerability and exposure. Ultimately, Niedecker’s involvement in the physical world appears to be psychological, literal, and more importantly, narrative. As Elizabeth Robinson points out, “[b]y foregrounding that environment and making use of it as an imagistic and narrative resource, Niedecker tells a story of life’s vicissitudes: vicissitudes that are shared alike by the human and natural players in her story” (2008, 124). Indeed, Niedecker substantiates her reflective poetics relying on the agentic power of nature and identifying a common 14 DuPlessis provides a suggestive interpretation of these lines: “This edge is the literal bank of river or water, and figuratively it can mean those who act with zest and keenness (edgy), and those who are tense, unstable, vulnerable, enraged, or war (on edge)” (2008, 165).

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ground between herself and the physical place where she spent most of her life. In a similar vein, she epitomizes Serpil Oppermann’s notion of nature as “storied matter”, in so far as she construes it as independent of human intervention, though representational to achieve purposeful meanings.

Conclusion Lorine Niedecker’s poetics embraces the narrative-agentic power of nature and addresses it specifically in the poems analyzed in this essay. These texts reveal a dynamic perception of the outside reality that mirrors her state of mind, while at the same time they entail an understanding of matter “as an active participant in the world’s becoming” (Barad 2003, 803). “Wintergreen Ridge” and “Paean to Place” alike represent narrative articulations of the poet’s perception of and interaction with nature, as well as of literal episodic events of her life. Both shed light on a continual conversation between the human and material phenomena and call for an integrative perspective whereby matter appears in possession of a potential agency, capable of determining and narrating the story of the world beyond human supremacy. Following this rationale, Niedecker’s minimalist compositions remarkably exemplify the notion of material ecocriticism that world and text are intertwined, inside a mesh of innumerable affinities and connections.

Works Cited Barad, K. (2003). “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3), pp. 801–831. Barron, P. (2016). “Lorine Niedecker’s Paratactic Poetics of Interrelation.” The Midwest Quarterly 58(1), pp. 28–50. Caddel, R. (1996). “Consider: Lorine Niedecker and Her Environment.” In: J. Penberthy, ed., Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet, Orono: National Poetry Foundation / University of Maine, pp. 281–286. Cocola, J. (2016). Places in the Making: A Cultural Geography of American Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Corman, C. (1996). “Preface.” In: L. Niedecker, The Granite Pail: The Selected Poems of Lorine Niedecker, Frankfort: Gnomon, pp. v–vii. Cox, K. (1996). “The Longer Poems.” In: J. Penberthy, ed., Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet, Orono: National Poetry Foundation / University of Maine, pp. 303–310.

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Davidson, M. (2011). On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics. Middleton: Wesleyan University Press. Dickinson, E. (1951). The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. Duncan, R. (2008). A Selected Prose, edited by Robert J. Bertholf. New York: New Directions. DuPlessis, R.B. (2008). “Lorine Niedecker’s ‘Paean to Place’ and Its Reflective Fusions.” In: E. Willis, ed., Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, pp. 151–182. Hayes, P.G. (1996). “‘At the Close-Someone’: Lorine’s Marriage to Al Millen.” In: J. Penberthy, ed., Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet, Orono: National Poetry Foundation / University of Maine, pp. 65–77. Heller, M. (2005). “Imagining Durable Works: Lorine Niedecker’s ‘Wintergreen Ridge.’” In: Uncertain Poetries: Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry, and Poetics, Cambridge: Salt, pp. 101–105. Iovino, S. and Oppermann, S. (2012). “Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency, and Models of Narrativity.” Ecozon@ 3(1), pp. 75–91. Iovino, S. and Oppermann, S. (2014). “Introduction. Stories Come to Matter.” In: S. Iovino and S. Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 1–17. Merriam Webster Dictionary. (n.d.) “Ambrosia.” http://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/ambrosia. Accessed Jun 26, 2019. Niedecker, L. (1986). “Between Your House and Mine”: The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman, 1960 to 1970, edited by Lisa Pater Faranda. Durham: Duke University Press. Niedecker, L. (1996). “Lake Superior Country.” In: J. Penberthy, ed., Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet, Orono: National Poetry Foundation / University of Maine, pp. 311–326. Niedecker, L. (2002). Collected Works, edited by Jenny Penberthy. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Oppermann, S. (2014). “From Ecological Postmodernism to Material Ecocriticism: Creative Materiality and Narrative Agency.” In: S. Iovino and S. Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 21–36. Penberthy, J, ed., (1993). Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky, 1931–1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Penberthy, J. (2002). “Life and Writing.” In: L. Niedecker, Collected Works, Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 1–11. Perloff, M. (1990). “Canon and Loaded Gun: Feminist Poetics and the Avant-Garde.” In: Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp. 31–35. Peters, M. (2011). Lorine Niedecker: A Poet’s Life. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

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Robinson, E. (2008). “Music Becomes Story: Lyric and Narrative Patterning in the Work of Lorine Niedecker.” In: E. Robinson, ed., Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, pp. 113–130. Smith, W. (1862). A New Classical Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, Mythology, and Geography. New York: Harper. The Ridges Sanctuary Webpage. (n.d). http://www.ridgessanctuary.org/landpreservation/founders/. Accessed Jun 26, 2019. Upton, L. (2005). Defensive Measures: The Poetry of Niedecker, Bishop, Glück, and Carson. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Wheeler, W. (2011). “The Biosemiotic Turn: Abduction; or, the Nature of Creative Reason in Nature and Culture.” In: A. Goodbody and K. Rigby, eds., Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, pp. 270–282. Wheeler, W. (2014). “Natural Play, Natural Metaphor, and Natural Stories: Biosemiotic Realism.” In: S. Iovino and S. Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 67–79.

chapter 4

Of Lyric Temporality and Materiality: Alice Oswald’s Environmental Poetics Heather H. Yeung

Abstract This essay examines the interconnectivity of poetic materiality and temporality, and landscape and voice, in the work of the British poet Alice Oswald. With attention to recent developments in lyric studies and ecopoetry, and through an examination of Oswald’s poetic outputs to date, the essay reconnects the material and embodied environments articulated in Oswald’s work with her poetically self-conscious attention to lyric form and voice, arguing for a more complex mode of reading and understanding Oswald’s environmental poetics.

Keywords Alice Oswald – British poetry – contemporary poetry – ecocriticism – ecopoetry – lyric – landscape – new lyric studies – poetic temporality

Over the last two decades, British poet Alice Oswald’s poetic production has demonstrated a deep engagement with an articulation of the environment, as well as a wide-ranging experimentation with the ways in which voice in poetry is figured and configured, and how poetic time is charted. From The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996) to Nobody (2018) the reader encounters a poetry whose materiality and temporality, or textual and vocalic spatialization, is complex, and which both draws on and questions preconceptions about the lyric and narrative, personal and environmental, dimensions of poetry. By examining the way in which landscape is configured through voice and vision in Oswald’s work, and by tracing some of the “songlines” and “patterns of flow” of her poetry, this essay seeks to reconnect the material and embodied environments of Oswald’s work with a poetic vision where lyric form and voice become “the locus for an experience of linguistic time” (Nowell Smith 2015, 162). A joint material and vocalic analysis of the poetry will show how Oswald’s © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004445277_005

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work self-consciously contests its relationship with time, with voice, and with space. Very often, for Oswald, there is only the water talking to us in the voice of amnesia asking the same question over and over and on his rock that poet shuffles about light-sleeping every so often answering back (Oswald and Tillyer 2018, 68) But who, really, answers? How mimetic is this waterlogged environment? The poet, or the figure of the poet, is a point of contact with but unsettled within the real and poetic environment. Voices (plural) are essential, as is their history, and this is configured in multiple ways. And from the multiple figures of lyric voice,1 a poetry arises which “gives itself by way of such figures, but [...] is encompassed wholly by none of them” (Nowell Smith 2015, 4), whose form “is audible in a rhythmic alternation between sound and sense, phonemic flow and lexical segmentation” (Blasing 2007, 91). This essay explores some of the modes in which Oswald’s work shows that there can be “no simple model” for lyric (Culler 2015, 349), no simple model for landscape poetry, nor indeed for the environment. Looking at Oswald’s poetic corpus from afar it is very easy, perhaps all too easy, to place her in a long line of “poets in a landscape”, of pastoral or nature poets, dating as far back as Horace’s “Bandusian Spring” or Virgil’s Eclogia, and running through the ecological experiments in personhood of Romanticism, to the present.2 The titles of Oswald’s Faber volumes up to 2010 and her collaboration with the artist Jessica Greenman appear to follow this logic of poetic expression of the English landscape: The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), Dart (2002), Woods, etc. (2005), A Sleepwalk on the Severn (2009), and Weeds and Wildflowers (2009). So, too does a past edited collection, The Thunder

1 Nowell Smith gives an inexhaustive but useful list: speechsound, voiceprint, style, authenticity, persona, possession, orality… (Nowell Smith 2015, 4). 2 I borrow the term “poets in a landscape” from Gilbert Highet’s influential 1957 study of the same title, whose aim was to “recall some of the greatest Roman poets, by describing the places they lived [...] evoking the essence of their work” (1957, 12), an uncomplicated aim which is continued into the present day in much criticism of poetry, in both biographical and ecocritical molds. See: Gilbert Highet, Poets in a Landscape (Hamish Hamilton, 1957 / Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959). An object-oriented antidote, however, which yet somehow demonstrates the importance of landscape and its articulations on and within poetic form may be found in Timothy Morton’s Ecology Without Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

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Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet (2005), in which Oswald’s introduction emphasizes the need to maintain the connection between earth to hand, and hand to sky (Oswald 2005b, x). In addition to this, Memorial (2011) and Nobody (2018) are both book-length poetic interactions with Homer’s great war narrative, the Iliad, and narrative of return, the Odyssey, respectively. Oswald is a poet, a gardener, a Classicist… With these titles, this information, it is both tempting and easy to read her poetry as a series of narratives of being-in-the-landscape, or as attempted anthropomorphic and/or mimetic representations of environment, hinting at the writer’s own “story” or connecting with the perceived subject matter at hand. All of these approaches are easily associated with a biographically-indebted narrative structure of reading; what Gérard Genette would call “a telling”, which gives “more or less the illusion of mimesis” (Genette 2004, 164).3 Yet, “lyric is often characterized as language cut off from worldly purpose” (Culler 2015, 129), and to draw solely on this mimetic, nature-bound, narrative equivalence would be to underestimate the fundamentally lyric nature of the poetics at hand and the manner in which ideas of “nature” or “environmental” poetry have changed in a critical and cultural lexicon in recent years,4 foregrounding more readily an interrogation of what Marcella Durand calls the problematic act of “defining the relationship of the observer to the observed [in] a poetry linked to its environs” (Durand 2010, 201), and questioning any “ecomimetic illusion of immediacy” (Morton 2007, 36). Indeed, entangled in this ethical problematic, Oswald has claimed that she is not a “nature poet”,5 and although the majority of the titles of her volumes, even of discrete poems, draw on elements of landscape, the environments they engage with are already subverted at this titular level: the “gap-stone stile” hosts an unexplained non-anthropic phenomenon, or “thing”; Dart contains no geographical indicator that this is a river, so the alternative meanings of the word are at play; 3 It is useful to bear in mind at this point that Genette’s “telling” has a particularly logical vectoral bent; it is made up of enunciation, reason, and narrative trajectory. 4 John Danvers writes against the overtly representational in the academic criticism of Oswald’s poetry, opposing, in his argument, Oswald’s poetic with the “highly coloured subjectivity” of the landscapes of the Romantic poetics. See esp. John Danvers (2004), pp. 204-215. In the first nearly two decades of the new millennium, a series of studies recuperating “Lyric” have emerged, particularly within the American academy, most significant of which are perhaps Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s 2007 Lyric Poetry: The Pleasure and Pain of Words, Robert von Hallberg’s 2008 Lyric Powers, Jonathan Culler’s 2015 Theory of the Lyric, as well as anthologies, such as 2014’s The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, and a special section, published in 2008, “The New Lyric Studies” in PMLA 123(1), pp. 181-234. 5 As early as 1996, Oswald has written: “I am not a nature poet, though I do write about the special nature of what happens to exist” (Oswald 1996b, n.pag.).

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“woods” are annexed by a Latinate gesture towards any possibility of continuation or expansion in “etc.”; nature and vocalic phenomena, as well as planetary ethics and address, are connected in The Thunder Mutters; the Severn river is not walked, but sleepwalked; the botanical book of etchings, Weeds and Wildflowers, prioritizing neither one nor the other, problematizes preconceptions of the natural world, taking on a celebratory naturalist’s perception similar to Richard Mabey’s which writes against the cultural, Linnaean, conception wherein “plants become weeds when they obstruct our plans, or our tidy maps of the world” (Mabey 2010, 1). Oswald’s poetry thus articulates a rich spatial presence which is not just of nature or landscape, and which is presented to us in a series of poetic events and ethical problems, which are spatialised through the figure of voice and the figuring of text. As a counterpoint to Genette’s “telling”, this essay poses a definition of lyric poetry, by Jonathan Culler, as a lens through which to more productively read Oswald’s poetry—the “production of an apparently phenomenal world through the figure of voice” (Culler 1985, 50). Oswald’s poetry bears distinctive witness to the human and nonhuman, living and non-living systems of the natural world in a polymorphic, polyrhythmic, polytemporal melange of multi-textured patterns of sound, image, and sense wherein voice serves a mediating function. Looking more closely at the volumes listed above, poetry, in foregrounding vocal expression whilst also manipulating the white space of the page in order to do so, becomes “a foundry of sounds” (Oswald 2002, 23), a “havoc of words not breathless at all” (Oswald 2009, 33), and “an entirely new structure” (Oswald 2005a, 3). Following this, in Oswald’s more recent volumes of poetry, Memorial (2011), Falling Awake (2016), and Nobody (2018), the reader encounters a translation of “atmosphere” rather than plot, which is at once “vocative” and “invocative” (Oswald 2011, 1-2), and an extension of the experiments in vocalization and semi-consciousness of Dart and Sleepwalk, respectively. Falling Awake contains the performance sequence “Tithonus: 46 minutes in the life of the dawn”, whose reading begins in darkness, and whose textual presence is structured around a timeline of the English midsummer dawn (Oswald 2016, 43-81); Nobody’s text fades out, from black, grey, to blank by the end of the long poem, whose language is a counterpoint to a sequence of abstract watercolours by celebrated British landscape artist William Tillyer, and where the trees, stones, fresh- and salt-water soundscapes of previous volumes are again reprised. In Oswald’s poetry the reader encounters a question of vocalic and textual spatialization, where vocal expression can provide a “dynamic grammar of orientation” (Connor 2000, 6) radically unlike the narrative or representational poetry of the “poets in a landscape” mould, where polyphony refuses any

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unproblematized instantiation of the lyric “I”, and where concrete materiality— of traditional and innovative poetic forms—makes space unfold in ways which resist a simplified environmental expression. The reader is invited not to read but to listen to or observe themselves reading—to use reading, as Marcella Durand writes, as “another form of observation—of exiting the I and entering the you, the world, the other, even as the I is changed through this interaction” (Durand 2010, 201); to articulate the shifting, paradoxical, opposition of the lyric “I call I call” with its echo of “not I not I”. This essay advances the idea that it is precisely for these reasons that Oswald’s poetry—both long and shortform—resists narrative, presenting us instead with examples of a lyric poesis which follows Jonathan Culler’s phenomenological formulation, above, and which demonstrates to us the ways in which the poetic articulation of the natural world is one of multiple voices and points of view. But what form to give this complex lyric production? It is certainly not a narrative form, in the mimetic mould of Genette, or according to Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s formulation of narrative as a “verbal act consisting of someone telling someone else that something happened” (Herrnstein Smith 2004, 111). This, in spite of the fact that many of Oswald’s poems begin with an invocative figure, or even a ballad-like address, foregrounding above all the “telling” of a tale. Indeed, the use of conventional or received poetic form and address persists across Oswald’s oeuvre, but is more often than not rendered complex and polyvocal through the use of paratext (see: “Tree Ballad”, in Woods etc., the productive use of marginalia in Dart, the time-line of “Tithonus”, even the images of Weeds and Wild-Flowers and Nobody), or made into a self-conscious voicing between human, animal, and natural world mediated through the devices of the received convention (see: the ballad-prayer “Seabird’s Blessing”, in Woods etc., the mirror-sonnet “Two Voices”, in Falling Awake, or A Sleepwalk on the Severn’s co-existence as poem and play). The phenomenal world of Oswald’s poetry is rich, and eschews the linear simplicity of narrative, which means the poem acts as a repository for theme or metaphor which supports narrative progression, either of the “tale telling” or of the monolithic lyric “I”. Instead, there is a complexity of textual and vocalic innovation, as well as a dedicated engagement with classical precedent and nature-ethics; combined, these are the structural principles which support the “telling” aspect of the poetry; its thematic, vocalic, lyric, and metaphorical progressions. Some of this complexity is latent in the poet’s own description of her book-length poem, Dart, as the poet draws on the discourses of map-making, of oral history, and of community engagement with the land in the tradition of aboriginal songlines, in describing the work as a “soundmap [...] a songline from source to sea” (Oswald 2002, vii), and obliquely answered by the single, unpunctuated line

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which occupies the sixteenth page of Nobody: “How does it start the sea has endless beginnings” (Oswald and Tillyer 2018, 16). And it is such a complexity of dialogic and topological resonance that informs both discrete poems and link poems across the breadth of Oswald’s work.6 Indeed, many if not all of Oswald’s poems create dialogue and work in dialogue with each other. This resonance and response are not only created through speech patterns of call-and-response, but also in textual variations across works. Resonances occur within poems and across volumes: voices, images, conversations, and structures repeat and build upon each other. The poems “River” and “Psalm to Sing in a Canoe” from Woods etc. contain a germ of the form of Dart, just as Dart’s “sleepwalker” anticipates the dreamscape of A Sleepwalk on the Severn, the meditative naming of Memorial, and the ordering principles of Falling Awake. Woods etc. contains a sequence of stone poems which demonstrate the differing vocalic and narrative principles that Oswald’s poetry combines: the pure vocalization and originary poetic inspiration of song (“Song of a Stone”), the “I”-questioning tale-telling nature of ballad and history (“Autobiography of a Stone”), and the world of physical action and interaction (“The Stone Skimmer”). This sequence is built out of The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile’s central stone-poems (“The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile”, and “When a Stone was Wrecking his Country”), both of which are concerned with the ethics of human engagement with the environment and experiment with giving voice to the nonhuman, as well as carrying with them echoes of the dreams of Dart’s stonewaller and the structure and way of reading Dart itself: “the whole earth tipping, the hills shifting up and down, shedding stones as if everything’s a kind of water” (Oswald 2002, 34). Aspects of this intentionally blurred estuarine perspective, and the differing perspectives of Woods’s stone sequence are repeated, echoed, and elaborated in later volumes—the “several registers” of Sleepwalk on the Severn (Oswald 2009, 1); the stony death of Amphimachos in Memorial; the “dried up” river-language of “Dunt” (Falling Awake). “The Melon Grower” (The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile) and “Head of a Dandelion” (Woods etc.) anticipate Weeds and Wildflowers. The poem “Tree Ghosts” (Woods etc.) and Dart’s concrete “swimmer” section both demonstrate a structural play. This structural play highlights an idea of (im)permanence of inscription, working towards two oppositional conclusions. These oppositional conclusions can be seen in the solidity of the naming and memory-work of Memorial, and the literal textual fade, or vanishing, at the end of “Tithonus”, 6 I have written more overtly on the spatial logic of dialogism and its “complex feedback loop”, with particular attention to Oswald’s poetry in a chapter on Oswald in Yeung (2015), Spatial Engagement with Poetry.

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and Nobody’s bold and frequent use of completely blank pages. Every poem in a different way vocalises the question and questions the idea of being, asking “who’s this”, and giving the answer “I am”, where the “I” is ever multiple, ever questioned. Indeed, it is with these questions, a dialogue posed between walker and landscape, that Dart opens. In addition to a call-and-response of multiple voices—a distinctly dialogic activity—is the topological feeling of the poems. As each of Oswald’s poems vocalises the idea or question of being, it also attempts to demonstrate a possible location of this being. Dart and A Sleepwalk on the Severn take as their broad structural models the topology of the rivers themselves. But equally both these long poems and the shorter poems in Woods etc. present us with a moment, or sequence of moments of vision and voice that, rather than being representational, manipulate text and landscape to create a vocalic utterance which occupies a lyric, rather than a narrative, present. Where, in “traditional narrative”, or even in many “traditional” readings of the lyric poem (as dramatic monologue or narrative utterance), the enunciating “I” is a singular cardinal point, representing stability and indicating the singular means by and through which the poem may be navigated, in Oswald’s poetry the first person pronoun is at best contested, and in the most part split and multiple. The “I” (indicating both emplacement and point of utterance) of Oswald’s poems gives way and at the same time occurs alongside its homonym eye, our real and metaphorical organ of poetic vision. This “I”/eye is both fragmented and multiple; it is affective and “kaleidoscopic” (Kristeva 2010, n.pag.), following and vocalising the poem’s “soundmap” or “songline” (Oswald 2002, vii). The “I”/eye indicates at once the “foregrounding of language in its material dimensions” and the lyric present’s “effects of voice and presence” (Culler 2009, n.pag.), mediating “the phonemic system and the sense system” (Blasing 2007, 91). Dialogic activity and topological feeling are intertwined in the structural principles that underlie Oswald’s poetic. These structural principles are interlinked, and combine in poetry the figures of voice, vision, and landscape that are so important for Oswald, which are akin to Paul Celan’s construction of the poetic act as comprised of dialogue, attention, and perception.7 The first of these structural principles can be found in Oswald’s short preface to Dart, in her glancing reference to the aboriginal tradition of the songline. John Danvers writes that Dart demonstrates “the same resonance for names and naming, for finding the right word, for crafting a song that has the intonation and music of the landscape, [... of] any indigenous people who give voice to a particular place, articulating the intelligences that inhabit the locality, picturing the mindscape that is immanent in landscape” (Danvers 2004, 206-207). This 7 See Paul Celan (1978), “Der Meridian”, trans. Jerry Glenn, Chicago Review 29(3), pp. 29-40.

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is true of Dart’s emphasis on oral history as a structuring principle,8 but the indigenous tradition that Oswald draws on in Dart has a more specific formal borrowing. Also known as “dreaming-tracks”, “footprints of the ancestors”, or “the ways of the law”, “songlines” are an aboriginal tradition of interlinked poetry, song, walking, travel, and landscape. Seasonally undertaken by different individuals in different directions, “songlines” are a ritualistic re-enactment of variant aboriginal creation myths. Bruce Chatwin writes that “Aboriginal Creation Myths tell of the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over the continent in Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path—birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes—and so singing the world into existence” (Chatwin 1987, 2), and in fact this practice of vocalic landscaping occurs even to the present day. And thus there exists an analogue between the songline tradition and Oswald’s figures (and voices) of water, stone, and the moon, which, given voice(s) in the poetry, call into being their human and nonhuman inhabitants. The songline tradition is in many ways rewritten in Dart’s history of composition, through the poet’s own walking and collecting of voices, names, and landmarks, from the landscape of the river Dart.9 A Sleepwalk on the Severn’s and Tithonus’s dreamscapes are born from the enunciated and enunciating space of the aboriginal songlines’s dreamtime; Memorial and Nobody, from voices that haunt both riverbank and the Homeric past. The “songline” not only calls its population into being, but also represents the space between given sites, thus functioning as a poetic (or vocalic) alternative to the map or compass. Parts of songlines (rhythms, names, images) may be shared between members of different tribes or from different areas. The songline is a fluid and changeable rather than static and historical tradition. There is no narrative to a songline, rather, it is a calling into being, a demonstration of the landscape as voice. Geometrically represented, songlines look like “an interlocking network of lines” (Chatwin 1987, 62), but practically they create meaningful boundaries, landmarks, and intersections vocally rather than geographically. Space, in the songline tradition, is a system of verbal exchange rather than of graphic representation.10 This way of formulating and 8 The poem has as one paratext a long list of people, or voices, to whom Oswald is indebted for their “significant contributions” to the poem (Oswald 2002, v). 9 See Oswald’s preface to Dart: “This poem is made from the language of people who live and work on the Dart. Over the past two years I’ve been recording conversations with people who know the river. [...] [However], these do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings” (Oswald 2002, n.pag.). 10 For a fuller discussion of the politics of these two variant concepts of space (the graphic and graphemic), see Graham Huggan, (2008) Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies, Liverpool: Liverpool UP, pp. 63-64.

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performing space is an analogue for Oswald’s topologies of voice, vision, and landscape, the latter of which is built out of the complex figure of voice rather than from a desire for representation or narrativization, and which constantly questions the ideas and the representations of being: why is this jostling procession of waters, its many strands overclambering one another, so many word-marks, momentary traces in the wind-script of the world’s voices why is it [...] why is this flickering water with its blinks and side-long looks with its language of oaks and clicking of slatey brooks why is this river not ever able to leave until it’s over? (Oswald 2002, 42-43) The second structural principle which I now wish to align with Oswald’s poetic is that of patterns of flow, and in particular, the flow patterns that are delineated, investigated, and explained in Theodor Schwenk’s ecosystemic book of 1965 Sensitive Chaos. Schwenk writes of the formation of any living being as “a multitude of sources, sinks and currents [which] work together to create the living form. This interplay is like the diversity of an orchestra with its instruments, that have their entries and their rests and are moulded into a single ‘body of sound’ by an invisible conductor” (Schwenk 1965, 65). As with the aboriginal songlines, Oswald has chosen another poetic model which links sound and space, and which is multiple in its singularity. Dart in particular (perhaps this is simply a virtue of its being Oswald’s longest work) borrows heavily from Sensitive Chaos. Schwenk’s “voice” (glossed on Dart as “Theodor Schwenke” [sic.]) may be found amongst the voices that comprise Dart, in one place marginally acknowledged, and in others not. But Schwenk’s philosophy, that all nature is subject to the theories of flow, may be found to create in Oswald’s poetry as much a structural pattern as do the aboriginal songlines, as well as contributing (as seen above) a voice. Schwenk writes, “the creation of form in any living substance is only thinkable if at one and the same place manifold movements can flow into, over, and through one another” (Schwenk 1965, 37). Another structural link between the topological and the vocalic. Form is created out of the convergence of multiplicity; flow, like the songlines of the aboriginal tribes, creates a network of crossing patterns, of “many strands overclambering one another” (Oswald

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2002, 42). And for Schwenk, the same flow patterns that can be traced in the movement of water and air (what he calls the world’s flowing forms), also helps sculpt the very form of our vocal cords and influences the movement of air and fluid through the human voice box, and through that, human (and indeed animal) vocal production, and even thought.11 Thus the vocalic and formal elements of the poetry may be linked. And indeed, what more appropriate formal progenitor for Oswald’s polyrhythmic, polyvocal, and multitextual poetic than Schwenk’s theorization of flow patterns? By building upon the three interlinked concepts (dialogue-landscape-flow), and the songline and flow pattern models that bridge them, it is easier, perhaps, to see how and why Alice Oswald’s poetry eschews narrative, in favour of a materially articulate lyric form and sentiment. Dialogue, landscape, and flow are thus a means by which the foregrounding in Oswald’s poetry of the multiple and phenomenal aspects of voice, vision, and address, can be read, and through which ideas of poetry and of being are connected.12 But it is the very nature of these things as presented to us in Oswald’s poetry through which the formal innovation also occurs. The ideas of voice worked through in Oswald’s poetry hinge on the multifaceted nature of the varied and variable enunciating “I”/eyes of the poem, and it is through this (or these) “I”/eye(s) that voice and vision, or dialogue, landscape, and flow, are mediated. The fluctuating nature of this “I”/eye is also a major means by which Oswald’s poetry resists categorisation as simply narrative utterance or poetry of landscape. This resistance takes places as much in the space of the page as it does in the voiced poem, and in privileging textual representation, vision, voice, and event over description and narrative, Oswald’s poetry works against more traditional formulations of

11 For the formation of the vocal chords through flow patterns, see Schwenk 1965, pp. 126132. Equally, with regard to the relationship of flow patterns to thought, Schwenk writes of “streaming wisdom”, where “the activity of thinking is essentially an expression of flowing movement [...] water and this spiritual activity of the human being belong together; the nature of one is the picture of the other” (1965, 97). This relationship is more complicated than simple metaphor due to its embodied as well as its linguistic reciprocity. And the language of this relationship is carried over into more recent thought, and even that directly concerning lyric poetry. See, for instance, the quotation from Blasing in the first paragraph of this essay. 12 Paul Celan, in “The Meridian”, makes a similar tripartite link between being and poetry. Poetry, for Celan, is the manifestation of being, and occurs through the feeling of one’s existence through the abilities to die, to relate to, and to perceive. The poetic act is an inherently non-narrative lyric one, and is comprised of dialogue, attention, and perception, and poetic art “consists of perceiving not representing” (Celan 1978, 29-40).

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the lyric poem as dramatic monologue or narrative art.13 And it is by tracing the development of the “figure of voice” in Oswald’s poetry (or, to rephrase this, by following the poetry’s songline), that the matter in which this distinctive poetic is composed may be seen, and through which a reader may engage affectively with the “apparently phenomenal world” that it creates (Culler 1985, 50). Dart begins not with the introduction of a distinctive subject but with a general sense of movement within a landscape. A set of questions is posed, formed out of a reaction to visual phenomena. This creates a verbal exchange, a dual encounter with voice and vision, landscape and dialogue: Who’s this moving alive over the moor? An old man seeking and finding a difficulty Has he remembered his compass his spare socks does he fully intend going over his knees off the military track from Okehampton? keeping his course through the swamp spaces and pulling the distance around his shoulders and if it rains, if it thunders suddenly where will he shelter looking round and all that lies to hand is his own bones? tussocks, minute flies, wind, wings, roots He consults his map. A huge rain-coloured wilderness. This must be the stones, the sudden movement, the sound of frogs singing in the new year. Who’s this issuing from the earth? The Dart, lying low in darkness calls out Who is it? trying to summon itself by speaking (Oswald 2002, 1)

13 See Culler (1983), The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p. 10. Culler is still insistent on recuperating the lyric from such readings, calling, in 2009, for “a capacious understanding of the lyric tradition which is not restricted either to the idea of a decontextualized expression of subjectivity [...] nor to the model of the dramatic monologue with a speaker whose situation, attitude, and goals we should novelistically reconstruct” (2009, n.pag.).

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In spite of the subject-matter of the dialogue, the voices at play in the first four verse paragraphs of Dart are geographically displaced. But as this opening section moves on, the marginalia indicates that our un-placed voices occur at the indeterminate source of the Dart, on Dartmoor: “the source of the Dart— Cranmere Pool on Dartmoor, seven miles from the nearest road” (Oswald 2002, 1) (alongside the verse paragraph beginning “and if it rains, if it thunders”). But as the topological indicators become stable, as the river itself is finally named in the main body of the poem, the number of voices increase, as does the indeterminacy of voice. Dart demonstrates the search and discovery of “a difficulty” (Oswald 2002, 2) that the old man character in these first lines articulates. In this “difficulty”, this landscape, the map, the walker and the voices move fluidly; the pronouns used are not indicative of a single, but of multiple subjects. Engaged in a reciprocal conversation, both parties using the first person pronoun, the boundaries between the speech of the walker and the landscape is porous, and at the same time the two voices also become entwined in the space that the poem is mapping. Not only does the walker “[pull] the distance” of the moor around his shoulders as if a cape, but he also keeps the Dart “folded in [his] mack pocket” (Oswald 2002, 2). As the bog, or the boggy source of the river, passively becomes a constituent part of the walker’s being, it also is endowed with voice and action. The walker will not let go of the Dart, and neither will the source of the Dart let go of the walker’s physical presence of affective engagement with the landscape: “I won’t let go of man [...] wanting his heart”. At the same time as the walker and the Dart become entwined in thought and action, a space of difference is created between them. This difference is the source of the river, a “secret buried in the reeds at the beginning of sound”, “trying to summon itself by speaking”, and answers to the later question that mirrors the one that opens the poem: “Who’s this issuing from the earth?”. Answering this question of emplacement, the landscape of the Dart’s source is called up through Dart’s sustained visual and aural observation of the progress through the landscape (all quotations, Oswald 2002, 2). The question and its answer, “who’s this...” also marks the establishment of a feeling of maintenance of width and progression in the poem, which is perpetuated by the prose conversation between river and walker about walking. While the river is haunted by man’s “horrible keep-time”, walking for the walker is less metronomic, “all I know... what I love” (Oswald 2002, 2). Walking provides a rhythmic stability apart from the “keep-time” of the pocket watch, and, at the same time, the poem’s form mirrors this thematic exposition of the rhythm of the walker contra and with the rhythm of the river. But in order to create the “phenomenal world” that Culler writes of in relation to the lyric poem, the form of the poem must also mirror these walking and flowing rhythms. As Dart

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progresses, the rhythms of questioning provide a certain rhythmic structure, as does the repetition of the first person pronoun. Recurring at different places in the line space, the I always carries with it a certain amount of insistence, and marks time in the poem, as well as the space on the page. I’ve done all the walks the Two Moors Way, the Tors, this long winding line the Dart this secret buried in reeds at the beginning of sound I won’t let go of man [...] at the centre of his own noise, clomping the silence in pieces and I I don’t know, all I know is walking. (Oswald 2002, 1-2) The “I” marks rhythm rather than a distinctive and singular subject matter. The blurring of the boundaries of subject-object relations is something that characterizes Oswald’s poetry, something which makes her poetic voice distinctive (in this instance, these relations are between the walker and the source of the river Dart). Whereas early criticism of Oswald’s poetry has read this blurring, and the resultant vocal multiplicity, as a lack of distinctive “voice”,14 it is precisely this apparent lack which animates the poems at hand. Formal innovation and the question of being are interlinked. Indeed, it is interesting to see how the often disembodied question “who’s this”, and its answering “I am”, repeats throughout Oswald’s oeuvre, giving form as well as a theme and counterpoint within the macro- and micro-structures of the poetry, through these rhythmical repetitions.15 The call-and-response relationship, in turn, animates the lyric landscape of Oswald’s verse. The very idea of landscape, Rachael Ziady DeLue writes, links the question of form and being; “landscape” as a concept marks an anthropocentric complicity within the environment, and at the same time blurs the subject-object relations in a similar way as operates in Oswald’s poetry:

14 For instance, Charles Bennett criticizes the poem due to this lack of narratorial presence and stability, stating “the voice which is absent is the voice we most need to hear: Oswald’s own” (Bennett 2002, 231). 15 For the former, see in particular Dart, the poem’s opening is “who’s this moving alive over the moor” (Oswald 2002, 1); for the latter, see in particular The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, in which the use (placing and enunciation) of the first person pronoun prefigures both the “I” play in Dart and the voices of Weeds and Wildflowers.

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The landscape is always ‘for us,’ since we construct it; but it seems to me that one of the things that a phenomenological reading allows us is to break down the subject-object relation, to break down the idea of landscape as a view. It is about lived experience, rather than ‘me-it,’ or self and other. That is one of the things the phenomenological has to offer: landscape as a thing that we live within. (DeLue et al. 2008, 104) Dialogue, as has been seen, links the landscape to the question of being. And to return momentarily to a comparison with the songline tradition, there can be observed a concept of landscape as “a thing that we live within”, where subject-object relations are complex. For one of Chatwin’s main sources on the songline tradition, “[a] song [...] was both map and direction-finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across the country” (Chatwin 1987, 14). As Schwenk writes, “the nature of one is the picture of the other” (Schwenk 1965, 97). The poems of Weeds and Wildflowers demonstrate this mixture of voice and vision, the complex interrelationship of subject and object relations. Each poem in the volume has a corresponding etching, but the correspondence between poem and etching is not always directly shown: the reader has to seek out and find the correspondences, as, very often, Greenman’s etchings will have a thematic, rather than botanical, correspondence to Oswald’s poetry. The etchings and the poems have separate indexes in the back of the volume, perhaps indicating the complexity of their relationship, as Oswald sees it: “two separate books [...] shuffled together” (Oswald and Greenman 2009, iii), of which the experience of reading generates “a slightly unsettling pleasure” (Oswald and Greenman 2009, iii). In her preface to Weeds Oswald writes that “what connects [the poems and the etchings] is their contention that flowers are recognisably ourselves elsewhere” (Oswald and Greenman 2009, iii); the poems of the volume link to the mapmaking process that addressed and subverted in Dart as the various prefaces to the volume also quote Aimé Cesaire: “the map of spring must forever be redrawn” (Oswald and Greenman 2009, i). Like Oswald Greenman writes of the volume’s composition in relation to the etching making process, that “the mirror-image aspect has some relevance to my relationship with Alice and her poems; varied but exact” (Oswald and Greenman 2009, iv). The poem “Narcissus” represents the “unsettling pleasure” of formal play on a more overtly poetic, linguistic, level. In the space of the volume, the poem is given to us twice, recto and verso, its first form as standard printing, its second from an etching by Jessica Greenman (Oswald and Greenman 2009, 26-27). However, the manner in which “Narcissus” is presented in the volume, twice,

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means that it works in dialogue with itself and its mythical (and botanical) subject matter. This is the only poem in the volume that has a textual rather than visual counterpart, thus complicating the already established ekphrastic relationship between the originary flower, image and text, vision and articulation (Oswald and Greenman 2009, 26-27).16 The connection between the two presentations of the poem has, as Greenman writes, a “mirror-image aspect”, and the relationship between the two “varied but exact” (Oswald and Greenman 2009, iv); “the nature of one is the picture of the other” (Schwenk 1965, 97). And again the same questions of being rise to the surface. Like “Narcissus”, “Snowdrop” presents etching and poem on corresponding recto and verso leaves. However, the correspondence between etching and poem bears more resemblance to the others shown in the volume. The final stanza of the poem elides being and naming in its poetic approach to the snowdrop, complicating the simplicity of the vocalic, anthropomorphised, characterization that takes up the preceding two stanzas: Yes, she’s no more now than a drop of snow on a green stem—her name is now her calling. Her mind is just a frozen melting glow of water swollen to the point of falling, which maybe has no meaning. There’s no telling. But what beauty, what a mighty power of patience intact is now in flower. (Oswald and Greenman 2009, 49) The corresponding etching quotes from Oswald’s poem, and the main matter of the etching is, rather than simply the snowdrop, a vase of flowers containing snowdrops alongside some of the other flowers represented in the volume (the violet, daisy, cowslip), beside a window which exposes the view of an outside landscape. The etching breaks and re-formats the lines of the Oswald poem that it quotes: “But what a beauty, what mighty power / of patience kept intact is now in flower” (Oswald and Greenman 2009, 49), becomes “[b]ut what a

16 I follow Murray Greenman’s expansion of the term ekphrasis, which liberates the term from simple description, instead encompassing any (particularly poetic) writing which aspires to create a sort of plastic spatiality in both form and theme; a concern with “our attraction and resistance to the natural sign” (1992, 64). In this instance, the ekphrastic relationship works in many directions: between Oswald and the flower, Greenman and the flower, and between Oswald’s and Greenman’s work. Theories of ekphrasis and poetry are a useful side note as they often look, in the poetic work of art, towards the means in which this work moves away from its formally prescribed temporal and spatial constraints.

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beauty / What a mighty power / Of patience kept intact / Is now in flower” (Oswald and Greenman 2009, 48). And so, Oswald’s poems and Greenman’s etchings taken both separately and together suggest a view and voice of a flower that, although formally conservative, subverts any sort of traditional representation and expectation. There is a care taken in naming in Oswald and Greenman’s collaboration which, akin to the importance of naming which John Danvers recognizes in Dart, can be seen to prefigure the intense catalogues of names in Memorial and Nobody, and which is unconventional. Oswald’s naming is also an act of blurring subject-object relations, and represents an imaginative “lived experience”, rather than a “me-it” relationship. As Oswald writes, “the plants come right up to the edges of their names and then beyond them” (Oswald and Greenman 2009, iii). The “name” of the snowdrop is “now her calling”: by which she can be recognized and recognize herself; a marker by which, in the mould of the songline tradition, she can represent the object whilst also calling it into being, creating its subjectivity. The static conventions of poetry are contravened when the etching and poem are read alongside each other, as different line-breaks are given in each representation of the poem. In spite of its initial formal conservatism, therefore, Oswald’s “Snowdrop”, like so many of the other poems in Weeds and Wildflowers, may be seen on closer inspection to present an unstable textuality. Indeed, the poems of Weeds, Woods etc., The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, and Dart, all seem to revel in this textual instability. Typographical innovation and error are indistinguishable.17 This sort of apparently randomized formal intricacy may, as hinted above, be traced throughout Oswald’s oeuvre in the play and positioning of the first person pronoun (or its absence from otherwise grammatically coherent moments), or rhyming resonance. The “I” in Dart, which is a significant vowel-based or apostrophic sound patterning in the poem, has a counterpoint. Beside the repetition of this textual representation of being, is woven its opposite: the “ooo” of the Dart’s ghostly Jan Coo. An “ooo” which represents both the moment of pure enunciation, or sound without text, and also nothing at all. The present absence of the first person pronoun, combined with the intimations of silence and enunciation in the intricate spacings and repetitions of “ooo”, provides Dart with what is perhaps its most concrete section. I steered through rapids like a canoe, 17 Viz. the moment in Dart’s marginalia where “Schwenke [sic.]” is cited (Oswald 2002, 20), which occurs in all editions of the poem. This sort of blending of apparent mistake and innovation can then be seen in the manner in which Schwenk is quoted, or misquoted, throughout the poem.

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digging my hands in, keeping just ahead of the pace of the river, thinking God I’m going fast enough already, what am I, spelling the shapes of the letters with legs and arms? S SSS W Slooshing the Water open and MMM for it Meeting shut behind me. (Oswald 2002, 23) The swimmer spells out in the water, just at the letters spell out in the space of the page, his action. He SW-Ms in the textual and paratextual space of the Dart and of Dart. More significant in this section of Dart than the punctuating hints towards representation and alphabetical play (S SSS = Slooshing, W = Water, M = Meeting), and the repetition of Dart’s foundational question (“what am I”), is the lack of an “I”. The swimmer’s action is without personality, is wholly given to his river-bound task, and like the many other enunciations that make up the body of Dart, the personality-endowing first person pronoun blends into the vocalic body of the river itself; the following section of the poem shifts from a first-person to third-person description, as the swimmer dives underwater into “a deep soft-bottomed silence” (Oswald 2002, 23). It is perhaps pertinent, therefore, that this swimmer section comes directly after the “silence” that is central to the structure of the poem. Just as the echoings of Jan Coo’s “ooo” mark the bounds between meaning and nonsense, sound and silence, in the poem, as does the SW-Mming of the swimmer. Indeed, Oswald herself writes of the importance of silence in language: “The metrical meaning of language includes its silences” (Oswald 2010, n.pag.).18 Silence is as much a foundational part of Oswald’s poetic as voice. But this does not preclude the dialogue, or singing of things, that is also foundationally important to Oswald’s poetic. Silence implies the periphery of vision, the marginal or parenthesized, the elements which make up the landscape that are not inscribed in the conventional map. And, indeed, silence forms an important concrete element of the forms Oswald’s poetry adopts. As early on as The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile Oswald has been concerned to address not only the primary matter at hand, but also what appears in peripheral vision or thought. And Annual Meadow Grass, quite of her own accord, between the dry-stone spread out emerald. 18 See also, on the subject of the importance of silence (and the notation of silence) in poetry, Oswald’s 2008 introduction to her Selected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt.

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(I was delighted by her initiative and praised the dry-stone for being contrary.) What I did do (I am a gap) was lean these elbows on a wall and sat on my hunkers pervading the boulders. My pose became the pass across two kingdoms, before behind antiphonal, my cavity the chord. And I certainly intended anyone to be almost abstracted on a gap-stone between fields. (Oswald 1996, 30) Parentheses and sub-clauses function in a poetic moment of textual play which is characteristic of Oswald’s poetry. As with the flower-voices of Weeds and Wildflowers, this poem is not simply a case of anthropomorphosis. Rather, it is a giving voice to an object from our peripheral vision, which, like the voices that make up the songlines of Dart, or the objects which comprise the vocalic landscape of the aboriginal songline, is at once “a map and a direction-finder” (Chatwin 1987, 13). And both textual and vocalic play may be charted between dialogue, landscape, and flow. There is attention paid explicitly to the formation of the landscape, movement through this landscape, and the placing of this voice, as well as to the act of voicing itself (“my cavity the chord”). This attention to the margins recurs in Oswald’s poetry at both thematic and formal levels as Oswald seeks to give graphic and graphemic representations of the phenomena to which her poetry gives birth. Indeed, the marginal approach to the phenomenal world helps structure Dart (see in particular the marginal indications of voice), and gives the voice-poem A Sleepwalk on the Severn stage directions as well as vocalic utterance. A similar attention to the marginal or peripheral can be seen in Woods etc.’s “Marginalia at the Edge of Evening”, and the ballad “Tree Ghosts”. The latter poem contains footnotes that are as much a part of the poem as the poem itself, as well as in the many explicitly dialogic question-and-answer forms that are a foundational part of Oswald’s poetic. In reading Oswald, it is undeniable that there is an important connection to be made between landscape and voice, whereby voice does more than sing of the landscape. These are poems which are constructed out of structural, even formal, principles (dialogism, the songline, flow patterns) which are less to do with narrative than they are to do with the very articulation of and questioning of the nature of being. Voice is at once embodied and disembodied, “the locus

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for an experience of linguistic time” (Nowell Smith 2015, 162), which precipitates self-conscious articulation and questioning. This articulation and questioning are in both its materiality and its temporal existence aligned back with the landscape, and complicated by the contested nature of the landscape itself, which is “both our subject and the thing in which we exist” (DeLue 2008, 10).

Works Cited Bennett, C. (2002). “Current Literature 2002: New Writing: Poetry.” English Studies 85(3), pp. 230–240. Blasing, M.K. (2007). Lyric Poetry: The Pleasure and Pain of Words. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Celan, P. (1978). “Der Meridian.” Translated by Jerry Glenn. Chicago Review 29(3), pp. 29–40. Chatwin, B. (1987). The Songlines. London: Penguin Press. Connor, S. (2000). Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Culler, J. (1983). The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Culler, J. (1985). “Changes in the Study of Lyric.” In: C. Hosêk and P. Parker, eds., Lyric Poetry: Beyond the New Criticism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 38–53. Culler, J. (2009). “Why Lyric?” Talk, School of Criticism and Theory Cornell University. Jul 12. Culler, J. (2015). Theory of the Lyric. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Danvers, J. (2004). Picturing the Mind: Paradox, Indeterminacy and Consciousness in Art and Poetry. Amsterdam: Rodopi. DeLue, R.Z. (2008). “Elusive Landscapes and Shifting Grounds.” In: R.Z. DeLue and J.W. Elkins, eds., The Art Seminar 6: Landscape Theory, London: Routledge, pp. 3–14. DeLue, R.Z., with Denis E. Cosgrove, Jessica DuBow, James Elkins et al. (2008). “The Art Seminar.” In: R.Z. DeLue and J.W. Elkins, eds., The Art Seminar 6: Landscape Theory, London: Routledge, pp. 87–156. Durand, M. (2010). “Spatial Interpretations: Ways of Reading Ecological Poetry.” In: B. Iijima, ed., The Eco Language Reader, New York: Nightboat Books, pp. 200–210. Genette, G. (2004). “Mood.” In: M. Bal, ed., Narrative Theory Volume 1, translated by Jane E. Lewin, Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge, pp. 225–262. Greenman, M. (1992). Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Hallberg, R.V. (2008). Lyric Powers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Herrnstein Smith, B. (2004). “Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories.” In: M. Bal, ed., Narrative Theory Volume 2, Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge, pp. 95–116. Highet, G. (1957). Poets in a Landscape. London: Hamish Hamilton. Huggan, G. (2008). Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Jackson, V. and Prins, Y. eds. (2014). The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kristeva, J. (2010). “Is there such a thing as European Culture?” Talk, British Academy, London. 24 May 2010. Mabey, R. (2010). Weeds. London: Profile Books. Morton, T. (2007). Ecology without Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nowell Smith, D. (2015). On Voice in Poetry: The Work of Animation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Oswald, A. (1996a). The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile. London: Faber and Faber. Oswald, A. (1996b). [op. ed.] PBS Bulletin. Spring, n.pag. Oswald, A. (2002). Dart. London: Faber and Faber. Oswald, A. (2005a). Woods etc. London: Faber and Faber. Oswald, A. (2005b). “Introduction.” In: A. Oswald, ed., The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet, London: Faber and Faber, pp. ix-xi. Oswald, A. (2008). “Introduction.” In: A. Oswald, ed., Selected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, London: Faber and Faber, pp. ix-xvii. Oswald, A. (2009). A Sleepwalk on the Severn. London: Faber and Faber. Oswald, A. (2010). “Alice Oswald on Poetry and Performance.” The Times Online. Feb. 26. Oswald, A. (2011). Memorial. London: Faber and Faber. Oswald, A. (2016). Falling Awake. London: Cape. Oswald, A. and Greenman, J. (2009). Weeds and Wildflowers. London: Faber and Faber. Oswald, A. and Tillyer, W. (2018). Nobody. London: 21Publishing. Schwenk, T. (1965). Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air. Translated by Olive Whicher and Johanna Wrigley. London: Rudolf Steiner Press. Yeung, H.H. (2015). Spatial Engagement with Poetry. New York: Palgrave.

chapter 5

The Political Is Personal: Juliana Spahr’s Political Ecology Esther Sánchez-Pardo

Abstract Who is the “we” whom Juliana Spahr addresses when writing her poetry and critical essays? Why is the collective so important when speaking about the risks and dangers of capitalism? In Spahr’s views, climate change, indiscriminate production and waste, environmental degradation and human exploitation are part and parcel of the moral hazards of capitalism. In this chapter, I argue that Spahr’s literary practice and her activism are interconnected and side with the concerns of fellow poets and readers in a transnational community—Spahr took part in the original demonstrations of the 2011 New York Occupy Wall Street movement. Focusing on the many and the multiple, rather than on isolated singularities, I reflect upon her emphasis both on “connective reading” (Spahr 2001) very much associated to collective identity, and on her support of the local (flora, fauna, species) versus the global. Spahr’s profound knowledge of Hawaii, where she taught, researched and lived for several years, and her thoughts on impermanence and change, bring about a fresh and engaged language-oriented poetry with a strong insight into the physical and the material-political. In my exploration of Spahr’s poetic practice, word and tone are shape-shifters and run parallel to geographical and environmental displacement.

Keywords Juliana Spahr – ecology – activism – feminism – personal is political – pastoral – connective

Can we speak of a poetry and poetics which show a deep concern for alterity and for Nature? The study and ethical stance towards biodiversity, climate change, the excess growth produced by global capitalism and industrial and © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004445277_006

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technological developments, converge today with the domain of (bio)ethics, with a sustainable economy and with efforts to reduce waste, to combat pollution and minimize the effects of indiscriminate production. Poetry is not alien to examining the effects of the tensions between the economy and the environment. Within this contested terrain, the consequences of environmental hazard hit badly the weakest, women, the urban and rural poor, migrants, and the traditionally deprived and misrepresented working class. In Juliana Spahr’s work, her engagement with class1 and with the consequences of being a forgotten and invisible member of the new proletariat tie in with the huge recent financial crisis and its aftermath: damaging and irreversible effects in the environment appear side by side with its detrimental impact on employment, harsh living conditions, precarious health and diminishing natural resources, whose access, essential for all, comes to be appropriated and exploited by transnational corporations under neoliberal policies. Grassroots activism has been essential in the life and work of Spahr, as a poet who identifies with post-Language poetry developments,2 a working-class ethos and an engagement with politics and the environment. In this chapter, I will specifically focus on Spahr’s recent collection Well Then There Now (2011), where the poet, focusing on materiality and diversity, approaches the realities of decay, environmental hazard, extinction and exclusion in different formats, exploring in her rhetoric forms of address which are essentially plural and inclusive, and which operate “de-familiarizing” the readers’ experience and expectations. To what extent are readers complicit with this general drift that leads to the deterioration of human relationships and of their interaction with the planet? One of the issues I will explore is the idea of the collective and collectivity, central in Spahr’s poetry, as in her rhetorical turn to a “we” and abandonment of the “I”. In other words, the poet herself identifies with some sort of woman of the crowd and addresses readers as one among all without distinguishing herself or wanting to take center stage. 1

In her monograph Everybody’s Autonomy (2001), Spahr writes about her working-class origin, and her father’s “unschooled obsession with reading” (xi). The preface reads, “[t]he harder part [in this book] has been the more personal one of who I am when writing this. I have often feel caught between an academic scene and a poetry scene that are often antithetical in desires and intents. I remain committed to both” (xi). In “The Incinerator”, the last section of Well Then There Now, Spahr goes back to her commitment to a working class ethos, “I am wondering what calling myself working class covers over. [...] I had grown up by defining class as being about the sort of housing one had in relation to one’s neighbors” (2011, 140). 2 The language poetry movement thrived in the 1970s and early 1980s. A broad range of different poets might be considered part of this movement as diverse as Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Jackson Mac Low or Carla Harryman, who broadly place emphasis on the material qualities of language, its production and reception, and are close to post-structuralist developments on signification, subjectivity and sociality.

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I will attempt to demonstrate how this collectivity is systematically present in Spahr’s poetry, engaging with the many, and the multiple, and exploring the possibilities of affiliations across differences. Spahr also emphasizes what she calls “connective reading” (Spahr 2001) very much associated to collective identity. In her “Sonnets” sequence, and in the piece “Unnamed Dragonfly Species”, the poet meditates upon the earth’s resilience, about solidity and fluidity, and the contingencies and hazards produced by the current stage of capitalism. Animals, humans and other species interact in a common ground whose transformations, impermanence and fragility end up yielding unexpected and unprecedented changes. In Spahr’s poetic practice, meaning shifts with context and runs parallel to geographical and environmental displacement. Juliana Spahr’s work remains complex and it participates of a postpostmodernist ethos in which genres no longer move along the lines they used to before the “linguistic turn” (Rorty 1992) came to happen in the second half of the twentieth century. Her work, heavily invested in the tradition of Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and in line with post-Language poetry derivations, addresses essential issues which speak to individuality and collectivity, the social and the political, the environment within late capitalism, globalization and the dissolution of the local, and civic engagement versus disaffection from community and politics. It is precisely by bringing politics and green activism together with poetry that Spahr’s work develops multiple senses of locality and care, drawing on the strengths of each activity. The depth of thinking in time and location within history and geography, as well as the critical stance to approach how power writes itself on human-environment relations brings in an increased criticality to poetry and poetics.

1

The Human as Embedded in Reading Practices

There is no way that we can think of the environment without situating it in relation with the human. In Spahr’s theorization everything is always already embedded in reading and writing practices, in the production of signification. By raising the question, “[w]hat sort of selves literary works influence, encourage or create” (Spahr 2001, 4), Spahr displays her theory of connective reading in an attempt to respond to the dialectic between the particular and the universal, the individual and community. For Spahr, those works which encourage “connection” are the most crucial, seeking to “engage with large, public worlds that are in turn shared with readers” (2001, 4). Reading is a dynamic and “reciprocal” activity, it is constitutive of the human, and the human is always a collective product. In her view, reading is an act we learn with others, the

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process is not “natural”, it is bound up with exchange, and in its operations a certain sense of community is encouraged. Spahr declares, “I am interested in works that encourage communal readings” (2001, 5). Clearly, the poet aims at exploring the relation between reading and identity, to draw conclusions “on the nature of collectivity” (2001, 5). For Spahr, close reading is a form of ethical responsibility. The poet is totally aware that reading moves us to an identification with alterity—with a wide range of social and cultural individuals and locations—which transcends differences. This practice of reading provides a methodological stance which Gayatri C. Spivak, drawing from Jacques Derrida’s notion of “teleopoesis” (in his Politics of Friendship [1994] 2005), defines as follows: “[teleopoesis] effects shocks to the idea of belonging, to affect the distant in a poesis—an imaginative making—without guarantees” and it ends up “revers[ing]” the values of belonging (Spivak 2003, 31). In this chapter, I am methodologically indebted to both Spahr and Spivak in the emphasis they place on connection and on identification with radical alterity. Proximity and distance (telos) operate simultaneously in any enriching and transformative reading practice. As a poet, as an academic and intellectual, Spahr is far from occupying a detached, ivory tower position, and her engagement and interaction within what she herself calls the public and cultural sphere (Spahr 2001, 5) is remarkable. In many ways, a poet should never do away with difference, singularity, particularities and rather be very attentive to “how individual identities negotiate within collectivities” (2001, 6). In Spahr’s view, reading is a communal activity, essentially connective. Reading is shareable, it is always reciprocal, and in the moments when this exchange takes place, a specific value of its own is created. In her experience, Spahr argues that parallel to this emphasis on communitas,3 a literature addressing gender, ethnicity and race arises. In several aspects of the following reading, I am informed by Charles Altieri’s views for a rhetorical turn in contemporary American poetry which, in 3 It was anthropologist Victor Turner who first defined the notion of communitas. In his view, both communitas and liminality are components of social structure and antistructure (Turner [1969] 1977). In the case of communitas, all members of a community are equally sharing some experiences; this usually takes place through the common ceremony of the rites of passage. To date, there is an important philosophical literature on communitas, from Maurice Blanchot (The Unavowable Community, 1983) to Jean-Luc Nancy (The Inoperative Community, 1983), Giorgio Agamben (The Coming Community, 1990) and Roberto Esposito (Communitas, 1998). In my view, Juliana Spahr’s contribution, from a literary and critical theory domain, is central for any current consideration on the importance of collectivity and community in reading practices and in the area of audience research.

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his view, stems from poetry’s urge to produce effects in the social and to push readers to act (Altieri 2011), and by theorizations by Ellen Rooney (1989); but also by Juliana Spahr herself (2001) in her anti-pluralist poetics as a major response to the fake gesture of potential inclusion for all upon which the ethos of Western democracies rests. Rooney critiques pluralism as an ideological system based upon the idea of a transnational community in which all are equal and negotiate using rhetoric and every discursive means at hand. In her view, through a process of (Althusserian) ideological interpellation, an individual, “produces a particular kind of reading and writing subject. The subject of pluralism assumes an infinitely persuadable (general) audience” (Rooney 1989, 53). The opposite is far less “socially-friendly” since anti-pluralist trends and practices construct readers as interested and partial—on the opposite side, there would be unbiased readers, likely to be persuaded—in their endeavor to encourage antagonism and struggle rather than consensus. Between pluralist and anti-pluralist positions, one can certainly locate antagonism. In recent US history, Rooney names Marxism and Feminism as two bodies of thinking which are tacitly excluded from the social arena, and paradoxically represent some of the most important critical trends with potential to resist liberal democratic political structuring. Juliana Spahr’s poetics engages the collective and its capacities for autonomous and direct action. She relies on the rationale and the principles of self-government at the basis of current social justice movements—such as Occupy Wall Street. Spahr took part in the original demonstrations of the 2011 New York Occupy Wall Street movement—where the “universal” and the “particular” co-exist, and where Western white middleclass human subjectivity’s centrality is also displaced to make room for those “others” of history, including all life forms in the planet. In this sense, regarding the centrality of the historical narrative for humanity, and the rather inconspicuous role the environment has played through the ages in comparison, it is legitimate to raise questions, such as what is it that the mere contemplation of the environment produces in us, humans? And why do we keep on reading it along the lines of the Romantics and the canonical tradition? In our present order of knowledge, the West has produced and reproduced the idea that nature comes before culture. In other words, we abide by a series of “bio-centric” codes to preserve the order of the West. Nevertheless, we are not biological beings that create culture; humans come into being simultaneously with culture. What makes humans human is that we are evolutionarily prepared to write (make inscriptions on a surface in order to communicate something), a feature which shows an adaptive response to our ecological and geopolitical environment. Within the nature-culture divide, scholars in anthropology and the social sciences, intellectuals, writers and artists see these two domains as more intertwined

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than ever before.4 Juliana Spahr sets herself up to bridge the gap between both of them drawing attention to the “local” nature of the culture of the West. If, as it has been argued, one is ready to take the “descriptive statement of the human on the biocentric model of a natural organism”, one should also be very aware “that it is itself, a culture-specific descriptive statement” (Wynter 2003, 267).

2

Reading Well Then There Now (2011)

Well Then There Now is a multi-genre collection, in which Juliana Spahr speaks to us in innovative ways with the proximity and the distance that a poet and academic talks to an audience whose complicity and attunement to her social and personal sensitivity is required. Readers are told this miscellaneous collection, cohesive in intent and generously open as regards form and content, consists of nine pieces of prior published work, mostly in literary journals. It comes from disparate sources, locations, and inspiration. Written and published under a variety of different circumstances, it responds to Spahr’s nomadic existence, and to her engagement in writing activities with many audiences. Part of these materials was self-published, part was published in journals, section five (“Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another”) first appeared as a chapbook, other sections were placed on websites, or designed for writing workshops. Spahr’s continued movement from inland US to Hawaii5 has been primordial in her becoming the writer she is now, and in the development of her mature thinking about her engagement with the world at large, her active and activist responses to capitalism, decolonial theory, deep ecological awareness and ethical stance. We can locate the origin of this collection in Spahr’s two previous writing ventures, namely, her critical essay Everybody’s Autonomy. Connective Reading and Collective Identity (2001) and her important fictional-cum-autobiographical

4

One of the most recent developments in critiquing the nature-culture divide are the New Materialisms and critical post-humanism studies. Among its major representatives, Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, Jason Moore and Rosi Braidotti have engaged since the 1990s in supporting some sort of paradigm shift within the Social and Natural Sciences. See esp. Coole and Frost (2010). 5 In The Transformation, Spahr writes on her move to University of Hawaii from SUNY Buffalo, and on how this shifted her poetic perspective: “In graduate school they had been taught a map of poetry that had the avant-garde squaring off at the borders against various national literary conventions. But when they got to the island in the middle of the Pacific and looked at the poetry that surrounded them they realized that this map of poetry that they had been taught in graduate school no longer made sense and they had to make new maps” (2007, 80).

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account, The Transformation (2007). Spahr has been an advocate for writers and poets’ special engagement with the communities and exchanges that poetry facilitates. This should be of prior importance to any consideration on audiences’ understanding the ways in which literature might be resistant or revolutionary. In her view, when critically assessing the poetry which comes out of “places of activist anticolonialism” as, for instance, the kind of poetry she was exposed to in Hawaii as an observer-participant in anti-colonialist protests, in which “the genre’s assumed shortness, its lack of rules and structures, and its links to orality made it a genre of populist protest” (2007, 81), one should be ready to shift the focus from “how [...] poetry was made” to “what it made [...] its resonances in the world” (2007, 82). Spahr’s penchant for introducing alternatives for understanding the radical matter of poetry takes her to intervene not only seeking radicality in her subversion of the materiality of language, but also in the specific material conditions and structural inequalities out of which these poetries develop. One should not forget that Spahr’s poetics takes up the legacy of Language poetry, and on top of that, the principles that inform ecopoetry constitute an important added strand which encourages a key element of interconnectivity. This fluid inter-connectedness among people, heritages, common lore, institutional sites which make them possible, and the environment which preserves these relations, are part and parcel of a shared economy of co-habitation and care. Jonathan Skinner in his essay “Why Eco-poetics?” (2001) emphasizes the extension and impact of ecological thinking beyond the most immediate environmental concerns moving towards a practice of research and writing which is sensitive to different sites where both confluences and boundaries coexist. Linda Russo, in turn, speaks of ecopoetry as “emplaced or environed writing” (Russo 2008, n.pag.) which is not only sensitive to geographical location but rather takes up both the natural world and the language of poetry as frames and facilitators for the intelligibility of that place, emplaced or environed writing requires attending to bioregions and regions of thought that lie beyond my immediate scope—to use a visual metaphor [...]. From where the writer is, she must attempt to complicate that place: understand what it was, how it got to be, how it is being actuated, and what it might be [...]. In an ecopoetical practice that considers material and linguistic emplacement (or how we situate language as framing ‘tool,’ to use [Lawrence] Buell’s term) environment and language and poet are ineluctable presences. (Russo 2008, n.pag.) Russo expands our understanding of ecopoetics as a reflection upon human interaction within the planet. Poet Lisa Robertson’s interest in what she calls

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the “post-pastoral” forms demonstrates her proximity to the concerns of ecopoetics through her critique of the use and abuse of the idea of “nature” in literature throughout the centuries, I begin with the premise that pastoral, as a literary genre, is obsolete— originally obsolete. Once a hokey territory sussed out by hayseed diction, now the mawkish artificiality of the pastoral poem’s constructed surface has settled down to a backyard expressivity. In the postpastoral poem (in evidence since the English romantics and their modernist successors) the evocation of “feeling” in poet or reader obeys a parallel planting of ‘nature’ in the poem. [...] I’d call pastoral the nation-making genre: within a hothouse language we force the myth of the land to act as both political resource and mystic origin. (Robertson 2002, 22-23) Robertson objects to granting the pastoral a hegemonic position among the genres to, in its turn, understanding nature as some sort of structural container for the construction of alterity (race, class, location, time) throughout History. Pastoral poetry represents a collection of oppressive protocols complicit with power and repression. In this sense, the poet’s scrutiny into any form of social complacency with histories of oppression and plunder, explicitly addressed in The Transformation, is certainly a major instance of thinking along the lines of the problematization that post-pastoralism brings about from modernism onwards. At present, the continuation of the pastoral into the post-pastoral and then, ecopoetry, meditates upon recent transformations in our current technologically-mediated world and incorporates the interdisciplinary concerns of ecology and human/nonhuman relationships.

3

“Some of We and the Land that was Never Ours”

Well Then There Now opens with a beautiful poetic sequence entitled “Some of We and the Land that was never Ours”, in which Spahr’s ruminations on the conditions of a nomadic existence, in transit between America and Europe, finds its climactic moment in issues regarding land and deracination, eating and being fed, and speaking and the idea of change. This highly experimental poem uses repetition or insistence, as Gertrude Stein would put it,6 to emphasize a 6

Stein writes “[t]here is the important question of repetition and is there any such thing. Is there repetition or is there insistence. I am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition. And really how can there be” (1935, 166).

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series of motifs related to nature, and the interconnection between humans, animals and fruits. The poem exhibits an incantatory rhythm built upon syntagmatic repetition of crucial elements which add to the poem’s multifarious meaning potential. Spahr’s problematization of the first-person plural, “we”, points to the group, a collectivity in which the speaker is also subsumed, but “we” is preferred and “us” is never mentioned. The personal object pronoun form “us” used regularly after a preposition or a verb does not appear at all. This, I suggest, is part of Spahr’s method as addressed in this chapter’s above section. As a legacy of the poet’s ideas in her volume Everybody’s Autonomy (2001), the “collective attention to the multiple” (2001, 13) is prior to any other tenet for reading, “an attention to the diversity of response in the name of individual rights” (2001, 13). Spahr’s work gravitates around what she calls reading connective moments (2001, 14), and those moments are presided over by autonomous subjects who could never be considered either as mere members of the “crowd” or understood as objects. As far as method is concerned, this poem is situated at the crossroads between early avant-garde experiments such as the Surrealists’ cadavre exquis and post-Language poetry developments. “Some of We…”, a crucial instance of Sphar’s experimental method, was constructed upon memories jotted down from a trip to France, which were technologically operated, “I came home and used a translation machine to push my notes back and forth between French and English until a different sort of English came out: this poem” (2011, 15). Our poet discloses her method on a note appended at the end of her poetic sequence. This machine-operated poem, originally a collection of thoughts and notes out of which Spahr tries to make sense of the work of memory—“I was just trying to figure out this day” (2011, 15)—offers readers first-hand insight into her crafting of poems. Spahr’s emphasis on collectivity, interconnection and vast multispecies interdependence shows in every page. The poem opens as follows: We are all. We of all the small ones are. We are all. We of all the small ones are. We are in this world. We are in this world. We are together. We are together. And some of we are eating grapes. Some of we are all eating grapes. (2011, 11) The poem progresses along recurrences of elements such as: the collective “we”, the idea of “togetherness (in the world)”, “eating grapes”, the importance of planting (seeds) on the land to feed people, the sharing of the land with the animal kingdom—such as the sparrows, in our poem—and differences in

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living and nourishment habits of different species. The poem’s concern with the land and sustainability of resources for the continuation of life is most central: But we were made by the ground, by the grapes. We ate the sheets of the ground. But we were made by the ground, by the grapes. Grapes of the ground. Some of we planted grapes. Green of the ground. Some of we were to settle. Some of we were to arrange. And the land was never ours. (2011, 12) A crucial concern for the poet is to secure visibility for those who were always dispossessed of the land, be it humans or animals. The land figures thus not only as nourishing agency, but certainly as the common ground shared by all living beings, a rich repository of food and resources for life to continue, the basis for interspecies co-habitation in a fair distribution of space and goods, a wellspring always ready-to-fulfill needs, the common ground for biodiversity and a site for the humans to settle down. In Spahr’s deep ecological-political thinking, one of the basic laws of nature, namely that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can be transformed, translates into the biological cycle and reads, “[a]nd we were the land’s because we were eating and the land let some of us eat. And we were the ground because we eat and the ground let some of us eat” (2011, 12). Certainly, the life cycle and the exceedingly bountiful gifts of Nature have nothing to do with the dictates of capitalism, and they are opposite to the principles of Economics, based upon scarcity and inequality. As Spahr states, “[b]ut the ground was never sure with us [...]. Never to be owned. Never to be had. And the land’s green is the land’s owning of us. And the green of the ground is the possession of the ground of us” (2011, 12). One of the interesting motifs the poet frequently uses is that of “eating”, being fed or providing nourishment. The importance of eating amounts as much as that of seeds, first planted, or simply thrown onto the land, and after the subsequent cultivation process is completed, transformed into essentials for subsistence. Clearly eating is the first human need, and this is something we share with the animal kingdom. In the poem, Spahr addresses “the small ones” (2011, 11 and ff.) alluding both to humans and birds, specifically sparrows. Both humans and sparrows eat “grapes”, and whereas humans eat, sparrows “peck”: “We are all in this world, this world of hands and grain together. We all the small ones are in this world, this world of the hands and grain, together. Some of us are sparrows pecking at our hand” (2011, 13). Spahr emphasizes the condition of all living beings, in an effort to identify needs, and to share what is available. Many of those beings have been

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dispossessed of their habitats, and many humans suffer dispossession from the land. The poem’s last section dwells upon change, and making change possible, We all the small ones are together in this world. To eat the grapes and not to plant the seed [...]. To change. To change. To make the change. To make the change [...]. To we are all in this world together yet still some of we are eating grapes, others pecking at the hand. (2011, 14) The poem’s metaphorical leap takes readers to a scenario in which inequality and the difficulties of subsistence under capitalism are endemic in the world today. While some enjoy the comfort and advantages of the first world, others have been deprived of their much valued “autonomy” and depend on the big economies and former colonial powers for survival.

4

“Sonnets”

“Sonnets”, the second section of this volume, consists of a series of ten fourteenline lyrics, which either exhibit throughout the collective plural “we”, or avoid the speaking position altogether. This section exhibits four left-hand side pages, listing in sonnet form a thorough analysis of the different components in a sample of blood. Structurally, the pages facing these “medical” poems feature a very different register and type of enunciation. The first and last poem of this sequence narrate the arrival of an unknown “we” to a place in the middle of nowhere—Hawaii—apparently with no connection whatsoever to them. A set of grammatical devices—prepositions, conjunctions, markers—proliferate “defamiliarizing” the relation between subjects and predicates: A catalogue of the individual and a catalogue of us with all. A catalogue of full of thought. A house where we with all our complexities lie. A catalogue of blood. A catalogue of us with all our complexities. A catalogue of how we are all full of thought and connection. The house where we are from and the house where we live. All things to be said more largely than the personal way. (2011, 25) Parts of the sequence juxtapose sets of lyrics listing the vital components that sustain human life—blood—with others which emphasize the complexity

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of all living beings, the importance of preserving the personal in the midst of community, the centrality of the idea of home, the discourse of confession, diversity in language, and the particularities of interconnectedness in Hawaii. Spahr manages to use the technique of cataloguing, to assist in her comprehensive impulse to embrace reality. Framed by a poetic structure in which displacement and migration are foregrounded, the central exchange between statistics, big data (as processed for human use) and naming, and operating linguistically upon a disorderly and chaotic reality, discloses a formidable experiment in conveying a political-cum-scientific message about how “[t]hings should be said more largely than the personal way” (2011, 23). The first and last composition allude to a subject—a “we”—identified with very few biographical details, “[w]e arrived by air by 747 and DC10 and L1011. / We arrived over the islands and we saw the green of them / out of the window [...]. We grew into it but with complicities and assumptions / and languages / and kiawe and koa haole and mongooses” (2011, 19). The central poems always refer to a pluralized subject with whom readers may potentially interact and “become” responsive to, “[w]e are full of thought and we are different. / For which things so several / [...] The catalogue of force and animal life. / The catalogue of the extension of life, the operation, and the animal” (2011, 21). Human and animal life partake of the same ethos and remain interconnected. One cannot argue that in her sonnet sequence Spahr is oblivious of social issues such as inequality, dispossession and a sense of belonging. In her emotionally-ridden social landscape, homelessness and lack of access to the land are coextensive with the condition of the colonized, There is in the thought of home. Those who had a home. Those who have a right to a home. And there is those who took and those who stayed in the taking. (2011, 25) Once again, the sense of collectivity is foregrounded, and the poetic voice claims for inclusivity, community and empowerment, “[w]ho authorizes so one is not single. / Who empowers so one is not alone / Who is various” (2011, 27). In the last composition, Spahr goes back to the idea of land deprivation, focusing poignantly on the attachment to the land of the native population and those who came to settle from afar, [b]ut because we were bunkered, the place was never ours, could / never be really ours, because we were bunkered from what / mattered, growing and flowing into, and because we could not / begin to understand that this place was not ours until we grew and flowed into something other

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than what we were we / continued to make things worse for this place of growing / and flowing into even while some of us came to love it and let / it grow in our own hearts, flow in our own blood. (2011, 29) Charles Altieri argues that Spahr’s sense of inclusivity “builds Whitmanian expansiveness out of Steinian repetition” (Altieri 2011, 134). In my view, the poet’s permanent forms of address to a larger-than-existence entity result in a drive toward the abstract and non-quantifiable human and the worldly, and make the human and its local/ethical specificities readable. Spahr is also aware that any attempt at giving a totalizing account of “we with all our complexities” is bound to failure. In this sequence, the sonnet form, traditionally the poetic frame for the expression of interiority par excellence is adapted to combine the personal and the collective, thus expanding the scope of the lyrical, the confessional, the reflective-meditative, the spatio-temporal, and their share in sociality.

5

“Unnamed Dragonfly Species”

The fifth section in Well Then There Now is entitled “Unnamed Dragonfly Species”. It consists of a series of paragraphs of unequal length and diverse typescript which express concern for the question of climate change and its global impact on the ecosystems of animals and humans and the heavy toll this is taking on the planet. All paragraphs finally gather in a choral message, conveyed by several voices. By means of a pattern of insistence and repetition in which a third person plural “they” introduces the views of the collective, this narrative, in “Acknowledgements and other information” section, offers an account in which declarative and factual events combine with an alphabetical list in the names of “endangered, threatened and special concern plant, fish, and wildlife species of New York State” (2011, n.pag.). The alphabetical list is singled out to accompany Spahr’s acute critique of the current state of affairs regarding animal species on the verge of extinction due to the global warming crisis and, the rising sea levels, the melting of the Arctic, the continuing retreat of the glaciers, and extreme weather conditions. The alphabetized list includes a good number of names of species whose creatures have been displaced and now appear as deprived of their original habitats. Spahr gathers information coming from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation website as a reliable source that speaks to us about those species that surely will have no place in the ecosystems affected by this unprecedented phenomenon of climate change:

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Sometimes they thought that glaciers interested them because glaciers are like zombies: slow moving and full of stuff, full of stuff and can’t be stopped. Seabeach Amaranth Like how in movies you can put a bunch of knives and bullets in a zombie and it keeps on moving. Seaside Sparrow That is how they thought of glaciers. Sedge Wren Sei Whale They move and no one can stop them whichever way they go. Sharp-skinned Hawk You can’t pin them down and hold them in place. Short-eared Owl Nor can you deter them when they start moving. Shortnose Sturgeon And they have history. (2011, 90) It is possibly the actual “melting” of the Arctic and the impact of global warming on glaciers—moving dramatically at a relatively high-speed pace—which is most visible and a matter of great concern with devastating effects. Spahr exhibits simultaneously the richness of a wide variety of species, situated strategically, interrupting a narrative where the mere facts speak for themselves. The text opens with the raw reality of increasing temperatures damaging and decimating daffodils in full bloom, The city of Rotterdam sent over daffodils. A Noctuid Moth The daffodils bloomed in the first weeks of April. Allegheny Woodrat They were everywhere. American Bittern They were yellow. American Burying Beetle It was April and then the temperature was 90 degrees and all the daffodils died immediately. Arogos Skipper All at the same time. Atlantic Hawksbill Sea Turtle This happened right where they were living. Atlantic Ridley Sea Turtle It was early April. Bald Eagle (2011, 75) The text makes clear that climate change is a global phenomenon, and travels through various geographies testifying to what this state of emergency is triggering globally. From Europe and the Netherlands, where the daffodils die due to the rise of temperatures, to glaciers in Antarctica (2011, 76). Spahr launches a series of poignant questions with no immediate or direct answer. Regarding the cracking and breaking off of glaciers in Antarctica, the concern for the local fauna is evident in her queries: “[W]hat was it like to be there on the piece that was breaking off. Cerulean Warbler Did waves form? Checkered White Was there a tsunami? Chittenango Ovate Amber Snail What had it been like for the penguins or the fish? Clubshell” (2011, 77). The text moves between simple constructions—“They learned that all this melting began to accelerate in 1988” (2011, 79)—and complex and convoluted syntactic constructions that aim at diverting attention from ecological disaster. At this point, the lists are interrupted, and relevant, dramatic information

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is included, only to reappear and continue denouncing climate change irreversible effects, Eskimo Curlew They could not even remember thinking at all about the weather that year. Extra Striped Snaketail When they really thought about it, they had no memory of any year being any hotter than any other year in general. Fat Pocketbook They remembered a few hot summers and a few mild winters (2011, 80) The poem’s allusion to an “unnamed dragonfly species” reminds readers that these lists are acts of naming that give visibility to species and realities that otherwise pass unnoticed, as invisible as the changes in the environment we are told about through the news, the Internet, and various reports of journalists, friends and people sensitive to these major and definitive changes. Spahr’s typographic technique opposes two major sections of discourse: the impersonal alphabetized names of endangered species in bold face, and the other “chunks” of text which perform a certain diegetic function. Also, this section shares the pronominal pronouns “we” and “they” with all other sections included in this volume. The speakers are part of a plural, collective voice which conveys memories, concerns, information and insight into the situation of an environmental and human crisis constantly lurking in the dark. In this piece, 1988 marks a somber beginning for the acceleration of climate change, and the text warns progressively of the dangers of this unprecedented collapse and decay to which extractive capitalism is leading the world. Spahr questions the boundaries between “they” and “the others”, between participants in western industrialized societies’ exchange, commerce and consumption, and those who suffer the consequences of indiscriminate and toxic production and waste. The increase in the surface temperature of the planet, the melting of the polar ice caps, the rise of ocean levels, plus the dramatic effects this global warming has on vegetation, animals and humans, is foregrounded and denounced. Spahr urges readers to take full responsibility for their actions, and to be aware of their complicity with the big economies which provide them with commodities and comfort while destroying the planet. Finally, Spahr’s emphasis on relatedness, connections and interdependence shows again in the last lines of this composition, [t]he systems of relation between living things of all sorts seemed to have become in recent centuries so hierarchically human that things not human were dying at an unprecedented rate. Wavy-rayed Lampmussel And the systems of human governments and corporations felt

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so large and unchangeable and so distant from them yet the effects of their actions felt so connected and so immediate to what was happening. Whip-poor-will They knew this but didn’t know what else to do. (2011, 93) Clearly, the dramatic effects of humanity on the planet and the huge impact of the Anthropocene have brought about irreversible changes. The subsequent industrial, technological and digital revolutions and their profound transformative potential have proved to be no longer life enhancing, they have rather become harmful and destructive. Spahr knows well that an engaged writer and intellectual cannot shy away from her responsibilities to amend a seriously damaged world.

6

The Political and the Personal: “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache”

“Gentle Now…” is the penultimate section in Well Then There Now. The poem is divided in five sections of unequal length, and it serves Spahr’s meditative stance toward what humans receive from nature and what, due to the greediness and exploitation of natural resources, we irretrievably lose with dramatic consequences for the planet. Spahr, a poet with a special sensitivity to ecological catastrophe and environmental grief, becomes also a green activist in her analysis of how natural degradation puts all living matter at risk. In this poem, Spahr continues her exploration on the first person plural personal pronoun “we”, a discursive intervention which obliterates the first person singular up to the fifth section, where it reappears and takes up the responsibilities of an engaged participant in the current stage of environmental and socio-political crisis. The poem opens with a prelapsarian moment of plenitude in which humanity and nature are in harmony with each other: We come in to the world. We come into the world and there it is. The sun is there. The brown of the river leading to the blue and the brown of the Ocean is there [...] And we begin to breathe. We come into the world and there it is. We come into the world without and we breathe it in. (2011, 124)

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Humans and nature interact, and the poem moves to Section II where the unnamed stream she speaks about qualifies as one of the streams she used to watch in Chillicothe, Ohio, where the poet grew up. The readers face an unpretentious natural landscape where the stream, the fauna and flora of its surroundings are captured with the keen eyes of childhood, and represented unromantically. Nature in a mid-Western middle-class town has nothing to do with the vision and idea of Nature described by English Romantic poetry. It is neither sufficiently beautiful nor inspirational; the Romantics’ encounter with the sublime and their reactions expressing awe, veneration and shock is far from this humble scenario. The poet provides a detailed description of the scene, emotionally charged with feelings of empathy and familiarity: “We loved the stream. / And we were of the stream. / And we couldn’t help this love because we arrived at the bank of the / stream and we began breathing and the stream was various and full of information” (2011, 125). This empathy is expanded further in Section III where the “Gentle now...” refrain is introduced. This section is extremely site-specific, and the catalogue technique is used as an all-inclusive device to create a space for the containment of this microcosm. In any event the poet’s intervention in archiving and listing the proper names of much of the fauna in the area does not necessarily mean that a certain fixed order is imposed, rather these listings are on and off interrupted by the second part of the refrain “don’t add to heartache”. Tensions between order and disorder also demonstrate the existing hiatus between the natural and the “scientific” human which comes to us as a result of “progress”. Diane Chisholm argues for the importance of the refrain in the tradition of American pastoralism, “[w]ith her refrain Spahr composes a minor territory within American pastoralism where the lyrics of visionary democracy continue to beat from Walt Whitman to Gary Snyder” (Chisholm 2014, 131). Section IV addresses the industrial and agricultural pollution of that stream, and the loss of wildlife and severe disconnection produced by these losses, We let in soda cans and we let in cigarette butts [...] We let in various other pieces of plastic that would travel through The stream. And some of it unknowingly. We let the run off from agriculture, surface mines, forestry, home Wastewater treatment systems, construction sites, urban yards, And roadways into our hearts. (2011, 131) Finally, Section V laments the loss of connections with nature as we grow older. Readers realize they do not even find the time to say farewell to the realities

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stored in our memories, and they are finally erased. The poem shifts from the collective to the individual, and the first-person pronoun singular “I” closes the sequence “I did not sing o wo, wo, wo! / I did not sing I see, I see. / I did not sing wo, wo!” (2011, 133). In Kimberly Lamm’s view, “Spahr develops an ethical vision that emerges from the fragile space between a detached and inflexible cultural symbolic and a supple imaginary that testifies to the need for connection” (Lamm 2007, 142). Clearly, the space for the collective human and the multiple world of nature as populated by all living creatures, the space for commonalities and differences is central in Spahr’s work. The transformative power which emanates from interaction, balanced distribution of power, respect for human and species’ rights and conservation of resources with a sustainable future in mind is foregrounded throughout Spahr’s important trajectory as an intellectual and an activist.

7

Conclusion

Spahr’s work is political and both her essays and her poetry provide a reading space for democratic engagement in acts of collective response to authority. She addresses issues such as globalization, environmental hazards, economic (neo)imperialism and neoliberalism among others. Her distinctive plural pronominal speakers manifest a certain political orientation in making themselves heard; they pursue the potential for difference and distinctiveness within their groups, and convey their messages across a variety of genres represented in the multimodal discourses gathered in Well Then There Now, where a miscellaneous collection of prose and poetry modalities interpellate the reader. In the continuation of a poetry of political and ecological awareness, critics agree that “the twenty-first century’s most pressing problem will be the sustainability of the Earth’s environment, and that the responsibility for addressing this problem, will increasingly be seen as the responsibility of all the human sciences” (Buell 1999, 699), and not just of specialized disciplinary knowledge like that of ecology, law, or public policy. Thus, the question of genre comes into play to discuss which literary forms can make this possible. The trajectory of the pastoral, together with recent developments, like Spahr’s post-Language poetry informed compositions, contribute to dynamize reflection and debate within this socio-poetical scenario. Spahr’s poems consist of concrete localities and the risks, fellowships and efforts of the human experience meant to restore nature as a home fit for the co-habitation of all living species. In Spahr’s poetry, nonlinearity, fragmentariness, repetition, serial form, together with focused attention and her sustained experimentation with

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personal pronouns, forms of address and the imbrication of the political and the personal, are crucial features of her “style”. Hers is a praxis of attuning every reading to every extra-textual implications of her texts. Spahr grants special attention to interaction and exchange in discourse, while she is very aware that language, by nature, in its double articulation must be understood as a set of practices which are always already both rhetorical and political. In her long and successful career as a poet, a professor, an activist and an engaged intellectual, Spahr’s involvement with current challenges and problems both in the US and the world at large has been exemplary. She would probably agree with many of her readers if we hold that literature is a pedagogical discipline which has major effects in fostering critical thinking, in the advocacy for freedom and respect for human and environmental diversity, in fleeing from a single vision or way of thinking and celebrating difference, tolerance and an ethics of sharing and response-able practice. If we were to raise the question of how poets instill environmental awareness and even activism in readers at present, we certainly would have to count upon Juliana Spahr’s attention to the rich and diverse collective within.

Works Cited Agamben, G. (1990, 1993). The Coming Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Altieri, C. (2011). “The Place of Rhetoric in Contemporary American Poetics: Jennifer Moxley and Juliana Spahr.” Chicago Review 56(2/3) (Autumn), pp. 127–145. Blanchot, M. (1983, 2000). The Unavowable Community. Barrytown: Hill Station Press. Buell, L. (1999). “The Ecocritical Insurgency.” New Literary History 30(3), pp. 699–712. Chisholm, D. (2014). “Juliana Spahr’s Ecopoetics: Ecologies and Politics of the Refrain.” Contemporary Literature 55(1), pp. 118–147. Coole, D. and Frost, S. eds. (2010). New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press. Derrida, J. (1994, 2005). The Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins. London: Verso. Esposito, R. (1998, 2010). Communitas. The Origin and Destiny of Community. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lamm, K.K. (2007). “All Together/Now: Writing the Space of Collectivities in the Poetry of Juliana Spahr.” In: C. Rankine and L. Sewell, eds., American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 133–156. Nancy, J.L. (1983, 1991). The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Robertson, L. (2002). “How Pastoral: A Manifesto.” In: M. Wallace and S. Marks, eds., Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, pp. 21–26. Rooney, E. (1989). Seductive Reasoning: Pluralism as the Problematic of Contemporary Literary Theory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Rorty, R. (1992). The Linguistic Turn. Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Russo, L. (2008). “Writing Within: Notes on Ecopoetics as Spatial Practice.” How2 3(2) (Summer). https://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/vol_3_no_2/ ecopoetics/essays/russo.html. Accessed Jul 2, 2019. Skinner, J. (2001). “Why Ecopoetics?” Ecopoetics 1 (winter), pp. 105–106. Spahr, J. (2001). Everybody’s Autonomy. Connective Reading and Collective Identity. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Spahr, J. (2007). The Transformation. Berkeley: Athelos. Spahr, J. (2011). Well Then There Now. Boston: Black Sparrow Books. Spivak, G.C. (2003). Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press. Stein, G. (1935). “Portraits and Repetition.” In: Lectures in America, Boston: Beacon Press, pp. 165–206. Turner, V. (1969, 1977). “Liminality and Communitas.” In: The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 94–130. Wynter, S. (2003). “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3(3) (Summer), pp. 257–337.

PART 3 Postcolonial Resistance and Neoliberal Toxicity

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chapter 6

Development as Deformation: Postcolonial Ecopoetics in Zulfikar Ghose’s Poetry Rabia Zaheer and Aamir Aziz

Abstract This chapter investigates the postcolonial ecopoetics in Zulfikar Ghose’s two poetic collections, Selected Poems and 50 Poems. Ghose is a Pakistani diaspora poet whose postcolonial aesthetics extrapolate the social, political and ethical repercussions of human intervention into nature to generate the narrative of sustainability against a planetary norm of disposability. This chapter primarily constructs a discursive critique of the politics of subjugation propagated through contemporary modes of development that work as neocolonial strategies disseminated by the West upon the colonized “other”. Consulting critical output by Huggan and Tiffin (2010), De Rivero (2010), Esteva (1992), Escobar (1995) and Sachs (1992), as well as Crosby’s “ecological imperialism” (1988, 103) and Shiva’s “Biopiracy” (1999), it exposes biopolitical underpinnings of urbanization, industrialization and biotechnological experimentation. Drawing parallels between the nature/culture and colonized/colonizer binary, it argues that environmental deformation displayed in Ghose bears the impact of “thanatopolitics” (Braidotti 2010, 201) upon peoples and nature. Moreover, it generates a postcolonial “toxic discourse” (Buell 2001, 39) that attempts to confront existing frames of present and futures to construct stable and sustainable futures.

Keywords ecopoetics – development – postcolonial ecology – biopolitics –thanatopolitics – toxic landscapes – sustainability

Zulfikar Ghose, the Pakistani diaspora poet displays a strong ecological awareness in his poetry. Informed by a biocentric vision, Ghose’s postcolonial aesthetics propagate an environmental discourse that highlights the disruptive © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004445277_007

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impact of human agency and calls for an active engagement with the environment. Setting the narrative of human progress against the backdrop of the exhausted planet, he illustrates the ravages of modern development through images of urban degradation, industrial waste and technological advancement. Hence, Ghose’s postcolonial poetry presents a holistic critique of the politics of subjugation that affects human life along with the environment. Raised and bred in Pakistan and India in his early years, Ghose witnessed the colonial repercussions and the subsequent partition of the subcontinent firsthand. His work provides clear insights into the “postcolonial ecology” (Handley 2011, 117) of ex-colonies and the resultant power politics that arose from the colonial as well as contemporary modes of suppression. Environmental collapse takes an eminent form in his poetry, where an active concern for the environment warrants an equally active critique of the imperial narrative and vice versa. This postcolonial-ecocritical alliance in Ghose’s poetry calls for a broader vision of the world to reconfigure and merge the conceptual boundaries of what it means to be “human” and/or “nonhuman” in the era of the Anthropocene. The chapter aims to project the destructive potential of development in Zulfikar Ghose’s poetry. For this purpose, the chapter analyses Ghose’s two poetic collections, namely Selected Poems (1991) and 50 Poems (2010), to highlight the strategies of suppression disseminated by varied modes of development in postcolonial environments. Within the broader frame of postcolonial ecocriticism and the Anthropocene, this chapter makes use of a number of critical concepts which include Alfred Crosby’s “ecological imperialism” (1988, 103), Vandana Shiva’s “biopiracy” (1999), Huggan and Tiffin’s, Gustavo Esteva’s, and Arturo Escobar’s ideas on development taken from Postcolonial Ecocriticism (2010), The Development Dictionary (1992), and Encountering Development (1995), respectively. Moreover, Lawrence Buell’s “toxic discourse” (2001, 30), Rosi Braidotti’s and Repo’s ideas on “thanatopolitics” (2010, 206; 2016, 111), and Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics” (2013, 186) are also incorporated to illustrate development as a destructive agency. A dominant debate in this regard challenges the altruistic connotations of development and global expansion. Development is a multifarious term with often opposing connotations in the contemporary ecocritical canon. While critics like Huggan and Tiffin as well as Escobar treat it as a weapon to subjugate the “third world” (2010, 19; 1995, 44), Oswaldo De Rivero (2010), Gustavo Esteva (1992) and Wolfgang Sachs (1992) deem it a purely destructive phenomenon rooted in the supremacy of the Western, or rich nations of the

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world. Development thus becomes the primary instigator of a class system that thrives on segregation, exclusion and division. Developing his critique with reference to the parallel but disjunctive discourse of the privileged versus underprivileged countries, De Rivero calls development a façade that “helps underdeveloped countries to conceal their misfortune and developed countries to sooth their conscience” (2010, 2). Viewed in this context, development becomes synonymous with global hegemony of the West that fosters Western beliefs, ideology, and culture. “Robbing peoples of different cultures of the opportunity to define the forms of their social life” (Esteva 1992, 9), it generates or validates “biopiracy”, which is the result of practising control over the “biodiversity and indigenous knowledge of countries of the South” (Shiva, 1999, n.pag.). For Shiva this control effectively sustains the colonizer/colonized and culture/nature binary to wield control over the life, land and culture of others. This discourse of development links with Crosby’s notion of “ecological imperialism” (1988, 103). Crosby identifies the biological and ecological imperative as the root cause of European expansion. He contends that more than using warfare or violence, the control over the natives was made possible by exploiting their land, “ecosystems, mineral resources and human assets” (2004, xviii). A similar power play underlies the relationship between the human and the nonhuman world in Zulfikar Ghose’s poetry, where biological and environmental invasion act as contemporary neo-colonial strategies for dominance. Centralizing the nature/culture debate, the Anthropocene frame attempts to reconfigure the essentially problematic nature-human relation in the modern discourse that conceives of nature as “other” than human, opposed to human progress, culture, and civilization. Studying nature in textual discourse, Manes states that “[n]ature is silent in our culture, for the status of being the speaking subject is allotted to and guarded as a human prerogative” (1996, 15). Related to this is how contemporary politics and its exclusionary tactics (Repo 2016, 111) affect the environment to generate a discourse of “othering”. In this scenario, biopower, or control over the biological assets of any group translates predominantly into the politics of death. Braidotti relates it to how the act of living itself “is identified with its perishability, its propensity and vulnerability to death and extinction. Biopower, thus means Thanatos-politics” (2010, 206), or thanatopolitics when perceived in connection with its repressive potential. Wielding the power of conferring death over others, contemporary power politics disseminated through various modes of development creates post-apocalyptic environments, where people are managed through the fear of death (Mbembe 2013, 186; Groeneveld 2014, n.pag.). Ghose’s poetry

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reveals this politics of death as a consequence of environmental deformation and ruin. Another significant notion is Buell’s “toxic discourse” (2001, 30), which expresses concern for environmental destruction. Usually set off by a disturbing environmental or climatic alteration, this discourse expresses human apprehension in the face of the dying planet. Buell further contends that this concern has not received due attention by the society and academia alike. In the light of Buell’s ideas, this chapter traces the toxic discourse in Ghose’s poetry that arises from a deeply felt disquiet for environmental degeneration. This chapter highlights three core processes of contemporary development in Ghose’s poetry: urbanization, industrialization and technological advancement. Though these neocolonial processes have formulated new methods of subjugation, they work on the same old ideological principles that led colonial expansion. They affect the human and nonhuman world in various capacities causing large scale damage that cannot be reverted. Ghose’s poetry renounces these human-centric acts disseminated by development to construct a sustainable future. The ravages of development are primarily inscribed in the landscape that is at the centre of Ghose’s postcolonial identity. While, on one hand, Ghose’s landscape is embedded with the trauma of colonial violence, on the other, it becomes the prime object of rapid urbanization. The external world in this instance becomes a “site for narrativity” (Zapf 2014, 52), empowering the nonhuman as the speaking subject who demands an address. Nature and the earth universally symbolize continuity and permanence, while in Ghose’s poems the mountains, trees, the sea, and air tell their own stories of death and ruin. Reading the colonial history embedded in the Pakistani landscape, Ghose bemoans that the “earth banks on roadside / idle as rubbish, while the imperial copper of aggrandizement was hammered” in the poem “A Short History of India” (1991, 14). The land is a victim of imperial expansion, as helpless as the natives who were colonized. The trauma of partition is also inscribed in the landscape, for human conflict drew the rope “stiff across the country” splitting it in two, while “the horizon paled, then thickened, blackened with crows”, as Ghose puts it in “This Landscape, These People” (1991, 11). Thus, it is evident that the landscape carrying scars of imperial violence takes centre stage in Ghose’s poetry. Ghose’s poetry abounds with images of the urban and deformed landscapes that tell the story of human advancement characterized by an unmitigated sense of waste. Rousing fear, panic and desolation, the urban landscape is projected through images of suffocation, loss and imprisonment. Commenting on metropolitan development and the increasing number of buildings in

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the urban centres, in the poem “Mutability” Ghose observes “how the concrete rises against the sky!” (1991, 27) to confine people within walls who live in “panic / crying for spaces to open”, as described in “Blood Sports” (2010, 55), while outside pollution blocks the nourishing sunlight. Ghose’s poems document the changeability of the urban landscape that constantly mutates in something worse than it was before. In the poem “Don’t Forget the Pill, Dear”, Ghose rebukes that we knowingly “submit / to history’s fashionable misconceptions” (1991, 29) like the charms of urbanization and development. Moreover, Ghose views modern city development as a failure of contemporary planning. Noting the deliberate destruction of nature, he wonders in “Mutability” how the few “tallest plane trees” could have survived the “elaborate road works” (1991, 27) of the developing metropolis. Green lands in Ghose’s poetry give way to barren cityscapes where steel and concrete consume all. Landscapes are reduced in “Don’t Forget the Pill, Dear” to a “museum display of trees and the ducks / splashing in the decorative lakes” or “turnstile’s three penny bit of nature!” (1991, 29). Ghose calls it “a falsification, a trick of the cultivated mind!” (1991, 29), a fool’s paradise created to satisfy the demands of a weak conscience. This “illusion of the green oasis” (Buell 2001, 38) created by the modern city fails to pacify the rising panic engendered by “global toxification” (2001, 39). In some instances, the fear and paranoia widespread in the urban life accompanies a yearning for the lost land of green, the “Wordsworth[ian] landscape” (1991, 40) which is a direct manifestation of his diaspora experience. Ghose is often nostalgic, as in the poem “Old Ragged Claws”, remembering a world where one expected “rivers to be wide / and plains to spread their vineyards and corn / with a deep green [...] the sky to be / on its best blue behaviour” (1991, 31). Moreover, this nostalgia generates a debilitating sadness that pervades his declaration: “my eyes are shot / with the blood of sunsets that brought no rest / Gone that land, slipped away [...] its trees uprooted” (1991, 31), its green faded. Ghose’s poem “The Other World” similarly laments the beauty of the natural world that is gone, be it “the ocean springing / up with its surprising sunsets”, “submerged beyond humpbacked hills / each with its solitary cactus”, and the evening “greying blue with a last vermilion streak”, “all reduced / now to bare symbols” (1991, 42). Ghose’s longing for the land he lost also links to the collective loss for a world that is no more, which is expressed in the poem “Come, Sailor”, for nothing “will bring back the heart-soothing / vision, nor will the hills / again be purple near the town that was once / home” (1991, 46). This restless feeling of being an outsider wherever he goes, coupled with the yearning for all that has changed, aptly corresponds to the ‘home’ that we all share, and have destroyed—the planet Earth.

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Insulated from all that is natural, such an imprisoned, unhealthy living generates a feeling of claustrophobic panic and bondage in the city dwellers. In the poem “The Other World”, the inhabitants of this new world survive on “the severe abstraction of darkness [...] the massed / solidity of water. [...] [and] air which exhausts the lungs” (1991, 43). Even outdoor space in these urban centres offers no relief as the atmosphere is laden with toxins blocking out life-giving sunlight. This affects people’s workday routines in the poem “Kew Bridge”, making them inhabitants of the night, as the “days grow darker earlier than dark / nights can fall”, and “I wake in darkness [...] [to] sleep / past sunrise” (1991, 28). Even the diurnal cycle has changed its course, replacing darkness with light and night with day. Apart from degrading the environment, toxicity generated by urban lifestyle also affects individuals causing ruptures in communal life (Buell 2001, 41). Such an unhealthy living produces a generation of lazy, indolent beings whose prime prerogative is to waste their life. In the poem “Blood Sports” Ghose envisions their habitual acts, whether on a Sunday afternoon or in the peak hours of a weekday. They are either shut within “darkened rooms, / the windows shuttered, and sprawled in overstuffed / sofas, smoking cigars” (2010, 55), or exist in “crowds pound[ing] / on car doors”, keeping their “palm[s] pressed against the horn” (2010, 55) in a traffic jam. Both examples reveal a self-destructive impulse prevalent in the present generation. The only respite from this poisoned, polluted existence is to evoke the pastoral which gains Edenic proportions in Ghose’s imagination. The “trauma of pastoral disruption” (McLeod 2016, 194) caused by the urbanization of natural landscape is plainly evident in Ghose’s desire to return to a world unadulterated by the aftereffects of human advancement. In short, a “permanent paradise” as displayed in the poem “Trees” (1991, 63), “where water [...] thick with / yellow-flowering hyacinths” is “intertwined with creepers” (64) evoking the pre-colonized biodiverse land of the subcontinent. In addition to urbanization, Ghose discusses the effects of industrialization on the biosphere, including urgent concerns for energy conservation, entropy and symbiosis. The incessant use of non-biodegradable materials like plastic and aluminium, and noxious chemicals emitted from factories and vehicles poison the atmosphere, bringing about irreversible damage. Ghose’s poem “Don’t Forget the Pill, Dear” denounces the modern industry as the primary cause of our present failures asserting that the factories producing “fumes from gas boiler[s] / commit us to degeneration” (1991, 29). Ghose repudiates human negligence as the worst form of irresponsibility that affects the generative potential of nature, making it a highly entropic environment. Ghose’s inquiry into such contemporary practices challenges the pro-capitalist stance

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propounded by modernized nations and exposes them as the new faces of the same old ‘imperial’ tradition. Ghose often compounds the effects of industrial development with the rapidly growing industrial waste that overtakes the landscape. His poetic landscape abounds with acres of slums where people dump waste, used up machines, and old household items. His poem “Old Ragged Claws” builds a series of questions, finally asking, “what land is this / where fields are banked with rusting refrigerators, fill[ing] up the earth’s wrinkles” (1991, 32). The reference to “earth’s wrinkles” humanizes mother Earth and reminds humans that nothing we do now can right the wrongs we have committed in the name of industrialization. Similarly, in “The Pursuit of Frost”, Ghose sums up the history of human civilization in images of industrial waste and pollution—“crushed aluminium cans”, “carbon waste”, “broken glass”, and “underground / cables” (1991, 35-36). Hence, Ghose debunks the “myth of development” (De Rivero 2010, 2) and iterates human history as a mass of fatal errors leading to an ecological disaster. Exploring postcolonial ecocritical concerns, Ghose’s poetry traces parallels between the nature/culture and the colonized/colonizer binary to subvert the discourse of “othering” on a dual level, encompassing race, age, and class on the one hand, and the nonhuman, or the extra human, on the other. Ghose’s poetry reveals that the contemporary obsession for urbanization and industrialization generates a regressive culture that opposes nature. It is a culture that breeds self-destruction, and the only exception to this passive self-abusive existence is one in which this destructive instinct is projected on to another. Thus, apart from indulging in excess of every kind, these masochistic humans get high on blood sports, whether “bull fights” for the rich or “cock fights” for the poor who “scream… for blood” in the poem “Blood Sports” (2010, 55) to derive pleasure. It is a world in which nothing is sacred, where the natural is taken over by the unnatural and “beauty is sculpted / in sterile rooms where women shed wrinkled skin”, as Ghose writes in “Among Perfumed Landscapes” (2010, 59) to replace it with an artificial one. In such a world, the “plastic surgeons” (59) playing God have reversed the flow of time to bring back the nearly dying. Youth and age have replaced each other, as the young look old while the aged wear masks faking youth. This degeneration does not stop at the physical level, rather it has penetrated the spiritual and moral being, stripping away the very basis of what makes us human. Furthermore, life holds no sacred value in this world, where animals are sacrificed by the fashion industry to retrieve fur, catering to the latest fashion ensemble. Human values, emotions and feelings have lost their

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worth, and even love is either an illusion, “a drugstore paperback / romance” (1991, 29), or parasitic, making each lover “suck the venom from the other’s flesh” (29), as is read in “Don’t Forget the Pill, Dear”. This unnatural culture proliferates through human greed and desire for power and primarily promotes a rejection of nature. Ghose further challenges the anthropocentric view of the world in which the human is at the centre speaking for the environment, and he assigns value to all living and non-living entities. This links to Cohen’s “ethics of relationality” (Cohen 2014, x) between all life on the planet, whether human, animal, or plant life, and “discloses a dimension in which ‘we’ and ‘they’ are caught together in an ontological dance whose choreography follows patterns of irredeemable hybridization and stubborn entanglement” (Iovino 2016, 11). The Earth thus becomes a community where all living and non-living beings share the same energy as one organism. This interconnection establishes agency on a larger scale including agency of plants, animals, aquatic life or the planet Earth itself (Durbeck, Schaumann, and Sullivan 2015, 121). In keeping with these ideas, Ghose’s poetic discourse questions the anthropocentric assumption of the human as a superior being and acknowledges the nonhuman as autonomous. His is a stance that concurs with contemporary posthumanist concerns of Rosi Braidotti, who views the environmental alternative as a combination of cosmology with anthropology in respect of diversity both in human and nonhuman form (Braidotti 2013, 48). This posthumanist thinking inquires both into the biological and non-biological categories and human centrism is invariably eroded (Oppermann 2016, 25). The third focal agent of neocolonial control is technological advancement in the field of modern warfare and surveillance, biohazardous experimentation and genetic engineering. Ghose relates modern computer-operated lifestyle and the obsession with technological advancement as necropolitical. Identifying technological advancement as self-destructive, Ghose in “The Incurable Illness” acknowledges “[t]he computers are programmed. The pill / marketed” and “the inventions that permit life also kill” (1991, 24). Putting responsibility strictly in our hands, he concludes the poem with a prophetic warning: “we’re the products we make, congenitally obsolete” (24), highlighting the death drive that underscores all that we do in the name of advancement. This is akin to Jacques Derrida’s ideas on the relation between modernity and new electronic media, specifically television, that operate like religion in our times (Naas 2016, 104). Sociologist Anthony Giddens relates the human ontological security with the consequences of modernity that also include construction of virtual reality in a digital space infested with images (Giddens 2013, 92; Tompkins 2003, 194; Tompkins 2014, 139). This aspect of technology has rendered modern

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life ineffectual. Due to advancement in media and technology, humans have become incompetent. The rich in Ghose’s poem “Among Perfumed Landscapes” own grand estates and “islands with satellite dishes on hilltops and are tuned / to the planet’s entertainment” (1991, 59). Completely dependent on technology, they watch television all day long even if they have to see reruns of programs they have seen before. Apart from affecting the quality of human life, modern neocolonial strategies propagated by technological advancement also destroy the environment. In one of his poems, “On Owning Property in USA”, Ghose states that we “simultaneously poison and preserve” (1991, 33) both ourselves and the green world around us, plainly identifying human agency as the primary factor bringing about our decline. Reiterating the same self-destructive impulse in the poem “Among Other Things”, he compares man to “the fruitless mulberry tree whose foliage thrives / on being regularly sprayed with insecticide” (1991, 60), effectively relating man to his environment, making the survival of one contingent upon the other and vice versa. Many of Ghose’s poems ask the reader a number of questions that relate human responsibility with environmental ruin. In the poem “Incurable Illness” he inquires: “What’s happening to our race?” as “[w]e’re dying sooner than we expected” (1991, 24). Similar questions pervade other poems signifying an active concern for the future of the environment and humanity, formulating a cautionary narrative against the destruction of nature. In other words, Ghose’s poems pre-empt what George Monbiot would argue in his feral concerns with reference to rewilding the seas, land and human life (2014, 122-123). Tracing the repercussions of the disrupted ecological balance on life expectancy, fertility, and mortality, he calls for a more sustainable technology. Linking technological advancement to biopolitics, Ghose’s poetic discourse exposes the manipulative tendencies of modern biopolitical methods that catalyse human and environmental collapse. These include strategies through which population, land and environments are classified in order to manage, seclude or exclude certain entities, groups or species. This is evident in Ghose’s poem “The Shadow Woman”, where certain spaces are cordoned off, like “the street of evil surgeons” or “clinic of defunct genes” (2010, 53). These places, where technology thrives, are barred from entry and strictly observed throughout the day. However, it is only at night, under the cloak of darkness, that one can attempt to enter them. In these places doctors and engineers conduct biogenetic experiments to modify humans and animals. In the postcolonial context, this notion relates to Vandana Shiva’s notion of “biopiracy” (1999) that argues against biological control of the colonized environment to generate revenue.

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The tenuous line between biopolitical and thanatopolitical control is traced by critics like Stuart J. Murray and J. Repo. Drawing links between the use of biopolitical power and thanatopolitical discourse, Repo calls “Thanatopolitics [...] the murderous underbelly of biopolitics” (2016, 111). While Murray intervenes in the intellectual duel between Foucault’s biopolitical and Giorgio Agamben’s thanatopolitical logic by emphasizing the classical Greek ideas about life and death in politics and political space, he emphasizes that “it is the good life, happiness, or Aristotelian eudaimonia that binds a community together, and sustains that community over time as a polis, politically” (2008, 205). In the light of this debate, Sitze’s idea that the modern man has entered a “thanatopolitical space [...] a space of indifference and abandonment” (2012, 221) gains significance. Ghose’s poetry identifies this indifference and apathy as the root cause of our current scenario. By highlighting the ever-worsening condition of the environment, Ghose iterates the need for an ideological change which is only possible if we change the way we think. Unless this transformation takes place, the terrain of human advancement will always disrupt the environment. Technological advancement and contemporary biopolitical strategies for deploying power are significant factors affecting environmental appropriation. The mechanized world portrayed in Ghose’s poems reflects modern man’s obsession with advanced technologies like surveillance. This world, as depicted in “The Shadow Woman”, is run by unidentified individuals who decide the fate of humanity, working in “high-tech security sealed off” (2010, 53) from the rest of the world to monitor life under watchful surveillance. There is an urgency and secrecy associated with this place where alarms go off without reason and people speak “in code on walky-talkies” (53), making life and death decisions for others. Thus, power is exercised through modern surveillance strategies and government authorized espionage. In the poem “Among Perfumed Landscapes”, Ghose creates a land “freed from memory” (2010, 59) where “compulsively, in uncounted circles, / men walk” (59) like Eliot’s hollow men, unsure, weak and dependent. A point to be noted is the similarity between Ghose’s and Eliot’s men, both products of the same modern civilization that is going nowhere. Though individuals are depicted as failures, it is the larger institutions or conglomerates feeding on them that gain power and monopoly. This regressive control over others is practiced by the more powerful countries of the world. Recognizing this global politics, Ghose projects the modern state apparatus as a grand failure in “The Incurable Illness” and states: “I see Europe raising towers of concrete / and glass and filling forms for the effete / state” (1991, 24) that is unable to put a stop to external influences in state management. Moreover, modern inventions in science and medicine rather than warranting a safe world, engage in thanatopolitical practices delivering death.

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Inventions are used as weapons of mass destruction to fuel warfare and terrorism. Many of Ghose’s poems expose destruction and death meted out in times of war. In his poem “The Attack on Sialkot” he captures the panic and fear that reign during wartime, stating “[f]rom the east and southeast the tanks, from the air / the jets converged [...] in a massive pilgrimage” (1991, 16) quick to reduce a city to shambles. The poem concludes with a question: “which / way will you turn now?” since all “landmarks are falling” (16). This idea finds theoretical basis in Repo’s discussion on biopolitics. Quoting Bigo and Jabri, she states that “the politics and practices of war, colonialism, border control, and homeland security” (2016, 110-111) have adversely affected the human race. Ghose further exposes the contemporary issues of environmental exploitation and acts of terrorism inscribed in the ecological world. In “Silent Birds” twin acts of terrorism result in an unnatural silence of birds. The crow, a trickster figure in his poetry, usually creating a racket (2010, 64) “alighted on the garden wall, / opened its beak out of habit but uttered / no sound” (63). The landscape shuddered and the parakeets are silenced in ominous expectation. The unnatural silence of birdlife is one of the ways in which nature narrates its stories (Iovino and Oppermann 2014, 1) in a one-sided dialogue with the human world. Discussing the effects of human agency on the nonhuman, Ghose notices how the seasonal migration of birds is disrupted due to the environmental changes. In the same poem he laments that the birds seem “troubled [...] as if some unexplained failure confused / flight patterns and rendered hazardous the autopilot of instinct” (63). The same goes for vultures that do not return “to the Parsi Tower of Silence” every year (63). Furthermore, Ghose observes that eagles and hawks that circled high in the skies now float in “sooty pollutants drifting up the sky” (64), while in another poem, “Come, Sailor”, he predicts a future in which there will be no birds migrating to far off homelands (1991, 46). Images of technological warfare and armament overtake the natural in Ghose’s poetry. The sea in the poem “Interlude on the Beach” turns otherworldly when “ghostly in the broken fog a tanker appeared, briefly / its black hull sprang sensation from the sea” (2010, 58), creating waves upon which birds rise in “white spirals / beginning their migration” (58). Thus, an anthropogenic intervention disrupts the natural habitat and biodiversity native to the area. Human intervention also extends to technological warfare taking root in disciplines of medicine and farming. A main impetus of the post-industrial, capitalized thought is the body as the “site of financial investment and potential profit” (Braidotti 2010, 204). Gaining control over the other’s body or bodies of otherness, which may be human or other than human, generates empowerment. This power of conferring life and death extends to “debates about foetal rights, abortion, stem cell research and euthanasia” (Bennet 2010, 56). Ghose’s

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seven poems entitled “Lady Macbeth’s Farewell to Scotland”, which he later changed to “Lady Macbeth and the Scorpions”, create a nightmarish land, the result of biohazardous experimentation. The poem “The Shadow Woman” refers to the toxic experiments carried out by the so-called learned men of the world, bent over “bloody wombs”, their “gloved hands dripping red” (2010, 53). These unnatural deeds are committed in a sterilized operating room where the “ceiling / light above them looks like a bleeding sun” (53) reminiscent of a decapitated landscape. Doctors and engineers in Ghose’s world are harbingers of death conducting genetic experiments on humans and animals to produce a “new breed” (2010, 54) fit for the modern world, as one reads in “On the Poisoned Land”. Fully legalized by the government and officials in power, these mutated beings, projects of the cloning industry, are checked on repeatedly by government officials who “arrived in pickups with oversize tires, looking / impressively scientific in masks and safety suits” (54). The need for secrecy, surveillance and safety measures points at underhanded acts concealed from the general public. Those in positions of power deal in the politics of death through biological warfare, genetic mutation, and nuclear testing. The latest experiments result in producing beings much stronger than the normal ones. Moreover, the sterile environment produces months of rare fertility in the poem “Exotic Nights”. Highlighting this disruption in the natural order of life and birth, Ghose states: “Ten thousand children were born in Dolores Hidalgo / between February and October” (2010, 56). Death, disease and sickness prevail in Ghose’s poems spreading from the human to the nonhuman world. This discourse on toxicity presents “an interlocked set of topoi whose force derives partly from the anxieties of late industrial culture, partly from deeper-rooted habits of thought and expression” (Buell 2001, 30). Ghose acknowledges in his poem “The Incurable Illness” that “[e]ach one of us is incurably ill” (1991, 24), spreading sickness to the surrounding environment. The atrophied landscape in Ghose’s poetry bears scars and seems a victim of a nuclear assault—distorted, sterile and monstrous. This corruption has infiltrated the very heart of nature in the poem “On the Poisoned Land”, for “among the exposed roots of giant cypresses / flourished black spotted orange mushrooms from / a soil crusted with soot” (2010, 54). This fact in Ghose finds theoretical explanation in Coole and Frost’s discourse on toxicity with reference to the damaging consequences of biotechnological experimentation and genetic engineering. This “open[s] up a minefield of ambiguous ethical, and political possibilities (such as biodisasters and bioterrorism)” (Coole and Frost 2010, 21), as well as “unforeseen mutations, trajectories of illness or distress, patterns of global climate change” (16) that are uncontrollable.

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Genetic experimentation to alter crops and vegetation have critical environmental outcomes. “Transgenic crops” increase health risk by introducing new mutations and diseases that disturb the ecosystem of the affected area (Shiva 1999, chap. 2, n.pag.). Ghose’s landscape also bears the impact of these genetic mutations. Vegetation is deformed in “Blood Sports”, bearing poisonous fruit like “the fig tree covered with purple-streaked bulbous fruit” (2010, 55). The plant-life produces faded flowers and dying trees twisted out of shape that resemble dried out bushes. Hence, Ghose’s poetry lays bare the cycle of violence that can only end in the destruction of both man and nature (Coupe 2013, 156). The second poem in the Lady Macbeth sequence, entitled “On the Poisoned Land”, further portrays a derelict post-apocalyptic world with land, water and air all barren and sterile. The atmosphere polluted with toxic fumes turns “the pink sunrise almost purple” (2010, 54). A thick mist covers the horizon while the sun burns through the grey haze of smog scarcely reaching the dying Earth (54). Ghose’s world is a darkened, shadowy place—a nightmarish land, where air is dispersed with chemicals affecting plant, animal and human life. In such a world, described by Ghose in “Three Rooms in a Fort by the Ocean”, the erratic climate churns up in “an electrical / storm” to wreak havoc, and black clouds rain endlessly making “the ocean violet” (2010, 92). The sea, the river and the ocean in Ghose’s poem “On the Poisoned Land” are laden with chemical waste producing a dense smog that covers the water ready to explode any moment like “fissured land which emitted steam from a / boiling interior” (2010, 54). In the poem “Interlude on the Beach” Ghose states: “the fog closed the sky and from the oceans rose / apparitions of sunlight as if the water’s depth / generated in primitive airy form foetus shapes / upon the spume” (2010, 58), creating an unreal landscape. These airy beings seem tangible, hovering midway between the sea and the air, portents of an ominous future. Human intervention in the natural processes disrupts the climate and creates irregular weather conditions including freak storms, drought and flooding. Ghose repeatedly uses paradox to portray the unnatural climate, be it “the permanent snow [...] in late June reflect[ing] the midnight sun” in his poem “In the Unlit Castle” (2010, 57), “the encroaching desert” (57), “the rainforests [...] on fire” (57) or “the perpetually frozen mountains” in “Among Perfumed Landscapes” (2010, 59). All these instances reveal a perverted natural world in which sterility nourishes growth, snow falls in summer, the desert invades green plains, and rainforests catch fire signifying ecological changes like desertification, deforestation and ozone depletion. Ghose also mentions in “The Water Carrier” (1991, 19) and “The Shadow Woman” (2010, 53) the sudden assault of extreme hot weather when heat

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emanates from the sun at dawn and even the stars look like balls of fire scattered in the sky signalling global warming. This rapidly transforming climate links to Iovino and Oppermann’s idea that we live in a world that tells stories (2014, 1) and communicates through its materiality. Thus, Ghose’s poetic landscape is a “palimpsest” (Dillon 2007, 9) of the continuous environmental mutilation that gives fair warning and calls for a biocentric and empathetic humanity. The climate consistently shifts bringing about an alien environment, one where the lush, green acreage is taken over by the dry, barren land. In the poem “Old Ragged Claws” Ghose states: “for the desert’s / pleasure, for the desert’s thirst [...] rivers [are] emptied” (1991, 31), even the birds have migrated elsewhere, leaving the trees “empty as a football stadium” (1991, 32), echoing silence that is “filled with the memory of squawking / geese”, and bird chatter in the poem “Sounds” (1991, 65). The repetition of the word “empty” in both instances aptly describes the modern man’s hollow existence. This description of the depleted landscape turns to dire warning of the approaching end with the “warrior on horseback” featuring in the poem “Exotic Nights” (201o, 56), one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse that are mentioned in the Bible, including Conquest, War, Famine and Death. An apt metaphor for the end of times, the horsemen bring utter devastation to the world. The politics of power pervading the human world discussed above works through the fear of war and conquest. It is in the natural environment that the other two, famine and death, reign. The atrophied environment is on a slow journey towards death and sterility. Tracing the anthropogenic impact on the environment, Ghose reveals the human as the primary agent responsible for the condition of the planet. In this post-apocalyptic environment, the figure of Lady Macbeth, a character in seven of Ghose’s poems, becomes more than a literary reference. Ghose’s Lady Macbeth differs much from her Shakespearean counterpart. Where the Shakespearean character is the unnatural woman who lacks “human kindness” (Shakespeare 1.5, 18), Ghose’s character embodies the dying mother nature, mutated, poisoned and twisted out of shape, but one who roams the landscape searching for signs of life. Ghose speaks for the earth that has been subjected to violence of different sorts. It is a repetitive violence that gradually builds and slowly annihilates over a period of time. Ghose’s Lady Macbeth, like nature, is a being more sinned against than sinning. Thriving on toxins like the “butterfly [that] sucks from the milkweed a toxin / that keeps off predator birds”, she has “drunk / the shadow of the yew” in “The Shadow Woman” (2010, 53) to survive in the unnatural world retaliating on the human in the same way. Lady Macbeth is photophobic, a “shadow woman” “protected from light” (53), who dons

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the cloak of darkness to haunt the poisoned landscape looking for anything that “could still reproduce itself”, as Ghose writes in “On the Poisoned Land” (2010, 54). Another poem, “The Unlit Castle”, describes her shut within walls passing from one window to another looking for escape and longing to “stand among / the oaks and be nourished by the absorbing rain” (2010, 57), only to be disappointed. Since the natural world is a toxic place devoid of growth, any attempt to resurrect the dying environment through artificial methods, including quick ways of seed dispersal and use of insecticides and fertilizers, becomes ineffective. In the poem “Exotic Nights” Ghose describes one such attempt: the atmosphere resounds with “a grinding noise in the air, / as of blades in a machine” (2010, 56), spreading chemicals that cling to the air. However, this method also fails to produce vegetation, the seeds never sprout, as nature refuses growth and fecundity. Ghose’s Lady Macbeth sequence repeatedly uses words like “panic” in the poems “Blood Sports” (2010, 55) and “In the Unlit Castle” (57), or “crazed” and “feverish” in the poem “Exotic Nights” (2010, 56) to capture the fear and paranoia that overshadows the modern world. The contemporary world is controlled through strategic methods of domination in order to propagate fear amongst others. Terrorism, the threat of war, political manoeuvres, and biopolitical practices have become a part of this power play, within the human as well as between the human and nonhuman world. Predicting the end of the planet as we know it, Ghose compares the dying day to the last stains of an orchestra in the poem “Sounds”. Furthermore, he states: “we’re compelled to make our retreat / and put the fragments together of what’s still / visible of the unfamiliar landscape” (1991, 65), before this too dissolves in perpetual night. These words echo a warning to save what is left before it is too late, before nature turns on us. Hence, analysing Ghose’s poetry, this essay has attempted to build a discursive critique of contemporary modes of development to expose their neocolonial ideology. It has further explored the politics of subjugation that takes an eminent form in postcolonial environments, where biopolitical practices transfigure thanatopolitical and necropolitical overtones. Thus, the land, the environment, human resources and material assets of the “othered” become the object of contestation exploited for the exercise of power. Most importantly, this essay has constructed a discourse of toxicity derived from the lethal impacts of urban expansion, industrialization and consumer-culture as well as technological experimentation in surveillance, warfare, medicine and farming. In doing so, it contests contemporary social, political, scientific and economic practices to confront the failure of development and calls for a posthumanist

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vision that sees other forms of life and materiality equally significant for building a sustainable future. Hence, the chapter has tried to prove that Zulfikar Ghose’s poetry uncovers the complex, but invisible web of contemporary power politics by engaging in contemporary debates on exploitation, biopolitics, warfare and imperialism, and as a postcolonial discourse that challenges metanarratives established by the West, thereby carving its niche in contemporary poetic discourse.

Works Cited Bennet, J. (2010). “A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism.” In: D. Coole and S. Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 47–69. Braidotti, R. (2010). “‘The Politics of ‘Life Itself’ and New Ways of Dying.” In: D. Coole and S. Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 201–220. Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Buell, L. (2001). “Toxic Discourse.” In: Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 30–54. Cohen, J.J. (2014). “Foreword.” In: S. Iovino and S. Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. ix-xii. Coole, D. and Frost, S. (2010). “Introducing the New Materialisms.” In: D. Coole and S. Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 1–43. Coupe, L. (2013). “Green Theory.” In: S. Malpas and P. Wake, eds., The Routledge Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory, 2nd ed., London and New York: Routledge, pp. 154–166. Crosby, A.W. (1988). “Ecological Imperialism: The Overseas Migration of Western Europeans as a Biological Phenomenon.” In: D. Worster, ed., The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 103–117. Crosby, A.W. (2004). “Preface to the New Edition.” In: Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. xv-xx. De Rivero, O. (2010). “Introduction.” In: The Myth of Development: The Non-Viable Economies of the Twenty-First Century, 2nd ed., translated by Claudia Encinas and Janet Herrick Encinas, New York: Zed Books, pp. 1–3.

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Dillon, S. (2007). The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Durbek, G., Schaumann, C. and Sullivan, H. (2015). “Human and Non-human Agencies in the Anthropocene.” Ecozon@ 6(1), pp. 118–36. http://www.ecozona.eu/article/view/ 642/689. Accessed Jun 15, 2019. Escobar, A. (1995). “The Problematization of Poverty: The Tale of Three Worlds and Development.” In: Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, pp. 21–54. Esteva, G. (1992). “Development.” In: W. Sachs, ed., The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, London: Zed Books, pp. 6–25. Ghose, Z. (1991). Selected Poems. Karachi: Oxford University Press. Ghose, Z. (2010). 50 Poems: 30 Selected 20 New. Karachi: Oxford University Press. Giddens, A. (2013). The Consequences of Modernity. John Wiley & Sons. http://books.google.com.pk/books?id=SVmkJEwWGwAC. Accessed Jun 15, 2019. Groeneveld, S. (2014). “Animal Endings: Species Necropolitics in Contemporary Transnational Literature.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison. Handley, G.B. (2011). “The Postcolonial Ecology of the New World Baroque: Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps.” In: E. Deloughrey and G.B. Handley, eds., Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 117–135. Huggan, G. and Tiffin, H. (2010). “Introduction.” In: Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, New York: Routledge, pp. 1–24. Iovino, S. (2016). “Posthumanism in Literature and Ecocriticism.” Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism 4(1), pp. 11–20. http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/Relations/ article/view/989/795. Accessed Jun 15, 2019. Iovino, S. and Oppermann, S. (2014). “Introduction: Stories Come to Matter.” In: S. Iovino and S. Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 1–20. Manes, C. (1996). “Nature and Silence.” In: C. Glotfelty and H. Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, Athens: University of Georgia Press, pp. 15–29. Mbembe, A. (2013). “Necropolitics.” In: T. Campbell and A. Sitze, eds., Biopolitics: A Reader, Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 161–192. McLeod, J. (2016). “Introduction: Postcolonial Environments.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 51(2), pp. 192–195. Monbiot, G. (2014). “A Work of Hope.” In: Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 121–152. Murray, S.J. (2008). “Thanatopolitics: Reading in Agamben a Rejoinder to Biopolitical Life.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5(2), pp. 203–207. Naas, M. (2016). “Television and Modernity: Jacques Derrida and the Religion of the Media.” Media, Culture & Society 38(1), pp. 96–106.

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Oppermann, S. (2016). “From Posthumanism to Posthuman Ecocriticism.” Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism 4(1), pp. 23–25. Repo, J. (2016). “Thanatopolitics or Biopolitics? Diagnosing the Racial and Sexual Politics of the European Far-Right.” Contemporary Political Theory 15(1), pp. 110–118. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292163353_Thanatopolitics_or_ biopolitics_Diagnosing_the_racial_and_sexual_politics_of_the_European_farright. Accessed Jun 15, 2019. Sachs, W. (1992). “Introduction.” In: W. Sachs, ed., The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, London: Zed Books, pp. 1–5. Shakespeare, W. n.d. Macbeth. http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/ macbeth_1_5.html. Accessed Jun 15, 2019. Shiva, V. (1999). Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Boston: South End Press. Sitze, A. (2012). “Biopolitics and Political Space.” Communication and Critical/ Cultural Studies 9(2), pp. 217–224. Tompkins, J. (2014). “Heterotopias and Multimedia.” Theatre’s Heterotopias: Performance and the Cultural Politics of Space. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 139–179. Tompkins, P.S. (2003). “Truth, Trust, and Telepresence.” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 18(3/4), pp. 194–212. Zapf, H. (2014). “Creative Matter and Creative Mind: Cultural Ecology and Literary Creativity.” In: S. Iovino and S. Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 51–66.

chapter 7

Meena Kandasamy’s Contestation of Inherited Cultural Landscapes in Touch Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández

Abstract This chapter argues that, in her 2006 poetry book Touch, the Dalit activist and writer Meena Kandasamy challenges the inherited, conflicted landscapes and narratives of her native Tamil Nadu, imbued with a history of sustained violence against disenfranchised Dalits. Following the distinction created by cultural geographer John Brinkerhoff Jackson (1984) between a vernacular landscape—associated with an intimate relationship of individuals and communities with the land—and an official landscape—connected with imperial and colonial practices—this chapter will look into Kandasamy’s (poetic) space in Touch as it resists through a composite of landscapes unbalanced in their relationship to each other. Kandasamy re-uses the ancient poetic tradition of Sangam literature, which employs a highly fixed codification of natural elements as symbols for both public and private emotions, in consonance with Jackson’s binomial. Thus, in Touch Kandasamy actively deploys the unequal tension between present official landscapes and historical vernacular landscapes articulating a subaltern discourse which voices the traumas lived through by her people. She does this to contest the hegemonic discourse created by the omnivores (Brahmins and colonizers, as addressed by Gadgil and Guha in 1995) and to advocate for the end of unjust and polluting practices stemming from official landscapes.

Keywords Meena Kandasamy – Touch – vernacular landscape – John Brinckerhoff Jackson – environmentalism of the poor – Dalit – violence – resistance – Sangam literature

© koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004445277_008

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Introduction

Meena Kandasamy’s first collection of poems, Touch (2006),1 was received with contrasting reviews five years after its publication. On one hand, Ashley Tellis (2011) pointed out her many English language mistakes and her scarce knowledge of what the poetic line is like;2 on the other, Jaydeep Sarangi (2011) described her poems as representing an indigenous lifestyle at the same time as creating a space for herself with a very personal poetic voice.3 Certainly, her poetry does not leave anyone indifferent, a fact that becomes evident in Kamala Das’s foreword to Touch, in which the renowned poet praises “the superiority of her [“Kandasamy’s] poetic vision” (Kandasamy 2006, 7). Most criticism about Touch focuses on her feminist Dalit poetics and the stigma of caste that the poet actively resists through her verse. Touch has been studied to “bring out the themes of Dalit suffering and the reactions that it evokes” (Narasimhan 2011, 434); discuss Kandasamy’s denunciation of “gender inequality and systematic subjugation of Indian woman [sic]” (Athwale 2014, 96); “explore the pains and predicaments of the marginalized communities and analyze their grievances” (Mahto 2015, 12); look into “the way in which [D]alit consciousness, subversion and decimation are brought out” (Chelliah 2016, 28); reflect on “caste, gender and patriarchy” (Laxman 2016, 1); analyze Kandasamy’s subverted language as a site of gendered protest (Agrawal 2017); “explicate the representation of caste and gender as dynamic intersectional systems” in a Brahmanic society which creates inequality (Biswas 2018, 107); and investigate the representation of Dalit women “as rebels fighting against the injustice perpetuated against them” (Glory 2018, 104).4 From these publications it becomes self-evident that 1 Kandasamy’s Touch is difficult to purchase nowadays. In electronic conversation I held with the writer, she explained that the publishing house closed after the editor had died. 2 Tellis reads: “She [Kandasamy] offered a volume of 84 poems that needed to have about 24 at most and those 24 needed an editor with a firm hand. With very little sense of the English language (the book is replete with the most insufferable errors and those are not the typos) and almost no sense of the poetic line, let alone prosody or metrics, the book was difficult to even finish reading” (Tellis 2011, n.pag.). 3 Sarangi writes: “Apart from her expert use of language, she has a sincerity of feeling and an honesty of experience rarely encountered. For Meena Kandasamy [...] poetry is about empirical truth and experience. [...] Her poetry is at best of private sensibility. Her consciousness is firmly yoked to the world around her, a world characterised by ecstasy and pain, love and despair” (Sarangi 2011, n.pag.). 4 Other studies jointly approach her two poetry volumes published to date, i.e., Touch together with Ms. Militancy (2010), to carry on analyses which range from understanding Kandasamy’s poems “as products of a counter-hegemonic discourse” that adds to the national imaginary the subaltern voice of Dalits (Chakraborty 2012, 35-36); studying the figures of Sita and

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her verse yearns to denounce how oppression, discrimination and exploitation perpetuate casteism in India and to break Indian readers’ familiarity with this aberrant tradition as her poetry reaches an international audience. Touch illustrates how Kandasamy challenges language and its twisted meaning in hegemonic narratives,5 the limits of physical pain and psychological suffering of her people, with a special emphasis on feminine figures, and the received foundational Hindu myths about casteism which justify, and ultimately perpetuate, the subjugation and killing of fellow humans and nature.

2

Thinking about the Landscape, History and Ecopoetry

Two-thousand-year-old Classical Sangam literature is written in Tamil, the oldest of all the modern languages in India.6 Gros explains that more than 450 poets from all classes of society—read all castes—were admitted to this school only after being judged according to “the recognition of their talent by their peers” (1984, 32). These poems followed a strict code known as Tolkāppiyam, Shoorpanaka as twin rebel figures in Kandasamy’s poetry (Maitra 2014); reflecting on the social structure devised in Touch and Ms Militancy (Pathak 2014); examining the language employed in love poems to turn upside down the role of victim into “a vocal, rebellious, desiring self” (Saluja 2015, 211); looking into “the sensible portrayal of the predicament to the outcastes in Indian society” (Priya 2016, 290); “explicat[ing] that the ‘I or i’ in her poetry [...] is not limited to an essentialist assertion of a single ‘woman’ rather it is anti-essentialist, a shape-shifter and performative” (Biswas 2017a, 20); approaching Kandasamy’s poetry as a transcodification of “Dalit aesthetics into mainstream Indian Poetry in English” (Biswas 2017b, 86); analyzing “sexuality, gender roles, and myths” as essential to the critical study of gender within feminist discourse (Biswas 2017c, 97); investigating the figure of the “new woman” as “powerful women characters” that “wage open wars to defend themselves against patriarchal rules to liberate women from their subservient position with the potency of cognizance to give them a transformative action” (Mattam 2017, 151); exploring “the revolutionary language of poetry [...] that breaks out of a hetero normative matrix” and creates a “third space” (Bhadra 2018, 93); commenting “on caste oppression and gender inequality” (Kamalesh 2019, 1490); to comparing Kandasamy’s poetry to that of other women poets, such as Maya Angelou, in their exploration of gender discrimination through a feminist lens (Fathima 2019, 62). 5 In this line, DeLoughrey and Handley describe the conditions which strain language use under postcolonial oppression: “This legacy of capturing and renaming nature leaves the postcolonial writer in the position of having to renegotiate the terms of taxonomy, struggling to articulate new relationships and new meanings in the tired language of empire. This process tends to render language more ironic, self-reflexive, and unstable [...]. This self-conscious process of renaming and revisioning is a subversion of the colonial language of taxonomy, discipline and control, and a key element in postcolonial literary production” (2010, 11). 6 Sangam means “academy of scholars”.

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“both a grammar and a richly commentated treatise on rhetoric” (Gros 1984, 32) which, as Sivakumar states, is “the only linguistic treatise that deals not only with the aspects of language but also with the modes of human life as influenced by geographical conditions” (2000, 182). These brief poems fall into two different categories: akam, associated with a subjective, individual or abstract poetic mode, deals with human relationships; and puṟam, an objective, public or sensible mode, refers to ethics or wars. Indeed, Rajagopal explicates that in akam the erstwhile man’s life was in nature and the nature was in his life. His ‘interior feelings’ and ‘exterior actions’ were indeed ostensibly governed by the natural environment wherein we find a variety of insects, amphibians, crustaceans, reptiles, mammals, birds and animals. The creatures of soft and wild nature were brought into relationship with mankind by the poets [...] to convey the nuances of human feelings [...]. Living beings are portrayed in Sangam poems not as isolated elements but as their integral parts. (2016, 77) Following Tolkāppiyam, akam poems are thematically separated into five thinais or modes associated with a specific landscape and imagery. Namely, kuṟiñci (mountainous region), mullai (forest or pasture), marudam (cultivable land), neydal (seashore) and pālai (desert or wasteland), an arrangement which symbolizes the wild-tame divide and links human feelings and themes with specific fauna and flora, geographical features, or weather elements. Sangam poetry clearly falls within the label of ecopoetry, particularly when one reads its major definitions given to date. Buell articulates four features which mark an environmental text: the increased presence of the nonhuman so as to suggest that the human and natural history belong together, the inclusion of other legitimate interests beyond human interest, the sense of an unavoidable ethic drive of the human to the environment, and the display of the environment as an agentic process (1996, 7-8). Scigaj describes ecopoetry as “poetry that persistently stresses human cooperation with nature conceived as a dynamic, interrelated series of cyclic feedback systems” (1999, 37). Gilcrest defines “ecological poetry” as that which displays “an ecocentric ethic of interconnectedness, reciprocity, and, in some instances, radical egalitarianism” (2002, 24). Bryson, condensing existing definitions, proposes that ecopoetry, while advancing on the tradition of nature writing, “takes on distinctly contemporary problems and issues” and establishes three basic characteristics; namely, “an ecological and biocentric perspective recognizing the interdependent nature of the world; a deep humility with regard to our relationships

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with human and nonhuman nature; and an intense skepticism toward hyperrationality, a skepticism that usually leads to condemnation of an overtechnologized modern world and a warning concerning the very real potential for ecological catastrophe” (2005, 2). The acknowledged confluence between language, human cultural traits and the geographical features of the place where those communities dwell find a striking parallel in John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, in which the cultural geographer describes complementary, unbalanced features of vernacular and official landscapes. Jackson claims that the landscape, if one is taught to see, can teach “about ourselves and how we relate to the world” (Jackson 1984, ix-x). The official landscape—placed at the center—is described as “well-defined, permanent, [...] self-sufficient, well adjusted” (1984, xi) and “established and maintained and governed by law and political institutions, dedicated to permanence and planned evolution” (xii). Likewise, Adamson explains that the official landscape “is an extractionoriented landscape,7 imposed by government and corporation on local geographies without regards for local peoples, cultures, or environments” (2001, 90). The official landscape becomes a (replenishable) commodity which can be managed, (over)exploited, or plundered. In turn, people in vernacular landscapes “are attuned to the contours of home and place” and their folk landscape is “a living, breathing landscape where geological features [...] are alive with meaning and significance, where people [...] can tell the names of their neighbors and the names of the trees, where they have a sense of the rhythms of local culture” (Adamson 2001, 90).8 Martinican writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant further states that “the landscape has its language” (1989b, 146), regardless of whether it is listened to or not by official landscapes. Vernacular landscapes—situated at the periphery of official landscapes—are identified with the disturbing instability “of people and spaces, [...] local custom, pragmatic adaptation to circumstances, and unpredictable mobility” (Jackson 1984, xii). Just because the official landscape has the “authority to remove, extract, develop, and pave over the vernacular landscape” (Adamson 2001, 91), 7 This quality recalls Saskia Sassen’s Expulsions. Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (2014), in which the scholar argues that impending global problems such as poverty, environmental degradation, displaced or imprisoned population are the consequences of predatory formations that transcend individual, corporative, or governmental schemes. 8 This distinction recalls Gary Snyder’s description of bioregionalism in The Practice of the Wild (1990, 44-48), in which he asks “how the whole human race can regain self-determination in place after centuries of having been disenfranchised by hierarchy and/or centralized power” and warns readers not to “confuse this exercise with ‘nationalism,’ which is exactly the opposite, the impostor, the puppet of the State, the grinning ghost of the lost community” (46).

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the vernacular landscape is “resisted by the political landscape when it could [can] no longer be ignored” (Jackson 1984, xii).9 Such a concentric spatial distribution, with an immutable, law-abiding and enforcing core, and a flexible periphery which needs control patently echoes Bentham’s architectural design of a jail in Panopticon (1791), which allows one security guard to watch inmates without being seen; Foucault’s subsequent development of panoptical structures in modern society as they create unequal power relations (1977); and Deleuze’s (1992) claim that “vast spaces of enclosure” (3) become surveyed in a new machine system of control. Moreover, Jackson warned about the “tension” existing between “the couplet observing/ inhabiting” basically because this binary represents distinct approaches to the study of landscape. Wilson and Growth (2002), in addition, stated that seeing the landscape as an arena of agency “requires a shift from viewing landscape as the somewhat passive result of human activity to landscape as essentially an active influence on social, economic, and political processes” (15; my emphasis). Termed as “different epistemologies”, Wylie mentions the existing gap between “observing and inhabiting, between the critical interpretation of artistic and literary landscapes and the phenomenological engagement of cultural landscape practice” (2007, 6). Whereas the latter is left to cultural geographers, the critique of artistic and literary landscapes is found in the emerging fields of Postcolonial Ecocriticism or Postcolonial Ecology,10 which look into the close relationship between literature and land, power relations and history. DeLoughrey and Handley, for instance, highlight the importance of the land in Frantz Fanon and Edward Said when describing colonial dynamics. For Fanon, they argue, “the land [was] a primary site of postcolonial recuperation, sustainability, and dignity” (2011, 3). Likewise, Edward Said stressed the role of the imagination in the process of recovering the lost land and the identity of belonging to place: “For the native, the history of colonial servitude is inaugurated by the loss of locality to the outsider; its geographical identity must thereafter be searched for and somehow restored [...]. Because of the presence of the colonizing outsider, the land is recoverable at first only through imagination” (1994, 77). In the same line, White advocates that spatial imagination “emerges from and is produced by an activity that more than any other defines us as human, namely our use and grasp of language” (White 2016, 15). Glissant emphasized that the threatened relationship with the land when a community is alienated from it 9 Jackson uses the expressions political as well as official landscape interchangeably. 10 Just to mention the titles of two groundbreaking theorizations on the hybridization between ecocriticism and postcolonial studies that the reader may be well aware of.

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“becomes so fundamental in this discourse that landscape in the work stops being merely decorative or supportive and emerges as a full character. [...] The individual, the community, the land are inextricable in the process of creating history. Landscape is a character in this process. Its deepest meanings need to be understood” (1989a, 105-106). Therefore, DeLoughrey and Handley describe space as the subjective experience of the place and imagination as bearing the workings of the mind in the re-appropriation of a past time and place gone and a language to cope with it: To speak of postcolonial ecology is to foreground a spatial imagination made possible by the experience of place [...]. Place encodes time, suggesting that histories embedded in the land and sea have always provided vital and dynamic methodologies for understanding the transformative impact of empire and the anticolonial epistemologies it tries to suppress. (2011, 4) Given the multifaceted ontology of place, the authors gesture toward the need to establish communication with the land (2011, 4) and pay close attention to what the land has to tell about the past (2011, 5). Estok, upon noting that the word landscape is both a noun and a verb, explains that it “not only determines our past, present, and future but is itself determined by us, by our regimes of violence, by our prunings and cultivations, by our encouragements and denials, and by our ecophobia and biophilia. Humanity, it seems, is inextricably involved with landscape” (2016, 215-216). Likewise, Cosgrove observes that the landscape is a “way of seeing that has its own history, but a history that can be understood only as part of a wider history of economy and society” (1998, 1). It is not surprising then that, for Jackson, history is one of the salient features of the vernacular landscape, which becomes “a composition of man-made or man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence”, understanding the word background as what “underscores not only our identity and presence, but also our history” (1984, 8). Extending Jackson’s description, in line with the advocacy of the imagination in reclaiming identity, those vernacular communities displaced need to reimagine the past, while communities still inhabiting the vernacular landscape forge their existence through the comradeship of everyday trudging, in contrast with the communities in official landscapes which, following Benedict Anderson’s theorization (1983), need to be imagined. Gadgil and Guha’s articulation of what they term “omnivores” and “ecosystem people” also denotes the essential practices of official and vernacular landscapes. Omnivores, living in official landscapes, devour “everything produced

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all over the earth” (1995, 4); ecosystem people, indigenous peoples from vernacular landscapes—which in India actually means the millions of low-caste impoverished Indians—“depend on the natural environments of their own locality to meet most of their material needs” (Gadgil and Guha 1995, 3). In this sense, Nixon—drawing on Martínez-Alier (2002)—speaks of “environmentalism of the poor” as “frequently triggered when an official landscape is forcibly imposed on a vernacular one” (2011, 17) and affirms that “environmental racism (that treat certain communities as more expendable than others)” (2011, 59) is “alive and well in India, entangled as it is with discriminatory traditions of caste, class, gender, religion, and aboriginality” (2011, 295). The narratives told by official landscapes shape as hegemonic grand récits in their “unifying and legitimating power [...] of speculation and emancipation” (Lyotard 1984, 38), which expunge the history of the subalterns, particularly the history of the female subaltern, as “[t]here is no space from which the sexed subaltern subject can speak” (Spivak 1994, 103). Spivak captivatingly uses the term space, which recalls Yi-Fu Tuan’s classic categorization of space and place (2001), yet not only referring to physical room, but also other epistemological, ontological or cultural dimensions required by a community to exist. Because the land is imbued with the violence that has taken place in it, “[a]ddressing historical and racial violence is integral to understanding literary representations of geography” (DeLoughrey and Handley 2011, 8). If place can potentially narrate history, the role of the postcolonial ecocritic is to describe how such processes—in their political, social, economic, cultural or subjective dimensions—manifest in literature. Following the above premises, the next section will explore the intricacies of Kandasamy’s Touch in her intimate relationship with Sangam poetry and Dalit community to look into the historical and narrative tension between the unequal power dynamics inherent in official and vernacular landscapes. In this sense, Kandasamy endeavors to write the history and portray the present of Dalits, as it reveals that “imposed official landscapes typically discount spiritualized vernacular landscapes, severing webs of accumulated cultural meaning and treating the landscape as if it were uninhabited by the living, the unborn, and the animate deceased” (Nixon 2011, 17). However, Kandasamy also devises a future community imagined through her ecopoetic verse.

3

Dalit History, Landscape and Poetic Imagination in Touch

Meena Kandasamy’s creative and imaginative powers provide her personal answer to the exciting and urgent questions about the indissoluble bond

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between land and oppression by resorting to classical Tamil Sangam literature in a fascinating interplay with such convoluted social themes. This analysis will take into account the words of Curtin, when she affirms that “if we believe that environmental and social justice are intertwined, we need to adjust our understanding of what an environmental problem is” (2005, 114). Kandasamy’s poetry, deeply concerned with relationships between people and nature and how such relationships are enmeshed with violence and discrimination through gender, caste and class, epitomizes the entropic tension produced in these disputing areas. The volume opens up with the poem “Lines addressed to a warrior” (Kandasamy 2006, 13), divided into three parts, each of which starts with an invitation to “come. / colonise me”; “invade”; and “capture”. The poetic voice is an anthropomorphized landscape who invites the male invader in. The poem is constructed on the use of such imperative expressions which repeatedly encourage the warrior to advance over what becomes a war-zone terrain: “creep into the hollows / of my landscape”. The gates in this landscape remain open, as typically do in Jackson’s vernacular landscapes, another invitation to settle down in this land and use it up for war: “your home your office / the writing desk and the trading post [...] / your machine guns, its manuals. / populate me with anthems”. This provocative invitation coming from the exoticized landscape is possibly a mental reverberation stemming from the warrior’s military culture, for the landscape-subject either remains unaware or passive to the invasion and the lyric voice informs that her “eyes click lock”. The exoticized landscape is poetically depicted as a lone dancer, an image which adds to the feminization of the land, whereas the invasion is ironically described as never done “with malice or manhood”. So, the female-male binary sardonically evokes love courtship. The landscape advises the warrior to “ignore the sand-brown / of my skin” at the same time as it expresses that the subject is a “willing blind” and ignorant (“I’ll never know black from white”) who will listen “stunned” to the stories about the supremacy of white over black (“talk of your finer finish”) that the warrior “script[s]” in the land. The landscape’s “blank skin”—blank being only one sound away from the word “black”—implies the submissive, anthropomorphized attitude of the landscape-subject to the stories about the battles fought. The landscape is portrayed as disabled, blind (the closeness of the words “hollow” and “eyes” followed by “blind” suggests so) and mentally impaired, lacking the capacity to distinguish the cultural reality of the conqueror and in need to be guided from a blank slate. The landscape voice resonates in the mind of the warrior showing her eagerness to be transformed, civilized, taught, and culturally inscribed with a heroic history of invasion. This

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landscape is thus asking the colonizer, or at least this is what seems to resound in the warrior’s mind, to convert her into an official landscape where the law, order and extraction dynamics are enforced. The poem “Non-conversations with a lover” (2006, 26) parallels “Lines addressed to a warrior” because the lover in the former can be identified with the warrior in the latter and the love relationship recalls the violent conquest of the landscape. In “Non-conversations with a lover” the poetic persona tells her lover that love is similar to her land because it is governed only by her own timing and this cannot be forced. The friction between the imposed rhythm of official landscapes, inattentive to nature’s cycles, and vernacular landscapes, whose peoples are in harmony with nature, is clearly evinced in the poem. As Eliade stated, man—read omnivores—“takes on the role of Time” (1978, 174) with his “desire to accelerate the natural tempo of things by an ever more rapid and efficient exploitation” of nature (1978, 173). The poem shapes around the features of the Sangam landscape kuṟiñci (Mountainous Region), which is characterized by being “cool with water in abundance” (Rajagopal 2016, 79). Water symbolizes “the source of life and fertility” (Ramanujan 2006, 155) together with generosity and abundance. This landscape is populated with wild animals such as elephants and usually contains scenes of love passions such as elopement. Hence, the “raging / of summer storms” as well as the elephant’s “uncontrollable tuskers / trampling” in the poem insinuate the frenzy of a sudden union with the lover. Like other akam poems, the lovers’ intercourse is not explicitly described, but “enacted by the ‘inset’ scene” (Ramanujan 2006, 206) of the elephants and the sudden pouring of water. Like the speaking landscape in “Lines addressed to a warrior”, the land depicted in “Non-conversations with a lover” does not disclose itself as a terra nullius, a Latin expression meaning nobody’s land, and a legal fiction (Connor 2005; Lindqvist 2012) enforced by early white colonizers and their offspring who “justified their claims to occupation by citing their belief that British settlement had effectively extinguished indigenous entitlement to land” (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, 147). Instead, it resembles terres vacantes, a French expression meaning vacant land from a European perspective, denoting land on which no Europeans live and, consequently, land that can be taken. According to Huggan and Tiffin, the attitude to and the effects on the lands and the natives remain the same in the case of both terms (2015, 178). The poet counterposes the indigenous and vernacular timing, and hence, its cultural understanding of love relationships against the official landscape and narrative about love. The poem “Touch” creates a fine tension with “Lines addressed to a warrior” because, whereas the landscape becomes a human skin in “Lines addressed to a warrior”, “Touch” (2006, 35) expands the symbol of the skin in several ways.

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The skin is no longer a metaphor for landscape, but two separate and closely connected elements: “your skin anchored you to this earth”. The skin therefore becomes the vehicle for the sense of touch and, as such, it is blamed for betraying the speaking voice when diverting her attention from the mind to the body during a meditation practice. The skin qualifies as a “sinner” for its “sensuality”. This somehow augurs the religious dimension that readers are about to discover in the unexpected turn in the second part of the poem, where the skin becomes the source of pollution associated to caste. If in “Lines addressed to a warrior” the invader does not pollute the landscape with its benevolent invasion settlement, the touch from a dark-skinned ecosystem Dalit—who yields as the landscape—mentally and physically impaired, will do so. The concept of belonging to the earth finds echo in two other poems in Touch. “Their daughters” (2006, 139) tells one legend “of her people” and another “of her land”. Her land, described as “uniform blue open skies” and “green lands and lily-filled lakes”, is saved by a “daughter”—in a clear feminist reference—when one night, after daily beating at the hands of her husband, she figuratively kills him “by stomping his seedbags…” and, as a consequence, helps maintain the vernacular landscape against the green revolution.11 These female figures, poetically described as “the daughters of their soil” for being loyal to their land and their people, inhabit a landscape with clear vernacular traits. Alternatively, in “Returning home” (2006, 91), images of invasion like those in “Lines addressed to a warrior” and “Touch” recur: “And I thought of my lover. / A primitive man who would invade / your aloneness” (italics in the original). The poet establishes a simile between the lover’s “ancient language” that “sound[s] to you like earth songs to / which your body awakens”. The body, colored like the landscape, is bound to the linguistic utterances from the land and attentive to its music and messages, complying with the ontological description of Jackson’s vernacular landscapes. Other poems from Touch also gesture toward love and violence as elements of a process which are approached either by resistance or yielding, in a similar vein to the dynamics of conquering a land seen in “Lines addressed to a warrior”. A paradigmatic example is the title poem “You don’t know if you are yielding or resisting” (2006, 18). In addition, the poem “Another paradise lost: the Hindu way” (2006, 39) reads: “The perfection of life is when you do not / know the difference between yielding and / resisting”. Finally, in the poem 11 In the early 1960s, agriculture in India adopted technologized methods from agribusiness development to increase production based on new machinery, such as tractors or irrigation facilities, fertilizers, pesticides, and what is known as highly yielding variety seeds. Vandana Shiva (1993), among others, has stated that violence inflicted on the peoples in those areas in the long run brought about social unrest and economic failure, not to mention natural devastation.

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“My lover speaks of rape” (2006, 138), the poetic voice confesses: “in the way of all life, he [her lover] could try / and take root, as I resist, and yield later, like the earth”. The distance—real and imagined—between landscapes’, ecosystem Dalit people’s and women’s yielding and resisting in love relationships is the space, in Tuan’s formulation (2001), in which Kandasamy builds her verse, fringed by contestation on one side and domination on the other. The poem “Inheritance” (2006, 71) epitomizes the historical and social turmoil existing between the communities who inhabit political and vernacular landscapes. Helplessly, silent; we watched it being seized away, all our lands. The Government—a fulltime bewitching whore had promised Jobs. Industrialization. Power, Electric. Everything went, Nothing came. Now, landless, uprooted, unsettled in a resettlement colony we feast our souls on lucent memories—Of an earlier life. The displaced, “uprooted” community echoes the qualities of the landscape in “Lines addressed to a warrior” while the Government, likened to the omnivore invader, continues making a farce about Dalits’ prospects. The only resort the community has is to recall the luminous past limits of the vernacular landscape: “memory charts / familiar horizons”. The poet ironically chooses a quote from Matthew 5:5: “Blessed are the meek / for they shall inherit the earth”, which possibly becomes another empty promise. The unbalanced power dynamics of both political and vernacular landscapes makes the sentence become the wishful thinking of a submissive—and yielding—community. Such unfulfilled promise reverberates in “Promises” (2006, 90), a poem dedicated to the poet’s sister in which the poetic persona promises not a land but showing “a picture postcard lake”, so that the addressee can recreate all the natural elements “only beheld in [her] imagination” so far with her five senses. So, the promise is to show a real landscape which looks like a picture, likening the picture to perfection higher than reality. This subverted triad imagination-realityrepresentation of such landscape actively recalls Gaston Bachelard’s (2002) “material imagination” to signify how the imagination is allured by the world it imagines, so that the materiality of imagination and the imagination of the material world meaningfully coalesce. A similar concept resounds in White’s description of psychogeography, necessary “because the places that we conjure

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up cannot be divorced from human culture [...]. The specific psychogeography of any particular place can only be reckoned by means of detailed contextual analysis” (2016, 5). Estok distinguishes between the conceptualization of the landscape and its perception as one of the central concerns of ecocriticism: “perhaps most often expressed through discussions about questions concerning the constructedness of nature, about the possibilities of unmediated perception and representation, and about the relationships between ‘real world’ problems and academic theory” (Estok 2016, 213). The promise soon reveals impossible to be fulfilled (“O’ the lake was not performing for us. / I didn’t see the promised peace”) and the poetic voice, feeling “bitter and hopeless and disappointed”, perceives instead “forest clearings”, “shallow brackish water” and birds competing for territory “out of habit”. The ecological call in the poem becomes evident in the lack of indigenous forest areas and fresh water, together with the struggle for territory represented by the birds. Winter is the explanation for the “bareness and the desolate waste”, and the new promise to return in summer relights the poetic voice’s hope for “that more congenial spot”. However, this promise is indeed loaded with at least three risks; one, that the “you” in the poem, having lied once, may lie again; two, that the landscape may withstand becoming the representation of an imposed ideal; and three, that the Dalit history that the poet “would have to carry / [...] in her heart” is an ill omen for the “oblivious” future so that she can only disguise “all my waiting days” as “a veritable phantasmagoria”. Such true fantasizing refers to the workings of her imagination in her material dealing with language, elusive reality and torn history. Indeed, the notion of “ecology of mind” (Bateson 2000), the view that the world is a “densely intertwined […] tissue of experience” (Abram 2010, 208), or Barad’s agential realism (2007), a continuous process that simultaneously involves matter and meanings in a unitary field of existence, emphasize the very nature of the poetic persona’s experience in “Promises” as the negotiation, the interaction and the iteration of her mind with this contesting landscape which does not entertain—or yield to—her. If in “Promises” birds represented human communities struggling for survival in a vernacular landscape besieged by official landscapes, the poem “The flight of birds” (2006, 98-99) enacts a metapoetic connection between human violence against each other and against nature, the ontology of poetry and birds, depicted as wiser than humans. Indeed, this poem follows the Sangam tradition in which the poets themselves were entitled to vehicle the ethos of the society to their kings—i.e., official landscape’s rulers. According to Rajagopal, “[t]hese men of intellect known for their integrity continually work for the welfare of society. [...] There are numerous such poets/bards who act purely in

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the interest of others, sometimes to save people and land, sometimes to highlight values and ethos” (2016, 63). The poetic voice tells how birds flying high in the sky sneer “haughtily at our absurdity” due to the violence inherent in “meaningless mosques and churches”, “patrolled international borders”, “men plucking out / and quashing the lives of other men and women and / poor helpless children”, “some crazy fanatical bomb detonating / killing instantly the people and the city and the forests” (Kandasamy 2006, 98). From their privileged aerial perspective, though not a panoptical one, birds remain not only helpless witnesses of the two landscapes, the vernacular—embodied by the forests and the ecosystem people in the rural landscape, and the official— eloquently represented by religious monuments which seem to be part and parcel of the violence, but also collateral victims who lose their own progeny. Despite their loss, birds do empathize with human suffering for they “shed a birdtear or two from there”. The poet, searching for a poetry which is “wordless / as the flight of birds”, quoting Ars Poetica by Archibald Macleish, advocates against commonly acknowledged human superiority to birds and claims that humans “need to feel with our red hearts / [rather] than think with some unlocatable mind” (99). Despite being “six-sensed creatures”, humans possess a divided, unbalanced self between feeling and thinking which prevents them from ceasing violence and writing such a poetry. Birds become authentic bards from whom human poets can learn the art of wordless poetry. The poem “Prayers” (2006, 57) exemplifies the incongruity of human violence located “in an arid land” with violence exerted in the name of Hinduism by “arid human minds”. After a man from a lower caste partially recovers from an illness, he sets himself to pray in gratitude to a nearby temple, one of those buildings hinted above as “meaningless”, where he is violently killed for having dared to visit an upper-caste temple by a Rajput,12 described as a “warrior caste lion”. Using Sangam elements, Kandasamy portrays a landscape, known as pālai or wasteland, that “is not seen as being a naturally occurring ecological condition” (Rajagopal 2016, 99). Instead, full of sand and stones, it appears in the adjoining areas of mountainous and forest land tracts withered under the extreme heat. In this landscape occupied by lions, Rajagopal states that the man “seems to be fighting against nature in its most unfertile manifestation” and depicts him undertaking a journey alone with some purpose in mind (2016, 100). The poem thus transforms the Sangam voyage menaced by wild nature into a voyage in which the wilderness is impersonated by a lion—an omnivore upper-caste typically inhabiting an official landscape.

12 A member of a Hindu military upper caste.

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Another poem which evinces the great divide between the ontology of nonhuman and human animals is “Songs of summer” (2006, 111-112), whose stanzas are interspersed each by a sentence in italics uttered by a grasshopper in summer. These insects populate Sangam poetry with their “peculiar sounds in the decayed trees in the desert tracts” (Varadarajan 1957, 56) or “tinkling sounds like the bells in a chariot and the noise of the west wind” (1957, 167). However, the same sentences are translated into its human-language version revealing the violence inherent in various human dimensions. When transposed in human deeds, the sentence “You are trespassing my territory”, expressed by the insect looking for mating, becomes a territory guarded “with LoCs and walls / and barbed wired fences” so characteristic of official landscapes; a vernacular landscape deprived of its autochthonous animals, communities and landscapes: “You killed creatures and cleared forests / And wiped away the darker people”; and a newly-created war-zone which expresses the plans of massive destruction (“Your mushroom clouds and wmds”) devised by omnivores in the official landscape. Likewise, the sentence “She’s mine” converts into: “Domesticated into drudgery, she was just / another territory, worn out by wars. A slave / who maintained your numbers”. The woman, in a gesture towards “Lines addressed to a warrior” and to “Non-conversations with a lover”, is represented either as a wild animal “domesticated” or a blank-slate “territory” conquered. Kandasamy’s Touch is characterized by White’s binary passivity and activity on his commenting about the spatial and temporal binding nature of the landscape: Contemplation of what lies buried below that top layer [of a given landscape] takes us on time travel back through recorded and unrecorded history [...]. Once again, time is the unavoidable factor binding space and memory. But so too is violence; here, the natural violence of the elements. The Earth bears witness silently, but in ways that we are driven to uncover. (2016, 4) The poem “We will rebuild worlds” (2006, 60-62) performs an active revelation of nature’s powers and promises a future revolution in which the revolutionaries, empowered by a series of natural elements from their vernacular landscape, will reconstruct the country torn by casteist violence. The rebels will “reclaim / the essence of our earth” and will name themselves with “words of fury like forest fires” and “words of wrath / like stealthy / wildcat eyes / that scare the cowards / in power / away”. Thunder will rise “in our throats” as they “brandish our slogans with a stormy stress”. The revolutionaries will ask about

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injustice with words which “will rush / in this silenced earth like the rage of a river in first flood”. Kandasamy, honoring her ancient literary heritage, selects natural elements which lend their powers to her cause, delineating a strong connection with the landscape that witnesses and responds to injustices. As Rajagopal points out, “[a]ncient Tamils worship the five elements of nature [...] such as earth, water, fire, wind, and ether (space)” (2016, 66) and, what’s more, there is a strong sense of empathy whereby “everyone is supposed to have sympathy for all living beings. That is how in the [Sangam] poem, ‘Nature’ is brought into relationship with man, furnishing lessons and analogies to human conduct and human aspirations” (2016, 86). This poem enacts a joint revolution of the oppressed landscape with its ecosystem people against the omnivores from official landscapes.

4

Conclusion

In Touch the landscape becomes an informing presence, revealed as an anthropomorphic world which either resists or yields to the unjust and brutally destructive onslaught of official landscapes. Natural elements such as forests, lakes or animals people her verse as powerful metaphors of human inner resources, emotions and social and political conflicts, but also as full entities that live together with ecosystem people in vernacular landscapes. She portrays animals in her poetic landscapes endowed with a sense of wisdom which is alien to those human beings who, disconnected from the natural world, lead their lives by the shackles of inherited beliefs and caste traditions. Rocked by the ebb and flow of the power dynamics dictating her history of gender and caste oppression and erasure as well as colonial imperialism, the poetic endeavor in Kandasamy’s Touch finely portrays the tension and the fruitful poetic wide spectrum opened up among the extremes of yielding and resisting time and again. Such a recurring cycle is represented in her verse by the landscape, its elements, its people, whose skins eventually become enmeshed with the land, weaving the past, present and future of Dalits as they inhabit their vernacular land in a continued struggle. Unequal human relationships are poetically depicted both in private, malleable and public, rigid landscapes, in which akam and puṟam elements pierce through time to populate her lines and create a fresh approach to the literary tradition she imbibed. Meena Kandasamy reclaims ancient Tamil literary tradition for her Dalit poetics as she pleads against caste practices and patriarchal subjugation of Dalit women. The landscapes chiseled in her verses partake in her vindication astonishingly.

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Works Cited Abram, D. (2010). Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Vintage. Adamson, J. (2001). American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism. The Middle Place. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Agrawal, P. (2017). “Mechanisms of Subversion: Language as a Tool of Gender Protest in Meena Kandasamy’s Touch.” In: S. Banerjee, ed., Towards New Horizons in Indian English Literature, Jaipur: Yking Books, pp. 60–69. Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Athwale, S. (2014). “A Quest for Gender Equality in Meena Kandasamy’s Touch.” International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature (IJSELL) 2(5), pp. 96–99. Bachelard, G. (2002). Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Translated by Kenneth Haltman. The Bachelard Translations. Dallas: The Dallas Institute Press. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bateson, G. (2000). Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bentham, J. (1791). Panopticon or, The Inspection-House. Dublin: Thomas Byrne. https://archive.org/details/panopticonorins01bentgoog/page/n3. Accessed Jun 15, 2019. Bhadra, S. (2018). “A ‘Space’ of One’s Own: Exploring the Language of Resistance in Select Poems of Meena Kandasamy.” postScriptum: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literary Studies 3(2), pp. 93–100. Biswas, P. (2017a). “Dalit Women Speak Differently: Reading Poetry by Meena Kandasamy.” English Studies International Research Journal 5(2), pp. 20–25. Biswas, P. (2017b). “English in Dalit Context: Reading Poetry by Meena Kandasamy.” Gnosis. An International Refereed Journal of English Language and Literature 3(4), pp. 86–96. Biswas, P. (2017c). “Re-writing Body: A Critical Study of Poetry by Meena Kandasamy.” Daath Voyage: An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in English 2(1), pp. 97–110. Biswas, P. (2018). “A Study of Caste and Gender Interface in the Poetry of Meena Kandasamy.” In: S. Limbale and J. Sarangi, eds., Dalit Voice: Literature and Revolt, New Delhi: Authorspress, pp. 106–128. Bryson, J.S. (2005). The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

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Saluja, M. (2015). “Rebelling through the Language of Love: A Study of Sexual Violence in the Love Poems of Meena Kandasamy.” Lapis Lazuli: An International Literary Journal 5(2), pp. 211–227. Sarangi, J. (2011). “Jaydeep Sarangi reviews Touch by Meena Kandasamy.” Mascara Literary Review Jan 1, n.pag. http://mascarareview.com/jaydeep-sarangi-reviewstouch-by-meena-kandasamy/. Accessed Jun 15, 2019. Sassen, S. (2014). Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Scigaj, L. (1999). Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press. Shiva, V. (1993). The Violence of the Green Revolution. Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics. London and New Jersey: Zed Books. Sivakumar, R. (2000). “Sangam Poetry.” Indian Literature 44(2), pp. 182–192. Snyder, G. (1990). The Practice of the Wild. Berkeley: Counterpoint. Spivak, G.C. (1994). “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. In: L. Chrisman and P. Williams, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, New York and Sydney: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 66–111. Tellis, A. (2011). “Poems of an Outdated, Designer Feminism”. The New Indian Express, Jan 30, n.pag. http://www.newindianexpress.com/lifestyle/books/2011/jan/30/ poems-of-an-outdated-designer-feminism-223287.html. Accessed Jun 15, 2019. Tuan, Y.F. (2001). Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Saint Paul: University of Minnesota Press. Varadarajan, M. (1957). The Treatment of Nature in Sangam Literature (Ancient Tamil Literature). Madras: The South India Saiva Siddhanta Works Publishing Society. https://ia801301.us.archive.org/25/items/TreatmentNatureInSangamLiterature/ Treatment%20nature%20in%20Sangam%20literature_text.pdf. Accessed Jun 15, 2019. White, J. (2016). “Introduction.” In: S.C. Estok, I.C. Wang and J. White, eds., Landscape, Seascape, and the Eco-Spatial Imagination, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–21. Wilson, C. and Growth, P. (2003). “The Polyphony of Cultural Landscape Study: An Introduction.” In: C. Wilson and P. Growth, eds., Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J.B. Jackson, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, pp. 1–22. Wylie, J. (2007). Landscape. London and New York: Routledge.

chapter 8

“Just Junk in a Safeway Cart I’m Pushing Down to the Recycling Center”: The Aesthetics of Ecology in Michael Robbins’s Poetry Stephen Hock

Abstract This chapter reads selected poems from Michael Robbins’s Alien vs. Predator (2012) and The Second Sex (2014) to argue that Robbins’s allusive aesthetics functions as one of the means by which his poetry marks its engagement with ecology, by suggesting an ecological ethics of recycling underlying his work. Rather than present itself as naïvely dedicated to appreciating, conserving, or even recycling the natural world, however, Robbins’s poetry marks recycling as a practice that propagates rather than resists the capitalist logic of commodification that his poems locate at the heart of environmental apocalypse, insofar as both recycling and commodification follow a model of repurposing material in the service of consumption. By extending the figure of the recycler so that it serves as an image of the poet, Robbins implicates himself within the processes of commodification that drive the engines of environmental destruction. Ultimately, Robbins’s work demonstrates that an ecological aesthetics and ethics in the present age of environmental apocalypse is less a matter of escaping the capitalist system and reaching back to some imagined originary state of nature—a state that, Robbins’s poems repeatedly show, is already gone—than of acting as a bricoleur of the found objects of one’s environment.

Keywords Michael Robbins – recycling – intertextuality – bricolage – ecology – postmodern

© koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004445277_009

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Michael Robbins’s collection Alien vs. Predator garnered as much attention when it appeared in 2012 as any recent debut by an American poet.1 Among other things, Robbins’s work catches readers’ eyes because of its densely allusive and intertextual quality, blending references to and quotations of works of both high and low culture in a manner long recognized as characteristic of the postmodern.2 To put it in an idiom from popular music that Robbins’s poetry itself invokes, Robbins performs the work of a hip-hop DJ, mixing samples from earlier works to build his compositions.3 Less a redefiner than a recycler of poetics, Robbins crafts poems that seem deceptively simple, for instance, by virtue of their adherence to patterns of 1 Anahid Nersessian describes the collection as “astonishing” (2012, 600), and goes on to note, “[s]ince ‘Alien vs. Predator,’ the title poem in this collection, was published in The New Yorker in 2009, Robbins has not yet shed his reputation as a bard of the mash-up and Internet meme. In a landslide of positive press, critics have focused invariably on his penchant for referencing pop star Britney Spears in the same breath as John Milton, or for writing short pastorals that cast Stevie Nicks and Mick Fleetwood as their shepherdess and swain” (600). In similar terms, Michael Lista’s review in Canada’s National Post opens by noting, “Michael Robbins is the rarest kind of poet: one who wakes up famous one morning (wait, I’m still going) before his first book is even out. When his poem ‘Alien vs. Predator’ appeared in The New Yorker in January 2009, it went, well, sort of viral. Music critics Carl Wilson and Sasha Frere-Jones gushed about it on their blogs. The Village Voice ran a three-page interview with Robbins about his 20-line poem. Gothamist recommended him for the Nobel Prize (Freud said there are no jokes)” (2012, n.pag.). 2 Apropos of this chapter’s focus on recycling, it is worth noting Dana Phillips’s description of postmodernity: “postmodernity is what one gets when modernity, having run out of ideas and raw material, can no longer ‘make it new,’ as Ezra Pound urged it to do, and must recycle everything” (2003, 27). 3 Alien vs. Predator’s final poem, “To the Break of Dawn”, offers Robbins’s clearest figuring of his poetic work as that of a DJ, highlighting the musical qualities of poetry as well as the affinities between the poetic traditions Robbins works in and the hip-hop DJ’s characteristic practice of sampling. Appropriately enough, in the poem’s final quatrain, Robbins figures his work as a poet in terms of a DJ mixing samples from earlier works—such as the Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” (1993), whose “Dollar dollar bill y’all” lyric the poem’s last line evokes—to build his compositions: I take this cadence from the spinning plates where the DJ plots the needle’s fall. I take it, and I give it back again to the dollar dollar bill and the yes yes y’all. (2012a, 70) Notably, the poem’s final quatrain also builds on another sample, Theodore Roethke’s “The Dance”, the first of his “Four for Sir John Davies”. The last stanza of “The Dance” begins, “I take this cadence from a man named Yeats; / I take it, and I give it back again” (1966, 105). In “To the Break of Dawn”’s final quatrain, then, Robbins remixes a hip-hop lyric with a sample from another poet, Roethke, who acknowledges drawing on another poet, Yeats, within a quartet of poems honoring yet another poet, Davies. The poem thereby presents itself as thoroughly intertextual.

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rhyme so straightforward as to seem outmoded or even childish. At the same time, the poems draw upon so many sources and antecedents that it becomes nearly impossible for any but the most ideal of readers to perceive the bulk of the intertextual threads they weave together, let alone all of them. Indeed, when Robbins was asked about the allusiveness of his poem “I Did This to My Vocabulary” in an interview that accompanied the poem’s publication in Poetry, he replied, “[i]nside is the only kind of baseball in poetry, which is why it’s so hard to keep score” (2010c, 171). This “inside baseball” quality of the poetry is one of the traps lurking within the fun of Robbins’s work, namely, that readers may become so caught up in the intertextual play that they turn the experience of reading Robbins into an insider’s game—or, more properly, a mug’s game—of keeping score of his allusions, and thereby risk overlooking the larger world of political and social concerns that underlie his work, including its ecological bent.4 This chapter argues that the playful intertextuality of Robbins’s work is, in fact, integral to the poems’ attention to questions of ecology, insofar as Robbins’s poetry figures his work as a poet as the work of a recycler. As such, Robbins’s allusive aesthetics suggests an ecological ethics of recycling underlying his work, as seen in selected poems both in Alien vs. Predator and in Robbins’s second collection, The Second Sex (2014). In this way, Robbins’s poetry evokes the analogy between poems and renewable natural resources outlined by William Rueckert, who argues, “Poems are a verbal equivalent of fossil fuel (stored energy), but they are a renewable source of energy, coming, as they do, from those ever generative twin matrices, language and imagination” (1978, 74). By returning to the generative linguistic and imaginative matrix of those intertexts that his poems allude to, Robbins’s work enacts in poetic form the ecological principle 4 One instance in which Robbins’s work appears to have been sought out because of misconceptions of his poetry that read it only in terms of its fun play of rhyme and pop-cultural intertextuality, which were then confounded with a brutally political poem, occurred early in 2013, after Robbins, along with five other poets, was commissioned by Yahoo! News to write an inaugural poem for Barack Obama’s inauguration for his second term as President of the United States. The poem that he wrote, “To the Drone Vaguely Realizing Eastward”, was rejected by Yahoo!, ostensibly because of its use of the vulgar word “queef” in its final line, though it is hard not to suspect that the poem’s condemnation of Obama’s policy of drone warfare did not suit Yahoo!’s purposes terribly well, either. While Yahoo!’s focus on vulgarity rather than the politics of the poem can come across as somewhat disingenuous, it nonetheless underscores the need to insist on the cohesion of Robbins’s aesthetics and politics, the way in which his pop-cultural allusions function within the poetry’s taking up of political and social issues, including ecological issues. Robbins went on to publish the poem and explain its backstory in a Tumblr post titled “This Is a Poem for President Drone” (2013), and it later appeared in his second collection, The Second Sex (2014, 45).

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that, as Rueckert puts it, “there is a one way flow of energy through a system but that materials circulate or are recycled and can be used over and over” (74), and thereby answers Rueckert’s challenge to “try to develop an ecological poetics by applying ecological concepts to the reading, teaching, and writing about literature” (73). At the same time, Robbins’s work resists what might be thought of as a conservative ecopoetics. Instead, Robbins’s poems evoke what Lawrence Buell has recently described as “a significant new turn for ecocriticism” that involves “lightening up on the save-the-world moral earnestness so salient in ecocriticism’s defining episodes so far: first-wave back-to-nature deep ecologism, second-wave environmental justice revisionism, and the newer-wave worlding of ecocriticism under the signs of ecoglobalism and postcolonialism” (2013, x). Rather than present themselves as earnestly dedicated to appreciating, conserving, or even recycling the natural world, Robbins’s poems situate themselves in a more ambiguous position, both more playful and more sinister. As his poetry mixes elements of high and low culture with one another, Robbins’s work likewise conflates the natural world with the artificial world constructed from the mass-marketed cultural detritus that fills the landscape of his poems, in an ironic mimicking of the process by which capital transforms the world’s natural resources into commodities.5 In this way, Robbins’s poems suggest the paradigm of the “beige ecocriticism” that Will Stockton calls for, one that “focuses not on conservation and sustainability but on destruction and re-creation: on recycling that does not simply preserve the environment” (2013, 170). In Robbins’s poems, recycling comes to function as a practice that propagates rather than resists the capitalist logic of commodification at the heart of environmental apocalypse, insofar as both repurpose material in the service of consumption. Robbins thereby echoes the principles of dark ecology theorized by Timothy Morton, who writes: The very consumerism that haunts environmentalism—the consumerism that environmentalism explicitly opposes and indeed finds disgusting— provides the model for how ecological awareness should proceed. A model that is not dependent on “right” or “proper” ecological being, and thus not dependent on a necessarily metaphysical (and thus illegal in our age) pseudo-fact (or facts). Consumerism is the specter of ecology. When thought fully, ecological awareness includes the essence of consumerism, rather than shunning it. Ecological awareness must embrace its specter. (2016, 125) 5 I use the term “landscape” in the sense that Catrin Gersdorf offers of “landscape as organized space and expression of culture’s relationship to nature” (2006, 63).

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By adapting the figure of the recycler to serve as an image of the poet, Robbins embraces the consumerist specter of ecological thought, implicating his own complicity within the processes of commodification that drive the engines of environmental destruction, as a means of coming to a fuller realization of his poetry’s ecological aesthetics.6 Ultimately, Robbins’s work demonstrates that ecological awareness under late capital calls for an aesthetics and an ethics built on recycling, of repurposing and repackaging the cultural junk that has apparently eclipsed our natural environment. Nurturing this landscape in productive ways in the present age of environmental apocalypse, however, is less a matter of escaping the capitalist system and reaching back to some imagined originary state of nature—a state that, Robbins’s poems repeatedly show, is already gone—than of acting as a bricoleur of the found objects of one’s environment within the capitalist system, including the poetic forms that Robbins recycles in his own work. “Dig Dug”, a poem that appears in Alien vs. Predator, provides one example of the need to insist on the integral relationship between Robbins’s intertextual aesthetics and his poetry’s engagement with issues of ecology. The poem’s final four lines read as follows: Slash is both sad and happy for Axl. The nation’s pets are high on Paxil. Memory is the bended grass where deer have lain. It’s hard to hold a candle to the cold November rain. (2012a, 6) The arc of these four lines visibly stages the dynamic that governs Robbins’s work and its reception, as it engages both with ecological issues and also with an audience perhaps better versed in mainstream pop culture than the inside game of the poetry world. The first of these lines, “Slash is both sad and happy for Axl”, presents what we might think of as one of Robbins’s characteristic repackagings of pop culture, with its reference to the widely reported longtime feud between two members of the heavy metal band Guns N’ Roses. Robbins returns to this topic in the final line of the poem, “[i]t’s hard to hold a candle to the cold November rain”, a nearly exact quotation from the band’s hit single “November Rain” (1991). This is the flash, the glitz, the glam, the sort of catnip that Robbins’s pop-culturally savvy readers can’t resist smiling at, the satisfying way he uses his allusions to reach readers. 6 As Morton comments, “all aesthetic solutions to the problems posed by the modern world end up reproducing the commodity form” (2007, 165).

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More interesting for purposes of discussing Robbins’s attention to ecology, however, are the two lines wedged, almost hidden, between those heavy metal riffs, “[t]he nation’s pets are high on Paxil” and “[m]emory is the bended grass where deer have lain”. Both lines deal with animals, but in radically different ways. The first, “[t]he nation’s pets are high on Paxil”, presents animals not just in the domesticated form of pets, but pets as they are further domesticated, further engineered away from their natural state, by virtue of the fact that they “are high on Paxil”. The mismatch between the pets and Paxil is only heightened when we remember that, earlier in the poem, the pets are said to suffer from “[e]rectile dysfunction” (6), rather than the depression that we might expect of pets taking Paxil; the irony is further compounded when we remember that one of Paxil’s possible side effects is sexual dysfunction. The denatured pets high on Paxil stand in stark contrast to the following line, “[m]emory is the bended grass where deer have lain”. In this line, we ostensibly get a picture of animals, in this case, deer, more clearly in their natural habitat, except for one thing: the deer are no longer there, only “the bended grass” where they “have lain” remains, with the entire image couched as the vehicle of a metaphor about memory. The natural world that the deer represent is vanishing, receding, absent, accessible only as a memory of the deer. The deer themselves, we might imagine, have been displaced and eclipsed by the creeping suburbia of pets high on Paxil, animals turned into commodities that are then refined with the aid of more commodities like Paxil, even as both are enveloped and eclipsed by the Guns N’ Roses lines, and thereby visibly give way to Robbins’s pop-cultural intertexts. The hiding of the memory of the vanished deer between the Guns N’ Roses allusions emblematizes the way that elements of nature linger in Robbins’s poems as vanishing vestiges, raw materials for the engines of late capital, and are then displaced by commodified mass culture. Robbins’s work presents no sentimental lament for that loss. As Anahid Nersessian notes, “Robbins mostly shuns the melancholic postures we have come to expect from environmental writing”; rather, “he appears to be in pursuit of a left-ecological poetics that doesn’t rhapsodize about trees or point fingers too baldly” (2012, 601). Indeed, any reading of Robbins’s poetry in terms of the “natural world” would seem to run counter to Robbins’s own framing of that term in his review of Robert Hass’s The Apple Trees at Olema as “what is ridiculously referred to as the ‘natural world’” (2010a, n.pag.). One of the comments on the online version of that review—posted (on September 14, 2010) under the name “MR”, as if to invite us to speculate that it was written by Robbins himself—explains the ridiculousness of referring to the “natural world” by observing, “[t]he human world (the built environment) is, obviously, no less

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‘natural’ than forests or mountains”. Indeed, as his poetry conflates high and low culture through its interwoven matrix of allusions, Robbins’s work similarly effaces the boundary presumed to exist between the “natural” world of deer and bended grass, on the one hand, and the “artificial” world of pets high on Paxil and Guns N’ Roses, on the other, to argue for the need to work at the remixing of those materials. Rather than presenting his poems as a means of seeing through the haze of popular culture to some imagined purity of nature, Robbins dives headlong into the intermixture of the two, demonstrating the truth of Patricia Yaeger’s claim that “an old opposition between nature and culture has been displaced in postmodern art by a preoccupation with trash: the result of weird and commodity-based intermingling” (2008, 323). The ecology underlining Robbins’s aesthetics is thus what Yaeger describes as “rubbish ecology”: “If ecology has been defined as the study of organisms and their environments and has evolved to mean environmental preservation or conservation, then rubbish ecology can be defined as the act of saving and savoring debris” (329). Robbins accordingly builds his poems on an ecological aesthetics of allusion and quotation that evokes the rhetoric of a normative environmentalist politics of careful stewardship of one’s environment—both the “natural” and the “artificial”—by virtue of its adoption of recycling as a figure for its citational poetics. Of course, Robbins’s intertextual mode of poetry is itself recycled, building as it does on the long tradition of poetry that engages in the same sort of densely allusive and intertextual work as Robbins’s. John Wilson’s review (2012, 20) of Alien vs. Predator suggestively compares the collection to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and though the point of Wilson’s comparison seems to be that there is a similarly stunning quality to both works, the comparison also underscores the intertextual style common to both. More recent examples of this intertextual poetic mode would include those addressed by Marjorie Perloff in her examination of “the claim, now being made by conceptual poets from Kenneth Goldsmith to Leevi Lehto, Craig Dworkin to Caroline Bergvall, that it is possible to write ‘poetry’ that is entirely ‘unoriginal’ and nevertheless qualifies as poetry” (2010, 12). As Perloff notes, this recent move to poetic “unoriginality” finds its antecedents not only in canonical modernists such as Eliot and Pound but also in poets such as Louis Zukofsky, John Ashbery, Susan Howe, and Steve McCaffery, with their “complex uses of citation and constraint, intertext and intermedia” (2010, 12). Perloff suggests the more recent mode of “unoriginal” poetry is, in part, a product of the culture of the Internet, where what comes to matter most is “what can be done with other people’s words—how already existing words and sentences are framed, recycled, appropriated, cited, submitted to rules, visualized, or sounded” (2010, xi). In this light, Robbins’s own

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“unoriginal” intertextual style marks him as, in Nersessian’s phrase, “a bard of the mash-up and Internet meme” (2012, 600).7 Perloff’s comment about the verbal operations she associates with the Internet-abetted move to “unoriginal” poetics—specifically, her inclusion of recycling as one way of understanding those operations—gestures toward what this chapter argues is the key figure for Robbins’s poetics, namely, that of the recycler. In fact, the poem in which Robbins most clearly figures himself as a recycler, “The Learn’d Astronomer”, presents its recycling not in terms of the “natural” world at all, but rather in terms of the precursor poems it draws upon. The poem thereby situates itself within the lineage of poetic practices that Susan Signe Morrison refers to as “metaphors of cultural recycling—in concepts such as intertextuality, bricolage, and appropriation” (2015, 158). From its title’s allusion to Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” on, the poem offers mock-elevated language to deflate the language of Romantic poetry. Ultimately, however, the poem’s final stanza steps back from that elevated tone and declares the subject matter of Romantic poetry—even “the burning fantastical heavens themselves”—to be “just junk in a Safeway cart I’m pushing / down to the recycling center” (2012a, 31). These lines figure the traditional language, forms, and subjects of love poems as junk to be recycled, and present the poet as recycler of that cultural junk that has accumulated over the centuries. At the same time, the ecological connotations of recycling evoke the possibility of reading Robbins’s intertextual poetics as a formal counterpart to his poems’ frequent thematic attention to presenting an ecological awareness of environmental catastrophe.8 In fact, the artifacts of the “natural” world that 7 The tradition of intertextual poetics that Perloff addresses in Unoriginal Genius is only one of the poetic lineages Robbins draws on or recycles. Among other things, Robbins’s use of rhyme has attracted comment from readers and from Robbins himself as one element that further marks his indebtedness to his poetic precursors. In an interview with Emily Witt, for instance, Robbins acknowledges the importance of Paul Muldoon and Frederick Seidel for his work by noting, “[b]ut also Muldoon’s ability and Frederick Seidel’s as well—their ability to be contemporary and to respond to the present while at the same time enjoying rhyme and meter. I find it interesting that rhyme is something that is less valued now in contemporary poetry and is viewed as unsophisticated or retro or just old-fashioned. There’s not a lot of strict meter in my book, but there are a lot of rhymes, including some very doggerel-ish rhymes, and I enjoy that” (Robbins 2012b, n.pag.). That enjoyment of “old-fashioned” and even “doggerel-ish” rhyme stands, in Yaeger’s terms, as another instance of Robbins’s “saving and savoring debris” (2008, 329), this time the debris of poetic tradition. 8 In similar terms, Sarah Nolan reads Kenneth Goldsmith—one of the “unoriginal” poets Perloff mentions—in terms of recycling in both a textual and an environmental register. In her discussion of Goldsmith’s “uncreative poetics” of “simply recording and copying without creating original text”, Nolan argues that Goldsmith’s “intention not ‘to add any more’ texts to the world but rather to recycle those that are already in existence is a fundamentally environmental impulse” (Nolan 2017, 103).

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appear in Robbins’s poems typically seem to be on the brink of being extinguished in an environmental apocalypse. The poems’ repeated references to extinction drive this point home. “Welfare Mothers”, for instance, begins and ends with images of the buffalo, one of the quintessential examples of an American animal threatened with extinction. The poem opens with the same phrase as Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark”, “I get up in the evening” (1984), and then appears to allude to Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs: “I get up in the evening, dress / the buffalo, slip into its carcass” (2012a, 7). The speaker takes on the aspect of Harris’s Buffalo Bill, who kills and skins women in order to wear their skins, in the hopes of becoming a woman. Robbins’s speaker, though, does not become the buffalo; rather, his actions appear to be coterminous with its extinction, as the poem’s final couplet reads, “[t]he final buffalo scrimps and saves. / I come on the uncut hair of graves” (2012a, 7), echoing Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and its line describing the grass, “[a]nd now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves” (1982, 31). “The final buffalo” stands in these lines as an icon for extinction, literalizing the “graves” that in Whitman’s poem serve as part of a vehicle for a metaphor for the grass. Indeed, in Robbins’s recycling of the language from Whitman, readers may suspect that the buffalo are the ones buried in the graves that the speaker comes on, an empty sexual gesture more masturbatory than reproductive, apropos of the images of various species on the verge of extinction that appear throughout Robbins’s poetry. “New Developments in Maoism”, for example, begins with the lines, “[t]he last living tiger falls / from the research facility. We make pollen” (2012a, 11), as if pollen is a commodity that is produced using knowledge derived from research on tigers. Later, the poem notes, “[t]he world is empty enough as it is” (11), a description seemingly at odds with the allusive world of Robbins’s poems, filled to bursting as they are with intertexts. It is, rather, the so-called “natural world”, the environment outside commodified mass-marketed culture, that is emptied out, as “[t]he last living tiger falls” dead. Similarly, in the third quatrain of “Material Girl”, the speaker announces: I backed over the last passenger pigeon. The sex was great. The mobled queen was good. O brave new world that has such Snapple in it! (2012a, 22) As in “Welfare Mothers”, these lines present a juxtaposition of sex with extinction, a love of death that Robbins identifies as the perverse heart of the engines of colonial and capitalist enterprise, as the “brave new world” of this poem is

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filled not, as in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with people (1987, 5.1. 183-184), but with Snapple. Indeed, in the ecological nightmare that Robbins’s poems sketch for us, human beings become another variety of creature on the way to extinction. Sometimes, this extinction appears as the end point of the process by which human beings, like other animals, become nothing but images on commodities, as in the third quatrain of “Use Your Illusion”: I was saying something about a baby. It had eleven dimensions, kind of a dim bulb. The last of a tiny race. Just a shadow on a milk carton now. (2012a, 23) In similar terms, “Rhymes”, from The Second Sex, ends with a grim statement from a representative of a dying species whose extraction of natural resources to turn into commodities has led it to the brink of extinction: This earth, my sole inheritance, spits up its precious lubricants. I kick an empty gas can. Behold: the next-to-last man. (2014, 33) The animals and other natural resources that appear in Robbins’s poems are hijacked by the careless processes of capitalist production that lead to their extinction. If, as Fredric Jameson has observed, the postmodern era of late capitalism is one in which “aesthetic production [...] has become integrated into commodity production generally” (1991, 4), then the world Robbins presents is one where all of nature, too, “has become integrated into commodity production”, in another permutation of Robbins’s undercutting of the distinction between the natural and the artificial. Of the poems in Alien vs. Predator, “Enjoy My Symptom” offers the clearest image of the natural and the artificial becoming integrated with one another, even as it also suggests the importance of the underlying figure of the recycler for understanding Robbins’s engagement with ecological issues. Images of environmental devastation litter this poem, as they do in so much of Robbins’s work. The poem’s first line declares, “I spit on any fresh green breast” (2012a, 8), echoing the “fresh, green breast of the new world” from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fable of the disastrous consequences of the American enterprise in The Great Gatsby (2004, 180). The poem thereby begins by indicting the violent contempt

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for the environment that lies at the core of the twin projects of colonialism and capitalism. Similarly, the poem’s closing line’s statement, “I rape the earth. It’s not my fault” (2012a, 8), betrays the speaker’s utter disavowal of responsibility for any sort of ecological stewardship, even as the reference to environmental destruction as rape draws on the sexualized violence implicit in the opening line’s recycling of Fitzgerald’s image of the breast as a figure for the land to be spat upon. Beyond the speaker’s apparent contempt for any notion of pristine nature, the moment in this poem that particularly highlights the conflation of the natural with the artificial, while more directly gesturing toward the recycler as a figure for Robbins’s poetics, comes in its second stanza. The final three lines of this stanza read, “Dick Grayson stole my lady friend. / Her muzzle was like yellow fog, / a postconsumer fiber blend” (2012a, 8). Characteristic of Robbins, these lines open with a pop-cultural allusion that would be familiar to a wide audience, this time to Dick Grayson, the secret identity of Batman’s sidekick Robin. Beyond the possible pun between Robin’s name and Robbins’s own, it is notable that these two superheroes, Batman and Robin, take on animalized identities that stage the folding of the human back into the nature that human beings only imagine themselves to be separate from. The poem then switches to a more high-cultural register, referring to the stolen lady friend in terms of the “yellow fog” of line fifteen of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (2003, 3). The intertextual reference to Eliot suggests that the stolen lady friend is a cat, but one curious thing about this cat is the fact that her muzzle is “a postconsumer fiber blend” (2012a, 8). If we take the muzzle to be a mouth guard fitted on the cat, this may be relatively unremarkable. If we take the muzzle to refer to the cat’s snout, though, then the fact that it is made of “postconsumer fiber blend” becomes more interesting. Rather than present the natural world being turned into a commodity, the poem presents the commodity stitched back into nature, the cat becoming a cyborg—like the Battlestar Galactica Cylon referred to in the poem’s fifth line, “[e]very Cylon is a mystery” (2012a, 8)—or patchwork of sorts. The cat becomes a “blend” of nature and artifice, perhaps “the speckled cybernaut” of the poem’s penultimate line (8), in another of Robbins’s conflations of the “artificial” with the “natural”. Given the speaker’s overall contempt for the environment, as emblematized in the poem’s first and final lines, it becomes possible to read the superheroic Dick Grayson’s theft of the lady friend as a liberation, the recovery of an animal that the speaker had previously appropriated as part of his pillaging of the earth and its resources. The more heroic merging of the human, the animal, the “natural”, and the “artificial” that is suggested in Grayson’s liberation of the cat would then gesture toward an alternative to the environmental disaster

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the speaker of the poem willingly participates in by virtue of his failure to see past the dividing line presumed to exist between the “human” and the “natural” that results in the thoughtless transformation of natural resources into commodities. Equally notable in the poem’s specification that the stolen lady friend’s muzzle is “a postconsumer fiber blend” is the fact that the muzzle is made of recycled materials, not unlike Robbins’s poems themselves. If, as Perloff contends in her discussion of “unoriginal” poetics, “the fabled Death of the Author has, in recent poetry, finally become a fait accompli” (2010, 18), then the particularly material quality of the “postconsumer fiber blend” echoes Roland Barthes’s well-known formulation in “The Death of the Author” that presents the text as “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (1977, 146). In other words, if the text is, to go back to the etymology of the word “text”, something that is woven, then the tissue it is woven of is “postconsumer fiber blend”, and all writers are ultimately recyclers. As Morrison puts it in terms apropos of Robbins’s description of the materials of poetry as “just junk in a Safeway cart I’m pushing / down to the recycling center”: Writings are the rubbish heap or composted waste of the mind. The poet mosaics together shards, recycles litter, and salvages fragments. The poet is a garbage collector, a detritus gatherer, a waste gourmet. Perhaps that is the beauty in poetry: it lets us feel viscerally the terror of waste, yet revel in the beauty of artifacts of loveliness—the word, the meter, the sound, the hush of decay. (2015, 199)9 Presenting its readers with images of that “decay”, of extinction and environmental destruction, Robbins’s poetry could be seen as raising the question of what an appropriate response would be. Any easy answer to that question, though, remains murky. As Nersessian comments, “Alien vs. Predator offers few coherent positions on the historical crises whose ghastly energy it taps” (2012, 605). Robbins himself likewise recognizes the conflicted terms of his engagement with political issues. In the interview that accompanied the publication of “Confessional Poem” in Poetry, he states:

9 In similar terms, Yaeger writes, “[n]ot only is the power of waste at the center of contemporary literature, not only does detritus replace nature, but waste managers and garbage haulers are its poets and purveyors, its historians and makers” (2008, 331).

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I know perfectly sane, quite intelligent people who insist it is sheer fantasy to imagine that there will ever be any alternative to the capitalist order. My poems try, in their modest way, to expose the ridiculous logic of this way of thinking (some more than others, obviously), even as they recognize its seductions, its inescapability. (2010b, 169) If the logic is inescapable, what alternative can his poems posit? In fact, Robbins’s attention to the rhetoric of recycling underscores its structural analogies to the logic of commodification: repurposing materials to turn them into new consumer products. The affinity between recycling and commodity capitalism is long-established. As Heather Rogers notes in her discussion of recycling as greenwashing, increasing focus on recycling in the 1980s and 1990s “helped industry in two ways: it distracted the public from making more radical demands while offering a means to connect to a new consumer base” by promoting consumer products and packaging as recyclable (2006, 236). As such, Rogers argues, recycling demonstrates capitalism’s capacity to “manipulate greening efforts to actually stoke the fires of consumption” (2006, 238).10 Given this context, it is unsurprising that Robbins’s poems suggest a skeptical attitude toward the idea of recycling as a response to environmental crisis. Tellingly, when another poem in Alien vs. Predator, “Affect Theory”, includes the line “You quit smoking! You recycle!” (2012a, 25), it is followed, three poems later in the collection, in “Black Wings”, with the line, “I still want—how shall I put this?—cigarettes” (2012a, 28), suggesting an ambivalence toward the ostensibly beneficial act of quitting smoking. Readers might likewise suspect that the poems’ ecological aesthetics is ultimately ambivalent about the rhetoric and logic of recycling. After all, the Alien vs. Predator franchise from which Robbins’s first collection takes its name is itself a mash-up of the Alien and Predator franchises, born out of the relentless drive to recycle earlier cultural productions in order to generate more commodities, including, in the case of the Alien vs. Predator franchise, comic books, video games, action figures, novels, and movies. So, while recycling could stand as a figure for a normative ecological ethics, it could also, in its less mindful aspect, function as a means to propagate “the capitalist order” whose logic Robbins states his poems are opposed to, an order in which, as in the Alien vs. Predator franchise, human beings function as just one more species threatened with extinction. 10 Compare Morton’s observation, “[h]elpful as they are, recycling and other forms of individual and local action could also become ways of fending off the scope of the crisis and the vastness and depth of interconnectedness. These responses fit contemporary capitalist life” (2010, 32).

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Indeed, the precarious position of the human race in Robbins’s poetry at times suggests that a willed extinction might be the only reasonable response to the ecological apocalypse the poems envision, as in “Sunday Morning”: I support the unborn child’s right to be spared the ghastly sight of this brightly burning world, this swiftly tilting dumpster. (2014, 23) In these lines, we see the ultimate futility of the naïve liberal hope in recycling as an ecological ethic under late capitalism’s relentless devouring of the planet, a process that turns the environment around us into nothing but a “dumpster” into which no rational person would want to bring a next generation, instead opting for an end to human history. In the ninth of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Walter Benjamin writes: A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (1968, 257-258) Faced with the pile of debris generated by the catastrophe of progress, the posture of the angel of history is not unlike that of Robbins’s poems, faced with the cultural detritus of high- and pop-cultural traditions, as well as with the physical junk produced by the engines of capital. Apropos of the wings of Benjamin’s angel, which are held open by the storm of progress, the signs are not good: “I eat wings”, Robbins writes in the first line of “Black Wings”, before offering the hellish vision, “[e]leventy thousand degrees outside / with a heat index of kablooey. / The tastiest wings of all are Satan’s” (2012a, 28). Robbins’s poems suggest that one starting point in our fallen world is to see that fallen condition as the ground for the work of stitching back together the human and the animal, the “natural” and the “artificial”, in a more mindful fashion than

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capitalism does in its drive to commodify, even as the poems demonstrate the inescapable nature of capitalism by situating themselves so thoroughly within its pop-cultural productions. The poems try to imagine an alternative order, even as they gesture toward the fact that the strategy of recycling as a model of ecological engagement remains undercut by recycling’s analogies to the capitalist drive to repurpose material to stoke consumer appetites. By virtue of the precarious or ironic position recycling thereby assumes, Robbins’s ecological aesthetics resists a poetics or a politics grounded in notions of purity in favor of one whose hybrid, remixed, and, yes, recycled quality calls for a different mode of stewardship of the fallen world that we delude ourselves into thinking we are separate from, even as his poetry acknowledges its own paradoxical complicity within the capitalist system that provides the materials it recycles.

Works Cited Barthes, R. (1977). “The Death of the Author.” In: Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, New York: Hill and Wang, pp. 142–148. Benjamin, W. (1968). “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In: H. Arendt, ed., Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, pp. 253–264. Buell, L. (2013). “Foreword.” In: J.J. Cohen, ed. Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. ix-xii. Eliot, T.S. (2003). “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In: F. Kermode, ed., The Waste Land and Other Poems, New York: Penguin, pp. 3–8. Fitzgerald, F.S. (2004). The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner. Gersdorf, C. (2006). “Imaginary Ecologies: Landscape, American Literature, and the Reconstruction of Space in the 21st Century.” Anglia 124(1), pp. 44–69. Guns N’ Roses. (1991). “November Rain.” Track 10 on Use Your Illusion I. Geffen B000000OSE, compact disc. Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Lista, M. (2012). Review of Alien vs. Predator, by Michael Robbins. National Post. Mar 30. https://nationalpost.com/afterword/michael-lista-on-poetry-alien-vs-predatorby-michael-robbins. Accessed Jun 5, 2019. Morrison, S.S. (2015). The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Morton, T. (2007). Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Morton, T. (2010). The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Morton, T. (2016). Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Nersessian, A. (2012). “Poetry at the Tipping Point.” Contemporary Literature 53(3), pp. 599–605. Nolan, S. (2017). Unnatural Ecopoetics: Unlikely Spaces in Contemporary Poetry. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Perloff, M. (2010). Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Phillips, D. (2003). The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robbins, M. (2010a). “Are You Smeared with the Juice of Cherries?” Poetry. Sept 1. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/69580/are-yousmeared-with-the-juice-of-cherries. Accessed Jun 5, 2019. Robbins, M. (2010b). “Confessional Poem.” Poetry 197(3), pp. 167–169. Robbins, M. (2010c). “I Did This to My Vocabulary.” Poetry 197(3), pp. 170–172. Robbins, M. (2012a). Alien vs. Predator. New York: Penguin. Robbins, M. (2012b). “Michael Robbins on ‘Alien vs. Predator.’” Interview by Emily Witt. Paris Review. Mar 27. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/03/27/michaelrobbins-on-%E2%80%98alien-vs-predator%E2%80%99/. Accessed Jun 5, 2019. Robbins, M. (2013). “This Is a Poem for President Drone.” Michael Robbins (blog). Jan 16. https://michaelrobbinspoet.tumblr.com/post/40735037994/this-is-a-poem-forpresident-drone. Accessed Jun 5, 2019. Robbins, M. (2014). The Second Sex. New York: Penguin. Roethke, T. (1966). The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Garden City: Doubleday. Rogers, H. (2006). “Garbage Capitalism’s Green Commerce.” In: L. Panitch et al., eds., Socialist Register 2007: Coming to Terms with Nature, London: The Merlin Press, pp. 231–253. Rueckert, W. (1978). “Into and Out of the Void: Two Essays.” The Iowa Review 9(1), pp. 62–86. Shakespeare, W. (1987). The Tempest. Edited by Robert Langbaum. New York: Signet Classic. Springsteen, B. (1984). “Dancing in the Dark.” Track 11 on Born in the U.S.A. Columbia B0000025UW, compact disc. Stockton, W. (2013). “Beige.” In: J.J. Cohen, ed., Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 170–192. Whitman, W. (1982). Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. New York: Library of America. Wilson, J. (2012). “Christmas Critics.” Commonweal 139(21), pp. 20–21. Wu-Tang Clan. (1993). “C.R.E.A.M.” Track 8 on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Loud B000002WPI, compact disc. Yaeger, P. (2008). “Editor’s Column: The Death of Nature and the Apotheosis of Trash; or, Rubbish Ecology.” PMLA 123(2), pp. 321–339.

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Against Use: (The Difficulty of) Writing Nature Poetry in an Age of Environmental Crisis Catherine Woodward

Abstract A piece of hybrid writing combining criticism, poetic theory and prose poetry; this chapter analyses my own practise and environmental aesthetic as an ecopoet/nature poet/political poet, as a way of engaging with the question of how contemporary poets write, must write, might write about “the natural world”. This chapter is at once anxious and positive, constructive and critical. Through a discussion which includes analysis of my own writing as well as original poetry, this chapter considers the problem of writing about nature in a way that takes account of our alienation from nature and our complicity in its destruction in a neo-liberal, late-capitalist westernised world. The chapter outlines an environmental aesthetic which has emerged from my practice and centres upon the ungraspability of the remainder in what we call “the natural world”, the remainder being that which escapes the anthropocentric view, that which cultural constructions of nature cannot contain or account for, that which refuses us. I attempt to reconcile this remainder by writing a version of the natural world in which it is possible for us to recognise ourselves, as opposed to writing an imposition of ourselves onto the natural world; this represents two different tactics of lyric troping. This chapter ultimately wrestles with the urgency for and difficulty of writing nature poetry appropriate to its object.

Keywords environmental crisis – isolation – alienation – complexity – remainder – use – ecopoetry

Can I write about “natural” objects without recalling to myself and others the crisis, without creating the imperative to speak about the crisis? No. The crisis

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frames my every interaction with “nature”. Am I already writing the crisis then? No. If I don’t directly address the crisis, I merely contribute to the crisis, because I imply that there is no crisis or that the crisis is secondary instead of allpervading and consuming. Do I then comply with and submit to the crisis? Do I wave off the burden of responsibility in favour of the pleasures of “nature”? I’m not sure. Who am I to not speak of the crisis? Who am I to soapbox at this world in crisis? Do I have a white saviour complex for the Earth? How could I say that “we” are destroying the Earth with clear conscience when relationships with, access to and impact upon the Earth are so vastly different for the different human inhabitants of this Earth? When certain peoples are disproportionately affected by the crisis? How dare I raise the finger when so many people depend upon the trashing of the Earth for their livelihoods? When so many, including myself, are locked into a cycle of junking, abusing and exploiting? But I also feel a joyful imperative to write about “nature”, a spiritual necessity which is a key socialisation binding me to the human inhabitants of Earth. But who then am I to write of “nature” just for the joy of it? I feel the joy drying up in my mouth. To attempt to write “nature poetry” in the context of the environmental crisis is for me to court a paralysis spiked with terrible necessity. This paralysis, as much as my writing, reflects my complicity in the crisis, which is my shame for which, angrily, I want no sympathy whatsoever. But then, why get so worked up about poetry at all, about a few pleasurable words with a relatively small readership, mostly passed off as irrelevant and fanciful? Poetry is written and water is still poisoned, sacred lands desecrated, forests razed, species ended, oceans acidified and so on. There can be no apathy, but why direct one’s concern and motivation through poems? I suspect that one should not. I suspect that I should not speak, that I cannot speak, but here I am in this essay, speaking. For myself as a practitioner of poetry, to write about those things we call “nature” can never be apolitical or asocial, yet the political-social efficacy of “nature-” or even “eco-” poetry is in doubt. How to write then? My own experience of the Earth and my necessity to speak about it emerges from a background of isolation, alienation and a level of global complexity which drives me to speechlessness. It is against this speechlessness that I work, but the background of isolation, alienation and complexity is what drives, informs, necessitates and checks my practice. Meanwhile, I must try to cultivate faith and hope in poetry; I write by the grace of poetry’s power to constitute our realities as well as its ability to establish and correspond with our relationships to the natural world and to each other. I entrust myself to its subtly pervasive formativity, to its magical properties. But its power is so very, very limited.

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In this essay I attempt to carry out my practice given all the above, I attempt to write a poem about the thing called “nature”, while knowing that the poem I write will be a disappointment to the aim. So, the further aim is to absorb that disappointment, for the poem to be disappointed of itself and in that will be its “success” (in the least dismal way possible). This will be a performance of my approach to “ecopoetry”, which is in turn a strategy for living in the crisis (and little else, I fear). In this, it is also a doomed attempt to voice an appropriate political-social response by working with the problems of isolation, alienation and complexity. Those problems, I think, manifest most clearly as one problem. There is no answer to the problem as such, the problem is familiar, even traditional, and it is a problem which I think is evident, in one way or another, in any “ecopoem”. This is what I once wrote about a goose: ...I shout consciousness washes up on the shore of a red-legged bird and in her brayed ugliness-song I am a me there hearing such grey-feathered red-legged goddesses the many such waters of many-ness surfacing for a while bird-like and singing a song to someone there on the shore... (Woodward 2017, 4) The name “goose” will not surface or suffice, instead it insinuates itself from its other life in “goddess”, “goose” being the “goddess-who-will-not-be-named”. The adjectival quality of her grey-feathered, red-leggedness aims to achieve a closeness to goddess more than ever the name of “goose” or “goddess” could achieve. That is, before she can be figured either as goose or goddess her legs are so very red, her feathers so very grey. But this is to make a show of the familiar doomed attempt to reference a pure goose before language, an attempt that will not lead me to a goose but only to an unrecognisable external emptiness and back again. Poetry is not and cannot be that pure thing, it does other things. The name of “shore” meanwhile designates a definite named edge, a boundary by which we mark objects such as nation-states and jurisdictions. The “goose” (or to use her other name, the “goddess”) is defined by the boundary at which other objects meet her and become known to her, objects that wash up like driftwood as records of the goings-on of the sea. This is presented as consciousness, consciousness which is like evidence of a long-gone cataclysm out there in the deep. Whether it is my consciousness or the goose’s is left obscure to reflect a mutual, simultaneous awareness of one another. The goose and I are standing in different places in relation to the shore, which ordinarily would determine whether “shore” is possessed as home or not-possessed (but

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perhaps soon to be) as a foreign frontier. Two opposing beings with claims on reality are in tension, but I’ve been trying to privilege the benediction of the goose’s being and awareness upon me. Like so: A lyric subject becomes conscious of the goose and the goose of the lyric subject, both are simultaneously delivered into the intelligible worlds of the other, mutually creating at the point of their meeting at the named boundary. At least that’s the drama I’ve set up and tried to represent. By the grace of hearing the goose’s (goddess’s) song I know myself to be a hearing subject, she enters through the ear that she creates as a hearing ear by her singing. Now cue the strange loop whereby I become a subject in a poem who has heard a goose braying while I stand on a now suddenly very real shore. I now recognise myself as bird-like, thieving the goddess’s image, I am made in the goddess’s image. I am, as it turns out, the one singing lyrically and over there is a goose, who in this dramatisation of the moment of consciousness, hears me singing. Meanwhile, the absence of punctuation allows for multiple implied but different sentences to exist nested one inside the other, for example “I shout consciousness washes up on the shore” contains: 1. “I shout and therefore consciousness washes up...” alternatively: a. “I shout and then consciousness washes up...” b. “I shout and meanwhile consciousness washes up...” 2. “I shout the phrase ‘consciousness washes up’” or “I shout the phrase…”: a. “consciousness washes up on the shore” b. “consciousness washes up on the shore of a red-legged bird” (and so on) Does my shouting bring about the event of consciousness washing up on the shore? Or does my shouting coincide with the washing up that was brought about by other, external means? Or does the event only exist insofar as I shout a description of it? At any rate, I’m commenting on the poem’s status as a voiceevent, wherein it seems that I come into consciousness by dint of an exchange between the material existences of myself and the goose, so the whole scene is ultimately just the hot air of my lyricising. This is the problem. This extract of mine takes as its object the move by which, in my everyday experience, I come to consciousness of myself, of the world and of myself in the world, and how in that I come to feel that an ungraspable thing has slipped through my fingers and afforded me nothing but an image of my own face. Isolated on an island, population one, I recognise that between hearing and seeing a goose and knowing that I have seen and heard one, some remainder, something terrible and precious has eluded me, something which belongs to the goose alone, or even to that brief moment of time and space in which the goose was a component. That remainder is such

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that it refuses me, refuses to be grasped, refuses to be articulated, refuses to be appropriated. Like poles of magnets we repel each other in that we each refuse our unique remainder to the other. I have made my individuated subject, just as I do every day, in every bloody thing I do, in all markets, but at this cost. I am embarrassed that I want to hold that remainder in my hands, because that thing cannot be held, it is not mine to hold. Shame is then supplanted by relief, even something like peacefulness or transportation. To me, the notion of the remainder is synonymous with relinquishing control to the mysteries of matter and existence. In other words, to relinquish the remainder is to submit to the occult and to sacrifice the domination of the individuated self in favour of an identity characterised by passive community in inalienable mystery. This seems inhuman at first, by which I mean it is counter-intuitive to the Western, humanist, neo-liberal, colonial mindset. But the poetic articulation of this deeply spiritual and ethical encounter also implements the stuff of the thing we call “nature” to a lyric end, which would seem to denature it (no pun intended). Even as I try to preserve that precious remainder with a candid representation of my epistemic encounter with it, I have put the goose to work for the purposes of that representation, the remainder has thus been boarded over, locked away, and what replaces it is a poem, a vision of the world that looks not like it but like me. Even in naming the remainder, in conceptualising a remainder as something approachable by language, I have invented, replaced and de-occulted it for my own purpose. In this sense, the refusal that I so desire to preserve is something I crush even as I desire to preserve it. It’s a fool’s errand then, to pine after what remains and is refused, as if it exists in any attainable sense, just as it’s a fool’s errand to bewail the distance between word and world, as if that distance existed in any real sense, as if for me the world were anything but wordly. As a poet I am no arbiter of the authentic. But still, as a poet I write poetry, and I pine and wail and feel it all as a problem nonetheless. I name this problem the problem of “use”, and the extract about the goose began to articulate the problem. As long as the goose is a metaphor for the poet, or for the awakening of the poet’s consciousness, then the goose serves the purpose of identifying me comfortingly with “nature”, employing a poetic logic at the goose’s expense. The goose is thereby appropriated and put to work. That is, the goose is used, by which of course I mean abused. A little on my choice of term—“use” is intended to suggest “abuse” while maintaining the image of mere necessity and innocence; “use” also has its echo in “refuse”, so in “use” I am implying that that which is refused is ultimately “use”, while at the same time I imply that to conceptualise refusal as refusal implies still more using. “Use” returns me to the questioning with which I opened, as it represents for me the complicity, complacency and moral ambiguity which problematises

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the whole project of ecopoetry, and indeed any “nature”-poetry. I must use, I must not use, I must speak, I must not speak, I need some other way to formulate a poetry of being in and with this Green World, one that works with my isolation, alienation and complexity. But this isn’t the part where I attempt an ecopoem. First, I want to contextualise the attempt a little, to consider it alongside previous expressions of isolation and alienation, previous futile attempts to circumvent use, previous complicities. Then we will know how this current attempt must deviate. Consider A. R. Ammons’ poem “Corsons Inlet”. In this example, the poet (in traditional fashion) charts his walk through a “natural” scene, observing and comparing the forms of “nature” with the forms of the poet’s mind, courting a comparison with Wordsworth. But Ammons avows that in his lyricising we find “no humbling of reality to precept” (2003, 136), the disorderliness of the observed “natural” objects resists the implicit ordering of the act of observation as well as the ordering of poem-writing. Just as the poem’s “natural” objects refuse fixed and sensible shapes (i.e. refuse us) they also refuse to dissolve into chaos (i.e. refuse to be neatly not-us in defiance of anthropomorphism as the term of order), divulging instead a fleeting and shifting order of their own. A flight of swallows is “an order held / in constant change: a congregation / rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable / as one event” (2003, 135). The paradox of “rich with entropy” gleans briefly, in its own refusal to make sense against our understanding of richness, the persistent mystery of “natural” objects and their relationship, mystery which causes the mind to constantly slip off its object and away. Ammon’s implication is that the human mind too, troped as mimicking or owning the same mysterious form as “nature”, possesses the same resistant mystery and therefore belongs to the “natural world”, and in this sense the human mind is of the “natural world’s” mysterious form. Or not quite. Ammons elects to take on the traditional pose of “nature”-poetry’s detached observer and this position is both a limit and a joy “I will try / to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening / scope, but enjoying the freedom that / Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision” (2003, 136). To intuit and respect the unknowable and endless disorderly order in nature is a task that the poet can only claim to try, not to master, and the intuition of infinite scope (the Sublime) which is all that is available to the mere detached observer, is that which Ammons is celebrating in nature. This is a sentiment I can get behind, the sentiment of joy at the refusing remainder, the sentiment of respectful distance. But a limitation is a limitation. Compare “Corsons Inlet” to Ammons’ “Gravelly Run” and read the former in light of the latter. What is at stake for the observer in “Gravelly Run” is

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self-knowledge in the completeness of the universe as accessed only through remainders “for it is not so much to know the self / as to know it as it is known / by galaxy and cedar cone” (2003, 137) but those remainders refuse to divulge themselves to the merely observing poet because of his detachment “so I look and reflect, but the air’s glass / jail seals each thing in its entity” (137) and the result? Refusal transpires as alienation at poetry’s failure “surrendered self among / unwelcoming forms: stranger, / hoist your burdens, get on down the road” (137). If we choose to read the two poems as speaking to and with one another, then the peace, acceptance and celebration of “Corson’s Inlet” is shadowed by a dissatisfied rage of impotence, a heartfelt bewailing of the poet as detached observer who senses his eternal alienation. The observational stance of “nature”-poetry seems useful up to a point, but it runs the risk of despond and despair, or of cold comfort when it meets the remainder that refuses. If I don’t openly use the materials of “nature” I lay myself open to an unprofitable disappointment, to a fruitless alienation. Of course, this is the same alienation with which I daily encounter “nature” myself, but I want it to create something positive and productive, true to the reality of my experience but consoling and motivating, all the better to approach the crisis with. In writing, I think I’m approaching the peace and mutual respect of the remainder’s sublimity, but am I just walking blindly towards despair or self-delusion and from there even to apathy (most dangerous of all)? “Corsons Inlet” courts traditional structures of use while it protests against them. Presumably, this is an attempt to resolve the structures and the protest, but it leads to a tenuous satisfaction and threatens to generate unhelpful affects. This is the catch. In the extract about the goose I tried to engage the catch this way: My poem resists and struggles with the conventional pose in which the lyric subject stands at a distance and observes the “natural” object while simultaneously singing to it its name, moulding it into her own image, impregnating it with her affects. It does this by collapsing and confusing the positions of observer and observed; I refuse to take up the pose while the goose refuses me, but my poem performatively ends up in that pose anyway. The rapidly swelling poetic subject swaps places with and absorbs the goose, troping her forming song as the song of the poem that sings her. I demonstrate that in my brayed ugliness-song I make and take everything. I tried to register a self-consciousness that would look at the problem without despairing, that would see in it an opportunity for remaking and reorganising the relationship between some (or even many) humans and the objects of “nature”. I tried to make a lyric subject who emerges at the end as something bright, spangly-eyed and better for the experience. I sense now that I need to clarify something. What is so bad about use anyway? It will come as a surprise to no one that “nature” has been used by poets:

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as a symbol through which to access the path between reality and the soul; co-opted as a figure for self-expression; as the source of a never-ending stream of affects; poets have written reflexively of the very pulling out of these affects; they have spoken through and for nature; they have enlisted nature’s support and solicitude, anthropomorphised it, troped it, made it serve some demonstrative purpose; they have constructed nations out of “nature”, as well as histories and traditions; “nature” is the subject of their rhetoric and with it they perform their social and civic duties. Of course, I’m just describing the day-to-day business of poetry, there is nothing essentially sordid about poetry’s usages; putting objects to use in the service of some poetic logic, some appeal, some communication, some provocation, some game, is the work of poetry. What I describe in this essay is simply what poetry does: poetry cannot but use. Neither will it come as a surprise that the concept of a “nature” available to poetry is in itself exploitative. Hence my persistent use of inverted commas. “Nature” groups together infinite forms of material, life, reality and so on, into a single nameable and intelligible object, which humans can put themselves in a granted, pre-given relation to. The word “nature” makes as if to gesture towards these infinite forms and in doing so it puts them to work in service of their own absorption under what is in truth a very limited and static concept within the terms of the humans who conceptualise and speak it. “Nature” also absorbs the remainder and appropriates refusal; the Sublime as the unfathomable awesome of the thing called “nature” is instrumentalised (most typically by the Romantics) in order to access the magnitude of human consciousness. Through the Sublime our human consciousness can see and recognise the limit of its own magnitude. I mean that writing about “nature” as we normally understand it is necessarily anthropocentric, and that’s old news. But it would surely be impossible for any poetry which dealt in the objects and forms of the “natural world”, indeed impossible for any ecopoem, to operate outside of this anthropocentrism which is couched in our language. To speak the word “nature”, or to speak about its objects, to make any linguistic attempt in its direction, is to tempt anthropocentrism. I understand “nature”, unsurprisingly, as alienating. “Nature” excludes us so that we might point to it and say “nature”. “Nature” must exclude us if we are to achieve it; one can get “close to nature” only because it is something that distance can be put in front of. At the same time, those materials that we believe to constitute “nature” we alienate from their own possibilities, conceived as they are along anthropocentric lines. The eco-critical campaign to complicate and expand “nature” is to be praised on this score. When I say “alienation” though, I’m describing what we glimpsed in Ammons’ “Gravelly Run”, something different to mere detachment from the materials of the natural world, rather I

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cannot be a part of them. The concept of a single coherent whole composed of harmonious parts has no currency with me. At least, this is what writing ecopoetry has led me to feel. To elaborate, I feel that what we call “nature” resists me as I resist it. Recall my goose goddess, we repel each other in mutual refusal of our remainders. I intuit no united front of disorderly order, such as can be found in “Corsons Inlet” and such that might disclose a comforting harmony between the “natural world” and the human mind. It is not that “nature” is hopelessly prior to my human mind, neither do I feel that poetry is prior in that it creates the world as such. Rather, notions about the “real” world must be expanded into a complementary view in which many contradictory things are true and real at the same time, without ever crossing over to afford a complete theory of everything. I have no real faith in an Edenic or Messianic time wherein “we” were, or will be, one with “nature”. Still, as a poet and a person I am burdened with the sense that “we” may have known “nature” but certainly not now, that the ways of the green witches are gone and the voice of the goddess is silent. It’s not just that I feel I can’t grasp “nature”, but that I feel I wouldn’t know it even if I did. The immanence of the natural world does not imply relation. But perhaps this is more about longing for that “we”, to which nature would give access. However, I don’t want my poem to suggest the baleful exclusion of “Gravelly Run”, so this isn’t where I attempt to write a poem either. I find that writing about nature does not “connect” me to anything coherent (or even disorderedly ordered) so much as it seems to contribute me to an ongoing incoherence in a way that has the potential to be spiritually transporting in a very enriching way, but which nonetheless has its basis in alienation. In writing poetry, that alienation manifests as the alienation of myself from the “natural world” through the practice of alienating objects from themselves by means of language. Importantly, I think this alienation is the same alienation that permits us to make of “nature” whatever we want it to be. It is a non-relation that permits us to make of “nature” a means: a means to dispose, to generate wealth, to generate scarcity, means to control, to junk, to expend, to exterminate, to deprive, to discriminate, to transcend, means to an end, where “the end” is the economy as the condition of survival, a condition so abstracted from the material exchange of the Green World that there is an epidemic, an epidemic of epidemics, because the unknowability of “nature” translates to meaninglessness ripe to be imprinted with meanings of our own, because that unknowability makes of “nature” a uselessness ripe to be put to our use. This is also old news. In some ways, this is what I can see poetry as doing too, so that any poetry which capitalises on alienation, or which emphasises detachment, indeed any poetry that uses (which is all poetry) contributes to or is

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complicit in this attitude and in this culture of use and abuse. And yet I must write poems and I must thrive. I mustn’t use, I cannot help but use, I must use, I mustn’t comply with use, I comply with use, I need to use, I am complicit in the crisis. If there is to be ecopoetry now, if I am to write an ecopoem now, it surely has to be written in accordance with this mantra. I must come to terms with that, so this too, is not where I attempt to write a poem. I find myself repulsed by the idea of using the world’s materials in the way I’ve been describing, of reiterating “nature’s” gesture of absorption and instrumentalisation, and yet I need the “natural world”. I feel that I have forgotten something, but I also know that I only dreamed it, I intuit a material affinity between myself and rocks, cats, sand, milk, sage bushes, whales and so on, but that affinity is inaccessible to me intellectually. I feel like I’m stealing when I pick wild apples. I recognise that words bear no substantial relationship between the material things they signify, but I also know that the invocation of spirits is achieved through ancient words of power. On a similar hand, I feel that my partner is being difficult for trying to source organic, free-range chickens for the wedding he is catering. I will fly to that wedding, when I come home I will look at the contents of my bank account and purchase a cheap, factoryfarmed chicken, I will put the chicken’s plastic wrap in the bin and I will not spend my remaining time organising a resistance, a protest or a movement against all that I have just enjoyed and/or been necessitated to do. I might, however, read a “nature poem” and feel less alone, less disconnected or less ostracised, less adrift in a world of thinly-veiled chaos and meaninglessness. I want to write about how I use the Green World and the things in it, I want to talk about how I am complicit in that use. Any ecopoem I write needs to include that articulation, it needs to engage the question of innocence, because the concern over innocence threatens to outstrip the environmental concern itself and to dominate the conversation I actually want to have. My shame as a practitioner of poetry is much easier to articulate than my need. It is shame in use and all it entails, shame in complicity with use. But it is difficult to articulate shame without stimulating disgust, or boredom, or equal shame in those I articulate it to. It is more difficult still to mobilise shame into the constructive and positive change needed at a time of crisis. How can one be innocent anyway? How could I write poems without troping, without using the objects of those poems to do what poems do? More shame, threatening to become despair, but also pig-headedness about the task. How to be complicit (because I could neither speak of material objects nor survive without complicity) and be guilty and alienated and complex and write? Now does not seem the time to represent “nature” as either handmaiden, medium or victim, faces she has worn alternately in her history as the object of

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ecopoetry. It is certainly not a time to revert back to Romantic humanist idealism, neither does it seem the time to despair, nor to tend inexorably towards silence. But such dialectics also fail to apply now that we have passed the brink of crisis and into the Anthropocene; they fail to apply so long as complicity and alienation are to be acknowledged as characteristic of our current period (and I would add that yes, the planet is still being brutalised, but the usefulness of this narrative may have run its course). There are no panaceas, there are no high horses, but there can be no apathy either. Lives are, of course, at stake and change is absolutely necessary. It goes without saying that our modern relationship to nature needs re-conceptualising, but I am doubtful as to whether poetry is a powerful enough medium for that. My faith shakes. So what then? Maybe I commit to complicity instead, commit to the practice of use, but instead of directing this towards alienation, I do it with an eye towards the remainder. Perhaps I operate under no illusions about what poetry does but perhaps I don’t fight it either, perhaps instead I multiply it to an excessive degree, a multiplication which spews out from a central null point which is the remainder, poetic practice and the object which is practiced upon in mutual magnetic repulsion. There are precedents. Karen Leona Anderson’s “Snowshoe Hare” (2003, 141-142) can be considered one: In the first part of “Snowshoe Hare” a “you” is brought into affinity with a hare, they are represented and addressed in hare-terms, but this is not a straightforward trope, you can’t say of this poem, “yes I get it, you are like a hare, very cute”, as you could say of many other poems. Anderson’s trope is perverse; the poem begins “Hunt hares because they run and leap for you” (2003, 141); if “you” is in terms of a hare then we have a conflation of predator and prey, destroyer and destroyed, while somewhere among the two there is pleasure in the act of it. We flip constantly and uncertainly between you-as-hare and hareas-you in all the perversity of such an encounter. Like the typical human of the environmentalist poem, the hare will “always make more / and destroy all the luscious green nibs of the saplings / before they are trees” (141) while she is also a “hard hare ma” (141) not the tender Mother Nature of idealist fetishism but humanly callous and pragmatic after the target of the environmentalist rhetorician. The floors of the “hard little house” (141) (hard as a hare ma) that so threatens the human “you” are said to “please” the hare, connoisseur of the hard and cold. Meanwhile, you is under threat, in flight from the overspill of human development to which you yet belongs; “the hunt for a place / bare of sound, rich with the lithe spines of grass” (141) echoes the hunt of the poem’s beginning; flight is chase, pursuit is to be pursued. Hare-human-human-hare is a tropic relationship far from simple and not simply using, though it must use nonetheless to be the trope that it is.

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In this poem, as opposed to Ammons’ poems, all is precept, but this precept is paradoxically a fecund ground. It is not a matter of sealing off or glossing over a “true” nature with a trope, but a matter of construction and ordering as a valid disclosure of “you” and “hare”. Hare and human hold each other in thrall and at a mutual distance. That is to say that this poem’s tropic technique carries a suggestion of reciprocity, but while human and hare are mutually apprehended in the image of the other, neither is presumed to fully explain or absorb the other. Both are only partially apprehended by the superficiality of the trope; animality belongs equally to the surrounding neighbourhood which “stretches its maw” (141), the predator-prey relation is further complicated by this and there can be no clear assignation of roles. Relationships and identities float uneasily around, ready to bolt or transform at any moment. The hare’s experience is not like the human’s, its experience is ultimately incomprehensible, even if the hare’s movements seem to have burrowed into ours, seem to be ours “run, /you and your young disappear” (141). And like that, you runs and leaves the hare to its own mysteries, while we (poet, reader, all of us) in turn vanish from the hare’s sight and knowledge. The tropic relation between human and hare in this poem strikes me as a momentary fit of madness which, because of its momentariness and its madness, is closer to the experience of being in the world that I feel is appropriate. Instead of being a detached observer, the human in this poem is deeply implicated, though not comfortably or by their own fancy or on their own terms. The second person address works elegantly to de-centre the human agent, to put them at mercy, to involve them in the epistemological loopiness of the poem along with the hare. Being a poem, the extent of these effects is limited and imperfect. That is to be expected. For example, the poem states that the hare “is not sorry” (141) for her callousness as a mother. At the same time that this resists the imposition of human values and affects onto the hare, it still interprets them through that anthropocentric lens and speaks for the hare with a human voice. But I hardly think that the poem could not do this, it is after all an instance of lyric voicing and is subject to the limitations and conventions of that voicing, it is not innocent of anything. I don’t intend to repeat Anderson. I will try to write bare-faced and guiltily, while at the same time gesturing to a redeeming void in the hope of staging my own renegotiation, one which neither shames nor denies me. First attempt: what happens when the moon turns her back and the birch leaf curls in anger.

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I’m pointing towards the remainder that I cannot speak or comprehend, i.e. the thing that really happens when the moon turns her back and the birch leaf curls in anger. It’s not a question but it threatens to be. In an attempt to represent a gestalt of knowing and unknowing, identification and appeal, the poem, in its impossible pointing, tries to be the answer to its own question that it cannot quite ask—it strives to be a contentless “that”. But, at the same time, I have made leaf and moon collude in pathetic fallacy, I have troped their physical functions as expressions of affect, anthropomorphising them, making them attest to the centrality and authority of human feelings in and over the materials of the Green World, making them reiterate the directional mode of poetic self-expression from inside to out, thereby confirming the authority of the poem itself in a closed loop. I have done this in the hope that the gesturing of the first line destabilises the anthropomorphising claims of the following two, leading not to the application of “natural” objects to confirm the tyranny of human affect, but to a renegotiation of the relationship between poet and “natural” objects, to an alternative function of such troping or to a less disagreeable troping. I claim that the leaf is angry or consumed by anger, but the first line intends to modify that claim so that it instead gestures to that thing which escapes the word “anger”, while at the same time announcing my human way of being in the world as this way of being interacts with the alien being of the leaf, which is what happens when I trope the leaf’s curling as anger. The leaf I encounter in the poem astonishes me with its tiny thing-like-anger-which-is-not-truly-anger; the same process is happening with the moon and its gravitational movement construed as an act of bitter abandonment or gesture of distain. But the possibility is open, perhaps “anger” is correct or close at least. At the site of this construction, the leaf may own “anger” or resist it or both. I have tried to give it space to do so. Meanwhile, the leaf curls up, the moon turns her back, they refuse to disclose, their refusal of disclosure is the true intended object of my disclosure. I, moon and birch leaf don’t touch exactly, but within the poem we are in a state of being together, if separated into our own realities. In this way, my humanness pushes against leaf and moon productively, I hope. I’m aiming at something I can’t hit of course, and that surrender to the impossibility of mastery is necessary. But the task I’ve set myself demands more. I mentioned “contributing” myself; it’s one thing to talk of loopy void-filled image-making, another to volunteer myself into that milieu, to conceive of being seen as much as seeing. What happens if I try to write a cacophony of shifting, dissolving, re-forming tropes, with a contentless “that” implied at their centre, and place myself somewhere in it to be recognised there? Second attempt:

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parsley root digs my way in shivering when the wind moves the body of all mud registers and turns the wormy circle does fever-dreaming time within circles of bird-like eyes so green-smelling and peace after the rain comes now was that a crow shouting when when what an ashy womb i am what a horn covered in flowers when i hear the desert that is the nightingale and see the flaming sword that are his eyes i remember it floored by love like a cherry tree i grew slowly into my attitude and all the while things lived and died in proximity to my young impenetrable everywhere anti-matter only to the trees it looks like a hare doing the moon’s blue skip doing the ancestral blood a running so that i won’t die you red-brown splash of rain in which i am drinking do not see me because i was not there was shadow-mother red threat hungry hungry hungry death how witches love a hare lithe and brief and hammering and secret like me I’m trying to be part of an ongoing stream of tropes, supplanting and undermining each other, turning up inside each other and changing object: hare as the trees see hare, me as the hare sees me, me seeing mud in seeing eyes seen as those of birds, all as I see it seeing. Or perhaps “hearing” or “feeling” would make a more appropriate sensory trope. I’m trying to resist resolution into a single trope while excessing unreasonably in the hope that I can suggest in each thing and in all of them together a remainder without qualities and a constant shifting away. I’m attempting to construct the “natural world” knowingly, not with a view to put it to express use but because that is the poetic way in which I dwell in and with this world. I build a lens with which I might see and recognise myself in the material exchange of the world. I want to demonstrate that I inhabit the world the way the Gulf Stream inhabits the ocean. Which is the point at which my exact stance as regards the relationship between poetry and reality ought to be clarified. Earlier, I gestured towards a complementary view of reality in which many things are true and real at the same time. The Gulf Stream is indivisible from the ocean, in which sense it does not exist as anything else; it is also a distinct segment of that ocean identified by its particular significance to those for whom it is significant; it is also a tropic, lyric construct, “a stream”. All of these things are true. The tropic functions of poetry bring otherwise unintelligible things into reality as intelligible (they bring the Gulf Stream intelligibly out of the ocean, for example) while always necessarily leaving out the remainder that refuses itself in this process. Poetry does this not because its tropes are ever true in a rational sense, but

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because they are often powerful. For humans, intelligible things also come to us in human shape, a shape which is necessarily inaccessible to anything else, a shape that unconsciously jostles myriad other shapes like ghosts. There are no “laws” of physics, only observable phenomena which we can schematise under the trope of a “law”, a trope which sanctions all operations of reality under a recognisably human legislation. At the same time, we can depend on these laws because they are indeed true. In this sense, our poetry is an attribute of reality (our poetry can be shown to make real and true things) but not because poetry accesses a pre-existent truth, creates a unifying truth, or possesses abilities in excess of the words from which it is made (words are able enough). Neither is “nature” poetry the poetry par-excellence for the production of reality (the lyric manifestation of intelligible reality happens at all levels of culture), but it does force the issue of encounter with remainders and other unknowable realities with which we share the universe. A “real” in any ultimate or unified sense cannot be “captured” by poetry, we can only contribute ourselves to the infinitude of realities via poetry’s means. I’m sure that the poems of geese are also true, whatever they are. But to return to the poem, my attempt is predictably more spiritual than efficacious. I’ve reflected my removed relationship from “nature”, but I have also made that removedness the basis of my being and being with “nature”. I can do this because I’ve made a magical recuperation of alienation, isolation and complexity (not for nothing the witches, circles and a horn covered in flowers) “Natural” forms and relationships between those forms are invoked through provisional correspondence more than they are described, they are constructed in succession through incantation and then fall apart again. This is a demonstration of my faith in the constitutive magic of words, in spellcasting. But now arises my reasonable doubt. Does this attempt answer, to any extent, the questions with which I began? I feel that I’ve evaded the problems more than approached them. But that is perhaps to be expected. To attempt to recognise myself in the world by exercising my poetic-magical manner of being in that world is of course another, slightly altered, iteration of the same old exploitative fancy. Worse and more importantly, it achieves little if anything rhetorically. Maybe the only noble thing in this failure is the sense of spiritual enrichment it gives me, that I suppose, would be a suitable role for poetry in the crisis and very valuable in its way. It feels like hope under another name, but not really hope. I still sense that I’ve caused some hurt or allowed some hurt to come to pass. Perhaps harm is just my ongoing state of living in the Anthropocene, and it must colour all of my poetry that encounters it. I began this essay with a lot of questions, which in summary amount to this question: “what are the ethical implications for a practicing ‘nature’ poet?”

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In terms of the poetry itself, the most dominant ethical concern is the necessity to reject implicit abuse, which contributes to the facilitation of physical abuses. This is not to suggest a rejection of use full stop (which is impossible), it is to recommend that poets channel use into other, hopefully more savoury, purposes. I hope that this would resolve the antagonistic stance against all that “nature” stands for, and I hope also that this would present an opportunity for new, positive ways of writing in relation to “nature”. Second, the practice of writing “nature” poetry also implies the ethical duty we owe to our own species which, at this Anthropocene time, would seem to be in opposition to the ethical duty we owe to all other species. Our job as poets (at least as far as tropic functions are concerned) is to exercise anthropomorphism, which is to propagate a reality which is home to us. The notion that poetry can even be written about “nature” declares that our belonging to the natural world is true. Again, I hope that this idea would open a way for the resolution of antagonism, although it strikes me now as an impossible burden. But realistically, poetry has relatively little influence as a discrete artform or as a collection of discrete artistic productions. Wherever it seems to have influence it usually gets reabsorbed into destructive institutions as public art. I would suggest that the ethical solution for poets (if it can reasonably be called that) is not to shout louder about all the above, but to get over ourselves, stop feeling so guilty about our much over-played responsibility and associated guilt, and to get on with the business of doing anything at all that strives against the direction of apathy. Poetry is, after all, something rather than nothing. The crisis of the Anthropocene is a great leveller from which perhaps only an unapathetic spiritual engagement can rise. The crisis is characterised by the impossibility of saying anything really conclusive about ethical implications or responsibilities, not in the sense that these disappear, but in the sense that they proliferate in a multitude so fecund that it contains repeated contradictions. Personally, I don’t believe that we poets will be the ones to save the world and end the crisis, so the ethical implications for poets perhaps ultimately relate to the articulation of a spiritual being-in the world that can be proper to that world in crisis (which would be anything but lame and accepting). Then we might see what that articulation transforms, if anything. All I can propose is the tendency away from apathy, and towards the proliferation of lyricalmagical tropes of “nature” until the word turns to ashes in our mouths. Perhaps that would at least be peace, and in the future (for it exists) something else.

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Works Cited Ammons, A. R. (2003). “Corsons Inlet.” In: A. Fisher-Wirth and L.G. Street, eds., The Ecopoetry Anthology, San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, pp. 133–136. Ammons, A. R. (2003). “Gravelly Run.” In: A. Fisher-Wirth and L.G. Street, eds., The Ecopoetry Anthology, San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, pp. 136–137. Anderson, K.L. (2003). “Snowshoe Hare.” In: A. Fisher-Wirth and L.G. Street, eds., The Ecopoetry Anthology, San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, pp. 141–142. Woodward, C. (2017). “I Have Seen This Before IV.” In: Sphinx, Norwich: Salò Press, p. 4.

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Index Abram, David 6, 51, 56, 57n11, 163 Becoming Animal 4 Commonwealth of Breath 2, 56 The Spell of the Sensuous 7, 57 activism 3, 111–113, 129 activist 126, 128, 129, 151 Agamben, Giorgio 59n12, 114n3, 142 agency 8, 14, 53, 59, 67–69, 72, 77, 79–80, 82, 87–88, 120, 134, 140–141, 143, 156 alliteration (see trope) alienation (see emotion) allusion (see trope) alterity (see otherness) animal 8, 10, 32, 36, 57n11, 58–62, 59n12, 68, 71, 74, 77, 78, 95, 98, 100, 113, 119, 120, 122–123, 125, 139, 140, 141, 144, 145, 154, 160, 165, 166, 176, 179, 180, 181, 184 animalisation, animality 16, 77, 181, 200 animal rights 49n5, 59n12 fauna 6, 44, 48, 111, 124, 127, 154 as other 14, 43, 48, 49, 51–53, 57 Anthropocene 1–3, 6–7, 10, 18, 43, 44, 45, 58, 126, 134, 135, 199, 203, 204 catastrophe 3, 126, 155, 178, 184 climate change 7, 13, 18, 48, 111, 123–125, 144 deforestation 10, 18, 145 environmental apocalypse 172, 174, 175, 179, 184 environmental crisis 3, 9, 19, 183, 189, 190 environmental degradation 2, 15, 45, 111, 155n7 environmental destruction 15, 136, 171, 175, 181, 182 global warming 9, 13, 54, 123–124, 125, 146 (over)exploitation 13, 15, 46, 73, 126, 143, 148, 153, 160 (species) extinction 7, 46, 48, 112, 123, 135, 179–180, 182–184 anthropocentrism 13, 196 anthropomorphism 52, 58, 61, 159, 194, 196, 204 autobiographical 79, 80, 116 awareness 5, 7, 8, 17, 26, 28, 55, 67, 68, 86n13, 116, 128, 129, 133

attention 11, 45, 91, 97, 100n12, 108, 116, 119, 124, 128, 129, 157, 161, 173, 176, 178, 183 conscience 8, 9, 135, 137, 190 consciousness 8, 9, 11, 17, 37, 54, 58, 60, 70, 72, 73, 83, 94, 152n3, 191–193, 195, 196 ecological awareness 28, 116, 128, 174, 175, 178 Barad, Karen 88, 118n4, 165 bard 32, 33, 172n1, 178 visionary 25, 26, 33, 41 Barthes, Roland 182 Bate, Jonathan 3, 14, 17, 30 Bennett, Jane 2, 116n4 Book of Genesis 10, 51, 60 biocentrism 13, 26, 43 Biosemiotics 8, 83 biosphere 7, 45, 56, 138 body 7, 8, 17, 38, 47, 47n2, 51, 57, 61, 76, 78, 85, 144, 161, 202, embodied 7, 8, 19, 36, 46n2, 49, 51, 54, 55, 61, 78, 91, 100n11, 108, 164 versus mind (see Cartesian dualism) Braidotti, Rosi 116n4, 133, 135, 140, 143 Bristow, Tom 3, 6, 6n3, 7, 47, 48, 61 Bryson, J. Scott 2, 3, 3n2, 4, 5, 11, 57, 58, 154 Buell, Lawrence 10, 12, 15, 18, 43, 45, 128, 133, 136–138, 144, 154, 174 capitalism 2, 13, 15, 16, 46, 56, 73, 111, 113, 116, 120, 121, 125, 138, 171, 174, 175, 179, 180, 181, 183, 183n10, 185 capitalist (see capitalism) capitalisation (see capitalism) genetic engineering 140, 144 industrialisation 15, 26, 27, 34, 35, 37, 59, 126, 133, 136, 138, 139, 143, 144, 147, 162 mechanisation (see industrialisation) neoliberalism 13, 15, 16, 45, 112, 128, technology 17, 27, 126, 140, 141, 142, 161n11 Cartesian dualism 6, 7, 48, 59, 60, 61, 83, 86, 161, Descartes, René 59, 60

208 observer versus observed 54, 60, 93, 194, 195, 200 subject versus object 80, 103, 104, 106, 192 chemicals 138, 145, 147 fertiliser 147, 161n11 fossil fuel 46, 173 insecticide 141, 147 city 29, 30, 34, 36, 46n1, 59, 76, 112, 127, 134, 136, 137, 138, 143, 147, 164 Christianity (see religion) class 118, 135, 139, 153, 158, 159 middle class 115, 127 working class 112, 112n1 colonialism (and anti-, neo-) 16, 112, 117, 121, 133, 134, 135, 136, 140, 141, 143, 151, 153n5, 156, 166, 179, 181, 193 colonised versus coloniser 133, 135, 139, 152, 160 commodification 16, 172, 174, 175, 183, 185 commodity 5, 46, 125, 155, 174, 175n6, 176, 177, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185 communion 13, 31, 35, 58 communitas (see community) community 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 15, 16, 17, 45, 52, 58, 71, 77, 95, 111, 113, 114, 114n3, 115, 117, 122, 140, 142, 151, 152, 155, 155n8, 156, 157, 158, 162, 163, 165, 193 complicity 103, 112, 116, 118, 122, 125, 175, 185, 189, 190, 193, 194, 198–199 conservation 18, 73n4, 123, 126, 139, 171, 174, 177 consumerism 174 (over)consumption 2, 10, 16, 18, 46, 125, 171, 174, 175, 181, 183, 185 contemplation 17, 30, 31, 33, 38, 115, 165, 184 meditation 47n2, 48, 50, 51, 52, 84, 123, 126, 161 culture versus nature 7, 53, 76, 78, 83, 115–116, 116n4, 133, 135, 139, 174n5, 177 naturecultures 7 death 17, 27, 29, 37–41, 46, 56, 83n10, 96, 133, 135, 136, 140, 142–144, 146, 179, 202 Thanatos 53, 83n10, 135 the dead 39, 47, 48, 184 Deloughrey, Elizabeth and Handley, George B. 153n5, 156, 157, 158 Derrida, Jacques 59, 59n12, 60, 114, 140 Descartes, René (see Cartesian dualism)

index development (and over-) 16, 83, 111, 112, 147 progress 27, 73, 127, 134, 135, 184 urbanisation 133, 136–139 dialogism 96n6, 108 dialogue 12, 19, 44, 96, 97, 100, 100n12, 101, 102, 104, 105, 107, 108, 143 diaspora 133, 137 Dillon, Sarah 12, 19, 146 discourse (see narrative) dwell 2, 5, 13, 59, 155, 202 dweller 10, 138 act of dwelling 8, 13, 27, 33, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 54 Ecocriticism 1, 2, 7, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 26, 27, 40, 163, 174 Material Ecocriticism 7, 8, 10, 14, 68, 69, 73, 79, 88 Postcolonial Ecocriticism 15, 134, 156, 156n10 ecology 5, 9, 15, 16, 44, 111, 118, 128, 133, 163, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177 affinity 12, 16, 19, 25, 86, 88, 198, 199 biodiversity (loss) 7, 46, 48; 43, 46, 48, 111, 135, 138, 143 connection 47, 70, 72, 77, 88, 93, 113, 114, 125, 127, 128, 163, 166 Deep (or Dark) ecology 5, 116, 174 interaction 30, 73, 77, 88, 95–96, 112, 117, 128–129, 163, 190 interconnectedness (see interconnectivity) interconnectivity 3, 6, 8, 47, 61, 68, 79, 91, 117, 119, 140, 154, 183n10 interdependence 7, 61, 72, 78, 79, 119, 125 knot 67, 74 mesh 2, 8, 69, 78, 79, 88 network 67, 69, 72, 98, 99 Postcolonial ecology 133, 134, 156, 157 reciprocity 3, 79, 84, 100n11, 154, 200 Social ecology 27, 34 web 77 ecopoetry 1, 2, 3, 3n2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 19, 25, 26, 43, 57, 58, 91, 117, 118, 154, 189, 191, 194, 197, 198, 199 Anthropocene lyric 3, 6, 7 ecological poetry 3, 154 ecopoetics 7, 17, 117, 118, 133, 174 environmental poetry 3, 5, 27, 93 nature poetry 2, 3, 9, 11, 189, 190, 194, 195, 203, 204

209

index postcolonial aesthetics 133 ecosystem 18, 73, 74, 123, 135, 145, 161, 162 ecosystem people 157, 158, 164, 166 emotion 6, 7, 15, 17, 30, 31, 67, 139, 151, 166 affect 4, 17, 19, 97, 102, 201 alienation 19, 156, 189, 190, 191, 193–199, 203 apathy 142, 190, 195, 199, 204 empathy 52, 61, 127, 146, 164, 166 fear 34, 135, 136, 137, 143, 146, 147, 191 gratitude 47, 53, 164 guilt 198, 200, 204 hubris 2, 80 humility 3, 5, 44, 58, 154 isolation 72, 78, 189, 190, 191, 194, 203 loss 127, 136, 137, 156, 164, 176 love 17, 33, 38, 39, 48, 51, 53, 72, 86, 102, 123, 127, 140, 152n3, 153n4, 159, 160, 161, 162, 178, 179, 181, 202 paranoia 137, 147 shame 190, 193, 198, 200 entropy 138, 194, 159 environmentalism 174 environmentalism of the poor 151, 158 ethics 4, 9, 14, 15, 16, 43, 94, 95, 96, 112, 129, 140, 154, 175 biocentric ethics 44, 61 ecocentric ethics 43 ecological ethics 171, 173, 183 ethos 16, 112, 112n1, 113, 115, 122, 163, 164 ethos (see ethics) exclusion 112, 135, 197 fauna 6, 44, 48, 111, 124, 127, 154 fear (see emotion) Felstiner, John 1, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 58 Feminism 111, 115, 152, 153n4, 161 flora 6, 44, 48, 73n4, 111, 127, 154 fractal 1, 11–13, 16, 19 fragility (see inequality) gender 60, 114, 152, 153n4, 158, 159, 166 Gifford, Terry 3, 11 Gilcrest, David 3, 5, 154 globalisation 113, 128 global 2, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 27, 44, 56, 111, 123, 124, 134, 135, 142, 155n7, 190 god (see religion) gratitude (see emotion)

habitat 10, 49, 121, 123, 143, 176 hazard (see Anthropocene) home (see place) hope (see emotion) hubris (see emotion) Huggan, Graham and Tiffin, Helen 10, 14, 44, 49, 58, 60, 61, 133, 134, 160 Humanities 27 environmental humanities 6, 11, 18 humility (see emotion) identity 15, 27, 29, 61, 78, 136, 156, 157, 181, 193 collective identity 111, 113, 114 imagination 8, 9, 11, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32–35, 37, 41, 55n10, 73, 138, 156, 157, 162, 163, 173 imperialism 128, 133, 134, 135, 148, 166 indigenous 10, 97, 98, 135, 152, 158, 160, 163 native 58, 122, 135, 136, 143, 151, 156, 160 inequality 117, 120–122, 152, 153n4 deprivation 87, 122 poverty 155n7 precarious 82, 86, 112, 184, 185 vulnerability 87n14, 46, 72, 135 interconnectedness (see ecology) interdependence (see ecology) Iovino, Serenella and Oppermann, Serpil 8, 14, 67–74, 77–79, 143, 146 isolation (see emotion) Leopold, Aldo 5, 8, 45 Material Ecocriticism (see Ecocriticism) Materialism 83, 116n4, 72 material deprivation (see inequality) material world 10, 14, 51, 68, 72, 81, 162 materiality 14, 15, 17, 44, 53, 72, 83, 91, 95, 109, 112, 117, 146, 148, 162 matter 2, 7, 8, 10, 14, 60, 67–71, 88, 101, 107, 117, 126, 163, 193, 202 storied matter 72, 78, 88 vibrant matter 56 meditation (see contemplation) memory 30, 87, 96, 119, 125, 142, 146, 162, 165, 175, 176 mind versus body (see Cartesian dualism) more-than-human 2, 4, 6, 6n3, 6n4, 10, 19, 44, 47, 49, 57, 57n11, 61 Morton, Timothy 92n2, 93, 174, 175n6, 183n10 myth 76n6, 83, 98, 105, 118, 139, 153, 153n4

210 narrative 15, 16, 27, 67–69, 72, 74, 79, 87, 88, 91, 93, 93n3, 94–98, 100, 100n12, 101, 115, 123, 124, 133, 134, 141, 148, 151, 153, 158, 160, 199 discourse 67, 72, 73, 78, 95, 122, 125, 128, 129, 133, 135, 139, 140, 141, 142, 148, 151, 153n4, 157 toxic discourse 15, 133, 134, 136, 144, 147 hegemonic discourse 151, 152n4 native (see indigenous) nature writing 45, 58, 154 neoliberal (see capitalism) network (see ecology) Nixon, Rob 10, 45, 158 Nolan, Sarah 7, 178n8 ontology 6, 12, 14, 44, 140, 157, 158, 161, 163, 165 otherness 60, 143 alterity 111, 114, 118 othering 16, 17, 135, 139, 147 the other 52, 74, 95, 125, 143, 192, 193, 200 palimpsest 1, 12, 13, 19, 146 patriarchal 153n4, 166 perception 6, 14, 19, 34, 37, 47n3, 84, 88, 94, 97, 100n12, 163 the senses 47, 56, 97, 161 pastoralism 127 pastoral 61, 92, 111, 118, 128, 138, 172n1 (post-) 15, 118 place and space 1, 4, 5, 57, 157, 158, 162 belonging 13, 114, 122, 156, 161, 204 displacement 111, 113, 115, 122, 123, 155n7, 157, 162, 176 emplacement 97, 102, 117 experience of place 6, 72, 157 home 4, 5, 32, 34, 35, 46, 48, 59, 76n6, 81, 122, 128, 137, 143, 155, 159, 161, 191, 204 place-makers 1, 4, 57 sense of place 25, 27, 30, 43 poetics (see ecopoetry) pollution (see Anthropocene) polyphony (see sound) postcolonialism 17, 174 preservation 9, 26, 46, 177 conservation 18, 73n4, 123, 128, 138, 174, 177 progress (see development)

index race 15, 17, 114, 118, 139, 141, 143, 155n8, 180, 184 reciprocity (see ecology) religion 60, 141, 158 Christianity 33, 38 56, 60 god/goddess 10, 31, 32, 33, 39, 48, 51, 56, 60, 77, 83, 83n10, 87, 107, 139, 140, 159, 191, 192, 197 holiness 31, 33, 36 sacredness 13, 31, 32, 33, 38, 41, 47, 61, 139, 190 resistance 18, 100, 151, 161, 198 responsibility 2, 15, 45, 114, 125, 126, 128, 138, 140, 141, 181, 190, 204 Rigby, Kate 2n1, 28, 33 Romanticism 1, 3, 5, 13, 16, 28, 29, 31, 33, 41, 49, 58, 83, 92, 93n4, 115, 118, 127, 178, 196, 199 countryside 29, 34, 35, 36 rural 29, 36, 68, 112, 164 Scigaj, Leonard 3, 154 semiotic 49n4, 53, 83 Shakespeare, William 146, 180 silence 106, 107, 107n18, 143, 146, 199 Slovic, Scott 12, 37 Snyder, Gary 46n1, 51, 61, 127, 155n8 Soper, Kate 1, 17 sound 44, 54, 70, 73, 82, 84–86, 92, 92n1, 94, 95, 97, 99, 106, 107, 159, 182 polyphony 2n1, 8, 13, 14, 43, 44, 94 song 2n1, 3, 45, 48, 53, 55, 83, 83n10, 96, 97, 98, 104, 161, 192, 195 songlines 91, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 104, 106, 108 voice 13, 15, 17, 43, 44, 45, 50, 59, 61, 73, 79, 82, 86n13, 87, 91, 92, 94–104, 106–108, 122, 123, 125, 152, 152n4, 159, 161–164, 192, 197, 200 space 4–7, 12, 15, 16, 17, 19, 28, 37, 40, 54, 55, 57, 61, 92, 94, 95, 98, 98n10, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 107, 120, 127, 128, 138, 140, 141, 142, 151, 152, 153n4, 155, 156, 157, 165, 174n5, 182, 192, 201 and place (see place) spaciousness 5, 55, 58 species 2, 6, 9, 10, 15, 27, 37, 44, 45, 46, 47, 51n8, 53, 58, 59, 60, 111, 113, 119, 120, 123, 124, 125, 128, 141, 179, 180, 204 species extinction (see Anthropocene)

211

index Spivak, Gayatri C. 114, 158 subjectivity 10, 37, 47, 54, 80, 84, 93n4, 101n13, 106, 112n2, 115, 154, 157, 158 sublimity 50, 83, 127, 194, 195, 196 supremacy 88, 134, 159 surveillance (see violence) sustainability 17, 27, 112, 120, 128, 133, 136, 141, 148, 156, 174 tame (see wilderness) technology (see capitalism) topophilia 4 toxicity 138, 144, 147 trans-corporeality 2, 6, 8 trauma 15–17, 136, 138, 151 trip 69, 70, 73, 77, 119 journey 70, 72, 76, 77, 78, 146, 164 trope 12, 82, 194, 196, 199–203 alliteration 54, 56, 73, 84, 85, 86 allusion 82, 85, 87, 125, 173, 173n4, 175–178, 181 dramatic monologue 97, 101, 101n13 enjambment 70, 81 metaphor 12, 13, 34, 35, 38, 49n4, 82, 86, 87, 95, 97, 100n11, 117, 121, 146, 161, 166, 176, 178, 179, 193 (post-)language poetry 112, 112n2, 113, 117, 119, 128 rhythm 11, 12, 58, 76, 85, 92, 94, 98, 100, 102, 103, 119

Tuan, Yi-Fu 4, 5, 27, 57, 158, 162 urban (see city) urbanisation (see development) violence 10, 16, 17, 135, 136, 145, 146, 151, 157, 158, 159, 161, 161n11, 163, 164, 165, 181, 184 (bio)terrorism 143, 144 biopiracy 133, 134, 135, 141 surveillance 140, 142, 144, 147 war 10, 13, 14n6, 29, 75, 75n5, 77, 87, 87n14, 93, 143, 146, 147, 153n4, 154, 159, 165 warfare 135, 140, 143, 144, 147, 148, 173n4 weapon 48, 134, 143 visionary (see bard) war (see violence) waste 10, 111, 112, 125, 134, 136, 139, 145, 163, 182, 182n9 debris 17, 177, 178n7, 184 detritus 174, 182, 182n9, 184 Whitman, Walt 123, 127, 178, 179 wilderness 9, 46, 46n1, 48, 50, 58, 59, 76, 101, 164 wild (versus tame) 45, 46, 154 wildlife 77, 123, 127 wildness 46, 46n1 wisdom 43, 48, 49, 50, 55, 61, 100n11, 166