Poetry and Sustainability in Education (Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment) 3030955753, 9783030955755

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Poetry and Sustainability in Education

Edited by Sandra Lee Kleppe Angela Sorby

Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment

Series Editors Alan Reid Faculty of Education Monash University Melbourne, VIC, Australia Marcia McKenzie Graduate School of Education University of Melbourne Melbourne, Australia

This series focuses on new developments in the study of education and environment. Promoting theoretically-rich works, contributions include empirical and conceptual studies that advance critical analysis in environmental education and related fields. Concerned with the underlying assumptions and limitations of current educational theories in conceptualizing environmental and sustainability education, the series highlights works of theoretical depth and sophistication, accessibility and applicability, with critical orientations to matters of public concern. It engages interdisciplinary and diverse perspectives as these relate to domains of policy, practice, and research. Studies in the series may span a range of scales from the more micro level of empirical thick description to macro conceptual analyses, highlighting current and upcoming turns in theoretical thought. Tapping into a growing body of theoretical scholarship in this domain, the series provides a venue for examining and expanding theorizations and approaches to the interdisciplinary intersections of environment and education. Its timeliness is clear as education becomes a key mode of response to environmental and sustainability issues internationally. The series will offer fresh perspectives on a range of topics such as: • curricular responses to contemporary accounts of human-environment relations (e.g., the Anthropocene, nature-culture, animal studies, transdisciplinary studies) • the power and limits of new materialist perspectives for philosophies of education • denial and other responses to climate change in education practice and theory • place-based and land-based orientations to education and scholarship • postcolonial and intersectional critiques of environmental education and its research • policy research, horizons, and contexts in environmental and sustainability education

Sandra Lee Kleppe  •  Angela Sorby Editors

Poetry and Sustainability in Education

Editors Sandra Lee Kleppe Faculty of Humanities Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences Elverum, Norway

Angela Sorby Department of English Marquette University Milwaukee, WI, USA

ISSN 2662-6519     ISSN 2662-6527 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment ISBN 978-3-030-95575-5    ISBN 978-3-030-95576-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95576-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and ­transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Rolf Nussbaumer Photography/Alamy Stock Photo. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

Part I Learning with the Biosphere: Birds, Bees, Flowers and Trees   1 1 Ways  of Listening: Birdsong, Poetry, and Sustainability in Education  3 Francesca Mackenney and Sophie Thomas 2 Hanging  on for the Bees: Teaching with Sylvia Plath’s Bee Poems 25 Sandra Lee Kleppe 3 “These  Things Never Happened but Are Always”: Why Tree Poems Matter 51 Heidi Silje Moen 4 Listening  to Animals for a Change: On Teaching Animal Poetry from a Critical Rhetorical Perspective 77 Carina Agnesdotter 5 Indigenous  Poetry and Sustainability: Troubling Anthropocene Logic Through Kinship and Holistic Care 97 Kevin Steinman v

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Part II Poetic Literacy and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) 119 6 Poetic  Learning for a Sustainable Future: Transforming Our Collective Story121 Robert J. Didham 7 “Whose  Action Is No Stronger than a Flower?”: Poetry, Education, and Environmental Crisis147 David Whitley and Elsa Lee 8 First  World War Poetry and Historical Literacy165 Torunn Skjærstad and Juliet Munden 9 Ecopoetry,  Pedagogical Encounters, and Holding Absence Present: Ideas for Classrooms185 Amelia Walker Part III Poets, Philosophers and the Planet 209 10 Ecologies  of the Classroom in an Existential Crisis: Félix Guattari’s Ecosophical Aesthetics and Teaching Poetry211 Jason Skeet 11 “Right  Has Just Left”: Rising to the Occasion of the Anthropocene Through the Multilingual and Transmedial Poetic Work of Cia Rinne231 Johan Alfredsson 12 The  Message of Poetry or Poetry as Messenger: The Poetics of Sustainability in the Pedagogical Context251 Peter Degerman

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13 Towards  a Sustainable Imagination: Reflections on Olav H. Hauge and the Teaching of Poetry267 Magne Drangeid I ndex289

Notes on Contributors

Carina Agnesdotter  is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She teaches courses on poetry, rhetorical criticism, and literature pedagogy. In her doctoral thesis “Poetry in Movement” (2014), she studied the rhetorical functions of poetry in the Swedish social movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Her recent research focuses on poetry and emotions and on the political and personal uses and interpretations of poems and song lyrics. Johan Alfredsson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His research primarily focuses different aspects of poetry regarded as a knowledge form, resulting in recent publications on, for example, poetry and pedagogy, poetry in children’s books, and various comparative aspects between Swedish and Danish contemporary poetry. He has also written books on the Swedish poet Bengt Emil Johnson and on gender perspectives in Scandinavian modernist poetry. Peter Degerman  is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, and vice dean at the Faculty of Human Sciences, Mid Sweden University, Sweden. He has carried out meta-theoretical studies of literary pedagogy and of the ecocritical aspects of modernist aesthetics. Between 2008 and 2010 he was the editor of the literary monthly Provins. He is also a writer ix

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Notes on Contributors

of prose and poetry, having received the Arnold Rörling Prize for his 1993 novel Gränsfall. Robert J. Didham, PhD  is the UNESCO Chair on Education for Sustainable Lifestyles, and an associate professor and centre director at the Centre for Collaborative Learning for Sustainable Development (CCL), Faculty of Education, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway. Magne Drangeid  has written extensively within literary pedagogy and literary studies. His latest work is Jordomseilerne (2022) on maritime travel literature. His research interest is ecocriticism, especially the interconnections between nature and humans in children’s literature and travel literature. Drangeid is Associate Professor of Nordic Literature in the Department of Education and Sport Science at the University of Stavanger (UiS), Norway. He is part of the UiS-based environmental humanities research group “The Greenhouse” and the research group “Transforming Education,” studying sustainability in education. Drangeid received his Ph.D. Degree in Nordic Literature from the University of Bergen in 2004. Sandra Lee Kleppe is Professor of English-Language Literature at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway. She is the author of The Poetry of Raymond Carver: Against the Current (2013), editor/co-­ author of Ekphrasis in American Poetry: The Colonial Period to the 21st Century (2015), and co-editor/co-author of Poetry and Pedagogy across the Lifespan: Disciplines, Classrooms, Contexts (with Angela Sorby, 2018). Elsa Lee  is an educationalist researching and teaching in environmental sustainability education from a critical, transdisciplinary perspective. Her work includes how the arts can help us understand our place in the world, using a new materialist lens to frame questions about education in relation to this. Francesca Mackenney is Research and Teaching Fellow in Romantic Literature at the University of Leeds, UK. Her first monograph, Birdsong, Speech and Poetry: The Art of Composition in the Long Nineteenth Century, is due to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. Alongside her

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research on birdsong in nineteenth-century literature, she has been working with schools and wildlife charities on the “Ways of Listening” project: a series of guided walks, educational resources, and (most recently) a podcast about birdsong for young people (waysoflistening.net). Her research and related work in environmental education has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Wordsworth Trust, The British Association for Romantic Studies, and Creative Scotland. Heidi Silje Moen  is Associate Professor of English-Language Literature at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway. She has written on Ezra Pound and animal poetry in an educational context. Juliet Munden  works with English in teacher education at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway. During the last twenty years she has trained teachers, written school textbooks, and developed course books for preservice and in-service teacher education. Her Ph.D. explored the reception of Eritrean literature, and her subsequent research has continued to focus on how we make sense of the texts we meet, not least the ways in which poetry can contribute to pupils’ development in language education. Jason Skeet holds a Ph.D. on “Writing the Real: Deleuze and Contemporary Poetry” from Cardiff University, UK. He is the programme leader for the M.A. in Professional Development for Language Education run by Norwich Institute for Language Education. He has taught at secondary school, and college and university levels. Torunn Skjærstad  works with English as a second language and English subject didactics at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway. After completing a Degree in Language and Culture from University College Cork, she worked for a number of years as a teacher at various levels in Norway. With a Master’s Degree in History from the University of Oslo, she has written extensively about history locally and nationally. She is working on her Ph.D. in how literary texts can contribute to the development of historical literacy in an English learning environment. Angela Sorby  has published Distance Learning: Poems (1998); Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917

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(2005); Over the River and Through the Wood: An Anthology of NineteenthCentury American Children’s Poetry, co-edited with Karen Kilcup (2013); Bird Skin Coat: Poems (2009); The Sleeve Waves: Poems (2014); and a prior collection co-edited with Sandra Kleppe, Poetry and Pedagogy Across the Lifespan (Palgrave Macmillan 2018). She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Marquette University, USA. Kevin Steinman works at Norway’s Directorate for Education and Training as a subject coordinator in English. Previously, he taught English literature, cultural studies, and teacher education at the University of Oslo and Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway. Kevin has sung a cappella for a living and owns a bowling ball. Sophie Thomas  has taught secondary school English for the past 13 years, in London and Bristol, England. She holds an MA in Environmental Humanities from Bath Spa University, and co-edits Raceme, a local poetry journal. Amelia Walker  has written four poetry collections and three poetry teaching resource books (in Palgrave Macmillan’s All You Need to Teach series). In 2016, she completed her Ph.D. for a thesis on creative writing’s value in contemporary universities. She presently lectures in courses on poetry, fiction, and storytelling at the University of South Australia, Australia. Her critically creative research is published in open-access journals, including TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, Writing From Below, Axon: Creative Explorations, and Double Dialogues. She is interested in creative writing’s scope for generating dialogues about social in/justice, ecological responsibilities, and the scope for a kinder world. David Whitley taught film, poetry, and children’s literature at Cambridge University for over thirty years. He is now an Emeritus Fellow at Homerton College. He is particularly interested in the way the arts offer different forms of understanding of the natural world and has written about this in a variety of contexts. He has written extensively on poetry education and on poets ranging from Wordsworth to Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott, Carol Ann Duffy, and Lorna Goodison.

Introduction

Why Poetry? The American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) was intensely interested in a question that remains relevant today: what is the relationship between the “natural” world and the human mind? In one of her many experimental lyrics she wrote: To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And reverie. The reverie alone will do, If bees are few.

For Dickinson, a prairie was not just a scenic vista, but rather an interdependent system sustained by pollination and yet also dependent on human reverie: our mindset, our consciousness, and our choices. At our own post-romantic moment in history, bee populations are plummeting and prairies disappearing—and “reverie” alone won’t reverse the damage. And yet, as the chapters in this volume suggest, the human imagination, as cultivated by Dickinson and other poets, continues to be an important and under-utilized global resource. Poetry matters in educational contexts because it can help students develop what Michael Bonnett (2002) xiii

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calls “sustainability as a frame of mind” as they learn to see the world more imaginatively, flexibly, and responsively. At the same time, of course, not all pedagogical approaches to poetry teach sustainability as a frame of mind—indeed, as Angela Sorby (2005) argues elsewhere, poetry in schools has often served to support environmentally destructive expansionist ideologies. The chapters collected here therefore both model (on a practical level) and theorize (on a more abstract level) how educators at all levels can, and should, use poetry to promote human flourishing in the context of environmental sustainability. Each chapter in this volume engages with the transformative power of poetry from a unique angle and register, but for organizational purposes we have divided the book into three parts. Part I focuses on pragmatic approaches to classroom activities and curricular choices; Part II considers policies and politics, including the politics of language/naming; and Part III takes a widescreen view, exploring some of the philosophical issues that arise when poems are integrated into “sustainability” curricula. We realize that the very word “sustainable” is broad and we hesitate to define it too narrowly at the outset. However, we can affirm that all the contributors to this volume agree that our current neoliberal ideal of “progress” cannot continue: we need to operate differently, which means we need to think—and even dream—differently. Taught as part of a sustainable curriculum, poetry can help students and teachers resist and rework the automatic thought processes that have been instantiated by a largely instrumental and “data-driven” educational system that echoes the neoliberal economy. Technologies need to change, but mindsets also need to change—and this is the work that education is uniquely positioned to accomplish. Poetry alone cannot save prairies or bees, but a student (or scientist, or farmer, or teacher) who can read and think poetically will be better equipped, and more motivated, to solve big problems creatively rather than relying on narrowly instrumental paradigms. To think like a poet is to infuse ideas with motion, emotion, permeable boundaries, and often a dash of political dissent. Because our contributors are keenly aware of the urgency facing the planet’s ecosystems—ecosystems which include all of us—they make the case that teaching poetry is not a luxury.

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Chapter Summaries The volume opens with Francesca Mackenney and Sophie Thomas’s “Ways of Listening: Birdsong, Poetry, and Sustainability in Education,” precisely because of this chapter’s broad relevance to both theoretical and applied learning contexts. The framework for the discussion emerges from actual class expeditions, whereby pupils (aged 12) went on a series of guided outdoor walks to experience birdsong. The activities the pupils engaged in were performed at the crossroads of science and literary work, blending sonography and ornithology with sensory experiences, conscious listening, and attentive reading and writing. The first part of the chapter compares famous bird poems by poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and John Clare with transcriptions of actual birdsong, putting the relationship between science and poetry in an artful dialogue whereby “sensory pathways” become “powerful routes into a multi-species account of the world.” The poignant reality of the decline in biodiversity, especially that of the nightingale in Britain, is expressed in this chapter as an ecological but also a cultural loss. At the same time, students were able to find value in their lived experiences of birds, honing their active listening skills, transcribing birdsongs, and producing their own poetry in the immersive context of their local ecosystem. The careful listening skills the pupils honed during outdoor excursions, documented in Chap. 1, complement the close reading and looking activities proposed in Chap. 2, “Hanging on for the Bees: Teaching with Sylvia Plath’s Bee Poems,” by Sandra Lee Kleppe. As Kleppe notes near the beginning of the chapter, the close reading skills we develop from engaging with poetry should lead to, or parallel, close looking skills to understand the needs of our ecosystems; understanding the needs of bees leads to concrete (in)actions for ensuring that they and we thrive and survive. The decline of the nightingale population described in Chap. 1 parallels the decline in bee populations noted in Chap. 2 and fits with the focus on the living biosphere of Part I. Sylvia Plath’s final manuscript Ariel (completed in 1963) closes with a section of bee poems that transfer detailed looking at bees into a masterful poetic sequence documenting a woman’s close interactions with a managed bee colony. The chapter

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locates Plath at the crossroads of the burgeoning feminist and environmentalist movements of the mid-twentieth century—a cultural moment represented by Plath’s contemporaries Betty Friedan, author of the seminal The Feminine Mystique (1963), and Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring (1962) is considered the starting point of contemporary environmentalism. Just as important as this cultural context are the takeaway and activity sections of the chapter, which include a large variety of concrete activities linked to the bee poems, encouraging teachers and learners to interact with, and respond to, their local environment. The first three chapters of this book collectively promote poetry as a tool (but not a remedy) to navigate the conundrum of anthropomorphism. Due to its imaginative, creative, and aesthetic qualities, poetry can mediate the gap between human and animal or plant perspectives. Chapter 1 explores aesthetic pleasure as a possible link between species and documents how pupils’ active listening to birdsong teaches them how to re-create such sound in their own poetry. In Chap. 2, Plath’s speaker in the bee poem sequence becomes so inextricably linked to the bees that she sometimes loses her sense of being human and finds herself disoriented inside the hive. In Chap. 3, “‘These Things Never Happened but Are Always’: Why Tree Poems Matter,” Heidi Silje Moen compares how Ezra Pound’s tree poems offer us a way out of the dilemma of anthropomorphism, whereas the poetry of Yeats does not. As Moen notes in Chap. 3, “Pound goes even further in challenging anthropocentric epistemology by prioritizing non-human knowledge and existence over human.” In a poem such as “The Tree,” analyzed in Chap. 3, Pound expresses non-human perspectives as not only desirable but a relief from the entrapment of the human mind: “I have been a tree amid the wood/And many a new thing understood/That was rank folly to my head before.” An important takeaway from this chapter is that by comparing poets, sustainability studies can better discern what to embrace and reject from our poetic traditions. While Yeats retains a sense of human-centeredness in poems such as “The Madness of King Goll,” reflecting a mindset that is potentially detrimental to the environment, Pound reworks passages from Yeats in order to obtain a metamorphosis from human to tree or wind that values the other-than-human.

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Poetry that engages with the other-than-human is also the subject of Chap. 4, “Listening to Animals for a Change: On Teaching Animal Poetry from a Critical Rhetorical Perspective,” by Carina Agnesdotter. She points out that from “a rhetorical perspective anthropomorphism is often effective, since we are more easily persuaded by those who are like us.” Through readings of stunning Swedish poems on everyday creatures—an earthworm, a fish, a butterfly—she explores how such poetry can be read and taught from critical-rhetorical perspectives that increase our abilities to engage emotionally and pragmatically with pressing sustainability issues. Indeed, these poems illustrate how “anthropomorphism does not have to be anthropocentric”; the rhetorical potential of poetry casts a wide net: it allows us to affectively connect to, imagine, and experience animal perspectives in ways that can move us out of emotional and political inertia. Poetry can equally help bridge cultural differences that have traditionally maintained boundaries between ethnic groups. Agnesdotter illustrates this point by describing a teaching seminar in which students were asked to explore the Sàmi (indigenous) poet Linnéa Axelsson’s poetry. Though they had no previous first-hand experience with Sàmi culture or with rhetorical criticism, they reported both emotional and intellectual connections to the indigenous perspectives, as well as a desire to bring such newfound knowledge into their own classrooms as aspiring teachers. Chapter 5, “Indigenous Poetry and Sustainability: Troubling Anthropocene Logic through Kinship and Holistic Care” by Kevin Steinman, provides yet another example of how poetry can navigate anthropocentricism through Native American perspectives. Steinman suggests that indigenous poets such as Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Gregory Scofield, and Lindsay Nixon promote sustainable frames of mind and can offer students aesthetic (rather than didactic) lessons in how to rethink widely held assumptions about the human/nature dichotomy. He explores different types of native aesthetics, including non-Eurocentric epistemologies such as métissage, which allow for hybrid identities; Cree poetics, an integrative creativity; and queer/two spirit readings that push back against settler colonization. “By privileging these particular poetic texts,” Steinman notes, “we extend students’ focus to sustainability and the other-than-human realm. Sustainability discourse affirms indigenous

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kinship and connectedness, countering long-held European distinctions between humans and their environments.” Steinman’s focus on indigenous poetics as a form of sustainable pedagogy leads us directly into Part II of the book, “Poetic Literacy and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD).” In Chap. 6 “Poetic Learning for a Sustainable Future: Transforming Our Collective Story,” Robert Didham takes a wide-angle approach, outlining the institutional origins of Education for Sustainable Development, as the concept emerged from broader discussions of sustainability in the UN General Assembly and other international forums. Stakeholders concerned with global development have come to recognize that the current economic “growth” model has harmed (or even destroyed) as much as it has cultivated. To sustain the world and its peoples over time, a multifocal approach must be taken, and poetry in particular can help evolve the concept of beyond anthropocentric economic data and toward more holistic measures of planetary well-being. Changing what counts as “development” will entail altering, not just systems of production and consumption, but also mindsets, particularly insofar as capitalist assumptions scaffold most current definitions of prosperity. Educational institutions can both practice and promote sustainable mindsets through teaching poetic (as opposed to strictly empirical) thinking—hence the value of poetry for ESD in the context of development writ large. As Didham argues, poetry can help students and teachers visualize new ways of understanding nature, culture, and progress. The role of poetry within current ESD discourses leads us to Chap. 7, “‘Whose Action Is No Stronger than a Flower?’: Poetry, Education and Environmental Crisis” by David Whitley and Elsa Lee. The authors explore two related claims, first, that poetry’s potential for developing affective and action-orientated engagement with issues relating to sustainability is huge, and, second, that “poetry offers ways to negotiate … major contradictory tensions that have emerged within the project of Education for Sustainability (ESD) in recent years.” The relationship between poetry and sustainability is presented in light of two current discourses: ESD 1—which holds a bias toward instrumental and scientific approaches in education and policy making—and ESD 2, which promotes critical and process-oriented thinking. While poetry seemingly

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has a closer affinity to ESD 2 in its figurative language and affective appeal, poets often have a profound knowledge of the natural world and their works have “the capacity to enhance a fact-based curriculum in ways that bring animals, plants and landscapes to life.” Whitley and Lee offer detailed readings of poems by Edward Thomas, Denise Levertov, and Olive Senor to illustrate how poetry can mediate the apparent divide between instrumental and more affective modes of learning. In Chap. 8, “First World War Poetry and Historical Literacy,” Juliet Munden and Torunn Skjærstad combine the affective and critical thinking modes of the previous chapter with historical awareness in their approach to teaching poetry in sustainable contexts. Because war causes devastation not just to individuals and societies but also to natural resources, they argue that studying war poetry can be a bridge into understanding the past that offers valuable lessons for a sustainable future. The authors advocate teaching historical literacy through powerful war poems written by soldiers, such as Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier,” Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” and Siegfried Sassoon’s “Does It Matter?” Bringing together the fields of history, literacy, and poetry in their discussion, Munden and Skjærstad offer a unique approach to sustainable education in which poetry takes central stage as a means to understanding how the cultural expressions of the past can serve a purpose for present and future generations. There are several important takeaways outlined in this chapter, among them that poetry is a favored genre in times of distress and unrest and that historical literacy is a means of understanding the tumult of World War I that has led to the massive technological and industrial developments that threaten our very existence today. The energy, creativity, and information stored in poetry can also translate into social action. Social action to counter impending disaster can take many forms, and this book invites readers to think differently about how poetry can contribute to a sustainable future. Chapter 9, “Ecopoetry, Pedagogical Encounters, and Holding Absence Present: Ideas for Classrooms” by Amelia Walker, turns to ecopoetry as a pedagogical tool to promote sustainable learning. Making important theoretical and formal distinctions between nature poetry, environmental poetry, and ecopoetry, Walker goes on to outline seven separate classroom/workshop activities that can

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make complex ecopoetry more accessible to educators who encounter learners of all ages and diverse social backgrounds. Walker’s chapter is an excellent example of how this book is intentionally both analytical and applied: her discussions of how ecopoetry can be understood as relational in light of Felix Guattari’s Three Ecologies (mental, social, and environmental) lead directly into concrete readings of poems in an Australian/ indigenous context, as well as to concrete examples of learning activities she has applied in actual workshops. Walker’s chapter also leads seamlessly into Part III of the book in which the authors engage more expansively with the theoretical implications of teaching poetry in sustainable contexts. The opening chapter (Chap. 10) of Part III, “Towards a Pedagogy of The Transversal: Using Félix Guattari’s Ecosophical Aesthetics for Teaching Poetry” by Jason Skeet, traces a number of threads introduced in Part II. Skeet challenges educators and students, especially those steeped in Eurocentric epistemologies, to rethink what counts as “development” and to reconsider how ESD is understood and taught. Skeet uses Guattari’s work to insist that much of what appears (through the lens of integrated world capitalism) factual or inevitable is, in reality, contingent. As Guattari argues, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin, poetry generates “creative subjectivity” through its auditory and metaphorical resonances, allowing readers to experience webs of interdependency that can move them beyond the rigid individualism that institutions, including schools, so often promote. Poems can transform mindsets, especially if students are treated as “co-operators” whose responses collectively constitute (rather than simply understanding) the text. In other words, it is not enough to just inform students about the costs of environmental devastation; they must be empowered to think ecosophically, rather than just techno-scientifically. Poems—precisely because they are often difficult, unsettling, and associative—can help students emerge as creative subjects capable of imagining new social formations predicated on aesthetic values. Skeet contributes to the conversation by integrating Guattari’s rhizomatic vision, but he also offers a set of experiential poetry exercises to help concretize the admittedly theoretical concept of ecosophical pedagogy. In Chap. 11, “‘Right has just left.’ Rising to the Occasion of the Anthropocene through the Multilingual and Transmedial Poetic Work of Cia Rinne,”

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Johan Alfredsson complements Skeet (and other, earlier contributors to this volume) by considering the “flux of experience” as it manifests in the distinctively “multilingual and intermedial” poetry of Cia Rinne. Alfredsson presents Rinne as a case study in lyric/rhizomatic “lines of flight” that can propel readers away from majority perspectives and into more unfixed, protean, and transpositional subject-positions. Rinne’s challenging, sonic poems invite such flights by relying less on representational language and more on shifts and wordplay: homonyms, homophones, and homographs. While Rinne’s lyrics might seem far removed from the pragmatic aims of ESD, by now readers of this volume are likely to apprehend her relevance: again, as Alfredsson shows, poetry emerges as a powerful (and ultimately pragmatic) tool for de-centering the anthropocentric subject. Ecological disasters cannot be countered using the same language and assumptions about linear progress that gave rise to them. ESD can only promote true sustainability if it can establish what Rinne calls a “different manner of reading” rooted in concurrency and non-discursive openness. Like Skeet and Alfredsson, Peter Degerman’s chapter (Chap. 12), “The Message of Poetry or Poetry as Messenger: The Poetics of Sustainability in the Pedagogical Context,” extols the value of poetry as a way to complicate the naïve epistemological pragmatism found in many discussions of ESD, particularly those generated by policy-oriented institutions like the UN. Degerman’s unique contribution here, however, is to think more dialectically about the relationship between “objective” and “subjective” approaches to language, rather than arguing for a radical flight away from the former. In an extended reading of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” Degerman deftly acknowledges how the poem gets its energy from Victorian economic forces, while also showing how its meanings and aesthetic effects can constantly (one is tempted to say “rhizomatically”) regenerate and expand as the text travels through time. Degerman’s central point is not that “Goblin Market” imparts didactic messages about sustainability; rather, he argues that the poem itself embodies the principle of sustainability as it plays with words, inviting readers to enter a multivocal stream of possibilities: “swart headed mulberries/Wild free-­ born cranberries.” In other words, when a poem such as “Goblin Market” is integrated into ESD curricula, it can mediate between subjective and

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objective forms of experience, acknowledging both the reality and the historical contingency of markets across times and cultures. Magne Drangeid’s chapter (Chap. 13), “Towards a Sustainable Imagination: Reflections on Olav H. Hauge and the Teaching of Poetry,” closes this philosophically engaged section by moving from the macroscopic to the microscopic, showing how big-picture theoretical issues reverberate through the work of a Norwegian poet and orchardist. Olav H. Hauge might never have used the term “rhizomatic,” but his poems nevertheless cultivate connections and openness in their forms as well as their themes. Interestingly, Hauge was also a psychiatric patient, embodying (while also, perhaps, implicitly problematizing) Guattari’s celebration of schizophrenic language as a way to establish subjective alterity. At the same time, Drangeid emphasizes Hauge’s fundamental accessibility; unlike Rinne’s challenging experiments, Hauge’s poems entwine the human and the more-than-human through intimate acts: building a treehouse, scything grass, speak[ing] “a little with the cat.” At the same time, Hauge’s capacity for border-crossing is to some extent a function of his outsiderness, so even as students encounter ordinary life in his poems, they are invited to read these poems from an unfixed subject-position that focuses more on sustainable processes than sustainable development. As Drangeid concludes, Hauge suggests that to live a sustainable life is “to take part in a diverse environment, shaped by both humans and non-­ humans.” While such a path may sound simple, it is difficult to achieve in the context of classrooms, institutions, and economies predicated on anthropocentric domination. All of the chapters in Part III thus take different approaches to the same fundamental problem: how can “education for sustainable development” be taught if the teachers and learners in question—from UN officials to young children—are enmeshed in institutions that privilege fundamentally unsustainable narratives of progress based on “growth” charts (or, one might add, test scores)? Poetry can break this cycle, as all of the essayists in this section (and this book) suggest, because lyric poems model and generate—to quote Jason Skeet— nonlinear textual, embodied, social, and ecological “environment[s] forever in the process of being invented.”

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Rhizomatic Connections Poetry and Sustainability thus moves from very concrete classroom-based concerns, as outlined in Part I, through matters of language and policy in Part II, and finally to larger philosophical, or “mindset,” questions in Part III. That said, certain key questions continue to emerge across all three parts: (1) What counts as sustainable education, and what (or who) is it for? (2) What is the relationship between the human and the non-human world, and how can poetry refigure this relationship? and (3) How can poetry—often seen as an impractical art form—contribute to real changes, including changes to what is considered “practical” or valuable? None of these questions have easy answers, and if answers emerge at all they will be co-generated, not just by the essayists in this volume but also by the teachers and students who engage with it. At its best, lyric poems generate—to quote Jason Skeet—nonlinear textual, embodied, social, and ecological “environment[s] forever in the process of being invented.” What matters most are not fixed or final answers (such as those posed on exams) but rather the intense and shifting connections—between humans and nonhumans and consciousness and nature—that poetry-reading can spark. To concretize the discourse of connections we wish to close this introductory chapter by juxtaposing two short poems—“Tall Nettles” and “A Small Tortoiseshell Butterfly”—drawn from elsewhere in the volume. The first, “Tall Nettles,” was written by the English poet Edward Thomas (1878–1917) and is discussed by Lee and Whitley in Chap. 7: Tall nettles cover up, as they have done These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough Long worn out, and the roller made of stone: Only the elm butt tops the nettles now. This corner of the farmyard I like most: As well as any bloom upon a flower I like the dust on the nettles, never lost Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.

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The second, “A Small Tortoiseshell Butterfly,” by Swedish poet Ingrid Sjöstrand (2014), was written a century after “Tall Nettles” and is translated and analyzed by Carina Agnesdotter in Chap. 4; it reads: As a small tortoiseshell butterfly you just need a few leaves but these you need

How might these poems, written in different centuries and different languages, from different gendered perspectives, connect? Firstly, both make visible the earth’s self-nourishing, which unfold for purposes other-­than-­ human: rain moves dust from nettles to soil, and leaves also feed the tortoiseshell butterfly. Moreover, the word for “tortoiseshell butterfly” in Swedish translates, literally, as “nettle butterfly,” setting up a conversation between the two poems: the leaves “you” need, if “you” are Sjöstrand’s butterfly, are nettle-leaves, the same leaves “loved” by Thomas’s human “I.” To read these poems together is to migrate between subject-positions while sustaining the desire to flourish that humans, butterflies, and nettles share. Moreover, to make a broader point related to Poetry and Sustainability, nettles spread through rhizomes and butterflies pollinate a range of flowers, never in a straight line. Butterflies and nettles can thus also serve as apt metaphors for the synergy—the unexpected links and responses— that we hope the chapters in this book will generate. One of the most important takeaways echoing through this book is that intellectual mastery alone is not enough to sustain the environment—indeed, it risks replicating an anthropocentric mindset that is, itself, part of the problem. We must forge affective connections—we must respond emotionally, like Edward Thomas does—to natural phenomena lest they forever remain other, outside of our capacity to care or take appropriate (in)action. As a poignant reminder of this, the poet Ingrid Sjöstrand died of COVID-19 in 2020 while Agnesdotter and the other authors in this volume were completing their chapters. The earth’s many systems are connected in ways we are only beginning to appreciate, but the pandemic sent a sobering message that nothing—neither nettles nor butterflies nor humans nor poems—exists in isolation. As Noel Gough (2012) puts it in his work on

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curriculum development, “Complexity invites us to understand our physical and social worlds as open, recursive, organic, nonlinear and emergent, and to be cautious of complying with models and trends in education that assume linear thinking, control and predictability.” If students learn to read poetry flexibly and passionately, they can concurrently learn new habits of mind and generate new perspectives on the enmeshed human and more-than-human world. The chapters in this volume aim to help educators begin the difficult work of changing, not just technocratic systems, but neuroplastic human minds. Teaching poetry empowers students to think imaginatively about how to sustain—and why to sustain—our world, its resources, and its beauty. Faculty of Humanities Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences Elverum, Norway Department of English Marquette University Milwaukee, WI, USA

Sandra Lee Kleppe

Angela Sorby

References Bonnett, M. 2002. Education for Sustainability as a Frame of Mind. Environmental Education Research 8 (1): 9–20. Gough, N. 2012. Complexity, Complexity Reduction, and ‘Methodological Borrowing’ in Educational Inquiry. Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education 9 (1): 41–56: 46. Sjöstrand, I. 2014. Planet till salu. Blå: obehagliga dikter [Planet for Sale. Blue. Unpleasant Poems]. Möklinta: Gidlund (2014): 7. Translation by Carina Agnesdotter. Permission to reprint the poem granted by the author in an email of July 10, 2019. Sorby, A. 2005. Schoolroom Poets. Durham, New Hampshire: University of New Hampshire Press/University Press of New England.

Part I Learning with the Biosphere: Birds, Bees, Flowers and Trees

1 Ways of Listening: Birdsong, Poetry, and Sustainability in Education Francesca Mackenney and Sophie Thomas

Scientists and poets have developed different ways of listening to, and attempting to understand, the song of birds. Approaches range from sonogram recordings (which enabled scientists, such as William Thorpe, to slow down and visually analyze the complex “patterning” of a male chaffinch’s song) to some rather less precise, though in many ways more evocative, renderings of the nightingale’s “fast thick warble” in poetry (Coleridge 2001, 45). In drawing together these different approaches, current scholarship on birdsong provides an opportunity to reflect on what makes poetry special or unique—what poetry can and cannot do, and how it differs from, for example, a piece or music or scientific chart. Poetry, at once less precise and more evocative than other forms of

F. Mackenney (*) University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: [email protected] S. Thomas Bristol Grammar School, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. L. Kleppe, A. Sorby (eds.), Poetry and Sustainability in Education, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95576-2_1

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representation, raises significant questions about how we read, interpret, and imaginatively respond to the world that surrounds us. By exploring how human beings have historically thought and written about the natural world, the practice of reading poetry furnishes young people with the tools to think critically and to analyze, as well as to robustly critique, the cultural attitudes that have directly contributed to a biodiversity crisis in which one in eight species of birds now faces extinction (Birdlife International 2018, 22). Poetic renderings of birdsong alert us to the eternal problem of the pathetic fallacy. Recent studies have emphasized the dangers of these anthropomorphizing tendencies and the poet’s consequent propensity to make the sounds of nature, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s phrase, “tell back the tale/Of his own sorrow” (Coleridge 2001, 20–21). As the ethologist and primatologist Frans de Waal has counter-argued, however, a scholarly obsession with anthropomorphism all too frequently slides into a form of what he terms “anthropodenial”: “the a priori rejection of shared characteristics between humans and animals” which “denotes willful blindness to the human-like characteristics of animals or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves” and “reflects a pre-Darwinian antipathy to the profound similarities between human and animal behavior (e.g. maternal care, sexual behavior, power seeking) noticed by anyone with an open mind” (de Waal 2009, 65). While de Waal’s research has called for a more open-minded approach to the study of our nearest relatives, the primates, this chapter calls attention to a long history of “willful blindness” toward birdsong as an everyday example of the agency, skill, and artfulness possessed by other animals on this planet. As well as raising awareness of an irresistible human tendency to make the natural world look and sound and talk like us, this chapter further explores how environmental education may be used to challenge reductive accounts of these “bird-brained” animals and encourage young people to recognize birdsong as an animal art in its own right and in its own style. This chapter is based on a series of guided walks organized at the University of Bristol. A symposium in January 2019 invited researchers from the arts and humanities to meet with members of local schools and public institutions, including the Avon Gorge and Downs Wildlife Project. The aim was to develop an innovative program of outdoor learning activities and resources, in the light of the most recent thinking and

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research on birdsong. Specifically, the group focused on designing a series of guided walks for local schoolchildren. The walks combined natural historical information with folklore and popular myth, science with poetry and music. This project forms the basis for a second series of walks organized in connection with the British Association for Romantic Studies and the Wordsworth Trust in Spring 2020. Funded by Creative Scotland, an audio resource (which includes recordings of birdsong, natural historical information, music and poetry readings, along with accompanying worksheets) is also available to teachers and educators online (waysoflistening.net). Based on our experience on the “Ways of Listening” project, in this chapter we argue that aesthetic appreciation is central to how we find meaning and value in the world that surrounds us and that consequently poetry can and must play a pivotal role in our efforts to sustain that world.

I In his highly influential book Why Birds Sing (2005), the musician and philosopher David Rothenberg has drawn together the different ways that human beings have interpreted, and sought to understand, the song of birds. Our fascination with birdsong may be traced all the way back to our earliest, most rudimentary attempts to “translate” these sounds into human words and phrases: The eastern towhee The white-throated sparrow The yellowhammer

Drink yourtea! Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody. A little bit of bread and no cheese.

Unquestionably, these traditional bird-sound mnemonics have for centuries provided scientists and amateur enthusiasts with a useful way of remembering, and distinguishing among, the notes of different species. But it is not difficult to see the problem here. Some of the rhythms of the white-throated sparrow may be captured in that repetition of peabody, peabody, peabody. And the yellowhammer’s patter of notes may also be detectable in “a little bit of bread and no cheese.” But is the eastern towhee really telling us to drink our tea? Of course, the birds are not really

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speaking, not to us anyway. When human beings attempt to “translate” the sounds of birds into human words and phrases, they are always thus in danger of descending into anthropomorphism and absurdity—of making the birds sound ludicrously like ourselves. In many ways, the transcription of the yellowhammer’s call tells us less about the bird itself than it does about the very thin and very hungry ploughboy whom the naturalist Richard Jefferies heard repeating these phrases over and over to himself in the late nineteenth century: “for,” as Jefferies wryly observed, “to have only a hunch of bread and little or no cheese” was all too frequently this poor boy’s “own case” (Jefferies 1880, 23). In the 1960s, the scientist William Thorpe was able to obtain a far more precise picture of birdsong following the advent of a new piece of technology: the sonogram. Below is Thorpe’s sonogram recording of the male chaffinch’s song:

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The sonogram (Thorpe 1954, 466) enabled scientists like Thorpe to slow down and visually analyze the complex patterning of a bird’s voice. It enabled him to produce a far more precise picture of the sounds the bird is making. Notice the timescale at the bottom of the diagram. These are sounds and structures which escape the human ear, which we cannot hear in the bird’s own time, never mind translate into our language. So where does this leave poetry? Birdsong tests the limits of language, and consequently it has inspired generations of poets to experiment with, as well as to profoundly reflect upon, the nature of the medium in which they work. In a small but canonical group of poems about birdsong in the Romantic period, birdsong is crucial to a wider exploration of the relationship between word and world, between poetic form and the natural sights and sounds it seeks to portray. Writing in the 1790s at Alfoxden in Somerset, Coleridge questioned the traditional mischaracterization of the nightingale’s song as melancholy: “Most musical, most melancholy” Bird! A melancholy Bird? Oh! idle thought! In nature there is nothing melancholy. But some night-wandering man, whose heart was pierced With the remembrance of a grievous wrong, Or slow distemper, or neglected love, (And so, poor Wretch! fill’d all things with himself, And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale Of his own sorrow) he, and such as he, First named these notes a melancholy strain. (Coleridge, 2001, 13–22).

Coleridge disputes John Milton’s previous description of the “most musical, most melancholy bird” and the long-standing Ovidian tradition from which it derives. In challenging the Philomela myth, Coleridge acknowledges and draws his reader’s awareness to a human tendency to anthropomorphize and the poet’s own propensity to make the sounds of nature “tell back the tale/Of his own sorrow.” In drawing attention to these seemingly irresistible tendencies within the human imagination, poetry can teach the next generation to recognize, analyze, and more deeply question the attitudes that have shaped our responses to the song

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of the nightingale and the natural world more generally. Poetry may never be able to tell us what the eastern towhee is saying, but it can tell us something about itself—about language and how it shapes our world. Coleridge’s poem inspired a series of other poems about the nightingale’s song in the Romantic period. In one of the most famous examples, John Keats compared his own plight with that of the “happy” bird in his “Ode to a Nightingale”: My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: ’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness— That thou, light wingèd Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease. (Keats, 2006, 1–10)

Like the “merry music” of Coleridge’s  nightingales, the “full-throated ease” of Keats’s bird is contrasted with the sadder, though wiser, music of a reflecting human intelligence. It represents a state of animal joy which is inaccessible to the human, melancholy poet. As he poignantly remembers the death of his brother, Tom, and seems to anticipate the onset of his own illness, Keats expresses the philosophical burden of human consciousness in a world “where but to think is to be full of sorrow” (Keats 2006, 27). For Classical writers and scholars, the nightingale was a musical, melancholy singer; for Keats, by contrast, it is an enviably “happy” bird. Diametrically opposed in some ways, these interpretations may nonetheless be seen as two sides of the same coin. In presenting this “happy” bird as wholly free from “the fever, and the fret,” of human life (Keats 2006, 22), Keats, no less than Milton before him, seems equally at risk of romanticizing this little brown bird as a mythic figure—a “light-­ wingèd Dryad of the trees.” Poetry, at once less precise and more evocative than other forms of representation, thus raises significant and pointed

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questions about how human beings relate and respond to the world that surrounds them. The so-called peasant-poet John Clare certainly thought that Keats, like other “inhabitants of great citys,” all too often seemed to fall into the trap of describing nature “as she […] appeared to his fancys & not as he would have described her had he witnessed the things he describes” (Clare 1985, 519). One summer, Clare attempted to “take down” the notes of a nightingale that had been singing “constantly as it were at my very door”: Chee chew chee chew chee chew—cheer cheer cheer chew chew chew chee —up cheer up cheer up tweet tweet tweet jug jug jug wew wew wew—chur chur woo it woo it tweet tweet tweet jug jug jug tee rew tee rew tee rew—gur gur—chew rit chew rit—chur-chur chur chur will-will will-will tweet-em tweet em jug jug jug jug grig grig grig chew chew wevy wit wevy wit wevy wit—chee-chit chee-chit chee chit weeit weeit wee wit cheer cheer cheer—pelew pelew pelew— bring a jug bring a jug bring a jug. (Clare 1983, 312–3)

Rothenberg praises Clare’s transcription of the nightingale’s song as “the most accurate rendering in words of a bird’s voice from the whole of the nineteenth century” (2005, 25). Unquestionably, the transcription

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represents Clare’s most sustained attempt to capture the sounds, rhythms, and patterning of a bird’s voice or “idiom”: his technique here contrasts starkly with earlier poems in which, as Eric Robinson and Richard Fitter point out, “doves coo and swallows twitter … in a conventional way” (1982, vii–viii). But Clare was not naïve. As an accompanying note to the transcription confirms, he was conscious of the difficulties inherent within his own attempt: “many of her notes,” he writes, “are sounds that cannot be written the alphabet having no letters that can syllable the sounds” (1983, 313). If it is difficult to avoid the idea that Clare’s nightingale is telling us to “cheer up,” is it also telling us to “bring a jug”? Clare may be seen as self-consciously playing on, and in a sense parodying, his own inflected phrases in those last smiling lines. Clare later incorporated this transcription into his long, autobiographical poem “The Progress of Rhyme”: The more I listened & the more Each note seemed sweeter then before & aye so different was the strain She’d scarce repeat the note again —‘Chew-chew chew-chew’ & higher still ‘Cheer-cheer cheer-cheer’ more loud & shrill ‘Cheer-up cheer-up cheer-up’— & dropt Low ‘Tweet tweet tweet jug jug jug’ & stopt One moment just to drink the sound Her music made & then a round Of stranger witching notes was heard As if it was a stranger bird ‘Wew-wew wew-wew chur-chur chur-chur’ ‘Woo-it woo-it’ could this be her ‘Tee-rew tee-rew tee-rew tee-rew’ ‘Chew-rit chew-rit’— & ever new ‘Will-will will-will grig-grig grig-grig’ The boy stopt sudden on the brig To hear the ‘tweet tweet tweet’ so shrill Then ‘jug jug jug’ & all was still A minute—when a wilder strain Made boys & woods to pause again

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Words were not left to hum the spell Could they be birds that sung so well— I thought & may be more then I That musics self had left the sky To cheer me with its majic strain & then I hummed the words again Till fancy pictured standing bye My hearts companion poesy. (1996–2003, III, 239–66)

Clare was a closely attentive student of the nightingale: an eager listener, both painstakingly precise and extraordinarily inventive in his attempts to get the sound of the bird into his own writing. Careful listening and formal experimentation are here combined with a profound respect for the irrevocable otherness—the strangeness—of the nightingale’s “witching notes.” Those raw, inhuman syllables are here incorporated into a poem which is about the human experience of listening to the everyday mystery of birdsong. For all its apparent imperfections and inaccuracies, the poetic medium ever thus invites us to analyze, stretch, and test the terms in which we understand the world that surrounds us. In asking us to reflect on how we think and write about other species, it also forces us to confront many of those ideas and assumptions that have led to the current environmental crisis. As poets like Coleridge, Keats, and Clare have recognized time and again throughout history, poetry provides a unique opportunity both to challenge the old and to create new ways of listening.

II Wandering through country lanes in his native Northamptonshire in the 1820s, Clare overheard two touring Londoners “lavishing praise on the beautiful song of the nightingale which,” he drily noted, “happened to be a thrush” (Clare 1983, 37). As Hugh Haughton observes, the fault or “mistake” lies with the Londoners; they have misheard the bird, and their mishearing reflects the pretensions and prejudices of city-dwellers who, by implication, might also mishear and misjudge Clare’s  poetry

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(Haughton 1994, 63). This seemingly minor comic incident, which took place roughly 200 years ago, nonetheless foreshadows many of the inconsistencies and complacencies in our current thinking about nightingales and the natural world more generally. Lavished with praise since Classical antiquity, this bird has in fact declined in population in the United Kingdom by a staggering 91% since records began in the 1960s (Hewson et. al, 2018). Unquestionably a “tragedy for British culture, as well as its environment” (as one recent headline has put it), this “shocking” and “terrible” loss highlights an urgent need to fundamentally rethink our understanding of the natural world—and our own relation to it (Moss 2014). “Let’s not allow the nightingale to slip quietly into the night and never be heard again,” concludes one impassioned article in The Ecologist (Rose 2015). “It is very sad,” reflects Chris Hewson of the British Trust of Ornithology in an interview in the Independent newspaper; “lots of people grew up hearing nightingale song in the past and now many people will never get that opportunity” (McCarthy 2010). Though well-­ intentioned and pragmatically addressed to the feelings and concerns of a broad general public, such remarks interpret the loss of the nightingale primarily as a loss to human beings, specifically the next generation of young people who will likely be denied the opportunity of hearing this bird sing. In this respect, national campaigns reflect the “tacit assumption” that Kate Rigby perceives as underlying the current sustainability agenda as a whole: namely, that “biodiversity loss should be limited primarily in order to protect human interests in the medium to long term” (Johns-Putra et al. 2017, 58–9). In societies characterized by “forms of human domination, exploitation, and marginalization of nonhuman others,” it seems sad though not surprising to Rigby that “the value of biodiversity should commonly be framed primarily in terms of its human benefits” (Johns-Putra et al. 2017, 58–9). The silencing of the nightingale may be mournfully deplored as a tragic loss to British culture; ironically, however, such an approach risks perpetuating the anthropocentric attitudes that have largely contributed to the tragedy in the first place. Rather than teaching the next generation to interpret the nightingale’s song as an undeniably rich source of its own personal enjoyment, our efforts on the “Ways of Listening” project have

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been to engender the kind of “deeper questioning” advocated by Rigby; through examining how the nightingale’s song has been differently interpreted by scientists, musicians, and poets throughout the centuries, young people may be invited to analyze, challenge, and test some of the “prevailing cultural assumptions, perceptions, and values” that have historically shaped our responses to the song of this little brown bird (Johns-­ Putra et al. 2017, 52–3). In “Nature in the Active Voice” (2009), the environmental philosopher Val Plumwood argues that the current crisis demands “much more than a narrow focus on energy substitutes”; “we need,” she insists, “a thorough and open rethink which has the courage to question our most basic cultural narratives” (2009, 113). Plumwood directly challenges an “ideology of human apartness” which she traces “down through Western culture from Christianity to modern science”: according to Plumwood, the “reductionist materialism” of Cartesian philosophers provided a “framework” which “identifies mind with consciousness, solidarises the human species as uniquely conscious agents, and reduces non-human forms to ‘mere matter,’ emptied of agency, spirit and intelligence” (2009, 119). Such “human-centredness” is damaging not only to other species so reduced to mindless machines (“slaves” or “mere tools,” in Plumwood’s terms) but also to human beings insofar as it perpetuates “the dangerous illusions that deny human embeddedness in and dependency on nature” (2009, 114, 120). More so than any other voice in nature, birdsong seems most forcibly to question the assumption that human beings are “uniquely conscious” agents with uniquely “active” voices in the world. In the traditions of Western science robustly critiqued by Plumwood, birdsong has troubled the boundary between human and non-human animals. From Pliny the Elder to Charles Darwin, scientists and ornithologists have found it difficult to “escape” the conclusion that the “art” of birdsong pre-figures “an aesthetic sense in the birds themselves” (Allen 1919, 531). Since birds have been kept and trained to sing for centuries, it has long been known to bird-fanciers that these animals learn to sing their songs. In the eighteenth century, the ornithologist Daines Barrington conducted a series of experiments from which he concluded that the songs of birds were “no more innate, than language is in man,” but “depend entirely upon the master under which they are bred, as far as

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their organs will enable them to imitate the sounds which they have frequent opportunities of hearing” (1773–1774, 252). Barrington compared the bird’s first attempts at song with “the imperfect endeavour in a child to babble” (1773–1774, 250). He described the process by which the nestling gradually learns and perfects the songs of its parents: Whilst the scholar is thus endeavoring to form his song, when he is once sure of a passage, he commonly raises his voice, which he drops again when he is not equal to what he is attempting; just as a singer raises his voice, when he not only recollects certain parts of a tune with precision, but knows that he can execute them. What the nestling is not thus thoroughly master of, he hurries over, lowering his tone, as if he did not wish to be heard, and could not yet satisfy himself. (1773–1774, 521)

Against the Cartesian view of animals as mere “mindless machines,” the apparent behavior of nightingales teaching their chicks to sing has throughout the centuries provided a tantalizing glimpse into the kind of artful, skillful, and intelligent animal minds from which human speech may have originally evolved (Fitch 2013; Miyagawa et al. 2013). In this respect, birdsong provides a unique opportunity to get the next generation thinking about whether or not the only “active” voice in nature is truly its own. Plumwood concludes her essay by championing the role of literature in “re-animating the natural world, and remaking ourselves as well, so as to become multiply enriched but consequently constrained members of an ecological community” (2009, 125). Although critics have rightly observed the dangers of anthropomorphism in literary representations of other species, Plumwood argues that this concept has been used too readily as a kind of blunt instrument to “stop us thinking differently”; most especially, she argues, the term has been used to police writers “found guilty of presenting the non-human world in more agentic and intentional terms than reductionism allows” (2009, 126–127). In poems such as “When First We Hear the Shy Come Nightingales,” Clare’s language asks us to “think differently”: to accept this poem on its own terms is to challenge how we perceive the art of birdsong, and how we perceive, measure, and value our own art by the contrast:

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When first we hear the shy-come nightingales They seem to mutter oer their songs in fear & climbing e’er so soft the spinney rails All stops as if no bird was any where The kindles bushes with the young leaves thin Lets curious eyes to search a long way in Untill impatience cannot see or hear The hidden music—gets but little way Upon the path—when up the songs begin Full loud a moment & then low again But when a day or two confirms her stay Boldly she sings & loud for half the day & soon the village brings the woodmans tale Of having heard the new come nightingale. (1996–2003, V, 222)

Clare’s  nightingale is neither a “melancholy” nor a “happy” bird but a “shy” and complex creature in its own right. It does not sing in “full-­ throated ease” but gradually “mutters” over and perfects its song. Throughout the poem, Clare draws implicit parallels between the song of the nightingale and the non-semantic elements of human speech: the sounds of words, the tones and rhythms of voice, the momentary stops and silences which are not language as such but which nevertheless remain meaningful aspects of language, and poetic language especially—“the signs of our affections, of our feelings,” as Jean-Jacques Rousseau once described them (1966, 59). In its meaningful use of sound, rhythm, and meter, poetry carries in itself the trace of an ancient, musical mode of human self-expression—or “musical protolanguage,” as it is sometimes known (Fitch 2013). More so than any other literary form, poetry draws us into a kind of sensory experience that human beings can share with other animals—it represents a way of knowing that transgresses the boundary between language and sound, human and “more than human” utterances. As our work on the “Ways of Listening” project has endeavored to show, poetic renderings of birdsong present a unique opportunity to hear nature in the active voice—and to hear our own voice as part of that larger chorus and community.

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III In the same month that we took a group of 24 twelve-year-olds to the Avon Downs in Bristol, (IPBES) (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) published its draft report on global biodiversity. It made for stark reading. Couched in the quantitative language of ecosystem services, it announced the loss and decline of global natural systems. “Human actions,” it stated, “threaten more species with global extinction than ever before and … a third of the total species extinction risk has arisen in the last twenty five years” (2019, 6). The report reminds its reader, too, of our human dependence on these depleted systems—our state of shared precariousness. With these pressures bearing strongly on our minds, we walked our little group out of the classroom and onto the Bristol Downs in spring. The birds themselves, as well as the trees and the flowers and the longer days, ought to be acknowledged as pedagogues and practitioners. They, in many ways, did the work for us. Our objective, as teachers and facilitators, was to ask our little group to notice this world around them and to respond to it creatively. Given the seriousness of the current situation, it seems strange to suggest that there is anything remotely radical or noteworthy in this, and yet the project felt significant—and, in its own small way, may have opened up space for a subversive critique of dominant discourses, both ecological and educational. One reason why the project clearly felt different for the students was the fact that it took place outdoors. Prominent education for sustainable development (ESD) practitioners and theorists from different schools of thought suggest that such a “Connection with Nature” is essential to transformative learning. But these beyond-­the-­classroom activities can remain dishearteningly superficial. “Nature” here is often reduced to a palliative treatment for a range of educational ills including obesity (Dyment and Bell 2008), risk aversion (Little and Wyver 2008), and poor concentration (Faber-Taylor and Kuo 2009). This model of ESD risks instrumentalizing the living world and further entrenching a dualist separation between the human and the more-than-­human. Poetry can unsettle this separation, being recognizable to children as a cultural space

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for play and, as a sensory form, one dripping in the animal senses of sound and shape. Importantly then, this was a hybrid project, denying the rigid separation of text and nature, of human beings and other animals. It drew on the self as relational, and on consciousness as intentional—contingent upon the interplay between the human being and its more-than-human object of enquiry, or longing or focus. Through attention to this not self, Michael Bonnett argues that “our own embodied being is enlivened and refreshed, our senses resonating with pure engagement, united with what they receive” (Bonnett 2016, 7). Though never explicitly or didactically explained to the children, the project sought to challenge a dominant “metaphysics of mastery”—through which the living world is instrumentalized and exploited. Opening the doors of our English classroom that day, we cracked open a discursive space through which we might “counter the scientism implicit in much of school culture” (Bonnett, 10). “Active listening,” or the ability to listen with “a great deal of concentration or focus,” is a common discourse in schools (Campbell 2011, 66). It underpins “effective” delivery of all curricula and inevitably, in most classrooms, reinforces an instructional mode dependent on memory and information processing. The word “listening” is often used in lessons as imperative shorthand for “pay attention this way.” Such usage, as well as its ubiquity in English National Curriculum at Key Stages 3 and 4, undermines, at times, the potency of listening as a sensory medium. This is not to say that such listening skills are not vital to the classroom and to pupil wellbeing; there is a reciprocity inherent in good listening. Keith McPherson suggests that “when [students] not only feel they are being heard but listened to as well—they are more likely to listen to others” (2008, 67). Implicit in this reciprocity is the development of empathy, of an awareness of the relational self: situated, contingent, and accountable. Likewise, the act of listening requires an openness and a willingness to let the world in. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer address the way in which “when we smell we are overtaken by otherness,” and sound too challenges our ideas of the bounded individual (1979, 184). These sensory pathways are powerful routes into a multi-species account of the world. Our morning on the Downs drew on the active listening skills

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cultivated and required by the classroom, as well as this other more personal, more subjective and creative art. Led by Mandy Leivers and Jill Parsons from the Avon Gorge and Downs Wildlife Project, our initial activity on the Downs helped students to begin to familiarize themselves with the birdcalls common to that habitat. The game was fun: cuddly toys, when squeezed, piped out the songs of different species. Toys were tossed to individuals, and already a relational closeness was fostered. Someone squeezed the goldfinch toy and we craned our necks to listen to a response of a wild bird defending its territory—perhaps intrigued, perhaps unsettled, by our presence. This open space, no more than 25 meters from the nearest busy road, began to open up to us and these new openings were constituted in sound and more-than-human utterances. Armed with this fragile new knowledge, students were asked to produce a sound map of an area. For this they sat alone, eyes closed, away from friends and peers, and sought to represent visually the sounds they heard around them. The aim here was not so much to identify as to portray the world around them. Stick-men represented the children themselves; a perforated line, the interrupted call of a chaffinch; heavy cross-hatching, the sound of lorries passing; and a wiggly line repeating at intervals, the call of a wren. Very few were able to identify individual species, but all were able to place themselves in a landscape of sound and to begin to play with representation, to find a way to depict their own interpretation of that sound. We walked further away from the road and read extracts from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Coleridge’s “The Nightingale”; we talked about the area of local woodland christened Nightingale Valley, in which the bird itself is no longer heard. In students’ later work, this sense of a silenced song would come up again and again. We read, too, from Clare’s“Progress of Rhyme.” Students sat on the ground in a circle and listened to these poems, written hundreds of years ago, about a bird they would likely never hear in the wild. Clare’s playful transcription of the bird’s song reminded the students of their own attempts to capture the sounds of their patch just a few moments ago. “But how accurately,” we asked them, “do any of these different styles or techniques truly capture the sounds that you are hearing now?” “Not really,” came the startlingly honest and plain-speaking reply. We talked through the concept of

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anthropomorphism. We stared into the void between word and world, between human word and human deed. With a new seriousness, students were for a moment confronted with the intractable strangeness of the nightingale’s song and the several misunderstandings that have, over the centuries, contributed to its near disappearance from our shores. The intention here, as throughout the project as a whole, was to raise awareness of the shaping power of language—both its dangers and its potential for change. Throughout the project as a whole, students were confronted with the challenge of imaginatively inhabiting other worlds: as well as fostering a respect for animal alterity, we sought to examine larger philosophical questions of agency and power in our world. Rather than dismissing descriptions of the nightingale as purely metaphorical or anthropomorphic, students were encouraged to take the subject matter seriously. Clare’s poems prod at the boundaries of perception and empathy: “curious eyes” threaten to disturb the nightingale in its secret nest and to “stop” or even silence its song. The poem asks us to see from the nightingale’s perspective and to look back and reflect upon our own all too “curious” and “impatient” selves from that perspective. It asks us to acknowledge another conscious being in the world—not simply conscious, but self-­ conscious and shy. And it asks us to acknowledge the art of the nightingale’s song. Those first “muttered” attempts at song trouble the boundary between language and sound, human and more-than-human utterances. The poem’s own rhythms, starts, and stops draw our attention to the non-­ semantic or extra-semantic aspects of our own language, the sounds of our words. Not simply a natural, spontaneous overflow of animal passion, the nightingale’s song is celebrated, like Clare’s own poem, as a triumph of hard-won craftsmanship: “But when a day or two confirms her stay/Boldly she sings & loud for half the day.” Armed with these poetic tools, the students set to work on a piece of writing that tried to put this place, these sounds, into words. This is not to suggest that they walked quietly away, sat demurely, chewed on pens, and wrote in silence. This would be untrue. A group of boys dug deep into the shrubbery, laughing and not really writing anything. Two girls sat at a picnic bench with sullen expressions which might have been taken for disdain but later turned out to be poetic endeavor. One boy, taken

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with the sound map idea, drew pictures. Another invented an entirely fictional scene. They pushed at the boundaries, physical and intellectual, of the task, making it their own in various obedient yet creative and individual ways. Watching them place themselves in playful, attentive relationship with the birds and the broader landscape of the Downs, it became clear that there was another sort of decentering going on. As educators, our role was to facilitate and to direct attention, not to transmit knowledge in expectation of a pre-specified response—a curriculum Bonnett describes as “constantly emergent” (2016, 14). Two weeks later, the students presented their poems to one another. They had homework and lesson time to work on the writing they did on the Downs. Some of them had stuck closely to the texts produced there, some had done their own observation at home, and some had leaned on their imagination to flesh out encounters that seemed significant to them. Almost all of their poems rhymed—a debt they owe to Clare. The poems are full of transliterated song. A blue tit’s call becomes “bi-bi-bi-tsi-tsi-tsi” and “cherub cherub” in one poem; in another, an unnamed bird calls “cho-cho, kee kee koo kee.” A song thrush calls “chiff-chaff cheep,” while elsewhere a “great singer never revealed” calls “tweeoot tweeoot.” In these experiments with language and sound, the poems wrestle with a sense of alterity and togetherness in a single encounter. The poetic form allows students the freedom to move beyond the restrictions of normative linguistic or ethical codes. There are other sounds in the poems: the “swish-swish” of wings, distant (and retreating) cars, and a student’s own hum. These prosodic experiments may be taken as further evidence of careful listening and imaginative reconstruction. Even in their naïve hyperbole, the students express a whole-body engagement with their experience: a breeze is felt across a palm, “a tingle within my feet”; someone stands “barefoot on the balcony floor”; eyes are repeatedly closed. As though in an effort to convey the animalness of other beings, they become more animal themselves. Unexpectedly, and certainly unrequested, a sense of loss and grief also emerges from these poems. Birds leave; they are “lost beyond the morning frost”; they fall silent. Students seem to have drawn their sensory investigation into a discourse of extinction and disappearance that extends far beyond our morning’s activities.

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As part of the school’s reporting system, students write a biannual reflection on their work in all subjects. These comments can often sound rote; children are asked to come up with a SMART target and though teachers ask them to steer clear of repeating summative evaluation, percentages and figures frequently occur in their reflective comments. Looking back on our work that term, students employed these same strategies. But one or two stood out. One student remarked, “It made me incredibly aware of (mainly animals) things around me. Even after handing my work in I find I say things like, that beetle has an almost greasy texture”—acknowledging the blurred boundaries of the project and an extension of the self. Another announced, “I feel that my favorite part has been writing our nature poems, because I really enjoyed the challenge of attempting to make it rhyme. It really made me appreciate the world around me.” The students acknowledge the difficulty of differentiating the different kinds of birds, but a general consensus emerges from these documents of the fun they had, a sense of their expanded engagement with the world around them, and an emerging debt and gratitude to the birds themselves.

References Adorno, T.W., and M.  Horkheimer. 1979. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso. Allen, F.H. 1919. The Evolution of Birdsong. Auk 36 (4): 528–536. Barrington, D. 1773–1774. Experiments and Observations on the Singing of Birds. Philosophical Transactions 63: 249–291. Birdlife International. 2018. State of the World’s Birds: Taking the Pulse of the Planet. Cambridge, UK: Birdlife International. Bonnett, M. 2016. Environmental Consciousness, Sustainability, and the Character of Philosophy of Education. Studies in Philosophy and Education 36 (3). Campbell, R. 2011. The Power of the Listening Ear. English Journal 100 (5): 66–70. Clare, J. 1983. The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1985. The Letters of John Clare. Oxford: Clarendon.

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———. 1996–2003. Poems of the Middle Period, 1822–37. Oxford: Clarendon. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 2001. The Collected Works: Poetical Works. Princeton: Princeton University Press. de Waal, Frans. 2009. Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial. In Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, ed. S. Macedo and J. Ober, 59–68. Princeton University Press: Princeton. Dyment, J.E., and A.C.  Bell. 2008. Grounds for Movement: Green School Grounds as Sites for Promoting Physical Activity. Health Education Research 23 (6): 952–962. Faber-Taylor, A., and F. Kuo. 2009. Children with Attention Deficits Concentrate Better after Walk in the Park. Journal of Attention Disorders 12 (5): 402–409. Fitch, T.W. 2013. Musical Protolanguage: Darwin’s Theory of Language Evolution Revisited. In Birds, Speech, and Language, ed. J.J.  Bolhuis and M. Everaert, 489–503. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Haughton, H. 1994. Progress and Rhyme: ‘The Nightingale’s Nest’ and Romantic Poetry. In John Clare in Context, ed. H. Haughton et al., 51–86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hewson, C.M., Miller, M., Johnston, A., Conway, G.J., Saunders, R., Marchant, J.H. & Fuller, R.J. 2018. Estimating national population sizes: methodological challenges and applications illustrated in the common nightingale, a declining songbird in the UK. Journal of Applied Ecology. 55 (4): 2008–2018. IPBES. 2019. Chapter 2.2 Status and Trends—Nature. In Summary for Policymakers of the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Accessed 18 November 2019. https://ipbes.net/system/tdf/ipbes_global_assessment_chapter_2_2_nature_unedited_31may. pdf?file=1&type=node&id=35276. Jefferies, R. 1880. About a Great Estate. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. Johns-Putra, A., et al., eds. 2017. Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text, and Culture. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Keats, J. 2006. The Complete Poems. London: Penguin. Little, H., and S. Wyver. 2008. Outdoor Play: Does Avoiding the Risks Reduce the Benefits? Australian Journal of Early Childhood 32 (2): 33–40. McCarthy, M. 2010. Nightingale Numbers Fall by 91 Per Cent in 40 Years. The Independent. Accessed 5 December 2019. https://www.independent.co.uk/ environment/nature/nightingale-­n umbers-­f all-­b y-­9 1-­p er-­c ent-­i n-­4 0-­ years-­2006098.html.

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McPherson, K. 2008. Listening Carefully. Teacher Librarian 35 (4): 73–75. Miyagawa, S., et al. 2013. The Emergence of Hierarchical Structure in Human Language. Frontiers of Psychology 4 (71). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ articles/PMC3577014/. Moss, S. 2014. Songbirds in Decline—A Tragedy for British Culture, as Well as Its Environment. Guardian. Accessed 6 December 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/apr/11/nightingale-­decline-­british-­songbirds. Plumwood, V. 2009. Nature in the Active Voice. Australian Humanities Review 46: 113–129. Robinson, E., and R.  Fitter, eds. 1982. John Clare’s Birds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rose, C. 2015. Don’t Let Our Nightingales Go Quietly! Ecologist. Accessed 6 December 2019. https://theecologist.org/2015/may/07/ dont-­let-­our-­nightingales-­go-­quietly. Rothenberg, D. 2005. Why Birds Sing: One Man’s Quest to Solve an Everyday Mystery. London: Penguin. Rousseau, J.-J. 1966. Essay on the Origin of Languages. In On the Origin of Language, Two Essays: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder, 5–83. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Thorpe, W. 1954. The Process of Song-Learning in the Chaffinch as Studied by Means of the Sound Spectrograph. Nature 173: 465–469.

2 Hanging on for the Bees: Teaching with Sylvia Plath’s Bee Poems Sandra Lee Kleppe

This is the time of hanging on for the bees—the bees. —Sylvia Plath, from “Wintering”

“Wintering” is the final poem of Sylvia Plath’s final book, Ariel, completed in late 1962, just weeks before she died in February 1963. Despite the grim circumstances of Plath’s demise and of the subject matter of “Wintering”—survival—the poem ends on a note of hope: “Will the hive survive … / … To enter another year? /. … The bees are flying. They taste the spring.”1 Plath considered Ariel her masterpiece, and the fact that she concluded this volume with a five-poem bee sequence culminating in “Wintering” warrants our attention as we move into a decade when the fate of humanity might very well rely on our hanging on for the bees and other creatures in our threatened ecosystems. Teaching with Plath’s bee poems can offer insights into how we got into the climate crisis, what S. L. Kleppe (*) Faculty of Humanities, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Elverum, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. L. Kleppe, A. Sorby (eds.), Poetry and Sustainability in Education, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95576-2_2

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we can do about it, and why poetry is essential to sustainability. Answering the why of poetry’s centrality to sustainability is the main gist of this chapter, and can be summarized thus: The close reading skills we develop from engaging with poetry should lead to, or parallel, close looking skills to understand the needs of our ecosystems; understanding the needs of bees leads to concrete (in)actions for ensuring that they and we thrive and survive.

Much of what follows consists therefore of close readings of passages from the bee poem sequence, including a consideration of Plath’s ambivalence toward the bees, her use of metamorphosis to navigate anthropocentrism, and ultimately what I term “Plath’s Poetry of Pollination,” which presents each and every flowering plant she describes in the sequence with reference to its significance for the poet and for the survival of bees. I thus emphasize looking at flowers in poems and in nature because it can enhance our understanding of both. Such a baseline understanding is crucial, but we still need to link it to actionable steps to figure out what we can do about the climate crisis. This practical pedagogical question is mainly answered in the Appendix section of this chapter, where educators and learners are offered activities and resources that can accompany close readings of individual stanzas, poems, or the bee sequence as a whole. The Appendix also includes specific sources on Plath and her bee poems. These poems have been widely interpreted, and the role of Plath’s fascinating personal history— her father was a leading expert on bees—is well documented. This chapter does not rehash biographical details and critical studies of the sequence but lists relevant resources in the Appendix sub-section titled Sylvia Plath and the Bee Poem Sequence. How we got into the current climate crisis is a topic much larger than the scope of this chapter. However, the first two sections address this in limited but important ways by drawing attention to the historical intersection among three seminal works in the respective fields of poetry, feminism, and environmentalism that appeared almost simultaneously in the early 1960s: Plath’s Ariel (completed in late 1962), Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (published a week after Plath’s death in 1963), and

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Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (published while Plath was writing Ariel in the autumn of 1962). Friedan’s and Carson’s books are the starting points of the current feminist and environmental movements, respectively. Considered together, their works led to the ecofeminism of the 1970s and beyond, a merging of studies that combines the concerns of both environmentalists and feminists, most notably by exposing the links between the exploitation of nature and the exploitation of women.2 These links are crucial even if they are not obvious. The ways societies mistreat women and nature have dire consequences for everybody. In her book Silent Spring (1962), Carson predicted the current predicament of bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which is connected to pesticides and has ravaged hives in the past two decades3: The world of systemic insecticides is a weird world, surpassing the imaginings of the brothers Grimm. It is a world where the enchanted forest of the fairy tales has become a poisonous forest ... where a bee may carry poisonous nectar back to its hive and presently produce poisonous honey. (26)

Carson’s book, however, is not a dystopian novel: it is a thoroughly documented treatise on the dangers of industrial pesticides on the intertwined ecosystems of humans, animals, plants, and insects. Carson’s research uncovered that harmful “synthetic pesticides have been so thoroughly distributed throughout the animate and inanimate world that they occur virtually everywhere,” causing often irreparable damage across systems (15). Just as pesticides poison plants, animals, and humans, toxic patriarchy pressured women in the 1950s to conform to what Friedan termed the “feminine mystique,” which conditioned women to find fulfillment in housewifery and taught them “to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents” (15–16). Plath used her own terminology for the stifling pressures of the feminine mystique: the title of her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar (Friedan 1963) refers to how a young woman in the 1950s felt trapped to the point of madness inside a metaphorical bell jar. Friedan also stresses throughout her book the dangerous toll on women’s mental health due to the feminine mystique, and she outlines a way out of this trap: “The only

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way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own” (365). Plath pursued her creative path with a passion, culminating in her masterpiece Ariel, but sadly paid the highest price as the shards of her jar’s glass ceiling tore her apart in the end. The five poems in Plath’s sequence—“The Bee Meeting,” “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” “Stings,” “The Swarm,” and “Wintering”—follow the speaker’s poetic, emotional, and intellectual musings as she becomes more and more involved with bees, tracing a woman’s evolving relationship to managed honeybee colonies, from a position of observer and outsider in the first poem to one of beekeeper by the end.4 Across the sequence, her relationship veers from “my fear, my fear, my fear” of the bees (81, line 10), to complete rapture in their presence: “I will be sweet God, I will set them free” (85, line 35). Her bumpy navigation of the natural world as a woman is an exercise in un-conditioning at several levels. Teachers and learners should embrace and not resist all of the ambivalence that accompanies this magnificent poetic sequence. These poems bear witness to a woman’s intimate relationship with nature in a time of great personal crisis, and as such can also parallel our need for emotional and intellectual sustainability in these times of great change and challenge.

Winter Is for Women Before returning to specific links with Friedan and Carson, let us look at some evidence of gender/ecosystem connections from the poems themselves. In three of the five bee poems, “The Bee Meeting,” “Stings,” and “Wintering,” Plath models her descriptions of bees on actual honeybee colonies, which are matriarchal; about 95% of all honeybees are female. One of the most striking images is in the opening poem: The white hive is snug as a virgin. Sealing off her brood cells, her honey, and quietly humming. (Lines 34–35)

The hive as a whole is described as a virgin, yet the individual brood cells in a hive are laid by the queen, who is not a virgin. As elsewhere in this

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sequence, such images are paradoxical. In actual honeybee colonies, it is the sterile female worker bees who help determine the gender of bees by constructing the cells in specific shapes and sizes so the queen knows where to lay fertile and non-fertile eggs. The virgin workers also sort the brood cells into functions and castes through targeted nourishment. Only a small proportion of these cells become male drones (about 5%), and a rare few will emerge into (competing) queens. The matriarchy of the hive is a give-and-take society not without internal strife. Though the sequence as a whole expresses Plath’s longing to join such a society—“I / Have a self to recover, a queen,” she writes in “Stings”—as well as her vehemence toward mid-century patriarchy, the complexities of an all-female civilization are never glossed over. In “The Bee Meeting,” Plath aptly describes the rivalry of the adult queen bee with competing virgin queens during the life cycle of the hive. The queen “is old, old, old, she must live another year” (line 44), while “in their fingerjoint cells the new virgins // Dream of a duel they will win” (lines 45–46). Fingerjoint refers to the appearance of the queen brood cell, which the female bees mold into that specific shape to signal its difference from worker and drone cells. The virgin queens fight each other to death, both in the real bee world and in the bee sequence, so only one can take “the bride flight, / The upflight of a murderess” (lines 47–48).5 Plath employs ambivalent images such as the virgin hive and the bride murderess—the drones also die after mating with a new queen—across the sequence to construct her poetic matriarchy as an alternative to the stifling postwar patriarchy that dictates women’s passivity, described in detail in Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. Friedan documents how books, magazines, and articles by so-called experts of the 1950s conditioned women to passively accept limited roles as sexual partners and mothers and pressured them to buy products to alleviate “a housewife’s drudgery” (116). Yet the female bees in Plath’s sequence are anything but passive. In “Stings,” the bees are “winged, unmiraculous women, / Honey-drudgers” (lines 21–22), who do all the work, thus the hive is appropriately described as an “industrious virgin” (line 35). In the real bee world, the male drones mate and die, or are expelled. Similarly, by the final poem “Wintering,”

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The bees are all women. Maids and the long royal lady. They have got rid of the men. (Lines 38–40)

By the end of the bee poem sequence, Plath concludes that the men are “blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors. / Winter is for women” (lines 91–93). The phrase “Winter is for women” is not just a pretty alliterative passage, it shows how Plath creatively combines language, gender, and knowledge of the bee colony ecosystem in a concise and precise line. Men are far from outcasts in the real world, but at the time of writing the bee poems, the patriarchal figures of father and husband were physically shut out from Plath’s life.6 Plath’s poetry, especially in Ariel, reveals her emotional scars from men and the pressures of growing up in the postwar patriarchy where women’s roles were reduced. As Friedan notes, A century earlier, women had fought for higher education; now girls went to college to get a husband. By the mid-fifties, 60 percent dropped out of college to marry, or because they were afraid too much education would be a marriage bar. (45)

Both Friedan and Plath were graduates of Smith College, as were the women Friedan surveyed for the basis of The Feminine Mystique (1963). The gist of Friedan’s analysis—and also partly of The Bell Jar, published the same year as Ariel (1963)—is women’s brewing dissatisfaction with gender roles. The majority of women interviewed in Friedan’s book experienced seeking fulfillment as housewives and mothers as drudgery, a word (as we saw above) both Friedan and Plath underline. Plath’s speaker in the bee poems finds creative outlets away from the entrapment of this feminine mystique; in “Stings,” whereas the female bees are “Honey-­ drudgers,” the speaker states, “I am no drudge / … I am in control. / Here is my honey-machine” (lines 23, 32–33). The control is, however, highly ambivalent; in the same poem, the honeycombs she is handling also “terrify” her (line 13). Elsewhere in the sequence, she is ridden with “fear” of the bees (“The Bee Meeting”), considers them “dangerous,” and at one point seems to regret buying bees: “They can be sent back. / They can die” (“The Arrival of the Bee Box,” lines 6, 24–25). In the poem “The Swarm,” there is a full-blown war where humans attack a swarm of (male)

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bees: “Pom, pom. They fall / Dismembered” (lines 36–37). As we will see in the next section, these passages go hand in hand with Plath’s growing anxiety over the postwar military-industrial complex and also correspond to Carson’s massive critique of the consequences of postwar industrialized farming.

Silent Spring and Appalling Noise The images of terror, war, and destruction in these passages and elsewhere in Plath’s poetry offer insights into how she experienced and expressed the personal and cultural trauma that followed in the wake of the two world wars, culminating in the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.7 For the first time in human history, the possibility of completely eradicating human life from the planet was palpable. Simultaneously, as noted above, the postwar period was an era of backlash for American women, who were pressured to give up their personal freedom to serve the greater good of postwar patriarchy. Plath’s relationship to bees in the sequence, while expressing both personal and cultural hope, also reveals new, troubling relationships to technology, nature, and gender that point toward a looming unsustainable future. The following quotes by Plath and Carson convey women’s important perspectives on the status quo of their age: The issues of our time which preoccupy me at the moment are the incalculable effects of fallout and a documentary article on the mad, omnipotent marriage of big business and the military in America. (Plath 1979, 98; originally published in 1962) Along with the possibility of extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man’s total environment with such substances [pesticides] of incredible potential for harm … the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. (Carson 1962, 13, 15)

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We saw above in “Stings” how the bee colony is portrayed as an industrious virgin and a honey-machine (lines 33, 35); another manufacturing image from the same poem appears when the hive is described as an “engine” that replaces the queen bee (line 59). In the closing poem, “Wintering,” Plath expresses in a nutshell how human tinkering with the environment—removing six jars of honey from her “machine”—confines the bees to a military-industrial fate: “Filing like soldiers / to the syrup tin/ To make up for the honey I’ve taken. / Tate and Lyle [syrup] keeps them going” (lines 24–27; emphasis added). The shaky balance between nature and culture in the bee poem sequence ends here in a precarious interdependence between the bees and their keeper. The industrial imagery (industrious, machine, engine, commercial syrup) points toward even scarier prospects than human fear of bee stings. Carson’s massive study Silent Spring (1962) thoroughly documents the harm of industrial capitalism on the environment and how pesticides keep us locked in a vicious cycle of damage to bees and humans alike. Not surprisingly, following the publication of Silent Spring, Carson was attacked by the insecticide industry, who attempted to silence her efforts at stopping the production of such harmful chemicals; at the same time, her work was embraced by conservationists and has become a cornerstone of the current environmental movement. It is ironic in this context that what Plath’s speaker seems to fear the most in her bee poem sequence is not bee stings but their noise. In “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” the speaker thinks the box would look like “the coffin of a midget / … were there not such a din in it. / The box is locked, it is dangerous” (lines 3–6; emphasis added), and a few lines later she exclaims, It is the noise that appals me most of all, The unintelligible syllables. …. Small, taken one by one, but my god, together! (Lines 17–20; emphasis added)

This appalling noise juxtaposes the “quietly humming” hive in “The Bee Meeting,” and the noise becomes even louder in the “The Swarm,” which repeats the exclamation “Pom! Pom!” four different times (cited

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below), interspersed with a “Shh, Shh” a third of the way through (lines 10–11). “The Swarm” is the only poem in the sequence in which the bees are described as men, and the only one Plath considered cutting: in the Ariel manuscript table of contents she put parentheses around “The Swarm,” which is the fourth of the five poems (see the facsimile on p. 97 of the Restored Edition). Just as male bees are ousted before winter, Plath indicates with this structure that the belligerent patriarchal swarm in the poem, modeled on Napoleon Bonaparte’s loud war machine, might be ousted before publication. In actual bee societies, a swarm is a rivaling group that breaks out to form its own colony, thus this structure of the sequence also conveniently mirrors actual bee behavior. The bee was Napoleon’s favorite emblem, and Plath employs the swarm as an analogy to his troops at “Waterloo, Waterloo” (line 7). The poem opens with, “Somebody is shooting at something in our town— / A dull pom pom” (lines 1–2). The noise soon grows louder as the villagers insist that the hive “must be shot down. Pom! Pom!” (lines 19–20). The racket continues through the poem, underlining its prominence: “Pom, Pom, the fall” (line 37), and “Pom Pom! ‘They would have killed me,’” exclaims one villager at the end of the battle (line 55). Ultimately, the swarm in “The Swarm”—just like “The Swarm” in the table of contents in Ariel—is relegated to a highly ambivalent place, as the bees end up “Walking the plank … / into a new mausoleum, / an ivory palace, a crotch pine” (lines 48–50). The mausoleum indicates a tomb, but the crotch pine indicates the swarm has simply been relocated. Plath’s poetry is very precise; when she uses repetition, something is clearly being overstated for emphasis. In “The Swarm,” it is the noise of the repeated pom pom of belligerent patriarchy that stands out. In the quieter final poem that immediately follows “The Swarm,” “Wintering,” it is the commercial name of the syrup the bees depend upon that is repeated for emphasis: “Tate and Lyle keeps them going” (line 27); “It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers” (line 29). Simultaneously and conversely, the woman in “Wintering” is becoming a flower: “her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think” (line 45). This metamorphosis of the woman from human to a part of the ecoworld of the bees is a poetic move Plath employs as an overarching strategy in this

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sequence—and it also mirrors the transformations Carson notes pesticides pass through once introduced to an ecosystem: They have entered and lodged in the bodies of fish, birds, reptiles, and domestic and wild animals so universally that scientists carrying on animal experiments find it almost impossible to locate subjects free from such contamination. … they occur in the mother’s milk, and probably in the tissues of the unborn child. (17)

In both the bee poem sequence and in Silent Spring, Plath and Carson underline the interconnectedness and chain reactions across human and natural systems. Compared to the Napoleonic war imagery in “The Swarm,” Plath’s use of metamorphosis to describe such reactions is a different and more nuanced way than analogy to navigate the tricky question of anthropomorphism that has become a thorny topic in current ecostudies and ecofeminism alike. The next section explores Plath’s use of metamorphosis to navigate the complexities of representing woman–bee relations.

Bee Meetings as Metamorphoses The stages honeybees pass through (egg, larva, pupa) to become fully emerged adults are technically referred to as metamorphosis. The woman in the bee poems also passes through a number of stages in her development across the sequence, but these are more complex and less straightforward. This section will briefly explore how metamorphosis is a more telling term than anthropomorphism to describe the speaker’s transformations by considering a few passages from the first and final poems—“The Bee Meeting,” where villagers meet to split a hive, and “Wintering,” where the speaker lives alone with a hive. While metamorphosis concerns a profound change from one state or phase to another, anthropomorphism, in poetry, is a way of describing the non-human world as human. Ecocriticism, including ecofeminism, has a very thorny relationship to anthropomorphism, especially if it lapses into anthropocentrism, the

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human-centric worldview that has led to the degradation of the environment. Just as patriarchy is a threat to women (and all humans), anthropocentrism is often seen as a threat to our survival on the planet.8 Plath engaged with a huge array of literary devices in the bee poem sequence, including personification (the bee box looks like “the coffin of a midget” in “The Arrival of the Bee Box”), anthropomorphism (“The mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everything” in “The Bee Meeting”), and zoomorphism (the swarm is “A flying hedgehog, all prickles” in “The Swarm”). The boundaries between such techniques are far from clear cut, and Plath glides through them on her journey through poetic metamorphoses. The first poem in the sequence, “The Bee Meeting,” exemplifies this. It describes a group of villagers who meet to split a beehive, and the speaker feels vulnerable in the presence of bees both before and after she dons protective gear: “I am nude as a chicken neck” (line 6) before, and afterwards “I am milkweed silk / the bees will not notice. They will not smell my fear” (lines 10–11). The zoomorphism “nude as a chicken neck” is a simile and hence an indirect comparison of a human with part of a chicken. The reverse personification “I am milkweed silk” is a metaphor, a direct transference of traits from plant to human. The jump from simile to metaphor accompanies the speaker’s metamorphosis human—chicken—milkweed. Milkweeds are important for pollinators and coincidentally the only plant where monarch butterflies lay their eggs. Both of the regal terms monarch butterfly and queen bee are metaphors and anthropocentric ways humans give meaning to nature. And both butterflies and bees are known for their metamorphoses, which subtly underlines Plath’s theme of transformation in these poems. Human language is inherently metaphorical and anthropocentric. It is metaphorical because it is always one step removed from experience. It is anthropocentric because it cannot be other: we experience the world exclusively from our human perspective. In the rules of everyday language, the term “queen bee” is an agreed-upon convention that does not mean the hive is an actual monarchy.9 Poetic language, however, is unruly: it need not follow standard grammar, it can deconstruct binaries (e.g. human/animal), and it can break out of the constraints of social conditioning (e.g. male/female roles). Poetry therefore teaches innovative

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thinking by questioning linguistic and societal conventions, a skill that can be applied to other challenges, including the survival of hives. By the end of the poem “The Bee Meeting,” the protagonist has broken out of the constraint of being a villager and transitioned to a bewildered position inside the hive: I am exhausted, exhausted—. Pillar of white in a blackout of knives.10 I am the magician’s girl who does not flinch. (Lines 51–53)

The metaphor of the “magician’s girl” being sliced in half mirrors the villagers’ slicing the hive in sections. The perspective of the girl in this passage is from the inside. She is not exactly a bee, but she is certainly not a villager either. The confusion she experiences is indicative of this in-between place: The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands. … What have they accomplished, why am I cold. (Lines 54–55)

For the villagers, this is a human-to-human meeting explicitly to exploit the hive, but for the speaker it is a different kind of meeting, one where she morphs into a different form. Her being cold in this final line of the opening poem “The Bee Meeting” echoes the image of her body that has become “a bulb in the cold” in the closing poem “Wintering” (line 45). Another example of the speaker’s metamorphosis from the first poem to the last is Plath’s repetition of “midwife.” A midwife is mentioned as one of the villagers twice in “The Bee Meeting” (lines 2 and 12), and the comparison of hive-splitting to a caesarian section is underlined in lines 26–27: “Is it some operation taking place? / Is it the surgeon my neighbors are waiting for?” By the final poem, “Wintering,” the speaker refers to herself as a midwife: “I have whirled my midwife’s extractor, I have my honey” (lines 2–3). The poet is also like a midwife with her vacuum extractor, coaxing out lines to bring forth new poems from the DNA of language, an organic system with infinite possibilities.11 In the bee poem sequence, the speaker goes through a number of metamorphoses

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including villager, magician’s girl, queen, God, and midwife, in addition to her interactions with a large variety of plants and flowers, discussed in what follows.

Plath’s Poetry of Pollination This section is the most exploratory one in the chapter. It will briefly present each flowering plant Plath has described in her sequence, commenting on its significance for her speaker, the bees, and our environment. Poetry has always had an intimate relationship with flowers, and each era has its very own language of flowers. Women writers in particular have embraced flower imagery as a vehicle to express their particular experiences of being female, whether these experiences involve women-towomen friendships, heterosexual relationships, or lesbian ones. Feminists, environmentalists, and ecofeminists have a keen interest in how women express their relationship to nature, and floral imagery is one of the most prevalent features women poets employ to express this.12 The language of flowers in Plath’s bee sequence is particular to her personal poetic idiom: it expresses her intimate knowledge of bees, her fear/fascination and intermingling with them, and ultimately her speaker’s citizenship in the bee matriarchy. Virtually every plant Plath mentions in the sequence provides food for bees in the form of nectar and pollen, and in return the bees pollinate each plant. For the poet, pollination is not so much a metaphor for physical impregnation as pollination of the imagination unleashing boundless poetic creativity. Close readings of Plath’s plant imagery reveal how close observations of actual flowers can enrichen poetry, and vice-versa. The Bee Meeting (pp. 81–83 in Ariel) • “Now I am milkweed silk, the bees will not notice. / They will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear” (lines 9–10). Also discussed above in the section on metamorphosis, milkweed is a migrant plant from North America to the United Kingdom, just as Plath was. The milk refers to the white liquid that comes out of damaged cells, and silk is a lay term for the white fibers inside the seedpods, also known as floss

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and technically as coma. It is not far-fetched to connect the thrice-­ mentioned fear in this passage to fear of a comatose state induced by massive bee stings; some stings may even cause blood clots leading to a stroke. Notice how Plath incorporates this imagery in the next flower passage on bean flowers: “leaves like bored hearts. / Is it blood clots the tendrils are dragging…? / No, no it is scarlet flowers” (lines18–20). The multiple connotations of redness and whiteness point to the colors of human blood and to the “white shop smock” the speaker is wearing to protect her from these harmful stings.13 Every word Plath chooses underlines her poetic precision and is pollinated with possibility. Silk, for example, is a material for garments produced by worms but also relates to and enhances images of the speaker’s white smock, and the rhyme with milk is an added bonus. Plath may have been familiar with milkweed silk from her childhood in the United States, as children were paid to gather its buoyant floss during the Second World War, when it was widely used in life vests and flotation devices.14 • “I am led through a beanfield, / … a sea of bean flowers, / Creamy bean flowers with black eyes and leaves like bored hearts” (lines 16–18). Bean flowers are attractive to bees and a rich source of pollen and nectar. Eyes and hearts are common metaphors to describe bean-flower anatomy. These bodily parts correspond to the plant parts that have evolved into particular shapes, colors, and/or scents that help guide pollinators to food.15 See also the entry above on milkweed. • “Is it the hawthorn that smells so sick? / The barren body of hawthorn, etherizing its children” (lines 24–25). Hawthorn is a source of pollen for bees in early to mid-spring; for humans it emits an unpleasant smell and one lay name for the bush is “mother-die,” referring to superstition that it smells like death and is bad luck to bring indoors, hence the bleak imagery of Plath’s passage. Hawthorn is commonly used in hedgerows, especially in the UK, where Plath lived in adulthood, and later in this poem she imagines that the speaker is “a personage in a hedgerow” (line 41). See the connection to the entry on cow parsley below. • “I am rooted, and the gorse hurts me / With its yellow purses, its spiky armory” (lines 31–32). Gorse is a source of pollen for bees from late winter to summer and a very common shrub in the UK.  Aptly

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described by Plath as yellow and spiky, she embellishes the gorse with personification, as purses (for the flowers) and armory (for the branches) are human accessories. The purses attract and the armory repels, adding to Plath’s penchant for juxtaposition to describe the woman’s conflicting emotions in the presence of bees. • “If I stand very still they will think I am cow parsley” (line 39). Like the hawthorn discussed above, cow parsley is sometimes called mother-die. Cow parsley is common along roadsides and in meadows in the UK and blooms abundantly in early spring, providing bees with pollen and nectar. The speaker uses the commonality of both hawthorn and cow parsley to express her hope that she will not stand out in the landscape: “I am cow parsley … / a personage in a hedgerow” (lines 39–41). The Arrival of the Bee Box (pp. 84–85 in Ariel) • “If I just … turned into a tree. / There is laburnum, its blond colonnades, / And the petticoats of the cherry” (line 29). Cherry blossoms are a good source of food for bees in the early to mid-spring, and cherry trees require honeybees for pollination. “Petticoats,” a personification, suggest that the blossoms are both demure and alluring, simultaneously covering up their sexual organs and drawing attention to them. This image is bolstered by Plath’s line “old whore petticoats” in the poem that immediately precedes the bee sequence, “Fever 103°” (p. 80, line 53). The speaker’s wish to become a cherry tree is another way of expressing her ambivalence—fear and infatuation— around the bees. Stings (pp. 86–88 in Ariel) • “The throats of our wrists brave lilies” (line 4). The scent of most lilies attracts bees to their pollen. This line describes the speaker and a honeycomb seller who are “bare-handed” as they handle the combs. There is multiple metaphoric transfer here: throats appear on wrists, the wrists then become lilies, and these lilies are given the human characteristic of braveness. In one line, Plath describes a completely intermingled ecosystem.

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• “And the hive itself a teacup, / With pink flowers on it” (lines 8–9). These are not natural flowers but ones the speaker has painted on the hive to decorate it in imitation of natureNature. • “These women who only scurry, /Whose news is the open cherry, the open clover” (lines 29–30). Cherry, discussed above, and clover are early bloomers and excellent sources of food/nectar for the bees in early spring. Clover in urban and rural landscapes is a sign of health for the ecosystem and should not be removed. (The Swarm) (pp. 190–192 in Ariel) • “Jealousy can open the blood, / it can make black roses” (lines 3–4). Black roses and the juxtaposing pink flowers in the previous poem are the only flower images in the sequence that do not refer to actual blooms. The metaphorical connotations of black rose are commonly death and despair. As discussed above, “The Swarm” was put in parentheses in Plath’s manuscript, showing her ambivalence to the patriarchal war scene it portrays. Jealousy is also an emotion Plath personally battled with due to her husband’s adultery. Wintering (pp. 89–90 in Ariel) • “Her body a bulb too dumb to think” (line 45). As discussed above, the woman has now metamorphosed into a bulb, awaiting the spring. • “Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas / Succeed in banking their fires / To enter another year?” (lines 46–48). The gladiolus is a midsummer bulb that attracts bees, thus linking this image to “her body a bulb” in the line just above it. The “fires” can refer to the bright red, orange, or yellow display of flowers. • “What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?” (p. 49). The Christmas rose is a common name for an evergreen plant, hellebore, that is not in fact related to the rose but belongs to the buttercup family. It is hardy in the UK, where Plath lived, and can bloom in December or January, hence its name. The Christmas rose is poisonous for humans and animals, but bees can find nourishment in its flowers, hence these are the first ones they

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taste if the hive survives the winter. This is the penultimate line in Plath’s bee poem sequence: it combines an image of winter, “Christmas,” with one of spring, “rose,” anticipating the transition to the closing line of the sequence: “The bees are flying. They taste the spring” (line 50).

Takeaways There are several ways in which poetry is important for sustainability, and only some of them have been touched upon in this chapter. First of all, poetry provides a link between our human world and the ecosystems that surround us by emotionally and metaphorically expressing how we are part and parcel of that world; poetic images such as “I am cow parsley / … a personage in a hedgerow,” or “her body a bulb” (“The Bee Meeting,” “Wintering”) express how the woman in the bee poem sequence is not at all separate from the natural environment even if she sometimes fears the implications of this. Secondly, and just as importantly, the close reading skills we learn by reading line for line and pausing on every detail mirror and bolster the close looking skills that are required for non-invasive study of our ecosystems. We can observe bees without killing them. When we discover, through observation, which flowers the bees love, we can plant them in our urban and rural landscapes. More close reading and close looking activities are included in the Appendix. Plath’s work, alongside that of her contemporaries Friedan and Carson, anticipates the evolution of current ecocritical trends, especially ecofeminist criticism, which is an umbrella term pertaining to theories and actions that address the connections between the oppression of women and the degradation of nature in patriarchal capitalism. This field has grown and branched out in different directions since the 1970s, most importantly to include intersectionality, the glaring absence of which is symptomatic of Plath’s era. We can no longer ignore the dire consequences of environmental destruction on bees and all other non-humans, but also how industrial capitalism harms specific groups based on factors such as socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds, alongside gender. In concluding, it is also important to note that Plath was quite adamant about the inherent value of poetry as poetry, rather than as a political tool to express her horror at the military-industrial complex. “My

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poems do not turn out to be about Hiroshima,” she writes in “Context,” but rather “the conservation of life of all people in all places … the great use of poetry is its pleasure—not its influence as religious or political propaganda” (pp. 92–93). Poetry is a parallel system—not unlike an ecosystem—obliquely but inextricably related to current events. Poetry allowed Plath exactly the space to pursue what Friedan noted as a woman’s creative work of her own outside of housekeeping and mothering. Poetry is open-­ended and provides not definitive conclusions but creative ones; it offers both pleasure and possibilities.

Appendix 1: Activities 1. Plath took up beekeeping as a hobby in the summer of 1962, and her father Otto Plath was an expert on bees, so she learned firsthand about their ecosystem. Visit a local beekeeper and find out everything you can about beekeeping. The following exercise works especially well with the first two poems in Plath’s sequence. At the beekeeper’s, pay attention to the types of protective gear used to approach the hives. Compare what is actually worn to Plath’s detailed poetic descriptions such as “gloved and covered,” “veils tacked to ancient hats,” “knights in visors,” “Breastplates of cheesecloth” (all from “The Bee Meeting”), “moon suit and funeral veil” (from “The Arrival of the Bee Box”), and so on. The poems will likely make more sense after the visit to the beekeeper, and beehives will also be better understood. If it is not a good season to visit, do this task online, finding out everything you can, in words and images, about beekeeping. 2. Find a local bee organization and use its resources to learn which bees are prevalent in your area and which flowers they prefer. Get to know as much as you can about wild and managed bees in your region and compare this information with how Plath portrays the bees, especially in “Stings” and “Wintering.” Pay special attention to gender, caste, and seasonal behaviors. Note ways in which her poetry provides accurate descriptions of bee societies and in what ways she departs from factual information through poetic license. The sequence should

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make more sense after this exercise, and bees will be better understood. If you can, volunteer your time at such a bee organization. 3. Activities with flowers: (a) Visit a local botanical garden and/or horticultural society online and in person and learn everything you can about flowers that rely on pollination. If it is spring or summer, acquire seeds and plant flowers that attract bees. Make sure the seeds are procured from pesticide-free sources. Make yourself familiar with at least five local plants that are bee magnets and be able to recognize them anywhere. Write down descriptions of these plants and compare with how Plath describes flowering plants in the bee sequence. (b) Go for walks in your neighborhood/area parks and photograph flowers and bees. Make a scrapbook identifying the different flowers. Note which types of bees like which flowers. Be on the lookout for these flowers and bees for this exercise and the next two. (c) Write a poem about the flowers you discover that attract bees. You can model it on any stanza or poem from Plath’s bee poem sequence. Try to be as precise and concise as you can in your descriptions but look for creative ways of expressing the details. (d) If it is not a good season for photographing flowers outdoors, look up online or at a library at least five flowers in your area that are known to attract bees. Draw each and every flower and add bees to the portrait if you like. If you do not feel capable of drawing, find images online and paste them in a scrapbook instead. If it is winter, find out where the bees are and how they find food and re-read Plath’s “Wintering,” comparing notes. Due to climate change, more and more bees are appearing during the winter months. Find out how you can help them survive and thrive. 4. Activities that work well with Carson’s Silent Spring: (a) It has been about 60 years since Carson published Silent Spring (1962), but pesticides are still a big threat to our pollinators. Find out everything you can about bee Colony Collapse Disorder, documenting factual information about what we know for sure about these problematic chemicals in this context. Get involved

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in your local community to help prevent the use of harmful pesticides in your area. Think globally, act locally. (b) Make a list of crops and types of food that rely on pollination, noting which foods would disappear without bees. Research the larger ripple effects of disruption to communities that might rely on these foods if they vanished, or any other consequences involved in losing the bees. (c) Write a poem called “Silent Spring.” Use your creativity and imagination to portray what it would be like if bees were few or disappeared in your area. Use any stanza or poem by Plath as a model. 5. The following activity works well with Plath’s poem “The Arrival of the Bee Box.” If it is autumn or winter and you cannot plant anything, build a bee hotel. This is a home for solitary bees and other pollinators who do not live in colonies but are excellent pollinators. There are many places on the web that give instructions on how to do this, for example, National Geographic Magazine (https://www. nationalgeographic.org/media/build-­your-­own-­bee-­hotel/, accessed July 29, 2020). Journal your reactions to the activity the way Plath describes her reactions to receiving a box full of bees; what creatures do you anticipate will move into the hotel? If and when any do come, spend time watching them, documenting their activities, and/or drawing them.

Appendix 2: Resources Bees: Books, Sites and Organizations for Learning Many thousands of books, treatises, and articles have been written about bees since antiquity. Plath’s father Otto Plath was an entomologist and published Bumblebees and Their Ways in 1934, based on his doctoral research. For current research, an excellent place to start learning is to view bee expert Marla Spivak’s TED talk, “Why Bees Are Disappearing” from 2013 (https://www.ted.com/talks/marla_spivak_why_bees_are_disappearing/discussion#t-­365412, accessed July 29, 2020); any of Spivak’s

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many works on bees are well-researched and informative. A few more prominent names among current bee experts whose work is accessible to a general public include Thomas Seeley, who has written several books and dozens of articles about the behavior of bees, Jürgen Tautz, whose The Buzz About Bees (2008) contains phenomenal illustrations, and Rosanna Mattingly, whose Honey-Maker: How the Honey Bee Worker Does What She Does (2012) will teach you everything you need to know and more about worker bees. • Friends of the Earth has a list of 49 excellent books about bees at https://friendsoftheearth.uk/bees/49-­best-­books-­about-­bees and their section on “The Bee Cause: Help Save the Bees” at https:// friendsoftheearth.uk/bees (accessed July 29, 2020) and has loads of current information and offers bee saver kits (the latter are donation-based). • Food Tank has a good overview of solution-oriented sites for protecting bees and the future of our food supply at “Buzzing for Solutions: 13 Organizations and Initiatives Helping to Save Bees,” https://foodtank.com/news/2015/01/buzzing-­for-­solutions-­13-­organizations-­ and-­initiatives-­helping-­to-­save-­bees/, accessed July 29, 2020. • Foundation for the Preservation of Honey Bees offers educational resources and promotes bee conservation by researching diseases and pesticides (https://preservationofhoneybees.org/, accessed July 29, 2020). • United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a substantial section on protecting bees and other pollinators at https:// www.epa.gov/pollinator-­protection/epa-­actions-­protect-­pollinators (accessed July 29, 2020). • The World Bee Project in the UK is a similar resource base, in the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, at http:// worldbeeproject.org/ (accessed July 29, 2020).

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Ecofeminism, Betty Friedan, and Rachel Carson Ecofeminism arose at the intersection of the works of Friedan and Carson, combining the interests of feminists and environmentalists. Since the 1970s, research in the field of ecofeminism has been steadily growing. Below are a few introductory works that cover the most important issues of ecofeminism as well as a few works that make specific links between Plath, Carson and Friedan. • Ecofeminism and Climate Change. An important journal started in 2020 that publishes interdisciplinary work bringing together the concerns of ecofeminism and pressing issues within the current climate change crisis, including the impact of climate change on women and the links between gender and the environment. https://www. emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/efcc • Foster, Emma. “Ecofeminism Revisited: Critical Insights on Contemporary Environmental Governance,” Feminist Theory 22(2): 190–205. This is an updated article (as of 2021) that can provide an overview and re-assessment of ecofeminist works from the 1970s to the 1990s. • King, Ynestra. “What Is Ecofeminism?”, Nation 245:20 (December 12, 1987): 702–31. This is an early seminal text defining the concept of ecofeminism where King also engages with other critics in an exchange of ideas on ecofeminism. • The Library of Congress has a substantial resource page on Carson at https://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/SciRefGuides/rachelcarson.html (accessed July 27, 2020) • Merchant, Carolyn. Merchant, who is Professor of Environmental Studies and author of the groundbreaking study Radical Ecology (1992), has explicitly noted indebtedness to both Carson and Friedan in her own ecofeminist research. Merchant continues to advance their lineage, and in this interview she discusses how women bear the brunt of climate change, especially in developing countries (https://www. d a i l yc a l . o r g / 2 0 1 8 / 0 4 / 2 2 / c a ro l y n -­m e rc h a n t -­u c -­b e rk e l e y -­ ecofeminism/, accessed June 7, 2021).

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• Mies, Maria, and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism, second edition, London: Zed Books, 2014. This is an essential reader for anyone interested in ecofeminism. First published in 1993, it has become a classic text in the field. • Miles, Kathryn, “Ecofeminism.” This article below provides a basic introduction and overview for beginners (https://www.britannica. com/topic/ecofeminism/Ecofeminisms-­future, accessed June 7, 2021). • Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Ludwig-­ Maximilians-­Universität, Munich, is an excellent updated portal on the impact of Carson’s works (https://www.carsoncenter.uni-­ muenchen.de/index.html, accessed August 10, 2020). • Sikora, Anna. “The Roots of ‘Ecocriticism’: Exploring the Impact of Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring,’” published December 21, 2017, by Gale Ambassadors. This is a good introductory article on the impact of Carson (https://www.gale.com/intl/blog/2017/12/21/the-­roots-­of-­ ecocriticism-­exploring-­the-­impact-­of-­rachel-­carsons-­silent-­spring/, accessed July 29, 2020). • The Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard University has an ample research guide on Friedan at https:// guides.library.harvard.edu/c.php?g=310769&p=2081796 (accessed July 29, 2020).

Sylvia Plath and the Bee Poem Sequence There are thousands of scholarly works on Plath. Below are some references to specific works that either treat the bee poem sequence in particular or the link between Plath’s poetry and ecofeminism. • A post titled “About the Bee Poems” published online at the University of Illinois contains articles by several prominent scholars specifically on the bee poem sequence. Among the most important contribution in the context of this chapter is the feminist Sandra Gilbert’s “A Fine, White Flying Myth: Confessions of a Plath Addict” (originally published in Massachusetts Review, Autumn 1978) (https://www. english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/beepoems.htm, accessed July 22, 2020).

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• Knickerbocker, Scott. “‘Bodied Forth in Words’: Sylvia Plath’s Ecopoetics.” College Literature 36, no. 3 (2009): 1–27. • Luck, Jessica Lewis. “Exploring the ‘Mind of the Hive’: Embodied Cognition in Sylvia Plath’s Bee Poems.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 26, no. 2 (2007): 287–308. • Richter, Natasha L. “Sylvia Plath’s ‘Bee Sequence’: A Microcosm of Poetic Development.” Inquiries Journal/Student Pulse, 2(01), 2010. http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/a?id=131 (accessed July 27, 2020) • Rogers, Janine and Charlotte Sleigh. “‘Here Is My Honey-Machine’: Sylvia Plath and the Mereology of the Beehive.” The Review of English Studies 63, no. 259 (2012): 293–310.

Notes 1. Unless otherwise noted, all poem citations are from Plath (2005). In Plath’s manuscript, the bee poems conclude the volume. When Plath’s widower Ted Hughes published Ariel in 1965, he moved the sequence to a different spot. 2. For more on the past and current ecofeminist movement, see the section “Ecofeminism, Betty Friedan, and Rachel Carson” in Appendix 2 of this chapter. 3. For documentation of the damaging role of pesticides in CCD, see, for example, United States Environmental Protection Agency, https://www. epa.gov/pollinator-­protection/colony-­collapse-­disorder#why%20it%20 is%20happening, accessed April 16, 2020, Renée Johnson, “Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder,” CRS Report for Congress, January 7, 2010, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33938.pdf, accessed April 16, 2020, and Marla Spivak’s 2013 Ted Talk cited in Appendix 2 of this chapter. 4. Plath also published two other bee poems outside of Ariel, “Lament” and “The Beekeeper’s Daughter” (in The Colossus, 1960), as well as a story about bees, “Among the Bumblebees” (in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, published posthumously in 1979). 5. Though this chapter is not primarily concerned with biographical facts, Plath experienced the rage of rivalry due to her husband’s affair with another woman, also portrayed in her poem “The Rival,” and her rage at

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patriarchal figures is infamously expressed in “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”—all from Ariel. 6. Plath’s father died in 1940, and she separated from Hughes in the summer of 1962. 7. For a related discussion of Plath’s war imagery, see Nicholls (2013, 338), where she concludes that, “the Cold War can be viewed as a sex war against women … waged by the masculinist nuclear war machine. … capable of draining away all remaining life and meaning from the environment.” 8. The “Ecofeminism” entry in the “Resources” section at the end of this chapter provides a few references for exploring the crucial problematics of anthropomorphism and anthropocentricism, and several other chapters in this volume also provide a more nuanced look at these topics; see the chapter descriptions in the Introduction. 9. In fact, Seeley’s work (2010) refutes the idea that bee colonies are monarchies and examines the complex community interactions among bee societies. 10. It is important to note that Plath’s use of racial imagery such as black/ white and white/African across the bee poem sequence predates both intersectionality and postcolonialism and thus may seem offensive to some readers; note, however, that honeybees are not native to the Americas; Africanized honey bees came to Brazil in the 1500s and spread to North America. In that context, Plath’s allusions to African are thus precise. 11. Other scholars have discussed Plath’s creative language in the bee poem sequence, see especially Richter (2010) and Rogers and Sleigh (2012) in Appendix 2 of this chapter. 12. One of the most recent studies in this context of flower imagery is Murphy (2019). 13. See also the note on racial imagery above. 14. For more on the use of milkweed silk during the Second World War, see https://www.mlive.com/news/2014/02/a_weed_goes_to_war_and_ michiga.html, accessed April 16, 2020. 15. For example, the naturalist and gardener Jim Conrad notes that “the heart-shaped splotch of brightness” in the middle of the bean flower “helps pollinators such as bees find the blossom’s center” (https://www. backyardnature.net/fl_beans.htm, accessed July 27, 2020).

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References Carson, R. 1962. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Friedan, B. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Murphy, P. 2019. Reconceiving Nature: Ecofeminism in Late Victorian Women’s Poetry. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. Nicholls, K. 2013. The Cold War Gothic Poetry of Sylvia Plath. In A Companion to American Gothic, ed. C. Crow. Oxford, UK: John Wiley and Sons. Plath, S. 1979. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and Other Stories. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 2005. Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript. New York: Harper Perennial. Seeley, T. 2010. Honeybee Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

3 “These Things Never Happened but Are Always”: Why Tree Poems Matter Heidi Silje Moen

Introduction In his poem “Heather” (1916), Ezra Pound depicts an extraordinary metamorphosis: The milk-white girls Unbend from the holly-trees. (Pound 1916, 53)

The fascinating verbal image “unbend” superimposes the image of unfolding flowers upon the idea of girls unbending or appearing from the stems of the “holly trees.” We can understand the poem’s visual description of girls stretching like flowers unfolding (“unbending”) toward the sun (there is a reference to a flame in the previous stanza), or flowers stretching like girls, but Pound does not seem to intend a comparison—if he had done so, he would have used the word “like.” Without the simile, I

H. S. Moen (*) Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Hamar, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. L. Kleppe, A. Sorby (eds.), Poetry and Sustainability in Education, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95576-2_3

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would suggest that what the poem asks us to do is to see both “girls” and flowers simultaneously, as merged, not separate. The lines above could be termed phanopoeic. “Phanopoeia” is defined in “How to Read” as “a casting of images upon the visual imagination” (Pound 1968), and in ABC of Reading as “the throwing of an image on the mind’s retina” (Pound 1979, 52). Both definitions suggest that the image is to be read conceptually as well as visually (by the mind as well as the eye). In addition, both the title, “Heather,” and “holly” (as in “holly-trees”) can refer to the name of girls and plants, and in the poem both ideas exist simultaneously in the compression of girls and buds into one. By asking us to pay attention to the metamorphosis between human and tree, Pound is not only deconstructing the nature/human divide but encouraging us to acknowledge a kinship to nature. Trees and plants matter for the climate, for biodiversity, and for people. However, the United Nations Development Programme’s entry on biodiversity warns us, “Every year, 13 million hectares of forests are lost, while the persistent degradation of drylands has led to the desertification of 3.6 billion hectares” (United Nations Development Programme n.d.). Creating a sustainable society, according to Stephen Sterling and environmental ethics, requires an epistemological and educational paradigm shift. In order to bring about a change in worldview, we need to challenge the dualisms that assume that humans are morally entitled to dominate and exploit nature (animals, insects, trees, plants), to move away from a human-centered worldview in which only humans are afforded intrinsic value, and to suppress our inherent egotism in favor of communality. Moreover, to aid in the transformation from a mechanistic to a sustainable world, we also need to complement scientific discourses with the joint effort of all disciplines. In this chapter, I will explore a reconceptualization of the human relation to and place in nature to bring about such a shift, and argue that poetry may aid in bringing about a change in worldview necessary for combating the loss of biodiversity. My main focus will be on reading Pound’s (1885–1972) conservationist imitations of Ovid (43 B.C.E.–17 C.E.) and William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) through the lenses of environmentalist ethics, and Arne Næss’s biospheric egalitarianism and his concept of self-realization in particular.

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What Does Sustainability Mean for Education? In 2001, Sterling published a briefing, Sustainable Education: Re-visioning Learning and Change, as part of a series published by Green Books on behalf of the Schumacher Society (Sterling 2001).1 The briefing describes a sustainable society as “one that can persist over generations, one that is far-seeing enough, flexible enough, and wise enough not to undermine either its physical or social systems of support” (Sterling 2001, 13). According to Timothy O’Riordan and Heather Voisey, quoted by Sterling, creating a sustainable society demands an epistemological and educational paradigm change: “The sustainability transition is the process of coming to terms with sustainability in all its deeply rich ecological, social, ethical and economic dimensions. … It is about new ways of knowing, of being differently human in a threatened but cooperating world” (13). Sterling’s main claim is that education at the time of writing was “still informed by a fundamentally mechanistic view of the world, and hence learning” (13). In order to create a sustainable world, educators and policymakers cannot merely put “sustainability” on the syllabus as a topic to be discussed and taught alongside existing subjects; rather, they must restructure education writ large: “No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it. We have to learn to see how to see the world anew” (12). Using a quotation attributed to Albert Einstein as an epigraph, Sterling suggests that in order to start learning to see the world anew, we need to create a new educational paradigm based upon secondand third-order learning and change. “Second-order change” involves critical and reflective learning that examines the assumptions of “first-order learning,” which is characteristically adaptive and informative. “At a deeper level still,” Sterling claims, “third-order learning” is also required: [W]hen third-order learning happens we are able to see things differently. It is creative, and involves a deep awareness of alternative worldviews and ways of doing things. It is, as Einstein suggests, a shift of consciousness, and it is this transformative level of learning, both at individual and whole society levels, that radical movement towards sustainability requires. (15, italics in the original)

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Finding solutions to make changes necessary to protect life on earth requires a joint effort across national, political, and disciplinary boundaries where a multiplicity of voices and discourses must be heard. In this chapter, I argue for including and utilizing poetry to help learners rethink received assumptions and ideas (first-order learning) concerning the human/nature relationship and, as such, aid in the transition toward transformative and sustainable third-order learning and change.

“ These Things Never Happened But Are Always”: Why Tree Poems Matter2 Pound’s re-workings of ancient Chinese, Japanese, and Provençal poetry are saturated with animals, trees, and references to people transforming into, or metamorphosing with, nature.3 In this way, his engagement with nature echoes those of Homer, Ovid, and Yeats. But in sustainability studies, the formal aspect of imitation is important as well. Finding solutions to make the necessary changes to protect life on earth requires global and cross-disciplinary cooperation, which also involves listening to a multiplicity of voices and discourses. In imitative rewritings, the old is transvalued and made new, opening for a plurality of approaches and perspectives. And, because it acknowledges a source at the same time as it transforms it, imitation could also be seen to relinquish the notion of the one authorial voice in favor of co-creation and inclusiveness. As such, the palimpsestic multi-voiced nature of poetic imitations seems particularly suitable to model a shift from the individual to the collective. Imitating poems about sudden transformations of humans into non-­ human nature could also be seen as a way of re-cycling fundamental values and ancient wisdom across the ages, a way of saying, “These things never happened but are always.” That line appears as an epigraph to Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony where it is ascribed to Saloustios, the author of Of Gods and of the World, and could be read as a celebration of the ability of the mind to imagine the unreal, the illogical, the unpredictable, the mystical and magical (Calasso 1993). Consequently, such discourses could be said to offer an alternative to

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“positivistic and instrumentalist models of rationality” criticized by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer for “the disenchantment of natural things” which “disrupts our relationship with them, encouraging the attitude that they are nothing more than things to be probed, consumed and dominated” (Brennan and Lo 2016, section 3.3). What “never happened but are always” in Pound’s poetry could be the experience of having been turned into a tree, plant, or coral, reflecting a need across the ages to live holistically in communion with non-human nature. It could also be seen as a response to seemingly constant human needs and yearnings for moving outside our own consciousness to experience things differently untampered by logic, language, and human egotistical subjectivity. Re-cycling seemingly impossible subject-positions of being not in nature but being-nature as such reiterates the importance of seeing nature not only as having value for us, but as having value in itself.

Pound and Environmentalist Ethics Sterling calls for a transformative shift of consciousness which can be found in Pound’s imitations and which is also foundational in some versions of environmental ethics. According to Brennan and Lo, “[I]n the literature of environmental ethics the distinction between instrumental value and intrinsic value … has been of considerable importance. … Many traditional western ethical perspectives are anthropocentric or human-centred in that they either assign intrinsic value to humans alone … or they assign a significantly greater amount of intrinsic value to human beings than any non-human things” (Brennan and Lo 2016, section 1). The problem with this perspective for environmental ethics is that by assigning intrinsic value to human beings alone, or by favoring the human over the non-human (plants, animals, nature), “the protection or promotion of human interests or well-being at the expense of human things turns out to be nearly always justified” (Brennan and Lo 2016, section 1). A related concern in environmental ethics is to challenge “human-­chauvinism (i.e. anthropocentrism) … responsible for much human exploitation of, and destructiveness towards, nature.” An extension of human-chauvinism is seen in the prescriptive nature of “the

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logic of domination” accompanying dualistic and hierarchical thinking. Examples of dualisms would be “male/female,” “reason/emotion,” “mind/ body,” “civilized/primitive,” “human/animal,” and “culture/nature.” The problem with these dichotomies, Brennan and Lo argue, is that “[t]he ‘logic of domination’ then dictates that those on the superior side (e.g., men, rational beings, humans) are morally entitled to dominate and utilize those on the inferior side as mere means” (Brennan and Lo, section 3.2). As we shall see later, Yeats’s speakers seem unwilling or unable to relinquish the human-centered perspective and dualistic thinking, which again impacts humans as well as nature negatively. By contrast, Pound, in many of his imaginative re-cyclings, deconstructs hierarchical and dichotomic oppositions between the human and non-human, making it impossible to separate between these, as is the case in “Heather,” when the girls are simultaneously also holly trees.

Pound’s Biospheric Egalitarianism The potential value of Pound’s imitative poems to sustainability studies can be understood through Næss’s deep ecology, which is a radical branch of environmental ethics. As in environmental ethics in general, according to Brennan and Lo, Næss’s deep ecology considers animals, insects, and nature as having intrinsic value. Because he endorses the idea that “all living things whatsoever [have] a similar right to live and flourish,” Næss’s position has also been termed biospheric egalitarianism (Brennan and Lo, section 3.1). The idea underpinning biospheric egalitarianism might not seem too radical in theory, but I believe anthropocentric ways of being in the world are so entrenched that it is difficult to think about what this perspective entails.4 What Næss asks us to do is envision a world in which we consider the lives and health of animals, plants, and trees as of equal importance to (or even more important than) the well-being of humans— a world in which humans would reconsider not only their mental and physical needs but also what is considered their right to inhabit the world, for the benefit of ants and plants. It seems impossible for humans to avoid impacting non-human lives in detrimental ways when moving

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about in the world. To avoid doing so, must we strive toward becoming impossibly incorporeal or, to quote Pound, tread with a “weight less than the shadow”? (Pound 1996a, 238). Not necessarily. Instead, to facilitate a transition toward biospheric egalitarianism, Næss proposes a radical reconceptualization of humans’ place in nature where, instead of seeing nature as different from us, which “induces human selfishness towards nature,” we should focus on the “identification of the human ego with nature” (section 3.2, 4).5 One consequence of rethinking our essential difference from nature in this way would be that it would make it easier to “count human interests in the same calculation alongside the interests of natural things (e.g. trees, wolves, bears, rivers, forests, and mountains)” (section 3.2, 5). In similar fashion, Pound, by creating an identity between girls and trees, could ideally influence our behavior and being in the world. By positing girls as trees and trees as girls, he not only makes the destruction of trees difficult to justify but also makes us reconsider what necessary harm in the interest of well-being would imply, and for whom. One thing poetry can do, as we have seen in “Heather,” is to challenge human-centered, hierarchical, and dichotomic ways of thinking about the human/nature relationship. If we could see all living things as having the same value and rights as humans, if we could imagine nature not as essentially different from, but rather as an extension of, the self, it would be far more difficult to justify the domination and utilization of nature as part of a legacy (whether that legacy is seen as a God-given or as justified through arguments of biological superiority). However, in other imitations, as in the passage from The Cantos below, “The Tree” (ca. 1905) and “La Fraisne” (“The Ash Tree”) (1908), Pound goes even further in challenging anthropocentric epistemology by prioritizing non-human knowledge and existence over human. [C]an you see with eyes of coral or turquoise or walk with the oak’s root? (Pound 1996a, 797)

In this passage in Canto CX, Pound seems to draw attention to the difference between human and other kinds of existence rather than the similarity. In the imitation, which contains a faint trace of Ben Jonson’s “Her Triumph,” Pound is challenging us to perceive the world from the

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perspective of oak and coral. Significantly, in these lines, he does not offer the perspective of plant or mineral life; instead, he seems to suggest that their kind of being and ways of sensing and knowing are essentially different from ours. That does not, however, mean that non-human being or knowing is insignificant or inferior. On the contrary, in proposition 6.522 of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), Ludwig Wittgenstein writes, “There are, indeed things that cannot be put into words. … They are what is mystical” (89). And, he continues: My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright. (Wittgenstein 2005, 89)

In other words, because language is a human construct and, as such, limited by its logical structure and our perspective, in order to see the world “aright,” we must abandon the attempt to express its “arightness” in language. This also means that language cannot express or encompass everything which is important and of value, that which Wittgenstein terms “the mystical.” The “mystical,” furthermore, is not termed mystical because it does not exist, but because it cannot be expressed in language. In similar terms, in “Machine Art,” Pound expresses the belief that “certain things [are] unknowable or at least unascertained and therefore not subject to satisfactory verbal explanation” (Pound 1996b, 144). What Pound seems to suggest in his tree poems is that until one has “walked with the oak’s root,” one cannot claim to “know” what it is like to be a tree—and the inclusion of coral and turquois in Canto CX suggests that this logic is meant ad infinitum (encompassing all there is). In addition, reading Pound through Wittgenstein makes us realize that not only may there be several perspectives on what is important and of value (human, animal, plant, mineral), but there might also be several ways of expressing it.

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 eats and Pound: The Suffering Ego Versus Y Self-realization The importance of imagining non-human knowledge and existence as different from ours can be found by linking Næss’s ideas of connectedness and self-realization. According to Brennan and Lo, to Næss, “self-­ realization” is “the deep satisfaction that we receive from identification with nature and close partnership with other forms of life in nature.” The concept of self-realization thus connects life quality to our ability to identify with nature. In addition, Næss’s idea of connectedness, the idea that “the identity of living things is … constituted by its relationship to other things” (Brennan and Lo 2016, section 3.1), makes it impossible for humans to achieve satisfaction in isolation. That is, our well-being is both dependent on and inseparable from the life quality and well-being of nature and other life forms with which we identify. And, as we shall see later, whereas Yeats posits the impossibility of relinquishing the human ego and self-interest in favor of identification with nature as cause for existential angst, Pound’s re-workings of Yeats may be read as remedies to the alienation felt by Yeats’s speakers. From a more pragmatic perspective, this idea that all living things are essentially connected through the mutual aim of survival is also reflected in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: all 17 goals are to be considered mutual, as a positive change made in one area (to end poverty) must not impact another (the protection of earth’s biodiversity) negatively (United Nations Development Programme n.d.). Consequently, read through the lenses of Næss and the UN’s development goals, the failure to relinquish human concerns for the sake of nature impacts not only nature but also humans negatively, and, because humans cannot achieve satisfaction in isolation, in Yeats’s poems, the ego suffers. In Pound’s tree poems, on the other hand, self-realization is posited as a reward, which is also the ultimate aim of the sustainable development goals: to ensure our common future (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987, section 3, §27). The way Pound’s imitations function as remedies is through identification with nature:

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Naethless I have been a tree amid the wood And many a new thing understood That was rank folly to my head before. (“The Tree,” lines 10–12, in Pound 2003, 14)

“The Tree” draws on both Ovid and Yeats. Ovid’s main influence on Pound could be said to be found in how both poets express the mysterious and nonsensical as part of immediate (as opposed to transcendent) experience.6 The poem can also be read as a re-working of Yeats’s “He Thinks of His Past Greatness” (1899) and “The Two Trees” (1893). Both poets utilize the trope of trees as a site of knowledge and posit human subjectivity in trees and, by doing so, also imaginatively extend subjectivity into nature. But it is the relation between the poets that I find important to address. By dramatizing the sheer difficulty of abandoning subjectivity and what is considered essentially human, Yeats’s works express how difficult a paradigmatic shift from a human-centered to a non-human centered epistemology may be to accept for the ego. In Pound’s works, on the other hand, the transition seems effortless since whether or not the speaker appears to be able to inhabit a non-human existence and knowledge is not questioned either in “The Tree” or in “La Fraisne.” In other words, whereas Yeats’s speakers become “[haters] of the wind” (“He Thinks of His Past Greatness,” line 7), Pound’s speakers “[become] the winds” (“La Fraisne,” line 50). Thus, the main difference between Yeats’s and Pound’s tree poems is that whereas Yeats’s poems are significantly human-centered, in Pound’s poems, the speaker’s allegiance is entirely with those whose mode of existence is non-verbal: winds and trees. In “The Two Trees,” Yeats rewrites the Ovidian Baucis and Philemon myth in which an old couple is rewarded for their hospitality by being turned into “trees growing … side by side” (Ovid 1955, 198). In “He Thinks of His Past Greatness,” the speaker claims to have been a “hazel-­ tree.” To be a hazel-tree, it is suggested, represents knowledge but also a condition of unity prior to death that the speaker initially seems to long for:7

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I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young And weep because I know all things now: I have been a hazel-tree, and they hung The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough Among my leaves in times out of mind: I became a rush that horses tread: I became a man, a hater of the wind. (“He thinks of his Past Greatness,” lines 1–7, in Yeats 1991, 90–91)

The speaker here apparently accepts the traditional separation-in-life and unity-in-death trope. However, at the same time as the poem expresses longing for the dissolution of subjectivity, it also reveals a subjectivity unwilling to obliterate the ego. This is signaled by the change to the possessive “his” in line 7 and the use of masculine end-rhymes which reassert the presence of a controlling mind throughout. In addition, even though seemingly accepting the unity-in-death trope, the poem’s conclusion, too, fights oblivion by emphasizing the physical aspect of love, touch: Knowing one, out of all things, alone, that his head May not lie on the breast nor his lips on the hair Of the woman that he loves, until he dies. (lines 8–10)

The obliteration of the lover who feels and expresses these feelings through speech will not come about without fight. Along with descriptions of physical aspects of love, the insertion “alone” seems to indicate the realization of a different kind of loss in death: if love as togetherness relies on difference, it can only be perceived of with someone. Similarly, if love is a reciprocal act of giving and receiving, it is dependent on the perception of one’s self in relation to that someone. This also means that the absolute identity that is longed for in the poem becomes a kind of undifferentiated aloneness. Hence, the tree-knowledge in this poem causes a sense of existential loss: “I became a man, a hater of the wind” (line 7). “The Two Trees,” too, fails to see the extension of subjectivity into nature as a reward. Baucis and Philemon, the two trees in the poem’s title, are described as exposed to the mercilessness of passing time and the elements that abstractly bring about destruction and decay:

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For there a fatal image grows That the stormy night receives, Roots half hidden under snows, Broken boughs and blackened leaves. For all things turn to barrenness In the dim glass the demons hold. (lines 25–30)

Unlike in Pound’s imitation, the reward from the gods for their hospitality is seen as unkind, and the site of love and reciprocity is placed in the center of the beloved’s heart: Beloved, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there. (“The Two Trees,” lines 1–2, in Yeats 1991, 69–70)

Instead of embracing the a-subjective communality of being-tree, both “He Thinks of His Past Greatness” and “The Two Trees” seem to dramatize the reluctance, or inability, to let go of subjectivity, the private and interpersonal, what might also be termed the human. It is important to note that, in these poems, ego, or self-interest, does not necessarily mean self-interest in terms of exploitation; it rather means an unwillingness or inability to let go of the human qualities we hold most dear: the ability to experience love through reciprocity, togetherness, look, and touch. By dramatizing the subject’s resistance to abandoning the ego and self-­ interest, Yeats’s philosophical poems on human nature may make readers understand the radical rethinking deep ecology asks us to do concerning our place in nature. At the same time, “He Thinks of His Past Greatness” in particular also expresses the speaker’s inability to abandon the subject-­ position for being tree as cause for a sense of absolute separation and loss: “I … weep because I know all things now” (lines 1–2). In “The Tree,” Pound, like Yeats, thematizes a mystical experience. In the poem, the speaker claims that, like the mythical Daphne, like Baucis and Philemon, he has been a tree. The fact that the poem can be read as an imitation of Ovid suggests the constancy of the need to address and experience that which cannot be put into words but which nevertheless is of value not only because it offers an alternative discourse to that of

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positivistic logic and science but also because it may teach us “how to see the world anew” (Einstein in Sterling 2001, 12). However, it is also a re-­ writing of Yeats. As opposed to Yeats’s tree poems, “The Tree” both begins and ends in the affirmative as the opening lines, “I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,/knowing the truth of things unseen before” (lines 1–2), are echoed in the poem’s conclusion: Naethless I have been a tree amid the wood And many a new thing understood That was rank folly to my head before. (lines 10–12)

In these passages, the speaker claims to have been a tree and acquired new wisdom in the process, yet, because he does not share this wisdom as the insufficient “many a new thing understood” indicates, the reader’s expectations are frustrated. However, rather than signal defeat, I propose that in the poem there is no real effort to separate between things that happened and things that never happened, to convince visually or logically that the speaker—like Baucis, Philemon, and Daphne—actually has been a tree. The archaic “Naethless” (“nevertheless”) could be read as defiant. At the same time, the fact that one single word provides the speaker’s only argument reflects an untroubled attitude. Furthermore, if the term is read onomatopoeically, as imitating the sound of wind in leaves, it hardly expresses an argument at all, but rather enacts an a-subjective disinterestedness which leaves it up to the rational world to argue over the logical impossibility of people having been turned into trees. This indicates that, as in the lines quoted from Canto CX, the unspeakable is part of the poem’s expression, something which is also strengthened by the fact that the initial statement, “I stood still and was a tree,/Knowing the truth of things unseen before,” is in the past. Thus the poem suggests that, after its occurrence, the kind of knowledge that is sucked up by roots is non-retrievable and non-verbal because, once it is expressed conceptually or verbally, it becomes something else: if you know you cannot speak and if you can speak, you no longer know. Consequently, in the poem trees do embody insights, but, as these are neither visualized nor verbalized, they are beyond human expression and, perhaps, also beyond our understanding. Whatever non-verbal interaction or communication

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has or has not taken place is indecipherable for us, and one can only wonder what the trees “know.” Provoking in a charming sort of way, at one level the poem can be read as a private untranslated communication among trees. Yeats’s and Pound’s speakers all extend subjectivity into nature, but in markedly different ways. In all these poems it is suggested that there is a distinction between arboreal and human knowledge. However, “The Tree” presents this opposition by reversing the way we usually think about the dichotomy between “self ” and “other.” In Pound’s poem, the “other” is not the non-human but those whose mode of expression is words. As such, Pound is offering the possibility that there are non-­ human ways of perceiving and knowing that are desirable yet unattainable until you have entered a certain state. This state is achieved in absolute identification with nature through letting go of the human. Pound’s imitation presents non-human existence as a communal state devoid of human/nature demarcations and thereby also devoid of existential anxiety. Yeats’s speakers, on the other hand, are unable to overcome what is seen as a divide between human and non-human existence and unwilling to abandon the ego and thus experience a sense of alienation and loss. The value of Pound’s re-workings of Yeats for sustainability studies can be seen in how they present the experience of abandoning worldly concerns for the communal non-subjective experience of being-­ wind or -tree as enriching, something to be desired and envied (“Knowing the truth of things unseen before”). However, it is also important to remember the ethical dimension of Næss’s biospheric egalitarianism. He not only suggests that the extension of subjectivity into nature, the experience of identification with non-human lives, could remedy a feeling of separation from the world; the main point he wants to convey is that self-realization through a sense of connectedness would lead us to take better care of nature. As we shall see in “La Fraisne,” imagining a metamorphosis with nature is to abandon human desires and ambition and cure human ailments. More importantly, affording equal value to humans and nature through identification also gives us a responsibility.

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Biospheric Egalitarianism and Responsibility The ability of woods and forests to improve our physical and mental health has been thematized by numerous poets; Pound and Yeats are just two key examples. However, again, it is the difference between the two poets I find relevant for sustainability studies. Whereas Yeats’s human-­ centered subject-positions bring out the detrimental effect of human-­ chauvinism (utilizing nature for egotistical gains), in Pound’s re-working, the speaker’s dissolution of the subject in nature signals a willed rejection of the human in favor of what nature can offer on its own premises. Combined, the poems enable us to address the responsibility for non-­ human lives accompanying biospheric egalitarianism. Seeking respite “mid the ash wood” (“La Fraisne,” line 9) might be enriching for us, but is the interaction equally beneficial for woods and forests? I have curled mid the boles of the ash wood, I have hidden my face where the oak Spread his leaves over me, and the yoke Of the old ways of men have I cast aside. (“La Fraisne,” lines 9–12, in Pound 1965, 15–16)

“La Fraisne” is a dramatic monologue set in “the Ash Wood of Malvern,” and, in the pseudo-biographical introduction to the poem, the content is said to be the legend of “Miraut de Garzelas, [who] after the pains he bore a-loving Riles de Calidorn and that to none avail ran mad in the forest” (14). Even more strongly than “The Tree,” perhaps, the poem dramatizes the movement toward dissolution of self and subjectivity as something that brings on a sense of relief. In addition to a number of other sources of inspiration mentioned in the poem’s introduction,8 the poem draws on Yeats’s “Madness of King Goll” (1884), The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), and “In the Seven Woods” (1904). The Yeatsian passages imitated by Pound are voiced by personae experiencing epiphanic realizations of failed aspirations, beliefs, and dreams. They portray strong men disillusioned with politics, ambition, the gods, and the ways of humans and the world: “the yoke/Of the old ways of men have I cast aside” (“La Fraisne,” lines 11–12). In all poems, we find a rejection of society and

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civilization representing the complexities of political, social, and sexual ambitions and desires, described in “La Fraisne” as “the sorrow of men” (line 22). And, in the following lines from The Wanderings of Oisin, we are also given to understand how human passions have led to senseless death and destruction: Sad to remember, sick with years, The swift innumerable spears, The horsemen with their floating hair, And bowls of barley, honey, and wine. (lines 5–8)

Significantly, in both Yeats and Pound, we find speakers who resort to nature as a way to heal and forget, as in “The Madness of King Goll”: And now I wander in the woods … I wander on and wave my hands, And sing and shake my heavy locks. The grey wolf knows me; by one ear I lead along the woodland deer; The hares run by me growing bold. (43, lines 38, 44–48)

However, again, we can see a difference in how Yeats and Pound perceive of the human/nature relationship in their poems through Pound’s reworkings. It is important to notice that, whereas madness and distress are present in all the poems, the main difference among them is that, in “La Fraisne,” the lines directly echoing Yeats are tranquil. In the lines functioning as a refrain in “The Madness of King Goll,” for instance, an image of fluttering leaves introduces a sense of discord: They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old. (42, lines 12–13; italics in original)

The corresponding line in “La Fraisne” is “Naught but the wind that flutters in the leaves” (line 19). The main reason for the difference in mood between the passages is that, in his re-working, rather than impose the

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speaker’s state of mind on nature, Pound lets nature influence the speaker. In “The Madness of King Goll,” both the stanzas outlining the king’s acquisitions of wealth and victories in battle and the stanzas describing his rejection of his former life in favor of a simpler existence “in the woods” are accompanied by the refrain quoted above. The broken line and unsettling rhythm suggest that, rather than extending the ego into nature, the king has brought civilization and thus unrest into the woods, animating the leaves by his destructive behavior, “shouting,” “slewing,” and “trampling” his way through “the bubbling mire” (stanza 3, lines 25–26). In similar fashion, in “In the Seven Woods,” the woods are seen as an antidote to passions and desires that exhaust the heart: “The unavailing outcries of the old bitterness/That empty the heart” (103, lines 4–5), and, as in “The Madness of King Goll,” a note of dissonance is introduced with the speaker’s interaction with nature: I am contented, for I know that Quiet Wanders laughing and eating her wild heart Among pigeons and bees. (“In the Seven Woods,” 103, lines 10–12)

Toward the end of the poem, Yeats’s speaker personifies “Quiet” as triumphantly cannibalistic. Whatever the oxymoronic expression means, the description of “Quiet” is deeply unsettling. As such, Yeats is, again, offering resistance to a satisfactory conclusion. Rather than bringing madness and unrest to nature as Yeats’s speakers do, in “La Fraisne,” the speaker is considered mad by rational society because he claims to have had “a dog-wood tree” (line 15) and a “pool of the wood” (line 31) as brides: “She [a “dog-wood tree”] hath drawn me from mine old ways/Till men say that I am mad” (lines 20–21). That is, the poem’s speaker is termed mad by so-called rational society because he describes the communion between humans and nature in relational rather than oppositional terms. As such, Pound also challenges received ideas on “natural” human behavior. In addition, in “La Fraisne,” as in Yeats’s poems, the speaker expresses disillusionment with the ways of men, whether that means “swordplay” or love. However, unlike King Goll and Oisin, Pound’s speaker enacts what I see as a self-imposed separation from what is normally understood as “rational” society and a

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simultaneous movement toward identification with nature signaled, firstly, by the self-willed dementia in the line, “I do not like to remember things any more” (line 49), and, secondly, by the disintegration of the subject in the lines preceding that statement: Once when I was among the young men … And they said I was quite strong, among the young men. Once there was a woman … … but I forget … she was … … I hope she will not come again. … I do not remember. (lines 40–46; ellipses in original)

Even though the speaker still uses the first-person pronoun in these lines, the disintegration of the subject is dramatized through the frequent use of ellipses and the confused references to who “she” was. In one place it is suggested that “she” was a “pool of the wood” (line 31), in another a “dog-wood tree” (line 15) or someone who has been one (or both), whereas in the lines above it is suggested that “she” was a woman. Rather than asserting subjectivity, these lines could be read as the dramatization of a speaker merging with nature and in the process forgetting what the terms “she” and “I” mean. The ultimate abandonment of subjectivity and simultaneous identification with nature is signaled in the final metamorphic transformation of the speaking subject to “winds” or “trees” and the linguistic transformation of the subjective “I” to the collective “we”: I like one little band of winds that blow In the ash trees here: For we are quite alone Here ’mid the ash trees. (lines 50–53)

Importantly, these lines make it notoriously difficult to decide whether the speaker has turned into wind or trees. The reasons, I suggest, are, firstly, that the confusion echoes the ambiguity as to who “she” was, again imitating a mind that is about to forget the ways of humankind, including the meaning of words, and, secondly, that, given the state of mind

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expressed here, whether the speaker has turned into wind, tree, or both, does not really matter. The main difference between the poems of importance to sustainability studies is the difference between human-chauvinistic separation from and egalitarian identification with nature and the resulting effect on it. Whereas the enactment of the speaker’s merging of subjectivity with the winds and/or trees causes relief in “La Fraisne,” in “In the Seven Woods” the speaker says he is “contented” at the same time as attention is drawn to the personified “laughing” and “wandering” “Quiet.” Even though the agent this time may not be the speaker, there is still a strong subjective presence at the poem’s conclusion denying the speaker rest and relief. Significantly, in Yeats’s poems, nature is affected negatively by the presence of strong human subjectivities in distress (“They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter”). There is no indication in these poems that the human/nature interaction is to be considered as mutual; nature is rather seen as a way to externalize and perhaps also alleviate human sorrows, and the effect is detrimental. In Pound’s re-writing, on the other hand, the poem’s speaker is portraying humans and nature in relational terms in ways that are detrimental to the speaker (his reputation), not to nature. In addition, by relinquishing his own ego and subjectivity, the poem’s speaker is also favoring nature’s way of being and knowing over human existence and epistemology. Significantly, whereas all the poems’ speakers may claim contentment at the poems’ conclusions, only one of them is.9 Numerous poets have praised the ability of nature to heal and offer respite from human ailments. That is, many poets may be said to have offered poetry to help readers develop a vocabulary through which to talk about and cope with extreme conditions and emotions such as grief, loss, disconnectedness, madness, or even dementia. A reading of the function of nature and the effect of human interaction on non-human lives in Yeats and Pound through the perspective of biospheric egalitarianism, however, makes us attentive to the fact that not all human/nature interaction is beneficial to nature. This is also one of the forester and nature conservationist Peter Wohlleben’s main points in The Hidden Life of Trees (2017). In order to offer mental and physical healing, because we “intuitively register the forest’s health,” forests, like humans, need to be strong and healthy (Wohlleben 2017, 223). Healthy forests, according to

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Wohlleben, are the ones that have been allowed to grow uninterrupted by forestry and artificial planting, that is, uninterrupted by human concerns and self-interest (Wohlleben 2017, chapter 35, esp. 239). And that is one way we can understand the dissonance in the human/nature relationships introduced in Yeats’s poems, including in the following refrain from “The Withering of the Boughs” (1900): No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind; The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams. (105–106, lines 8–9)

Yeats’s importance to sustainability studies may be as a warning. We may read the distressed leaves and grieving boughs (“The Madness of King Goll” and “The Withering of the Boughs”) and the unrest characterizing the conclusion of “In the Seven Woods” as symbolic of the effects of human needs and actions on non-human lives (for instance, deforestation to make room for new settlements and other kinds of exploitation prioritizing human needs above the needs of nature). Yeats dramatizes the inability of speakers to abandon their dreams and desires to dominate and control nature and, as a consequence, it is sickened. Pound, by contrast, is able to convey the experience of a dissolved or dissolving subject-­ position as something to be desired, which makes his work useful to sustainability studies in a different way because, as Næss suggests, if we could imagine nature and humans as having equal value and with a “similar right to live and flourish” (Brennan and Lo 2016, section 3.1), it would be far more difficult to justify human domination over and utilization of nature. One of the ways in which one could imagine such a reconceptualization of the human/nature relation is through deconstructing traditional dichotomic and hierarchical ways of thinking about this relation and also consider it as mutual. That is, not only ask what nature can offer us, but also ask what we have to offer.

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Conclusion What “are always” could be the need across the ages to overcome the existential divide felt in Yeats’s poems between humans and nature, between a-subjective contentment “among pigeons and bees” and the desires and needs driving the egotistical self and nature to destruction. What “never happened” in Pound’s poetry could be the experience of being oak-root, coral, wind, and tree. What is important to notice is that (with the possible exception of “Heather”), in all the imitations treated, Pound values the perspectives and experiences of nature over human perspectives and experiences. By echoing and re-writing sources in poems dramatizing a willful dissolution of subjectivity into a community of trees, Pound could also be said to favor the communal over the individual on the formal and thematic levels. By extending communality to include trees (representing nature) and privileging the existence and knowledge of nature, plants, and trees over the self, Pound in fact asks us to care more for nature than for humans. Privileging the “other” over the “self ” is essential if we are to create a common future. What can poetry offer in the joint effort of coming to terms with sustainability? Wohlleben’s Hidden Life of Trees has been classified—and discredited—as popular science. The book’s popular appeal derives from the way he uses research as a starting point to encourage readers to think of trees as akin to animals and people—as social, sentient beings with emotional needs and with the ability to feel pain, fear, and empathy and communicate (by sending off scent signals to nearby trees when under attack) (Wohlleben 2017, 6–7, 12–13).10 At the same time, because his approach to scientific fact has in common with literature and poetry that he imaginatively anthropomorphizes trees, his discourse has been met with skepticism by biologists. As Sharon Kingsland writes in her book review: Biologists, in his words, get “worked up” about translating findings from animals to plants and blurring the boundaries between plants and animals. His [Wohlleben’s] response is “And so what? What would be so awful about that?” The distinction between plants and animals is an arbitrary one, in his view. He believes in the importance of erasing this distinction, because

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he thinks that recognizing the similarities would cause us to pay more attention to trees and other vegetation. (Kingsland 2018, 5)

Environmental ethics and conservationist literature show that alongside dualistic human-centered discourses of dominance and utility, alternative discourses do exist. The fact that trees are disappearing off the face of the earth in numbers too large to comprehend, shows that these discourses must be listened to. The creation of a sustainable world requires a paradigmatic rethinking of the borders between scientific veracity and imaginative discourses. If we consider scientific and imaginative aesthetic approaches to sustainability as complementary rather than antagonistic, we may also find that different disciplines may help provide different perspectives on what may have been considered an essential divide between the observer (humans) and the observed (nature, animals, insects, trees, plants). In the age of the Anthropocene, we need to move away from an ego-­ centric worldview toward communal ways of living and thinking, as Pound so eloquently models formally and thematically. The usability and recyclability of Pound’s work is indeed all the more striking because, biographically and politically, he was unable to imagine the non-hierarchical world that his poems help us picture. Næss—and the United Nations Development Programme—asks us to see the connectedness among all living things and to use the imagination to enact political change. However much we want to act ethically toward, preserve, and “appreciate” other species, nature, and the earth’s biodiversity, Yeats’s poetry reminds us of the sheer difficulty of imagining and bringing about a reality where we willingly set our own subjectivity and egotistical needs aside to create a sustainable world. At the same time, the unique ability of conservationist literature and poetry to deconstruct oppositions between human and non-human ways of existence, to make the reader imagine non-human perspectives and communal ways of being, and to stage imaginary encounters with lives we cannot quite comprehend but which we nevertheless feel deeply related to may enable us to empathize and identify with that which is other and different. This is the first step toward change if the study of poetry is embedded in an interdisciplinary curriculum that moves among poems and ecosystems and politics.

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Sustainable education demands a shift in the premise of why we are studying trees, roots, plants, and animals and how we perceive of the natural. The joint effort of all disciplines may help us ask different questions and, as such, offer different solutions. That is, ask not only what nature can give us in terms of utility and joy, but also what we have to offer; not only ask what makes us different from nature, but also what we have in common: what if plants really are like people—or people are like plants? “So what” if the wondrous things in Pound’s poetry never happened? The change in perception of received ideas on what is natural, on nature and our place in it called for in his work is precisely what is needed if we are to move beyond first-order learning toward action. In short, conservationist literature and poetry might not only instill the desire in us to preserve the natural world but, through a sense of kinship, might also help us rethink the world and our place in it.

Notes 1. Ernst Friedrich Schumacher (1911–1977) was a “pioneer in integrated thinking about economic, environmental and cultural issues” (Schumacher Center for a New Economics n.d.). 2. Parts of this section have been adapted from my unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (H. S. Moen 2010). 3. For further critical readings of Pound’s approach to and appreciation of nature and the arts, see Baumann and Ricciardi (2018). 4. See also Shaun Tan’s illustrated fable “Bears with Lawyers” in Tales from the Inner City, which imagines the legal consequences (and conundrum for humans) of biospheric egalitarianism. In the story, humankind is sued by bears who demand reparations for all the damages done throughout history: the “case against humankind [had been] gathered over some ten thousand years” and included: “Theft. Pillage. Unlawful Occupation. Deportation. Slavery. Murder. Torture. Genocide” (Tan 2018, 167; italics in original). If animals (or the non-human) were to be given similar rights as humans, it is suggested, we would owe a debt too great to repay as we simply do not have the means to offer reparations. As Tan’s narrator exclaims, “The bears asked us to relinquish our hold on all that never belonged to us in the first place” (168).

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5. This is not necessarily a new way of thinking. As Brennan and Lo write, “[o]ne clear historical antecedent to this kind of nature spiritualism is the Romanticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as expressed in … The Reveries of the Solitary Walker” (section 3.2). 6. Neither Pound nor Ovid believed the latter’s tales of mystical transformations were true. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid creates a linear myth of origins from a cosmological past (mythos) to the present founding of Rome and the deification of Caesar (logos), suggesting that the concern in the Metamorphoses was not to present positivistic truth but rather to construct an imagined genealogy of human existence from a time in which gods and mortals interacted to the point in history when humans became their own agents. Likewise, in “Arnold Dolmetsch” (1918), Pound writes: The first myths arose when a man walked sheer into “nonsense,” that is to say, when some very vivid and undeniable adventure befell him, and he told someone else who called him a liar. Thereupon, after bitter experience, perceiving that no one could understand what he meant when he said that he ‘turned into a tree’ he made a myth—a work of art that is—an impersonal or objective story woven out of his own emotion, as the nearest equation that he was capable of putting into words. That story, perhaps, then gave rise to a weaker copy of his emotion in others, until there arose a cult, a company of people who could understand each other’s nonsense about the gods. (Pound 1968, 431) 7. According to Peter Brooker, the “hazel-tree” refers to the Gaelic tree of knowledge (Brooker 1979, 44). Peter Brooker, A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound. London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1979, 44. 8. The introduction to “La Fraisne” is written in the form of a razo which was used in Provençal poetry as a prose explanation or preface to a poem. In the razo, the author or author-persona explicitly states that the poem should be read as a reworking of the fictitious poets Miraut de Garzelas and Peire Vidal (a legendary Provençal troubadour) and the historical Marie de France and Yeats of the “Celtic Twilight” (Pound 1965, 14). 9. The exact term used in “La Fraisne” is “glad”: “But I have seen the sorrow of men, and am glad,/For I know that the wailing and bitterness are a folly” (lines 22–23).

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10. As an example, Wohlleben uses the research of Suzanne Simard and others who, since the 1990s, have “studied the networks linking tree roots with mycorrhizal fungi, forming a web of underground relations that has been dubbed ‘the wood wide web’” (Kingsland 2018, 2–3) to suggest that, because trees are connected and are able to pump nourishment through the “web” in times of drought, trees do communicate and have empathy (12–13, 18).

References Baumann, W., and C.  Ricciardi. 2018. Ezra Pound’s Green World: Nature Landscape and Language. Brighton, UK: Edward Everett Root. Brennan, A., and Y.S. Lo. 2016. Environmental Ethics. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. Stanford University Press. Accessed 20 December 2019.  https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/ ethics-­environmental/. Brooker, P. 1979. A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound. London: Faber and Faber. Calasso, R. 1993. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. New  York: Vintage Books. Kingsland, S.E. 2018. Facts or Fairy Tales? Peter Wohlleben and the Hidden Life of Trees. Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 99 (4): e01443. Accessed 20 December 2019. https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ full/10.1002/bes2.1443. Moen, H.S. 2010. Continuities and Discontinuities and the Resistance to Closure: Vortices in Ezra Pound’s Imitations, Imagisms, and The Cantos’ Ends and Beginnings. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Bergen, Norway. Ovid. 1955. Metamorphoses. London: Penguin Books. Pound, E. 1916. Lustra of Ezra Pound. Privately Printed. ———. 1965. A Lume Spento and Other Early Poems. New York: New Directions. ———. 1968. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions. ———. 1979. ABC of Reading. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1996a. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions. ———. 1996b. Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2003. Poems and Translations. New York: Library of America.

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Schumacher Center for a New Economics. n.d. Ernst Friedrich Schumacher. Accessed 27 December 2019. https://centerforneweconomics.org/envision/ legacy/ernst-­friedrich-­schumacher/. Sterling, S. 2001. Sustainable Education: Re-visiting Learning and Change. Cambridge: Green Books. Tan, S. 2018. Tales from the Inner City. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. United Nations Development Programme. n.d. Sustainable Development Goals: 17 Goals to Transform our World. United Nations Development Programme. Accessed 6 April 2020. https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/ sustainable-­development-­goals/goal-­15-­life-­on-­land.html. Wittgenstein, L. 2005. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge. Wohlleben, P. 2017. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World. London: William Collins. World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987. Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yeats, W.B. 1991. The Poems. London: J. M. Dent and Sons.

4 Listening to Animals for a Change: On Teaching Animal Poetry from a Critical Rhetorical Perspective Carina Agnesdotter

Introduction Which poems are appropriate to use in the teaching of ecologically sustainable development? As I ponder this, I happen to listen to a radio show about the Swedish author and Nobel laureate Harry Martinson (1904–1978). In the program, actress Stina Ekblad reads one of Martinson’s best known and most widely distributed poems, “The Earthworm” (“Daggmasken”), from the collection Trade-Wind (Passad) (1945). The poem personifies the earthworm as a “deathless, gray, tiny farmer in the planet’s soil” that is working tirelessly to make the fields ready to wear “their harvest clothes” (Martinson 1982, 139, lines 10, 7). After the reading, Ekblad talks about how she previously suffered from a severe worm phobia and how the reading of poems about worms, including “The Earthworm,” cured it. The poem’s unexpected imagery

C. Agnesdotter (*) Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. L. Kleppe, A. Sorby (eds.), Poetry and Sustainability in Education, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95576-2_4

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made the dreaded worm appear as “one of us: living, suffering, with the same right of place in existence as we” (Ekblad 2019). The anecdote shows that reading poetry can actually make a real difference on a personal level. It is also an example of how poetry can, precisely through its aesthetic design, help to change the perception of reality and, in this case, break down the mental barrier between the reader and an animal species that appeared profoundly alien before reading. This chapter is based on my experience of teaching poetry at the university, especially in teacher education. In courses where I teach poems that in different ways relate to pressing societal issues—such as racism, nationalism, gender inequality, or climate change—students have a similar experience to the one described by Ekblad. They express a strong urge to speak not only about the poems as poetic texts, but also about the thoughts and feelings that the reading gives rise to that are directed at phenomena in the world outside the poem. To insist that the discussion in the classroom should be devoted to the poem as such—focusing, for instance, on form or the use of poetic devices—and not the context it relates to is to stifle the interest that the poem has aroused and to limit the importance of poetry in our lives, in society, and in education. It has become increasingly clear to me that the readers’ personal relations to the subjects of the poems influence the experience, understanding, and appreciation of the poems themselves and vice versa. In this chapter, I will discuss a method of teaching poetry with topics that refer to sustainability issues, exploring both text and context in ways that offer in-depth knowledge not only about poetry but also about the topics that poems are about. I will also emphasize how the reading of the poems influences readers’ and students’ thoughts and feelings. My starting point is thus rhetorical. Rhetoric can, by a broad definition, be understood as the “human  use of symbols to communicate” (Foss 2018, 3), which in some sense renders all poetry rhetorical. A more classical definition emphasizes that rhetoric is intended to influence or persuade an audience in a specific rhetorical situation. At the center of a rhetorical situation is, according to Lloyd F. Bitzer, an urgent problem— an exigence—that can be affected or removed by rhetorical discourse that influences the audience (Bitzer 1968, 6). One of the most urgent problems of our time is the ecological crisis, and I will use poems that can be

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related to that crisis in the discussion about how poetry can be taught from a critical rhetorical perspective. The fact that the nature and causes of and possible solutions to the ecological crisis are unclear, and therefore under constant debate, shows that it to a high degree is a rhetorical exigence. In the complex rhetorical situation that has emerged around global environmental problems since the 1960s, politicians, scientists, and activists use rhetoric in order to gain acceptance for their understanding of the problem, influence policy, and affect the personal behavior of the audience (Besel 2013; McCabe 2012; Otto 2009). The ecological crisis also increasingly influences literature and literature research. Poetry, especially, is highlighted by both poets and ecocritical scholars as a genre particularly suited to exploring complex environmental issues and finding new ways of thinking and living. Susanna Lidström, for instance, suggests that poetry has an opportunity to offer new perspectives on the acute environmental problems that policy has failed to solve because it is “designed to contain multiple levels of meaning at once, challenge the imagination, and evoke responses that are based on something more than scientific consensus and rationale” (Lidström 2015, iii). Poetry thus offers a form for expressing thoughts and feelings about the ecological dilemma that differ from the dominant discourse in public media. According to M.  Jimmie Killingworth and Jacquelin S.  Palmer, the media discourse is characterized by polarizing and oversimplifying ecospeak that prevents new thinking and cements conflicts between groups with differing views (Killingsworth and Palmer 1992, 8–10). The ability of poetry to offer new perspectives is also one of the reasons why poetry plays an important role in the rhetoric of the environmental movement. My study of the rhetorical functions of poetry in Swedish social movements of the 1970s and 1980s shows that the poems used in the environmental movement greatly contributed to developing new knowledge and ways of thinking about the exigences in which the movement was involved. The poetically condensed argumentation technique of the poems required for their interpretation a co-creative reader, involved in both the poetry’s aesthetics and its context. One of poetry’s most important rhetorical functions was to make the overall and often abstract environmental issues personally relevant to the recipient. The poems did so by connecting intellect with emotion, personal with

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political, local with global, and present with history and future (Agnesdotter 2014). Poetry’s ability to provide a personal anchored intellectual and emotional knowledge of complex and difficult-to-solve problems like the ecological crisis makes it rewarding to use not only in literature education but in all the subjects that deal with these issues. The aim of this chapter is to discuss how teaching poetry from a critical rhetorical perspective can provide knowledge of ecology and sustainable development, and how the image of reality created in the poems affects us as readers.

A Rhetorical View of Animal Poetry In discussions about how we can create an ecologically sustainable future, the ability to understand the non-human world—animals and nature—is often emphasized as an important prerequisite for understanding ourselves as part of the ecosystem and, by extension, acting to preserve it. In ecocriticism, poetry has been promoted as a genre whose specific aesthetic design makes it particularly suitable to explore the relationship between humans, animals, and nature (Garrard 2012; Kerridge 2014; Lidström 2015; Oerlemans 2018; Stein Larsen et al. 2017). Poetry with animal motifs is therefore interesting material to use in the teaching of environmental sustainability. There are, of course, many kinds of animal poetry, which offer different input to the discussion about the view of animals, the relationship between animals and humans, and the more general environmental threats. Lidström and Garrard (2014) distinguish two dominant directions in ecopoetry, to which many animal poems can also be attributed. In ecophenomenological poetry, the primary focus is “observation or recognition of the natural world for its own sake” (Lidström and Garrard 2014, 43). This type of poetry is based on the individual’s experiences of nature and animals, especially of the kind of animals that are easy to visualize and relate to. “The Earthworm,” cited in the opening of this chapter, could be understood as an ecophenomenological poem, although the earthworm itself may not be easy to relate to. However, one of the points of “The Earthworm” is that it leads the reader to notice and appreciate the worm for its extraordinary properties and

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fundamental importance to the earth. The attention to animals and nature for their own sake may lead to an increased awareness of the importance of the non-human world and affect how we act in relation to it. This makes this type of poems interesting to use in teaching about ecological sustainability. Sasha Matthewman has developed an ecocritical method for teaching poems with natural motifs such as these. She argues that the teaching should take as its starting point the experience of nature that the poem embodies and explore how it relates to “real” nature. It is nature and the students’ personal experiences of it that should be the focus of teaching, not, for example, the linguistic features of the poems (Matthewman 2010, 50). This focus on the reality that the poems refer to and the student’s experience is important also for my teaching method, but I also want to draw more attention to how the poems create the image of reality and how this image affects us as readers. Alongside the poems about nature “out there” and our individual relationship with it, Lidström and Garrard distinguish a different direction, which they call environmental poetry. This poetry addresses environmental issues more explicitly and focuses on “the historical, political and cultural dimensions of the relationship between human and non-human nature” (Lidström and Garrard 2014, 50). Environmental poetry is more clearly linked to poetry’s potential to influence both policy and personal behavior, which many ecocritics emphasize as the main task of ecopoetry (Garrard 2012, 3–4; Kerridge 2014). The focus on the ability of poetry to make a difference on both a personal and a political level shows that environmental poetry can also be understood as fundamentally rhetorical. According to Sonja K. Foss, one of the communicative functions of rhetoric is to construct the image of reality. This construction affects not only our intellectual understanding of the world in which we live but also our feelings and actions (Foss 2018, 6). Ekblad’s reflection, above, on the reading of “The Earthworm” made it clear that the poem had changed her image of reality. If we are to analyze how “The Earthworm” is designed to construct a reality for the reader, and perhaps even persuade her to adopt its perspective, we can point out that the poem, through the anthropomorphic presentation of the earthworm as “the underneath farmer” (139, line 6),

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establishes a rhetorically effective analogy between the worm and human, where the positive values associated with the human farmer are transferred to the earthworm. The earthworm borrows, so to speak, the farmer’s ethos (one can note that the poem’s earthworm is male, just like the conventional image of a farmer, though real earthworms are hermaphrodites). As we could see, Ekblad emphasized that the poem made her perceive the earthworm as “one of us,” and it is likely that the analogy contributed to that. The comparison also provides knowledge about the function of earthworms in nature, which is a logical appeal (logos) for the worms  being worth respect. Feelings of indignation and compassion (pathos) may be aroused by the image of the earthworm, whom the speaker indicates is not respected, even though he “works entirely full of soil, / speechless with soil, and blind” (139, lines 4–5). Ekblad also pointed out that the image of the worm as “suffering” moved her. By stressing the necessary work of keeping the earth moving to prepare for the harvest, the crucial importance of the earthworm for human survival is emphasized, which opens the opportunity for reflection on the relationship between animals and humans. The poem’s rhetorical features are most evident through the twice-­ repeated rhetorical question: “Who really respects the earthworm” (139, line 1). The obvious answer to the question in this context is “too few”, and, in fact, it is an invitation to the reader to “really”, in depth, respect the earthworm. The question also suggests that it is a problem that so few do. From a rhetorical point of view, we have to ask ourselves why the (lack of ) respect seems so important to the speaker of the poem and try to link the question to a rhetorical exigence, that is, to a problem in the world outside the poem. Considered as an environmental poem, “The Earthworm” may be related to the rhetorical situation that has arisen around the environmental crisis. It then invites reflection on the threat to the ecosystem in a wider sense. Thus, a poem does not necessarily have to be intended as a contribution to a rhetorical situation, or to actively relate to an exigence, in order to function as a starting point for a discussion and contribute to increased knowledge and commitment in relation to exigences that are relevant now. Poems from older times often find renewed relevance for later generations precisely because they seem to say something important about current problems. One example of that is

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how “The Earthworm” gets entangled in the environmental issues when quoted in a blog post discussing farming, weather, and climate. The writer of the blog post, “Ourfriendben”, also feels obliged to answer the poem’s question: “Finally, let me just note that, for gardeners in general and earthworm lovers everywhere, the answer to Martinson’s ‘who’ is a resounding ‘us’!” (“Ourfriendben” 2008).

 eaching Poetry from a Critical T Rhetorical Perspective What does it mean to study and teach poetry from a critical rhetorical perspective? Foss defines rhetorical criticism as “a qualitative research method designed for the systematic investigation and explanation of symbolic acts and artifacts for the purpose of understanding rhetorical processes” (Foss 2018, 6). The critical rhetorical study of texts involves analysis and interpretation of the texts themselves but also focus on how they relate to reality and how they are designed to affect readers. When teaching poetry about urgent societal issues, it is productive to take the rhetorical situation as a starting point and focus on the links between situation, textual strategies, and readers’ reactions. Unlike rhetorical texts in other genres, poetry often lacks well-defined appeals and a clear line of argumentation that would walk the reader step by step to a conclusion. Rather, in a poem the entire argument could be given in the form of an image, an example, or a metaphor (Agnesdotter 2014). It is also often unclear to what rhetorical situation—if any—a poem actually relates, which “The Earthworm” is an example of. The reader is usually required to engage in active dialogue with the poem in order to recreate situation and argument, which allows for a deeper personal involvement in both the poem and the issues it relates to. As Lennart Hellspong points out in an article about the functions of rhetorical criticism in education, this way of approaching texts as answers to demands in a rhetorical situation promotes empathy and understanding, since the student has to place herself in the author’s position and reflect on the solutions that have been chosen, but also provides a critical perspective. The purpose of this

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critical perspective, however, is not to dismiss the text but to respond to its speech (Hellspong 2006, 67). Rhetorical criticism is in this way closely linked to critical thinking and the developing of a communicative ability that is crucial for a democratic citizen’s role.

Teaching Methods I have found it rewarding to introduce critical rhetorical thinking by asking a number of questions that in different ways focus both on the reality the poem relates to and on why and how the text’s construction affects readers. Foss, who has a similar point of departure in the article “Rhetorical Criticism as the Asking of Questions” (1989), formulates two questions that also work well as overall questions in critical rhetorical poetry analysis: “What is the relationship between the rhetoric and its context?” (1989, 192) and “How does the message construct a particular reality for the audience and the rhetor?” (1989, 193). The questions must, of course, be concretized and divided in ways that suit the selected poems, the student groups, and the purpose of the teaching. The advantage of starting with general questions such as these, instead of, for example, specific rhetorical theories and methods, is that even students who lack previous knowledge of rhetorical criticism can reason about them in a productive way. They can take stock of what they already know about the context the poem actualizes and, if necessary, investigate it more closely. To answer the question of how the poem constructs the image of reality, which is in fact a question of how the poem persuades, they can explore their own and their fellow students’ experiences of reading the poem and try to point out what it is in the poem that makes them react as they do. For instance, when I taught Linnéa Axelsson’s epic poem Ædnan (2018), which depicts Sámi history for the last hundred years, students were able to explore their experiences of reading and reacting. The seminar was part of a literature course focusing on literary genres and themes, and the students had not been introduced to rhetorical theory. I had asked them to prepare for the seminar by thinking about the following questions: What image of reality does Ædnan construct? Did you learn anything about the history and situation of the Sámi and/or Swedish

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society and people that you did not know before? If so, how was that knowledge conveyed through the text? Do you think Ædnan has the potential to affect readers and society? If so, in what way and why? They were also asked to each select one of the poems in Ædnan that they found particularly interesting and to formulate thoughts and questions about the sample text that we could use as a starting point for the seminar discussion. This turned out to be a seminar where I as a teacher did not have to do anything to activate the students. They immediately started sharing what they knew about the historical and political issues the poems refer to and searching the internet for more facts to fill in the gaps in the poetic description of the events. They then went on to discuss the emotions brought about by their new insights into the Sámi situation, of which none of them had any personal experience. We were able to explore the reactions more closely when the students introduced the different poems they had selected, which used a large variety of poetic and rhetorical devices such as descriptions, repetition, metaphors, similes, and symbols. At the end of the seminar the students concluded that they had gained a greater understanding both of the reality for the Sámi through history and of how the poems had affected their thoughts and feelings. They said that they would like to return to Ædnan and use it in their future work as teachers, and also that they appreciated the book more after having discussed it this way. This is a particularly important point when working with poetry, as it shows that a critical rhetorical approach also gives space for aesthetic experiences and enjoyment. With students who have prior knowledge of rhetorical criticism, the questions can function as a starting point for a more in-depth analysis using rhetorical theories and concepts. I have, for instance, used Bitzer’s theory of the three constituents of the rhetorical situation—the exigence, the audience that can be influenced by the discourse, and constraints, which are the limitations and resources that affect the speaker/writer and the audience in the current situation (Bitzer 1968)—in a lesson comparing the lyrics of “This Is My Land” by Sofia Jannok and “My Country” (“Mitt land”) by Ultima Thule. In a decontextualized reading, these two lyrics are similar. They use the same kind of nature images and rhetorical appeals in a eulogy to their country. Nevertheless, the impression of the two texts differs significantly, as they relate to two different rhetorical

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situations. Jannok is a Sámi artist and activist, and Ultima Thule is known as a nationalist band, with connections to the Swedish extreme right movement. By exploring the construction of the image of reality in the lyrics, through the lens of Bitzer’s theory, the students could turn their instinctive liking of one of the texts and dislike of the other to a more informed and critical discussion of the context and rhetorical purpose of the texts and of their own reactions. To sum up, my experience is that using questions to which students seek answers, by examining their own and their peers’ experience of the poem and the reality it relates to, leads them to really engage in dialogue with the poem and their fellow students. The method often creates a commitment to both the poems and the topics they are about.

Choice of Animal Poems To further exemplify what it might mean to analyze poetry with animal motifs from a critical rhetorical perspective, I have chosen two poems by the Swedish author Ingrid Sjöstrand (1922–2020).1 Sjöstrand herself was deeply involved in the environmental movement, and the selected poems can undoubtedly be regarded as environmental poems that focus on ecological problems and also actualize the power relations between animals and humans. The poems are short and easily accessible, which makes them suitable to use as an example in this context. I showed above that both ecophenomenological and environmental poems can be rewarding to discuss from a critical rhetorical perspective, as they tell us something important about the non-human world, animal–human relations, and overall environmental problems. The growing awareness of the threats to animals and nature has led to an increased interest in how animals are represented in culture in general, and to the emergence of theoretical fields such as animal studies (Garrard 2012, 154–155; Oerlemans 2018, 3). Especially in animal studies, there is a criticism of the fact that animals are usually not represented as animals in the culture but are ascribed human characteristics and human intention (Garrard 2012, 153–154). Anthropomorphism has been the absolute trend

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in poetry, where the majority of animal poems, according to Oerlemans, say more about humans than about animals (Oerlemans 2018, 124). From a rhetorical perspective, anthropomorphism is often effective, since we are more easily persuaded by those who are like us. The image of anthropomorphized animals highlights the similarity. In a study of the rhetoric of the animal rights organization PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), Wendy Atkins-Sayre has shown how effective the emphasis on the traits and qualities that animals and humans have in common is in breaking down the boundary between animals and humans. By portraying animals as capable of thinking, feeling, and even judging the actions of humans, the images used by PETA invite people to expand their identities in such a way that the animals are also included in their “moral communities” (Atkins-Sayre 2010). Atkins-Sayre also makes an important point when she shows that anthropomorphism does not have to be anthropocentric.2 It can focus on animals instead of humans, and thus allow the latter to imagine what it means to be an animal (Atkins-­ Sayre 2010, 318). Because of this, anthropomorphism also has clear educational advantages. Matthewman argues that using anthropomorphic descriptions of animals in education can “bring animals into a vivid and empathic focus, which scientific description cannot” (Matthewman 2010, 64). By giving animals voice and conscious agency, animal poems have the potential to function as a bridge between humans and animals. I have chosen here as examples poems with anthropomorphic images of animals, which not only allow us to understand something about the living conditions of animals but also draw attention to the threat to animals, to the entire ecosystem, and thus to ourselves.

As a Small Tortoiseshell Butterfly As a small tortoiseshell butterfly you just need a few leaves but these you need. (Sjöstrand 2014, 7)

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This very short poem of only fifteen words (eleven in the Swedish original) divided into four lines allows us to adapt the perspective of a slightly anthropomorphized small tortoiseshell butterfly. Naming a special species of butterfly in the first line shows that the poem is not about butterflies in general, nor does it use the butterfly as a literary symbol. Instead, the butterfly appears here as a specific animal, with specific needs for survival. The second line shows how extremely modest these needs are. In the third line through the word “but,” a conflict is introduced. The last two lines implicitly suggest that the butterfly is not even granted the few leaves it needs for its survival. The poem may at first seem to express an obvious observation. However, interpreted as an argument in relation to a rhetorical situation, it does contain social criticism and can, despite its compressed form, offer knowledge of both the butterfly’s living conditions and the consequences of the ecological crisis. How, then, does the poem relate to its context? The poem is, on a basic level, about the conditions of the small tortoiseshell butterfly. An examination of the poem’s relation to its context requires a certain knowledge of precisely these conditions. The small tortoiseshell butterfly is the most common butterfly species in Sweden and is also found throughout Europe. It mainly lives in cultural settlements and feeds on nectar and nettles. (The Swedish name is, in a direct translation, “nettle butterfly.”) The butterfly plays a central role in the ecosystem, partly because it and its larvae constitute important food for other species. The poem further suggests that the butterfly’s habitat, and thus the butterfly itself, is threatened. A report from 2019 shows that 40% of the earth’s insect species are threatened with extinction and that butterflies and moths are particularly vulnerable. One of the reasons is that large-­ scale agriculture has caused many species to lose their natural habitats. Insects are also threatened by chemical pesticides, invasive species, and climate change (Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys 2019). According to the Swedish Board of Agriculture, the small tortoiseshell butterfly is not yet threatened in Sweden, but in England their prevalence has decreased significantly in the last decade. The reason is believed to be that the butterfly is attacked by a parasitic fly that has become more common with the warmer climate (Jordbruksverket 2018). By studying how the poem relates to its context, it is thus possible to gain knowledge about the

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butterfly itself and about how environmental degradation and climate change threaten both the species and the ecosystem. Of course, the latter includes humans. How does the poem construct a special reality for the reader? How does it work as an argument? Initially, we can note that the image given of reality is that the small tortoiseshell butterfly is threatened by the lack of enough leaves to eat. The needs and requirements of the butterfly are thus presented as small and just, which can be considered as a kind of ethical appeal, since it depicts the butterfly’s character in a way that is likely to arouse the recipients’ trust and goodwill. The fact that this butterfly only takes what it needs for its own survival can also be regarded as a criticism of capitalism, as it opens an implicit comparison with the human way of exhausting the earth’s resources. The small needs, enhanced by the poem’s repetitive scheme, and the smallness of the butterfly in the world are also embodied in the highly compressed form of the poem. The aesthetic design strengthens the argument. Empathy for the poem’s subject may also be strengthened by the fact that the reader probably has a positive image of butterflies in advance. Here, no detailed argumentation of the kind we saw in “The Earthworm” is needed. It is also likely that most people living in Europe have seen a small tortoiseshell butterfly. The threat described can thus be perceived as concrete and close, which is important for arousing commitment and emotions (pathos). The image of how the butterfly risks not getting the few leaves it needs to survive can also provoke indignation. Considered in relation to the rhetorical situation as a whole, the threat to life that the poem implies is a strong emotional appeal. Pronounced arguments aimed at the reader’s reason (logos) are few in such a compressed poem. Its explicit statement is self-evident: you need what you need. Still, if analyzed in relation to a rhetorical situation in which the ecological crisis constitutes the problem, it uses some logical appeals for reasoning, which build upon the reader’s knowledge of the context. It argues, among other things, enthymemically—that is, through a logical reasoning that omits the facts that are known to the audience— as it assumes that readers can draw the conclusion that the butterfly as a species is threatened solely through the laconic formulation “but these / you need.” The enthymeme is usually thought to be an effective

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argumentation strategy, since it requires the recipients to fill in missing parts of the arguments themselves. Further, the implicit antithesis between how little a butterfly needs and how much humans think we need, which has led to the butterfly being deprived of its natural habitat, can be considered a logical appeal if one believes that there is a causal connection. Together with the students, we can discuss how we perceive these different appeals to both feeling and reason and work around whom the poem really wants to convince and about what. It is possible to regard the poem as positioning the reader as responsible for the butterfly being threatened, but also as positioning her as part of the threatened ecosystem. This compressed and seemingly uncomplicated poem can thus be taken as a starting point for discussions about the nature of the environmental crisis, about its causes and possible solutions, and about how poems and other texts can be designed to persuade.

The Fish The fish who have been here for four hundred and thirty million years and the birds who have been here for three hundred and fifty million years sigh to each other The ones that came just now the two-legged walking around and spitting on the Earth – will they stay? (Sjöstrand 1987, 8)

Compared to the poems about the earthworm and the small tortoiseshell butterfly, “The Fish” is more explicitly pedagogical and polemical,

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but it also has a humorous tone that has made it popular among the students with whom I have discussed it. Here, two types of animals, the fish and the birds, through the trope of synecdoche, may represent all animals in a kind of only half-pronounced accusation against humans. The poem’s representation of the animals is fully anthropomorphic, as they are given the voice and possibilities of communicating with one another across species boundaries with the help of the rhetorical trope prosopopoeia. Emma Tornborg argues that the use of prosopopoeia can be regarded as an “act of empowerment,” as the text gives voice to otherwise silent objects (Tornborg 2014, 34). Animals may not be silent, but they do lack human language, and here they are given the power to speak directly to humans. The poem activates the knowledge of the history of the earth’s development and argues that the fish and the birds by virtue of their significant age—something that occupies just over half of the poem’s lines and is emphasized by the repetitive form—have accumulated knowledge and experience enough to assess the irresponsible behavior of the “newcomers.” Age is also an important part of the ethical appeal. The fish and birds are simply positioned as the adults in the room. Even the sighing can possibly be interpreted as an adult reaction to a child’s immaturity. It is interesting to note that humans in this poem are positioned as an animal species among others. They are only referred to as “the two-­ legged,” also a kind of synecdoche where the whole human being is represented by only one feature. Thus, when the other animals look at humans, the number of legs is what is distinctive, not the formidable brain capacity that is at the center of humans’ self-image. In this poem, it is instead the fish and birds that represent thinking and moral superiority, which is shown by the fact that they have the power to assess and implicitly condemn human actions. Animals are here understood in human terms (anthropomorphism) and humans in animal terms (zoomorphism). In addition, the poem’s animals are shown as superior to humans (allomorphism). Precisely the moral superiority of the animals makes it possible that the reader of this poem identifies more with the fish and the birds than with the two-legged, which in that case blurs the boundaries between animals and humans and might challenge the reader’s identity. Although this poem does not represent animals in a realistic way, it provides

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interesting points of departure for a discussion about the relationship between animals and humans and the ethical issues associated with them. Pathos in this poem is mainly aroused by the image of “the two-legged” spitting on the earth, which puts humans in the position of the opponent of the animals. Spitting is a strong sign of contempt, and the image therefore becomes deeply symbolic. The poem ends with a question: “Will they stay?” The question expresses the critical attitude of the animals, but is not to be understood as a rhetorical question. Instead, it is highly authentic and directed toward the reader. Will humanity survive? The poem raises a number of other issues to consider when examining the relationship to the context. What is it that could cause the animals in the poem to regard humans as contemptuous of the earth? Is the charge justified? If so, is it possible to do something to change people’s behavior? In the same way as in the poem about the butterfly, it is clear that this poem requires a committed reader who can recreate the underlying assumptions on which the highly implicit argumentation is based. It raises important questions about environmental rights and obligations, but it does not give any explicit answers. The readers must find the answers themselves, which makes the poem an interesting starting point for both personal and political reflection. The discussion about the poem’s image of reality and how we should relate to it also gives students an opportunity to develop their own ability to both articulate their views and actively listen to others.

Conclusion What would animals tell us, if they could talk? Poetry offer us an opportunity to explore this question, by giving animals human language and agency. As readers, we are invited to see the world from the animals’ perspective and look at ourselves through their eyes. To really engage with this kind of poetry might be especially important at a time marked by the ecological crisis, since the shift of perspective could give new insights about the problem and our own relation to it. One way of taking serious what poetry can contribute to education about problems in the “real world” is to teach from a critical rhetorical

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perspective, focusing both on the reality the poems are related to and on the image they give of this reality. Poetry, with all its possibilities to contain multiple meanings and affect readers in unpredictable ways, is exciting material to use in critical rhetorical analysis. The approach requires students to engage deeply with the poetic text as they explore its image of reality and how it affects their own and their fellow students’ attitudes and emotions. The focus on what the poem does in relation to readers and society, rather than on what it means, opens for an active and critical response from the students, as they are encouraged to expand their knowledge about the issues at stake and to pay attention to how their attitudes and feelings are formed. Teaching poetry from a rhetorical perspective is thus at the same time a method for practicing critical thinking, which is also an important aim in education for sustainable learning.

Notes 1. Sjöstrand has given her permission for the poems to be translated and published in full in this chapter. I dedicate the chapter to her. 2. Ann-Sofie Lönngren defines anthropocentrism as follows: “‘Anthropocentrism’ here is understood as the notion that ‘human’ is at the center of the world, that there is a clear and stable divide between human and animal, human ‘is hierarchically superior to the animal’” (Lönngren 2015, 1).

References Agnesdotter, C. 2014. Dikt i rörelse: Ingrid Sjöstrand och poesins retorik i kvinnornas fredsrörelse 1979–1982. Möklinta, Sweden: Gidlund. Atkins-Sayre, W. 2010. Articulating Identity: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Animal/Human Divide. Western Journal of Communication 74 (3): 309–328. Besel, R.D. 2013. Accommodating Climate Change Science: James Hansen and the Rhetorical/Political Emergence of Global Warming. Science in Context 26 (1): 137–152. Bitzer, L.F. 1968. The Rhetorical Situation. Philosophy and Rhetoric 1: 1–14.

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Ekblad, S. 2019. Lundströms Bokradio Special om Harry Martinson 2/3: Vårt behov av Harry [Lundströms Bookradio Special on Harry Martinson 2/3: Our Need for Harry] (Radio Program). Sveriges Radio, January 12. Foss, S.K. 1989. Rhetorical Criticism as the Asking of Questions. Communication Education 38 (3): 191–196. ———. 2018. Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Garrard, G. 2012. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge. Hellspong, L. 2006. Pedagogiska funktioner hos retorisk kritik. Rhetorica Scandinavica 38: 63–71. Jordbruksverket (Swedish Board of Agriculture). 2018. Nässelfjäril—ett välkänt vårtecken, December 4. Accessed 27 January 2020. http://www.jordbruksverket.se/amnesomraden/miljoklimat/ettriktodlingslandskap/mangfaldpaslatten/fjarilariodlingslandskapet/nasselfjaril.4.37e9ac46144f41921 cdfb16.html. Kerridge, R. 2014. Ecocritical Approaches to Literary Form and Genre: Urgency, Depth, Provisionality, Temporality. In The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, ed. G. Garrard. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Killingsworth, M.J., and J.S. Palmer. 1992. Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Larsen, P.S., et al. 2017. Økopoesi. Bergen, Norway: Alvheim and Eide. Lidström, S. 2015. Nature, Environment and Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Poetics of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. London: Routledge. Lidström, S., and G. Garrard. 2014. ‘Images Adequate to Our Predicament’: Ecology, Environment and Ecopoetics. Environmental Humanities 5 (1): 35–53. Lönngren, A.-S. 2015. Following the Animal: Power, Agency, and Human–Animal Transformations in Modern, Northern-European Literature. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Martinson, H. 1982. The Rattle Bag, ed. S.  Heaney and T.  Huges. London: Faber and Faber. Matthewman, S. 2010. Teaching Secondary English as if the Planet Matters. Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis. McCabe, K. 2012. Climate-Change Rhetoric: A Study of the Persuasive Techniques of President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Australian Journal of Communication 39 (2): 35–57. Oerlemans, O. 2018. Poetry and Animals: Blurring the Boundaries with the Human. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Otto, C. 2009. Rhetoric, Science, and Global Climate Change. ProQuest dissertations and theses. “Ourfriendben.” 2008. Ode to an Earthworm. Poor Richard’s Almanach, November 21, 2008. Accessed 22 March 2020. https://ourfriendben.wordpress.com/2008/11/21/ode-­to-­an-­earthworm/ Sánchez-Bayo, F., and K.A.G.  Wyckhuys. 2019. Worldwide Decline of the Entomofauna: A Review of Its Drivers. Biological Conservation 232: 8–27. Sjöstrand, I. 1987. Världen i vitögat. Dikter om i dag. Stockholm: Pax. ———. 2014. Planet till salu. Blå. Obehagliga dikter. Möklinta, Sweden: Gidlund. Tornborg, E. 2014. What Literature Can Make Us See: Poetry, Intermediality, Mental Imagery. Malmö, Sweden: Bokbox.

5 Indigenous Poetry and Sustainability: Troubling Anthropocene Logic Through Kinship and Holistic Care Kevin Steinman

We were held in the circle around these lands by song, and reminded by the knowers that not one is over the other, no human above the bird, no bird above the insect, no wind above the grass. Harjo 2019, lines 17–20

Introduction: Poetry as Sustainable Pedagogy The first Indigenous US poet laureate, Joy Harjo, interweaves Muscogee Creek oral tradition (“held in the circle … by song”) with flattened, horizontal inter-relationships (“no / Human above the bird, no bird above the insect, no wind above the grass”) to illustrate a central syllogism of sustainability in her 2019 poem “Bless This Land.” This chapter suggests that poetry written by Indigenous authors can teach sustainability precisely because of recurring patterns of relating as kin, rather than

K. Steinman (*) Directorate for Education and Training, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. L. Kleppe, A. Sorby (eds.), Poetry and Sustainability in Education, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95576-2_5

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protector, executor, or “hyperseparated” (Emmet and Nye 2017, 154) and superior to the other-than-human. This follows Lawrence Buell’s observation that our “environmental crisis involves a crisis of the imagination … [demanding] better ways of imaging nature and humanity’s relation to it” (Buell 1995, 2). Timothy Morton, too, insists that “[e]cological writing wants to undo habitual distinctions between nature and ourselves. It is supposed not just to describe, but to provide a working model for a dissolving of the difference between subject and object, a dualism seen as the fundamental philosophical reason for human beings’ destruction of the environment” (Morton 2007, 63–4; emphasis added). Thus, this chapter aims to supply pedagogical support for teaching Indigenous poetry toward increased ecological/ relational awareness. As “a particularly compelling literary form for confronting the ruptures of history and the fragmenting effects of settler colonialism,” poetry is “ideal … for naming the fierce beauty of contemporary Indigenous personhood” (Justice 2018, 60). In choosing poetry to teach sustainability, we can remind students of the orality shared by this genre and Indigenous traditions. By privileging these particular poetic texts, we extend students’ focus to sustainability and the other-than-human realm. Sustainability discourse affirms Indigenous kinship and connectedness, countering long-held European distinctions between humans and their “environments” (Mebratu 1998, 497; Justice 2018).1 Furthermore, given English literature’s historically “civilizing” role for colonized subjects, as noted by Gauri Viswanathan (2015), we acknowledge that “imperialism’s educational project, [given] its relatively recent demise … lives on, for many of us, as an unconscious aspect of our education” (Willinsky 1998, 3). For non-Indigenous teachers of Indigenous texts, like this chapter’s author, this cautionary note deserves special consideration.2 One way of addressing the lingering colonializing power of literature is to actively adopt texts written by Indigenous authors into our class reading lists. This may be done not only to redress historical pedagogical injustices perpetrated against colonized and Indigenous groups, nor simply because national curricula require it. For many good pedagogical reasons, including the teaching of sustainability, the voices of these poets demand and deserve to be heard.

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As a white settler proponent of Indigenous text/culture, I take seriously the dangers involved in reifying Indigenous “naturalness” as a new form of exotic “othering.”3 Sergei Prozorof, for instance, cautions against such Native/nature alignments as a new form of colonial “biopower” (Lindroth and Sinevaara-Niskanen, 2016, 130).4 Lindroth and Sinevaara-­ Niskanen’s exhortation to expand the Indigenous “resiliency discourse” to include care, victimhood, and hope (2016, 130) is a call to which this chapter responds. Like Sam McKegny, I suggest that a reciprocal alliance between writer and reader avoids artistic appropriations like those Gregory Scofield writes menacingly into “Dissertation.” Here the poet’s creative work is “over[taken] like a landlord, / rent[ing] him a room in his life” (Scofield 2009b, 125). McKegny’s sober reflections on settler scholarship of Indigenous texts inspire readers to read humbly. This more “sustainable” approach helps avoid “subjecting Indigenous poetry to pre-formulated methodologies indebted to Eurocentric philosophical traditions … anathema to particularized Indigenous world views” (McKegny 2014, 45–47). … In line with Morton’s ecomimesis, the poems in this chapter do not didactically argue for the importance of the non-human or “natural” realm. Instead, they render/demonstrate by making aesthetically appealing an “incarnation” of place, to borrow Morton’s description of Val Plumwood’s Australian forest presented “communicative[ly], narrative[ly]” (Morton 2007, 64–6). These incarnations, in turn, offer us new renderings challenging the dualist tradition with which settler colonialism in North America thinks “nature.” This chapter aims to remind students (and teachers) that poetry is literature too, even in this Instagram5 and Snapchat age. By reading poetry, we gain perspective on the oral/textual ways of passing down traditional cultures, as well as trans-historical, trans-cultural, and interdisciplinary connections that poetry makes. Not least, poems tend to be among literature’s shorter forms, allowing for rich learning without long hours of reading outside the classroom. De-centering is a prime benefit of reading Indigenous poetry’s “relational” spaces. Julian Agyeman, Robert Bullard, and Bob Evans’ concept of just sustainabilities harmonizes with a de-centered, “relational” Indigenous worldview: “[a] truly sustainable society is one where wider

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questions of social needs and welfare, and economic opportunity are integrally related to environmental limits imposed by supporting ecosystems” (Agyeman et al. 2002, 78).6 To this end, Daniel Heath Justice observes that Indigenous texts “help us bridge the gap of human imagination between one another, between other human communities, and between us and other-than-human beings” (Justice 2018, xix). This chapter reads several recent poems written by North American Indigenous authors, including Harjo (briefly, above), Scofield’s “Offerings” and “Policy of the Dispossessed,” Lindsay Nixon’s “niya,” Wendy Rose’s “Truganinny,” and Marilyn Dumont’s “October, 1869: To Smoke Their Pipes and Sing Their Songs.” In doing so, it suggests these texts’ potential to “heal … both the individual and a community that includes the natural environment” (Smith and Fiore 2010, 60). By applying Indigenous aesthetics to poetic themes related to environment, we are invited to think in a newly de-centered, way—if not, as Aldo Leopold encouraged readers to, “as a mountain” (Leopold, 1949, 132) then at least differently. That holistic healing can be possible while at the same time “acknowledg[ing] dislocation and isolation” reflects the power of Indigenous poetry from North America. Furthermore, poetry, called “edgwalking” by Warren Cariou, can “destabilize those edges that keep Aboriginal peoples marginalized in contemporary North American culture … by holding different realities side by side” (Cariou 2014, 33). Thus poetry can “decolonize the imagination by bridging the ideological boundaries that often separate the beneficiaries of colonialism from those who are objectified and impoverished by it” (32).

Indigenous Poetics Ecocritical and Indigenous studies theories, including Neal McLeod’s “Cree poetics,” help read poems for sustainability education. “Cree poetics” casts a wide net for poetry as creative, integrating gesture for better understanding the world (Neuhaus 2015, 163). Its emphasis on storytelling as a way of connecting (McLeod 2014, 91) reminds the reader of the adhesive power of texts such as Dumont’s “October 1869: To Smoke

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Their Pipes and Sing Their Songs,” which critiques settler colonial surveying and subdividing of Cree land. This process, through which “lives were fragmented” (Dumont 2015, line 2), made Cartesian squares out of organically shaped parcels of land that traditionally had been more orthographically organized and understood through stories (Dumont 2014, 85). In the poem’s second stanza, the speaker ponders whether the surveyors’ instruments could determine the number of years Nault had lived and cleared brush harvested firewood on the same land he was now barred from? (Dumont 2015, lines 29–31)

The rhetorical question’s answer is: no, surveyors’ instruments could never have measured these losses. Indeed, such “Western” tools were designed to collect only abstracted information severing human stories from their environments by writing certain humans out of this new cartographic dataset.7 Reading this poem through sustainability discourse helps us observe the “external logics” governing Indigenous land usage that have resulted in increased and often extreme poverty, accelerated depredation of natural resources, and loss of culture and territorial space (Surraliés and Hierro 2005, 9). Dumont’s depiction of separation of Indigenous people from their land makes use of a symbology of loss observed by Dexter Fisher: “[a]s a symbol for all that is lost, the land is …” a recurring image (Fisher 1980, 14). Learning to recognize this profound signification, then, becomes part of reading Indigenous poetry in English. This follows McLeod’s emphasis on “the moral responsibility to remember” as a part of mamâhtâwisiwin (McLeod 2014, 91).8 By rejecting the idea that our understanding of “Nault’s river lot” can or should be constrained by “ledger … lines / angles, meridians, and parallels” (Dumont 2015, lines 9–10), Dumont insists that we remember “the cultural stories of the land [that] were diluted” (Dumont 2014, 84) by “iron stakes at the corners / of perfect square miles” (Dumont 2015, lines 12–13). Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s exploration of Nishnaabeg knowledge highlights one corresponding aspect of Indigenous “relations”: “land as

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pedagogy” (Russo 2019, 159–60; emphasis added). By carefully observing the connections/connectedness between human and land, readers learn. Here we find echoes of Leopold’s call to develop a “land ethic,” which insists on a transformation of human “from conqueror of the land-­ community to plain member and citizen of it” (Leopold 1968, 204).9 Crucially for sustainability, in severing Indigenous peoples’ histories from their lands, Canadian settler colonial surveying dissects human from other-than-human, giving philosophical cover for the hyper-­ industrialization that has led to global warming.10 This mapping impulse, then, both reproduces and supports settler colonial and neo-liberal otherings of “nature” as an object to be divided and conquered, rather than lived with and nurtured.11 Dumont’s poem thus counters this colonial strategy of division with a holistic “interdependence of language, sacred history, ceremonial cycle and the land” (Neuhaus 2015, 163). By encouraging students to discuss and critique mapping as an alienating feature of settler colonialism, this poem (re-)acquaints readers with one essential, although often unseen, tool wielded by Empire. Such critique of established modes of thinking, values, and practices is necessary for meeting the challenges of sustainability (Rødnes 2019, 65). The radical wholeness observed in Indigenous poetry by Mareike Neuhaus is supported by a literary structure she terms “holophrastic poesis.” This concept posits a synecdochic structure through which literary form and theme harmoniously narrate kinship and community (Neuhaus 2015, 29). Holophrastic communication, also described as “relational bundles” (Neuhaus 2015, 43–49), informs Indigenous narrative strategies involved in poetic expression. These narrative “backbones” (Neuhaus 2015, 30), where found, reflect “tendenc[ies] … toward figurative uses of language” and a minimalistic style (24). Such tendencies and stylistic choices are clearly compatible with lyric poetry’s call for concision and word play and emerge when Indigenous authors write poetry in English.12 In addition to reading through Neuhaus’ lens of holophrastic poesis, I also consider below elements of “métissage,” a “strategy of reappropriation” (McCall 2012, 34) enabling hybrid identifications by Indigenous authors. These identifications, as demonstrated by Dumont, result in “a multiplicity of identity as a strengthening” (Dumont 2014, 83).

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The texts suggested here assist in teaching “a more holistic understanding of sustainability” through Indigenous poetry (Walshe 2017). An interdisciplinary pedagogy, exemplified by Nicola Walshe’s research on Environmental and Sustainability Education, foregrounds participatory rather than normative approaches (Walshe 2017, 1133). This means encouraging debate both in the classroom and beyond. Discussions may involve challenging positions such as Morton’s claim that “[e]cological awareness is the moment … civilized people—narrators of our destiny— find out that they are the tragic criminal” (Morton 2007, 9). Thus, students can develop awareness through discussions of Indigenous poetry “that the Anthropocene is our doing” (Morton 2016, 9). … The prose poetry of Nixon’s “niya” evades easy generic characterization or rulesetting (Janss and Refsum 2005, 228). Without line breaks, regular meter, or rhyme, this modern poetry variant unsettles any static understanding of “an” English poetic tradition. We can also read “niya” as responding to and renewing the Indigenous oral tradition. When the stranger bumps his shoulder into me, hard, without an ounce of concern, I can feel the fire bubbling inside of me. The heat from the concrete rising up, through my feet, reverberating like electricity about to erupt magma through every orifice of my body … (Nixon 2018, lines 1–3)

In her “concrete” urban setting,13 the poet/speaker experiences an insulting and uncomfortable physical jolt. This “bump,” followed by no “concern,” transforms “heat” from her socio-physical context into an emotional landscape ripe with potential for lethal volcanic eruption: Lava that will oxidize every atom and molecule of his body on contact. The city as embodied trauma. The trauma of settlement. I spin around to yell after him, letting the anger fully consume my spirit as it has so many times before. (Nixon 2018, lines 4–6)

This central volcanic image of “lava … oxidiz[ing] every atom and molecule of his body on contact” can be read through Neuhaus’ schema of “word bundles.” The image implies the man’s synecdochic

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standing-in-for: by delivering the insult of giving no apology for slamming shoulders on the sidewalk, the man awakens pressurized memories as symbol of settler colonial “traumas.” Not only land/personal space usurpations, but also the physical and cultural violences of residential schools jar and jostle an “embodied” earth/poet, releasing geologic tensions from below. Nixon’s sudden and potentially catastrophic volcanic dis-lodgings function synecdochically (again, standing in for “the trauma of settlement”—echoing Dumont) because of their materiality (it takes a human bump to set the poem in motion). Until only recently in Canada, these violences had been followed by official silences mirroring the silence offered by Nixon’s inconsiderate passerby. Thus, the poem imagines a performance of moral reparation in the age of “Truth and Reconciliation” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015). Nixon’s conclusion, “I don’t know where the empowerment ends and the dissolution begins anymore,” underlines the tensions and ambiguities in modern Indigenous identity. This final poetic moment reflects Morton’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s “ambient rhetoric”: a “dialectical image,” looking simultaneously toward oppression and liberation (Morton 2007, 142). The reader, in negotiating the dynamic and problematic boundary between “empowerment” and “embodied trauma,” is invited to help disentangle the poem’s multi-­ layered conflations. … A Poetry for the People (P4P) approach promoted by June Jordan at the University of California, Berkeley, works by engaging students to write/share/refine their perspectives through poetry. In doing so they are challenged to expose oppressive ideology, leading to self-discovery, expression, and community building (Rangel 2016, 540). Given the challenges involved in recognizing Western civilization’s culpability in global climate crisis, this creative strategy is one that I can wholeheartedly recommend, especially in response to a poem like Nixon’s. Following Walshe’s example, students can draw a picture of a human situated in her environment before and after reading Indigenous poetry. Students could then discuss to observe any noticeable changes in the illustrated relationships between human and other-than-human elements. Group conversations on their images could center around what

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they have drawn, and why (Walshe, 2008). When teaching poetry within a reader response framework, a reader’s response to the text is central. That there is no “one way” of reading a poem is especially relevant when teaching Indigenous poetry, so we do well to remind students of this “relational” disciplinary/cultural truism. The “decolonizing holistic pedagogy” (DHP) (Rangel 2016, 536; 539–40) put forward by Indigenous studies shows poetry’s ability to redress imbalances in power (Carlassare 1994, 220–21).14 Contrasting with this patriarchal, fragmented, and colonializing European worldview is an Indigenous “relational” understanding of space that Alexandre Surraliés and Pedro Garcia Hierro find stretching from Peru to the Canadian Subarctic. This common “American” Indigenous view—as seen above with Dumont’s “October, 1869”—does not subdivide territories into colonial “zones of utility” (Surraliés and Hierro 2005, 11); within this framework, humans are “no more than one actor among many” (Surraliés and Hierro 2005, 14).15 Tol Foster’s promotion of productive entanglements between the local and the transnational echoes in Justice’s focus on “relationship” in Indigenous texts: Relationship is the driving impetus behind the vast majority of texts by Indigenous writers—relationship to the land, to human community, to self, to the other-than-human world, to the ancestors and our descendants, to our histories and our futures, as well as to colonizers and their literal and ideological heirs—and that these literary works offer us insight and sometimes helpful pathways for maintaining, rebuilding, or even simply establishing these meaningful connections. (Justice 2018, xix)

This position has been described by Garnet Ruffo as “biophilia”: a “kinship between humans and other life forms” (Howard 2019; emphasis in original), and overlaps with Thomas King’s notion of “continuous community … [as] one of the primary ideas from which our literature proceeds” (King 1990, xv).16 Rose’s “Truganinny” (Rose 1981) exemplifies such continuous community: a pan-Indigenous poem authored by a Native American in the voice of the “last Tasmanian.” Rose’s transcultural approach can be read as métissage: in this case, a reassembly of Indigenous identifications

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following colonial settler fragmentations. This historical Trugernanner suffered the murders of her mother, uncle, and fiancé and the abduction of her sister, as well as rape and dislocation at a young age. After a lifetime of adjusting to settler colonial violence, her husband’s body was defiled in death (Ryan and Smith 1976). Rose imagines her subject near the end of her life, fearing similar indignities. Beckoning the listener intimately close, she tells a bitter tale implicating multiple sexual assaults in the tragedy of nurturing “many dead daughters,” Their mouths empty Their lungs silent. (Rose 1981, 21, lines 17–19)

The speaker urges the listener to hold her hand and accompany her to a safe place where she can “speak … / sing one last song” (Rose 1981, 21, lines 29–30) before being interred. She is afraid that “they are waiting for me” (line 34) to appropriate her body as an object of colonial display. Her dying wish is to be taken to “the source / of night,” to the great black desert where dreaming was born. (Lines 43–45)

These exhortations invite the reader to consider specific places where the speaker could safely be accompanied by the listener for burial. These places, whether “under the bulk of a mountain” (line 47) or … in the distant sea (lines 48–50)

share in their generality the quality of being able to hide the speaker from settler colonists’ searching eyes and hands. Mountainous “bulk” and the “distant / sea” give spiritual succor echoing Neuhaus’ observed figurative, minimalistic “word bundles.” The alliance sought between speaker and reader allows the latter to imagine the land protecting against appropriation and display of her body. This

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underlines the community and care valorized by both Indigenous poetry and sustainability studies. Readers’ historical knowledge that Trugernanner was not protected against such indignities in death highlights a tension between the poetic wish and historical record. Energy generated by readers’ sense of lingering injustice, combined with the poetic invitation to nearness, impels an end to exploitation and improved care for those most vulnerable to violence today. This includes both Indigenous communities and their lands/environments. … Scofield’s “Offerings” (Scofield 1996) displays “two spirit urbanity” (Tatonetti 2014). According to Cariou, Love Medicine and One Song can be read as “a Cree rewriting of Shakespeare’s … [sonnet] sequence” (v): Scofield undoes the “prevailing media portrait of Aboriginal people as victims of sexual aggression and abuse, rather than as active and loving participants in sexual relationships” (ii). Read through McLeod’s “body poetics” and queer studies’ affirmation of LGBTQ+ sexuality, it connects “living bodies to the living earth around us” (Cariou 2014, 89).17 Patriarchal heteronormativity “others” queer individuals (Root 1996, xv–xviii), women, and nature “to confirm and justify their exclusion” (Philips and Rumens 2016, 2). By reading Indigenous texts as always already “queered” from settler colonial contexts, we apprehend the potential for these two “minority” groups’ claims for justice and inclusion to overlap and align. “Nature” is a construct against which both Indigenous poetry and queer studies push back. Thus, Scofield’s work approaches its target from both starting points simultaneously, achieving the sort of unification of fields Robert Azzarello envisions. The poem opens with its speaker, lying over his lover, comparing himself to a sacred mountain where black bear paws the earth, sniffs. (Scofield 2009a, 23, lines 2–4)

The poem’s opening metaphor establishes a deep bio-/geologic relationship between Scofield and his other-than-human surroundings. It also announces a sensual poem celebrating physical expressions of love

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from his partner, here transformed into the pawings of an other-than-­ human bear “sniff[ing] / for songs” (Scofield 2009a, 23, lines 4–5). This aligns with Nicole Seymour’s observations of the biocentric concerns of recent queer texts: “caring not just about the individual, the family, or one’s descendants, but about the Other species and persons with whom one has no immediate relations” (Emmet and Nye 2017, 158–59). Both of these opening images convey super-human size and strength, indicating pride in queer expressions of affection.18 But this pride does not foreclose the possible threat of homophobic danger in response to expressing same-sex love in an Indigenous/Canadian context. Therefore, the non-­ urban setting may also offer “natural” refuge as a safe haven. Moving above his lover like prairie wind, my hands scented summer rain. (Scofield 2009a, 23, lines 7–9)

the poet synaesthetically aligns senses (touch and smell, [imagined] sight) with other-than-human elements (wind and rain) through simile and metaphor, culminating in a moving aesthetic experience of passion. The poem’s love/“nature” matrix becomes both the medicinal source of health and a force for poetic inspiration: I drink from moonlit pools, sing with frogs. (Lines 19–20)

Here the final association with frogs indicates a poetic alliance with musical amphibians who, though invisible to human eyes, make themselves known by their nighttime mating chorus. This association’s nod to Indigenous oral traditions can be productively read through McLeod’s “wâhkôhtowin” (kinship/relationships), both in terms of its “poetics of empathy” and in terms of its “kinship to the land” (McLeod 2014, 92–94): sweet water runs from my mouth and becomes poetry. (Scofield, 2009, 23, lines 22–24)

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According to David Getsy, the word “‘queer’ … offers a strategic undercutting of the stability of identities,” enabling cultural authority to be disputed (Getsy, 2016, 15). Getsy highlights “self-made kinships” as a strategy of “queer” activism, underlining intentional familial continuity between Scofield’s queer and Indigenous identities. Thus, the poem’s final “becoming” rests upon “self-made” kinship between poet and the other-­ than-­human world. This relating becomes a limitless resource for poetic inspiration: the speaker needs only to open his mouth, and poetry “runs” out. This poem, then, can be read as an LGBTQ+ resistance to heteronormativity through valorization of two-spirit love, while affirming Indigenous poetry’s abiding connection to other-than-human life. … Scofield’s “Policy of the Dispossessed” (Scofield 1996) problematizes Indigenous belonging in Canada in the late twentieth century, beginning with ancestors’ shame and degradations following colonial displacements. The final stanza’s third line, “I went back and dug in the prairie soil,” turns poetry into an archaeological tool, reminiscent of Seamus Heaney’s “Digging.” In both cases, a “recovery” (Ramanzani and Stallworthy 1966, 2951) or excavation (Scudeler 2006, 133) of an historically marginalized heritage can be read: There among the buffalo bones and memories an ancient language sprang from the earth and wet my parched tongue. (Scofield 1996, 55, lines 45–47)

Whereas Heaney’s pen metaphor for his father’s digging privileges written English,19 Scofield’s metaphor uses English to compare a lost/ recovered Indigenous language to water for a thirsty man. This metaphor foregrounds the poet’s tongue/orality. Since the tongue is the muscle most responsible for producing the sounds of oral communication, we may be reminded how the written word transforms, “becom[ing] the spoken [via] rhythms, patterns, syntax and sounds” of Scofield’s urgent expression (King 1990, xii; emphasis added). But this metaphor also registers food and drink’s flavors and wetness. Scofield’s overdetermined metaphor, then, deftly and holistically combines two aspects of the tongue’s organic/material life into one. Crucially, the (excavated) land is

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the site of this reclaiming of sustenance (as) language. As Scudeler observes, “the land gives back to Scofield the Cree language, which he uses to subvert the dominant language and culture and which is also an integral part of his activism and of his work” (Scudeler 2006, 134). Scofield’s autobiography reveals a complementary demonstration of his deep connection with the land. Here he reaffirms his Métis20 identity as an adult: A surprising new feeling had awoken within me. I looked around … and saw my people … I felt my heart sink into the very landscape, my spirit joining those of our ancestors in the empty ravines and coulees. I had searched for a land of belonging and now I had found it. … Suddenly the colour of my eyes, hair, and skin seemed to belong to me, perfectly matching the prairie landscape that held such a dignified history. (Scofield 2019, 166)

Relevant here is Hubert Zapf ’s notion of literature as cultural ecology: texts allow “socially repressed or marginalized people … [to] voice themselves” (Clark 2011, 153). Scofield’s poem, echoed by his biography, highlights various textual “voicings” of Indigenous poetry. Not only are the historically marginalized spoken into being, but so are the local “environments” in which they dwell. These words of belonging—both to oneself and to one’s surroundings—indicate a nearly synecdochic relationship between these two aspects of the poet’s “environment.” His physical body and home place harmonize in their “rightness,” indicating a newfound comfort in the recently publicized queer identity of a two-spirit Cree/Métis man dwelling on traditional lands.

Encircling The Indigenous voices above invite critical, even transformational, thinking about our shared climate crisis. By refocusing on the intersection of “racism, sexism, colonialism, speciesism, and the environment” (Philips and Rumens 2016, 11), we observe not only vulnerabilities but

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possibilities. As Clark writes, “Environmental issues are creating the need for new types of interdisciplinarity, greater interchange between the natural and social sciences and the humanities and even questioning the rationale of the division between them” (Clark 2011, 163). By activating Indigenous poetry’s power to challenge anthropocentric readers’ nature/ human dichotomy, we model bold, forward-thinking interdisciplinarity in our pedagogy. Linda Hogan’s “beautiful entanglement” of the human and other-than-human, then, becomes an invitation to consider further integrations (Smith and Fiore 2010, 71). Living through what Amitav Ghosh calls “the Great Acceleration” of climate change, we risk losing “exactly those forms of traditional knowledge, material skills, art, and ties of community that might provide succor to vast numbers of people around the world—and especially to those who are still bound to the land” (Ghosh 2017, 161). Such “alternative, oppositional ways of knowing” (Smith 2012, 204) are summarized by Surralés and Hierro as an “Indigenous vision … [of ] nature and [humans] shar[ing] existential relationships of reciprocity and mutual respect” (Surraliés and Hierro 2005, 11). The poets in this study encode signs of their access to this visionary knowledge into their work. In so doing, they offer alternatives for readers to the “securitization and corporatization of climate change” (Ghosh 2017, 160). Such an alternative vision benefits the transformations required for a future we hope will be sustainable. Ultimately, by teaching sustainability through Indigenous poetry, we inspire a broader understanding of difference: “[e]ducation that dedicates time and recognition to non-Eurocentric epistemologies and narratives deepens our understanding of history and our relationship to the past, thus helping to restore our sense of wholeness” (Rangel 2016, 537–8). By countering the colonial narrative of Indigenous deficiency (Justice 2018, 2; emphasis in original), Indigenous poetry reminds readers that residual social challenges have more to do with centuries of colonial settlement and its effects than with some “innate expression of our very nature” (4; emphasis in original). In this way, poems function as part of “our cultural, political, and familial resurgence and our continuing efforts to maintain our rights and responsibilities in these contested lands” (5–6). Teaching Indigenous poetry and sustainability together encourages students to uncover, pursue, and preserve interconnectivity between

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communities and their lands/environments. Ultimately, this choice for infusing “eco-centric thinking and values into” education encourages “students to live and work as citizens in more interconnected ways in the world” (Tooth and Renshaw 2009, 95; emphasis added). By troubling the received western binary of human/“nature” into more nuanced and integrated understandings, we make an important intervention in sustainability education. To achieve this, poetry can help.

Notes 1. Ecofeminism aligns in interesting ways with this approach: Donna Haraway’s natureculture is a useful conceptual tool for breaking down the essentialist, dualistic split between “human” and the “natural” (Haraway 2003). 2. So does Clark’s observation of Robert Harrison (1992) echoing Martin Heidegger’s privileging art and literature as sites where human subjects are discovered to be essentially “other” than their non-human “environments” (Clark 2011, 61). This chapter intervenes against this by reading literature that re-weaves these artificially bifurcated elements. 3. As Fikret Berkes has pointed out, this “sentimental fallacy … [can lead to] exaggerated claims of native ecological knowledge and wisdom,” like the apocryphal native ecology of Chief Seattle, demythologized by Paul Wilson’s 1992 article (Berkes 1999, 146–8). This phenomenon has taken on the shorthand term “ecological Indian” (Clark 2011, 122). 4. Indeed, “ideological mystification” of the “Ecological Indian” is a trope I hope I have avoided. I join with Joni Adamson (2001), Greg Garrard, and others in suspicion “of any attempts to make [Indigenous people] figures of ecological piety and authenticity” (Garrard 2012, 145). If they have transformed landscapes, any changes to environments have always taken place “within the terms of their own cultural cosmos” (Garrard 2012, 145), making their contributions to Western ecocriticism free of the burdens of Judeo-Christian human supremacy over “nature.” 5. Demonstrating poetry’s flexibility to adapt to new media landscapes, Trygve Skaug has parlayed his Instagram poetry into a recent string of bestselling published titles in Norway for teens and adults. 6. Since the 1990s, a movement for environmental justice has become part of political messaging in the United States’ Democratic Party.

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7. Far from a neutral administrative tool, as the Irish playwright Brian Friel illustrates in Translations (1980), mapping always consolidates colonial power over subjugated lands (Edwards 2008, 85). 8. According to McLeod, poetry involves mamâhtâwisiwin, “the process of tapping into the Great Mystery” (McLeod 2014, 91). 9. For Clark, Leopold’s mid-twentieth-century anthropomorphizing of birds and reveries on land ownership somewhat dilutes his environmental message (Clark 2011, 77–84). 10. Interestingly, George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864) was perhaps the “first major modern work suggesting that human activities were leading to negative effects of the environment” (Botkin 1990, 32). 11. Indigenous poetry as an appropriate response to what Polly Higgins (2010) and others have termed “ecocide” is supported, too, by Amitav Ghosh. He judges imperialism and capitalism to be similarly implicated in our global environmental crisis (Ghosh 2017, 87). Historical questions of social justice can thus be extended to problems of environmental degradation, on Indigenous lands as well as elsewhere. 12. Since this genre is not necessarily a traditional Indigenous form, it exhibits what might be termed a “hybrid” aesthetic, suggesting a correspondence in literary form with Dumont’s notion of Métis identity. 13. Mark Watson (2010) and Daniel Francis observe the tendency to romanticize Indigenous people as irrelevantly frozen in the past, and absent from contemporary urban settings. Nixon, by making her poetic speaker a member of the Indigenous urban diaspora, challenges this. 14. Ecofeminism also critiques and deconstructs hierarchical dualisms wherein “the feminine, women, nature, and other subordinated groups … [are deemed] not to possess rationality and autonomy” (Philips and Rumens 2016, 2). Already in 1980, Fisher notes that in modern Indigenous literature “woman, once so strong in Indian life, no longer has the power even of the trickster to transform the Indian’s condition into a sane existence” (Fisher 1980, 13). 15. These central ideals for sustainability studies are bolstered by Tol Foster’s “relational regionalism” (Neuhaus 2012). 16. That King’s and Howard’s national context—Canada—may be seen to extend to other parts of North America is evident from the boundary crossing done by figures such as Dumont’s forebear Gabriel Dumont (Dumont 2014, 83). 17. Similar to this chapter’s efforts to engage sustainability via poetry, Robert Azzarello points out that Scofield and others who write queer Indigenous

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texts are integrating two fields which have heretofore struggled to intersect: queer and ecocritical studies (Azzarello 2012). 18. Craig S. Womack’s observation that queer Indian presence fundamentally challenges the American mythos about Indigenous masculinity (Womack 1999, 279–80) aligns with Scofield’s belated choice to combine expressions of homosexuality and Indigeneity in his poetry (Scudeler 2006). 19. “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun” (Heaney 1966, 2953, lines 1–2). 20. “Métis” can describe “any person of mixed Indian-white ancestry who identified him- or herself and was identified by others as neither Indian nor white, even though he or she might have no provable link to the historic Red River métis” (Peterson and Brown 2001, 5).

References Adamson, J. 2001. American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Agyeman, J., et al. 2002. Exploring the Nexus: Bringing Together Sustainability, Environmental Justice, and Equity. Space and Polity 6 (1): 77–90. Azzarello, R. 2012. Queer Environmentality: Ecology, Evolution, and Sexuality in American Literature. Burlington: Ashgate. Basseler, M. 2014. Environmental Learning: Ökodidaktische Konzepte für den Englischunterricht. Frendsprachliche Unterricht—English 129: 2–8. Berkes, F. 1999. Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management. Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis. Botkin, D. 1990. Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-first Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Buell, L. 1995. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bürgener, L., and M.  Barth. 2018. Sustainability Competencies in Teacher Education: Making Teacher Education Count in Everyday School Practice. Journal of Cleaner Production 174 (10): 821–826. Burns, H.L. 2015. Transformative Sustainability Pedagogy: Learning from Ecological Systems and Indigenous Wisdom. Journal of Transformative Education 13 (3): 259–276.

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Cariou, W. 2014. Edgework: Indigenous Poetics as Re-placement. In Indigenous Poetics, ed. N.  McLeod, 31–38. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Carlassare, E. 1994. Essentialism in Ecofeminist Discourse. In Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory, ed. C.  Merchant. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Carroll, C., and A.  Lawson (2017) “New Media, Activism, and Indigenous Environmental Governance: Politics and the Minnesota–Wisconsin Wolf Hunt,” in S.  Monani and J.  Adamson (eds). Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies, New York: Palgrave, pp. 119-135. Clark, T. 2011. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dumont, M. 2014. The Pemmican Eaters. In Indigenous Poetics in Canada, ed. N. McLeod, 83–87. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press. ———. 2015. The Pemmican Eaters. Toronto: misFit Books. Edwards, J. 2008. Postcolonial Literature: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Emmet, R., and D.  Nye. 2017. The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fisher, D. 1980. The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Gadotti, M. 2010. Reorienting Education Practices towards Sustainability. Journal of Education for Sustainable Development 4 (2): 203–211. Garrard, G. 2012. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge. Getsy, D. (Ed.). (2016). Queer. MIT Press. Ghosh, A. 2017. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gottlieb, R., ed. 1996. This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment. New York: Routledge. Haraway, D.J. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Vol. 1. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Harjo, J. 2019. Bless This Land. World Literature Today 93 (4): 34–35. Heaney, S. 1966. Digging. In Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. J. Ramanzani and Stallworthy, vol. 2. New York: Norton. Higgins, P. 2010. Eradicating Ecocide: Laws and Governance to Prevent the Destruction of Our Planet. London: Shepheard-Walwyn.

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Howard, L. 2019. Poetry, Place, and Indigenous Identity: Armand Garnet Ruffo and Liz Howard Discuss the Magic of Finding Good Poems in Unlikely Places. Walrus. Janss, C., and C.  Refsum. 2005. Lyrikkens Liv: Innføring i Diktlesning. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Justice, D.H. 2018. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier Press. King, T. 1990. All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Prose. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Leopold, A. 1968. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lindroth, M., and H. Sinevaara-Niskanen. 2016. The Biopolitics of Resilient Indigeneity and the Radical Gamble of Resistance. Resilience 4 (2): 130–145. McCall, S. 2012. Diaspora and Nation in Métis Writing. In Cultural Grammars of Nation, Disapora, and Indigeneity in Canada, ed. C.  Kim et  al., 21–41. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press. McKegny, S. 2014. Writer-Reader Reciprocity and the Pursuit of Alliance through Indigenous Poetry. In Indigenous Poetics in Canada, 43–60. Wilfrid Laurier University Press. McLeod, N. 2014. Cree Poetic Discourse. In Indigenous Poetics in Canada, ed. N. McLeod, 89–103. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Mebratu, D. 1998. Sustainability and Sustainable Development: Historical and Conceptual Review. Environmental Impact Assessment Review 18 (6): 493–520. Morton, T. 2007. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: University of Harvard Press. ———. 2016. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New  York: Columbia University Press. Neuhaus, M. 2012. Reading the Prairies Relationally: Louise Bernice Halfe and ‘Spacious Creation,’. Canadian Literature 215: 86–102. ———. 2015. The Decolonizing Poetics of Indigenous Literatures. Regina, Sask.: University of Regina Press. Nixon, L. 2018. niya. In Nîtisânak. Montreal: Metonymy Press. Peterson, J., and J. Brown. 2001. The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press. Philips, M., and N. Rumens. 2016. Introducing Contemporary Ecofeminism. In Contemporary Perspectives on Ecofeminism, ed. M. Philips and N. Rumens, 1–16. London: Routledge.

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Ramanzani, J., and J.  Stallworthy. 1966. Headnotes to Seamus Heaney. In Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2, 2951–2952. New York: Norton. Rangel, N. 2016. An Examination of Poetry for the People: A Decolonizing Holistic Approach to Arts Education. Educational Studies 52 (6): 536–551. Rauscher, J. 2014. On Common Ground: Translocal Attachments and Transethnic Affiliations in Agha Shahid Ali’s and Arthur Sze’s Poetry of the American Southwest. European Journal of American Identity 9 (3): 1–19. Root, J. 1996. Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative. New York: Columbia University Press. Rose, W. 1981. Six Poems. Frontiers 6 (3): 20–23. Russo, B. 2019. Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations by Aileen Moreton-Robinson. American Indian Quarterly 43 (2): 244–247. Ryan, L., & Smith, N. (1976). Trugernanner (Truganini) (1812–1876). In Australian Dictionary of Biography. Rødnes, K.A. 2019. Skjønnlitteratur og Bærekraft: Et Bidrag fra Norskfaget. In Bærekraftdidaktikk, ed. A. Kvamme and E. Sæther, 61–75. Fagbokforlaget: Bergen, Norway. Scofield, G. 1996. Native Canadiana: Songs from the Urban Rez. Vancouver, B.C.: Polestar. ———. 2009a. Love Medicine and One Song / Sâkihtowin-Maskihkiy êkwa Pêyak-Nikamowin. Wiarton, Ont.: Kegedonce Press. ———. 2009b. Dissertation. In Kipocihkân: Poems New and Selected. Gibsons, B.C: Nightwood Editions. ———. 2019. Thunder through my Veins: Memories of a Métis Childhood. Toronto: Anchor Canada. Scudeler, J. 2006. ‘The Song I Am Singing’: Gregory Scofield’s Interweavings of Métis, Gay, and Jewish Selfhoods. Studies in Canadian Literature / Études En littérature Canadienne 31 (1): 129–145. Shiva, V., and M. Mies. 2014. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books. Smith, L.T. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People. New York: Zed Books. Smith, T., and J.M. Fiore. 2010. Landscape as Narrative, Narrative as Landscape. Studies in American Indian Literatures 22 (4): 58–80. Strauss, S. (1992). Historical Record Be Damned, They Sell Environmentalism by Co-opting Chief Seattle, Globe and Mail, February 8, 1992. Surraliés, A., and P.G. Hierro, eds. 2005. The Land Within: Indigenous Territory and the Perception of Environment. Copenhagen: Iwigia.

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Tatonetti, L. 2014. The Queerness of Native American Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tooth, R., and P. Renshaw. 2009. Reflections on Pedagogy and Place: A Journey into Learning for Sustainability through Environmental Narrative and Deep Attentive Reflection. Australian Journal of Environmental Education 25: 94–104. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). Honoring the Truth, Reconciling the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, www.trc.ca. United Nations Environment Program. (2019). Emissions Gap Report, https:// wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/30797/EGR2019.pdf?seq uence=1&isAllowed=y Viswanathan, G. 2015. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press. Walshe, N. 2017. An Interdisciplinary Approach to Environmental and Sustainability Education: Developing Geography Students’ Understandings of Sustainable Development Using Poetry. Environmental Education Research 23 (8): 1130–1149. Watson, M. 2010. Diasporic Indigeneity: Place and the Articulation of Ainu Identity in Tokyo, Japan. Environment and Planning 42 (2): 268–284. Wilson, P. 1992. What Chief Seattle Said. Lewis and Clark Law School, Natural Resources Law Institute News 3 (2): 12–15. Willinsky, J. 1998. Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Womack, C.S. 1999. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Part II Poetic Literacy and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)

6 Poetic Learning for a Sustainable Future: Transforming Our Collective Story Robert J. Didham

In “The Question,” the Irish poet Theo Dorgan writes: “What have you done / with what was given you, / what have you done with / the blue, beautiful world?” The concept of sustainable development challenges human society to answer this question, finding new perspectives and solutions which can balance the social, economic, and environmental aspects of global climate change while strengthening system interlinkages. In order to realize the ambition of the sustainable development agenda, it is necessary to collectively recreate and relearn our development narratives. Cultural narratives are important because they undergird all other forms of thinking and action. They influence the way in which we interpret, contextualize, and make meaning of the experiences we have and the information we receive. “A frame of reference encompasses

R. J. Didham (*) Centre for Collaborative Learning for Sustainable Development, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Hamar, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. L. Kleppe, A. Sorby (eds.), Poetry and Sustainability in Education, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95576-2_6

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cognitive, conative, and emotional components, and is composed of two dimensions: habits of mind and a point of view” (Mezirow 1997, 5). The ability to “shift” narratives is a learned experience, which suggests that education for sustainable development (ESD) is important because it links learning to the contexts and challenges of everyday living. With education for sustainable development, we can empower people with knowledge and competencies which will help them become active agents of change in their own lives and in their wider society. “ESD pedagogies do more than facilitate learning of knowledge—they promote learning of skills, perspectives and values that sustainable societies require” (Laurie et al. 2016, 6). However, the pursuit of sustainable development requires educational approaches that can inspire and unlock the potential for transformative, social learning as we write new narratives—and new narratives require new forms of language. Poetry can play an important part in the educational process because it models and invites new and imaginative forms of expression while at the same time seeking precision in meaning and purpose. Through poetry, teachers and learners can practise reframing how our collective narratives are recounted and understood. What exactly is sustainable development? As a big concept, it has been understood as an organizing principle, a design perspective, a management approach, and as a development goal for society or even as a new paradigm for development. Since 2015, sustainable development has also been a global agenda with a far-reaching scope and scale, as captured within the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations General Assembly 2015). It thus represents an ambitious roadmap for change and a call for social transformation. Today we are also taking a decision of great historic significance. We resolve to build a better future for all people, including the millions who have been denied the chance to lead decent, dignified and rewarding lives and to achieve their full human potential. We can be the first generation to succeed in ending poverty; just as we may be the last to have a chance of saving the planet. The world will be a better place in 2030 if we succeed in our objectives. … What we are announcing today—an Agenda for global

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action for the next 15 years—is a charter for people and planet in the twenty-first century. (United Nations General Assembly 2015)

Sustainable development has been referred to in many different ways, but it may be this narrative value of sustainable development—its ability to capture this ideal that a better future is possible, that we know the needed course of actions to reach it, and that if we work together we can achieve it—that is socially most significant. Literary texts, such as poems, can facilitate this process by enabling readers and writers to imagine and verbalize alternatives to the current, dominant “growth” narrative. For example, the poems of the legendary Chinese Tang Dynasty poet Han-­ Shan speak to modern readers about the pleasures of renouncing materialist accumulation in favour of a simpler and richer life lived in proximity to and in balance with the natural world. “Trusting fate, I escaped to forests and natural springs / where I live at ease and see things freely” (Han-Shan 2018, 241). The concept of sustainable development is new, but the human impulse to live in harmony with nature is very old indeed. Since the concept of sustainable development was first introduced in the “World Conservation Strategy” ( International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources 1980) and further detailed as a proposal in Our Common Future (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987), it has been subject to greater elaboration and refinement across a range of sectors and disciplines, but also misappropriation and dilution as it has become an increasingly popular media and public relations topic (Bonnett 2013). From its early formulation, sustainable development has been presented as a pathway to move from problem to solution, while implicitly challenging the dominance of a (linear) economic growth model. Defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987, Chapter 2), sustainable development asserts that a more positive course of societal development is possible and encourages each of us to imagine what such a positive course might mean. Progress for sustainable development has been slow at times because it must compete with the dominant (growth-oriented) development narrative as well as with the systems and discourses structured around the

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proliferation of this narrative. Despite this, throughout the 1990s, sustainable development was a concept that received increasing academic and political attention. Sustainability science expanded across a wide range of fields (both in natural and in social sciences), and sustainability principles were applied and tested within a diversity of professional arenas. Over the course of approximately twenty-five years, sustainable development went from basically an unknown, fledgling concept to both a recognizable, distinct field of its own as well as an area of focus within a number of different fields (Mebratu 1998; Robinson 2004; Sneddon et al. 2006). Concurrently, although a global body of poetry has emerged responding to the world’s sustainability crises, the value of poetic discourse has seldom been considered outside of literary circles. However, it is clear that sustainable development requires an interdisciplinary, holistic approach if it is to move beyond the theoretical. The practice of education for sustainable development will be most effective if it includes the arts in general and poetry in particular, in addition to the social and physical sciences. When people encounter sustainability issues, such as climate change, they need frameworks that make these issues meaningful to them. The practice of reading poetry is essentially a form of meaning-­ seeking and meaning-making that can thus prepare students to meet the world’s challenges in holistic and innovative ways.

 uality Education and Transformative Q Learning for Sustainable Development A new narrative does not automatically change the status quo but, if widely adopted, can reset expectations and liberate ingenuity. Yes, the challenges are fierce, and the future is unpredictable. But here is an opportunity to replicate, accelerate, and escalate existing successes while driving innovative and transformative changes. (Lubchenco and Gaines 2019, 911)

Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) is specifically a goal for quality education and aims to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” (United Nations General Assembly 2015, 14). There are varying views on what

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constitutes quality education, and within SDG 4 several of the targets remain focused on quantitative achievements related to the availability, accessibility, and attainment of education. Within the targets of SDG 4 there is also some focus on the achievement of standardized performance levels, as well as the development of lifelong learning skills and competencies. However, the targets of SDG 4 put less emphasis on the need to build learners’ capacities and competencies to respond to change and transformation, both to address the pressing socio-ecological crises that have the potential to destabilize society and to alter development pathways towards greater sustainability. The only exception is target 4.7 which aims to “ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development” (United Nations General Assembly 2015, 17). This under-articulated target challenges teachers and learners across the lifespan to picture what such knowledge and skills might look like. ESD is strongly focused on educational practice, or the E in ESD; it is not just about including SD knowledge within the contents of the curriculum. With a leaning towards educational reform/improvement and enabling the conditions for transformative learning, ESD has recently been recognized as a model that directly strengthens the implementation of quality education (Didham and Ofei-Manu 2015, 2018; Laurie et al. 2016). ESD is oriented towards whole system perspectives, and it aims to achieve learning for change. In practice, this means a focus on cross-­ curricular and interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and a greater effort to link classroom learning to real-world application. ESD promotes a view of quality education that is concerned not just with measurable learning outcomes and national standards, but also with encouraging lifelong learning and developing the skills and values of learners to become agents of change. A key challenge of quality ESD is thus ensuring the relevance of education and the applicability of knowledge and competencies for addressing sustainability challenges. With a focus on developing lifelong learning competencies needed to address sustainability across all ages (UNESCO 2017), ESD uses participatory, active learning methods that promote experiential education, collective problem solving, and democratic dialogue. Classrooms that allow for creative reading and writing assignments are thus important sites for the practice of ESD.

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The final report of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development found that the implementation of ESD helped change certain teaching and learning outcomes. It led to advancement in students’ analytical and critical thinking capacities, encouraged students to ask more questions as part of their learning, and strengthened cooperative and student-centred learning activities (Buckler and Creech, 2014: 65). “In this context, quality education can now be understood not only to instil basic competencies (such as literacy and numeracy) but to develop lifelong values that underpin sustainability…. Many now agree that quality education for sustainable development reinforces peoples’ sense of responsibility as global citizens and better prepares them for the world they will inherit” (Buckler and Creech, 2014, 28). A study carried out across eighteen countries on the impacts of ESD implementation found that the pedagogies of ESD had a stronger transformative impact on primary and secondary education than the sustainability content (Laurie et al. 2016). At its best, such an education is both qualitative and quantitative, incorporating values-based habits of mind that literature and poetry can teach as well as more technical science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) skills. Considering the recognition of the role ESD can play in achieving transformative learning—that is “the process of effecting change in a frame of reference” (Mezirow 1997, 5), it is rather surprising that within the ESD literature there has been very little discussion about the literary dimensions of sustainable development or reflection on how this may be addressed in education. The language-based frames of reference we develop can have a reciprocal impact on our learning and a reinforcing impact on this framework as it creates the lens or schematic we use for understanding the world around us. A sustainable development worldview promotes an “integrative and pluralistic system for knowledge generation and codification,” and by encouraging critical reflection and future anticipation it is also linked with the idea of paradigm change (Ofei-Manu and Didham 2018). Through critical reflection, we can examine the deeper assumptions that frame our beliefs and through communicative learning we can also critically reflect on others’ views. “Transformative learning involves critical reflection of assumptions that may occur either in group interaction or independently. Testing the

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validity of a transformed frame of reference in communicative learning requires critical-dialectical discourse” (Mezirow 2003, 61). Mezirow promotes three important features in facilitating transformative learning: • Learners should gain awareness of and critically reflect on their own assumptions as well as those of others, • Learners should have experience in identifying the frames of reference around different situations and use their imaginations to interpret and redefine problems from different perspectives, • Learners should participate in discourse and be guided towards effective discourse processes that can promote collective meaning making and social learning. (Mezirow 1997) Lotz-Sisitka et al. (2015) argue that while Mezirow’s view of transformative learning primarily focuses on the cognitive transformations of learners, there is a further need to theorize on how the cognitive transformations relate to social action and agency. By doing so, it becomes possible to address the “collective transformation of human activity” (Lotz-Sisitka et  al. 2015, 75). Poetry, with its emphasis on form and often-surprising language, can contribute especially to the second objective: using the imagination to redefine problems from different perspectives. In Pablo Neruda’s celebrated “Odes,” for example, he traces the origins of common commodities, like salt and lemons, in ways that underscore how food originates in nature and is transformed by culture. Just as importantly, his beautiful language engages readers affectively, making them “care” as much as they “know.” In Neruda’s case, this is not just a theoretical effort, since he wrote during a time of national upheaval and change in Chile and his work still resonates worldwide. The concept of sustainable development emerged as a collective effort to create an alternative development scenario that is built upon the foundations of environmental sustainability and social justice. “[D]evelopment scenarios are stories with a logical plot and narrative about how the future might play out” (Raskin et al. 2002, 14). The dominant development scenario promotes continuous economic growth as the engine for all development, and this scenario is based upon a false belief in material

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abundance and inexhaustible natural resources, as well as the prolific consumption of cheap, unrenewable sources of energy (Burns 2015; Ziervogel et  al. 2016). Even while the underlying beliefs of this scenario break down, the narrative itself remains so pervasive and socially reproduced that it still is difficult to effectively confront. For sustainable development, one of its great challenges is inspiring a collective reimagining of our development scenario, and in turn this also requires the embedding of this scenario within our wider social and cultural narratives. Sustainable development is not just about replacing one development scenario with another; it is also about opening up the framing features of these scenarios for review and critical reflection. While this type of reframing is difficult to achieve, poetry can contribute by reframing familiar assumptions in ways that make them less naturalized and more clearly problematic. Poetry can thus facilitate reframing by encouraging collective dialogue and deliberation around the types of scenarios that we desire and the goals we commonly agree (or disagree) upon. Poems written during previous periods of social change can do this effectively; for instance, William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience seeks to redefine what counts as “innocent” and why, thus challenging readers to consider if and how children are corrupted by external forces. Education has an important role to play in this process as it has both normative and emancipatory influences that must be taken into account (Sterling 2010; van Dijk and van Dijk 2012). Moreover, poems often pose problems that have no clear “right” answer, teaching readers to stay open to new ways of thinking. At its best, ESD can allow for negotiation among multiple viewpoints rooted in overlapping (but not identical) values. The formation of normative competence in the learner is one of the foundational ESD competences (Barth et  al. 2007; Lozano et  al. 2017; Newig et  al. 2013; Rieckmann 2018; Wiek et al. 2011). “Normative competence is the ability to collectively map, specify, apply, reconcile, and negotiate sustainability values, principles, goals, and targets. This capacity enables, first, to collectively assess the (un-)sustainability of current and/or future states of social-ecological systems and, second, to collectively create and craft sustainability visions for these systems” (Wiek et al. 2011, 209). Normative competence is based on the ability to identify presuppositions, reveal underlying beliefs and values, and compare proposals. It also provides an

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action-guided approach to analysing the effectiveness of proposed solutions and strengthens individual capacity to work effectively with others to encourage participation and motivate change by better relating to the perspectives and value-basis of each person (Grunwald 2007). Reading a poem can compel the individual into viewing the situation from another perspective, if only temporarily. This is especially true when the poem is written from a very different or non-human subject-position and forces the reader into greater stretch of imagination to place him or herself in the context of the subject, as is the case in Neruda’s poems “The Tree Is Here, Still, in Pure Stone” (Aquí está el árbol en la pura piedra) and “Wind on the Island” (El viento en la isla). Poetry is often the opposite of “normative,” but it can help readers gain the competencies necessary to find common ground because it requires everyone to engage in meaning-­ making and intersubjective dialogue. Competence in ESD is thus guided by core sustainability principles such as social justice, ecological integrity, ethical concepts, and the pursuit of win-win options (Wiek et al. 2011). From a pedagogical perspective, it is important to consider the key learning features that underpin a sustainable development framework (or worldview) and how education can provide both the normative and the emancipatory influences to propagate these key features. Ofei-Manu and Didham (2018) highlight five relevant features: 1) holism and integration, 2) systems perspective or whole systems thinking, 3) interdisciplinarity and cross-boundary approaches, 4) cultural relativism and social constructivism, and 5) pattern recognition and system design from patterns to details (i.e., synergy). Contrasts to these key learning features—atomism, siloed organizational structures, dogmatic and didactic direction, and linear planning—are visible in our political and economic systems, in our social structures, and even in our educational practice. Atomized, dogmatic/didactic structures have become so foundational to the dominant development narrative that they are often unquestioningly replicated and reinforced throughout society’s institutions and systems. “We have come to speak of ‘grand narratives,’ value and truth systems which have determined the development of human culture over a considerable span of human time” (Rudnick 2000, 4). For ESD, the challenge is not one of supplanting one dominant narrative with another; it seeks to provide a transformative, social learning

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process in which people are freely able to participate in collective discussions and decisions in order to frame (and continually reframe) this new narrative and ideally develop a common language for sustainable development. For this reframing to be successful though, not only must it capture a functional language, but it also requires a level of emotional engagement or even passion. The lyric is as important as the storyline if “grand narratives” are to be overcome. This is why the arts—including poetry—are key in education for sustainable development.

 oetic Learning, Collective Imagination, P and Meaningful Relatedness “We need new stories, new terms and conditions that are relevant to the love of land, a new narrative that would imagine another way.” (Hogan 1995, 94)

What must occur for a person to change their view of the world, and how can poetry in education support a process of transformative learning to support this? Mezirow (1991) identifies a “disorienting dilemma” as the initial element in stimulating a transformative learning process. Disorienting dilemmas are events or experiences that individuals cannot adequately understand from their own worldviews or belief systems. These dilemmas are significant enough to create “an unsteadying influence on the individual’s life, with the consequence that the subject seeks to make sense of their experiences” (Howie and Bagnall 2013, 817). In an effort to handle the inconsistencies created by this dilemma, this may lead an individual to shift parts of their own frame of reference; Mezirow (1991) identifies meaning schemas and meaning perspectives as two distinct parts of our frames of reference that can shift when dealing with a disorienting dilemma. Individuals may improve their efforts to deal with such dilemmas by engaging in both critical reflection and rational discourse with others. Howie and Bagnall (2013) argue, though, that transformative learning theory is best understood as a conceptual metaphor, rather than as a set, linear process. Poems can be used for learning purposes by presenting disorienting dilemmas, and if readers find the new

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situations that are presented challenging it can teach them how to approach problems and make sense of experiences in new ways. Some poetic traditions, like surrealist poetry, have even developed an array of techniques aimed at creating disorientation as a primary goal. Besides the disorienting dilemma, transformative learning theory also highlights the importance of the instrumental and communicative domains as potential locations in which a change of perspective or frame of reference will occur. While the instrumental domain is about understanding how things work in the environment around us and draws on the individual’s skills for deductive reasoning and experimental engagement, the communicative domain is about expressing and understanding one another, and it draws on the individual’s skills for abductive reasoning (Howie and Bagnall 2013). Mezirow’s view of transformative learning begins with a disruptive event, and it suggests that, through processes of critical reflection, discourse, and cognitive reasoning (deductive and abductive), individuals will end up shifting their perspectives so that they can adequately contextualize this event into their own frames of reference. Wartime poetry, for example, has served this purpose in trying to find new meaning from the experiences of a truly disruptive event. Writing about his time as a soldier during the First World War, Wilfred Owen expressed the “insensibilities” caused by the horrors of war which led him to question the very meaning of the war. Climate change is an equally disruptive event in history that may prove to have much longer and far-reaching consequences than war, but many of the “horrors” of climate change are more indirect in nature and less acute, thus making it a challenge for learners to adequately respond to it. By studying how Owen responded, through poetry, to the collapse of his faith in authority, students might find a model to track and cultivate their own responses to the environmental catastrophes that are currently unfolding. Rudnick (2000) speaks about the power of creative acts in influencing culture and civilization, arguing that humans as social beings are driven towards seeking a better future. It is specifically within this linkage between humans’ creative efforts and their desire for the betterment of the world that we can harness the collective imagination of individuals to challenge their present knowledge and gain the courage to move into the unknown. “It is a fact that the poetry of life draws its creative powers

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mostly from outside the Cartesian paradigm and that it finds itself in a constant competition and confrontation with it” (Rudnick 2000, 4). Lawrence (2005) also warns against an overdependence on cognitive functions to achieve transformative learning and instead argues for artistic ways of interpreting, understanding, and knowing. Artistic expression supports a more holistic way to experience and understand the world around us and our relationships within it (Lawrence 2005). When poets describe the natural world aesthetically or even sensually, they can implicitly move the cultural narrative away from exploitation towards more respectful or integrated frameworks. Indigenous North American poets such as Kimberly Blaeser present an alternative framework that shows a more holistic perspective and/or interpretation, with “each epoch a burnished stratum, a wave of color.” Lyric visions of deep history contrast directly with the dualistic and empirical natures of the dominant framework. Drawing on Howie and Bagnall’s suggestion that transformative learning be understood more as a conceptual metaphor than as a theoretical construct, the elements of a disorienting dilemma (or a disruptive event), critical reflection, instrumental learning, rational discourse, and communicative learning all provide valuable features in understanding how education can support a learning process towards framing a new narrative for sustainable development. However, Rudnick’s and Lawrence’s arguments about the power of creative processes and artistic expression in inspiring collective imagination and challenging traditional paradigms and ways of thinking are also highly significant to this overall discussion. A clear distinction can be identified, though, between the more individual learning perspective applied in Mezirow’s view of transformation learning and the collective, social learning process discussed by Rudnick. At the level of the individual, “disruption” is an important part of transformative learning, but at the collective level “creative expression” becomes more important in reimaging social narratives and paradigms (and overcoming the normative influence of dominant narratives/paradigms). Globally, the socio-ecological crises we are facing present (and have presented for multiple decades) the type of disorienting dilemma that can initiate a process of transformative learning, and thus we must consider more acutely why, over the last three decades, the narrative of sustainable development has

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not been able to adequately confront dominant development discourses. How much of this deficiency has to do with the fact that, while sustainable development has become adept at critiquing current systems, it has remained insufficient in its ability to inspire and envisage adequate interpretations of a sustainable future that captures our collective imagination? If the major narrative challenge for sustainable development is to move from a position of critique to a place that draws on our creative efforts to seek a better future, then we must consider how we may better utilize the humanities and creative arts in teaching education for sustainable development. “Art has the unique ability to symbolise complex abstractions in concrete ways, which yields the potential for raising awareness and bringing about a shift in mindset, necessary for sustainability” (Shrivastava et  al. 2012, 29). While scientific perspectives may support the instrumental domain of learning, humanities and creative arts influence the creative and communicative domains of learning in ways that awaken human emotions. Passion and creativity are both important attributes in securing a collective effort towards reimagining our development pathways towards a more sustainable future (Shrivastava et al. 2012). Humanities and creative arts in general offer opportunities to inspire the collective imagination, thereby reframing our collective narrative. Reframing, as part of a social learning process, requires a change of meaning that often includes the establishment of new vocabulary and new use of words to capture our transformed views of the world. Poetry can play a unique role in these efforts because it offers alternatives both to rational, cognitive interpretations of meaning and also to the sentimental clichés that public languages too often generate (Bloomfield 2015). “[Poetry’s] ‘efficacy’ lies not in provoking action but in opening up a space for glimpsing alternatives to knowledge understood in terms of rationality, consistency and certainty” (Bloomfield 2015, 30). Both reading and writing poetry are acknowledged for their pedagogical value in stimulating students’ reflection processes, and the use of poetry can encourage more consideration of the connections between self and one’s wider experiences (Cowin 2012; Gay and Kirkland 2003). The use of poetry and written exercises is also noted as an effective method in teaching empathy,

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potentially strengthening a learner’s understanding of another person’s feelings (Furman 2005). “The poetry of life rests on the word and on other symbolic manifestations of creative human expression, on the figurative nature of meaning or meanings, on the imagination, on learning, and even on the level of the human capability to understand” (Rudnick 2000, 4). Beyers (2012) argues for the importance of poetic learning for sustainability as this leads to the development of meaningful relatedness which can be applied to better understanding both human-human relationships and the human-­ nature relationship. Language directly influences and structures the framework through which we understand and conceptualize our relationships, and poetic learning in particular can free us from the limiting effects of language and open our language to the creative process of new meaning-making. There are, of course, many different ways to imagine and describe the human-nature relationship. When John Muir, the naturalist writer and “father of the national parks,” wrote about the human-nature relationship, he used a spiritual language drawn from nineteenth-century romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman: Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. (Muir 1901)

When, sixty years later, Rachel Carson wrote about the human-nature relationship she used and also advanced an ecological language that made twentieth-century environmentalism resonate with readers. For each of us, as for the robin in Michigan or the Salmon in the Miramichi, this is a problem of ecology, of interrelationships, of interdependence. We poison the caddis flies in a stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die. We poison the gnats in a lake and the poison travels from link to link of the food chain and soon the birds of the lake margins become its victims. We spray our elms and the following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step

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by step, through the now familiar elm leaf-earthworm-robin cycle. These are matters of record, observable, part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of life—or death—that scientists know as ecology. (Carson 1962)

While the focus on interrelationships remains key in both the above quotes, we can note that different uses of language and of tone convey very different interpretation or feeling about the human-nature relationship. Moved by a deep emotional connection to nature, it is not surprising that Muir wrote poems, while Jill Lapore calls Carson “the scientist poet of the sea.” The field of sustainable development has struggled to capture people’s creativity and collective imagination in envisioning a better world beyond this one, often relying on social-scientific language and methodologies. Sustainable development by definition remains rather utilitarian; while in practice there are both affective and aesthetic elements to the concept, these features need further integration into the practice of sustainable development. Poetry can support this integration by supplying such affective and aesthetic linguistic possibilities. The fact that the most often quoted definition of sustainable development remains the first part of the rather formulaic and now more-than-thirty-year-old text from Our Common Future (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987) in part demonstrates how little the language of sustainable development has evolved. Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts: • the concept of “needs,” in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and • the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs. (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987) Dry syntax and bullet points demonstrate how the advocates of sustainable development prefer to appeal to the rational, cognitive nature

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of individuals and to the instrumental domain of learning. This is understandable, but it misses an opportunity to appeal to the communicative domain of learning and to the collective imagination of people in general and young people in particular. Poetic teaching and learning is needed if the field of sustainable development expects to draw out the creative efforts of individuals, particularly those working outside the sciences, to seek a better future and to inspire the collective reimaging of relationships in meaningful ways. At the very core of sustainable development is how we understand and frame relationships, not just the human-nature relationship but also human-­ human relationships. In fact, social ecologists suggest that understanding how to build and foster healthy human relationships is an important prerequisite of creating a sustainable relationship with nature (Baugh 1990). The use of poetry in education can help to inspire creative visions for a sustainable future, facilitate emotional investments, and strengthen discourse and communication on these themes.

F inding the Language of Sustainable Development Through Poetry By applying systems thinking to the multiple relationships interlinking the members of the earth household, we can identify core concepts that describe the patterns and processes by which nature sustains life. These concepts, the starting point for designing sustainable communities, may be called principles of ecology, principles of sustainability, principles of community, or even basic facts of life. We need curricula that teach our children these fundamental facts of life. (Capra 2005: 22–3)

Can poetry help us to find a new language for sustainable development, or at least, in expressing the narrative of sustainable development, bring more life and meaning to key meta-themes and principles of sustainability? If the narrative of sustainable development is going to inspire a larger social, transformative learning process, then it must advance from being primarily focused on critique and identifying current unsustainable

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practices, and it will need to move towards creative and at least sporadically optimistic visions for a better, more sustainable future. Furthermore, the cultural narrative will itself need to move from an instrumental approach (i.e., trying to explain the current situation and how things function) towards a more communicative approach (i.e., using discourse and dialogue to agree upon a common understanding for sustainable development). Poetry in classrooms can provide teachers and students with the fungible language, the emancipatory power, and the freedom of expression to test and develop new meanings and new forms of speech. Aidan Davison (2008) argues that while definitions of sustainable development remain ambiguous, this can be part of the strength of the concept. Furthermore, by not having clearly agreed objectives but rather being an open concept based around a set of core principles, the concept can attract a wide array of objectives and practices. “[S]o too is the value of debate about sustainable development not to be found in fixed definitions and assertions. It is to be found in the movement and interaction of ideas and interests on retrospective questions of the future” (Davison 2008, 193). The concept of sustainable development is framed around core principles, but the concept is distinctive in its ability to pull together and orient different perspectives and practices towards the larger pursuit of these principles. In other words, one of the unsung strengths of this concept is its flexibility: if teachers and students embrace it, they can also create their own meanings and contextualizations of the concept. A major challenge for sustainable development is the difficulties people have in thinking about complex systems and interrelationships. This stems in part from our scientific and cultural traditions, which are dominated by linear rational thinking and a materialist worldview that values atomized pieces of larger, interconnected systems. Sustainable development depends on working within and across a network of relationships which can be hard to picture when examined through our dominant perspectives (Capra 2005). “Because living systems are nonlinear and rooted in patterns of relationships. Understanding the principles of ecology requires a new way of seeing the world and of thinking—in terms of relationships, connectedness, and context—that goes against the grain of traditional Western science and education” (Capra 2005, 20). Capra goes

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further in this explanation by identifying several shifts in perception that are required to achieve this new way of thinking, including: • from the parts to the whole—the systemic properties of a living system depend on the interaction of all properties of the system and cannot be understood by reducing it into smaller parts; • from objects to relationships—human systems and ecosystems function as communities and this means that the important focus of study is the network of relationships that exists within these systems; • from objective knowledge to contextual knowledge—the two previous points demonstrate a need for understanding things within their given context and not as abstracted items, which in turn means that systems thinking in all forms must account for the given environment; • from quantity to quality—the scientific approach depends on quantification and measurement, but this directly reduces the value of things that cannot be measured—including the important qualities of relationships and context; • from structure to process—the scientific approach holds a perspective towards fixed items and units which is unrealistic to the nature of living systems which undergo a constant process of change and transformation; • from contents to patterns—by understanding relationships within systems, we can also find that there are certain patterns of interconnections that are reoccurring and give greater meaning to the system than does an observation of its distinct parts. (Capra 2005) Can poetry’s abilities to strengthen creative and communicative learning provide a basis for translating these shifts in perception into a functional discourse? Poetry has the ability to capture the significance and enormousness of those great moments that people experience in their lives and in connection with nature (Rudnick 2000); as such, poetry can help us to better understand those attributes that cannot be measured or quantified and can bring a voice to the feeling of having a deeper connectivity with the world around us. As Whitman put it in 1855, “[E]very atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” If students want to find

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meaning in atoms, they should ideally study both physics and poetry, and the interdisciplinary nature of ESD supports this. Holden et  al. (2017) argue that we should understand sustainable development as an ethical statement, and they identify three moral imperatives that underwrite this statement: satisfying human needs, ensuring social justice, and respecting environmental limits. “Sustainable development’s key themes must come from theories that are fundamental to the understanding of those imperatives, not merely reflecting stakeholders’ parochial preferences or a short-term political consensus” (Holden et al. 2017, 4). Earlier in the chapter, five learning features of a sustainable-development framework were highlighted: 1) holism and integration, 2) systems perspective or whole systems thinking, 3) interdisciplinarity and cross-boundary approaches, 4) cultural relativism and social constructivism, and 5) pattern recognition and system design from patterns to details (i.e., synergy) (Ofei-Manu and Didham 2018). Is it possible for poetry to bring greater meaning and understanding to these moral imperatives and learning features, and is it possible to incorporate these key learning features into the overall narrative for sustainable development? One proposal for an organizing principle for ESD is to engage the heads, hands, and hearts in learning efforts (Capra 2007; Sipos et  al. 2008). As an organizing principle, this image captures the cognitive, psychomotor, and affective learning domains. Poetry has a unique ability to connect with head, heart, and hands simultaneously. The cognitive challenges presented by poetic language mean that it must be read slowly and carefully and that its meanings will emerge only through effort. In addition, however, poetry does not seek merely to inform but also to engage the emotions, asking the reader to engage personally with the images. Moreover, unlike other forms of language, poetry is often uniquely musical and rhythmic, connecting the body to the heart and the mind (i.e., the psychomotor learning domain). The global popularity of hip-hop, with its attention to lyrics and movement (and politics), attests to the potential power of connecting feelings, thoughts, and actions. Indeed, it may be poetry’s ability to intertwine these three learning domains together in a creative tension or productive friction that can provide the most significant gains in education for sustainable development. By deliberately

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creating disruptive moments that inspire and motivate change in perceptions, poetry can stimulate a learning process that is oriented towards reframing our understandings, transforming our collective development narrative, and establishing a language through which we might find common aspirations.

Conclusion What is clear by now is that to break deeply entrenched, unsustainable patterns (assumptions, behaviours and values) requires a new kind of thinking inspired and informed by powerful learning processes that simultaneously lead to individual and collaborative action and transformation. (Wals and van der Leij 2009, 17)

Sustainable development, as a global agenda for change, is constrained by its failure to capture the heads, hands, and hearts of individuals in a holistic and inclusive way. The use of poetry in education for sustainable development can play an important role in engaging people to think, feel, and act in more connected ways. Poetry, by engaging our creative and communicative abilities, can also aid in transitioning from a negative to a positive mindset in relation to sustainability; while poems sometimes critique society, they also serve as vectors of praise and hopefulness. Transformative learning for sustainable development requires individual and collective change, and this is only possible if people have creative as well as technical tools at their disposal. Poetry can provide support for key learning outcomes including critical reflection, future thinking, ethical awareness, and interpersonal skills. It can also strengthen the holistic learning experience of the learner by ensuring greater connection among the head, hands, and heart throughout the learning process and encouraging multifaceted, interdisciplinary examination of complex topics such as sustainable development. “[O]ur poetry enables us to take in the fullness of these topics; we explore in an embodied, intellectual, spiritual, and emotional way” (Tanaka and Tse 2015, 50). The narrative of sustainable development can gain strength by working across the learning domains to incorporate cognitive, embodied,

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affective, and even transcendent moments in its pursuit of a sustainable future. Few forms of expression can traverse such a complex and sophisticated course as poetry can, and thus poetry is imperative to our efforts. Teaching and learning poetry can help us develop imaginative frames of mind, so that we can capture our collective imagination and deepen meaningful relatedness with our visions for a sustainable future.

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7 “Whose Action Is No Stronger than a Flower?”: Poetry, Education, and Environmental Crisis David Whitley and Elsa Lee

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea But sad mortality o’er-sways their power, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower? William Shakespeare, Sonnet 65

In this chapter, we explore two fundamental and linked claims. First, that poetry’s potential for developing affective and action-orientated engagement with issues relating to sustainability is huge—perhaps even limitless. This potential is, as yet, largely untapped and uncharted, however. Related to this perhaps bold claim, we argue that poetry offers ways to

D. Whitley Homerton College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] E. Lee (*) Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. L. Kleppe, A. Sorby (eds.), Poetry and Sustainability in Education, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95576-2_7

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negotiate—if not entirely resolve—major contradictory tensions that have emerged within the project of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in recent years. In particular, poetry may help bridge the divide that has opened up between ESD’s predominantly instrumental goals, in responding to our current crisis, and the kinds of transformation at a more affective, personal level that are equally necessary and urgent. The kinds of understanding that poetry enables, in other words, can help us see more clearly exactly what is at stake as we try to pilot ESD on the best possible course in our global, collective, but also intensely personal responses to the environmental crises that we all currently face. To explore these two claims we shall look briefly, first, at poetry’s close connection with environmental awareness and how this fits—or fits awkwardly, in some respects—with the aims of ESD, as these have been articulated, refined, and debated recently. In the second half of the chapter, we probe the issues emerging from this initial charting of the territory in more detailed ways, through analyzing exemplary poems that both demonstrate and to some extent problematize the perception that poetry and sustainability constitute an ideal partnership, whose power to enable deeper understanding and engagement is yet to be fully realized. Let us begin by sketching an argument for poetry being uniquely positioned in its capacity to develop understanding of environmental and sustainability issues. Fundamental to this claim, we would suggest, is the apprehension that poetry has—and has always had—a special affinity to the earth. Walt Whitman wrote: “I bequeath myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love” (1950, 75). Here the poet’s whole sense of being is immersed in the natural processes of organic growth. Not all poets have identified the ultimate taproot of their art so unequivocally in the vitality of the earth. William Butler Yeats famously came to see the ultimate source of poetry in the debased image of a “foul rag and bone shop of the heart” (1994, 395). But even this is an image of recycling, evocative of the sometimes unsavory processes whereby the earth’s physical forms (and the products of human industry) are broken down and repurposed over time. There are vast realms of poetry whose focus and content are neither the earth nor the environment in any overt way, of course. We tend to think of “nature poetry” as a discrete genre or category within the domain of poetry as a whole, albeit an important one. And yet nearly all

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poetry—even if its overt focus is on human relationships, the divine, war, politics, or urban squalor—draws on imagery and metaphorical connections that derive from nature. Poetry is deeply connected to nature, even as it registers, examines, and reflects on the modes in which that connection has become increasingly attenuated in modern cultures. We have outlined a case for poetry having a primary connection to what one might loosely call environmental consciousness in the above. We now want to define the goals of ESD more fully and to examine how recent debates within ESD open up a fruitful—but also problematic— space for poetry’s contribution in this more specific area. The United Nations goal for ESD and Global Citizenship (SDG 4.7) is declared on the UNESCO (2019) website as: By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development.

This blanket statement provides what may seem initially a straightforward—if wide-ranging—articulation of what ESD is aiming to achieve as a medium-term goal. But, in fact, the phrasing skirts by a number of difficult questions. Although there is a measure of consensus over some universally desirable outcomes for a sustainable future, for instance, there is also intense debate over the extent to which “sustainable development” is consistent with current models for economic growth, even if this includes a much larger proportion of the so-called green technologies. Leaving this fundamental question aside, the focus on learners’ acquiring “knowledge and skills to promote sustainable development” is also symptomatic of a bias toward instrumental goals in most policy and institutional contexts in relation to education. Why are the harder-edged “knowledge and skills” attributes being foregrounded here, as opposed to arguably more foundational qualities such as “disposition and understanding,” a sense of connectedness to the web of life on earth, and the notion of education for human development in line with Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s

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(2011) work, for example? The phrasing highlights a division within ESD policy formulation that has been widely discussed over the past decade or so, but which remains difficult to resolve satisfactorily. It is worth noting here that this debate cannot be solved simply by turning to a different term (e.g. from “ESD” to “Education for Sustainability”). The way in which these different terms are used by different authors means that there is no clear division that can be called upon to address this problem, as will become obvious in the next sections where we discuss how these terms have been applied by researchers who have been engaged in this field for many decades. According to Paul Vare and William Scott (2007), there are three major types of thinking about sustainable development, learning, and change. These, in turn, feed into a fundamental divide in terms of how the aims and orientation of ESD may be characterized. Vare and Scott classify this bipartite division as ESD 1 and ESD 2. ESD 1 encompasses science- and social-science-led approaches that either are instrumental in character or are directed toward clear goals and ideal outcomes and focus on behavior change. The teaching styles for delivering these learning goals tend to be expert-led, with the role of the non-expert learner being to assimilate the prescribed knowledge and “to do as guided with as much grace as can be mustered” (as the authors, rather archly, put it). ESD 2 is more oriented toward process than content, and is also more learner-­ centered in its pedagogies. Vare and Scott characterize ESD 2 as: a. Building capacity to think critically about (and beyond) what experts say and to test sustainable development ideas. b. Exploring the contradictions inherent in sustainable living. c. Learning as sustainable development. Although both these approaches are clearly important, the urgent need to produce measurable outcomes and action to redress our current environmental crises has tended to give priority to the more content-led, expert-­ driven modes of ESD 1 in formulating policy. As Vare and Scott observe: Authorities who promote sustainable development often see formal education in terms of ESD 1 … [and there is] a deep-rooted preference for ESD

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1 both in policy and prescription and the work of non-government organisations (Vare and Scott 2007, 194)

While recognizing strengths in the ESD 1 approach, Vare and Scott make a strong argument for ESD 2 being equally important in building a long-­ term sustainable future, and they seek to redress the balance between these two approaches, concluding that the two approaches are in fact inseparable and rather like the two sides of a coin or the westernized interpretation of the yin-yang symbol where the seed of one lies in the other. It is tempting to see poetry and poetry education as having qualities that fit best with ESD 2. Poetry, clearly, is an art form that engages us fundamentally through the emotions, and most poetry teachers see the development of students’ independent responses and critical faculties as being their primary area of concern. Poetry is also a realm that thrives on paradox and ambiguity, rather than generally advocating clear goals. It may move readers and invite them to take strong stances in relation to controversial issues, but it tends to reflect on the complex forms in which we work through inner feelings in order to do this. As Yeats (1959, 331) observed, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” Poetry would seem ideally positioned to explore apparent contradictions, however, to develop critical thinking, to work through overarching ideas and ethical concerns at a personal level. It surely has the capacity to help learners make fresh connections, to be open to new perspectives. These potentialities relate strongly to categories a. and b. in Vare and Scott’s characterization of ESD 2. In line with what Vare and Scott argue in terms of the relations between ESD 1 and 2, we posit that poetry, through its unique capacity to illuminate critical issues and uncover hidden complexities (as ESD 2 would advocate), has the potential to facilitate at least some of the aims embodied in ESD 1. Poets are generally keen observers, for instance, who are not only attentive to detail but also often deeply knowledgeable about plants, animals, and ecology. While they may use figurative language and conceits at times, poets such as John Clare, Elizabeth Bishop, Lorna Goodison, Marianne Moore, D.  H. Lawrence, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Kathleen Jamie, Alice Oswald, and many others, have a

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profound understanding of the natural world. They incorporate details into their poems that rival the finest observations of ecologists and naturalists. Used selectively, these poems clearly have the capacity to enhance a fact-based curriculum in ways that bring animals, plants, and landscapes to life, in the most subtle and engaging linguistic forms. Moreover, increasingly there are efforts to develop more prominent platforms for the varied kinds of poetry that academics tend to categorize as “post-­ pastoral.” Rather than simply celebrating or idealizing the natural world, this kind of writing is alert and critically responsive to the myriad ways in which human activity, natural life forms, and landscapes interact with one another, forming constantly evolving, interdependent relations. The British poet laureate, Simon Armitage, recently announced a prize for new nature poetry in this post-pastoral idiom, for instance, and the number of quality anthologies gathering such poems together has increased dramatically in recent years. The value of these poems resides primarily in their recognition of and response to the complex ways in which economic development impacts on nature and the environment. They are emotionally charged reflections and responses, rather than being scientific documents. But they generally work from a strong factual base, and some take a stance supporting positive action, as well as responding to loss, disruption, change, and resilience from multiple angles. Such poems, in this respect, offer opportunities not only to stimulate interest and understanding of the challenges that sustainability practices face in a grounded way, commensurate with the goals of ESD 1 but also to model and test the kinds of stances that ESD 1 programmes are designed to inculcate in a way that incorporates the more process-oriented dimensions of ESD 2. Stephen Sterling is another theorist who has made major efforts to develop thinking within which what he calls the “philosophical and problematic dichotomy” that exists between instrumental and process-led models of sustainability education. He too argues that these can be rendered compatible. In his 2010 article, “Learning for Resilience or the Resilient Learner?”, he adds another dimension to this thinking, however, by drawing on aspects of resilience theory. In doing so, his article opens up a significant additional perspective that has particular salience for poetry. For, if the most pervasive themes within poetry are associated

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with time, loss, and irrevocable change, then it is also true that poems tend to generate positions that one might characterize as ultimately resilient, within which that loss can be understood. We would argue, however, that poems—which create emotionally participative spaces that model resilient attitudes toward change—offer something beyond Sterling’s appropriation of resilience theory. We consider that the distinctive experience embodied in poetic forms may be a valuable, even necessary, adjunct to this theory. Sterling notes that, within scientific background papers, “the antonym for resilience is often said to be vulnerability” (Sterling 2010, 11). He then goes on to explore whether resilience and vulnerability should necessarily be seen in opposition to each other. He makes the crucial argument here that education for sustainability needs to have a transformative effect on learners, enabling them to adapt their worldviews as well as behaviors. Learners need to be in touch with vulnerability at a personal—as well as a systems—level for this transformative effect to take place. For many learners, this will involve a kind of epiphany that transforms their previous outlooks: “we often need to experience an abrupt and harsh threshold event, breakdown or surprise before we accept that we can’t continue the way we are going,” Sterling suggests (2010, 13). This notion of the significance of vulnerability in how we address the challenges of environmental degradation has also been addressed by Ramsey Affifi and Beth Christie (2019) in their work on the pedagogy of death in environmental education, which bears some relation to Sterling’s reflections on transformation through education for sustainability. Poems, however, can be seen as engines generating precisely the experience of traversing thresholds, breaking down habitual responses, and offering surprising new insights in verbal forms. For Don Paterson, poetry has been “from the earliest deeply connected with the world and our survival in it.” It is one of our earliest resources for resilience, in other words. But Paterson also sees poetry at its best as embracing a particular kind of risk, “of the sort that makes readers feel genuinely uncomfortable, excited, open to suggestion, vulnerable to reprogramming, complicit in the creative business of their own self-transformation” (2004). These poetic qualities, we would suggest, are a crucial complement to the kinds of argument that Sterling is making: but they offer a different terrain for these arguments to operate within, subtly

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transfiguring and taking them further in the process. Vulnerability is not the antonym of resilience in poetic configurations: it is the necessary precondition for resilience. We turn now to consider in more detail how particular poems may both exemplify the qualities we have discussed so far and enable us to explore the underlying issues further, in a grounded way. We begin by considering a category of poems to which most major poets have contributed significantly but which also has the capacity to work across the aims of ESD 1 and 2, as we have outlined above. This is the poem whose primary subject (often named in the title) is a particular species of plant or animal. As we have suggested, such poems often contain a wealth of accurate, factual information about the life forms they invoke. But they also work within a number of other dimensions not readily available within an ESD 1 approach, or indeed non-poetic approaches generally. Let us begin with a poem written early in the twentieth century by Edward Thomas that seems, at first, so straightforward and ordinary we might easily pass it by. The poem goes under the mundane title of “Tall Nettles” (1949): Tall nettles cover up, as they have done These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough Long worn out, and the roller made of stone: Only the elm butt tops the nettles now. This corner of the farmyard I like most: As well as any bloom upon a flower I like the dust on the nettles, never lost Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.

This is a poem whose unshowy observations of a common weed growing in a neglected area yields more the longer we dwell with it. Taken from a purely instrumental point of view, the poem might be used to frame a lesson developing wider knowledge of its principal subject, the nettle, in a way that highlights ecological perspectives. The common nettle, Urtica dioica, is widely distributed across temperate regions of the world. Most people in these regions have had encounters with nettles from an early

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age; we learn quickly that they sting, but otherwise we tend to ignore them: youngsters even exercise a kind of retributive justice on them often, by scything them down with sticks. But the reason they are so commonly encountered is that, like many weeds, they are evolutionarily attuned to thrive in ground near humans. They like the phosphate-­rich, preferably recently disturbed, soils that human activities, whether through farming or gardening or other activity, often generate (Mabey 1996, 67–68). So nettles tend to flourish particularly vigorously near human settlement and to grow tall, as Thomas’s poem observes, in the kinds of neglected sites where people do not bother to cut them down. Apart from their stinging function, they have been an important source of food and vitamins for many people historically, particularly in subsistence cultures where other food is scarce. And they provide food for a host of insects, including the humble but essential and now threatened bee, so they have an important function within a web of ecological dependencies. Thomas’s poem might serve as a pretext for disseminating knowledge of, or exploring, all these aspects of the nettle’s life and connections in a way that would fulfill aims of ESD 1. The plant is exemplary, in many ways, in demonstrating the hidden interplay between human cultures and other life forms, as well as the interdependencies between different species in complex food chains. All this is important knowledge in terms of building the ecological awareness necessary for sustainable development. But we would like to suggest that the poem offers something more than this, if it is viewed as a significant experience in itself, rather than as an instrumental portal to contingent knowledge and instruction. For the emotional power of Thomas’s poem resides in its quiet insistence on the value of attentiveness to one’s environment and the personal connections that, sometimes in eccentric or surprising forms, may grow from this. The poem values spaces that are neglected—where worn-out farm implements are left to rust—and notices what goes on there. This everyday, ambient, noticing of things deepens over time (“these many springs”) until it yields the surprising realization (for the reader at least) that nettles can be appreciated (even loved) with a depth of feeling equivalent to that generated by the more obvious attractiveness of flowers. And the language of the poem gifts the attentive reader, who is willing to dwell with the poem over time, an equivalent experience to that of the speaker. For

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the modest assertion that the speaker has come to like “the dust on nettles” (actually the tiny hairs that dull its surface texture slightly and enable it to sting) just as much as flowers insinuates itself into our consciousness with the force of surprise. In a small but insistent way, the poem asks us to reprogram our habitual way of looking at things to accommodate this. And then the final image sweeps this up into another realm, unostentatiously, and with just a hint of poetic flourish that yet never leaves the phenomenal world. The shower that freshens the appearance of the nettles’ leaves, by temporarily covering the tiny hairs in a glistening film of water, lifts the horizons within which we see Thomas’s mundane subject in a way that is difficult to analyze or understand fully. Nevertheless, many readers will feel the shift in perspective deeply. The shower, whose transmission of water to the earth is so vital to all life forms, “proves” its “sweetness” here because it shows the surface aspect of the plant in a way that generates a fresh and surprising vision. Thomas’s poem generates its fresh vision in small ways, but it is exemplary in its subtle unfurling of larger potentialities. Within the specificities of the speaker’s feelings about nettles and neglected spaces, we catch glimpses of what Gerard Manley Hopkins, in “God’s Grandeur,” (1967)  called the “dearest freshness” that “lives deep down things.” Thomas does not press the metaphorical or symbolic resonances of his subject at all, but the poem’s exemplary reach is perhaps extended by the nettle being generally disliked. Nettles also epitomize a certain kind of resilience, resisting human’s attempts to control their growth, coming back time and again to proliferate in neglected spaces. Other poems about individual species may similarly celebrate resilience in implicit, grounded ways, but also extend the range of associations and thought connecting to this. In Heaney’s poem “Whinlands” (1969), for instance, the qualities of the plant become metonymically associated with the resilience of a culture in the context of Irish history. Heaney’s poem evokes the distinctive qualities of the prickly shrub that is called whin, gorse, or furze in different regions of Britain and Ireland, with all the accuracy and attention to detail of a skilled naturalist. But he allows a metaphorical strain to insinuate itself into the language of his descriptions of the plant in a way that suggests another subject entwined with the natural forms. The metaphorical associations of the language tilt toward violence, heat,

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and fire. The whin’s yellow flowers (it is seen “in full bloom now”) are compared to the “small yolk stain” of birds’ eggs, while the magnificent spectacle of the gorse in bloom is evoked with an almost apocalyptic undercurrent as though, “all the birds’ eggs in / All the nests of the spring / Were spiked and hung / Everywhere on bushes to ripen.” The spectacle is invested with hints of a violent undercurrent evocative of a nature red in tooth and claw, as though, to borrow Yeats’s phrase for an earlier period of Irish history, a “terrible beauty” was being born in the vision of the blooming gorse. The violent image chain is continued into the poem’s explicit evocation of the plant’s remarkable capacity for resilience. Vulnerable though it is to flame (it is easy to set alight with a single match that swiftly generates “fierce heat”), the “tough sticks” of the whin’s stems and branches nevertheless “don’t burn, / Remain like bone, charred horn.” What endures, then, is “this stunted, dry richness” which, Persists on hills, near stone ditches, Over flintbed and battlefield.

Like Thomas’s nettles, the landscape within which the plant flourishes is registered as shaped by human activities, with the battlefield particularly resonant with the contested history of violence, resistance, loss, and regeneration that has characterized Ireland. But the “flintbed,” characteristically of Heaney, also registers a deeper level of time in the evolution of rocks under pressure that underlies this. The poem enables connections to be made between real natural environments, culture and history. To the United Nations edict for “appreciation of cultural diversity” one might add, “and the struggles for survival that have parallels and connections in both cultural and natural forms.” In this sense, poetry offers a vital imaginative component of “culture’s contribution to sustainable development.” Gorse is a plant that is common and native to many countries in western Europe. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was also deliberately exported, initially as a hedging plant, to other continents, including Australasia, the Americas, and Asia, where it spread to be categorized often as an alien invasive species. Thus, although the plant

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has a particular emotional resonance with and connection to place for a writer like Heaney, its range has been radically increased by human agency so that it is now a worldwide—if sometimes unwelcome—phenomenon in temperate zones. Poems can enable us to reflect deeply on this dual, often dynamic, aspect of identity, both local and global, that is shared by humans and many other life forms. There is a tendency for environmental literature to valorize a sense of connection to the local and regional in this dual identity, since this is the aspect under threat of erasure in an increasingly globalized world. This emphasis on rootedness that is under threat from wider forces is sometimes criticized for being too conservative in outlook, based on the perspective of privileged groups, and impervious to more democratic, socially progressive, and cosmopolitan perspectives (Heise 2008). But it is possible to explore connections to the environment, and, indeed potentially transformative perceptions, in the more transient, fleeting forms that modernity tends predominantly to engender, too. Denise Levertov’s poem “For Instance,” which heads up her innovative and sometimes unsettling collection of nature poems The Life around Us (1997), is a particularly fine instance of this. Levertov was born in Essex, England, in 1923 to a Welsh mother and a father who was an émigré Russian Jew. Levertov herself moved to the United States in 1948, marrying an American and living there for most of the rest of her life. It is widely accepted that her stronger, more authentic, poetic voice became evident after her move to the United States. Levertov’s strong affiliations to several different cultures and no single homeland epitomizes the cosmopolitan sensibility of UNESCO’s global citizen, however. Like Bishop, she traveled widely, and many of her poems reflect the more transient perspectives available to the traveler, as opposed to rootedness in a landscape known since childhood. As one of the most ecologically aware writers of her time, she demonstrates that there is no single pathway to acquiring the understanding and commitment necessary to sustaining our future. In “For Instance,” the speaker generalizes her own experiences as typical for travelers in almost any country in the modern world. The poem begins:

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Often, it’s nowhere special: maybe a train rattling not fast or slow from Melbourne to Sydney, and the light’s fading …

Neither the landscape nor the speed appears notable, but the exemplary journey chosen is a long one (certainly by British standards), and there is ample time, one presumes, for ambient attention to what is passing by to flicker in and out of focus, especially as the light turns crepuscular. What the poem celebrates, though, viewed from this enclosed railway compartment, is the enduring human capacity to find meaningful connection, even in the most unpropitious of circumstances. The experience is one of slipping momentarily out of the habitual mode of gazing as a human subject at the objectified world out there (a mode where habit effaces the specificity and vitality of the phenomenal world around us). When the grip of this habitual gaze loosens, however, the landscape is experienced momentarily as acquiring agency and looks back at the human observer, or rather “through” them, as the speaker puts it: … an inconsequential bit of wood, a coppice, looks your way, not at you, through you, through the train, over it, gazes with branches and rags of bark to something beyond your passing.

The “shred of seeing” engendered at this moment is not deemed to be “more beautiful than a million others.” Indeed, it may be less so. But for some unaccountable, perhaps even uncanny, reason, it appears to lodge deep in the mind and memory. Like Wordsworth’s famous image of spring daffodils dancing in the breeze, this far less aesthetically worked up “shred of seeing” also flashes subsequently “upon that inward eye”, as Wordsworth (1964)  put it. Years later, the recurrent memory of this seemingly inconsequential event carries an emotional charge capable of releasing a profound feeling of connection to the earth’s ever-changing, but enduring, essence. Levertov expresses this connection through an allusion to the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s ninth Duino Elegy (2011). The image of the landscape when it returns, Levertov suggests,

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“wrenches from you the old cry: / O Earth, belovéd Earth.” The lyrically intensified form in which a deep connection to the earth erupts in this line is repeated as a kind of refrain at the end of the poem in Rilke’s original German: “Erde, du liebe.” In the Elegy itself, the fuller version of this line reads “Erde, du liebe, ich will,” expressing Rilke’s speaker’s acquiescence (“ich will” echoing the marriage vow) in earth’s urgent insistence on the need for transformation. Tacitly and subtly, Levertov aligns her poem’s revelatory aspect with Rilke’s perception that the dynamic order of change governing all earthly things requires a transformative spiritual response from human beings. Poetry bears witness to those moments when our perception of the mundane opens up an “earthdoor,” as Derek Walcott puts it in Omeros (1991, p.  321), to release its transformative potential in us. Levertov’s poem explores how we experience the environment around us subjectively, focusing on the fleeting, ephemeral modes in which that experience typically presents itself in the modern world, but suggesting that even these may break into deeper forms of connection and renewal at times. Since it explores perceptual process rather than fact-based knowledge of the environment, the poem is clearly more aligned to the aims of ESD 2 than to those of ESD 1. Nevertheless, it has a firm basis in the phenomenal world, offering the individual speaker’s experience of a landscape that could be anywhere as exemplary of the way many of us now relate to surroundings that are imbued with little personal sense of connection. In many poems, however, the speaker’s sense of specific place identity is a central focus. Such poems, we would suggest, provide a potential bridge between the aims of ESD 1 and ESD 2, generating an emotive, subjective space within which specific details of the forces threatening a sustainable future can be vividly portrayed and understood. Poems can be extraordinarily economical in the way they make complex relations and vast historical perspectives memorably comprehensible, and this can be a huge advantage in building the kinds of emotional investment, as well as knowledge, that effective sustainable education requires. Our final exemplary poem does precisely this, making the distinctive, place-based experience of the Caribbean island of Jamaica available in powerful, vivid, and challenging form for an audience worldwide.

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Olive Senior’s “Meditation on Yellow” (1994) is a poem of some 200 short lines that tracks through 500 years of Jamaican history, from the island’s first European colonization to the present. The poem’s ambitious historical sweep is made coherent and accessible by being filtered through a single speaker’s voice. The license afforded by this central conceit enables the speaker to move across time, making sense of the legacy of various interconnected eras in a down-to-earth way that embodies the distinctive dialect and sensibility of Jamaican people. The speaker begins her reflections by assuming the historical position and identity of the indigenous Taíno people at the time when the colonists first invaded. The speaker’s persona ends up as a worker, who hopes to retire peacefully, after years in poorly paid service to the tourist industry. In between, she speaks from inside the experience of slavery and its aftermath. What makes the poem so remarkable is the extraordinarily deft way that its monologue is developed throughout as an address—and implicitly as a challenge to understand the experience of subjugated races—to those who came to rule the island. “At three in the afternoon / you landed here at Eldorado,” the poem begins, adding, with the bitter humor of retrospect: Had I known I would have brewed you up some yellow fever-grass and arsenic.

The poem’s deftness resides not only in the combination of light touch, colloquial ease, and sharpness of perspective that characterize the speaker’s voice. Even more important, from the point of view of sustainability issues at least, is the way the symbolic dimension of the poem’s focus on “yellow” is used to develop understanding of interlinked aspects of the whole setting. Yellow is alluded to first as the color of gold: the precious metal that is the hidden driver behind the colonists’ urge for conquest (it “fires the brain”). But yellow is also the color of the native fever-grass that is used as a distinctive flavoring for tea. And it is the color with which the sun infuses the whole landscape, alluded to in the epigraph from Gabriel García Márquez with which the poem opens and providing an emotional tone that is inflected in varied forms in association with all the major

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themes as these are developed. Perhaps most significantly, “golden” is the color of the macca (subtly contrasting with the gold that is the invaders’ avaricious quest), a common weed that becomes metonymic for both the Jamaican environment and its oppressed peoples: Golden the macca the weeds which mark our passing the only survivors on yellow-streaked soil.

Just as in Heaney’s “Whinlands”—but in wider ranging and more specific forms here—the resilience of an indigenous, yellow-flowered weed becomes linked both to the survival of subjugated cultures and to the vulnerability of a whole race of people. “We were not golden / We were a shade too brown,” the speaker observes sardonically: nevertheless, the affiliation between the resilient macca and the non-white, subordinated peoples remains powerfully asserted. Yellow forms an associative chain in Senior’s poem that enables readers to hold together forms of racial discrimination, the earth’s resources exploited in particular forms of economic development, and the hardy resilience of plants that continue to flourish, despite human intervention and the incursion of farming. The extraordinary economy of the poem’s totalizing vision enables these discrete elements to be held imaginatively in relation to each other. Sterling (2009, 77) has argued that developing the ability “to think relationally” is the most fundamental single factor needed if “we want the chance of a sustainable future.” “Meditation on Yellow” is a vivid exemplar of poetry’s remarkable capacity to think relationally in challenging, imaginative, compelling, and fully grounded ways to which it is also easy to relate. As well as thinking relationally, such poems also enable us to extend the reach of our empathetic understanding across the globe in ways that embrace, rather than erase or diminish, the specificities of place. A brief poem cannot do all the work for us. But writing of such quality is a rich resource for sustainable education, uniquely valuable in its own right but also opening out onto the whole range of interlinked issues—including social and environmental justice—that constitute this domain.

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How can beauty, “whose action is no stronger than a flower,” counter the great forces of change and destruction that hold sway over the earth? Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65 asks. We might pose a similar question in relation to poetry and the unsustainable pressures we have placed on our environment. “How with this rage” can poetry “hold a plea”? Yet action that is no stronger than a flower may, in fact, be an appropriate metaphor for the apparently inconsequential, yet ultimately far-reaching, kinds of influence and connection poetry can engender. The “action” of flowers is, after all, the very engine for all life on earth. If we are to develop successful educational programs that go beyond the instrumental, yet can also foster effective and considered environmental action, poetry offers an astonishingly rich and powerful resource. Poetry provides a terrain upon which a more holistic version of environmental education can be grounded, a possible bridge between the approaches characterized as ESD 1 and ESD 2. Poetry does not just tell us about the relational understanding of the world that we need to develop: it embodies that understanding in dynamic, fresh, and vital forms. Poetry enables us to experience deeply the vulnerability that is part of being alive, but it also—often in extraordinarily succinct and striking ways—reviews longer-­term adaptations and processes that constitute resilience. It is no exaggeration to say that poetry makes us alive to the world around us; but we would argue that it has a major role to play now, too, in helping to keep that world alive.

References Affifi, R., and B. Christie. 2019. Facing Loss: Pedagogy of Death. Environmental Education Research 25 (8): 1143–1157. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350462 2.2018.1446511. Heaney, S. 1969. Door into the Dark. London: Faber and Faber. Heise, U. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hopkins, G.M. 1967. The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. London: Oxford University Press. Levertov, D. 1997. The Life around Us. New York: New Directions.

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Mabey, R. 1996. Flora Britannica. London: Sinclair-Stevenson. Nussbaum, M. 2011. Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University of Press. Paterson, D. 2004. The Dark Art of Poetry. T. S. Eliot Lecture. Rilke, R.M. 2011. Selected Poems (with Parallel German Text). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Senior, O. 1994. Gardening in the Tropics. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Sterling, S. 2009. Ecological Intelligence: Viewing the World Relationally. In The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy: Skills for a Changing World, ed. A. Stibbe. Totnes, U.K.: Green Books. ———. 2010. Learning for Resilience or the Resilient Learner: Towards a Necessary Reconciliation in a Paradigm of Sustainable Education. Environmental Education Research 16 (5): 511–528. Thomas, E. 1949. Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber. UNESCO. 2019. Education for Sustainable Development. Accessed October 12, 2019. https://en.unesco.org/themes/gced/sdg47progress. Vare, P., and W. Scott. 2007. Learning for a Change: Exploring the Relationship between Education and Sustainable Development. Journal of Education for Sustainable Development 1 (2): 191–198. Walcott, D. 1991. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Whitman, W. 1950. Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose. New York: Random House. Wordsworth, W. 1964. Wordsworth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yeats, W.B. 1959. Mythologies. London: Macmillan. ———. 1994. The Poems. London: J. M. Dent.

8 First World War Poetry and Historical Literacy Torunn Skjærstad and Juliet Munden

Introduction In this chapter, we make the case that war poetry can be a point of entry to the historical past, stimulating both emotional involvement and curiosity about what actually happened, and encouraging the development of values necessary to a sustainable future. The combination of affective engagement, critical thinking, and historical awareness is what characterises the understanding of historical literacy on which this chapter builds. We argue that the extraordinary and powerful poetry produced during the First World War can bring the past to life, giving readers emotional and ideological access to issues that are central to how we understand the war today and pertinent to contemporary discussions of warfare and its consequences. One of the most serious consequences of war is the devastation it causes to natural resources, as well as to individuals and societies. Cairns

T. Skjærstad (*) • J. Munden Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Hamar, Norway e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. L. Kleppe, A. Sorby (eds.), Poetry and Sustainability in Education, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95576-2_8

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(2003, 185) explains why learning from the past, fostering democratic citizens, and avoiding war are crucial to a sustainable future: “War is incompatible with sustainable use of the planet since modern technology, including nuclear capabilities, makes war an unsustainable practice.” Cairns is primarily concerned with how war leads to the unsustainable use of what he calls “natural capital.” The three poems that we consider are concerned with the unsustainable wastage of human capital that war entails. We have chosen poems written by men who served in the First World War. Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon are the most anthologised war poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Egremont 2014; Fussel 2013; Hibberd 2019; Jones 2014). Brooke’s “The Soldier” (1914), written towards the beginning of the war, and Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1917), written during its later stages, offer readers a chance to engage with poems that have made a lasting contribution to how the war is conceived and remembered (Motion 1998). The possibility that readers are already familiar with these frequently anthologised poems is in itself a reason for looking at them anew to explore how they can serve the purposes of historical literacy. To become historically literate about the First World War, one must manage the balance between “affectively tuning in to the tragedy and futility of the First World War” (Davison 2017, 148) and coming to grips with the historical context and the legacies of war. For this purpose, we have also chosen to include Sassoon’s “Does It Matter?” (1917), because of its striking form, because of its concern with the consequences of war, and because of the particular historical context of its production. To develop our argument, we first consider the term historical literacy and its relationship to sustainability. To provide an historical context for the poems, we describe in brief the psychological, social, and historical impact of the First World War. For this reason, and not because we are adherents of an unfashionable and “naïve biographism” (Eagleton 2008, 208), we have chosen to say something about the lives of the individual poets. Knowing something about the young men who wrote the poems can provide the reader with a point of identification, given that poetry sometimes “becomes alien and forbidding to readers as they age” (Kleppe and Sorby 2018, xv). We also touch on the contemporary reception of the poems, describing them not as objects of calm study but as situated

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cultural expressions and sites of ideological struggle (Hall 2001). Lastly, we review the affordances these three First World War poems offer for the fostering of a sustainable future through historical literacy.

Historical Literacy and Sustainability The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations 2015) states that “democracy, good governance and the rule of law, as well as an enabling environment at the national and international levels, are essential for sustainable development.” In this chapter, we seek to demonstrate that sustainable development can be supported by historical literacy, a literacy that entails addressing and fostering critical thinking and historical awareness, values necessary to shaping a sustainable future (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization 2014). An example of how these values can contribute to sustainability is to be found in a report entitled Sustainable Development, Heritage, and History in the Scottish Highlands (Kehoe and Dalglish 2018). The report highlights that “the past is a part of the problem, but also a part of the solution” and claims that “a certain kind of history is necessary to move forward into the future … for developing understanding of problematic and conflicted pasts as part of the process of overcoming their harmful legacies” (13). Historical literacy, as the name suggests, sees the coming together of two fields, in response to the search for an interdisciplinary approach that rethinks both history and literacy (Maposa and Wassermann 2009; Moje 2008; Monte-Sano et al. 2014). Over time, the term has been adopted and redefined, and, though it is used in various ways, it has come to represent a combination of cognitive and affective dimensions, where historical empathy, historical awareness, and historical knowledge constitute the term (Seixas 1996; Seixas and Morton 2013; Downey and Long 2016). Nokes (2013) emphasises the cognitive dimension when he defines the term as “the ability to not only learn from the historical accounts that others have written, but to independently develop new interpretations of the past” (20). This definition underlines the importance of critical thinking in historical literacy, as does the definition

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offered by Downey and Long (2016, 6), which includes historical awareness, linking history to life outside school for the purpose of developing the ability to engage knowledgably in public debate. Zanazanian and Nordgren (2019) argue that the affective and cognitive dimensions are equally important, and they suggest that at the core of historical literacy is an acknowledgement that people’s understandings of the past “strongly impact individuals’ ability to navigate the world” (771). Harris and Burn (2016) describe historical literacy as meeting the wider aims of education in that it helps “prepare young people for life in democratic society” because it fosters critical thinking, empathy, and awareness of the past (539). Ruin (2019) emphasises that “humans are destined to live with memory, with an awareness of the past,” and by developing historical literacy we develop more knowledgeable citizens who can make informed choices and decisions for a sustainable future (798–808). Although they weight them somewhat differently, these various definitions of historical literacy demonstrate that affective engagement, critical thinking, and historical awareness are central aspects of historical literacy. They are also core values in a sustainable future. When it comes to the development of historical literacy, we draw on an educational project in three phases about the First World War (Davison 2017). The first phase involved developing in students “a sense that past lives matter” (150) through engagement with films, photographs, and first-hand accounts. In the second phase, the students worked on historical records, while in the third phase they were encouraged to make judgements and to contextualise what they had learned, enabling them to participate knowledgably in discussions about war, both past and present (153). This model for the development of historical literacy can benefit from the inclusion of poetry in the first phase. First World War poetry is particularly suited to developing “a sense that past lives matter,” offering multiple affordances for engagement and critical thinking. In the second phase of Davison’s model, historical knowledge enables the reader to move from a response primarily formed by their own emotions, experience, and ideology towards a more historically informed understanding. To illustrate the way in which historical knowledge can inform engagement with poetry, we therefore present a very brief outline of the First World War.

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The First World War When Austria-Hungary declared war against Serbia in August of 1914, old alliances and secret diplomacies came into play. The causes of the war were many. There had been an international imbalance of power since the German defeat of Napoleon III’s France in 1871, and the unsettled and escalating situation in the Balkans, economic depression and social unrest in many European countries, and a European military competition added to a sense of impending crisis, making war seem unavoidable (Keegan 1998). The resources of great empires were mobilised, and people arrived and were sent from the vast British Empire and the French colonies to fight against Germany in Belgium, on what became known as the Western Front. Men from the far reaches of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires fought each other on the Eastern Front. It was a total war, as it required states to mobilise their economies and populations, as well as their armed forces. It also became a modern war, because of the technological innovations to which it gave rise: the use of aircraft, chemical weapons, heavy artillery, and new methods of communication. Although most military leaders, politicians, soldiers, and civilians believed the war would be over quickly, it raged from August 1914 until November 1918. There had been nothing like the First World War, and it was later described as “the greatest moral, spiritual and physical catastrophe in history,” an Urkatastrophe (Merriman 2010, 926). In total, 74 million people were mobilised, and possibly as many as 40 million soldiers and civilians died. The war on mainland Europe was predominantly fought by men who spent their days and nights in a system of uncovered, narrow, muddy, and rat-infested trenches (Becker 2015; Yorke 2014). Among the new military weaponry that was introduced, chemical gas attacks were “uniquely terrifying to the soldiers” (Hillstrom 2013, 179). Looking back on his service as a private in the First World War, John Lawrence Hall recalled that he was more frightened by gas than by anything else (Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, n.d.). In the wake of the war, there was a wave of social revolution (Eagleton 2008, 47), and four empires fell. The Russian tsar had been overthrown, and the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Turkish Ottoman empires

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collapsed. The Treaty of Versailles (1919) was signed in the new German Republic by the victors, and the war and the Treaty are usually regarded as the root cause of the economic, political, and social turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s (Merriman 2010).

First World War Poetry The First World War made an impact on every aspect of society (Cocroft and Stamper 2018), and literature was no exception (Townshend 2005, 117). The upsurge in poetry writing was quite unexpected, as we can see from two contemporary commentators. In the fourth edition of the Wipers Times, a trench magazine published by British soldiers from February 1916 to December 1918, there was a notice from the editor. He reported receiving “a hurricane of poetry” and urged “a few of the poets to break into prose as a paper cannot live by poems alone” (Wipers Times 2018, 45). At the outbreak of the war, the English poet and critic Sir Edmund Gosse was concerned for “the intellectual wealth of the nation” and predicted a bleak future for British poetry (1916, 32). Two years later, he republished his 1914 article, adding a commentary in which he expressed how pleased he was to find his fears groundless: It is a positive luxury to look back on those words and to admit with the deepest satisfaction that they were unfounded. … It is, I think, wonderful to observe not how much, but how little, the intellectual energy of the nation has been either depressed or disconcerted. (1916, 33–34)

In more recent times, Sir Andrew Motion, who was to become British poet laureate, spoke at the eightieth anniversary of the Armistice, saying that “memories of the First World War are still endlessly pondered and transformed in the minds of those born long after it ended” and acknowledged the war poems as a source of these memories (Motion 1998, 38). Argha Banerjee (2006) has objected that poetry written by men who saw active combat has been the dominating source of such memories, at the neglect of voices expressing other experiences. Banerjee makes a valid point about representation, but, although all three poems we have chosen

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are by young men who served as officers, they have qualities that make them particularly suited to the purposes of historical literacy. We will now elaborate on this claim, beginning with the earliest of the three, “The Soldier,” by Rupert Brooke.

“The Soldier” Brooke was born in 1887. His father was a teacher and his mother a school matron, and they nurtured their children’s interest in literature and arts throughout their childhood (Jones 2014). Brooke developed his passion for poetry as a student and published his first volume of poems in 1911. When war broke out, Brooke enlisted in the Royal Navy. He saw action several times before he contracted a fatal infection from a mosquito bite and died in April 1915. Brooke’s early death, coupled with the popularity of his sonnets, established his reputation and made him a catalyst for the early war poetry (Jones 2014). Some of his sonnets, including “The Soldier,” succeeded “in expressing the prevailing mood of millions of people in that short and shining moment when the war seemed glorious, peace a bore, and the national cause simple, generous, and right” (Jones 2014, location 7655). If I should die, think only this of me:   That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be   In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,   Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam; A body of England’s, breathing English air,   Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away,   A pulse in the eternal mind, no less   Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

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  And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,     In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

“The Soldier” expresses a deep sense of identity with England and glorifies a willingness to sacrifice one’s life for the greater good of the nation. Fussel (2013) describes the poem as portraying war as an evangelic invitation to an eternal life, where the home nation is a paradise (location 6296). Wilde (2019) makes the point that Brooke, far from downplaying the immense grief that loss entails, was deliberately providing solace to those who might one day experience that their loved ones had been buried “in some foreign field.” Burying soldiers where they died, rather than bringing their bodies back to England for burial, was customary in the early stages of the war, and, though Brooke did not live to see it, a necessity in the war’s later stages, when bodies were blown apart or irretrievably covered in mud and explosives (Wilde 2019). The conviction expressed in the poem that to die fighting for England is a meaningful, honourable, and ultimately even peaceful death has led to “The Soldier” still being much used in military memorial ceremonies, despite changed patterns of warfare and changed perceptions of patriotism (Wilde 2019).

“Dulce et decorum est” It has been claimed that Wilfred Owen “comes second only to Shakespeare among the poets studied in British schools” (Couderc 2018, 75). Born in 1893, his father was a railway official and his mother came from a well-­ respected religious family. Owen had prospects of a church career but chose to turn it down. Having failed to gain a university scholarship, he decided to leave for France to teach English. When the war broke out, Owen was not interested in enlisting. He expressed that “the only thing that would keep him going in battle would be the thought that he was fighting for the language ‘Keats and the rest of them wrote’” (Hibberd 2019, location 2867). After a year, however, Owen changed his mind, and in October 1915 he returned to England to enlist. He was sent to the front in January 1916, and in his earliest letters home expressed his belief in the justness of the war. After some particularly violent military

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engagements in the spring of 1917, Owen was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh, a hospital primarily for the observation and treatment of shell shock (Hibberd 2019, location 3489). While a patient there, he wrote “Dulce et Decorum Est.” The poem describes a gas attack and draws on Owen’s own experience as well as accounts from other soldiers that he met at Craiglockhart. Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

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My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Owen describes in language that is both graphic and replete with poetic devices the horrors that the soldiers experienced and that they cannot forget. Santanu Das comments that the brilliance of the poem lies in it not being about a particular historical attack “but rather, in a way that only poetry can, it evokes for us and plunges us straight into the sensuous, almost the tactile thickness of the moment” (British Library 2014). It is this poetic evocation that can enable a reader to relive something of the soldiers’ experience, and thereby raise their awareness that past lives matter, an awareness that we argue is necessary for the development of historical literacy and an understanding of the unsustainability of war. The final lines of the poem reject as a disingenuous falsehood the words of the Roman poet Horace that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. This intense disenchantment with war was to become Owen’s legacy to generations of readers. Owen published only a handful of poems during his lifetime. A small collection, including “Dulce et Decorum Est,” appeared a couple of years after his death, but few people were interested in reading poems about the war at that time (Ricketts 2018). It was the turbulence of the 1960s that brought Owen to public attention. His vivid depiction of the soldiers’ experience chimed with the ongoing revision of the grand narrative of the First World War, which now emphasised the sufferings of the common soldier, the wastage of war, and the extreme incompetence of the high command (Ricketts 2018).

“Does It Matter?” Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886. His father was disinherited by his wealthy Baghdadi Jewish family after marrying Sassoon’s mother, an Anglo-Catholic. Sassoon went to university, but left without a degree and went on to pursue leisure activities and his passion for writing and poetry (Egremont 2014, location 629). As the war approached, Sassoon’s

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patriotism and political interest grew, and he enlisted just before the outbreak of war. In May 1915, he was commissioned in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. In the spring of 1917, Sassoon was wounded and sent back to England to recover. He seized the occasion to express his growing concerns about the war, and he caught the interest of pacifist campaigners who believed that a statement against the war from a serving officer, especially one who had been awarded the Military Cross, would help their cause. Sassoon wrote a statement that was read aloud in the House of Commons, saying that the conflict “has now become a war of aggression and conquest.” He protested “against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed” and “the deception which is being practiced on them” (Egremont 2014, location 2595–2604). To avoid the threat of a court martial, Sassoon was promptly sent to the same hospital as Owen. It was during his time at Craiglockhart that he expressed some of the same ideas in poetry, writing, amongst other poems, “Does It Matter?” Does it matter?—losing your legs? … For people will always be kind, And you need not show that you mind When others come in after hunting To gobble their muffins and eggs. Does it matter?—losing your sight? … There’s such a splendid work for the blind; And people will always be kind, As you sit on the terrace remembering And turning your face to the light. Do they matter?—those dreams from the pit? … You can drink and forget and be glad, And people won’t say that you’re mad; For they’ll know that you’ve fought for your country And no one will worry a bit.

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Both in his actions and in his poetry, Sassoon demonstrated a belief in the necessity of critical thinking and democratic engagement. “Does It Matter?” was, however, dismissed as a “querulous peace poem” by Cambridge Magazine where it was first published in October 1917 (Egremont 2014, location 3076). Knox (1983) felt that the bitter irony of “Does It Matter?” did not cater to the public expectation that poetry should offer comfort and uphold patriotic values. The “carefully controlled anger” of the poem challenged this belief, and the poem was not well-received (Moeyes 1997, 49–50). According to Moeyes, people believed that “their patriotic duty was to kill the soldiers [returning home injured] with kindness” (48). Sassoon later returned to the front and survived the war. As with Owen, it was only in the 1960s that his poetry received widespread acclaim (Egremont 2014).

 utting War Poetry to Use in the Development P of Historical Literacy and Sustainable Education We now turn to how “The Soldier,” “Dulce et Decorum Est,” and “Does It Matter?” can contribute to the development of historical literacy, specifically affective engagement, critical thinking and historical awareness. What is it that makes these three poems particularly suited to this purpose? Firstly, and most obviously, the poems are situated cultural expressions of the First World War and offer insight into their time and context of production. Brooke, Owen, and Sassoon belong to the first generation to deal with this total modern warfare and the particular technological advancements and psychological terrors that it involves (Townshend 2005, 3). They were part of a group of poets who attempted “an assessment of the physical and spiritual effects of that kind of war,” and consequently their poetry has a strong historical interest (Johnston 1964, ix). The originality and immediacy of Owen’s and Sassoon’s writing have therefore led their poems to be seen not only as poetic expressions but also as reportage (Campbell 1999, 211).

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Learning from past generation is a central part of developing a sustainable future (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe 2015), and learning from the past through texts produced by Brooke, Owen, and Sassoon can allow learners to access and reflect on important questions concerning sustainability. Seixas (2005) suggests that encountering cultural expressions from a past generation may contribute to the development of morality. He goes so far as to say that “historical knowledge that does not lead to moral orientation and moral judgement is useless history” (144) and suggests that the overall purpose of encountering texts from past generations should be to develop awareness about the past and critical thinking, to serve a purpose for the present and future generations. Secondly, poetry is, it seems, a favoured genre in times of distress and unrest, as illustrated by the words of Gosse and in the Wipers Times mentioned above. In 1970, Sally Hansen argued that letting students encounter war poetry was one way in which teachers could respond to their students’ restless radicalism. “This is the time for youth to listen to the voices of those who, while plunged in the chaos of war, spoke most eloquently of peace,” she says, with reference to Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1970, 497). Hansen’s argumentation, though she did not so name it, is an example of the use of poetry for the development of historical literacy. Thirdly, the compressed language and form of the poems can stimulate the need to read creatively and “to think differently and maybe a little harder” (Kleppe and Sorby 2018). Amanda Naylor and Audrey Wood (2011) claim that poetry offers a particularly powerful way of expressing thoughts and ideas and argue for the place of poetry for the development of critical thinking. The ecotheorist William Rueckert argued in 1978 that the reading of poetry is particularly powerful for the cause of sustaining our future, that, in the encounter with poetry, energy and information stored in the poetry could be released and translated into social action, allowing the poetry to function as a partnership between the past and the present (Glotfelty 1996, xxix). Others have been concerned with poetry’s cognitive, emotional, and social benefits, and Karen Simecek and Kate Rumbold find evidence that “the experience of poetry can offer crucial ‘thinking spaces’ in which to

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reflect on our lives” (2016, 310). In this thinking space, the reader can move from the particularity of the poem to a reflection on war in general, or to other wars that have played a  part in their own lives—from the idealism of “The Soldier” to a more general consideration of idealism and patriotism and what it means for soldiers of any nationality to die and be buried far from their homeland, from the daily and nightly horrors of trench warfare to the human cost of all warfare, from being disabled as a young man in England in 1917, to being disabled at any age, anywhere, at any time. Both “Dulce et Decorum Est” and “Does It Matter?” offer thinking space around the long-term effects of trauma—the recurrent “dreams from the pit”—allowing a discussion of how today’s societies respond to “the mental wounds of war” (Reid 2014). They provide an opportunity to consider how to commemorate soldiers dealing with post-traumatic stress “in a culture which tends to glorify or glamorise military heroes” (91). A fourth reason why these particular poems are well suited to the purposes of developing historical literacy is that “The Soldier” can be read as a counterpoint to the poems of Owen and Sassoon. Considering the three poems together allow for the comparison of different perceptions and portrayals of war, from enthusiasm to revulsion. In the context of the poets’ lives, they also show the trajectory from enthusiastic patriotism to disillusionment and protest. Furthermore, the language in which the poets express their convictions and experience also changes. Vincent Sherry (2005) explains how poetry came to reflect the reality of the war, both in form and content: The sensibility of the pre-war years was not only challenged, it was ultimately transformed by the dire realities of the martial experience it was called upon to witness. The high-gloss, arcadian surface of Brooke and his companion talents lost its sheen, its credibility. A new convention formed around the strong model of (the later) Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. (7)

Sassoon and Owen, with their images of exhaustion, filth, shellfire, and psychological damage, have become a dominant representation of the First World War (Campbell 1999, 204), and their poetry is taken to be

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“the voice of Western Front disillusionment” (Stephen 1996, 139). Brooke’s poetry, by contrast, has been said to uphold a glorified and naïve vision of war (Hynes 1992). We should, however, be wary of reading Brooke’s poem with the smugness of hindsight. Brooke was not naïve (Wilde 2019), and to describe his work as having a “high-gloss, arcadian surface,” to use Sherry’s words, is to judge him at best ungenerously and at worst unhistorically. Brooke’s poem certainly feels calmer and more controlled than the other two poems. The central extended metaphor, in which the soldier’s corpse is England, requires a more careful reading than the angry, ironic simplicity of Sassoon’s poem. The “high gloss” of Brooke’s poem has also to do with the conventions of the sonnet form, which Brooke follows, in order to convey a sense of order and completion, and which Owen inverts and exploits in order to create an impression of immediacy and disruption. Our fifth and final reason for advocating the use of these three poems for the development of historical literacy, is a remarkable feature that they all share, namely that they each explicitly demand engagement from the reader. This feature can make them more accessible to those who might otherwise fear the study of poetry “as a precious and secret rite” (Harmer 2000, 15). In the opening line of “The Soldier,” Brooke gives instructions as to how he is to be remembered: “If I should die, think only this of me” (emphasis added). The entire poem can be read as a prohibition against conventional mourning. If he dies as a soldier, Brooke wants people to think of his death not as a source of grief but as a source of pride and solace. Owen, in stark contrast, challenges his reader to relive with him the trauma of exhaustion and attack and the recurrent nightmare of watching the agonies of a fellow soldier. “If in some smothering dreams you too could walk behind the wagon that we threw him in,” writes Owen (emphasis added); if you could hear him choking on his own blood, then you, like me, would realise that the ideal of dying for one’s fatherland is a delusion, a deliberate falsehood, told to “children” over and over again, from one war to the next. Lastly, Sassoon bombards his reader from start to finish with angry questions. “Does it matter?” he asks, challenging the platitudes and jocularity that cannot console an invalid soldier. The reader must listen to the resentful detailing of the things that the soldier can no longer do, can no longer be part of, and the enduring nightmares

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that kindness cannot reach. Sassoon’s question admits only one answer: “Yes, it does matter. It matters terribly.”

Concluding Remarks In this chapter we have argued for the role that poetry can play in making sense of the past. We have shown how three poems from the First World War can enable the reader to develop both affective and cognitive engagement. We have argued that studying these poems is the very opposite of what David Harmer called “a precious and secret rite” (2000, 15) and that they open a space for critical thinking and awareness, both about the First World War and about contemporary issues relating to war and its consequences. By extending the use of war poetry beyond both emotive response and reportage, “The Soldier,” “Dulce et Decorum Est,” and “Does It Matter?” can serve the purposes of developing historical literacy. They do so by reminding us that past lives matter and that we are formed by the complex and changing interactions of ideology and experience. Being able to reflect on the experience and consequences of war and being able to acknowledge and think critically about the ways in which the past plays into our understanding of the present are necessary skills for any society that seeks a peaceful and sustainable future.

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Cairns, J. 2003. War and Sustainability. International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology 10 (3): 185–193. https://doi. org/10.1080/13504500309469797. Campbell, J. 1999. Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism. New Literacy History 30 (1): 203–215. https://www.jstor. org/stable/20057530. Cocroft, W., and P. Stamper. 2018. Legacies of the First World War: Building for Total War, 1914–1918. London: Historic England. Couderc, G. 2018. Bliss and Britten: Building Up Wilfred Owen as Myth. Anglo Saxonica: In Remembrance of the Great War: Re-working Myths 16: 73–94. Davison, M. 2017. Teaching about the First World War Today: Historical Empathy and Participatory Citizenship. Citizenship, Social and Economics Education 16 (4): 148–156. Downey, M.T., and K.A. Long. 2016. Teaching for Historical Literacy. New York: Routledge. Eagleton, T. 2008. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Egremont, M. 2014. Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography. London: Picador, Pan Macmillan. Fussel, P. 2013. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Glotfelty, C. 1996. Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis. In The Ecocriticism Reader, ed. C. Glotfelty and S.R. Sanders. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Gosse, E. 1916. Inter Arma: Being Essays Written in Wartime. London: William Heinemann. Hall, S. 2001. Encoding/Decoding. In Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. C.L.  Harrington and D.D.  Bielby, 163–177. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hansen, S. 1970. Teaching the Poetry of War. English Journal 59 (4): 497–501. Harmer, D. 2000. Poetry in the Primary School. Education 3 (13): 15–18. Harris, R., and K.  Burn. 2016. English History Teachers’ View on What Substantive Content Young People Should Be Taught. Journal of Curriculum Studies 48 (4): 518–546. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2015.1122091. Hibberd, D. 2019. Wilfred Owen. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Hillstrom, K. 2013. Defining Moment: World War I and the Age of Modern Warfare. Detroit: Omnigraphics.

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Hynes, S. 1992. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. London: Pimlico. Imperial War Museum Sound Archive. n.d. Private John Hall, 14599, code A, reel 2. Accessed January 24, 2020. https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/ item/object/80014203. Johnston, J.H. 1964. English Poetry of the First World War: A Study in the Evolution of Lyric and Narrative Form. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Jones, N. 2014. Life, Death, and Myth: Rupert Brooke. London: Head of Zeus. Keegan, J. 1998. The First World War. London: Hutchinson. Kehoe, S.K., and C.  Dalglish. 2018. History, Heritage, and Sustainable Development: A Position Statement on the Scottish Highlands. Northern Scotland 9 (1): 1–16. Kleppe, S.L., and A.  Sorby. 2018. Poetry and Pedagogy across the Lifespan: Disciplines, Classrooms, Contexts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Knox, B. 1983. Siegfried Sassoon. Grand Street 2 (4): 140–151. Maposa, M., and J. Wassermann. 2009. Conceptualising Historical Literacy—A Review of the Literature. Yesterday and Today 4: 41–66. Merriman, J. 2010. A History of Modern Europe: From Renaissance to the Present. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Moeyes, P. 1997. Sigfried Sassoon: Scorched Glory. New York: St. Martin’s. Moje, E.B. 2008. Foregrounding the Disciplines in Secondary Literary Teaching and Learning: A Call for Change. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 52 (2): 96–107. Monte-Sano, C., S. De La Paz, and M. Felton. 2014. Reading, Thinking, and Writing about History: Teaching Argument Writing and Diverse Learners in the Common Core Classroom, Grades 6–12. New York: Teachers College Press. Motion, A. 1998. Lest We Forget. New Statesman 11 (522): 36–38. Naylor, A., and A. Wood. 2011. Teaching Poetry: Reading and Responding in the Secondary Classroom. New York: Routledge. Nokes, J.D. 2013. Building Students’ Historical Literacies: Learning to Read and Reason with Historical Texts and Evidence. New York: Routledge. Owen, W. 1917/2014. Dulce et Decorum Est. In First World War Poems from the Front, ed. P. O’Prey, 123. London: Imperial War Museum. Reid, F. 2014. ‘His Nerves Gave Way’: Shell Shock, History and the Memory of the First World War in Britain. Endeavour 38 (2): 91–100. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2014.05.002.

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Ricketts, H. 2018. Wilfred Owen: The ’60s Poet. In. World War I Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings. University of Oxford. Accessed January 27, 2020. http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/?p=4276. Ruin, H. 2019. The Claim of the Past—Historical Consciousness as Memory, Haunting, and Responsibility in Nietzsche and Beyond. Journal of Curriculum Studies 51 (6): 798–813. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2019.1652936. Sassoon, S. 1917/2014. In First World War Poems from the Front, ed. P. O’Prey, 51. London: Imperial War Museum. Seixas, P. 1996. Conceptualizing the Growth of Historical Understanding. In The Handbook of Education and Human Development: New Models of Learning, Teaching and Schooling, ed. D.R.  Olson and N.  Torrance, 765–783. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers. ———. 2005. Historical Consciousness, the Progress of Knowledge in a Postprogressive Age. In Narration, Identity, and Historical Consciousness, ed. J. Straub, 141–163. New York: Berghahn Books. Seixas, P., and T.  Morton. 2013. The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts. Toronto: Nelson Education. Sherry, V. 2005. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simecek, K., and K. Rumbold. 2016. The Uses of Poetry. Changing English 23 (4): 309–313. Stephen, M. 1996. The Price of Pity: Poetry, History, and Myth in the Great War. London: Leo Cooper. Townshend, C. 2005. The Oxford History of Modern War. New  York: Oxford University Press. Treaty of Versailles, 1919. 2017. Great Neck Publishing. United Nations. 2015. Transforming Our Worlds: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. A/RES/70/1. Retrieved January 27, 2020, from https://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/70/1&Lang=E United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. 2015. Strategy for Education for Sustainable Development: Learning for the Future: Competences in Education for Sustainable Development. Accessed May 2, 2020. https://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/env/esd/ESD_Publications/ Competences_Publication.pdf. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. 2014. Education for Sustainable Development. Accessed December 12, 2019. https://en.unesco.org/themes/education-­sustainable-­development.

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Wilde, R. 2019. The Soldier, by Rupert Brooke. ThoughtCo. Accessed January 27, 2020. https://www.thoughtco.com/the-­soldier-­by-­rupert-­brooke-­1221215. Wipers Times. 2018. The Wipers Times (1916). Oxford: Osprey Publishing. Yorke, Trevor. 2014. The Trench: Life and Death on the Western Front 1914–1918. Berkshire: Countryside books. Zanazanian, P., and K.  Nordgren. 2019. Introduction. Journal of Curriculum Studies 51 (6): 771–778. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2019.1652940

9 Ecopoetry, Pedagogical Encounters, and Holding Absence Present: Ideas for Classrooms Amelia Walker

Encounter: An Introduction Criticism and crisis: as Raymond Williams noted in 1976, these words are crucially linked. While both still tend to be used predominantly in negative senses, suggesting “fault-finding” modes of “judgement,” an equally valid and sometimes more helpful understanding is that of the crisis as a crossroads or junction—a site of meetings and departures—and criticism as the necessary “response” or turn made to redress the dilemma faced (Butler 2001). For me as a poet-turned-academic, creative writing and teaching are always-already critical and part of this response. Katja Hilevaara and Emily Orley’s Creative Critic (2018) inspires me in this.

The most important thing: This chapter was written on the lands of the Kaurna people. I pay my respect to Kaurna elders, past and present, and to all first nations’ peoples.

A. Walker (*) University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. L. Kleppe, A. Sorby (eds.), Poetry and Sustainability in Education, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95576-2_9

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My work begins and continues always in and from crisis, at the nexus of the personal, political, and pedagogical. Within the folds, the hinges, of these things reside problems, questions, and provocations that stir me to think, to search, and to write. This chapter is no different, beginning at the meeting of multiple crises. Most obviously and in broad terms, I write in response to the environmental degradation currently threatening Earth and us creatures living on it. More specifically, the problem spurring this chapter springs, paradoxically, from the hope, even joy, that has risen in me across recent years through my increasing engagement with ecopoetry—an “inclusive, ecological, and political” range of writing practices that “interrogate the egregious impact of humans on the world and other species” (Chisholm 2014, 119). I came to ecopoetry, initially, as reader and reviewer. Then I began writing ecopoems and exploring ecopoetry with students and participants in university classes and community-based workshops (including primary and high school settings, where I deliver occasional guest workshops through “artist in schools”–style initiatives). According to the environmental education researcher Alette Willis, reading and discussing ecological writing can “facilitate reader shifts in perceptions” about “the valuing of non-human organisms and the morethan-human world” (Willis 2019, 443) because it immerses people in “aesthetic, emotional, and relational contexts” that encourage transformation of people’s “attitudes and even their identities” (455). My experiences affirm this: through continuing exploration of ecopoetry, I have increasingly recognised and instilled behavioural changes supporting sustainability. For instance, I have largely abandoned supermarkets, where cereals, nuts, legumes, and rice come in non-recyclable packaging. Instead, I shop at a local business where customers fill containers from home. If ordering take-away food or coffee, I bring a reusable lunchbox or cup. In addition to plant-based eating, I now base nutritional choices on food miles, water usage, and biodiversity. I’ll ride my bike despite foul weather and fatigue, and when I shifted house twelve months ago, public transport and walkable amenities were top-of-list deciders. Previously, such possibilities simply didn’t cross my mind: they were closed off, made invisible by a normative upbringing in which supermarkets and cars were ordinary elements of adulthood. In line with Felix Guattari’s Three

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Ecologies (mental, social, and environmental) (Guattari 2014), ecopoetry peeled back my cultural blinkers and expanded my conceptual limits, which illustrate how ecopoetry drives mental change through an “ecopoetic attitude” that “encourages openness to the unfamiliar” and “formal techniques” that “push readers and writers to think in ways that exceed habitual thought practices.” Mental change drives social and material change that “supports environmental sustainability” through expanded “perspectives on ways to address environmental crises” (Langsford and Walker 2020). Observing “the need to care for the environment” as “one of the most discussed topics” in global society today, the educational researcher Linda Wason-Ellam encourages educators “to teach future generations about the importance of caring for their world,” identifying “learning textually and visually” through picture books and story as a key strategy for use in primary school contexts (Wason-Ellam 2010, 290–291). This reflects a “growing call to integrate learning across traditional disciplinary divides,” including through “teaching related to the environment in a range of disciplines not normally associated with the subject area, such as literature” (Willis 2019, 455). As a lecturer in creative writing whose undergraduate students include a significant number of aspiring schoolteachers, I agree about environmental literature’s potentials for fuelling learning about sustainability—though I perceive this as extending beyond the primary and secondary classrooms on which Wason-Ellam (2010) and Willis (2019) focus: university tutorials and community-based workshops (e.g., in local libraries) provide equally strong potentials and bear scope to engage participants whose age-ranges, educational levels, and socio-economic backgrounds exceed those of typical school students. Ecopoetry can appeal across age levels to spark “becoming” processes through which “creative energies are mobilized” and “new ways of being and thinking are generated” (Davies 2009, 20). For those seeking ecopoem examples for classroom reading and discussion, I recommend the free-to-access online journals ecopoetics, Plumwood Mountain, and Bomb Cyclone.1 A potential problem, however, is that much ecopoetry is formally complex and thus not always immediately accessible to all readers (Maling 2013). Outlining ways for educators to make ecopoetry accessible is thus

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this chapter’s major aim. First, observing difficulties of definition, I propose treating ecopoetry relationally, via its connections with nature poetry, environmental poetry, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and visual poetry. Then, I pose ecopoems as spaces for staging “pedagogical encounters” (Davies and Gannon 2009) and explain how ecopoetic layout turns typeless spaces into zones for encountering the un-­encounterable—things (all but) lost to extinction, erosion, depletion, degradation, invasion, or colonisation. Following this, I outline learning activities and discuss how they played out in library-based workshops with participants including educators and interested general community members.

Ecopoetry: A Genre in-becoming [W]riting is a becoming … traversed by strange becomings that are not becomings-writer but becomings-rat, becomings-insect, becomings-wolf. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 265)

Definition creates challenges for ecopoetry in classrooms: it is prolifically “fluid,” perpetually in processes of regeneration and diversification (Maling 2013). Each individual ecopoem presents “an ecology: a microcosmic ecosystem” that is always changing and spawning new variations (Arigo 2007). However, overly broad definitions typically overlook what makes ecopoetry transformative (Maling 2013), so this section will suggest treating ecopoetry relationally in connection with other genres. Arigo (2007) and Maling (2013) separately distinguish ecopoetry from nature poetry and environmental poetry. Nature poetry indicates poems about natural settings and phenomena, without any necessary environmentalism. It privileges the lyric human subject (“I”) observing natureas-object, implying anthropocentric human superiority (Arigo 2007; Maling 2013). Environmental poetry is by contrast “propelled by and directly engaged with politicised environmentalism,” emphasising human responsibility but still maintaining a dichotomy of human subject versus nature-as-object (Arigo 2007; Maling 2013). Ecopoetry crucially treats humans as animals—part of nature—prompting humble reassessment of our relationships with beyond-human entities, from which we may learn

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(Skinner 2007; Arigo 2007; Maling 2013). Treating humans as animals means ecopoetry’s “natural” subject matter can include farms, mines, cities, and more. Ecopoetry does not “return ‘back to nature’”; it reminds us “we never left … the bulldozers and the birds are part of the ecology” (Arigo 2007, 2). Atop its thematic connections with nature poetry and environmental poetry, ecopoetry bears formal links with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and visual poetry, reflected through how ecopoetic concern manifests “between the lines, in the white spaces, questioning even the paper upon which the poem is printed” (Arigo 2007, 2).2 Like L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, ecopoetry draws on poststructuralist and postmodern critical theories to emphasise language as constructed and connected with thought (Perelman 1996, 15). Ecopoetic uses of syntax, punctuation, enjambment (line breaks), and typology fracture language, pushing its limits (Arigo 2007; Chisholm 2014; Day 2016).3 Like visual poetry, ecopoetry often arranges text—text including words, punctuation marks, numbers, arrows, shapes, lines, and more—to encourage non-linear reading (Bloomfield 2013; Lipson 2013). For instance, the online journal Bomb Cyclone’s signature image is a fingerprint shaped as what could be a mushroom cloud, a hurricane, or a tree, compelling reflection about human imprints on Earth. This exemplifies how poems’ shapes can contribute ideas not explicitly stated in the text itself. Shapes can also convey affect— for instance, through more abstract suggestions of angularity, smoothness, isolation, interconnection, and similar notions. One poem might have multiple start and end points; indeed, assumptions about what constitutes “one” poem may be troubled via groupings of distinct poetic units readable together or independently. Like L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, this pushes linguistic limits, encouraging different reading approaches (Bloomfield 2013). This section began by observing ecopoetry’s definition as challenging. I posited treating ecopoetry relationally and have now outlined that this means considering thematic differences from nature poetry and environmental poetry and formal similarities with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and visual poetry. But how can this relational treatment operate in classrooms where learners seek to identify and discuss specific poems as eco- or otherwise? Rather than categorising, I recommend querying and debating

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each poem’s becoming-­eco tendencies. “Becoming” is never-complete; it is always movement towards; relationships of proximity simultaneously indicate distance or further potentialities to activate (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 265). Becomings may be multiple: poems can at once be becoming-eco, becoming-nature, becoming-environmental, becoming-­ L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and/or -visual, and/or more. Learning activities involving visual and/or spatial representation of these becomings, for instance mind-mapping or flow charts, provide possibilities for honouring ecopoetry’s specialness while maintaining its capacities to grow and change.

 pening (to) Otherness and Holding O Absence Present This chapter’s introduction described how reading and writing ecopoetry has expanded my conceptual limits, proposing that ecopoetry facilitates thinking beyond the habitual. Though consistent with published literature on environmental writing in pedagogy (Wason-Ellam 2010; Willis 2019), this claim can still benefit from theoretical explication. The previous section noted how ecopoetry, like L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and concrete poetry, uses devices that push linguistic limits. Given intimate interconnections between language and thought (Perelman 1996) and recognising that dominant rules of grammar and style promote “inculcation” into normativity (Butler 1999), poetic techniques that push linguistic limits can open minds in ways that unsettle socio-cultural conditioning (Perelman 1996; Knowles et  al. 2012). For instance, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets commonly resist or reposition the poetic “I” beyond conventional western understandings of selfhood, facilitating openness to becoming-Other, while visual poems that make text readable in multiple orders unsettle hierarchical notions of authorship and authority in and beyond reader-writer relations (Barthes 1967). By incorporating these techniques, ecopoetry takes up Guattari’s call for works on “mental” and “social” as well as “environmental” ecologies (Guattari 2014, 114), and it generates possibilities for “pedagogical encounters”—interactions through which learners “think

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creatively” and “move beyond the boundaries of our current habituated thought” (Davies 2009, 46). To illustrate how ecopoetry does these things, this section explains how, firstly, ecopoems offer spaces for staging pedagogical encounters that encourage becoming-Otherwise and, secondly, ecopoetic layout, especially typeless space, sustains encounters with the unencounterable—the lost, forgotten, silenced, erased, eroded, extinct, depleted, invaded, and/or destroyed. The book Pedagogical Encounters (Davies and Gannon 2009) emphasises Deleuzian encounter: that which “forces thought to raise up and educate the absolute necessity of thought or a passion to think” (Deleuze 2004, 176). Pedagogical encounters crucially facilitate openness to becoming-Otherwise (Davies 2009), which ecopoetry facilitates by foregrounding human encounters with beyond-human entities (Cooke 2010; Gander and Kinsella 2012; Stuart 2017). Ecopoems, as “space[s] of literature” (Massumi 1987, xiii) and “mental space[s]”4 (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 551), provide settings for pedagogical encounters. Poemsas-spaces are textual frameworks constructed through available cultural and semantic technologies. Staging encounters with-and-in poems entails mental experimentation via assemblage of hitherto unassociated or differently associated factors, which compels awareness of hitherto-unthought trajectories for ongoing thought and writing. Staging pedagogical encounters through ecopoetry indicates more than writing about lived experiences of learning: it entails writing as learning and experience (Richardson 2002). Imagined encounters are equally possible as lived ones; even lived encounters are through writing re-membered differently (Tota and Hagen 2016). For instance, this chapter’s next section describes my lived encounter with a rabbit: the description is a fresh encounter within the textual space; writing it entailed fresh learnings and becomings.5 To encourage learners to stage pedagogical encounters through ecopoetry, educators might encourage the reading or writing of poems involving interactions with animals, plants, insects, fungi, rivers, oceans, crystals, or the wind, among other beyond-human entities and phenomena. In line with ecopoetic recognition of the humanas-animal, this could include interactions set in cities, offices, or other human-influenced settings (see Appendix).

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Layout in ecopoetry is key to the pedagogical encounters poems may stage, for layout influences what style of space a poem constructs, thus setting the scope for what can happen in that space. This chapter earlier discussed ecopoetry’s deployment of visual poetry devices. I now add that ecopoems use these devices in specifically eco ways. Sometimes they visually or structurally mimic ecological shapes and processes, for instance those of potato roots, rabbit warrens, or ant colonies.6 Other times, ecopoems may engage positive deployment of “negative space”—in visual art, “the area of the image that is not the subject of the representation” (Mann and Stevko 2018, 6). In pedagogy, negative space reflects “those silences and spaces that demarcate the unsaid elements” (Fendler 2017, 3). In ecopoetry, it predominantly involves strategic use of typeless areas of the page or screen (see Appendix). It may also mean inserting holes into poems or using L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-­inspired devices of fractured enjambment and/or stanza groupings. Positively engaging negative space challenges conventional assumptions about subject-object relations and their implied hierarchies or operations of privilege (Fendler 2017, 3). Poetic uses of negative space can signal silenced issues and lend presence to the absent. Typeless space thereby potentiates encounters with the unencounterable: the lost, extinct, eroded, invaded, depleted, and more. To illustrate the complex notion of encounters with the un-encounterable and holding absence present, I now turn to the Australian situation. The continent commonly known as Australia (though it has other names) is commonly understood as “post-colonial” (Nugent 2009, 35). However, given the multiform violences exacted, the term “invasion” seems more appropriate (Pulford 2018, 102). These violences are ongoing: Australia remains in a “crisis of remembering and forgetting” reiterating “the myth of ‘terra nullius,’ the idea that, though Australia was clearly occupied when Britain claimed the territory … the territory was legally an empty country” (Pulford 2018, 99, emphasis in original). Terra nullius is one among the many forms of erasure and silencing that have occurred in Australia since 1770, when invasion began, and still resonate. Another is the stolen generation: the 1890s–1970s government-legislated practice of forcibly separating young Indigenous Australian people from their families to be raised by white families or on church missions (Pulford 2018, 99). Atop human

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suffering, this interrupted intergenerational transmission of crucial knowledges about appropriate care for Australia’s delicate ecosystems. Harm resulting includes species extinction of animals and plants, erosion of important land structures, gutting of sacred sites for mining, fires and droughts linked with irresponsible farming practices, and more. As a person of Scottish-Irish descent born and living on Australian soil, I wonder, how can I avoid reperpetuating invasion’s violences? Without knowing intent, I am prone to inflict harm through mundane acts I am culturally habituated to think normal. This includes even speaking the (English) language in which I have been raised to think—a language that has driven other tongues to extinction, impoverishing the mental and social ecologies. John Kinsella and Russell West-Pavlov signal these same problems when they ask how non-indigenous people born and/or living in Australia can write ecopoetry in ways that “respect indigenous space and open that space to people in need of a place” (including refugees): “How can we entertain and respect multiple arguments for presence? How can we all be and not take away from each other?” (Kinsella and West-Pavlov 2018, 60). For Kinsella and West-Pavlov, an approach to the problem of space in the ecopoetries of invaded landscapes involves recognising that “[s]pace does not need to be filled: it is not a vacuum to be fed. It is a presence. But a presence that can tolerate mutual ‘occupation’” (2018, 60). Following this argument, typeless spaces in ecopoems metaphorically stage much more than absence of text: space is text that presents space and/or absence (as presence). For instance, the following excerpt from Open Door (Kinsella 2018) uses enjambment to fracture sentences, creating room for the reader to pause, reflect, and realise things missing from mainstream discourse: So many things are out of kilter this year—old species are reinventing themselves, changing habits, remaking. (55–56)

The creation of spaces via enjambment also features in the Indigenous Australian poet Steve Armstrong’s recent collection Broken Ground (2018). For instance:

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Desperate for order? Better to pretend such dis-possession is the province of only a few and try to forget murder understood as economy. (23)

Elsewhere in these collections, both Armstrong (2018) and Kinsella (2018) also enact linguistic fracturing through stanza breaks. They furthermore carve spaces in poems through indentation of individual lines as well as entire stanzas, sometimes creating sawtooth effects down the poems’ uneven margins. These sawtooths are readable as allusions to treefelling and/or how mining cuts into earth.7 Spaces or holes can also be carved within poems (for instance, Appendix presents an ecopoem in a corporate setting, where white spaces signify fired workers and the erosion of working conditions through neoliberal cost-cutting). Similar deployments of typeless space are observable in “indigenous” (Russo and Reed 2018, 41), “anticolonial” (2016, 210), and “postcolonial” (Milne 2015, 68–70) ecopoetries from Latin America, Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and beyond. In addition to invasion or colonisation, ecopoetic use of negative space can encounter extinction, erosion, pollution, and natural resource depletion, among other forms of loss that may frequently seem invisible, silenced, and/or denied. Common to these examples is the sense of absence—literally (things lost or diminishing) and conceptually (silencing of the problems). These absences are in senses un-encounterable, but ecopoetry, by present-­ing space, offers modes of encounter. This is how ecopoetry holds absence present, how it enables encounters with the unencounterable. These, I suggest, are particularly crucial forms of pedagogical encounter because they encourage becoming-Otherwise in ways that may redress the loss or threat: if we cannot bring back what has been destroyed, we can at least consider ways of stopping or slowing the destructive processes. Holding absence present is also key to the premise from which this chapter began—that reading and writing ecopoetry can open minds and change behaviours. In line with this, I recommend that exploration of layout, especially typeless space, forms a major component in classroom-based practices of reading and writing ecopoetry in order to prompt learning about sustainability.

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Ideas for Ecopoetic Writing in Classroom Contexts Having now discussed what ecopoetry is and how it supports learning about sustainability, it is time to consider practicalities of how to approach ecopoetry in classrooms. This section presents a sequenced list of activities developed for ecopoetry workshops that I facilitated while preparing this chapter. Run in a library and promoted via social media, the free-toattend workshops were attended by teachers, writers, and library members with poetic experience levels ranging from self-identified complete beginners to widely published poets. With these keen participants, I was privileged to evade discipline issues, but, recognising this, I asked the teacher participants their thoughts regarding potential resistance and have incorporated such considerations into my discussion of the workshop plan (in the section following this one). The discussion also details how the plans presented in this section were remade in actual workshops, responsive to situational factors. The plan nonetheless provided useful building blocks for reassembling. This is how I suggest using it: the activities are (flexible) ideas rather than (fixed) instructions or exercises.

Activity One: Warm-up If participants do not know one another, this doubles as an introduction. Otherwise, it offers a non-threatening ease-in to the concept of ecopoetic encounters. Ask each participant to share an anecdote about an experience of interaction with a beyond-human entity. Example: I’m Amelia. In the mornings I run along a coastal road where feral rabbits live. Recently, one paused and stared at me intensely before racing away. Its fear stung: I’m vegan and love animals. Yet the fear was grounded. Humans in Australia shoot and release viruses to cull rabbits, which destroy native animals’ habitats and food sources. Rabbits don’t do this deliberately, though. They were brought here by invaders and probably don’t know the harm they cause. The encounter reminded me how I likewise cause harm unknowingly.

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 ctivity Two: Choosing an Encounter for Staging A in a Poem Affective connections enhance learning (Munden and Skjærstad 2018, 263). To help participants identify emotive encounters, read feeling words. Between words, pause and ask participants to list beyond-human topics that come to mind. Participants can repeat topics. Sample List: Joy:      Waterfalls, parrots, sunrise, oranges Despair:     Nightfall, winter, mine shafts, bones, worms Hope:      Daffodils, eggs, river springs, campfires Community:    Soft grass, mushroom rings, campfires Solace:      Mountains, old trees, tortoises, sunrise Love:      Eggs, nests, parrots, raspberries

Continue for around twenty emotions. Compare lists, then invite participants to choose a topic for writing about. If the same topic appears multiple times, this signals interest, especially if associated with contradictory emotions (as “sunrise” in the sample list appears alongside both “joy” and “solace”).

Activity Three: Emphasise Contingency Pedagogical encounters are contingent: specific, situated, and chancebased; it happened this way, but it could have happened differently or not at all (Gannon 2009, 72). Contingency supports learning through reflection on how encounters might have differed. Encourage specific makers of time, place, participants, and details. The details can be invented: poems stage fresh encounters, whether imagined or experience-inspired. Ask questions like: • Who and/or what parties are involved in this encounter? • How are they connected? What separates them? • What is the setting and season?

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• What are some five sensory details? • What is the broader socio-historic context (world events, technology, etc.)? • What happened immediately before and after? • What is simultaneously happening elsewhere? • What if an element were altered? How would things differ?

Activity Four: Writing the Encounter-as-Sensations Without using pronouns (“I,” “you,” etc.), invite participants to produce lists of sensory and affective associations. These won’t necessarily form poems, but offer materials to use in poems. The following sample list reflects the rabbit encounter described in activity one: Darkness, streetlamps, running, breath, fog, orange, a moment, flash, over, happening over, eyes, black, shooting, reflecting, the coastline, disappearing, shrubbery, shrinking, histories, guns, viruses, fleeting, permanent.

Activity Five: Listing Questions for the Other Ask participants to list questions for their Other. The aim is to generate ideas, not necessarily polished poems. What might the Other know that we do not? What may we humbly learn?

Activity Six: Shifting Voice and Perspective This activity reframes self-Other relations through language. Participants write prosepoems referring to the beyond-human as “you” (second person) and the human as “they,” “she,” or “he” (third person). Here is an example restaging the rabbit encounter described earlier: Flash. Less than a second. The moment is over. Yet it keeps happening. Over and over. Eyes. Your eyes. Black diamonds. Shooting stars. Pools reflecting the creature you have seen and seem to flee. Wisely. For its kind have harmed yours—with their viruses, with their guns. On two overgrown back legs, it pants along,

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shrunken front legs swinging bent and useless by its sides. Beneath h­ umming streetlamps its spent breath trails as fog, lurid orange against the pre-sunrise sky. The seaside road is flanked by houses on one side, cliffs on the other. Between road and cliff remains a shrinking zone of shrubbery where you pause before darting—disappearing—surviving. The creature barely registers your presence, let alone how alike you are: small, yet responsible for big things; surviving through, through destruction. Each action. Each pause. So fleeting. So permanent. Like a gunshot. Torchlight. Flash.

Activity Seven: Playing with Layout Invite participants to visually reformat a prose text in multiple ways (I suggest using the prosepoem from activity six). For inspiration, view and discuss samples of visual poetry. The following is a non-exhaustive list of approaches to try: • Shaping poems representationally: arrange text as a picture, for example, an apple or a face. Encourage shapes that do more than reflect subject matter (for instance, tree poems shaped as trees). Suggest experimentation with shapes that contrast with or extend the text (tree poems shaped as axes or skyscrapers). • Multidirectional poems: this potentially extends the poems-mimicking-nature approach. Consider multidirectional forms in nature—for instance, potato and ginger rhizomes, rabbit warrens, ant colonies, waterways, coral, and crystals. Can poems reflect these shapes? How does it affect textual beginnings and endings? How many ways can a multidirectional poem be read? How do reading choices shift the reader-­writer relationship? • Fracturing lines and language: view examples of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. Experiment with breaking lines and/or stanzas in different places, including mid-­sentence and/or in syntactically jarring ways. Mid-word line breaks can signal how longer words are formed from smaller ones, prompting reflections on etymology and the oft-political histories language bears. Punctuation marks in the middle of words produce similar effects (for in/stance, some … thing re-(as)sem/bl/ing th[!]s).

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• Erasure: remove some words from the poem. Removal can be at whim or following an elected rule like removing every fifth word, or particular types of words such as nouns, pronouns, verbs, words containing certain letters, words with a nominated number of syllables, or similar. • Putting holes in a poem: this introduces negative space. Make the poem’s text a backdrop foregrounding a typeless space or spaces. Effectively, put holes in the poem to present absence. A tree poem could signal habitat loss and extinction through bird-­shaped holes. • Foregrounding white space: holes can be around as well as inside poems. Typeless space is not empty of text: it is text of emptiness. Using some example poems, compare and discuss why poets may have chosen to shape and position space(s) as they did. Encourage participants to explore these decisions in their own poems.

Adapting the Ideas for Classroom Contexts The previous section’s activities should be remade to suit differing situations. This section describes how I altered my plans in actual ecopoetry workshops, responsive to situations as they unfolded. This section also incorporates reflections on how teacher participants indicated they would adapt activities for school- and university-based settings, which include disciplinary considerations (resistive learners). In activity one, the icebreaker, participants shared and responded to one another’s anecdotes enthusiastically, entering dialogues about commonalities and differences among experiences. Participants with teaching backgrounds agreed that this activity would suit most learners able and willing to engage in dialogue-oriented learning. Learners with barriers towards spoken interaction would require adaptations—for instance, transferring the activity to a written and/or electronic medium such as an online classroom discussion forum. Benefits of the icebreaker were visible when I began sharing my own anecdote. As I related my experience and feelings, participants’ bodily postures became more open, indicating developing rapport. They seemed to relax, perhaps because my story entailed some vulnerability, which enhances relationality (Gannon 2009,

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63–64). As we continued, anecdotes fed into poems and ongoing conversations. Some participants later wrote poems developing or adding detail to the encounters they had described at the start. Others staged imaginary encounters inspired by anecdotes they had heard shared. Participants thereby relaxed bounds of selfhood, opening to interconnection. The encounters staged in their poems became extensions of their intersubjective encounters with one another. They reminded me how writing produced through workshop activities arises from more than just each individual activity itself: tacitly and knowingly, participants respond to every aspect of a workshop, including introductions and the set-up of space; small things bear big impact. Activities two to six were designed as a staged sequence through which participants would, in activity six, stage an encounter in the form of a prose(eco)poem to be visually remade through activity seven. I never ran the activities precisely as planned. For example, in the first workshop, because our icebreaker dialogues had already generated much writing material, I immediately afterwards proposed a ten-minute writing sprint and invited participants to create a prosepoem about an encounter involving non-human and human entities—the one they had described or another of their choice. Following this, we progressed through activities two through six: I asked each participant to consider a different encounter from the one they had written about in the sprint and to stay with the sustained encounter for the sequenced strategies. Then, after activity six, I offered participants a second ten-minute writing sprint to produce another poem in relatively free form (meaning without activity six’s constraints around voice and perspective) using the encounter they’d been exploring through the activities. We then shared and compared poems produced through (a) the first writing sprint, (b) activity four, (c) activity six, and (d) the second sprint. I asked whether participants preferred the freer or more structured approaches, inviting feedback on which activities worked and didn’t work for them. Their responses surprised me. The poems produced through the first and second writing sprints were in my view equivalent in strength. Yet participants almost unanimously indicated that they preferred the poems from the second sprint: they believed the sequenced activities had fed into and enhanced these later poems. Participants reported that the

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activities themselves were challengingly worthwhile: they struggled but valued the process and the insights gleaned. This, however, was a keen group. For reluctant learners, I would omit or adapt the tougher activities (four and six, my participants indicated) and focus on the more straightforward ones (two, three, and five). Responses to activity six interested me especially. Participants considered it the most flummoxing yet most valuable activity: it pushed them to write and think beyond their habitual points of view. However, most participants, while declaring activity six’s value, veered from its constraints on second and third person. They played with voice and perspective in other ways—for instance, speaking from the beyond-human perspective as “I” and/or addressing the human as “you.” In accordance with my instruction to bend rules where it aided their writing processes, they maintained the spirit of the exercise while adapting it to suit their needs. They pushed against my rules and created new ones that served poetic creation. This reflects Kinsella’s depiction of (eco)poetic form as a box one pushes against in order to get beyond the box (2007, 94). In activity six, I encouraged participants to produce prosepoems so that in activity seven we could experiment with differing visual layouts of the same text. Before discussing how activity seven went, prosepoetry warrants consideration for its own layout qualities. Prosepoetry confounds the literary critic Terry Eagleton’s tongue-in-cheek characterisation of poetry as writing wherein “it is the author, rather than the printer or word processer, who decides where the lines should end” (2007, 25). Prosepoetry’s decision is refusal-to-decide—which is still a decision and still bears effects or indeed even consequences. Where environmental issues are concerned—for instance, global warming—those who refuse to decide may deny responsibility for these consequences; ecopoetic prosepoetry can be read as alluding to this. Another possible suggestion ecoprosepoetry makes is of overrun spaces. My example poem for activity six includes both: its crowded visual aesthetic mimics the urgency with which rabbits and human invaders have proliferated on and ravaged Australian soil. It also serves as a metaphor for erasure of erasure or double-silencing in discourses of Australian history and culture—specifically, how so-­called past colonial violences are re-perpetuated through nonacknowledgement of colonisation-as-invasion and of its present ongoing

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impact (Pulford 2018). Prosepoetry’s crowding out of space offers a metaphor to speak this silencing of silence. I now turn to the non-exhaustive list of visual layout approaches listed in activity seven. In the community workshops, I gave participants the list of approaches plus examples to peruse, then asked them to experiment with creating as many versions of poems produced in activity six or their free writing sprints. I encouraged them to produce as many versions as they could within a twenty-minute time window, applying at least two different approaches and potentially applying the same approach in multiple ways (for instance, by placing differently shaped holes in the same poem, then comparing the effects). Participants located activity seven’s most significant benefits in the processes of comparing the same text differently laid out. This, they indicated, demonstrates hands-on how layout can open, foreground, or obscure differing poetic interpretations. They also said they found it useful and fun to consider and compare examples of published poems using inventive layout strategies in order to gain inspiration for approaches they could use in their own writings. In the workshops, the examples provided a good springboard for discussions about the techniques that have already been explored, what seemingly remains yet untried or underexplored, and how things tried in the past might be altered or pushed further. Regarding particular techniques, most participants initially shaped poems to mimic nature— approaches involving positive space. However, most subsequently began exploring negative space: shaping text representationally seemingly offered a gateway towards manipulating typeless space. Teacher participants indicated that activity seven seemed not one but multiple activities. Each one, they suggested, could have warranted a dedicated lesson. Overall, they thought activities one to seven would work best staggered across multiple weekly classes as a dedicated learning unit.

Concluding Thoughts This chapter has sought to extend existing work on environmental literature as a pedagogical tool for encouraging personal and social transformations to address the ecological crises of our age (Wason-Ellam 2010;

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Willis 2019). Building on and pushing beyond extant accounts, I have posed that ecopoetry can appeal across age-ranges in formal primary, tertiary, and secondary learning contexts as well as informal or communitybased workshop settings. Observing challenges of accessibility due to ecopoetry’s complexities, my aim has been to provide strategies via which educators can make ecopoetry engaging for learners and workshop across diverse personal, social, and educational backgrounds. Towards this aim, key recommendations this chapter has provided include, firstly, to overcome challenges of definition, treat ecopoetry relationally in connection with nature poetry, environmental poetry, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and visual poetry, for instance via activities like mind-mapping; secondly, to facilitate expansion of conceptual limits, engage ecopoems as spaces for staging pedagogical encounters, for instance by writing about encounters with beyond-human beings; and thirdly, to promote thought about extinction, invasion, and depletion, encourage encounters with the unencounterable, especially via ecopoetry’s formal manipulations of typeless space. The explicit exercises I have described offer practical models of how the above recommendations can translate to actual classroom settings, while the description of how I adapted the activities in response to participant needs offers insight into how the models can (and should) be re-modelled to suit bespoke learning situations and contingent demands. This chapter has, however, considered but a small selection of ecopoetry’s pedagogical potentialities. I look forward to ongoing dialogues about how pedagogical applications of ecopoetry and other modes of environmental writing can expand knowledge, individually and collectively, and thus potentiate the global shifts towards sustainable practices so vital to the ongoing survival of human and beyond-human life on this earth as we know it. Acknowledgements  I thank my workshop participants: Dashielle Alain, Jessica Monck, Heather Taylor Johnson, Mike Hopkins, Virginia Barratt, Chloe Cannell, Pam Makin, Shaine Melrose, James Parker, Anna Canturias, Belinda Harrison, Surabee Sukha, Aisha Sultan, Sarah Jane Justice, Francesca Da Rimini, Jessica Liebelt, Janmesh Pandya, Belinda Cole, and Janet Wu.

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Appendix: Sample Ecopoem with Holes The day they took the plants Today they took our plants away I was at my desk No knock just the door, opening and then the bluster: bodies, two bodies barging in and marching over scooping up our pot-bound fern and taking it —Where are you taking that? I asked —Cost cutting —So … whoever waters it is out of a job? Silence. The closing door. Now I’m staring at where the plant isn’t: Turns out it was hiding some hideous stains

Notes 1. Accessible at the following links: https://ecopoetics.wordpress.com/; https://plumwoodmountain.com/; http://www.bomb-­cyclone.com/. 2. Examples of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and visual poetry influences in ecopoems may be observed in ecopoetics, Plumwood Mountain, and Bomb Cyclone. See links in endnote one. 3. I have also given focused discussion to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry techniques in ecopoetry in my free-to-access review of Kristin Lang’s Weight of Light (Walker 2018). 4. To strict Deleuzians, “plane” might seem more appropriate, but “space” is a term I use because I feel it more pertinent to ecopoetry as a practice strongly concerned with spaces, physical and mental.

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5. A valid argument-in-waiting is that all poems stage encounters because readers and writers mentally confront the poem’s subject matter. However, not all encounters are pedagogical encounters, which crucially require Deleuzian openness to Otherness and becoming-­ Otherwise (Davies 2009). Ecopoetry’s connections with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and visual poetry facilitate this kind of openness through linguistic strategies that reposition the “I” and/or unsettle received textual habits. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, visual poetry, and ecopoetry can thereby all facilitate pedagogical encounters, but, of these three, ecopoetry, with its environmental focus, is most likely to facilitate encounters and prompt becomings that extend knowledges about sustainability. 6. I have deliberately listed “rhizomatic” systems in a nod to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome as exceeding linear and “arborescent” models of cognition (1987, 23). 7. For extended discussion of how space operates in Kinsella’s and Armstrong’s poetries, see my online-accessible review of their collections (Walker 2019).

References Arigo, C. 2007. Notes Toward an Ecopoetics: Revising the Postmodern Sublime and Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. How2 3 (2). Accessed 22 August 2019. https://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/ vol_3_no_2/ecopoetics/essays/pdfs/arigoessay.pdf. Armstrong, S. 2018. Broken Earth. Crawley: University of Western Australia Publishing. Barthes, R. 1967. The Death of the Author. Aspen: 5–6. Accessed 22 August 2019. http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html#barthes. Bloomfield, M. 2013. Landscaping the Page: British Open-Field Poetics and Environmental Aesthetics. Green Letters 17 (2): 121–136. Butler, J. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. ———. 2001. What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, 5. https://eicp.net/transversal/0806/butler/en.html. Chisholm, D. 2014. Juliana Spahr’s Ecopoetics: Ecologies and Politics of the Refrain. Contemporary Literature 55 (1): 118–147.

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Cooke, S. 2010. Orpheus in the New World: Poetry and Landscape in Australia and Chile. Antipode 24 (2): 143–150. Davies, B. 2009. Difference and Differentiation. In Pedagogical Encounters, ed. B. Davies and S. Gannon, 17–30. New York: Peter Lang. Davies, B., and S.  Gannon, eds. 2009. Pedagogical Encounters. New  York: Peter Lang. Day, I. 2016. Ecological Crisis and the Re-enchantment of Nature in Jaime Huenún’s Reducciones. In Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical Perspectives on Art, Film, and Literature, ed. M. Anderson and Z.M. Bora, 199–216. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Deleuze, G. 2004. Difference and Repetition. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., and F.  Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Eagleton, T. 2007. How to Read a Poem. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Fendler, R. 2017. Resignifying the Negative Space: Troubling the Representation of Learning. International Journal of Education and the Arts 18 (33): 1–20. Accessed 22 August 2019. http://www.ijea.org/v18n33/. Gander, F., and J.  Kinsella. 2012. Redstart: An Ecological Poetics. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Gannon, S. 2009. Difference as Ethical Encounter. In Pedagogical Encounters, ed. B. Davies and S. Gannon, 53–68. New York: Peter Lang. Guattari, F. 2014. The Three Ecologies. London: Bloomsbury. Hilevaara, K., and E.  Orley, eds. 2018. The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice. Oxford: Routledge. Kinsella, J. 2007. Disclosed Poetics. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 2018. Open Door. Crawley: University of Western Australia Publishing. Kinsella, J., and R.  West-Pavlov. 2018. Temporariness: On the Imperatives of Place. Tübingen, Germany: Naar Frankte Tempo Verlag. Knowles, K., et  al. 2012. Reading Space in Visual Poetry: New Cognitive Perspectives. Writing Technologies 4: 75–106. Langsford, S., and A.  Walker. 2020. The Value and Limits of the Healthy Ecology Metaphor: Ecopoetry and Connections between Diversity, Communication and Survival in the Face of Environmental Crises. Axon: Creative Explorations 10 (2). Accessed 15 April 2021. https://www.axonjournal.com.au/issue-­vol-­10-­no-­2-­dec-­2020. Lipson, G.B. 2013. Concrete Poems and Couplets: Poetry Writing. Dayton, OH: Lorenz Publishing.

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Maling, C. 2013. Planting Roots: A Survey of Introductions to Ecopoetry and Ecocriticism. Cordite Poetry Review. Accessed 22 August 2019. http://cordite. org.au/essays/planting-­roots/. Mann, T.S., and R. Stevko. 2018. Negative Space. Hampden, MA: Graven Image Publishing. Massumi, B. 1987. Translator’s Foreword. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, ed. G.  Deleuze and F.  Guattari, ix–xvi. London: Continuum. Milne, H. 2015. Writing the Body Politic: Feminist Poetics in the Twenty-first Century. In Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics, ed. B. Vabour et al., 65–86. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Munden, J., and T. Skjærstad. 2018. English Poetry in the Foreign Language Classroom: A Study of Teacher Perspectives, Purposes, and Practices. In Poetry and Pedagogy Across the Lifespan: Disciplines, Classrooms, Contexts, ed. S.L. Kleppe and A. Sorby, 255–276. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nugent, M. 2009. Captain Cook Was Here. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perelman, B. 1996. The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pulford, D. 2018. Andrew Bovell in the History Wars: Australia’s Continuing Cultural Crisis of Remembering and Forgetting. In Staging Loss: Performance as Commemoration, ed. M. Pinchbeck and A. Westerside, 95–108. Springer Nature: Cham, Switzerland. Richardson, L. 2002. Writing Sociology. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 2 (3): 414–422. Russo, L., and M. Reed. 2018. Counter-desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Skinner, J. 2007. Editor’s Statement. Ecopoetics 1: 5–8. Accessed 22 August 2019. https://ecopoetics.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/eco1.pdf. Stuart, A. 2017. A Romantic Entanglement with Ecopoetry. Text 41. Accessed 22 August 2019. http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue41/Stuart.pdf. Tota, A.L., and T. Hagen. 2016. Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Walker, A. 2018. A Well-Made House: Review of Kristin Lang’s The Weight of Light. Text 22 (1). Accessed 15 April 2021. http://www.textjournal.com.au/ april18/walker_rev.htm.

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———. 2019. Broken and Open, Cycling and Re-cycling: Poetry of the Australian Rural Landscape Now. Text 23 (1). Accessed 15 April 2021. http:// www.textjournal.com.au/april19/walker_rev.htm. Wason-Ellam, L. 2010. Children’s literature as a springboard to place-based embodied learning. Environmental Education Research 16 (3-4): 279–294. Williams, R. 1976. Keywords. Glasgow: Fontana. Willis, A. 2019. Conversations in the Wildwood: Narrators, Readers, and the Rise of the Ecological Self. Environmental Education Research 25 (3): 443–457.

Part III Poets, Philosophers and the Planet

10 Ecologies of the Classroom in an Existential Crisis: Félix Guattari’s Ecosophical Aesthetics and Teaching Poetry Jason Skeet

“It is worse, much worse, than you think”—with these words, David Wallace-Wells begins his account of the environmental crisis in The Uninhabitable Earth (Wallace-Wells 2019, 3). It is an attempt to catalogue the realities of the crisis (with facts rarely presented in mainstream media): how areas of the planet become uninhabitable due to the dire effects on the human body of global warming and the consequences of rising sea level … how economies are impacted by carbon pollution, as a result of, for example, the proliferation of wildfires and the increasing likelihood of extreme weather events … the decline of food resources, forcing whole populations into poverty and starvation … our health suffering from what is happening to the air we breathe and the water we drink … how the ecological crisis contributes to human conflicts … and so on. Most of what Wallace-Wells details is already happening, driven by

J. Skeet (*) Norwich Institute for Language Education (NILE), Norwich, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. L. Kleppe, A. Sorby (eds.), Poetry and Sustainability in Education, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95576-2_10

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a web of causation that includes the numerous feedback loops through which global warming escalates or “cascades” in ways scientists are yet to fully understand. These processes are irreversible. Moreover, there are linkages between environmental destruction and mental health: “climate affects both the onset and the severity of depression [since] rising temperature and humidity are married, in the data, to emergency-room visits for mental health issues” (137); further, many of those exposed to extreme weather will experience ongoing trauma, while pollution is linked to mental illness in learners and dementia in the elderly. It is the need to recognize such linkages that the philosopher, psychotherapist, and political activist Félix Guattari is concerned with in his identification of the three ecological registers of the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity. One of the refrains to be found in Guattari’s work is his assertion of the need for a paradigm shift in the field of mental health care, described by Guattari as a passage from a technico-scientific paradigm (or which wants to be such, because it is, most often, only technocratic and imbued with an obsolete positivism), to an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, that is to say implying a moral responsibility, a micro-political commitment and calling, with regard to each concrete case, each particular situation, a creative attitude that I will relate to the generic theme of the re-singularization of praxis. (Guattari 2019, 7)

There are two further themes across Guattari’s work connecting with his call for this shift in paradigm: first, how the technologies on which Integrated Word Capitalism (as Guattari designates it) supports a standardized and dominant subjectivity while, at the same time, these technologies enable the “emergence of innumerable aspirations for knowledge, for creativity and, correspondingly, for the conquest of new spaces of freedom” (6); second, that traditional forms of militant resistance to capitalism, with their underlying model of a revolution by force, no longer work, thus the need to take account of what Guattari terms “molecular revolutions,” which he relates to “women’s emancipation, racism, and the aspirations of minorities of all kinds …” (7; ellipses in original).

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The quotations above are taken from Guattari’s contribution to the “Latin American Network of Alternatives to Psychiatry” conference held in 1986. The date for Guattari’s contribution is significant because, by this mid-point in the 1980s, climate science had developed most of the tools and approaches it has used since to document the causes and effects of global warming. Indeed, several landmark studies had already by then shown evidence of the looming disastrous consequences for human civilization of climate change.1 This was the decade politicians first started to talk seriously about the problem, subsequently failing to follow up on their rhetoric with any significant action—a decade of missed opportunities in line with all the ways missed opportunities and broken pledges have continued into the present (Rich 2018). Meanwhile, Guattari’s contribution to the growing ecological awareness of the 1980s was the invention of a new field of investigation, an interdisciplinary bridgework connecting art, science, and philosophy: ecosophy. However, ecosophy must be thought of as a minor science, as defined by Gilles Deleuze and Guattari in the twelfth plateau of their Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 351–423), proceeding by way of an open field of operations and through an experimentation with concepts that varies according to the specific problem addressed. Guattari’s work continues to pose the following challenge: how to bring what he terms as ecosophical aesthetics into differing and diverse domains, which involves exploring the production of singular subjectivities, through procedures that are both ethical and rooted in aesthetic practices. In response to the challenge, I want to put forward the case for drawing on Guattari’s work to reconsider the concept of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), so that ESD encompasses the three ecological registers Guattari identifies. However, extending the scope of ESD in this way also necessitates a fundamental reconceptualization of sustainable development in the context of what we know are irreversible processes of climate change. Guattari argues that environmental devastation occurs alongside a narrowing of the production of a processual and singularizing subjectivity—it is not only plant and animal species that are vanishing but also the “words, phrases, and gestures of human solidarity” (Guattari 2000, 29). Education, therefore, has a vital conservation role to play by supporting learners’ creative uses of language, and in enabling

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learners to explore their “human solidarity” through what Sue Golding calls the eight technologies of otherness (curiosity, noise, cruelty, appetite, skin, nomadism, contamination, and dwelling): a conception of otherness in which the other “can never be a person, or a thing, animal, vegetable or mineral” but is rather “nothing more or less than relations, ‘techniques,’ or technē (in Foucault’s sense): the everyday strategies we use, wittingly or no, to make all the we-selves into me-selves” (Golding 1997, xii). In what follows, I want to reconceptualize ESD on the basis that it must encompass Guattari’s three ecological registers and, as with Golding’s conception of otherness, that it involves thinking relationally, a thinking that can be supported through certain procedures or strategies in the classroom (however, it will be outside the scope of this essay to explore specific ways in which Golding’s eight technologies might be applied to classroom contexts2). In the second and third sections of this essay, Guattari’s ideas and their relevance to education are considered, with a focus on connecting ESD and poetry by looking in a broad way at what an ecosophical approach to reading and writing poetry in the classroom could involve. Guattari’s work helps us to see why it is important for teaching and learning to include processes that have no preconceived outcomes. The environment of the classroom is key to this. Moreover, an educational response to the ecological crisis that draws on Guattari’s work might use poetry as a vehicle for ongoing teaching and learning that explores mental and social ecologies; as Guattari insists, “without transforming mentalities and collective habits, there will only be ‘remedial’ measures concerning the material environment” (Guattari 2015, 106). Ideas for classroom practice are offered on the basis that, as Moacir Gadotti states, we must “distinguish, without separating, education about sustainable development from education for sustainable development” (Gadotti 2004, 14; emphasis in original). Guattari’s concern with the production of singular subjectivities—in opposition to a standardized capitalist subjectivity—requires a focus on the processes and procedures used in the classroom. That is, we need to recognize how certain processes and procedures—in this case, what learners are asked to do with poetry in terms of their reading and writing—can enrich learners’ productions of singular subjectivities. An emphasis on developing mental and social ecologies in the classroom is

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also, therefore, a concern with education for sustainable development. First of all, we will need to re-orientate ESD along lines made possible by Guattari’s ecosophy.

 ustainability and Development Within S the Classroom Environment We should be mindful of Guattari’s diagnosis of the ecological crisis as a question of “the ways of living on this planet” (Guattari 2000, 20) when considering how the term “the Anthropocene” has gained widespread usage in current discussions around “environmental awareness.” As Guattari argues, Integrated World Capitalism produces a standardized subjectivity “intoxicated with and anaesthetized by a collective feeling of pseudo-eternity” (Guattari 2000, 34), and, likewise, the idea of the Anthropocene is articulated all too often in a way that supports a perspective from which the historical particularities of the ecological crisis are evaded. Anthropocene discourse can often either simplify the analysis of the ecological crisis—a single word used to refer to a multitude of historical and social factors (thus, a way to eschew having to think about this complexity)—or depoliticize it, thereby fostering an ecological fatalism and/or belief in humans as inherently destructive.3 In opposition, then, to these infelicities promoted by the use of the Anthropocene as short-­ hand for the ecological crisis, it has to be asserted that environmental devastation is not the product of an anthropos cast into perpetual struggle with nature and by necessity appropriating Earth’s resources as if it is the fate of the species. What needs to be emphasized is how environmental destruction is the result of specific historical conditions—conditions that are contingent and never necessary. Ecological deterioration is the result of capitalism, for which the alternative term “capitalocene” might help to situate an analysis within the historical specificity of capitalist relations of production and consumption:4 “more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades” (Wallace-Wells 2019, 4); it is the world’s poorest who produce the least CO2 but suffer the most from the consequences of carbon pollution (Wallace-Wells 2019, 52–58).

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These words of caution regarding the ways the Anthropocene as a term of reference is put to use are also relevant to thinking about what can be meant by the idea of “sustainable development” and, moreover, to the ways ESD is conceptualized. Up to now, the idea of ESD has often been tied to initiatives by the United Nations such as the 1992 Conference on Environment and Development (also known as the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit), where member states agreed on “reorienting education towards sustainable development” (United Nations 1992, 93). Underlying such initiatives is a definition of sustainable development as a “concept of conserving resources for future generations [for] the long-term stability of the economy and environment” (Emas 2015, 2). As Rachal Emas explains, this widely accepted definition was first proposed by the U.N.sponsored Brundtland Commission in the 1980s; it is a view, I would argue, that tends to emphasize how its objective is only “achievable through the integration and acknowledgement of economic, environmental, and social concerns throughout the decision making process” (2), without explicitly addressing the politics of how decisions are made or questioning why, in the list of its identified concerns, it is the economic that comes first. So, one way that educators have tried to embed ESD into the curriculum is through the design of lessons around the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.5 However, elements of these goals—“economic growth, full and productive employment” (Goal 8); “sustainable industrialization” (Goal 9); “sustainable consumption and production patterns” (Goal 12)—reflect the objectives of Integrated World Capitalism, its structural need to expand continually in order to generate profit. To what extent, then, should proponents of ESD accept this linkage between economics and environmentalism, as well as the legitimacy of the United Nations as the best means there is for furthering the international cooperation required to tackle the ecological crisis? The issue I am raising here is the extent to which ESD is willing to critically engage with the concept of sustainable development. As Gadotti puts it: “there is a capitalist view of sustainable development and of environment which, by being anti-ecological, may be considered a ‘trap’ …. But there is also an emancipatory view. As any new movement, the ecology field is also one of ideological disputes” (Gadotti 2004, 13). By using Guattari’s work to broaden the concept of ESD, so that ESD can encompass the three

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ecological registers of the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity, I would then argue that extending the scope of ESD in this way brings with it a fundamental re-versioning of the concept of sustainable development in the context of irreversible processes of climate warming. The Brundtland Commission definition presupposes a teleological conception of economic progress, as well as a political system in which the “goals” are set by a tiny minority; moreover, it is built on a belief in the separation between humanity and nature, as well as the idea of the environment as a container of natural resources that must be managed; further, by focusing on these natural resources, the Brundtland Commission definition fails to account for the social, cultural, and mental ecological resources that future generations will also need to draw from. Rather than teach lessons about U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, I want to suggest that the post-capitalist emphasis of Guattari’s work forces on educators the need to think about how to prepare learners for a world of increasing “precariousisation” (Guattari 2019, 7). Indeed, I would further argue that the entire purpose of education must be re-conceived in the context of the mounting use of machinic labour (robotics, the various developments placed under the banner of artificial intelligence, and information technology), so that a growing part of the population will be destined to a life of unemployment. Education as a preparation for full employment is an increasingly absurd proposition. What if sustainable development was no longer understood in economic terms at all? On the basis of Guattari’s work, another conception of sustainable development is possible. This re-versioned concept can be created from an ecosophical perspective and this can be done by breaking the term down. “Development” refers to the ways environmental, social, and mental ecologies entangle themselves. It can be thought of as a putting into practice of ways to complexify these tangled interactions, increasing the possibilities for inter- and intra-ecological relations, constructing further connections and maximizing ecological potential. The notion of “sustainability,” then, refers to the conditions most likely to help keep these entanglements from ossifying. For example, the necessity for dissensus rather than consensus; the need for difference rather than assimilation to a norm—people, Guattari insists, must become “more united and increasingly different” (Guattari 2000, 45). Sustainable development from this ecosophical perspective recognizes the unnatural processes within nature,

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in the sense that chaos and randomness operate at the heart of nature so that nature can be said to always work against itself. Health, then, is the ability of an organism to develop and sustain a relation with chaos, and an ecosophical version of sustainable development is also, therefore, a process of what Guattari calls “chaosmosis”—wild yet harmonious ecologies of randomness and unknown outcomes. Guattari then provides the ecological formula for chaosmosis as: • a nascent subjectivity • a constantly mutating socius • an environment in the process of being invented. (Guattari 2000, 45) Reconceptualizing ESD in the light of Guattari’s work raises questions, such as: to what extent can an educational system sustain a “nascent” and ever developing mental ecology, with all the emotional and spiritual care and support this implies?, to what extent can a school sustain “constantly mutating” social assemblages without resorting to the fixity of organizational hierarchies that ultimately reflect capitalist structures?, to what extent can a classroom be an environment capable of supporting tangled and heterogeneous subjectivities?, and to what extent can teachers and learners “singularize the overall functioning” (Guattari 2000, 34) of a lesson, that is, enable multiple meanings and perspectives to emerge within the lesson? I would argue that these questions will not be addressed by an ESD restricted to learning about “environmental stewardship” and “global citizenship.” Instead, I want to suggest that teaching poetry, focusing on the processes and procedures for doing the learning, can be a way to address these questions. Indeed, as Guattari himself puts it, “poetry should be prescribed like vitamins” (Guattari 2009, 67).

 n Ecosophical Approach to Reading Poetry A in the Classroom As Wallace-Wells writes, the climate system that “raised everything we now know as human culture and civilization is now, like a parent, dead” (18). We are environmental orphans and, for Guattari, this orphaned condition amounts to nothing less than a fundamental existential crisis in

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which environmental devastation is not separate from the damage to social and mental ecologies, what he describes as a “general movement of implosion and regressive infantilization” (Guattari 2000, 19) which, alongside the effects of CO2 emissions, threatens the continuation of life. Moreover, as Franco “Bifo” Berardi argues, countering this destruction will involve a “process aimed to the liberation of the social body from the abstract domination of financial absolutism, from the abstract grip that is suffocating social respiration just like airborne pollutants are spreading asthma and cancer to the lungs of the next generation” (Berardi 2018, 10). Guattari attacks capitalism’s cultural construction of a separation among the three ecologies, a separation underpinned by a belief that humans are, at an ontological level, independent from their environments. In contrast, ecosophy embraces relational thinking, so, while it may draw from ecology as a science of relations, yet, with the suffix -sophia, its focus is on the wisdom to be gained from thinking relationally and from making connections. This is also an understanding of how a person does not exist as a distinct entity: rather, an individual is shaped by the relations they enter into and, through processes of interaction, are also able to reconfigure these relations at the same time as they are configured by them.6 Indeed, a further aspect of this thinking is the recognition of the need to move among the three ecological registers so as to construct relations—in fact, as Manola Antonioli points out, in reality there are numerous ecologies to connect and spaces in-between to explore: “economic, media, technological, urban environment, all involved in a questioning around the preservation of natural and psychological balance that are both individual and collective” (Antonioli 2018, 78). It is in reference to a subjectivity “auto-enriching its relation to the world” that Guattari proposes poetry may “have more to teach us than economic science, the human sciences and psychoanalysis combined” (Guattari 1995, 21). Drawing on the ideas of the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, Guattari outlines how “creative subjectivity” uses poetry for its own process of production by seizing upon: 1. the sonority of the word, its musical aspect; 2. its material significations with their nuances and variants; 3. its verbal connections;

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4. its emotional, intonational and volitional aspects; 5. the feeling of verbal activity in the active generation of a signifying sound, including motor elements of articulation, gesture, mime; the feeling of a movement in which the whole organism together with the activity and soul of the world are swept along in their concrete unity. (Guattari 1995, 15) Guattari cites Bakhtin’s assertion that the last aspect “encompasses all the others” (1995, 15). This aspect is rhythm and, as Guattari also indicates, it is possible for the poem’s rhythm to connect with a wider rhythm, a “feeling of a movement” in which we can be “swept along,” as Berardi puts it (Berardi 2018, 17), beyond and beside ourselves. For Guattari, this movement, generated in a poem through its linguistic patterning and repetition and not concerned with transmitting a message, has the potential to become the catalyst for a rupture in the organization of the “already classified” (Guattari 1995, 20) or, as Deleuze and Guattari discuss in What Is Philosophy?—referring to D. H. Lawrence’s depiction of the established order as “an umbrella” that shelters people, “on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions”—poets “make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 203). Guattari claims that a poetic rupture is able to put into play what the psychotherapist Daniel Stern calls “emergent subjectivity” (Guattari 1995, 19), so that poetry provides what Stern calls a “vitality affect” capable of sending “processes of subjectivation down untried paths rather than back to pre-established co-ordinates” (Genosko 2015, 125). Guattari’s insistence on the relationship between poetry and creative subjectivity could be considered reason enough for regularly exposing learners of all ages to all manner of genres and forms of poetry. Indeed, rather than supply a prescriptive list of poetry to use in a classroom, I would rather encourage teachers to choose from the poetry they read themselves and to provide their learners with opportunities for their own explorations. However, I do want to offer some broad guidance on ways to support an intensive and close reading of poetry, since I want to propose that the use of procedures for helping learners to think with poetry

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might also help with the development of the creative subjectivity Guattari stresses. For any close reading of a poem in the classroom, it is useful to adopt a four-stage framework: before (stage I), during (stage II), during-and-­ after (stage III), and after (stage IV) reading phases (Benton and Fox 1985, 110). A before-reading phase focuses on pre-reading tasks in which a context for the reading is prepared. The reading phases involve tasks to do while reading in which responses to the poem are generated and then explored, linking then to after-reading tasks in which learners’ responses are developed, modified, and refined. After-reading tasks might involve discussions and writing activities or developing responses using other art forms (for example, visual arts or drama). Within this four-stage process there is also the possibility to use specific procedures or thinking routines (Ritchhart et al. 2011) to support learners’ responses. For example, in the while-reading stages in which learners first respond (stage II) and then hold and explore their responses (stage III), the thinking routine line-­ phrase-­word can be used: Learners read a poem and complete a graphic organiser in which they: select a line from the poem that was meaningful and helped them understand the poem; a phrase that moved, engaged or provoked them but which is not in the line they have selected; one word that captures their attention or strikes them as powerful (this can be in the line/phrase chosen or not). Learners then share and discuss their choices and are asked to reflect on their conversations by responding to the following questions: what themes emerge?; were there aspects of the poem not captured in your choices? (Based on Ritchhart et al. 2011, 207)

This example of a thinking routine to support close reading (teachers will adapt and develop this and further procedures for their specific teaching contexts7) can be used alongside cooperative learning structures: that is, learning that involves the learners working together doing a task that can only be completed by them working together. Although Guattari wrote little that explicitly addresses education, what he does have to say agrees with this emphasis on cooperative learning—for example, in a discussion of how to activate singular subjectivities,

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Guattari refers to schools that use “cooperative systems, assessment meetings, a newspaper, the pupils’ freedom to organise their own work individually or in groups, etc.” (Guattari 2000, 34). In line with Guattari’s thinking here, the literature on cooperative learning recommends two essential features of the learning process: positive interdependence and individual accountability. Positive interdependence is about how cooperative learning promotes peer support among learners. For this to happen, a task needs to be set up so that it can only be completed by learners working together. Getting learners to work together in this way has the effect of encouraging them to support one another, so that the success of one learner benefits the other group members. Individual accountability means making sure every member of a group has to make a public contribution during the group work and that learners have to communicate with one another as part of the task. Without this communication among the learners, the task cannot be accomplished. In addition to these two features of the learning process, cooperative learning works best when heterogenous groups are used (formed with the widest possible mix of characteristics such as gender, ethnic and cultural background, and ability level) and learners have undertaken team building activities to help them with conflict management and decision-making.8 Using cooperative learning structures within the four-stage framework for reading outlined above—for tasks involving preparing, exploring, developing, modifying, and refining responses to a poem (Benton and Fox 1985, 110)—can be a way to develop diverse mental and social ecologies within the classroom, in contrast, I would argue, to a capitalist culture of competitive, individualistic focused learning. One proponent of cooperative learning in the U.S. has argued that this approach to learning “is the single most powerful tool this nation has for improving race relations” (Sapp 2006, cited in Anderson 2019, 8). I would add to this that in the context of ESD and teaching poetry, using cooperative learning structures in purposeful and well-planned ways may also help to challenge the fixity of social structures within the classroom, creating an environment in which tangled and heterogeneous subjectivities emerge and where multiple meanings and perspectives are embraced.

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 n Ecosophical Approach to Writing Poetry A in the Classroom For Guattari, art provides a model for a “new aesthetic paradigm,” an essential shift in thinking that is crucial since the “aesthetic power of feeling, although equal in principle with the other powers of thinking philosophically, knowing scientifically, acting politically, seems on the verge of occupying a privileged position within the collective Assemblages of enunciation of our era” (Guattari 1995, 101). In this new paradigm, teaching and learning can be described as an ethico-aesthetic practice, involving as well the production of singularizing subjectivity. Guattari defines subjectivity as the “ensemble of conditions” from which arise individual and/or collective “instances as self-referential existential Territories, adjacent, or in a delimiting relation, to an alterity that is itself subjective” (Guattari 1995, 9). According to Guattari, then, the emergence of subjectivity is a construction process, the building of an existential territory or environment, which takes place in relation to an alterity—to an otherness. This relation is vital for subjectivity’s autopoiesis, for it to produce and replenish itself. This is why a singularizing subjectivity is always opposed to the fixity of identity. Further, as Guattari makes clear, there is a necessary “non-human pre-personal part of subjectivity [which is] crucial since it is from this that its heterogenesis can develop” (9).9 The examples of this non-human component to subjectivity Guattari chooses to emphasize are technology and language, which are both means by which humans render time, space, and their environments understandable to consciousness. In Guattari’s account of subjectivity’s production, it now becomes apparent why an artistic practice, such as poetry, is so important. While language organizes perception and experience so that it is recognizable, poetry uses language in creative and uncommon ways, breaking language open, exploring new possibilities of language “through the ironic act of exceeding the established meaning of words” (Berardi 2018, 32). According to Guattari, subjectivity’s singular production is catalyzed by this deframing or deconstructive process (Guattari 1995, 80). For ecosophy, poetic practice is therefore one way to counter the effects of the devastation wreaked on mental and social

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ecologies by capitalist culture as it aims to standardize subjectivity, the effects of which Guattari describes as “mental implosion and chaosmic spasms” (Guattari 1995, 135). Yet, Guattari insists that these effects can be “transformed” into “riches and unforeseen pleasure” (135)—poetry, then, can be a catalyst for such transformations. For Guattari, it is not the case that artistic practice must be prioritized, although he does see such practice as exemplary since art can provide a singular experience which destabilizes existing frames of reference. The point for Guattari, then, is not an aestheticization of life but a utilization of aesthetic practices across diverse domains. In this way, what unites different practices is the way they can be composed by affects, singularities, and becomings. Guattari is interested in art as a process without a preconceived outcome. This has implications for any pedagogy that draws on his work, since it raises the question: what might happen to education if it moves out of a techno-scientific paradigm with its striated pedagogies characterized by set national curricula, instrumentalizing learning objectives, endless technocratic measures in the name of “quality assurance,” and more and more data-driven decision-making? Taking Guattari’s ecosophy into education, with the emphasis on connections “between the three ecological registers” of the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity (Guattari 2000: 19–20; emphasis added)—since moving-­ between is the mode of life in which the social organism is best able to maintain its fullest health and experience the greatest joy—might make possible an education that sustains the elements of chaosmosis: ever-­ developing subjectivities, a constantly mutating social ecology, and a (classroom) environment forever in the process of being invented. An ecosophical approach to teaching poetry must be conceived as an ethico-aesthetic practice and built on the interconnections between reading and writing, on a recognition that both are processes of active productions of meaning. Reading and writing are interrelated performances of linguistic production. This view of readers as co-operators of the text alongside the writer is entirely in keeping with the aesthetic paradigm that Guattari proposes. An ecosophical approach therefore involves procedures for writing poetry alongside procedures discussed above for supporting learners’ responses to poetry. Fortunately, an excellent “experiments list” with procedures for writing has been put together by

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the poet and teacher Charles Bernstein (see Bernstein n.d.). Although Bernstein uses these procedures in a higher-education context, they can be adapted to any age and level of learner. These procedures encourage experimentation and linguistic play. They are used in what Bernstein calls a “writing experiments seminar” in which the “syllabus is an imaginary map to a constantly transmogrifying place …. The syllabus (like the pronouncement of the teacher) is subject to its own mandates to question and reorder” (Bernstein 2011, 53). Together with the use of cooperative learning structures referred to earlier, Bernstein’s varied poetry experiments can enable shared explorations of poetry and collaborative writing practices, providing further opportunities for developing and sustaining different mental and social ecologies within the classroom. Here is a sample of procedures (together with their original numbers in Bernstein’s list): 4. Bird song homophonics: Listen to a birdsong and transcribe what you hear in English words or alphabetic transcriptions. 10. Tzara’s Hat: Everyone in a group writes down a word (alternative: phrase, line) and puts it in a hat. Poem is made according to the order in which it is randomly pulled from hat. 14. Serial sentences: Select one sentence each from a variety of different books or other sources. Add sentences of your own composition. Combine into one paragraph, reordering to produce the most interesting results. 18. Alphabet poems: make up a poem of 26 words so that each word begins with the next letter of the alphabet. Write another alphabet poem but scramble the letter order. 19. Alliteration (assonance): Write a poem in which all the words in each line begin with the same letter. 22. Collaboration: Write poems with one or more other people, alternating words, lines, or stanzas (chaining or renga), writing simultaneously and collaging, rewriting, editing, supplementing the previous version. This can be done in person, via e-mail, or via regular mail. 23. Group sonnet: 14 people each write one ten-word line (or alternate measure) on an index card. Order to suit. Alternate: write the poem in sequence, with each person writing the next line having read and considered the previous lines. Modify this to any form or to an open form with any number of participants. 29. Write a poem in which you try to transcribe as accurately as you can your thoughts while you are writing. Don’t edit anything out. Write as fast

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as you can without planning what you are going to say. (Sometimes called “free writing.” Try this with handwriting. Compare versions done by hand and on a computer.) 33. Write a poem with each line filling in the blanks of “I used to be _____   but now I am ______.” (“I used to write poems, but now I just do experiments”; “I used to make sense, but now I just make poems.”) 34. Write a poem consisting entirely of things you’d like to say, but never would, to a parent, lover, sibling, child, teacher, roommate, best friend, mayor, president, corporate CEO, etc. 35. Take same sentence or stanza and cast it as if said to oneself silently, half-whispered, said to an intimate, said to a small group, said to a large group. 39. Write a poem without mentioning any objects. 42. Write an autobiographical poem without using any pronouns. 43. Attention: Write down everything you hear for one hour. 51. Chronology: Make up a list of dates with associated events, real or imagined. 56. Write a poem composed entirely of questions. 57. Write a poem made up entirely of directions. 62. Pick 20 words, either a word list you generate yourself or from source texts. Write three different poems using only these words. 72. Improvisation: Ask someone to suggest a poem title and topic. Write the poem immediately in response. Do this as a quick series, five minutes maximum for each poem. 81. Pick several images from the internet or a magazine and make an arrangement with them; then write an accompanying poem for each. 94. Make a poem composed of all the things you don’t know (or some of them).

Conclusion I have argued that an ecosophical approach to teaching poetry—one which supports a reconceptualization of ESD as processes of engagement across the three ecological registers of the environment, the social, and the mental—is not just a concern with exposing learners to poetry “about,” for example, the ecological crisis (although of course a teacher

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might see value in doing this); it is also not just concerned with asking learners to write poetry “about” environmental related themes, such as, for example, the topics covered by the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (although teachers might well see value in doing this, particularly if this involves a critical evaluation of these goals). The notion of reading and writing as interconnected aesthetic practices in the classroom, together with the procedures for teaching and learning that I have suggested, is important for recognizing the role education can have in supporting emergent and diverse mental and social ecologies. The use of cooperative learning structures, for example, can be seen as developing, sustaining, and responding to the environment of the classroom, so that learners are given the opportunity to construct and explore interweaving mental and social ecologies using collaborative reading-writing activities and different ways to share and discuss their responses to poetry. The examples of procedures for writing experiments allow learners to play with language individually and collectively, also developing the “creative subjectivity” Guattari emphasizes. A pedagogy based on Guattari’s concept of the three ecologies would empower teachers and learners to investigate movements between the three ecologies and to extend connections as widely as possible. I would argue that the recognition of the ways a classroom environment can sustain and develop different mental and social ecologies and, by extension, linking these ecologies to the environment beyond the classroom is also a way education might in some way address the on-going and escalating impact on mental health of our environmental and existential crisis. Some readers may object that this hope is merely a form of utopian thinking; to this I would respond with Guattari’s observation about true utopians being those who “believe that current societies will be able to continue along on their merry little way without major upheavals” (Guattari 2009, 307). For educators, the tools for putting into practice the conception of ESD I am putting forward already exist (such as the use of cooperative learning structures and ideas for writing poetry that I have referred to)—the upheaval will involve the collapse of the beliefs and values underpinning any education system dependent on the production of a standardized capitalist subjectivity in both its teachers and their learners.

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Notes 1. Nathaniel Rich provides an overview of the key studies from this period in an article in the New York Times, (Rich 2018). 2. Golding’s book could provide examples for teachers (of teens and adult learners) of texts that can be used for further exploration in their classrooms of the eight technologies. 3. For a useful overview of the Anthropocene and recent literature on the subject, see Kunkel 2017. 4. For a detailed explanation of the concept of the Capitalocene, see Bonneuil and Fressoz 2017, 222-52. 5. For example, the British Council has published a collection of English Language Teaching materials with lesson activities focused on a specific U.N. Development Goal (Maley and Peachey n.d.). The complete list of U.N. Sustainable Development Goals can be found at: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs. 6. Another important aspect of Guattari’s transversal thinking was the development of schizoanalysis as a mapping of ways the Unconscious is produced by social and historical forces, in opposition to the reductive mechanisms of psychoanalysis focusing on family dynamics. 7. More ideas for thinking routines can be adapted from Ritchhart et al. 2011. 8. For more about cooperative learning, including ideas for various cooperative learning structures, a good place to start is Spencer Kagan’s website, https://www.kaganonline.com. 9. By “heterogenesis,” Guattari means an increase in diversity, which can be contrasted to the use of “heterogeneous” to refer to an entity composed of different parts.

References Anderson, J. 2019. Activities for Cooperative Learning: Making Groupwork and Pairwork Effective in the ELT Classroom. Stuttgart: Delta Publishing. Antonioli, M. 2018. What Is Ecosophy? In Schizoanalysis and Ecosophy: Reading Deleuze and Guattari, ed. C.V.  Boundas, 74–86. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Benton, M., and G. Fox. 1985. Teaching Literature: Nine to Fourteen. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Berardi, F. 2018. Breathing: Chaos and Poetry. South Pasadena, Calif.: Semiotext(e). Bernstein, C. 2011. Attack of the Difficult Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. n.d. Experiments. University of Pennsylvania. http://writing.upenn. edu/bernstein/experiments.html. Bonneuil, C., and J.-B.  Fressoz. 2017. The Shock of the Anthropocene. London: Verso. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Athlone Press. ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? London: Verso. Emas, R. (2015). The Concept of Sustainable Development: Definition and Defining Principles, Brief for GSDR 1-3, United Nations. Retrieved December 14, 2019, from https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/ documents/5839GSDR%202015_SD_concept_definiton_rev.pdf. Gadotti, M. (2004). Education for Sustainable Development: What We Need to Learn to Save the Planet? São Paulo: Instituto Paulo Freire. Retrieved December 14, 2019, from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f178/83719973 1df7e4426c2ce4e800be71b840a2.pdf. Genosko, G. 2015. Pathic Transference and Contemporary Japanese Art. In Machinic Eros: Writings on Japan, ed. F.  Guattari, 119–136. Univocal Publishing. Golding, S. 1997. The Eight Technologies of Otherness. London: Routledge. Guattari, F. 1995. Chaosmosis. Sydney: Power Publications. ———. 2000. The Three Ecologies. London: Continuum. ———. 2009. Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews, 1977-1985. South Pasadena, Calif.: Semiotext(e). ———. 2015. Machinic Eros: Writings on Japan. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. ———. 2019. A Paradigm Shift. Deleuziana 9: 6–9. Kunkel, B. 2017. The Capitalocene. London Review of Books 39 (5): 22–28. Maley, A., & Peachey, N. (eds) (n.d.). Integrating Global Issues in the Creative English Language Classroom: With Reference to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, British Council. Retrieved December 14, 2019, from https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/ PUB_29200_Creativity_UN_SDG_v4S_WEB.pdf. Rich, N. (2018). Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, New York Times, August 1, 2018. Retrieved December 14, 2019, from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-­ change-­losing-­earth.html.

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Ritchhart, R., et al. 2011. Making Thinking Visible. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. 1992. Agenda 21, Rio Declaration, Forest Principles. United Nations. Wallace-Wells, D. 2019. The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. London: Penguin Books. Sapp, J. (2006). Cooperative Learning: How to Help Your Students Talk about Race: Interview with Robert Williams, Teaching Tolerance Magazine 30. Retrieved February 25, 2020, from https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/ fall-­2006/cooperative-­learning.

11 “Right Has Just Left”: Rising to the Occasion of the Anthropocene Through the Multilingual and Transmedial Poetic Work of Cia Rinne Johan Alfredsson

All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured. —“Too-Ticky” in Tove Jansson, Moominland Midwinter

Activating Human Responsibility Earth scientists have over the last few years had an increasing tendency to speak of how our planet has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene.1 This implies the activity of humankind (“anthropos”) as the number-one influence on a range of fundamental planetary systems. This chapter examines how turning to one specific human activity, in this

J. Alfredsson (*) Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. L. Kleppe, A. Sorby (eds.), Poetry and Sustainability in Education, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95576-2_11

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case poetry, can help us understand humankind’s position in relation to the planet, and how such an understanding can guide us in rising to the occasion, and take responsibility for this delicately influential position. For help, I call upon the translingual and transmedial poetic work of the Swedish-Finnish-German poet and artist Cia Rinne (b. 1973). However, before introducing her work more thoroughly, I need to briefly address the question of what poetry means in this particular context. In an article from 2002, Paul Hernadi speaks of four “mixable cardinal colors of verbal worldmaking, the thematic, narrative, lyric, and dramatic modes of literary discourse,” and how these four “correspond to four kinds of ways in which words discharge primarily problem-solving functions” (2002, 29). Of these four modes, the “lyric” allegedly corresponds to giving “concurrent expressive accounts of ongoing experience.” Hernadi further claims that this strategy emanates from one of the human brain’s four basic cognitive modalities, the one that attends to the “flux” of experience, a modality by which we “continually monitor what is happening in, to, and around us” (2002, 29). I wish to take as a point of departure this idea of the “lyric” having to do with monitoring—and giving “concurrent expressive accounts” of—the flux of experience, i.e. not only what we experience through our senses but, in a wider phenomenological sense, “in, to, and around us.” From this starting point, I will move toward the question of what this means when one approaches poetry? There is potential here for focusing on the dynamics of—and between—these ostensibly different perspectives on experience (“in, to, and around us”); for seeing them as one, and consequentially for overcoming polarizations between a number of seemingly binary phenomena, such as within-without, here-there, subject-object, culture-nature, speaking-listening, teaching-learning, etc.

Deleuze, Guattari, and Language Barriers Despite Rinne’s Swedish-Finnish-German language background, she primarily writes in English, with constant shifts and double exposures into mainly German and French. Her poetic work could be described as minimalist, perhaps even naivistic, in terms of the level of lexical

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understanding required to grasp the poems semantically. However, the poems have conceptual, permutational, and deconstructive sides to them, where they work not only with language but primarily on language and between languages; the “flux” of the ongoing experience is in no way a monolingual one. Several early commentators have characterized her writing as “multilingual” (Lutz 2012; Huss and Tidigs 2015, 2017; Schmidt 2019). This aspect of her work poses fundamental semiotic questions of e.g. where “iconic” representation turns into “symbolic,” how these two can be simultaneously active at a trans-language level, and how this affects conventional borders between epistemological and ontological manners of approaching or discussing art and literature. A telling example of how these aspects come across in Rinne’s work can be found in the following passage from notes for soloists (2009):2 war was was war was war? war war war was war was here.

The semantic meaning of this passage is fully dependent on whether you see the words as English or German. If you see them as English, you will see a poem that employs permutations in order to pose questions about war and about the past, perhaps even about places or positions, through the use of the last word: “here.” If you read the words as German, the war aspect disappears, and is replaced by something of a philosophical parody (why not of Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit [Being and Time]?), except for the last word, once again: the entry “here” is nowhere to be found in a German dictionary. This mixture of languages, and the aforementioned effects, are of course highly deliberate on Rinne’s side (the passage prior to the quoted segment reads “insecurity / in security,” bolstering this deliberation). However, the effects do not stop there. If we are to see her work as some kind of “flux” that requires monitoring, we need to keep both languages

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in mind (at least, the English meaning would be clear to a vast majority of potential readers, even in Germany). Doing that would make the last word stand out, with the effect of the poem also saying that the very keeping of language barriers (regarded as a synecdoche for barriers in general) might very well initiate wars (as it happens, there has been one or two catastrophic wars between English- and German-speaking countries…). Even at a superficial level of understanding this text, it would be fair to say that it does show how (language) differences can be a source of conflict. But it is just as fair to say that the poem concurrently shows that by refraining from saying that it is written in either German or English and instead saying that it is both German and English—or even that German and English have a great deal of traits in common (not only genealogically, but also in terms of phonemes, graphemes, and other material qualities)—these very language differences can instead initiate a number of processes alternative to conflict (such as dialogue, mediation, recognition, perhaps even mutual understanding). Consequently, in its written form the poem demonstrates what I (leaning on the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) would like to call a potentiality for immanence in relation to language: On this plane there are no predetermined hierarchies, relations, or functions for the components active there. It is called planes of immanence,3 where everything has the same significance, the function and meaning of each component not being seen as inherited, but as something created in encounter. … Thus, focus is not directed towards what is, in terms of definitions and categories, but rather towards what could be when various equal components connect. (Johansson 2019, 29–30; my translation)

This quotation is from a recent book, Blivandets pedagogik (The Pedagogy of Becoming), written by the Swedish educational sociologist Lotta Johansson, who presents an educational philosophy that finds its premises in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, and addresses the massive responsibility challenges that humankind faces in relation to the Anthropocene. In her project, she points out what could be done differently, within the given frames of existing school systems, in order to meet these challenges: Finding alternative ways of understanding humankind, and the world, is particularly important in a time where we face challenges that could have

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cataclysmic consequences if not dealt with in a humble, responsible, and creative manner. (Johansson 2019, 36; my translation)

Deleuze and Guattari’s theories revolve around abstract concepts and phenomena like “planes of immanence,” “rhizomatic,” “lines of flight,” “deterritorialization,” “minority,” etc. The assets of their philosophy in the context where Johansson employs it lie first and foremost in the stressing of change and growth as processes which are “open and uncertain, along winding and unpredictable paths without points of reference or guides” (Johansson 2019, 65; my translation). Apart from the fact that many of their points of departure might give us “lines of flight” in relation to the discourses of thought and action which have taken us to the Anthropocene, they also resonate with certain ideas and definitions of poetry—or of the poetic—related to Hernadi’s ideas of the lyric mentioned earlier.4 One of the most well spread of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts is the rhizomatic, which is inspired by the “rhizome,” a life form whose principle for growth, according to them, is the decentered, the unpredictable, and the ungovernable (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987, chapter 1). A large number of the life forms we refer to as “weeds” are generally described as rhizomatic. Rinne has herself been using this metaphor explicitly in relation to the difference between working with only European languages, on the one hand, and, on the other, with languages without obvious genealogical relation (e.g., Japanese and Finnish): “Perhaps these European languages are united by a language rhizome and an acoustic compatibility which enables language shift through meaning or sound” (Rinne 2016, 19; my translation) which indicates her familiarity with Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy.5 When it comes to how the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari can be seen in relation to poetry, Jason Skeet has written an article entitled “Applied Schizoanalysis: Towards a Deleuzian Poetics,” where he investigates how, and what aspects of, their philosophy can relate to poetry. What he concludes is that their concept of schizoanalysis comes very close to a definition of the poetic. This concept relates to Deleuze and Guattari’s idea that capitalist logic has to stop short when approaching the two important poles within which it operates:

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For Deleuze and Guattari, capitalist social production is always caught between two poles. On one side, it moves in a schizophrenic direction by decoding all flows; on the other side, a paranoiac counter tendency attempts to control the processes put into play. Thus, whilst capitalism approaches the schizo limit, it must also pull back. (Skeet 2017, 97)

Skeet argues that schizoanalysis, a way of reading that Deleuze and Guattari employ in their work, “seeks to explore how poetry can enact certain deterritorializations, how it involves itself in the schizo state of evolution, pushing towards this schizo limit” (2017, 97).6 This pushing against the limit is even described as a “revolutionary task,” in relation to capitalist logic (2017, 97). Against that background, the poetic might have the kind of revolutionary nature to it that Johansson and I call for.7

Bordering and Transmediality I am not the first scholar to focus on Rinne’s thought-provoking work (Perloff 2010; Lutz 2012; Huss and Tidigs 2015, 2017; Mønster 2016; Kangaskoski 2017; Schmidt 2019). Out of this previous research, there is one particular article by Markus Huss and Julia Tidigs (2015) whose objectives come close to what I do here. In their article, they focus upon Rinne’s work as “multilingual and intermedial poetry,” relying not least on Naoki Sakai’s concept of bordering (“not only a border crossing but also and preliminarily an act of drawing a border, of bordering” [2009, 83]). This concept touches upon how I approach Rinne’s work in that it also focuses on the processual, performative, and immanence-related aspects of language: “At the core of Sakai’s argument is, thus, an ambition to question the conceptualization of the world’s languages in terms of a group of countable artefacts” (Huss and Tidigs 2015, 16–17). In addition to Sakai, Huss and Tidigs further rely on the work of Jan Blommaert, who stresses a view of “language as something intrinsically and perpetually mobile … and made for mobility. The finality of language is mobility, not immobility” (Blommaert 2010, xiv). These two linguistically based arguments (from translation studies and sociolinguistics, respectively) are very much to the point when it comes

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to characterizing Rinne’s work. In an essay from 2016 which starts out with the question “why write in different languages?,” Rinne speaks of the translingual aspects of her work in the following terms: every language is connected to an entire catalogue of connotations and cultural references which, to a various degree, constitutes a backdrop to its users. The shifting between different language systems could be understood as a political standpoint, as a resistance against a homo-linguistic construct that neglects poly-linguistic reality, and against the alleged dependency between nation and language, which has had severe consequences for people throughout history. The concurrency of languages might better correspond to the co-existence of different language worlds which open up for different values, and reference systems. (2016, 16; my translation)

The fact that she calls this a “political standpoint” not only relates to Sakai’s and Blommaert’s perspectives but also connects her poetic practice to the revolutionary intentions of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, regarded as an activity that does not stop where the “flows” risk turning into schizophrenia. In the aforementioned essay, Rinne gives poly-lingual writing something of an emancipatory function, by claiming that writing on the border between languages “allows the texts to retain an abstract character” (2016, 18; my translation), with the consequential effect of stripping the words and phrases of the “catalogue of connotations and cultural references” mentioned earlier: It is intriguing to see what happens when language … is deprived of its usual function, and put into use in manners beyond its commonly accepted utility. Words, or texts, that operate on the border between different systems … call for a different manner of reading, which might even result in a questioning of reading itself. (2016, 17; my translation)

What she describes here is strongly related to the kind of concurrency that Hernadi speaks of—with language being the tool for monitoring the flux of experience. Consequently, by stressing how fallible the “commonly accepted utility” of language is in this respect, Rinne points not only in the revolutionary political direction of Deleuze and Guattari but also in the direction of the lyric. Furthermore, these statements relate to some of

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the risks that follow from embracing the idea of “the Anthropocene,” risks which have been pointed out by a large number of critics. One such risk is that placing humankind in the figurative control room of Earth’s ecological and geological systems might boost human confidence into something god-like. What Rinne’s description of the political aspect of “the concurrency of language” does is to open up for shifting not only among language systems, but also among different planetary perspectives, enabling what we might call mentalization with different species, organisms, and the fundamental planetary systems themselves—ideas that also correlate to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of lines of flight, which should be seen as always escaping from normative majority perspectives to deviant minority ones. Trough transpositions of these figures of thought, and the findings in Rinne’s poetic practice, as shown earlier— this might lead to manners of relating to the planet and to humankind’s position in relation to it, having to do less with conflict (e.g., between various human and other-than-human perspectives) than with the alternatives to conflict mentioned earlier: mediation, recognition, understanding. Perhaps even to synergy? In her insightful introduction to the book Recomposing Ecopoetics, Lynn Keller leans upon Donna Haraway’s critical take on the Anthropocene as “too focused on ‘Species Man,’ too little focused on ongoingness, and insufficiently attentive to thinking with other planetary organisms” (2017, 7). Transposing Rinne’s ideas and poetic practice into planetary perspectives might assist in accomplishing what Haraway evolves in the following terms: “History must give way to geostories, to Gaia stories, to symchthonic stories; terrans do webbed, braided, and tentacular living and dying in sympoietic multispecies string figures; they do not do History” (2016, 49). Attempts at relating to the webs, braids, tentacles, and string figures that characterize terran life undoubtedly demand a “different kind of reading” and indeed force us to question the reading we call history, in a fundamental manner. When it comes to Notes for Soloists, Rinne has put these issues into transmedial practice in quite a sophisticated manner by also publishing it as a soundpiece: Sounds for Soloists (2011). The work revolves around Rinne’s voice reading the text, accompanied by ambient music and sound, designed by Sebastian Eskildsen. The fact that the text is read by one

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single voice (a “soloist”) canonizes one specific way of reading the written text—e.g. when it comes to the piece “war, was…” discussed above. In her recorded reading of this particular segment, Rinne switches between the two languages: the first and second lines are read in English; the third, fourth, and fifth in German; and the last two lines in English again. Within the recording, the reading of this part is further accompanied by sounds of gunshots, highlighting the English meaning of the word “war.” Regarded from this specific interpretational perspective, Sounds for Soloists has to be seen as one possible interpretation (of many, note the fact that there are two plurals in the title: Sounds for Soloists) of the poly-linguistic concurrency that the written text Notes for Soloists consists of. It represents one way of reading, understanding, and relating to the text, one way of monitoring the flux of experience that approaching this text means for any reader. Huss and Tidigs stress that a comparison between the two versions highlights “the tensions between visual sign and pronunciation:” There are so many ways this passage can be rendered in speech, with articulation affecting semantics as well as linguistic borders. […] [S]ound undercuts sight—and the ambiguity of the visual letters is foregrounded. / The printed text, then, is not yet completed or finalized; it is produced by the act of reading, and with each reading it can be re-shaped differently. (2015, 20)

Once again, this foregrounding of language’s inherent ambiguity, alongside the re-shaping quality of “each reading,” not only brings us to familiar definitions of the poetic, having to do with texts that attempt to “transpose other media’s modalities or expression within their own medium” (Huss and Tidigs 2015, 18) but also demonstrates the potential for the poetic to “capture” the dynamic aspects of the flux of experience, the webbed, braided, and tentacular “geostories” (figuratively) of this particular text. Other sections of Rinne’s piece work with ambiguities that demonstrate that languages, such as German or English, could be seen as being on the same immanent plane as any other conventional discourse of language. One such example is Rinne’s frequent use of homonyms, homophones, and homographs, as in the following excerpt where the semantic

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ambiguity of the words “left” and “right” is put into play, not only spatially on the page (which in itself questions the order in which the words should be read. Is there a right order? The text says no, because “right has just / left” …) but also in other manners:8 this is left.  this is right. that’s   right. right. left is    right. right is right. what’s left?  right is left. left is left.      right? right has just left.

The difference between the example above and the one discussed earlier, where the acoustic aspects of the words differ, whereas the visual aspects do not, is that when it comes to the words “right” and “left,” they are homonyms, i.e. they have several semantic meanings (“right” means both a direction, “correct,” and a privilege), but are identical when it comes to both acoustic and visual qualities. In the case of “war” and “was,” these words are homographs, i.e., identical only when it comes to their visual aspects but different in acoustic qualities. In Notes for Soloists, Rinne also employs a number of sophisticated manners of using homophonic representation (identical in acoustic, but not visual, qualities), as in the following example, which takes the questioning of reading conventions a step further: 100 --é (censuré).

In French, “A hundred above é” spells out, “Cent sur é,” and is thus pronounced in exactly the same way as “censuré,” which means “censored.” Thus, what happens in the transmedial transformation of this part of the work is the opposite equivalent of what happened in the “was/war”

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example mentioned earlier. In this case it is the specific reading (in French) of the written text that points out the acoustic similarities between “100 / --- / é” and “(censuré).”9 Within the written text, it takes a lot of imagination from e.g. an English speaking reader to understand this particular meaning of this passage. It requires the graphemes to be read out loud, in one specific manner. Rinne’s work is packed with these kinds of shifts and wordplays within, and between, languages and other representational regimes or discourses. All in all, I would say that the experience of approaching the text, and the effort required to relate to the heterogeneity of it, corresponds well to the idea of monitoring the flux of experience that Hernadi talks about as “lyric.” In this respect, it is something of an understatement to say that Rinne’s work has strong lyric/poetic qualities—but it still needs saying. Since early Antiquity, lyric poetry has been working creatively with tensions between acoustic and visual representational aspects of language, in relation to the voicing of soloists. This is where the “lyric” stems from. And, according to Hernadi and others, it is what it still relates to. Within the field of poetic practice, however, much has happened during the last few decades.10 A large number of contemporary poetic practices have put the conventional idea of the lyric into motion and under scrutiny: the position of the stable subject, the lyrical I, has been under attack not least from various norm-critical perspectives. And, the work of Rinne certainly adds to this new, critical, poetic practice, which once again relates to the “revolutionary task” that Deleuze and Guattari speak of.

 he Emancipatory Potential T of Poetic Otherness The lyric, or poetic—which is a term I would rather use in relation to these “contemporary poetries” (Retallack and Spahr 2007) and their aspiration to verbally deal with the complex experience of concurrency—is something that semantic discourses of language cannot, and do not always want to, put into words. Concurrency opposes the objectives of unambiguous clarity inherent within these discourses; a clarity which would demand knowledge of whether “war” is in English or in German, whether “left” means a direction or what remains, and according to which

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“100 / --- / é” has absolutely nothing to do with censorship. The poetic, however, has in its genealogy a wish not only to bridge but to intentionally play with—and even evoke—these kinds of ambiguities. In this manner, poetry does embrace the concurrency, the “mobility,” the “lines of flight,” of language. It is even constituted by it. When it comes to the “poetries” of the last few decades, this constitutional and genealogical embrace has had a number of particular consequences. One such consequence is the numerous alliances between poets, on the one hand, and language and convention critical theories, on the other, illustrating how poetry as a specific knowledge form has evolved, through its capacity for connectivity. (Rinne’s mentioning of the rhizomatic is one such example.) Joseph M. Conte discussed this poetic tendency as early as 1991, in relation to Jean Baudrillard’s ideas: Something has changed, and the Faustian, Promethean, (perhaps Oedipal) period of production and consumption gives way to the “proteinic” era of networks, to the narcissistic and protean era of connections, contact, contiguity, feedback and generalized interface that goes with the universe of communication. (Conte 1991, 11; see also Baudrillard 2002, 127)

These ideas of the “proteinic” and the protean, as vehicles to describe poetic change over the last few decades, harmonize very well with Haraway’s critique of humankind’s inability to shake the perspective of “Species Man” that has taken us into a planetary state of crisis (2016, 47–48). One of the specific things she calls for is an understanding of the world in terms of “string figure games” (2016, 13–14), which in themselves seem related to Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of the rhizomatic, adding the aspect of involving several life forms. Taken into joint account, these ideas facilitate the creation of a kind of poetic zone, which potentially offers lines of flight from certain discursive power structures inherent in the conventions and norms of language as well as of ecology. This offers a movement not only toward “deterritorialization” but also toward what Deleuze and Guattari explicitly refer to as the “minority.” This minority relates to “majority,” which is “a standard measure by which to evaluate.” Their prime example of such a majority is the “adult-white-­ heterosexual-European-male-speaking a standard language” (Deleuze

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and Guattari 1987, 105), which indicates how these thoughts have obvious resonance with the kind of explicitly norm-critical ideas that much contemporary poetry allies itself with. Another emancipatory idea of the poetic can be found in Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s Lyric Poetry (2007). This book stresses how poetry research has been overly focused on the hermeneutic (and its main question of what something means) and thus ends up close to the romantic-modernist tradition of the poet having something highly specific to say through poetry (quite close to what Conte, through Baudrillard, calls the “Promethean” aspect of poetry). Blasing does not turn against this per se but resents how this research tradition tends to regard the poetic (which in her understanding concerns primarily how meaning is conveyed or produced) as means and ornaments, or parts of an intricate puzzle. Her view of lyric poetry is primarily that it is non-discursive: Above everything else, it is a formal practice that keeps in view the linguistic code and the otherness of the material medium of language to all that humans do with it—refer, represent, express, narrate, imitate, communicate, think, reason, theorize, philosophize. It offers an experience of another kind of order, a system that operates independently of the production of the meaningful discourse that it enables. This is a mechanical system with its own rules, procedures, and history. It works with a kind of logic that is oblivious to discursive logic. (Blasing 2007, 2)

Apart from resonating with Deleuze, Guattari, and Conte, this also taps well into Rinne’s thoughts on how relieving language of its “commonly accepted utility” leads to not only “a different manner of reading” but even “a questioning of reading in itself ” (2016, 17; my translation). This emancipatory aspect of the poetic, through its embrace of concurrency, ambiguity, and even contradiction, functions as a materialist, performative counter image to the normatively discursive view of language. Through this image, the transpositional aspect that we have been highlighting in relation to Rinne’s poetry is further bolstered. Altogether, we are given potential for lines of flight into minoritarian deterritorialization, in relation to the “majority” ideas and norms that brought us to the Anthropocene, whether we call them anthropocentric, capitalist,

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discursive, or what not. The idea of poetry as a vehicle for a linguistic “otherness … to all that humans do with it—refer, represent, express, narrate, imitate, communicate, think, reason, theorize, philosophize” (Blasing 2007, 2) has the same kind of emancipatory, radically abstract potential that Rinne claims that writing on the border between languages has: it liberates language from the “catalogue of connotations and cultural references” that Rinne speaks of. Through these non-discursive traits, the idea of the poetic consequentially offers an opportunity to renegotiate conventional discourses of power. This kind of consciousness is something that is present in the new poetries of which Rinne is a part, where creativity and critique, as well as politics and poetics, are seen as highly interdependent.

Pedagogical Challenges: Centrifugal Solutions In an intriguing chapter in the volume Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary (Keller 2007), written years before her earlier mentioned book on ecopoetics, Keller addresses the “new” discourse critical poetry from a pedagogical point of view. This operation leads her to stating the need for classroom practices that work centrifugally, embracing all the readings of a poem that come up and consequently follow the heterogeneity of the leads of these readings—a method that can easily relate epistemologically to the aforementioned ideas of lines of flight, poly-­ linguistics, and concurrency. Since contemporary poetry tends to have “far less representational coherence … the poem often yields intrigued bewilderment, not a sense of emotional or intellectual understanding” (Keller 2007, 31), this is a very productive method, according to Keller. This would certainly be true when it comes to the trans-lingual, minimalist, and naivistic aspect of Rinne’s work. In relation to “texts that continually challenge or ignore linguistic or literary conventions,” this method has the effect that “interpretative authority … is located in no individual and held precariously by the group, which is likely to have attained no sense of closure when its members leave off discussion of the text” within the classroom (Keller 2007, 32). The centrifugal classroom is distinguished by three main traits: (1) “it relies more, and more fundamentally,

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on a collective rather than a privatized reading process”; (2) its “interpretative authority is dispersed,” as mentioned earlier, meaning that it is also a “less hierarchical space [where] the teacher cannot function as the dispenser of wisdom;” and (3) an “outwardness” in which the class is “drawn toward the world outside the poem and how language works there” (Keller 2007, 32–34). Keller claims that the alternative, centripetal classroom has dominated poetry teaching for a long time. In that classroom, poetry reading is regarded as an intimate, life-changing, and private activity where there is a right way of reading and understanding a poem—a way which a teacher can show their students or pupils how to find. It is the individual’s encounter with the poem that is in the center of the centripetal classroom, and class discussion “aims to enhance that encounter through analysis, as the solitary experience is unfolded … and modified through exposure to others’ responses” (Keller 2007, 31). Keller’s main point is that this centripetal way of teaching poetry falls short when approaching contemporary poetic practices. The readings of Rinne’s work we have just been performing highlight a number of arguments for the centrifugal classroom approaches. The lines of flight, the focus on concurrency and ambiguity, the potentiality in refraining from choosing one discourse (German or English, phonemes or graphemes), the openness to the immanence-related metaphors of the “proteinic” and the “protean” (rather than the highly transcendental denotations of the “Promethean”)—all these things could be seen as “centrifugal” arguments, where the poem is in the center, and where approaching it leads to a dispersion not only of authority but also of potential meaning. A counterargument to such a view of poetry would be that it relativizes the meaning of a poem. However, Rinne’s work shows how this idea of “meaning,” or closure, is oftentimes an illusion, particularly in contemporary poetic practices like hers. In the final words of Huss and Tidigs on the effects of Rinne’s work: [E]very single reader of these poems participates in an ongoing linguistic process, where the borders between known—as well as unknown—languages are constantly being renegotiated. Notes for soloists teaches us to pay attention not only to the potential multilingualism in every monolingual

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text, but also to the mobility of the linguistic border: Every time one tries to finally pin it down, it takes flight again. (2015, 22)

This last sentence captures a central dilemma not only in Rinne’s texts but in poetic texts in general or even in relation to linguistic border phenomena.11 These ideas can be employed in understanding humankind’s relation to its surroundings—as surroundings, or as resources. In order to deal with the crisis of the Anthropocene, humankind needs what Johansson calls “humble, responsible, and creative” means of understanding, and interacting within, these surroundings. Placing poetry, and not the individual, in the center of the classroom and facilitating for its force to move centrifugally, out into the classroom and its inhabitants (as part of the “flux of experience”), might very well assist in doing just that. When it comes to the humility, responsibility, and creativity that the Anthropocene demand of human beings, according to Johansson—students who learn and experience that poetry comes to them, little by little, if they allow it by keeping an open mind, have a large advantage over students who learn and experience that poetry should be used to their benefit: to be tortured,12 devoured and left to die, right?

Notes 1. The popularization of the contemporary use of the term is usually dated back to Paul J. Crutzen’s “Geology of Mankind” (Crutzen 2002). 2. This poem is described as “striking,” but not commented any further, in a footnote in Marjorie Perloff’s massively influential book Unoriginal Genius (Perloff 2010, 173n.21). 3. For further reading on this elusive concept, see e.g. Deleuze (2001). 4. Lines of flight is another one of those elusive concepts in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings. It is strongly related to escaping from conceptualizations, while simultaneously shifting focus towards relational aspects, to connectivity: “Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities. The plane of consistency (grid) is the outside of all multiplicities. The line of flight marks: the reality of a finite number of dimensions that the multiplicity

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effectively fills; the impossibility of a supplementary dimension, unless the multiplicity is transformed by the line of flight; the possibility and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency or exteriority, regardless of their number of dimensions” (1987, 9; emphasis added). 5. The use of Finnish and Japanese is exemplified in Rinne’s collaboration with Tomomi Adachi (2012). 6. Deterritorialization is yet another of those elusive concepts. It is strongly interdependent with the lines of flight, planes of immanence, and the rhizome in that it also seeks to describe a move away from what is, into a non-hierarchical ontology (see e.g. Deleuze and Guattari 1987). 7. In relation to the capitalist logic that Deleuze and Guattari oppose, it is worth noting that one of the alternatives to Anthropocene that has come up during the last few years is Capitalocene (cf. Haraway 2016, 30–57). 8. The use of columnar writing in this poem seems indebted to a poem by the Swedish concrete poet Bengt Emil Johnson from his 1984 poetry collection Bland orrar och kor (Amongst Black Grouse and Cows), discussed in Alfredsson (2012, 22–25). 9. This example does, of course, also signal another quite specific aspect of language, i.e., the one of code, or encryption, where writing “100 / --- / é” instead of “censuré” might in itself be a response to censorship, whether in a totalitarian state or in a secret club for children. 10. I am referring to what, in its widest sense, could be labeled as “the linguistic turn” of philosophy, where critical theory, continental philosophy, and their offspring have led to a new kind of discourse-critical awareness within poetic practice. 11. In her book The Poetics of Indeterminacy, Marjorie Perloff talks about the way poets have related to the dilemma described in Huss and Tidigs’s last sentence: “Every time one tries to finally pin it down, it takes flight again.” Perloff posits a difference between the modernist poetry departing from Stéphane Mallarmé, on the one hand, and, on the other, that departing from Arthur Rimbaud. Her main argument is that, however difficult it may be to decode poems from the Mallarmé tradition (her prime example is T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land), “the relationship of the word to its referents, of signifier to signified, remains essentially intact” (Perloff 1980, 17). The Rimbaud tradition, however, relates to the dilemma in quite a different manner: “the symbolic evocations generated by words on the page are no longer grounded in a coherent discourse, so that it

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becomes impossible to decide which of these associations are relevant and which are not” (Perloff 1980, 17–18). It is undoubtedly the latter, the Rimbaud tradition, to which not only Rinne but also the contemporary poetries described by Keller relate. 12. Interviews by Daniel Xerri show that a large number of English teachers can relate strongly to the image of “torturing” poetry (as described in a poem by Billy Collins) as a characterization of what they teach their students and pupils to do in their classrooms (Xerri 2013).

References Alfredsson, J. 2012. After Concretism: The Legacy of Mid-20th Century Sound Technology in Bengt Emil Johnson’s Poetry. In Media and Materiality in the Neo-Avant-Garde, ed. J. Ingvarsson and J. Olson, 15–36. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Baudrillard, J. 2002. The Ecstasy of Communication. In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. H. Foster, 126–134. New York: New Press. Blasing, M.K. 2007. Lyric Poetry: The Pain and Pleasure of Words. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Blommaert, J. 2010. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Conte, J.M. 1991. Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Crutzen, P.J. 2002. Geology of Mankind. Nature 415: 23. Deleuze, G. 2001. Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D.J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hernadi, P. 2002. Why Is Literature: A Coevolutionary Perspective on Imaginative Worldmaking. Poetics Today 23 (1): 21–42. Huss, M., and J. Tidigs. 2015. The Reader as Multilingual Soloist: Linguistic and Medial Transgressions in the Poetry of Cia Rinne. In Borders under Negotiation, ed. D. Rellstab and N. Siponkoski, 16–24. Vaasa, Finland: VAKKI Publications. ———. 2017. The Noise of Multilingualism: Reader Diversity, Linguistic Borders, and Literary Multimodality. Critical Multilingualism Studies 5 (1): 208–235.

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Johansson, L. 2019. Blivandets pedagogik (The Pedagogy of Becoming). Lund: Studentlitteratur. Kangaskoski, M. 2017. From Pressing the Button to Clicking the Mouse: The Shift from Static to Dynamic Media. In Dialogues on Poetry: Mediatization and New Sensibilities, ed. D. Ringgaard and S. Kjerkegaard, 127–147. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Keller, L. 2007. FFFFFalling with Poetry: The Centrifugal Classroom. In Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary, ed. J. Retallack and J. Spahr, 30–38. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2017. ‘Recomposing Ecopoetics’ North American Poetry of the Self-­ Conscious Anthropocene. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Lutz, H. 2012. Cia Rinne and the Soundpoetic Event: Listening for Other Languages. Baltic Worlds 2: 27–29. Mønster, L. 2016. Ny nordisk: lyrik i det 21. århundrede. Aalborg, Denmark: Aalborg Universitetsforlag. Perloff, M. 1980. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2010. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Retallack, J., and J. Spahr. 2007. Introduction: Why Teach Contemporary Poetries? In Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary, ed. J. Retallack and J. Spahr, 1–10. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rinne, C. 2009. Notes for Soloists. OEI. Accessed February 25, 2020. http:// www.ubu.com/vp/rinne.html. ———. 2011. Sounds for Soloists. YouTube. Accessed February 25, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=y2NaLpiHOzU. ———. 2012. Homophonic Translations: Japanese–Finnish. YouTube. Accessed February 25, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vchi88ajMgA. ———. 2016. Från tanke till tunga genom karuselldörrar. Lyrikvännen 63 (5–6): 14–19. Sakai, N. 2009. How Do We Count a Language? Translation and Discontinuity. Translation Studies 2 (1): 71–88. Skeet, J. 2017. Applied Schizoanalysis: Towards a Deleuzian Poetics. Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics 7: 86–102. Schmidt, M.K. 2019. (U)muligheder: Multilingvistiske strategier hos Cia Rinne og Christina Hagen. Edda 106 (1): 24–38. Xerri, D. 2013. Colluding in the ‘Torture’ of Poetry: Shared Beliefs and Assessment. English in Education 47 (2): 134–146.

12 The Message of Poetry or Poetry as Messenger: The Poetics of Sustainability in the Pedagogical Context Peter Degerman

Introduction The reading and writing of poetry are often perceived as predominantly subjective domains, while the discourse of sustainability takes the form of an objective, overarching set of precepts. These perceptions often result in an intrinsic division between opinions and facts, especially when poetry is used in a cross-disciplinary context. Poetry education as a means of dealing with issues of sustainability can thus be marginalized between the subjectivity of the poetic experience and the supposedly objective parameters that form the basic values of institutional policymaking. In the readings of poetry there can be no wrong or right, only more or less plausible interpretations. In the discourse of sustainability there is, on the other hand, a set of basic values often taken for granted.1

P. Degerman (*) Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. L. Kleppe, A. Sorby (eds.), Poetry and Sustainability in Education, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95576-2_12

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The premise of this chapter is that the potential of poetry as a means of cross-disciplinary learning can only be fully realized if the specific sustainability of the poetic texts is taken into consideration. Using Theodor W. Adorno’s often misinterpreted statement about poetry after Auschwitz as a starting point, this chapter elaborates poetry as a certain subjective way of reaching the objective. This relation between the subjective and the objective also indicates that there can be different ways of reading a poem in a cross-disciplinary context—concentrating either on the message of the content or on the message of the form. As an example of this different kinds of reading, I will use the popular and often anthologized poem “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti. The argument here is that the truth of poetry is never fixed and that the ability to produce different readings can function as a “messenger” between the subjective and the objective realms, and thus between different epistemologies and subject contents. Adorno affirmed a special value to the poetical fragment—and to avant-garde art in general—as opposed to the cultural products of mass culture. Avant-garde art, he suggested, is the splinter in the eye, the only fragment left for responding to the downfall of a hegemonic western culture. However, the poetic fragment might not be reserved for a certain kind of literature, I argue, but can be extended to a certain kind of fragmental reading of literature.

Poetry After Auschwitz “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” Adorno stated in Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, “and that also corroborates the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.”2 These words about the writing of poetry having no meaning after Auschwitz have been passed down and interpreted in many different ways, almost always wrenched out of context. The gist of many of these interpretations is that poetry, or art in general, is superfluous in a world where such a thing as genocide can occur. In a pedagogical context, the implications of such a reasoning could then be that poetry may well be legitimized in the subjective realm of free time—on the same level as, say, role-playing or online games—but that it has no fundamental bearing on the big societal issues of today and

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therefore a limited utility as a subject content. Seen in the light of today’s environmental challenges, concerning sustainability, the question here is what relevance, if any, can poetry teaching have in an interdisciplinary pedagogy addressing issues of sustainability—can there, for example, be any poetry teaching after we became aware of the climate crisis? Even though such a question may seem far-fetched, it is really just a variation of the fundamental pedagogical question about the place of a certain subject content in the school curricula. As many have pointed out, poetry teaching is already marginalized in the policy agenda for language and literacy teaching (Gordon 2014, 1; Martin 2010, 3). Its use across the curricula, in interdisciplinary contexts, is mainly confined to writing poetry as a personal response or expression, without any real awareness of the possibilities of poetics in cross-disciplinary pedagogy. Furthermore, using poetry teaching as a method of dealing with societal challenges runs the risk of reducing poetry to a mere instrumental role. The use of poetry in a context of sustainability often favors a thematic reading rather than an aesthetic or more formal one. Here we are getting closer to the real meaning of Adorno’s famous utterance. Rather than no poetry after Auschwitz, there can be no traditional, linear, or realistic poetry after the Holocaust. In the same way that any technical development toward sustainability is part of the very industry that fostered the environmental problems, western poetics are part of the culture that made genocide possible—at least the industrial, rational form of genocide. Such a statement is certainly part of a negative dialectic, but it is a key point to understanding poetry pedagogics and sustainability in the light of Adorno’s thinking.3 Poetry teaching in the cross-disciplinary context has therefore to acknowledge the tensions between the supposedly individualistic, subjective expression of art and the official, administrative policy of sustainability. Not doing so would be accepting false harmony within a basically antagonistic society. Western literature and the mechanisms of global warming are parts of the same society; although the concept of sustainability in art and in the production of commodities operates on different levels, those levels are still parts of the same societal context. It may seem obvious, but not to understand these relations, reducing poetry to mere

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subjective emotional responses, might lead us to the conclusion that it is indeed barbaric to write poetry in the age of rampant global warming. Poetry teaching, according to this line of thinking, is not something that resolves contradictions within the discourses of sustainability but something that, on the contrary, embodies these tensions within that discourse between the possibilities and the impossibilities of development. In an interdisciplinary context, this implies that poetry is a special mode of critical thinking concerning other subject contents, as for example social studies or biology, or overarching questions such as those concerning sustainability. Poetics can thus be seen as a way of insisting upon the complex relations between the subjective and the objective. A model to be used here is the one of “Hermes,” the messenger, put forward by Michel Serres. According to this model, there is no unique objective truth nor any superior discourse, but rather a multitude of different discourses among which there are different “translations” (Serres 1982). Teaching poetry in an interdisciplinary context is thus using poetics as a messenger between the subjective and the objective and among different epistemologies. Poetics as messenger, or “translator,” among different epistemologies is not to be confused with literacy as a methodological concept in cross-­ disciplinary teaching. Andrew Stables and Keith Bishop, for example, advocate a broad, or “strong,” literacy that has the potential to draw together different subject disciplines “without denying their differences as discourses or ‘language games’” (2001, 96). However, the ambition to merge different discourses into an overarching environmental literacy may result in just smoothing over the productive ruptures or tensions that inevitably occur in environmental studies. While Serres’s theories of the “Hermes” acknowledge the need to translate subject contents into one another in much the same way that foreign languages need to be translated from one to another, environmental literacy tends to take the emergence of a “world language” for granted, which would make any translation redundant.

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The Poetics of Sustainability When trying to explain the metaphorical dimension of the statement about poetry after Auschwitz, Adorno later stated that philosophy is to be taken neither as an absolute discourse nor as something pointing out or trying to communicate a fact (1973, 362–63). The same can be said about poetry. Poetics has nothing to do with the language of the official policy documents on sustainability—and yet, poetry is not a subjective free zone where anything goes. Discussing specific modes of poetic sustainability outside of an official policy discourse and outside of the hegemonic western culture criticized by Adorno, one has to think about poetry as something that is, on the one hand, a singular material inscription in time and space and, on the other hand, something open to innumerable readings and to different understandings. As Claire Colebrook has noted, literary sustainability is something quite distinct from the concepts of sustainability outlined in official policy documents. While the latter base their assumptions on the mathematical, logical, and statistical formulas of objectivity and of truth in general, poetics “sustain a marked difference” (2017, 121). The official documents about sustainability in education—and in society as a whole—may look to the future, assuming that the truths of today will remain the same through time, as they are supposedly based on objective facts, whereas literature is open to the future in the respect that it will always generate new meanings. At the same time any given literary text must always be the starting point for these interpretations. If the original versions of, for example, Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” were to disappear—the original manuscript, all the prints, all the digital versions, and all the downloading of the poem—the truth of the poem would no longer exist, but, as long as the inscription of the poem is available, this truth will be forever changing according to new understandings. We may know the poem as an expression of romanticism and of Christian allegory typical of the historical context in which it was written, or as a story for children— as the author herself once stated4—but at the same time it is possible to acknowledge many of the later readings of the poem as just as substantial. From the 1970s onward, the poem has, for instance, been read as an

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expression of homosexuality (Gilbert and Gubar 1979; Welter 2006),5 a critique of capitalist marketing (Holt 1990; Mendoza 2006), and—last but not least—a piece of ecocriticism (Scott 2007; Mason 2018). The words of the poem stay the same, but the truth of it changes—or rather, the poem continuously generates new truths. Using the philosophy of Jacques Derrida (1992, 37), Colebrook argues that there is a certain sustainability in literature that has to do with the relationship between an inscription allowing the present to be carried into the future and an intent—or original truth—that does not need to accompany this inscription: To read a text as literary is to think of it as maximally sustainable, as what might always be reiterated beyond any of the present bounds of sense. A text would also be—as literary—hyper-promissory: we might “know” (historically) that it makes no sense to read Twelfth Night as queer or transgendered (if the concept of queerness had no meaning in the original context), but the play always allows for new performances that—say—most Americans would not grant to other texts such as the Declaration of Independence or the US Constitution, or that most Christians would not grant the Bible. (Colebrook 2017, 122)

To read poetry—or rather, to read in a poetical mode—is to acknowledge a material sustainability of the inscription that is independent of any fixed meaning. While Colebrook discusses a certain mode of sustainability in the ways that a text is read literarily, Adorno proposes a specific quality in lyric poetry that, on the one hand, mirrors the time and place of its conception and, on the other hand—immanently—opposes its time and place. The sustainability of lyric poetry lies thus in the way in which it uses the language of its time and society only to make this everyday speech transcend the contexts of its time and society: Lyric poetry, therefore, shows itself most thoroughly integrated into society at those points where it does not repeat what society says—where it conveys no pronouncement—but rather where the speaking subject (who succeeds in his expression) comes to full accord with language itself, i.e., with what language seeks by its own inner tendency. On the other hand, language cannot be raised to the position of an absolute voice of existence, as

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some current ontological theories of linguistics would have it. … When the speaking subject, the “I,” forgets himself completely, he [sic] is yet entirely present; language (as a sanctified abracadabra) would otherwise submit to the process of reification and disintegrate as it does in everyday speech. (161)

For Adorno, poetic sustainability is capable of resisting reification and— independently of any conceivable intention—to oppose its “enforced services in the realm of economically organized purposes and goals” (169).6 Read in the light of today’s policies concerning sustainability, Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” is just as valid a depiction of the “economically organized” as of the burgeoning market strategies of the Victorian age.

Thematic and Formal Reading If Colebrook’s concept of sustainability is about the way literature sustains itself beyond any specific intention or interpretation, and Adorno’s concept of poetics refers to a specific mode of sustainability in poetry that lifts the words out of the realm of the ordinary, what, then, are sustainable poetics in a pedagogical context? Poetry as a means of teaching sustainability must acknowledge that the mode of the literary is radically different from the mode of the official documents or news channels covering, in this case, environmental issues (Colebrook) and that poetry even opposes official discourses, reflecting their inherent antagonistic contents (Adorno). To read in a non-literary way is always to insist upon the specific truth of a text. To read in literary way is to insist on the subjective, individual intention of the poetic text. However, in the pedagogical situation, this individuality is often contextualized in a supposedly objective, truthful frame—historical, social, or biographical. This is, of course, a traditional way of teaching poetry, by providing pointers concerning such basic entities as genre and epoch to facilitate readings in the classroom. If one wants to use literature to teach something outside of literature—in this case, environmental issues—the relation between the subjective emotions of poetry and the objective facts of the historical and biographical framing tends to reduce poetry to a mere tool for unpacking the facts.

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Reader-response theories on literary pedagogies have further underlined this dualism between subjective emotions and objective facts. It is in the act of reading that we assimilate the text—either with emotional sensitivity or with the intention of sampling bits of facts. This kind of efferent reading, as opposed to aesthetic reading—to use to the expressions coined by Louise M. Rosenblatt (1978)—is centered on the individual incitement of reading. One could replace the terms efferent and aesthetic with the words thematic and formal. For Rosenblatt, the same poetic text could be read in both these modes, but in many pedagogical contexts they have been interpreted as ways of reading different genres—the efferent reading reserved for non-fiction, the aesthetic for literary texts. To reserve different readings for different genres is to simplify the relation between efferent and aesthetic readings; nonetheless, one has to be aware of the idiosyncrasies of every genre. If we do not treat poetry as a specific way of expression there is no reason to teach poetry at all, especially not in a cross-disciplinary context. When Colebrook talks about a specific literary reading of sustainability, she has certain texts in mind, certain genres. When Adorno implies that there can be no writing of poetry after Auschwitz, it means that the traditional poetry of the western bourgeois now is made impossible. In Adorno’s statement there lies a division between popular culture and high culture, which is typical for critical theory but problematic in a pedagogical context. Even though the qualitative distinction between mass culture and avant-garde high culture today may seem outdated, the specific mode of the poetic as a way of bridging the subjective and the objective speaks for the necessity of teaching poetry as a genre. The particular truth of poetry, where “individuality raises the lyric poem to the realm of the general by virtue of it bringing to light things undistorted, ungrasped, things not yet subsumed” (1989, 156), is an important but often overlooked part of poetry teaching. In relation to Serres’s theories of the poetic mode as a messenger among different epistemologies, this quality of overarching subjective and objective ontologies is the real advantage of poetry pedagogy in dealing with cross-­ disciplinary questions. It is by the use of a defined aesthetic form that poetry enables individual experience to express the general.

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The Sound of Different Meanings Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” may here serve as an example of how poetry can be used not only as a thematic expression of environmental issues but also as a certain mode of sustainability contained in the poetic language. In the former case, the poem becomes a vehicle—or a starting point—for discussing certain themes that may be uncovered in the poetic text. In the latter case, the actual words of the poem become ways of subjectifying the objective, factual discourse of sustainability. Both those methods have their advantages in a pedagogical context, but in the thematic reading one may wonder if it is really necessary to use poetry, or if one might as well use prose fiction, biographical notes, or any other text reflecting the themes one wants to discuss. Just as Twelfth Night, the case exemplified in Colebrook’s discussion, “Goblin Market” is complex and intriguing, open to numerous different readings. Themes that fit well with contemporary environmental problems seem to be as easy to find as if they had been intended in the first place. One might even think of Rossetti’s poem as depicting the tensions between the global and the local in questions of sustainability. While the goblin merchants run a global business, peddling fruit from all over the world, the two sisters Laura and Lizzie cultivate the land near their home, getting their produce according to traditional values and in harmony with their biosphere: Early in the morning When the first crock crowed his warning, Neat like bees, as sweet and busy, Laura rose with Lizzie: Fetched in honey, milked the cows, Aired and set to rights the house, Kneaded cakes of whitest wheat, Cakes for dainty mouths to eat, Next churned butter, whipped up cream, Fed their poultry, sat and sewed. (Rossetti 2015, 8)

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As Terrence Holt (1990, 52–53) has pointed out, the home of the sisters, their oikos, seems to be opposed to the goblin’s glen by the river and thus to the world of commerce, but the two are in fact interwoven in the economics of the world—the oikonomia, the managing of the home. Reading the poem as a figuration of such a theme of environmentalism seems to be an attractive pedagogical starting point for a study of poetics in the context of sustainability. Here we have not only the dichotomy between the natural and the industrial but also the complexity of the preconditions of life. Indeed, such a thematic reading of the poem fully well illustrates the certain quality of sustainability in the literary reading pointed out by Colebrook. However, there is more to the poetic text than that; this reading is only one among many possible. Reading for a theme will eventually only confirm that which we already set out to look for. According to Adorno’s critique of lyric poetry, it is rather in the archetypes of modernity that the subjectivity of the poem unconsciously reveals the important themes of a society. Instead of thematic readings of the poem as an example of issues of relevance for our time, readings concentrating on the specific poetic mode—the language, the rhetorical tropes—may uncover the inherently antagonistic matter that presupposes these issues. In other words, instead of reading the poem through the policy of sustainability—in education or in society as a whole—one can read the policy of sustainability through the poem. “‘Come buy, come buy,’” cries the goblins in Rossetti’s poem, “With its iterated jingle/ Of sugar-baited words” (9). The poem shows that words can be deceptive, rhetorically persuasive, sweet, and alluring, but also a playful game of sounds and rhythms—an essentially closed, self-sustaining activity. The playfulness of words, the nearness to nursery rhyming, indicates that the poem can be interpreted in many different ways, or rather that the sounds of the words are just as important as any given meaning: Laughed every goblin When they spied her peeping: Came towards her hobbling, Flying, running, leaping, Puffing and blowing, Chuckling, clapping, crowing,

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Chuckling and gobbling, Mopping and mowing, Full of airs and graces, Pulling wry faces, Demure grimaces, Cat-like and rat-like, Snail-paced in a hurry, Parrot-voiced and whistler, Helter skelter, hurry skurry. (12–13)

The use of repetition, of sounds and resounds, sometimes within the same line, makes Rossetti’s lyrical style an unusually distinct example of how a certain poetic sonorousness empties words of meaning so as to constantly open them up to the sound of new meanings. The words of the poem are also there on the page, scattered about in the same way as the fruits of the merchant goblins, bits and pieces to be picked up and put together by any reader. “Bloom-down-cheeked peaches/Swart-headed mulberries/Wild free-born cranberries” (1). In her diary Time Flies, Rossetti considers how poetry can be at the same time written words that are “words even while unuttered,” even though a note on the page is not music but a silent sound—“and what can a silent sound be?” she asks herself (1897, 30–31). The answer to that question should of course be poetry, if we by poetry mean the sublime, that which transcends the boundaries of outside and inside, of the subjective and the objective, of time and space. As she says in the poem “An Old-World Thicket,” “something not music, yet most musical” (2008, 247). This non-musical music of the poetic language is made to reverberate out of the written words in new ways with every reading, with every contextual framing. One like a ratel tumbled hurry skurry. She heard a voice like voice of doves Cooing all together: They sounded kind and full of loves In the pleasant weather. (3)

Poetry is all about voices, different voices, different subjectivities. “These are not the voices of subjectivities imaginary or real,” writes Emily

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Harrington, “but rather often multivocal, blurring the boundaries between the interior and exterior consciousness” (2014, 15). The voices can—in accordance with Adorno’s thinking—turn the subjective into the general and thus bring to light things not yet subsumed. But not only that, one would like to add: poetic voices also point to the future. The ways that the poetic text is open to interfusing voices may give the reader a sense of the text as a broken-off fragment that can always be rediscovered in new contexts. Thus, the poetic text as something transcending any final reading might then “offer a time beyond our grasp” (Colebrook 2017, 123). Adorno’s words about lyric poetry being barbaric in the aftermath of Auschwitz must then be understood as the impossibility of reading poetry in any final, assuring way, aiming at the wholeness of the text. The only way to read or write poetry after Auschwitz is to understand it as broken-off fragments, as something without any final meaning.

Conclusion To understand the relevance of Adorno’s ideas in the pedagogical context, we must change focus from the poetical text to the poetical reader. Adorno turned to the avant-garde for a way out of the barbarism and the mass-cultural ready-mades that traditional poetry had become after Auschwitz, understanding the poetical fragment as a possibility of transformation of art as well as of society. Nevertheless, this transformation might, in poetry pedagogy, not be reserved for a certain poetic genre, to a non-linear, broken-up assemblage of words, or to experimental, modernistic poetry, but rather to a broken-up, non-linear reading of poetry. When reading a traditional poem such as “Goblin Market,” we may apply to it an unconditional, broken-up reading, understanding it as fragments directed to the future. That is the essential lesson to be learned from Adorno as far as poetry pedagogy and sustainability are concerned: we should treat any kind of poetry as open-ended and “experimental,” as fragments “unearthed” by the reader. The answer to how to teach new experimental poetry—that “nothing should be taken for granted” (Perloff 2004, 257)—might also be the answer to teaching poetry in general, thus

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revealing the sustainability of traditional poetry as well as the temporality of policy documents. This pedagogical stance is then a certain poetic way of having an openended questioning take on any subject content. Rather than using poetry as a message, as a container of some sort of “subjective” matter, poetic language may serve as a kind of messenger among different contents, different epistemological “languages.” The sustainability of poetic language—always open to dissimilar truths, to heterogenic objectives, consistently addressed to the future—thus takes advantage of permanent renegotiations in a pedagogical situation. Using poetics across the curriculum thus affirms differences among subject contents, instead of trying to find overarching thematic sameness. The poetics of sustainability operates in-between subject contents, on the level of a language not fixed in time or in meaning. The way that the voices of “Goblin Market” interfuse the importance of sounds and rhythms gives us some of the answers to the initial question of why we should want to work with poetry in a formal learning situation, in addition to other genres and texts. The poetic text in the pedagogical context emphasizes certain aspects of sustainability in art, at the same time as being a subjective expression that answers to general societal challenges by the use of aesthetic form. The poetry of Rossetti, the rhythms and repetitions, may then be seen as fragments of language that in the form of sounds can be heard in different contexts, depending on the way that they are brought forward and put together—“With its iterated jingle/Of sugar-baited words.”

Notes 1. The discourse of sustainability is extremely heterogenic. Having its origin in the 1970s, the term is today used in so many different contexts that its specific meaning is impossible to define—although the positive connotations of the term are indisputable. Often used in pair with “development”— “sustainable development”—the term was originally used in the economics of fishing and forest industries, while its current most hegemonic form was coined in the United Nations Brundtland Report (Borowy 2014).

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2. “[N]ach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das friβt auch die Erkenntnis an, die warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedicht zu schreiben” (Adorno 1955, 26). 3. Instead of the unity principle of dialectics and the concept of the superordinate principle, the negative dialectics strives to go outside of such a sway of unity, arguing that the outcome is still contradictive and might be negative. In culture, and maybe especially in poetry, the dialectics between what is and what might be is always open and has no end-point. 4. This passed-down fact is debatable. Jan Marsh (1994, 282) quotes the review from the Spectator of April 12, 1862, where the poem is declared as “a true children’s poem.” Even though one also can find themes of “temptation, regression and redemption” appealing to adult readers, Rossetti herself seems to have made it clear that children were not among her intended readers, but later on she started to write poems especially addressed to children, supposedly trying to ride on the wave of a new, booming children’s market, and may in this context have talked about “Goblin Market” as a tale for children. 5. In the introduction to the volume Victorian Women Poets, Joseph Bristow writes: “Gilbert and Gubar immediately seize on how, in this narrative of female resistance to male authority, ‘Rossetti does … seem to be dreamily positing an effectively matrilineal and matriarchal world, perhaps even, considering the strikingly sexual redemption scene between the sisters, a covertly (if ambivalently) lesbian world.’ If the latter comment seems far-­ fetched, then it should be borne in mind that in 1973 Rossetti’s poem was reprinted, with titillating illustrations, in the soft-porn magazine Playboy” (Bristow 1995, 13). 6. Reification is an important concept in Adorno’s thinking. In the modern age almost everything tends to become a commodity, an object of market laws. Only poetry—or a certain kind of poetical “experimental” art in general—has the power to resist this commodification or reification; it is not possible to turn it into mere objects. However, Adorno is not clear on this point. Thoughts on poetry after Auschwitz indicate that traditional poetry has become only objects on the market in modern society and thus worthless in any true, poetical meaning—at the same time some of this traditional lyrical poetry seems to still resist reification, due to a certain way of defining the antagonistic constitution of modern development.

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References Adorno, T.W. 1955. Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp Verlag. ———. 1973. Negative Dialectics. London: Routledge and Kegan. ———. 1989. Lyric Poetry and Society. In Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed. S.E. Bronner and D. MacKay. New York: Routledge. Borowy, I. 2014. Defining Sustainable Development for Our Common Future: A History of the World Commission on Environment and Development. London: Routledge. Bristow, J., ed. 1995. Victorian Women Poets. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Colebrook, C. 2017. The Twilight of the Anthropocene: Sustaining Literature. In Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text, and Culture, ed. A. Johns-Putra et al., 115–136. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Derrida, J. 1992. Acts of Literature. London: Routledge. Gilbert, S.M., and S.  Gubar. 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Gordon, J. 2014. A Pedagogy of Poetry through the Poems of W. B. Yeats. London: Trentham/Institution of Education Press. Harrington, E. 2014. Second Person Singular: Late Victorian Women Poets and the Bonds of Verse. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Holt, T. 1990. ‘Men Sell Not Such in Any Market’: Exchange in Goblin Market. Victorian Poetry 28 (1): 51–67. Marsh, J. 1994. Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography. London: Jonathan Cape. Martin, S. 2010. Présentation: Les poèmes au cœur de l’enseignement du français. Français aujourd’hui 2 (169): 3–14. Mason, E. 2018. Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mendoza, V.R. 2006. ‘Come Buy’: The Crossing of Sexual and Consumer Desire in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. English Literary History 73 (4): 913–947. Perloff, M. 2004. Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Rosenblatt, L.M. 1978. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Rossetti, C. 1897. Time Flies: A Reading Diary. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

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———. 2008. Poems and Prose. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2015. Goblin Market. New York: Penguin Random House. Scott, H. 2007. Subversive Ecology in Rossetti’s Goblin Market. Explicator 4: 219–222. Serres, M. 1982. Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Stables, A., and K. Bishop. 2001. Weak and Strong Conceptions of Environmental Literacy: Implications for Environmental Education. Environmental Education Research 7 (1): 89–97. Welter, N. 2006. Women Alone: La Fanu’s ‘Camilla’ and Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market,’. In Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre, ed. K. Harrison and R. Fantina. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

13 Towards a Sustainable Imagination: Reflections on Olav H. Hauge and the Teaching of Poetry Magne Drangeid

Poet and Fruit Grower The poet Olav H. Hauge (1908–1994) lived his whole life in Ulvik, a small fjord-side village in the Hardanger region, Western Norway. He was an orchardist and a farmer, a humble apple-grower on a five-acre farm perched high above the village with a magnificent view of the fjordscape (Grinde 2016, 19). More surprisingly, he spent his early years reading books, partly due to health problems. He read everything in the local public library and connected to culture abroad through books sent from his mother’s brother, who had emigrated to America (Stegane 2014). He sometimes sneaked away from his tasks at the family farm and climbed a nearby pine tree “to immerse himself in worlds opened up by the printed word” (Grinde 2016, 18).

M. Drangeid (*) Department of Education and Sports Science, Faculty of Arts and Education, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. L. Kleppe, A. Sorby (eds.), Poetry and Sustainability in Education, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95576-2_13

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As a young poet, he was inspired by Norwegian and English romanticism; later, his poetry defies easy labels. It can be argued that he is a Classicist, a Romantic, and a Modernist at the same time. Regardless of categorizations, he is now regarded as “one of the most significant Norwegian poets of the 20th century” (Stegane 2014), and he has been translated into more than twenty languages. An international audience will experience a unique merging of Norwegian culture, eastern philosophy, and European and Anglo-American modernism. Closely related to this blend is Hauge’s life-long search for passages leading from alienation towards meaningful world connections. The American poet Robert Bly, one of Hauge’s translators, writes, “He has much to give, and he gives it in small spoonfuls, as nurses give medicine. Everywhere in the daylight of this work, you see tiny experiences being valued” (2008, xi).

The Cell Hauge was hospitalized several times at Valen Psychiatric Hospital, not far from his hometown. In all, he spent more than five years at this asylum. His poem “The Cell,” which was published posthumously, reflects this experience. The speaking persona looks back on his former withdrawal from the outside world. The poem opens with, “I belonged here./ Perhaps I always/longed for here” (Hauge 2016, 392). The next lines are a description of the cell. It is austere, with naked walls, a mattress, some blankets, a rubber bedpan, a radiator, a door with a small slot, and iron bars on the window. On the walls, strange marks and letters are scratched in stone. The persona recalls beating the radiator while he sang. He seems to live in a world of shattered meaning. Nevertheless, the poem ends with a gleam of light. During daytime the sun reaches even this room, laying “a golden slab/on the floor./Here as well” (392). Are poems like “The Cell” capable of leading the reader towards essential life qualities, towards joy of life and well-being? Obviously, such a world-opening potential is dependent on certain poetic qualities, which point us towards the three related themes explored in this chapter. First, I look into the reciprocal relation between environmental experiences and reading, focusing on the reader’s imagination as essential. Next, I

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consider Hauge’s animation of the non-human environment, his anthropomorphism. This leads towards a tension in many of Hauge’s poems, between dwelling and wider horizons, between everyday life and dreams. I continue by discussing a sensorimotor, embodied approach to the teaching of poetry, focusing again on the importance of enhancing the students’ imaginations. Concluding my discussion, I relate the poems to sustainability, used as a textual concept with relevance to the teaching of poetry. My contribution is meant for educational settings and not as literary criticism in the strict sense.1 I limit myself to Hauge’s poetry and mostly focus on his later work. Nevertheless, my approach should be relevant beyond this particular poet and his Norwegian context.

Eco-cognitive Criticism and Sustainability Theoretically, I place myself within ecocriticism, broadly understood in accordance with both Greg Garrard’s definition as “the study of the relationship of the human and non-human” (2012, 5) and Cheryll Glotfelty’s understanding of this field: “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (1996, xviii).2 To throw light on both the poet’s depiction of nature–culture and the corresponding reading experience, I also lean on eco-cognitive and cognitive literary criticism and research (Weik von Mossner 2017; Cave 2016; Gallese 2017a). From this position, I explore the poet’s and the reader’s movements back and forth between literature and reality, between the immediate response and reflection. Regarding sustainability, my point of departure is Hubert Zapf (2016, 27) and his model for sustainable texts, understood in accordance with his version of cultural ecology as an ecological force within culture. Zapf ’s model consists of three discursive modes: an imaginative counterdiscourse which foregrounds what is culturally marginalized, a culture-critical metadiscourse which deconstructs hegemonic ideologies, and a reintegrative interdiscourse which brings together, in creative and transformative ways, knowledge otherwise kept apart (Zapf 2016, 95–121). Like Zapf, I consider the first mode to be fundamental, expressing both our imaginative capabilities and literature’s capacity for calling forth

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new or alternative worlds. Following Zapf, I do not see textual (or poetic) sustainability as restricted to explicit environmental writing; it is dependent on literary qualities within the three mentioned discursive modes. Leaning on James J. Gibson (1986) and Terence Cave (2016), I use the term affordance to provide new perspectives on literary features. The concept was first coined by Gibson: “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill” (1986, 127). This goes for humans as well, although what characterizes human culture is creative use of the environment. In “The Cell,” for instance, the patient uses the radiator as a music instrument, “encased in steel;/such a wondrous sound/when I beat it/and sang” (392). The naked walls in the cell are transformed too, into whiteboards with strange marks and “letters scratched in stone.” In Cave’s criticism, not only the depicted environment but also the literary conventions, motifs, and thematic elements are affordances. They are always relational, that is, dependent on the reader. The reader’s realization of the literary text may be limited, but, in principle, the potential is unlimited. The “meagreness” of the text makes this possible. Literature is always unspecified compared to reality (Cave 2016, 25) and therefore dependent on the reader’s imagination. This makes the affordances open-ended and prepares for innovation.

Poetic Passages Hauge’s search for meaning is both a life struggle and a poetic task. The existential value of his experiences is dependent on his aesthetic exploration and on what literature offers (Cave 2016, 46–62). The most important tool is his Parker pen, capable of turning memories and life experiences into art, even when life is fragile. “Solitude is sweet” is the first line in the poem “Behind the Mountain of Solitude” (Beneath the Crag [Under bergfallet], 1951). The next lines are a warning: “[S]o long as the road back/to the others/is open” (84). Poetry seems to be his search for such a “road back.” However, he did not always find the passage open. In a journal entry from 1957, he writes: “Madness—Is most often an intensity of emotions and imagination, so that you forget yourself. The inner world becomes the only real one” (Hauge 2016, 130). Later the

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same year, he notes, “from this side poems are rarely, if ever written” (131). Also in “The Cell,” the patient guards himself against the world. The outer world is almost absent. However, “The Cell” looks back on mental illness; it comes from a boundary where poetry is again possible, while also “visions are revealed” (131). What is the relevance of this for teaching? First, both the poet and the student reader create the poem as mental text worlds (Werth 1999)— imaginative and alternative worlds—“on the basis of perceived common ground knowledge” (Stockwell 2009, 7). To understand others and ourselves, our brain-body system uses both physical reality and our imagination, including fictional worlds, constantly switching among them (Gallese 2017a, 27; cf. Drangeid 2018, 57–60). Next, a poetic reorientation makes Hauge’s search for meaning recognizable for young readers. Especially in the first part of Hauge’s work, from Embers in the Ashes (Glør i oska, 1946) until at least On the Eagle’s Hillock (På Ørnetuva, 1961), his feeling of alienation is strong. He expresses this outsider experience in accordance with the romantic poetry he admired. This includes Henrik Wergeland, as well as the great poets in English romanticism: William Butler Yeats, P. B. Shelley, William Blake, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Later, it will also include German-speaking poets such as Friedrich Hölderlin, Georg Trakl, and Paul Celan (Sejersted 2007, 203). Although he never abandons the romantic tradition, there is a development. In the 1960s, just when his formal artistry as a sonneteer is at its peak, something new appears. Hauge seems to find new pathways. More often, he turns towards the immediate—towards his farming tools and working tasks, describing it all in a concrete manner, often in short poems inspired by Anglo-­ American imagism, Japanese haiku-poetry, and ancient Chinese poets. In the collection On the Eagle’s Perch, he even names his Chinese masters: Ch’ü Yüan, Li Po, T’ao Ch’ien, Lu Chi, and Wang Wei (Andersen 2002, 32). Distant traditions, alluded to in the title of the collection Droplets on the Eastern Wind (Dropar i austavind, 1966), offer new possibilities. Although living in his small village, this autodidact poet was not an intellectual backwoodsman, and he steadily expanded his scope. At least in Norway, his way of writing was new and soon inspired a whole generation of younger poets, especially the so-called Profil

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generation, who were named after their literary journal. Having Hauge as one of their models, they wrote what they called new simple poems (“nyenkle dikt”). Promoted among others by the leading Norwegian poet Jan Erik Vold, Hauge obtained an almost mythical status. In 1972, he even appeared on stage at Haugesund music festival, in front of a hippie audience who treated him as a rock star. Nevertheless, Hauge’s later poems cannot always pass as “simple.” Even the short ones are often more complex than an inexperienced reader can be expected to reflect upon. At the same time, they offer many intuitive reading pleasures. Even when touching on existential questions, they can be read as straightforward poems. This makes them useful for teaching literature. Many of Hauge’s poems are within the students’ reach even in primary and lower-secondary school. What makes them relevant is especially their yearning for meaning sought in everyday life (Andersen 2017, 24). His search for meaning includes both humans and more-than-­ humans (Abram 2017), both nature and culture, or, rather, the mixture of nature–culture (Latour 2017). Hauge describes his orchard, the cultivated landscape, animals and plants, and the wilderness surrounding the fjord. One short poem, “And I Was Grief,” from Droplets, touches upon this return to the immediate. In the first lines, the speaking voice is grief, dwelling in a cave. He is also proud, building beyond the stars. The last three lines, however, reflect a new entwinement: “Now I build in the nearest tree,/and each morning when I wake/the pine threads its needles with gold” (223). Often cited when discussing these ideas are some lines in the poem “Everyday Life,” also from Droplets. Realizing that the storms in life are left behind, the poet points out the following: “But you can find a way to live/in everyday life as well,/in our ordinary grey days” (244). The poet is resigned to an ordinary life (Sejersted 2016, 310); however, he is filled with a silent joy: “After you’re done with your tasks,/ you can fry up some bacon/and read Chinese poetry” (244). Not always content with his human dwelling, Hauge often focuses on plants and animals in the environment. Trond Arnesen (2016) found more than 70 species (taxa) mentioned in the 432 poems he analysed. Most frequent are trees: birch, scots pine, apple, and great sallow. Among plants growing in the outlying farmlands, juniper and matgrass are most

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often mentioned. It “provides a testimony to the traditional agricultural landscape and the connected species and activities and hardship that still speak to us” (Arnesen 2016, 23). This hardship is significant. Hauge worked as a farmer until he was seventy-three. However, his attitude to manual work was ambivalent; he recognizes its poetic importance, but it is also an obstacle to his writing. Most important for my own perspective is Arnesen’s conclusion regarding Hauge’s exploration of his natural–cultural surroundings. What Hauge offers is not a pastoral idyll, as in romantic poetry. His writing is based on practical experience and manual work, an “extensive knowledge of plants and ecosystems” (Arnesen 2016, 23) and a “high degree of environmental awareness” (23). This is more in line with what Terry Gifford labels the post-pastoral, understood not as after the pastoral but as reaching beyond it, “works that successfully suggest a collapse of the human/nature divide while being aware of the problematics involved. It is more about connections than the disconnections essential to the pastoral” (Gifford 2014, 16). The practical work connects Hauge’s writing to the body and to the material world. His text–world connections, however, go beyond farming. A closer look at the poem “Leaf-Huts and Snow-Houses,” from Ask the Wind (Spør vinden, 1971), illustrates other poetic passages with educational relevance. In the first part, the poet is piling together words, more or less at random. He does not much value the resulting poems. Nevertheless, he takes pleasure in making them; it is like having a house for a short while. This comparison prepares for a more far-reaching association. The text leaves behind the piling up of words in favour of childhood memories: “I recall the leaf-huts/we built of branches/when we were kids” (290). One may ask whether the memories from childhood are a precondition for the poet’s “piling of words” or the other way around. The best answer is probably that such text–world connections function as two-way passages; they are reciprocal, and not only for the “piling” poet. Regarding Zapf ’s “sustainable texts” model, my suggestion is that the imagination called forth is a prerequisite within literary reading. Without the imagination, the text is left underspecified, without the inferences that allow us to project ourselves into its world (Cave 2016, 25).

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The Animation of the World In this section, I elaborate on the same text–world connection, but focus on human/more-than-human entwinement. My point of departure is the poem “Scythe,” from Droplets, in which we meet a farmer so out of date that he still uses a scythe, letting it sing quietly in the grass while his own thoughts roam free; “There is no pain,/says the grass,/to fall for the scythe” (263). In this poem, my primary interest lies in the animation of the scythe and the grass. The animation is made through metaphor, although the scythe is also culturally and metonymically linked to the reaper, a personification of death often used by Hauge. The grass falls victim to the scythe quite literally, while the reaper reminds us that the scytheman is mortal, just like the grass. Death is harsh, but it is mitigated by the absence of pain. Can the scytheman expect to “fall” himself, quietly, like the grass, and not for a noisy mowing machine? The poem can be accused of being anthropocentric, that is, seeing nature from a human perspective, in accordance with human values and objectives (Stueland 2016, 165). Hauge ascribes human-like traits to both the scythe and the grass. However, I understand his anthropomorphism differently. It emphasizes the fate of the grass just as much as the human predicament. The poem could be read as a counterdiscourse and a culture-critical discourse (Zapf 2016), targeting what Bruno Latour calls the modern propensity to de-animate the more-than-human world (2017, 41–74). In their understanding of the world, moderns try to consider non-humans as inert, without the capacity to act. They consider themselves as the only actors. Contrary to the physical environment and the more-than-human biosphere, humans are endowed with subjectivity and intention. Latour considers this notion both dangerous and difficult to uphold in a situation where the environment increasingly acts upon us, responding to exploitation and pollution. Humans, by contrast, seem incapable of setting forth the necessary actions; we do not answer. The view that the environment functions without intention or will and is subject only to blind cause and effect is not viable, according to Latour. A scientist seeking objective knowledge through a de-animation of the

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environment would actually be unable to speak at all, because language is metaphoric, animating even our physical environment (Lakoff and Johnson 2003). Therefore, instead of trying to make the environment into an inert background, “we must learn to inhabit what could be called a metamorphic zone” (Latour 2017, 58). Since the modern distinction between humans and more-than-humans gives just as little meaning as the nature/culture distinction, we need all kinds of “morphisms” to be able to register and follow all the transactions going on between humans and non-humans. The relevance for Hauge is obvious, as Latour writes: [I]t makes no sense to accuse novelists, scientists, or engineers of committing the sin of “anthropomorphism” when they attribute “agency” to “something that should not have any.” Quite to the contrary: if they have to deal with all sort of contradictory “morphisms,” it is because they are trying to explore the form of these actants, which are initially unknown and then gradually domesticated by as many figures as are needed in order to approach them. (66)

Hauge’s human-specific perspective—his senses, body, and mind— will necessarily mark his exploration of this zone of transformation. However, is his exploration anthropocentric? Calling upon both Latour and the eco-cognitive scholar Alexa Weik von Mossner, I suggest the opposite. In Weik von Mossner’s approach, we recognize Latour’s non-­ anthropocentric notion of anthropomorphism. Opposed to forms of crude anthropomorphism, she sets forth a critical anthropomorphism. Critical anthropomorphism is to show “awareness of the inevitable anthropocentric bias of one’s interpretation” (Weik von Mossner 2017, 135) while, at the same time, putting oneself in the shoes of the more-­ than-­humans. Hauge’s grass gets a kind of will-to-life to which humans can relate. The use of the old-fashioned scythe not only alleviates the fall of the grass. Its song also calms the mower and makes his fall less harsh. Hauge brings humans and non-humans closer. In another poem from Droplets, “Wild Rose,” the relationship set up is more traditional, although it is still a counterdiscourse. Instead of singing of roses, the poet wants to sing of the thorns and the roots: “how it grips/ the rock as firmly as/a girl’s slender hand” (262). Again, the human

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domain illuminates nature. However, the simile also emphasizes the image of the girl’s hand. In “The Birch,” also from Droplets, an old man named Halldor contends that the birch grows only in the morning. Without even reflecting on the shift from tree to humans, the persona dismisses this as nonsense: “I believe we grow while sleeping” (262). Obviously, trees and humans are seen as subjected to the same principle or law. In “Overnight the Grass Turns Green” (Ask the Wind), nature’s agency is everywhere. The mist rises, the sun climbs above the mountains, a bird dares to sing, and even the past is performing: “From mornings long ago joy/faintly beats its copper shield” (274). It is reasonable that Hauge, the orchardist, animates plants most often. However, he also animates animals, as in “The Crow,” “The Seagull,” and “Hawk and Falcon” (115–116), all from Slowly the Woods Redden in the Gorge (Seint rodnar skog i djuvet, 1956). The charming poem “The Cat” (Droplets) depicts the first animal that a person visiting the farmyard will run into. The poem recognizes the animal as an observant and sentient being, worthy of cross-species empathy: “Speak a little with the cat./More than anyone/he senses what’s really going on” (s. 263). In this way, the poetic animation prepares the reader for an understanding of human and more-than-human entwinement, opening up consideration of the non-human, whether animal, plant, or landscape. Today, such an understanding finds support also within evolutionary biology, genetics, and phenomenology. The different creatures on earth are seen as “co-evolved animal kindred” (Westling 2016, 67). Hauge sometimes states this kind of kinship explicitly. In the poem “Kin” (Slowly the Woods Redden), he compares human character traits, moulded by the environment, to the birch, the pine, and the nard-grass. The poem starts like this: “If you’re kin to the birch,/you’ll last a long time,/endure both rain and wind” (111). The tough guy is kin to the nard-grass and lasts the longest, at a cost: “Nothing bothers you/—and nobody wants you!” Many poetic devices work through what is called estrangement (Shklovsky 1990, 6), defamiliarization, or dehabituation (Miall 2006, 145, 197). Poetry makes us perceive the ordinary as something new and enchanted. In Hauge’s case, poetry can even be called an ontology close to the animism of many indigenous people. According to the anthropologist Tim Ingold, such animism is not an infusion of spirit into

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substance; rather, it is an immanent dynamic within a field of relations where “beings of all kinds, more or less person-like or thing-like, continually and reciprocally bring one another into existence” (Ingold 2011, 68). Ingold underlines such an “animic perception of the world” (69) as an alternative to modern cultural models separating us from life. Hauge’s poetry operates within the same field of relations.

Dweller and Wayfarer Before concluding with some educational afterthoughts, I will qualify my own picture of the dwelling poet. Although Hauge’s dependency on his local environment is obvious, one should keep in mind that, even in his youth, he felt like an outsider in his village. Besides, being a farmer, he stayed there out of necessity. Hauge as a dweller in life and poetry has been explored by Hadle Oftedal Andersen (2017), reading him—not surprisingly—in the light of Martin Heidegger’s essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” (Heidegger 2001, 143–159). This results in several deep and sensitive readings. However, perhaps like myself, Andersen seems to make Hauge into too much of a Heideggerian. After all, it is easy to find poems that balance the picture of the dweller. There are obvious tensions between the village dweller and his longing for a wider horizon, between place and space, between the fruit grower and the poet. The most outspoken in this respect is perhaps “Here I Have Lived,” from Ask the Wind. The speaker has seen years sailing by, has lived his entire life at the same place. However, the poem concludes with this: “Trees and birds have settled in,/ but I have not” (291). Hauge’s yearning for the mystical should be mentioned also. In Slowly the Woods Redden, the last stanza of the poem “Luminous Spaces” concludes that there shall be luminous spaces “between all things/until the end of time” (126). The first lines, however, call out a warning: “Don’t come near,/never too near!” According to Jørgen Magnus Sejersted (2016, 310), Hauge makes allegories of time. He investigates what disrupts our experience of presence and totality. Possibly related to this is the tension between a manageable life as a dweller and madness, as in “I’ll Have to Think of Mischief,” from Gleanings (Janglestrå, 1980). In this poem, the

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persona’s joy is boiling over, and he thinks of mischief: “throw cold water on the kettle,/hang a stone on the scale,/fall the biggest pine I’ve got” (339). Hauge often had to calm himself down. In Hauge’s most famous poem, “It Is That Dream” (Droplets), the longing away from triviality is less ambivalent than in “Luminous Spaces.” The dream we carry is that something wonderful will happen, that time and hearts and doors shall open, that even mountains shall open: “that our dream will open,/and that one morning we’ll glide/into a cove we didn’t know” (266). Still, one should notice that the metaphors are embodied; they are dependent on their literal meaning and on life experiences. “Luminous spaces” are still found in physical manifestations, “between all things,” in “self-unfolding” (ecstatic) moments (Rigby 2004, 33). Possibly, later reflections on Heidegger’s concept of dwelling could fit Hauge’s work better than the German philosopher’s own understanding. Ingold, for instance, holds several aspects of Heidegger’s dwelling to be troublesome. First, the concept is actually dependent on some kind of opening or clearing, freed from everyday activities. To “be,” the human dweller must paradoxically depart from existence. Contrary to this, animals merely exist in their environment. They cannot reflect on their own existence and therefore cannot “be” (Ingold 2011, 11). This anthropocentric view is far from Hauge’s understanding. This is clear in the poem “The Cat” and in his journal entry from 1955: “Children and animals know best who you are. They see not the outer person, but rather the inner man” (2016, 100). Moreover, Heidegger’s emphasis on a local and settled life does not always fit the tensions in Hauge’s poetry. Ingold’s understanding that is more dynamic can accommodate its “movements” better. Hauge tries to open up the world. Such an effort implies, according to Ingold, embracing the world along a path: “The path, and not the place, is the primary condition of being, or rather of becoming” (Ingold 2011, 12). Instead of the concept of dwelling, he prefers inhabitation. He considers the environment to be not something we occupy but a meshwork we inhabit. He calls it “a domain of entanglement” (71) and argues that it is experienced through sight, sound, hearing, and touch. Rather than observing a landscape, inhabiting implies becoming part of it. The air even enters our

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body. With this in mind, Ingold introduces the concept of “weather-­ world” to emphasize our immersion in our environment (129). This concept fits Hauge better, as his work is immersed in a moving and acting environment. Actually, he was a wayfarer himself, and not only intellectually. Seventy years old, he married Bodil Cappelen, an artist, tapestry designer, and weaver. The poem “The Carpet,” from Gleanings, starts like this: “Weave me a carpet, Bodil,/weave it of dreams and visions,/weave it of wind” (343). Olav Grinde writes, “In his years with Bodil, the poet showed a greater willingness to travel from his native Hardanger” (2016, 25).

Poetry in School Although my intention is not to recommend specific methods in teaching, I will conclude with some reflections on educational affordances, hopefully with some transfer value to other poets. In this section, I use Zapf ’s “sustainable texts” model (2016, 27), indicating the force of literature within culture. As already mentioned, I place emphasis on the imaginative counterdiscourse. Textual sustainability is grounded in our imaginative capabilities and in literature’s capacity for calling forth new or alternative text worlds. Reading is in fact a rich and multimodal, embodied simulation (Gallese 2017a, 2017b). The reader is prompted to use all the senses to imagine both well-known environments and unfamiliar ones, worlds both real and fictional. In Hauge’s poems, the student faces both an animated environment and a human/more-than-human entanglement. Imagining this is a starting point for the development of respect for the environment. Hauge’s creative use of his immediate surroundings could even be considered a teaching aid for student well-being and for the development of a more sustainable lifestyle. A good way to enhance environmental discoveries would be to trust the richness of what Cave calls pre-reflective reading: the reader’s spontaneous sensorimotor response (2016, 21). This aspect of reading, aesthetic in the word’s original meaning, should be promoted in school. A student who discovers and explores the described environment using memories,

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associations, knowledge, and all the senses will reach a more embodied, deeper experience, and subsequently a deeper reflection, than a student hurrying into formal analysis and interpretation. This implies an adjustment of the analytic and hermeneutic tradition in school, a tradition still in good health in spite of several decades of reader-oriented pedagogy in teacher education. In Norwegian lower-­ secondary classrooms, new research covering seventy-two language art lessons shows that the teacher typically underlines the formal and generic aspects of poetry, “such as metaphors, contrast, and symbols” (Gabrielsen et al. 2019, 14). How the devices function in each particular poem is not given any attention, nor is the student’s personal response. I suspect that this works against both student motivation and the most important affordances of the text. An adjustment of this tradition will lead the student closer to the core of poetry. Many of Hauge’s poems can support such an adjustment. “To My Fingers,” from Gleanings, focuses on embodiment. The poet laments his fingers, so often forced “to slave away for a cold brain/and a dead body!” (364). If he could only refrain from writing until the fingers start whispering; “how good might my poems then be!/Then you might speak with tongues of fire!” (364). In the short poem “Dead Tree,” from Ask the Wind, the interpretation-­ oriented readers will probably find something to ponder: “The magpie has flown;/she won’t build in a dead tree” (282). However, first they should notice their immediate response. Besides, the motif itself is worth exploring before reflecting on the human relevance. How does nature work, and why? When reading “Leaf-Huts and Snow-Houses,” the first goal might be simply to cultivate the student’s literary imagination, the capacity to, as the poem puts it, “recall,” “crawl inside,” “sit listening,” and just “be there.” Following this concept where the pre-reflective sensorimotor response is valued just as much as searching for “hidden” meanings, the student-poet could also be given the opportunity to write their own poems, using “Leaf-Huts and Snow-Houses” as their model or frame. Both reading and writing could be used as poetic passages to a sustainable imagination, offering both embodied experience and environmental entwinement.

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Among literary scholars, “Leaf-Huts and Snow-Houses” is most often valued as a meta-poem, a reflection on poetry (Karlsen 1998, 128; Kittang 1994, 123). Ordinary readers, on the other hand—at least my first-­ semester teacher students—seldom dwell upon such self-referential dimensions. I would argue that the reason is not only their limited experience with literature but also that the poem’s most salient qualities, triggering the readers’ immediate response, lie in the specific memories of leaf-huts and snow-houses, not in the house of words imagined by the poet. What is most important here? The imaginative discourse—the memories—is in fact part of the meta-poetic architecture. Nevertheless, the reader may overlook this poetic self-reflection and still appreciate the poem. Without imagination, on the other hand, triggered by the description of memories, we have no poem at all. Hauge’s comments on the text–nature relationship in Japanese and Chinese poetry reveal a similar appreciation of the literary detail: “the small and large events” (2016, 333) instead of speculation. In Chinese poetry, he writes, “it is always a specific landscape being described, with place names, season, everything voiced precisely. Never do you find generalization that ends in moralizing!” (333). His own version could be the short “Today I Sensed,” from Droplets. The poet leaves his house, sensing that he has made a good poem: “When I came outside, the birds were singing in my garden/and the sun was shining joyously over the Bergafjell” (257). In a journal entry dated January 5, 1985, he praises the Chinese poets again: “Oh, those long rivers, with their birds and boats, but first and foremost the stars!” (375). In the next line, Hauge is home again, noting this: “The starlings have arrived.” Should we quit interpretation altogether and only enjoy pre-reflective reading? This is not what I recommend, and, besides, it would be impossible. Notice Sejersted’s comment that the “things” depicted by Hauge, without exception, are animated and filled with feelings. Just as relevant, he could not help it, he once explained (Sejersted 2007, 200). Turning to cognitive poetics, we might add that this is just the way humans are, whether poets or ordinary readers. The human species thinks this way, relying on analogy and metaphor, even in pre-reflective reading. In any case, we rely on our literary body-and-mind (Lakoff and Turner 1989; Turner 1996). Consequently, interpretation and counterintuitive reading

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(Cave 2016, 21–24) should not be eradicated. Pre-reflective cognition actually calls for it, even if plain answers are often difficult to find. One example is Hauge’s self-examination in “The Golden Cock,” from Slowly the Woods Redden, one of his most famous poems. At first glance, it may seem plain. Despite this, it is mysterious (Kittang 1994, 119). In the sonnet’s first stanza, the persona is resisting the hollow sound of his sold soul: “I was long dead./Dead inside my shell,/and I crowed like the golden cock of Constantinople” (125). However, a dream paradoxically shakes him awake. Suddenly, he is a child again, at home; the house is asleep; the moon shines on the floorboards. His heart is beating with joy, and he hears a wordless call. In the last stanza, however, we learn that this deep-felt return from vanity and greed does not last long: “From beyond the room, grief sounds its heavy clapper./Then the dream releases me. In my golden belt/I once more crowed for the Emperor and swore.” Atle Kittang (1994, 119–123), Ole Karlsen (1998), and Staffan Söderblom (2006, 183–185) all offer deep and sensitive readings of the poem. Thinking counter-intuitively, they put forward many thought-­ provoking questions, for instance: who is the one calling without words? the sleeping mother or father? the child? or maybe, rather, the moon— often associated in Hauge’s poetry with absence, loneliness, and sorrow? No reader, even the most advanced, can exhaust the meaning-potential. Nevertheless, even an inexperienced reader can imagine the scene, can reflect on it, and ask eye-opening questions.

Sustainable Discourses Although the imaginative counterdiscourse is essential, Zapf ’s remaining modes should also be mentioned. The culture-critical metadiscourse, the deconstruction of hegemonic ideologies implicit in the work, is perhaps not self-evident in Hauge’s poetry. He has several explicitly political poems, criticizing the Korean and Vietnam wars. However, more relevant in this mode is the implicit critique and the cultural self-reflection and self-examination (Zapf 2016, 103). Returning to “Leaf-Huts and Snow-Houses,” perhaps this poem could qualify as a culture-critical metadiscourse because it lets us experience,

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although vicariously, a childhood marginalized in a world dominated by adults. “The Golden Cock” is a more obvious, however also more challenging, example. The poem criticizes official art—and the artist himself as a dead, sold soul. The critique is mirrored in the form. The poet is both using and challenging the traditional architectonics of the sonnet (Karlsen 1998, 128, 138; Kittang 1994, 122–123). Typographically, it seems to comply with the French-Italian tradition, whereas the rhyme patterns are English and Shakespearian (Kittang, 120). In addition, a tension between form and content is salient. The golden cock of Constantinople may symbolize the strict form, but the dream challenges this order, wakening the persona from his shell—until “grief sounds its heavy clapper” (125). In the last line, the persona is dead again: “I once more crowed for the Emperor and swore” (125). Poetry itself seems to be at stake. For a moment, the poet’s quest for order and coherence is suppressed, realizing a mysterious presence of child memories, joy and a sorrow. The reintegrative interdiscourse applies more to Hauge’s work in general. Within my perspective, the animation of the non-human world and the human–non-human entanglement are the most important forms of reintegration. Opposing modern, dualistic thinking, the poems challenge dominant cultural models, trying to bring together what modernity—at least since Descartes—has separated (Plumwood 1993, 41–68): reality and madness, body and mind, manual labour and art, human and more-­ than-­human, place and space, culture and nature. So, what kind of lesson does Hauge offer the young reader? Most importantly, that a life shut off from fellow beings is full of sorrow. A sustainable life, on the contrary, takes part in a diverse environment, shaped by both humans and more-than-humans. When choosing texts, the teacher should look for poems that reflect on both alienation and fellowship, exploring the passages from Self to Other (both humans and more-than-humans). Zapf ’s model for sustainable texts can be used to identify good candidates: does the poem enhance our imagination? Does it offer the reader a culture-critical self-reflection? Is there a reintegration of what is usually kept apart? From an ecocritical perspective, such criteria might contribute to a necessary re-evaluation of the literary curriculum. Regarding the student, the pre-reflective aspects of reading should be valued as an important text-to-world passage, but without replacing

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reflection. The ecocritic Richard Kerridge recommends a balance “between interpreting a storm or an owl in a literary work in metaphorical and symbolic terms (what does it represent?), and interpreting it directly and literally, as a real living owl (it represents itself, primarily)” (2012, 13). Hauge had a deep understanding of his environment. A similar engaged exploration in poetry and life will favour the reader. This leads both teachers and students towards a nature–culture beyond the classroom, towards literary education and life immersed “with the whole of our being in the currents of a world-in-formation: in the sunlight we see in, the rain we hear in and the wind we feel in” (Ingold 2011, 129). From “behind the mountain of solitude,” Hauge reminds us: “You cannot shine/entirely alone” (2016, 84).

Notes 1. This is why I only cite extracts from the poems, and in English translation. For the definitive Norwegian versions, see Dikt i samling (Hauge 1994). In English, several selections of Hauge’s poems are available (Hauge 1985, 1990, 2008). I use the latest and most comprehensive collection, translated by Olav Grinde (Hauge 2016). 2. I wrote the first draft of this chapter in 2019, as an Academic Visitor at Bath Spa University’s (BSU) Research Centre for Environmental Humanities, UK. I am grateful for the opportunity to work at BSU. A special thanks for help, inspiration, and hospitality to Professor Kate Rigby, Research Centre Director; to the Deputy Director, Professor Owain Jones; and to the Visiting Scholars Professor Terry Gifford and Professor Axel Goodbody. Thanks also to Associate Professor Allen Clarence Jones, UiS, for suggestions and language revision, and to Professor Dolly Jørgensen, Greenhouse, UiS, for language revision and for recommending me as an Academic Visitor at BSU.

References Abram, D. 2017. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-­ Than-­Human World. New York: Vintage Books.

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Andersen, H.O. 2002. Poetens andlet: om lyrikaren Olav H. Hauge. Samlaget. ———. 2017. Byggja bu dikta. Nordisk poesi 1: 22–36. https://doi. org/10.18261/issn.2464-­4137-­2017-­01-­03. Arnesen, T. 2016. Ecology, Species, and Poetry of the Outlying Lands: A Norwegian Pastoral? Green Letters 20 (1): 20–33. https://doi.org/10.108 0/14688417.2015.1121114. Bly, R. 2008. Homage to Olav H. Hauge. In The Dream We Carry, ed. R. Bly and R. Hedin, xi–xiii. Port Townsend, WA: Cooper Canyon Press. Cave, T. 2016. Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Drangeid, M. 2018. Litterær lesing som multimodal sansesimulering. In Multimodalitet i skole- og fritidstekstar, ed. M. Rogne and L.R. Waage, 55–70. Fagbokforlaget. Gabrielsen, I.L., et al. 2019. The Role of Literature in the Classroom: How and for What Purposes Do Teachers in Lower Secondary School Use Literary Texts? L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature 19: 1–32. https:// doi.org/10.17239/L1ESLL-­2019.19.01.13. Gallese, V. 2017a. Mirroring, a Liberated Embodied Simulation and Aesthetic Experience. In Mirror Images: Reflections in Art and Medicine, ed. H. Hirsch and A. Pace, 27–37. Thun, Switzerland: Verlag für moderne Kunst. ———. 2017b. Visions of the Body: Embodied Simulation and Aesthetic Experience. Duke University. Accessed August 10, 2017. https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/visions-­body-­embodied-­simulation-­aesthetic-­experience/. Garrard, G. 2012. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge. Gibson, J.J. 1986. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum. Gifford, T. 2014. Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral, and Post-Pastoral. In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment, ed. L.  Westling, 17–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Glotfelty, C. 1996. Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis. In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. C.  Glotfelty and H. Fromm. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Grinde, O. 2016. Introduction: Poetry that Opens Luminous Spaces. In Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals, ed. O. Grinde, 15–32. Buffalo, N.Y.: White Pine Press. Hauge, O.H. 1985. Don’t Give Me the Whole Truth: Selected Poems. London: Anvil Press Poetry. ———. 1990. Selected Poems. Fredonia, NY: White Pine Press.

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———. 1994. Dikt i samling. Oslo: Samlaget. ———. 2008. The Dream We Carry. Port Townsend, WA: Cooper Canyon Press. ———. 2016. Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems and Journals. Fredonia, NY: White Pine Press. Heidegger, M. 2001. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper Perennial. Ingold, T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge, and Description. London: Routledge. Karlsen, O. 1998. Sonetten som aritmetisk og arkitektonisk struktur: En intertekstuell lesning av Olav H. Hauges ‘Gullhanen’ fra Seint rodnar skog i djuvet (1956). Nordlit 2 (1): 121–141. https://doi.org/10.7557/13.2176. Kerridge, R. 2012. Ecocriticism and the Mission of ‘English’. In Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies, ed. G. Gerrard, 11–23. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Kittang, A. 1994. Olav H. Hauge og sonetten. In Tunn is: om Olav H. Hauges forfattarskap, ed. T. Tønnessen, 112–123. Oslo: Landslaget for norskundervisning. Cappelen. Lakoff, G., and M. Johnson. 2003. Metaphors We Live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G., and M. Turner. 1989. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, B. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity Press. Miall, D.S. 2006. Literary Reading: Empirical and Theoretical Studies. New York: Peter Lang. Plumwood, V. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge. Rigby, K. 2004. Ecstatic Dwelling: Perspectives on Place in European Romanticism. Angelaki 9 (2): 117–142. https://doi.org/10.108 0/0969725042000272780. Sejersted, J.M. 2007. Olav H.  Hauge (1908–1994). In Den norske litterære kanon 1900–1960, ed. E.B. Hagen et al., 190–208. Oslo: Aschehoug. ———. 2016. Olav H. Hauges tidsallegorier. Edda 103 (4): 296–370. Shklovsky, V. 1990. Theory of Prose. Funks Grove, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Söderblom, S. (2006) Och jag var länge död: Läsningar av det ambivalenta: Olav H. Hauge. The Author. Stegane, I. 2014. Olav H. Hauge (English). Nynorsk kultursentrum. Accessed May 2002. https://www.allkunne.no/framside/english/ olav-­h-­hauge-­english/1938/83387/. Stockwell, P. 2009. Texture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Stueland, E. 2016. Natur, force majeure og toksiske perspektiver: økokritiske perspektiver hos Olav H. Hauge. Norsk litterær årbok, pp. 157–179. Turner, M. 1996. The Literary Mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Weik von Mossner, A. 2017. Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Werth, P. 1999. Text Worlds. Harlow, UK: Longman. Westling, L. 2016. Merleau-Ponty and the Eco-Literary Imagination. In Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, ed. H. Zapf, 65–83. Berlin: De Gruyter. Zapf, H. 2016. Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Index1

A

ABC of Reading (Pound), 52 Adamson, Joni, 112n4 Adorno, Theodor W., 17, 55, 252, 253, 255–258, 260, 262, 264n6 Ædnan (Axelsson), 84, 85 Affifi, Ramsey, 153 “Affordance,” 167, 168, 270, 279, 280 Agency, 4, 13, 19, 87, 92, 127, 158, 159, 275, 276 Agenda for Sustainable Development, see United Nations (UN) Agnesdotter, Carina, xvii, xxiv, 80, 83

Agriculture and habitat loss, 88 industrial, 31 Agyeman, Julian, 99, 100 Alfoxden, Somerset, 7 Alfredsson, Johan, xxi, 247n8 Alienation, 59, 64, 268, 271, 283 Allegory, 255, 277 Alliteration, 225 Allomorphism, 91 Alterity, subjective, xxii, 223 Andersen, Hadle Oftedal, 271, 272, 277 “And I Was Grief ” (Hauge), 272 Animal rights, 87 Animal studies, 86 Animal vs. human dichotomy, 56

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. L. Kleppe, A. Sorby (eds.), Poetry and Sustainability in Education, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95576-2

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290 Index

Animism, 276 Anthropocene, xvii, xx, 72, 97–112, 215, 216, 228n3, 231–246 vs. “capitalocene,” 247n7 Anthropocentrism, 26, 34, 35, 55, 93n2 and science, 111 Anthropomorphism and “anthropodenial,” 4 “critical,” 238, 275 Antonioli, Manola, 219 Ants, 56, 192 Apple trees, 272 Archaeology, 109 Ariel (Plath), xv, 25–28, 30, 33, 37, 39, 40, 48n1, 48n4, 49n5 Arigo, Christopher, 188, 189 Armistice (1918), 170 Armitage, Simon, 152 Armstrong, Steve, 193, 194, 205n7 Arnesen, Trond, 272, 273 Ash trees, 68 Ask the Wind (Hauge), 273, 276, 277, 280 Asthma, 219 Atkins-Sayre, Wendy, 87 Atomic warfare, 31 Auschwitz, 252–255, 258, 262, 264n6 Australia, 192, 193, 195 indigenous people of, 193 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 169 Autopoiesis, 223 Avon Downs, 16 Avon Gorge and Downs Wildlife Project, 4, 18 Axelsson, Linnéa, xvii, 84 Azzarello, Robert, 107, 113–114n17

B

Baghdad, 174 Bagnall, Richard, 130–132 Bakhtin, Mikhail, xx, 219, 220 Balkan region, 169 Banerjee, Argha, 170 Barley, 66 Barrington, Daines, 13, 14 Baucis, 60–63 Baudrillard, Jean, 242, 243 Bean flowers, 38, 49n15 Bears, 28, 46, 57, 73n4, 107, 108, 153, 160, 187, 189, 198, 200, 201 Beech trees, 66 Bees beekeeping, 42 castes of, 29, 42 decline in population of, xv matriarchy among, 29, 37 “Behind the Mountain of Solitude” (Hauge), 270, 284 Being and Time (Heidegger), 233 Belgium, 169 Bell Jar, The (Plath), 27, 30 Beneath the Crag (Hauge), 270 Benjamin, Walter, 104 Berardi, Franco “Bifo,” 219, 220, 223 Bergafjell, 281 Berkes, Fikret, 112n3 Bernstein, Charles, 225 Bible, 256 Biodiversity, xv, 4, 12, 16, 52, 59, 72, 186 Biophilia, 105 “Biopower,” 99 Biospheric egalitarianism, 52, 56–58, 64–70, 73n4

 Index 

“Birch, The” (Hauge), 276 Birch trees, 272, 276 Birds, xv, 3–16, 18, 20, 21, 34, 90, 91, 97, 113n9, 134, 157, 189, 276, 277, 281 See also Individual varieties Birdsong, xv, xvi, 3–21, 225 Bishop, Elizabeth, 151, 158 Bishop, Keith, 254 Bitzer, Lloyd F., 78, 85, 86 Blaeser, Kimberly, 132 Blake, William, 271 Blasing, Mutlu Konuk, 243, 244 “Bless This Land” (Harjo), 97 Blommaert, Jan, 236, 237 Blood clots, 38 Bly, Robert, 268 Bomb Cyclone (journal), 187, 189, 204n2 Bonnett, Michael, 17, 20, 123 Brennan, A., 55, 56, 59, 70, 74n5 Bristol, University of, 4 Britain, see United Kingdom (UK) British Association for Romantic Studies, 5 British Council, 228n5 British Empire, 169 See also Individual territories etc.; United Kingdom (UK) British Trust of Ornithology, 12 Broken Ground (Armstrong), 193 Brooke, Rupert, xix, 74n7, 166, 171, 172, 176–179 Brundtland Commission, 216, 217 Buell, Lawrence, 98 Buffalo, 109 “Building Dwelling Thinking” (Heidegger), 277

291

Bullard, Robert, 99 Burn, Katharine, 168 Buttercups, 40 Butterflies, xvii, xxiii, xxiv, 35, 87–90, 92 C

Caesarian birth, 36 Cairns, John, Jr., 165, 166 Calasso, Roberto, 54 Cambridge Magazine, 176 Canada, 104, 113n16 indigenous people of, 109, 194 Cancer, 173, 219 Cannibalism, 67 Cantos, The (Pound), 57 Capitalism “natural capital,” 166 “Integrated World Capitalism,” 215, 216 See also Development; Industrialism Cappelen, Bodil, 279 Carbon, 211, 215 See also Climate crisis Cariou, Warren, 100, 107 “Carpet, The” (Hauge), 279 Carson, Rachel, xvi, 27, 28, 31, 32, 34, 41, 43, 46–47, 134, 135 Cartesian philosophy, 13 “Cat, The” (Hauge), 276, 278 Catholicism, 174 Cats, xxii, 276 Cave, Terence, 269, 270, 273, 279, 281–282 Celan, Paul, 271 “Cell, The” (Hauge), 268–271

292 Index

Ceremonialism, 102, 172 Ch’ü Yüan, 271 Chaffinches, 3, 6, 18 “Chaosmosis,” 218, 224 Chemical weaponry, 27, 134, 169, 173 Cherry trees, 39 Chickens, 35 Childhood, and innocence, 128 Chile, 127 Chinese, poetry in, 54, 272, 281 Christianity, 13 Christie, Beth, 153 Clare, John, xv, 9–11, 14, 15, 18–20, 151 Clark, Timothy, 110, 111, 112n2, 112n3, 113n9 Climate crisis, 25, 26, 102, 104, 110, 201, 211–213, 253, 254 Clover, xiii, 40 Colebrook, Claire, 255–260, 262 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, xv, 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, 18 Colonialism, 98–100, 102, 110 post-colonial, 192, 194 See also Imperialism; Indigenous peoples Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), 27, 43, 48n3 Coma, 38 Concurrency, xxi, 237–239, 241–245 Consciousness, xiii, xxiii, 8, 13, 17, 53, 55, 149, 156, 223, 244, 262 See also Subjectivity Constantinople, 282, 283 Constitution, U.S., 256

Consumption, xviii, 128, 215, 216, 242 Conte, Joseph M., 242, 243 Coral, 55, 57, 58, 71, 198 Covid-19 pandemic, xxiv Cow parsley (mother-die), 38, 39, 41 Craiglockhart War Hospital, 173 Cranberries, xxi, 261 Creative Critic (Hilevaara and Orley), 185 Creative Scotland, 5 Cree, 100, 101, 107, 110 Criticism, concept of, 185 “Crow, The” (Hauge), 276 Crystals, 191, 198 Cultural relativism, 129, 139 D

Daffodils, 159, 196 Daphne, 62, 63 Darwin, Charles, 13 Das, Santanu, 174 Davies, Bronwyn, 187, 188, 191, 205n5 Davison, Aidan, 137 Davison, Martyn, 166, 168 de Waal, Frans, 4 “Dead Tree” (Hauge), 280 Declaration of Independence, 256 Decolonization, 100, 105 Deconstruction, 282 Deer, 66 Degerman, Peter, xxi Deleuze, Gilles, 188, 190, 191, 205n6, 213, 220, 232–238, 241–243, 246n3, 246n4, 247n6, 247n7

 Index 

Dementia, 68, 69, 212 See also Mental health and illness Democracy, 167 Democratic Party (U.S.), 112n6 Derrida, Jacques, 256 Descartes, René, 283 Deterritorialization, 235, 236, 242, 243, 246n4 Development concept of, 121, 123, 127, 137, 216, 217 global, xviii sustainable, xxii, 59, 77, 80, 121–130, 132, 133, 135–140, 149, 150, 155, 157, 165, 167, 176–180, 213–218, 263n1 See also Capitalism; Industrialism Dickinson, Emily, xiii Didham, Robert, xviii, 125, 126, 129, 139 “Digging” (Heaney), 109 Disenchantment, 55, 174 “Disorienting dilemma,” 130–132 “Dissertation” (Scofield), 99 “Does It Matter?” (Sassoon), xix, 166, 174–176, 178–180 Dog-wood, 68 Domination, logic of, 56 Dorgan, Theo, 121 Doves, 10, 261 Downey, Matthew, 167, 168 Drangeid, Magne, xxii, 271 Droplets on the Eastern Wind (Hauge), 271 Drought, 75n10, 193 Dryads, 8 Dualism, 52, 56, 98, 113n14, 258 Duino Elegies (Rilke), 159

293

“Dulce et Decorum Est” (Owen), xix, 166, 172–174, 176–178, 180 Dumont, Gabriel, 113n16 Dumont, Marilyn, 100–102, 104, 105, 113n12, 113n16 E

“Earthworm, The” (Martinson), 77 Ecocide, 113n11 Ecocriticism, 34, 80, 112n4, 256, 269 eco-cognitive literary criticism, 269 Ecofeminism, 27, 34, 46–47, 49n8, 112n1, 113n14 “Ecological Indian” trope, 112n3, 112n4 Ecologist, 12 Ecology cultural, 110, 269 deep, 56, 62 ecostudies, 34 Guattari’s Three Ecologies, xx, 186 Ecomimesis, 99 Ecopoetics (journal), 187 Ecopoetry, xix, xx, 80, 81, 185–204 Ecosophy, 213, 215, 219, 223, 224 Ecospeak, 79 Edinburgh, 173 Education higher, 30, 225 policy, xviii women, 30 See also Pedagogy

294 Index

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), xviii, xx, xxi, 16, 122, 125, 126, 128, 129, 139, 148–150, 213–218, 222, 226, 227 ESD 1 vs. ESD 2, 160, 163 instrumental vs. process-led models of, 152 Egalitarianism, biospheric, 52, 56–58, 64–70, 73n4 Einstein, Albert, 53, 63 Ekblad, Stina, 77, 78, 81, 82 Elms, 134 Emas, Rachel, 216 Embers in the Ashes (Hauge), 271 Empathy, 17, 19, 71, 75n10, 83, 89, 133, 167, 168, 276 Energy, unrenewable, 128 England, 88, 158, 171, 172, 175, 178, 179 Enjambment, 189, 192, 193 Enthymemes, 89 Environmentalism, xvi, 26, 134, 188, 216, 260 Epiphany, 153 Epistemology anthropocentric, xvi, 57 Eurocentric, xx Erosion, 188, 193, 194 Eskildsen, Sebastian, 238 Essex, 158 Ethics, environmental, 52, 55, 56, 72 Evans, Bob, 99 “Everyday Life” (Hauge), 269, 272 Exploitation of nature, 27 of women, 27

Extinction, 4, 20, 31, 88, 188, 194, 199, 203 of languages, 16, 193 F

Faust legend, 242 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan), xvi, 26, 29, 30 Feminism, 26 ecofeminism, 27, 34, 46–47, 112n1, 113n14 Fever-grass, 161 First World War, see World War I Fish, xvii, 34, 90–92 Fisher, Dexter, 101, 113n14 Fitter, Richard, 10 Flies, 134 Flight, lines of, xxi, 235, 242–245 Flowers, xviii, xxiii, xxiv, 16, 26, 33, 37–43, 49n12, 49n15, 51, 52, 147–163, 171 See also Individual varieties Folklore, 5 See also Mythology; Oral tradition Forests, 27, 52, 57, 65, 69, 99, 123, 263n1 See also Trees “For Instance” (Levertov), 158 Foss, Sonja K., 78, 81, 83, 84 Foster, Tol, 105, 113n15 Foucault, Michel, 214 “Fraisne, La” (Pound), 57 France history of, 169 literature of, 172 Francis, Daniel, 113n13

 Index 

Friedan, Betty, xvi, 26–30, 41, 42, 46–47 Friel, Brian, 113n7 Frogs, 108 Fungi, 75n10, 191 Furze, 156 Fussel, Paul, 166, 172 G

Gadotti, Moacir, 214, 216 Gannon, Susanne, 188, 191, 196, 200 Garcia Hierro, Pedro, 105 García Márquez, Gabriel, 161 Garrard, Greg, 80, 81, 86, 112n4, 269 Gas, poison, see Chemical weaponry Gender among bees, 28–31, 41, 42 roles, 30 among worms, 78 General Assembly, see United Nations (UN) Genocide, 252, 253 “Geostories,” 238, 239 German, poetry in, 159–160 Germany in history, 169 literature of, 234 Getsy, David, 109 Ghosh, Amitav, 111, 113n11 Gibson, James J., 270 Gifford, Terry, 273, 284n2 Gladiolas, 40 Gleanings (Hauge), 280 Global warming, see Climate crisis Glotfelty, Cheryll, 177, 269

295

Gnats, 134 Goal Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 227 “Goblin Market” (Rossetti), xxi, 252, 255, 257, 259 God, 28, 32, 37, 57, 62, 65, 74n6, 238 “God’s Grandeur” (Hopkins), 156 “Golden Cock, The” (Hauge), 282, 283 Goldfinches, 18 Golding, Sue, 214, 228n2 Goll, King, 67 Goodison, Lorna, 151 Gorse, 38, 157 Gosse, Edmund, 170, 177 Gough, Noel, xxiv Grammar, 35, 190 Grasses, xxii, 97, 148, 196, 233, 274–276 Great Britain, see United Kingdom (UK) Great sallow trees, 272 “Green technologies,” 149 Grinde Olav, 267, 279, 284n1 Growth, economic, model of, xviii, 123 Guattari, Félix, xx, xxii, 186–188, 190, 191, 205n6, 211–227, 228n6, 228n9, 232–238, 241–243, 246n4, 247n6, 247n7 H

Haiku, 271 Hall, John Lawrence, 169 Han-Shan, 123

296 Index

Hansen, Sally, 177 Haraway, Donna, 112n1, 238, 242, 247n7 Hardanger region, 267 Hares, 66 Harjo, Joy, xvii, 97, 100 Harmer, David, 179, 180 Harrington, Emily, 261–262 Harris, Richard, 168 Harrison, Robert, 112n2 Hauge, Olav H., xxii, 267–284 Haugesund music festival, 272 Haughton, Hugh, 11 “Hawk and Falcon” (Hauge), 276 Hawthorn, 38, 39 Hazel-trees, 60, 74n7 Heaney, Seamus, 109, 114n19, 151, 156–158, 162 “Heather” (Pound), 51, 52, 56, 57, 71 Hedgerows, 38, 39, 41 Heidegger, Martin, 112n2, 233, 277, 278 Hellebore, 40 Hellspong, Lennart, 83, 84 “Here I Have Lived” (Hauge), 277 Hermeneutics, 243, 280 Hermes, 254 Hernadi, Paul, 232, 235, 237, 241 “Her Triumph” (Jonson), 57 “Heterogenesis,” 223, 228n9 Heteronormativity, 107, 109 “He Thinks of His Past Greatness” (Yeats), 60, 62 Hewson, Chris, 12 Hidden Life of Trees, The (Wohlleben), 69, 71 Higgins, Polly, 113n11

Hilevaara, Katja, 185 Hip-hop, 139 Hiroshima, 31, 42 History, xiii, xix, 4, 11, 26, 31, 73n4, 74n6, 80, 84, 85, 91, 98, 102, 105, 110, 111, 131, 132, 156, 157, 161, 167–169, 177, 197, 198, 201, 237, 238, 243 See also Literacy, historical; Memory Hogan, Linda, xvii, 111, 130 Holden, Erling, 139 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 271 Holism, 129, 139 Holly trees, 51, 52, 56 Holocaust, 253 Holt, Terrence, 256, 260 Homer, 54 Homography, xxi, 239, 240 Homonymy, xxi, 239, 240 Homophony, xxi, 239 Homosexuality, 114n18, 256 Honey, 27, 28, 32, 36, 49n10, 259 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 156 Horace, 174 Horkheimer, Max, 17, 55 Horses, 61 Housewifery, 27 Howie, Peter, 130–132 Hughes, Ted, 48n1, 49n6, 151 Human-chauvinism, 55, 65 See also Anthropocentrism Human vs. animal dichotomy, 56 Human vs. nature dichotomy, xvii, 111 Huss, Markus, 233, 236, 239, 245, 247n11

 Index  I

J

Iconicity vs. symbolism, 233 Identity, hybrid, xvii Ideology, xiv, 13, 104, 168, 180, 269, 282 “I’ll Have to Think of Mischief ” (Hauge), 277 Immanence, 234, 235, 247n6 Imperialism, 98, 113n11 See also Colonialism Independent, 12 Indigenous peoples of Australia, 193 of North America, 99, 100, 132 in urban areas, 113n13 See also Individual groups Indigenous studies, 100, 105 Individualism, xx Industrialism, xix, 27, 31, 32, 41, 102, 216, 253, 260 See also Capitalism; Development Ingold, Tim, 276–279, 284 Insects, 27, 52, 56, 72, 88, 97, 155, 191 See also Individual varieties Instagram, 99, 112n5 Interdisciplinarity, 111, 129, 139 Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), 16 Intersectionality, 41, 49n10 “In the Seven Woods” (Yeats), 65, 67, 69, 70 Ireland, 156 literature of, 157 “It Is That Dream” (Hauge), 278

Jamaica, 160 Jamie, Kathleen, 151 Jannok, Sofia, 85, 86 Jansson, Tove, 231 Japan, poetry of, 54, 271, 281 Jefferies, Richard, 6 Jewish people, 174 Johansson, Lotta, 234–236, 246 Jonson, Ben, 57 Jordan, June, 104 Juniper, 272 Justice, Daniel Heath, 98, 100, 105, 111 Justice, social, 113n11, 127, 129, 139

297

K

Kagan, Spencer, 228n8 Karlsen, Ole, 281–283 Kaurna people, 185 Keats, John, xv, 8, 9, 11, 18 Keller, Lynn, 238, 244, 245, 248n11 Kerridge, Richard, 80, 81, 284 Killingworth, M. Jimmie, 79 “Kin” (Hauge), 276 King, Thomas, 105, 109, 113n16 Kingsland, Sharon, 71, 72, 75n10 Kinsella, John, 191, 193, 194, 201, 205n7 Kittang, Atle, 281–283 Kleppe, Sandra Lee, xv, 166, 177 Knox, Bernard, 176 Korean War, 282 Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (Adorno), 252

298 Index L

Laburnum, 39 Land ethic, 102 Lang, Kristin, 204n3 Language and birdsong, 7 figurative, xix, 102, 151 and the mystical, 58 Native American, 105 non-semantic aspects of, 19 Lapore, Jill, 135 Latin America, 194 Latin American Network of Alternatives to Psychiatry, 213 Latour, Bruno, 272, 274, 275 Lava, 103 Lawrence, D. H., 151, 220 Lawrence, Randee Lipson, 132 “Leaf-Huts and Snow-Houses” (Hauge), 273, 280–282 Learning first-order, 53, 54, 73 second-order, 53 third-order, 53, 54 transformative, 16, 53, 54, 122, 124–132, 136, 140 See also Education; Pedagogy “Learning for Resilience or the Resilient Learner?” (Sterling), 152 Lee, Elsa, xviii, xix, xxiii Leivers, Mandy, 18 Lemons, 127 Leopold, Aldo, 100, 102, 113n9 Lesbianism, 37, 264n5 Levertov, Denise, xix, 158–160 Li Po, 271 Libraries, 43, 187, 195, 267 Lidström, Susanna, 79–81

Life around Us, The (Levertov), 158 Lilies, 39 Listening, xv–xvii, 3–21, 54, 77–93 Literacy historical, xix, 165–180 “strong,” 254 Literature for Change (Young), 5 Lo, Y. S., 55, 56, 59, 70, 74n5 London, 74n7 Long, Kelly, 167, 168 Lotz-Sisitka, Heila, 127 Love Medicine and One Song (Scofield), 107 Lu Chi, 271 “Luminous Spaces” (Hauge), 277, 278 Lyric Poetry (Blasing), 243 M

Macca, 162 “Machine Art” (Pound), 58 Mackenney, Francesca, xv “Madness of King Goll, The” (Yeats), xvi, 65–67, 70 Maling, Caitlin, 187, 188 Man and Nature (Marsh), 113n10 Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (Calasso), 54 Marsh, George Perkins, 113n10 Martinson, Harry, 77, 83 Mastery, metaphysics of, 17 Materialism, 13 Matgrass, 272 Matriarchy, 29, 37 Matthewman, Sasha, 81, 87 McKegny, Sam, 99 McLeod, Neal, 100, 101, 107, 108, 113n8

 Index 

McPherson, Keith, 17 Mechanistic worldview, 53 See also Materialism “Meditation on Yellow” (Senior), 161, 162 Melbourne, 159 Memory, 17, 104, 109, 159, 168, 170, 270, 273, 279, 281, 283 See also History Mental health and illness, 27, 65, 212, 227, 271 See also Dementia; Neurosis; Psychiatry; Schizophrenia Metamorphosis, xvi, 26, 33–37, 51, 52, 64, 74n6 in bees, 33–37 Metaphor, xxiv, 35–38, 83, 85, 107–109, 130, 132, 163, 179, 201, 202, 235, 245, 274, 278, 280, 281 Meter, 15, 18, 103 Métis people, 110, 113n12, 114n20 Métissage, xvii, 102, 105 Metonymy, 156, 162, 274 Mezirow, Jack, 122, 126, 127, 130–132 Michigan, 134 Midwifery, 36, 37 Military Cross, 175 Military-industrial complex, 31, 41 Milkweed, 35, 37, 38, 49n14 Milton, John, 7, 8 Mind/body dualism, 56 Minimalism, 102, 106, 232, 244 Mining, 193, 194 Miraut de Garzelas, 65, 74n8 Modernity, 158, 260, 283 Moen, Heidi Silje, xvi, 73n2 Moeyes, Paul, 176

299

Moominland Winter (Jansson), 231 Moon, 42, 282 Moore, Marianne, 151 Morton, Timothy, 98, 99, 103, 104, 167 Mother-die, see Cow parsley (mother-die) Moths, 88 Motion, Andrew, 166, 170 Mountains, 57, 100, 106, 107, 134, 196, 276, 278, 284 Muir, John, 134, 135 Mulberries, xxi, 261 Munden, Juliet, xix, 196 Muscogee Creek people, 97 Music, 3, 5, 8, 238, 261, 270, 272 “My Country” (song), 85 Mysticism, 54, 58, 62, 74n6, 277 Mythology, classical, 8 N

Næss, Arne, 52, 56, 57, 59, 64, 70, 72 Nagasaki, 31 Napoleon I, 33 Napoleon III, 169 Nard-grass, 276 Nationalism, right-wing, 78 National parks, 134 Native Americans, xvii, 105 Nature, xix, xxiii, 4, 7, 9, 13–17, 21, 26–28, 31, 32, 35, 37, 41, 52, 54–57, 59–62, 64–73, 73n3, 74n5, 79–82, 85, 86, 90, 98, 99, 102, 107, 108, 111, 112, 112n4, 113n14, 123, 127, 131, 132, 134–136, 138, 139, 148, 149, 152, 157, 158, 188,

300 Index

189, 203, 215, 217, 218, 236, 246n4, 272–276, 280, 283 See also Human vs. nature dichotomy “Nature in the Active Voice” (Plumwood), 13 Naylor, Amanda, 177 Neoliberalism, xiv, 194 Neruda, Pablo, 127, 129 Nettles, xxiii, xxiv, 88, 154–157 Neuhaus, Mareike, 100, 102, 103, 106, 113n15 Neurosis, 27 New York Times, 228n1 New Zealand, 194 “Nightingale, The” (Coleridge), 18 Nightingales, xv, 3, 7–15, 19 Nightingale Valley, 18 Nishnaabeg people, 101 Nixon, Lindsay, xvii, 100, 103, 104, 113n13 “Niya” (Nixon), 100, 103 Nokes, Jeffery D., 167 Nonlinearity, 189, 262 Nordgren, Kenneth, 168 Northamptonshire, 11 Norway, 267 literature of, 112n5, 271 Notes for Soloists (Rinne), 233, 238–240, 245 Nussbaum, Martha, 149 O

O’Riordan, Timothy, 53 Oak trees, 57, 58, 71 Obesity, 16 Objectivity, 255 subjectivity vs., 251

“October, 1869: To Smoke Their Pipes and Sing Their Songs” (Dumont), 100, 105 “Odes” (Neruda), 127 “Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats), 8, 18 Oedipus, 242 Oerlemans, Onno, 80, 86, 87 Ofei-Manu, Paul, 125, 126, 129, 139 “Offerings” (Scofield), 100, 107 Of Gods and of the World (Saloustios), 54 Oisin, 67 “Old-World Thicket, An” (Rossetti), 261 Omeros (Walcott), 160 On the Eagle’s Hillock (Hauge), 271 Ontology, 247n6, 258, 276 Open Door (Kinsella), 193 Oral tradition, 97, 103, 108 See also Folklore; Mythology Orley, Emily, 185 Ornithology, xv See also Birds Oswald, Alice, 151 “Otherness,” 11, 17, 190–194, 205n5, 214, 223, 241–244 eight technologies of, 214 Ottoman Empire, 169 Our Common Future (World Commission on Environment and Development), 59, 123, 135 “Overnight the Grass Turns Green” (Hauge), 276 Ovid, 52, 54, 60, 62, 74n6 Owen, Wilfred, xix, 131, 166, 172–179 Owls, 284

 Index  P

Pacifism, 175 Palmer, Jacquelin S., 79 Paradigm shift, 52, 212 Parsons, Jill, 18 Paterson, Don, 153 Pathos, 82, 89, 92 Patriarchy, 27, 29–31, 33, 35 Patriotism, 172, 175, 178 Peaches, 261 Pedagogical Encounters (Davies and Gannon), 191 Pedagogy of death, 153 decolonizing holistic, 105 ecosophical, xx land as, 102 Pedagogy of Becoming, The (Johansson), 234 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), 87 Peru, 105 Pesticides, 27, 31, 32, 34, 43–45, 48n3, 88 Petticoats, 39 Phanopoeia, 52 Phenomenology, 276 Philomela, 7 Picture books, 187 Pigeons, 71 Pines, 33, 267, 272, 276 Plath, Otto, 42–44 Plath, Sylvia, xv, xvi, 25–48 Ariel, xv, 25–28, 30, 33, 37, 39, 48n1, 48n4, 49n5 bees in, xv, 29, 31, 37–40, 42 Pleasure, aesthetic, xvi Pliny the Elder, 13 Plumwood Mountain, 187, 204n2

301

Plumwood, Val, 13, 14, 99, 283 Poesis, holophrastic, 102 Poetics body poetics, 107 indigenous, xvii, xviii, 100–110 Poetry American, xi British, 152, 170 Canadian, 194 Chinese, 54, 272, 281 defined, 258 ecophenomenological, 80 ecopoetry, xix, xx, 80, 81, 185–204 environmental, xiv, xix, 81, 188, 189, 203, 227 French, 232, 283 German, 159, 232, 241, 245, 271 indigenous, xvii, 97–112, 113n11 Irish, 121 Italian, 283 Japanese, 54, 281 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, 188–190, 198, 203, 204n2, 204n3, 205n5 Latin American, 194 layout and typography in, 188, 191, 192, 194, 201, 202, 283 lyric, 102, 241, 243, 256, 260, 262, 264n6 multilingual, 236 nature, xix, xxiii, 148, 152, 188, 189, 203 negative space in, 199 post-pastoral, Provençal, 152 Provençal, 54, 74n8 romantic, 271, 273 and social action, xix, 177 surrealist, 131

302 Index

Poetry (cont.) visual, 188, 189, 192, 198, 203, 204n2, 205n5 wartime, 131 See also Individual poems, Poets; Prosepoetry Poetry and Pedagogy (Keller), 244 “Poetry for the People” (P4P) approach, 104 Poets laureate, 97, 152, 170 “Policy of the Dispossessed” (Scofield), 100, 109 Pollination, xiii, 26, 37–41, 43, 44 Postmodernism, 189 Poststructuralism, 189 Potato roots, 192 Pound, Ezra, xvi, 51, 52, 54–67, 69–73, 73n3, 74n6, 74n8 Poverty, 59, 101, 122, 211 Pragmatism, xxi Prairies, xiii, xiv, 108–110 Primates, non-human, 4 Process-oriented thinking, xviii Profil poets, 271 Progress, concept of, 123–124, 217 “Progress of Rhyme, The” (Clare), 18 Prometheus, 242, 243, 245 Propaganda, 42 Prosepoetry, 201, 202 Prosopopoeia, 91 Prozorof, Sergei, 99 Psychiatry, xxii See also Mental health and illness Psychoanalysis, 219, 228n6 Q

Queerness and queer studies, 107 “Question, The” (Dorgan), 121

R

Rabbits, 191, 192, 195, 197, 198, 201 Racism, 78, 110, 212 See also Colonialism; Imperialism Railway travel, 159 Rape, 106 Rationality, 55, 113n14 Rats, 169, 188, 261 Reading aesthetic vs. efferent, 258 centrifugal vs. centripetal, 245 four stages of, 221, 222 Reappropriation, 102 Reasoning, deductive vs. abductive, 131 Recomposing Ecopoetics (Keller), 238 Red River, 114n20 Reframing, 122, 128, 130, 133, 140 Reptiles, 34 Residential schools, 104 Resilience, 152–154, 156, 157, 162, 163 Revolution, 169, 212 Rhetoric, 78, 79, 81, 84, 87, 104, 151, 213 ambient, 104 “Rhetorical Criticism as the Asking of Questions” (Foss), 84 Rhizomatic, xx–xxv, 205n6, 235, 242 Rhyme, 10, 21, 38, 103, 283 Rhythm, poetic, 15, 139, 263 Rich, Nathaniel, 213, 228n1 Rigby, Kate, 12, 13, 278 Riles de Calidorn, 65 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 159, 160 Rinne, Cia, xx–xxii, 231–246 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit (1992), 216

 Index 

Risk aversion, 16 Rivers, 57, 101, 134, 171, 191, 260, 281 Robins, 134 Robinson, Eric, 10 Robotics, 217 Romanticism, 255, 268, 271 Rose, Wendy, 100, 105, 106 Rosenblatt, Louise M., 258 Roses, 40, 275 Rossetti, Christina, 252, 259, 261, 263, 264n4, 264n5 Rothenberg, David, 5, 9 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 15, 74n5 Royal Welch Fusiliers, 175 Rudnick, Hans H., 129, 131, 132, 134, 138 Rueckert, William, 177 Ruffo, Garnet, 105 Ruin, Hans, 168 Rumbold, Kate, 177 Russia, 158, 169, 219 S

Sakai, Naoki, 236, 237 Salmon, 134 Saloustios, 54 Salt, 127 Sámi people, 84, 85 Sassoon, Siegfried, xix, 166, 174–180 Schizoanalysis/Schizoanalysis, 228n6, 235–237 Schizophrenia, 237 Schumacher Society, 53 Scofield, Gregory, xvii, 99, 100, 107–110, 113n17, 114n18

303

Scotland, 5 Scott, William, 150, 151, 256 Scudeler, Jane, 109, 110, 114n18 “Scythe” (Hauge), 274 “Seagull, The” (Hauge), 276 Seattle, Chief, 112n3 Seixas, Paul, 167, 177 Sejersted, Jørgen Magnus, 271, 272, 277, 281 Selfhood, 190, 200 See also Consciousness; Subjectivity Self-realization, 52, 59–64 Sen, Amartya, 149 Senior, Olive, 161, 162 Serbia, 169 Serres, Michel, 254, 258 Sexism, 110 Seymour, Nicole, 108 Shakespeare, William, 107, 163, 172 Shell shock, 173 Shelley, P. B., 271 Sherry, Vincent, 178, 179 Silent Spring (Carson), xvi, 27, 31–34, 43 Silk, 35, 37, 38, 49n14 Simecek, Karen, 177 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, 101 Sjöstrand, Ingrid, xxiv, 86, 87, 90, 93n1 Skaug, Trygve, 112n5 Skeet, Jason, xx–xxiii, 235, 236 Skjærstad, Torunn, xix, 196 Slavery, 161 Slowly the Woods Redden in the Gorge (Hauge), 276 “Small Tortoiseshell Butterfly, A” (Sjöstrand), xxiii, xxiv, 87–90

304 Index

SMART targets, 21 Smith College, 30 Social constructivism, 129, 139 Social media, 195 Söderblom, Staffan, 282 “Soldier, The” (Brooke), xix, 166, 171–172, 176, 178–180 Somerset, 7 Songs of Innocence and Experience (Blake), 128 Sonnets, 107, 171, 179, 225, 282, 283 Sonograms, 3, 6 Sorby, Angela, xiv, 166, 177 Sounds for Soloists (Rinne), 238, 239 Sparrows, white-throated, 5 Speciesism, 110 See also Anthropocentrism Stables, Andrew, 254 Starlings, 281 Stars, 197, 272, 281 Steinman, Kevin, xvii, xviii Sterling, Stephen, 52, 53, 55, 63, 128, 152, 153, 162 Stern, Daniel, 220 Stolen generation, 192 Subjectivity anthropocentric, xxi, 188 and capitalism, 215 creative, xx, 219–221, 227 emergent vs. objectivity, 227, 254 See also Consciousness; Selfhood Supermarkets, 186 Surraliés, Alexandre, 101, 105, 111 Surrealist, 131 Sustainability “just sustainabilities,” 99 and lifestyle, 149, 279

See also Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 59, 122, 216, 217, 228n5 Sustainable Development, Heritage, and History in the Scottish Highlands (Kehoe and Dalglish), 167 Sustainable Education (Sterling), 53 Swarms, of bees, 30 Sweden Board of Agriculture, 88 social movements in, 79 Sydney, 159 Syllogism, 97 Symbolism vs. iconicity, 233 Synecdoche, 91, 234 Synergy, xxiv, 129, 139, 238 Systems perspective, 129, 139 T

T’ao Ch’ien, 271 Taíno people, 161 “Tall Nettles” (Thomas), xxiii, xxiv, 154 Tang dynasty, 123 Tasmania, 105 Tea, 5, 161 Technology, warfare and, 176 Tennyson, Alfred, 271 Terra nullius, 192 “This Is My Land” (song), 85 Thomas, Edward, xix, xxiii, xxiv, 154–157 Thomas, Sophie, xv Thorpe, William, 3, 6, 7

 Index 

Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze and Guattari), 213 Three Ecologies, The (Guattari), xx, 187 Thrushes, 11, 20 Tidigs, Julia, 233, 236, 239, 245, 247n11 Time Flies (Rossetti), 261 Tits, blue, 20 “Today I Sensed” (Hauge), 281 “To My Fingers” (Hauge), 280 Tornborg, Emma, 91 Tourism, 11, 161 Towhees, eastern, 5, 8 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein), 58 Trade-Wind (Martinson), 77 Trakl, Georg, 271 Translations (Friel), 113n7 Trauma, 31, 103, 104, 178, 179, 212 See also Shell shock “Tree, The” (Pound), xvi, 57, 60, 62–65 “Tree Is Here, Still, in Pure Stone” (Neruda), 129 Trees, xvi, 8, 16, 39, 51–73, 189, 198, 199, 267, 272, 276, 277 in Pound, xvi, 59, 60 See also Forests; Individual varieties Trickster, 113n14 “Truganinny” (Rose), 100, 105 Trugernanner, 106, 107 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 104 Turkey, 169 Turquoise, 57

305

Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 256, 259 Two-spirit identity, 110 “Two Trees, The” (Yeats), 60–62 U

Ultima Thule, 85, 86 Ulvik, 267 Umbrella, 41 Lawrence’s metaphor of, 220 Unemployment, 217 UNESCO, 125, 149, 158 Uninhabitable Earth, The (Wallace-­ Wells), 211 United Kingdom (UK), xv, 156, 192 Royal Navy of, 171 See also Individual locations, writers United Nations (UN), xviii, 122, 123 Agenda for Sustainable Development, 122, 167 Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, 126 Development Programme, 52, 59, 72 General Assembly, xviii, 122–125 See also UNESCO V

Valen Psychiatric Hospital, 268 Value, instrumental vs. intrinsic, 55 Vare, Paul, 150, 151 Veganism, 195 Versailles, treaty of/The Versailles Peace Treaty, 170 Vietnam War, 282

306 Index

Viswanathan, Gauri, 98 Voisey, Heather, 53 Vold, Jan Erik, 272 Vulnerability (vs. resilience), 153 W

Walcott, Derek, 160 Walker, Amelia, xix, xx, 187, 204n3, 205n7 Wallace-Wells, David, 211, 215, 218 Walshe, Nicola, 103–105 Wanderings of Oisin (Yeats), 65, 66 Wang Wei, 271 Warfare, 165, 172, 176 idealization of, 178 poetry about, 165, 176 in trenches, 178 Wason-Ellam, Linda, 187, 190, 202 Waterloo, Battle of, 33 Watson, Mark, 113n13 Ways of Listening project, 5, 12, 15 “Weather-world,” 279 Weight of Light (Lang), 204n3 Weik von Mossner, Alexa, 269, 275 Welsh people, 158 Wergeland, Henrik, 271 West-Pavlov, Russell, 193 “When First We Hear the Shy-Come Nightingales” (Clare), 14 Whin, 156, 157 “Whinlands” (Heaney), 156, 162 Whitley, David, xviii, xix, xxiii Whitman, Walt, 134, 138, 148 Whole systems thinking, 129, 139 Why Birds Sing (Rothenberg), 5 “Wild Rose” (Hauge), 275 Wilde, Robert, 172, 179 Williams, Raymond, 185 Willis, Alette, 186, 187, 190, 203

Wilson, Paul, 112n3 Wind, xvi, 60, 61, 63, 66, 68, 69, 71, 97, 108, 191, 276, 279, 284 “Wind on the Island” (Neruda), 129 Wine, 66 Wipers Times, 170, 177 “Withering of the Boughs, The” (Yeats), 70 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 58 Wohlleben, Peter, 69–71, 75n10 Wolves, 57 Womack, Craig S., 114n18 Wood, Audrey, 177 “Word bundles,” 103, 106 Wordsworth Trust, 5 Wordsworth, William, 134, 159 World Conservation Strategy, 123 World War I, xix, 131, 165–180 and memory, 170 origins of, 166, 169–170 World War II, 38 Worms, 38, 77, 78, 80, 82 phobia of, 77 Wrens, 18 Y

Yeats, William Butler, xvi, 52, 54, 56, 59–67, 69–72, 74n8, 148, 151, 157, 271 Yellowhammers, 5, 6 Young, Rebecca, 5 Z

Zanazanian, Paul, 168 Zapf, Hubert, 110, 269, 270, 273, 274, 279, 282, 283 Zoomorphism, 35, 91