This being an ecopoetical blog and all, I thought I'd post my final version of my paper along with the support handout. It might not be real exciting, but there it is. We'll get to the porn later.
Talking “from” Ecopoetry: Theory and Practice in Ecopoeisis
As a poet and teacher, I’ve felt the need for a set of categories that describe the work of ecopoetry to guide my own reading and writing, and I’ve also struggled to articulate what’s important about this issue for colleagues and students. My suggestions today are informed by my reading of some of the current ecocriticism, a lot of the thinking about ecopoetics as well as ecocomposition. I’ve summarized that work on the handout now going around. I’m happy to talk more in the Q&A about those quotes, but what I want to offer in this talk is the understanding I’ve developed as I’ve worked through the reading in my own teaching and scholarship. So, in response to those who’ve started taking up this subject before me, I think the work of ecopoetry involves these four items: 1) the appearance of non-human nature as dynamic and with its own agency; 2) the writer’s attempt to understand their connection to the non-human world, through the exploration of the writer’s context in culture and society; 3) a sense of play; and 4) a resistance to nostalgia. Let me explain what I mean by these categories by referring to the four poems I’ve provided on the other side of the handout. What I hope to do here is outline an approach and practice that’s flexible, vibrant and necessary.
First we have the appearance of non-human nature as dynamic and with its own agency. Many of the thinkers included in the handout ask how we can connect with non-human nature that seems so much more, so much larger than ourselves. All of the theorists touch on some aspect of this in the “Ecopoetics” section. Buell picks up the dynamism explicitly. Scigaj and Gilcrest add a bit of nuance, which is nice. The importance of this issue for a poet is that non-human nature is profoundly Other and starkly confronts us with what it means to be human. But we need to keep in mind that nature is neither, as Buell suggests, monolithic or static. It makes the task of the poet harder, or course: the intellectual target of thought is always moving. But this allows us to engage more deeply. It’s one thing to understand someone by looking at a wall they built, it’s quite another thing to dance with them. We can approach and explore non-human nature, but complete understanding will always retreat. We must also be aware that some of that non-human nature has its own agency, a point that Gilcrest, especially, stresses. I think that this dance is intriguing because of the constantly shifting border and the demand it places on us for understanding. But, as all of us in education know, greater learning only points to larger areas of ignorance. Or at least it should.
The poems in the handout might not do all of these things explicitly at the same time, though I do think that they have some aspects of all of these points. I’d like to look at Jimmy Santiago Baca’s poem, “Praise,” first. In the poem, we have a narrator apparently in a field—it’s a little unclear—observing, in the first stanza, nature’s response to the tolling of the local church bells for a service. The noise is immediately turned into horses, though the naming of the horses doesn’t happen until line seven. That is, the purely human bells are transformed into a domesticated animal, a curious position between humanity and non-human nature. The stanza leaves the bells behind to describe the landscape and life of the world around the human, but, because of the horse-as-bells, we can’t completely escape the human world, and the work of the poem seems to be content with this conceit.
The second stanza flips the poem. The horses and church are gone. We start with blackbirds all by themselves on that first line. The hymn books of the second line continue the reversal. The relation of religion and culture remains the inverse of the first stanza. The fourth line introduces the “I,” and while we might critique introducing a speaker so late in such a short poem, it seems to me that this is an important rhetorical move: the speaker wishes not to be in the Isleta Pueblo church, but in this more natural setting, involved in this more pagan worship. And sure enough, in lines seventeen and eighteen, the blackbirds make “a pure offering of love/ to the light.” That is, they arise in one of those stunning displays of complex group behavior and “glide. . . spiral and swoop.” Here, the speaker is saying, is all we need of god and worship. The nature, if you will, of the tenor and vehicle remains reversed from the first stanza. The human incense and alter boy carry their meaning back to the blackbirds that remain wild, that act as they wish. If they launch into the air as an act of worship, it’s their own worship of another natural phenomenon. We might quibble over the usefulness of personification in that section, but the birds remain themselves.
The poem’s engagement with the Catholic church is at best ambivalent. While the bells are a point of departure, the last line argues for seeing the world itself as a church. The blackbirds shift the center of the poem by carrying the weight of the metaphor in the second stanza. Though he starts with Catholicism, Baca finally finds his church in the field. The cultural context, as well as the physical contexts, bring me to the next point I want to take up.
The second point I want to address is the writer’s attempt to understand their connection to the non-human world, through the exploration of the writer’s context in culture and society. I started thinking about this after reading John Elder’s argument that poetry exists as an “ecotone” between expressly human culture and the nonhuman world. Sidney Dobrin and Christian Weisser’s work in ecocomposition—on the handout under “Landscape and Context”—has been very useful to me, and influenced my thinking profoundly. The ecopoem must connect to the culture and society that it inhabits; otherwise, it risks not being heard. But here’s what I find interesting: culture is a product of evolution; it is a product of non-human nature, yet we recognize it as our own. The ecopoem must contend with this paradox. Around the indissoluble differences of culture and non-human nature, ecopoetry searches for the ecotones, the shifting boundaries that yield language, insight, struggle. But these differences aren’t differences. We are natural beings building cities as naturally as bees build hives. Unlike the bee, however, we are aware of the hives we build, why we built them, how they connect, intellectually, to other hives, other minds. Also unlike the bee, when we look to other creatures, we understand that we cannot know them. Thus, the differences swirl back up to surround us and the search for poetry begins again.
In the Baca poem, to return to that piece for a moment, he starts with the church. The church is named and placed, though not seen. In the poem, it leads the speaker back to a contemplation of non-human nature, but the church also has a cultural weight. In a generous reading, the church is a gathering place, a social, economic and spiritual center for a community. Less generously, it’s a tool of colonialism. The poem asks us to contrast these possible readings with the natural world that surrounds the speaker, especially after the turn at the second stanza.
That kind of turn also shows up in the Honorée Fanonne Jeffers poem. I read that move as part of their awareness of craft, borrowing, as it does, from the sonnet tradition. But Jeffers is also responding to a much older tradition: agriculture. Factory farming seems to entirely erase nature, but gardening is far more intimate, as is, sadly, sharecropping as well. The mother figure knows about the land and has strong opinions about what will grow there, as she reveals in lines five and six. The speaker of the poem notes the gardening that she did with the mother, and it’s at that point in the poem, lines eight through thirteen, that the speaker struggles to understand at least three things: the mother, her own girlhood, and the natural world she encounters as a girl working (or not) beside her mother. I think it’s easy, in this discussion of non-human nature, to miss the importance of culture, especially as we look at a piece like this. The adult of the species is teaching her young. As humans, we have a lot of other baggage that gets dragged along with our big brains and strange consciousness, but we are also animals. Moments in poems that emphasize or illustrate this point should not be overlooked.
Another level to the speaker’s interaction with her mother is the place. While not named, we know it’s somewhere in the cotton belt. Jeffers gives us a character who grew up in a particular, Southern place and learned, maybe, how to garden. In the last lines, the speaker’s relationship to that place—and it’s important that we’re looking at nature in that place—that relationship is troubled. The heat’s too much. Her garden’s been reduced to one jade tree in a pot, and she’s killing that. And why? Because she’s trying to understand “the truth of this land.” A land where much is tied up, including the notion of a happy childhood contrasted with her mother’s experience of work and race. The contact of these two contexts—nature and culture—allows the poet to add layers to what might otherwise be a fairly simple lyric about a garden plot or a straightforward narrative about the mother’s life. The ecotone where nature meets culture is, as these poems reveal, a rich area to explore.
My third point is an area that few people have explored in ecopoetry: a sense of play. I’m motivated to bring up this topic because of poets like Arthur Sze and thinkers like David Gilcrest who want writers to maintain the reasons we come to poems to begin with. Also, many of my friends are poets of the postmodernist persuasion who bring a lot of joy into their composition process. And there’s no reason they should get all the fun. Under the “Language and Self” section, though, I have some responses that ecopoetic critics have to postmodernism. I’m particularly interested in Scigaj’s référance as a way to ecopoesis. Even as we weigh his strategy of holding up a book in the midst of nature, the ecopoems we craft must allow our full range of joy and experimentation as we try to connect to our world and the other creatures here with us. Play allows for interdependent coevolution that explores the contingent within connection, that lets the mind roam without limit. Play marks us as part of the natural animal life of the planet, but how we play extends our cultural and intellectual selves. Play reveals deep connections.
I think that some of this play shows up in Arthur Sze’s work generally, and specifically in the poem on the handout, “Syzygy.” To start with, the title itself is fun. Sze plays an elaborate game throughout the poem by illustrating a variety of syzygies, a concept that a lot of different disciplines have borrowed from astronomy. It has to do with binaries in conjunction or opposition. The eclipse in lines twelve through fifteen is an example. But all the way through the poem, we see a mind moving quickly, engaging briefly before heading on. It’s a fun poem. Look at the movement; I count seven fairly major shifts in the twenty short lines of the piece. We start with a pick-up with a too-loud bass. We move to gonadotropins from menopausal nuns. Next, a splinter that illustrates how attention seems inconsistent. On to the eclipse and a possible seduction. Last, we read a meditation on how we make sense of the welter of experience that is our lives. The way Sze approaches the topic should make many of the critics I’ve been talking about happy.
The poem is less about land and “the wild” than it’s about nature through the lens of science. We see vials, a magnifying glass and it’s reverse, binoculars, and a tuning fork. We also have the speaker’s body and senses. Hearing and seeing, first. Struggling with a splinter allows an important, brief discussion of peripheral vision and attention. Then the speaker is watching an eclipse and, lastly, rubbing and biting on a partner in an intimate, firelit scene. But none of these objects—either of science or the body—are particularly serious. In this poem about the seriousness of paying attention even to small things, and the difficulty of sorting meaning out of life, the tone is light. The slightly tricky “catch the bass” in the second line; I don’t think I’m the only one who read a fish the first time through. And there’s just something about menopausal nuns and the word “gonadotropin” that strikes me as amusing. Then you’ve got the pairing of blue mold and falling apples, which actually makes sense, given that blue mold grows on apples. The ear biting is cute, and also silly. It’s a wonderful, lively poem. As ecopoets, we need to remember and embrace this kind of fun, even as we move forward.
My fourth and last point is that this is not a movement that sees looking at place or engaging with nature as a look back. Ecopoetry must resist nostalgia. Writers like Janisse Ray and Scott Russell Sanders argue for this kind of writing as a template and vision for the future. In its own context, ecopoetry must push past the frequently simple praise traditions of the pastoral or the georgic; nature is neutral and can only be approached with the understanding that non-human nature will forever remain non-human.
The people writing and engaging with ecopoetry engage contemporary thought and strive to push this practice forward—because we must if we’re to survive. And it’s here that I’d like to bring in ethics. Like Gilcrest—and in the poetry community generally—I’m wary about yoking aesthetics to ethics; it’s too easy to end up with either propaganda or painful didacticism. We must also confront the fact that we, as humans, have altered the entire planet. We might be nostalgic about a prelapsarian, Edenic garden, but it’s not going to happen while we’re still around. This also raises questions that speak to the nature of how to experience nature, landscape and wilderness that I’m going to blithely pass over to get to this point: Looking backward will never allow us redemption. We must learn from out past—however hard that might be—and we must look toward an ethically framed future.
When we look at the poems here, the issue of nostalgia is best responded to by Jeffers. African Americans have a fraught relationship with “wilderness,” for cogent and horrific reasons. The “truth of the land,” she writes, is “hard.” Part of that truth, yes, is in the past. But it’s a past that must be looked at clearly. Lauding a georgic past with gentlemen farmers attuned to the ways and cycles of nature begins to erase a host of people who were not at the top of the economic food chain. Jeffers’s family clearly qualifies. I think that any of us who have tenant farming, or are victims of other exploitative economic practices, in our family’s past are not so keen to go back to that way of being in the world. Jeffers reminds us that nostalgia, cultural and artistic, erases the real suffering of real people.
In a different way, Sze also resists nostalgia. His poem suggests an embrace of new technologies through a phenomenological engagement with what they offer. I don’t think he’s blind to their potential downsides; his wondering about the source and use of gonadotropins and his parenthetical worry over blue mold strike me as being cautious. And the theme of attempting to make sense of both the large and small happenings of a day reveals an awareness that tries to look beyond the surface meaning of events. The poem that comes closest to pastoral lyric, Baca’s “Praise,” wrestles with the problem of culture and nature, church and field.
To conclude: There is a world out there, we can work to describe it, and—especially for ecopoets—we should. As we as ecopoets work to define what we do, our definitions and categories must be fluid, allow for non-human nature’s own dynamism and agency, embrace the poet’s exploration of the world through multiple contexts, focus on language and play, and ask for ecological engagement that does not look back to earlier modes of political protest poems and other forms of nostalgia. Metaphor and fiction (to respond to Gilcrest) work as instruments, or tools, or games that help us understand self and other. Even as we try to understand and make sense of a world that will ultimately evade us, we must remember that we are always connected to culture, nature, landscape. Ecopoetics allows a poet to recognize those connections, explore those connections, and is the only poetry that sustains those connections.
The handouts have a funky, two-column layout, so I hope you can just click below to get a look at them.
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