Ecopoetry and the School of Quietude

I ran across this post (from well over a year ago, now) asking about the nature of New American ecopoetry. I read "New American" as friendly to the post-avant crowd, but I so rarely pay attention to poetry politics and career-shaping that I don't have any deeper speculation than that. The speculation there dovetails well with the discussion over on How2's current issue about ecopoetics. There seems to be a lot of hand-wringing about the perception that ecopoetry doesn't seem to want to embrace the post-avant, language, post-language, etc. version of poetry. Indeed, ecopoets seem--mostly--to be content with exploring the School of Quietude (Silliman's dismissive term for poets who reject the avant). 

Because I need to get to the business of other aspects of living, I'll drop this in: Language-y work participates far too much--and unreflectively so--in the culture of culture. By taking language as its sole referent, it becomes a monoculture. Therefore, it seems at best dull. 

Now, is there a lot of dull SoQ nature poetry out there? Oh, hell, yes. And I'm intrigued by Christopher Arigo's approach to cross-pollinations between what might be called mainstream poetry (whatever that means at this point) and the various avants and their work. 

(As an aside, the idea that ecocriticism is not up to the task of revealing new, interesting aspects to a poet's work, as the end of New American Poetry post--first link, above--suggests, seems strange to me. Unless what he's saying is that there's not a secret history to be recovered, in which case I'm with him. But to explore new aspects of work and discuss their implications seems the work of critics.)

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