When ecocriticism became a recognized critical school in the 1990s, its focus was barely on poetry. As J. Scott Bryson pointed out in 2002, “within the new world of ecocriticism, scholars were largely ignoring the works of ecologically oriented poets and were focusing almost exclusively on nonfiction and some fiction, examining the works of Thoreau, Leopold, Dillard, Abbey, and other prose nature writers” (1). The table of contents of The Ecocriticism Reader, a landmark ecocritical work published in 1996, clearly reflects this: out of the twenty-five essays
anthologized, five of them deal with nature writing, while only one is about poetry (in the form of Native American chants and songs).
Towards the very end of the twentieth century, environmentally concerned poetry was only beginning to gain attention from ecologically-minded scholars. In 1999, Leonard M. Scigaj published the first important book-length critical work on ecopoetry, Sustainable Poetry. Three years later, Bryson’s Ecopoetry, the first anthology of critical essays on ecopoetry, was published. The past decade saw some scholarly efforts to map out new territories for ecocriticism (for example, Camille Dungy’s Black Nature (2009) and Joshua Corey and G.C. Waldrep’s The Arcadia
Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (2012)). Nonetheless, the primary
approach to ecopoetry is still realist referentialism. Most ecocritics, like Scigaj, tend to oversimplify poetry by primarily trying to make poems correspond to certain ideological positions which they celebrate or criticize. And those that do not engage environmental politics on the surface tend to be viewed as toxic deviations from the purity of ecoliterature.In his dissertation Lyric Ethics: The Matter and Time of Ecopoetry, critic Adam
William Dickinson observes that “poetry has been misread or misapprehended by many ecocritics” (5). Many of them “judge environmentally concerned and metaphorically rich poetry according to its realist, mimetic, and representational virtues, rather than by the relational dynamics that it presupposes in its metaphorical engagement with the environment.” In so doing, “ecocritics risk marginalizing lyrical approaches to the natural world that provide an alternative way of thinking ethics” (5-6).
One is reminded of Juliana Spahr’s statement that “nature poetry was immoral”
for its inaccurate representation of the ecosystem and its plight (69). Spahr feels that nature poetry is often ignorant, full of erroneous descriptions of nature. “[E]ven when it got the birds and the plants and the animals right,” Spahr notes, “it tended to show the beautiful bird but not so often the bulldozer off to the side that was destroying the bird’s habitat. And it wasn’t talking about how the bird, often a bird which had arrived recently from somewhere else, interacted with and changed the larger system of this small part of the world we live in and on.”
Indeed, a realistic depiction of the ecosystem and its crisis can educate its reader about why and how we must take actions to save our planet. But the lack of action today cannot be attributed solely to a lack of understanding of the environmental problems and their solutions. More often, apathy is the cause for the inaction among most people, who most likely know about the escalating environmental crisis but are not emotionally motivated to get involved.
The urge to address these environmental issues directly and objectively with reference to scientific evidence in literary works is the result of a growing impatience towards this prevalent inaction.1 However, by focusing primarily on the objectivity
1 I am thinking of Spahr’s sonnets (Well Then There Now 20, 22, 24) on our interconnection with the biocommunity which consists of blood statistics
and correctness of the apparent content of a literary work, ecocritics may be replicating the very mindset responsible for the depletion of natural habitats and species. What this approach fails to see, is the fact that how we are invited to engage a poem is often a hidden metaphor for our encounter with things in the natural world.
And that great poems always say more than it appears to. What must be rebuilt first of all is not simply more scientific explanations about nature, but rather an authentic relationship with nature, one in which we live and experience, rather than simply know about, our interdependence with other living and nonliving organisms.
Is there, then, not a need for a poetry that confronts the full complexity of our living experience with nature at the risk of “misrepresenting” the natural world as we know it in the objective sense? This is a question I shall pursue in this thesis.
Ultimately, I want to defend non-realist, “difficult” poems against charges of
obscurity and not effectively engaging environmental issues, and show that many of them not only possess an environmental awareness, but also powerfully challenge many anthropocentric suppositions responsible for the current environmental crisis.
Jorie Graham’s ecopoetry, as I shall argue in this thesis, provides an important way of thinking about how poetry can articulate ecological values in non-realist manners. Her ecopoetry is unique not only in the way it unites environmental activism with poetic difficulty, but also in its original representation of the self and nature.
Before Graham, poets like Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, and Robert Hass, had already been working on describing our phenomenological engagement with nature. Their works tend to celebrate and lament our relations with nature, while confining nature to its traditional sense as the planet Earth. On the other hand, an ecocritic such as Tim Morton sees the traditional idea of nature as separated from the human subjectivity as itself the source of ecological problem. For Morton, the way ecoliterature has been
celebrating our embeddedness in nature as if the latter is only a “surrounding medium” (4-5) is dangerous. “Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration” (5). At his most extreme, Morton even suggests that poets should refrain from writing “about” nature at all.
Graham sets herself apart from all these approaches, including the traditional
phenomenological poems, Morton’s radical rethinking of self and nature, and Spahr’s realism, by reinventing the subject as both distinct from things in the natural world and yet always already intertwined with them, and registering the experience of perceptual engagement with nature in a contextualized, polyvocal language.