A couple of weeks ago the
poet Ted Mathys gave a well received talk about ecocriticism and poetry at the
Poet’s House. In one strand of his
complex argument he implies that ecocriticism is not just interested in
ecological imagery or subject matter.
He examines the ways in which several poets conceptualize our planet,
and how images such as the Earth taken from outer space fundamentally altered
our mental and ethical relationship with Earth. In other words, a nature poem can no longer maintain an
innocent stance toward its subject matter.
Though the history of
ecocriticism was beyond the scope of Ted’s talk, it seems to me that Gary
Snyder has been not only writing ecological poetry, or ecopoetry, for a long
time, but also ecocriticism before it was called such. In a groundbreaking way that has become
familiar to so many of us, Snyder folds Buddhist thought and ecological thought
together to examine not just our relationship to the Earth but to how we make
language with regard to the Earth.
He demands a reconsideration of how we conceptualize nature. Often
Snyder’s poetics are embedded in his poems:
A small cricket
on the typescript page of
"Kyoto born in spring song"
grooms himself
in time with The Well-Tempered Clavier.
I quit typing and watch him through a glass.
How well articulated! How neat!
Nobody understands the ANIMAL KINGDOM.
I’m neither Buddhist nor an
eco-philosopher; I just try to be an environmentally-minded citizen. For a long time I had wanted to write
about the land and what is happening to it, but couldn’t. I didn’t feel I could write poems of
place, landscapes, or any kind of nature poem. Neither did I think simply representing environmental
degradation was enough. Then one
day, in conversation with my brother, a property attorney, I was introduced to
the discourse of what is called “real property rights,” and had my own, not
particularly profound, ecocritical moment: part of the problem with our civilization is that we
conceptualize land mainly as property.
The terminology I learned is rich and bizarre: “blackacre,” “faggot of rights,” “fertile octogenarian,”
“hereditament,” etc. I
misremembered “blackacre” as “darkacre,” and this kept resonating for me, and
became the basis for my most recent book, darkacre. The
opening series is, in part, a parody of the language of property law, but with
the lyrical dialed way up. There
are some environmentally disturbing images, such as poor boys melting plastic
from computers to smelt the heavy and precious metals inside, but mostly these
poems draw attention to language we use to define the Earth. Later in the book comes a poem about an
oil pipeline that has been breached, destroying a village and delta. In another, the Gulf sky is “pierced by
oil platforms,” and now—though I did not intend this—they can only be read in
light of Deepwater Horizon, as if they might explode.
After darkacre was in production, I came across a term in the New
York Times that describes maybe what
I was getting at: solastalgia. It’s a
neologism created by the followers of the philosopher Gregory Bateson, and it
refers to psychological and existential grief experienced by those living amid
environmental degradation (all of us?), for example West Virginians seeing
their mountaintops lopped off for coal, family farmers ceding their fields and
woods to parking lots and shopping malls, and now perhaps most acutely, the
Gulf state residents recoiling at the growing oil spill.
p.s.
Thanks to Stacey Harwood and David Lehman for the great week!
