by Lynn Keller
Ecocritical concerns about environmental politics easily mapped themselves onto ongoing contests within the poetry scene, contests that pitted experimental poetry, particularly Language poetry, against the so-called “mainstream” expressive lyric. There was a strong interest among early environmental critics in integrating frankly autobiographical discourse into their criticism, a politically motivated departure from then-dominant conventions of literary criticism. This more personal mode of criticism—demonstrated, for example, in Elder’s Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature—seems to have recognized its poetic corollary in the personal lyric. Language writers, meanwhile, were critiquing the reliance on the “pseudo-intimacy” of personal “voice” in mainstream poetics, asserting, “the self as the central and final term of creative practice is being challenged and exploded in our writing in a number of ways.”20 In addition, both because of a desire to reach a broad audience and because of an ethical value placed on simplicity by environmentalists at least since Thoreau, environmental critics gravitated toward poetry in an “accessible” plain style. In attending primarily to straightforwardly representational writing, ecocritics aligned themselves with the poetic mainstream.
Jonathan Skinner began bridging these divides by launching the journal ecopoetics in 2001. Reflecting the self-conscious Anthropocene, the journal, as Skinner announced in the inaugural editor’s statement, “takes on the ‘eco’ frame, in recognition that human impact on the earth and its other species, is without a doubt the historical watershed of our generation.” Observing that “ ‘environmentalist’ culture has ignored most developments in poetics since Ezra Pound,” Skinner asserted that “the environmental movement stands to be criticized for the extent to which it has protected a fairly received notion of ‘eco’ from the proddings and complications, and enrichments, of an investigative poetics.” He added, however, that the avant-gardes of the late twentieth century, “noted for linguistically sophisticated approaches to difficult issues, stand to be criticized for their overall silence on a comparable approach to environmental questions.” The journal was founded on the “hunch” that there was in fact a good deal of poetry being produced that addressed environmental concerns and that did so in ways that “subvert the endless debates about ‘language’ vs. lyric, margin vs. mainstream, performed vs. written, innovative vs. academic, or, now, digitized vs. printed approaches to poetry.” That hunch has been borne out not only by the diversity of material in the issues of ecopoetics but also by the massive anthology The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (2012), edited by Joshua Corey and G. C. Waldrep, which highlights those previously overlooked experimental or investigative poetics, by The Ecopoetry Anthology, a huge tome of varied work edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street (2013), and by Camille T. Dungy’s Black Nature (2009). Jed Rasula’s This Compost (2002) drew attention to little-recognized forms of environmental focus in the work of Black Mountain poets and their antecedents, while the developing interest among environmental critics of poetry in more experimental forms was at once registered and reinforced by the small-press publication in 2010 of Brenda Ijiima’s Eco Language Reader. This is the context in which most of the ecopoetic work to be discussed in this book has become visible.21
Meanwhile, ideas of nature themselves have been changing. Whether explicit or implicit, affirmation of nature’s sacredness by early ecocritics and the poets they attended to follows the intellectual currents that environmental historian William Cronon charts and challenges in his landmark essay from 1995, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Like Williams, Cronon stresses that “nature” and “wilderness” are evolving cultural constructions, so that wilderness, once seen as “the antithesis of all that was orderly and good,” had by the end of the nineteenth century become sacred. He argues that the Romantic doctrine of the sublime, according to which the divine is manifest in nature’s most awe-inspiring landscapes, combined in the United States with nostalgia for the vanishing frontier to produce a sense of nature as something apart from human civilization, a sacred and vanishing space offering escape from industrialized modernity, a treasured refuge for human and nonhuman species alike. This sense remained predominant in both environmentally oriented poetry and criticism until very recently, and such work attempted to offer readers the beauties and consolations of undisturbed nature, even if mourning its diminishment. Cronon argues, however, that such thinking is deeply problematic: its dualistic vision of humans as separate from nature “poses a serious threat to responsible environmentalism” because it does not encourage people to live sustainably and respectfully in nature. Wanting contemporary Americans to take care not just of distant and supposedly unspoiled wilderness protected from human impact, but also of the landscapes we use and the places we inhabit, Cronon calls for a rethinking of nature and the wild that escapes the dualism between humanity and nature so fundamental to Romanticism’s legacy.22
Critiques of the ideas of nature on which traditional nature writing rests have appeared with increasing frequency in the self-conscious Anthropocene. Precisely because Anthropocene self-consciousness recognizes the pervasive impact of humankind on the entire planet and challenges notions of any place being pristine or untouched by people, it has contributed significantly to changes in environmentalist thinking about nature. Writing in 2011 Crutzen and Christian Schwägerl have this to say about nature now: “Geographers Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty argue we are no longer disturbing natural ecosystems. Instead, we now live in ‘human systems with natural ecosystems embedded within them.’ The long-held barriers between nature and culture are breaking down. It’s no longer us against ‘Nature.’ Instead, it’s we who decide what nature is and what it will be.” Similarly, Jed Purdy asserts, “It doesn’t make sense anymore to try to honor and preserve nature, a natural world that is outside of us, a nature that is defined partly by being not human, a nature that is purest in wilderness, rain forests, and the ocean. Instead, in a world we can’t help shaping, the question is what kind of world we will shape.”23 In the twenty-first century, environmentalist organizations previously devoted to wilderness preservation have been expanding their purview to embrace issues of environmental pollution affecting residents of cities and environmentally degraded regions, as well as energy issues tied to global warming, and they have increasingly modified their strategies for preserving what had earlier been imagined as pristine lands to take into account the people who live on or make their living from those lands.
Responding to comparable pressures, ecocriticism has increasingly understood nature as thoroughly intertwined with culture, and has expanded the body of texts studied to include works that depict urban environments or landscapes of extraction, or that explore chemical spills, global warming, and other Anthropocene issues. Timothy Morton has been a particularly audible critic of received ideas of nature, announcing in Ecology without Nature that “the idea of nature is getting in the way of properly ecological forms of culture, philosophy, politics, and art.” In its place he champions what he calls “the ecological thought,” “a practice and a process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings—animal, vegetable, or mineral.” Morton’s ecological thought involves encountering much more than Wordsworth’s beautiful and permanent forms of nature that Bate invites readers to attend to: it requires contemplating human interconnection even with beings that are not strictly natural, including cyborgs or forms of artificial intelligence, and thinking about such unsettling topics as where our toilet waste goes and how we regularly drink recycled waste water. It involves losing “our sense of Nature as pristine and nonartificial.” Such understandings have come to be so widespread that Ursula Heise could accurately observe in reviewing Morton’s 2013 book Hyperobjects that “recent environmentalist thought, from Stacy Alaimo and Richard White to Richard Hobbs and Peter Kareiva, has already moved well beyond this separation [of humans from a nature conceived of as �
��over yonder’] in ways that don’t tally with the strawman environmentalism Morton attacks.”24
Resisting a focus on Romantic pastoral and the wild, numerous scholars in the environmental humanities have recently been pushing beyond narrow understandings of what counts as environmental and beyond traditional Western understandings of the human place in the natural world. No longer thinking of nature or even ecological processes as separable from culture, ecocriticism has turned increasingly toward the methodologies of cultural studies and has drawn on an ever more diverse body of theoretical literature, escaping what Buell termed “first-wave ecocriticism’s naively pre-theoretical valorization of experiential contact with the natural world.”25 Attention has been shifting toward issues of environmental justice in the context of global literatures, thereby linking ecocritical with postcolonial as well as queer and race studies. All these developments, along with the dramatic changes earth systems have been undergoing in the twenty-first century, have opened the door to poetry and poetics that fit the conventions of “nature writing” in neither form nor content.
Nonetheless, ecocriticism concerning anglophone poetry in particular has continued to focus largely on nature poetry, just as the most popular poetry associated with environmental concern has continued to be work depicting solitary experiences in wild or rural settings. Because this study does not treat such poetry, and in some ways pushes back against it, I want also to acknowledge its power in generating a sense of connection to non-urban environments and an appreciation of their value. Careful attention to the “beautiful forms of nature”—that phrase Bate took from Wordsworth—provides one motivation for protecting the environment from further degradation. Moreover, some well-known nature poets have, through their prose writing, offered important conceptions of how societies should be organized and how political change might take place. For example, Wendell Berry has championed local networks of agrarianism, nonindustrial eating, and sustainable agriculture, and Gary Snyder has articulated a bioregionalism in which watersheds define areas of shared environmental interests and potential activism.
Looking briefly at a couple samples of late twentieth-century nature poetry by celebrated senior poets, born in the mid-1930s, will demonstrate both the strengths of the genre as it has been generally practiced, as well as its limitations in relation to our present moment. My first example is a poem by Wendell Berry that I have loved—a poem I chose to read at the informal memorial where my family and I scattered my mother’s ashes by a pond in an area of restored prairie just outside Madison, Wisconsin. Titled “The Peace of Wild Things,” it comes from Berry’s volume Openings, published in 1968, at the height of America’s war in Vietnam:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.26
Neither my mother nor I share Berry’s explicitly Christian faith, so his allusion to the Twenty-Third Psalm—“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters”—is not the source of the comfort I find in this poem. I take pleasure simply in thinking of my mother’s ashes strewn where she would have appreciated the peacefulness and quiet freedom that I savor when I visit the spot. Berry’s vision of resting in “the grace of the world,” rendered with the graceful closing of three anapestic feet, is profoundly appealing, and it has obvious continuity with Wordsworth’s message in his “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”: that being in or even recalling having been in places of natural beauty and tranquility provides a soul-soothing reprieve from “the fretful stir / Unprofitable, and the fever of the world.” (Even Berry’s punning allusion to taxing aligns with Wordsworth’s invocation of finance in the word “unprofitable,” as both gesture toward capitalism’s contribution to what disturbs them.) The repetition of a pattern fundamental to Romantic poetry enacted in the late twentieth-century speaker’s desire to escape from a world “too much with us,” in Wordsworth’s phrase, into the habitat of wild birds demonstrates the durability of the perspectives and longings that accompanied the rise of industrialism.27 And yet now, fifty years after Berry composed “The Peace of Wild Things,” when more than 80 percent of Americans are living in urban areas, awareness of how few people in the developed world know the colorful plumage of the male wood duck (though its range includes much of the United States) or have access to such undeveloped landscapes makes this lovely vision of taking comfort in nature feel anachronistic and nostalgic. Nostalgia seems an insufficient response to current environmental problems.
Where Berry’s speaker, whose “rest” echoes that of the wood drake, seems able to feel a part of nature “for a time,” my second representative example of recent nature poetry places greater emphasis on the gap between the human and nonhuman nature. It’s a poem by Mary Oliver, who is literally America’s most popular living poet, a best-selling writer whose public readings may draw crowds of thousands. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, she is widely appreciated as an “indefatigable guide to the natural world.”28 Rarely depicting humans other than her speaker and rarely acknowledging human impact on the natural world, Oliver’s poems describe with wonder animals and sometimes plants associated with the wild. Where exactly these encounters with deer, fox, owls, water lilies, herons, and so forth take place is not disclosed—perhaps in fact they occurred in suburban spaces—but they create the impression of a speaker privileged to observe life in the wild. The observed life forms serve as prompts for conscious love of this world or as examples humans would do well to imitate.
Here, then, is another poem in which water fowl appear, Oliver’s “The Kingfisher” from her 1990 volume House of Light:
The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
like a blue flower, in his beak
he carries a silver leaf. I think that this is
the prettiest world—so long as you don’t mind
a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life
that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?
There are more fish than there are leaves
on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
wasn’t born to think about it, or anything else.
When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water
remains water—hunger is the only story
he has every heard in his life that he could believe.
I don’t say he’s right. Neither
do I say he’s wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf
with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry
I couldn’t rouse out of my thoughtful body
if my life depended on it, he swings back
over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
(As I long to do something, anything) perfectly.29
Where the peace of wild things offered Berry escape from what troubled him, Oliver in “The Kingfisher” finds the world of nonhuman nature itself troubled by death and predation so that awareness of “a little dying” impinges on the speaker’s aestheticizing appreciation of this as the “prettiest world.” However, the speaker refuses to weigh in on the ethics of the kingfisher’s killing of the fish (euphemistically introduced as a silver leaf), regarding such debates as irrelevant to animal behavior. She is confident that the predatory bird is incapable of abstract thought; its behavior is governed by one simple desire: to eat so as to live. And while she says she won’t judge the bird’s behavior, her description of his cons
umption of the fish elevates that act to a form of communion; her metaphorical language (“the silver leaf / with its broken red river”) aestheticizes the gore of slaughter, while the bird’s “religious” behavior suggests innately reverent observance. Non-human nature, the poem announces, is capable of a perfection that inevitably eludes the inescapably “thoughtful” (fallen) human. “The Kingfisher,” then, demonstrates the attitudes Williams and Cronon observe in connection with our Romantic inheritance: the sacralization of nonhuman nature and the assumption that there is a stark gap between the human being with her rational mind and the other inhabitants of the planet. These produce a longing to be fully part of “rough and easy” nature, alongside a melancholy awareness that even language can’t accomplish that unification. Oliver’s gestures toward personification perform lightly playful, self-consciously anthropocentric attempts at bridging the gap, but the dualistic sense of the human divided from nonhuman nature that Cronon, Morton, and other environmental scholars regard as problematic governs “The Kingfisher.”
Although Berry, a farmer and committed agrarian, often presents landscapes more obviously used by humans than Oliver’s, the nature that both poets turn to is not evidently a diminished one; perhaps because both are Christian writers who link nature to divinity and perfection, in their work the natural world and its cycles are imagined as essentially unchanging and timeless, as is the consolation nature offers. Again, however, from the perspective of the self-conscious Anthropocene, we might note that the kind of nature both poems depict is unavailable as first-hand experience to a great many people on this planet, who inhabit degraded landscapes or live in urban centers. The world of the twenty-first century is full of urban dwellers who have no experience of wood drakes or kingfishers or the comparable native species of their regions. If brought to rural Kentucky, where Berry works his organic farm with horses rather than machines in an area where his family has farmed for generations, they might well feel more frightened than calmed. Ill at ease in the quiet of that place without traffic and anxious about disease-carrying ticks and mosquitoes or possible snakes, they might well take no pleasure in lying on the rough ground by a lake’s edge.