GREENWOR(L)DS: Ecocritical Readings of Canadian Women's Poetry
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University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository University of Calgary Press University of Calgary Press Open Access Books 1999 GREENWOR(L)DS: Ecocritical readings of Canadian Women's Poetry Relke, Diana M.A. University of Calgary Press Relke, Diana M. A. "GREENWOR(L)DS: Ecocritical readings of Canadian Women's Poetry". University of Calgary Press, Calgary, Alberta, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/49342 book http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca University of Calgary Press www.uofcpress.com GREENWOR(L)DS: ECOCRITICAL READINGS OF CANADIAN WOMEN’S POETRY by Diana M.A. Relke ISBN 978-1-55238-665-1 THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. It is an electronic version of a book that can be purchased in physical form through any bookseller or on-line retailer, or from our distributors. 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Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the wording around open access used by Australian publisher, re.press, and thank them for giving us permission to adapt their wording to our policy http://www.re-press.org/content/view/17/33/ GREENWOR(L)DS Eeoefitieal leadings of Canadian Women's Poetry Diana M.A. Relke University of Calgary Press This page intentionally left blank for my sister Joan Relke artist, scholar, and good friend Also issued in electronic formats: ISBN 978-1-55238-665-1, ISBN 978-1-55238-358-2 Contents PREFACE 7 INTRODUCTION: A Literary History of Nature 11 1 POETIC CONSCIOUSNESS 39 1 Double Voice, Single Vision: Ecopoetic Subjectivity and Margaret Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie....4\ 2 Mother Nature, Daughter Culture: Marjorie Pickthall's Quest for Poetic Identity 67 3 Noble and Ignoble Savagery: Patriarchy and Primitivism in the Poetry of Constance Lindsay Skinner 95 2 ECOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS 139 4 The Task of Poetic Mediation: Revisiting Dorothy Livesay's Early Poetry 141 5 The Ecological Vision of Isabella Valancy Crawford: A Reading of Malcolm's Katie 161 6 "time is, the delta": Steveston in Historical and Ecological Context 181 5 GREENWOR(L)DS 3 ECOCRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS 203 7 Feminist Ecocritique as Forensic Archaeology: Digging in Critical Graveyards and Phyllis Webb's Gardens 205 8 Tracing the Terrestrial in the Early Work of P.K. Page: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Ecoreading 235 9 Confronting the Green Indian: Aboriginal Poetry and Canadian Literary Tradition.. 257 10 Recovering the Body, Reclaiming the Land: Marilyn Dumont's Halfbreed Poetic 285 AFTERWORD: Does Nature Matter? 315 ENDNOTES 325 WORKS CITED 339 INDEX 355 ABOUT THE AUTHOR 363 6 preface n 1994, feminist philosopher of education Jane Holland t Martin reprinted several of her most influential essays in a volume she entitled Changing the Educational Land- scape. She opened her introduction in dialogue with another in- fluential feminist thinker: "I was in my fiftieth year when I began this book: for me a time of flowering," Carolyn Heilbrun wrote in the preface of Reinventing Womanhood. I was fifty-one when my flowering occurred. (Martin 1) Landscape. Flowering. How easily horticultural metaphors trip off the tongues of women when they are speaking personally, situating themselves in discourse, positioning themselves as sub- ject. These metaphors seem to lurk in the language, held out to us as if by some invisible butler, ready for us to slip into. How easily, too, women rewrite them! For according to linguistic con- vention, women do not "flower" in their fifties. By the time a woman has reached her fifties, her "bloom" has faded and she has "ripened" into maturity. Where do these metaphors come from? Why do women use them? How do women use them, and how do they use women? I have spent almost two decades pursuing these questions in the 7 GREENWOR(L)DS poetry of Canadian women. Now, in my fifties, I am ready to "harvest" some of the answers. The season seems right for it. Canadian ecological literary criticism came of age in 1998, with the Spring/Summer issue of Canadian Poetry, subtitled Much with Nature, which brings together original essays by several ecocritics and convinces those of us who have been working in relative isolation that we are finally a community. The issue is the fruit of several years of literary ecoactivism on the part of Canadian Poetry's editor, David Bentley, who has been inviting, inspiring, and even cajoling Canadian critics to take up the ecocritical chal- lenge since at least 1980, when he published his editorial, "A New Dimension: Notes on the Ecology of Canadian Poetry." I am indebted to David for his encouragement and his own fine ecocritical work to which I refer so often in these essays, and for soliciting for Canadian Poetry some of the work reprinted here. I have been so long at work upon these essays that the scores of people to whom I owe a debt of gratitude challenge the con- ventions of acknowledgment far beyond their limits, and the few names I mention here are only the tip of a large and solid ice- berg in a sea of experience. I wrote versions of the opening pieces while working within the supportive environment of the femi- nist community at Simon Eraser University, where my students in the first women's studies course I taught — significantly, a course on women and Utopias — helped me to understand how women envision a world in which earth care comes first. Of the many faculty members there, Andrea Lebowitz and Meredith Kimball stand out as the two whose influence most helped to shape my thinking about women's relationships, including those with nonhuman nature. The middle stages of this project were carried out in the stimulating interdisciplinary environment of the University of Calgary where I had the opportunity to present several papers on my work in progress and receive valuable feed- back from Marsha Hanen, Dean of the Faculty of General Stud- ies during the early part of my tenure there, Helen Buss and Aritha van Herk of the Department of English, and many other fine colleagues. The latest essays were written at the University of Saskatchewan where several colleagues, including Wendy Schissel, Susan Gingell, Carol Morrell and others had more in- fluence than they can know. Our conversations about this project helped to keep me focused despite the often hectic work of 8 GREENWOR(L)DS establishing the Department of Women's and Gender Studies which did not leave me much time for writing. I owe special thanks to Alison Mitchell, my hard-working research assistant for three years, and Tonya Kaye, tireless secretary in the WGSt office, both of whom helped to keep my other projects afloat when I needed the time to work on the essays. Friends in Van- couver — most notably Marjorie Weir, Carol Lane, and Irene Niechoda — have been long-suffering and unfailingly polite about serving as sounding boards, as were my kinswomen Daria Danko and Joan Relke. Like their commitment to feminism in their eve- ryday lives, Daria's love of all things literary and Joan's organic vision as realized in her beautiful sculptures have been endur- ing sources of inspiration to me. I owe thanks to many librarians in the Queen's University Archives, the EJ. Pratt Library (Victoria University), the W.E. Bennett Library (Simon Fraser University), and the University of Manitoba Archives.