Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets

University of Kentucky UKnowledge Literature in English, North America English Language and Literature 5-6-1999 Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets Leonard M. Scigaj Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Scigaj, Leonard M., "Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets" (1999). Literature in English, North America. 2. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/2 Sustainable Poetry This page intentionally left blank Sustainable Poetry Four American Ecopoets LEONARD M. SCIGA] THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Copyright © 1999 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 99 00 01 02 03 5 4 3 2 1 Libraty of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scigaj, Leonard M. Sustainable poetty ; four American ecopoets / Leonard M. Scigaj. p. em. Incoudes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8131-2120-5 (d. ; alk. paper) 1. American poetty-20th centuty-Histoty and criticism. 2. Nature in literature. 3. Merwin, W.S. (William Stanley), 1927- -Knowledge-Natural histoty. 4. Berty, Wendell, 1934- -Knowledge-Natural histoty. 5. Ammons, A.R., 1926- -Knowledge-Natural histoty. 6. Snyder, Gaty, 1930- -Knowledge-Natural histoty. 7. Environmental protection in literature. 8. Nature conservation in literature. 9. Ecology in literature. 1. Tide. PS31O.N3S38 1999 811'.5409355-dc21 99-18166 This book is printed on acid-free recyded paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Libraty Materials. Manufactured in the United States of America For William T. Hendricks, M.D. who saved my life three times and for my Literature and Ecology students who save my spirit every year This page intentionally left blank The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need-if only we had the eyes to see. Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 190 Wisdom does not inspect, but behold. We must look a long time before we can see. Henry David Thoreau, "The Natural History of Massachusetts," 29 True philosophy consists in re-Iearning to look at the world .... Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology ofPerception, xx When philosophy ceases to be doubt in order to make itself disclosure, explicitation, the field it opens to itself is indeed made up of significations or of essences-since it has detached itself from the facts and the beings-but these significations or essences do not suffice to themselves, they overtly refer to our acts of ideation which have lifted them from a brute being, wherein we must find again in their wild state what answers to our essences and our significations. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 110 The pictographic glyph or character still referred, implicitly, to the animate phenomenon of which it was the static image .... With the phonetic aleph-beth, however, the written character no longer refers us to any sensible phenomenon out in the world, or even to the name of such a phenomenon (as with the rebus), but solely to a gesture to be made by the human mouth. There is a concerted shift of attention away from any outward or worldly reference of the pictorial image .... David Abram, The Spell ofthe Sensuous, 100 This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface Xl Abbreviations Used in the Text XIX 1 Ecopoetry and Contemporary American Poetry Criticism 1 2 Sustainable Poetry: A Poetry of Reftrance 35 3 Homology and Chiastic Energy in the Lived Body: A.R. Ammons 83 4 The Long Hunter's Vision: Wendell Berry 129 5 Closing the Ecarts through the Moment of Green: W.S. Merwin 175 6 Wild Nature and Joyful Interpenetration: Gary Snyder 231 Postscript: The Green Referential Fuse 273 Works Cited 281 Index 297 This page intentionally left blank Preface Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, is a picturesque resort town, complete with white picket fences, manicured lawns, elegant flower gardens, antique bed and breakfasts, yupscale curio shops, posh pubs where one can sip one's pint 0' bitter, and sunset dinner cruises up the Niagara. The town is situ ated where the Niagara River empties into Lake Ontario, which is pictur esque enough, but it is a resort town primarily because the world-renowned Shaw Festival resides there, offering some of the best live theater in North America. Having dabbled in the theater as an undergraduate in my home town of Buffalo, New York, a short drive from Ontario, I would take in a play every summer I returned home to visit my parents. In the summer of 1989 I decided to stay overnight in Niagara-on-the-Lake and see two days of shows, including Man and Superman. The odyssey that produced the following study began the morning after the overnight when, while stroll ing along the waterfront, I noticed a beautiful beach near the center of town that displayed a large "No Swimming" sign. Yachts at anchor, sailing boats tacking in the gentle breezes, dinner cruises up the river, but no swimming at a gorgeous beach in clear view ofwhere the Niagara empties into Lake Ontario? I was shocked. I knew Love Canal was being cleaned up, but that spot of polluted soil was in a small, well-defined area of the city of Niagara Falls, at least ten miles away. What could possibly create so much pollution that swimming in Lake Ontario was verboten? As I returned to Virginia Tech to prepare fall classes, I began to meditate on why the poststructural language theory I was reading to keep abreast of critical theory for my modern and contemporary poetry classes seldom engages environmental problems in the real world that we traverse daily. Though I had recently signed contracts to complete two books for G.K. Hall, I resolved to begin reading whatever environmental criticism I could find that discussed con temporary literature, especially poetry. I had audited a sophomore-level Preface Xll ecology course in Virginia Tech's Biology department in 1981, for my own enrichment, but never found the time to continue the interest. I soon learned that toxins from the chemical plants on the American side of the Niagara River travel hundreds of miles through the limestone layers of the Niagara escarpment and that heavy industry in Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Hamilton, and Toronto still dumps tons of waste each day into the water. Then I remembered the Canadian swimmer Vicki Keith: when she was preparing to complete the last of her swims across all five Great Lakes with a swim across Lake Ontario in August 1988, her support crew teased her often about the polluted water she would swallow. The more I read, the more convinced I became that I should develop a new environmental literature course for my department. Literature and Ecology began in Virginia Tech's English department in the spring of 1995 with one section per year. Four years later, we have three or four sections every semester. Each semester I show short video clips from the National Audubon Society Special Great Lakes: A Bitter Legacy (Lucas 1991). The clips summarize a famous study by the Wayne State researchers Joseph and Sandra Jacobson about how PCBs in the umbilical cord blood of women who ate Lake Michigan sport fish several times a month for at least six years prior to pregnancy have permanently harmed their children, who test at subnormal levels for memory retention at age four. The impairment was more measurably pronounced and visible also in verbal functioning, atten tion, and reading in the same 212 children when retested at age eleven Oacobson). As my students leave the classroom in ashen-faced silence, I meditate on how Niagara Falls, a favorite haunt of my youth, now vies with Cancer Alley, the southern Mississippi, as the most polluted body of water on the North American continent. As I lock up the VCR, I have bleak visions of how every day thousands of globe-hopping tourists take snap shots of what is possibly the greatest open sewer in the world. There ought to be a position in contemporary poetry theory that accounts for poetry that addresses environmental disasters such as this. In 1994 I read John Elder's excellent Imagining the Earth (1985) and Wendell Berry's wonderful Standing by Word!- (1983) in the same month and slowly realized that one could separate nature poetry and environmen tal poetry from ecopoetry, develop a critical position for ecopoetry that responds to poststructurallanguage theory, and in the process account for levels of sophistication in the ecopoetry I was enjoying. Elder laid the foun dation for further studies of environmental poetry, and primarily articu lated how the nature poetry of Ammons, Berry, Jeffers, and Snyder shares X1l1 Preface themes with canonical nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers such as Wordsworth and Eliot on the inhabitation of place, pollution as cultural decay, etc.

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