At the Centre of the Edge Contemporary Ecological Poetry and the Sacred Hybrid Karen Mccarthy Woolf
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At the Centre of the Edge Contemporary Ecological Poetry and the Sacred Hybrid Karen McCarthy Woolf Royal Holloway, University of London Practice-based PhD in Creative Writing 1 Declaration of Authorship I Karen McCarthy Woolf hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others this is always clearly stated. Signed: Date: 21/09/2017 2 Abstract Ecocriticism is a comparatively new and vital discipline that responds to the literatures of an increasingly urgent environmental crisis. Yet, while its remit within the fields of materialist and secular thought is diversifying and expanding to include postcolonial, cultural and queer theories, alongside geography and other earth sciences, there is less conversation with complementary and syncretic disciplines such as ecotheology and religious ecology. This thesis makes the case for a diversification of the secular as a singular epistemological paradigm. It suggests the ‘sacred hybrid’ as an additional transdisciplinary framework through which we can read, critique and write contemporary poetry that demonstrates ecological/environmental themes that connect to emotional and spiritual procedures and content as well as intellectually-driven aesthetics. Through close readings of Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris, Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion and Joy Harjo’s Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings as exemplary texts, the thesis demonstrates the critical amplifications that the sacred hybrid can elicit. Drawing on Mircea Eliade’s explication of the sacred and profane as contingent and contradictory spheres, it shows how each collection contains a sacred yet asymmetric ‘centre’, with the capacity to incorporate diverse notions of Otherness. These expressions include spiritual modalities constructed via strategies of juxtaposition, shamanic chant and interbiotic utterance that correspond to pre-Christian and syncretic indigenous religiosity. Glück’s collection The Wild Iris is a starting point because it demonstrates how sacred hybridity may operate structurally within a text. Its content questions the existence and nature of God as a transcendent monotheistic deity, yet conversely, God’s omnipresence is confirmed by an implicit and simultaneously explicit expression of the immanent sacred through a theophanic and animist landscape. Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion follows on. In contrast to Glück’s focus on ontology, this reading uncovers how the poems resituate the terms and conditions under which cultural epistemologies are formed. Both collections share dialogic structures that require the reader to undergo a ritualistic or stated ‘entry’ through a nominal portal. However, while Glück critiques the theological dynamics of the human condition 3 under Christianity, Miller brings additional nuance to that critique by directing the reader’s attention towards the inequities and consequences of colonial biases. In this instance, Rastafarian ‘reasoning’ as a literary tactic maps onto third and fourth wave ecocriticism in its fluidities and reconstitution of national, gender- based and social identities. Joy Harjo’s Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings is the final book under consideration because it consolidates both strands of epistemological and ontological enquiry in its exemplary structures that are formed through Mskoke/Cree sacred numerological architectures. In Chapter 3, the problematics of appropriation, and with it idealised nostalgia, are also addressed. These challenges of representation may be read solely as aspects of the social-cultural flashpoints that occur at the points of juxtaposition in The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. However, because Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings is also deployed here as a decolonised, indigenous research methodology, and by extension a conduit for spiritual and political merger and coherence, poetry’s potential as an agent of societal healing and knowledge production is revealed and acknowledged. All of the readings help to determine the critical capacities of sacred hybridity as an additional lens through which ecopoetic texts may be more comprehensively analysed. In the creative component, Unreasonable Disturbances responds to a variety of macropolitical pressures, from the refugee crisis and climate change to migration and urban gentrification. It also includes moments of autobiography, elegy (for flora and fauna) and emotional fracture that play out against an ecologically unstable backdrop. The book contains formal interventions and disruptions that characterise its linguistic composition as hybrid: these include the lyric/prose hybrid the ‘coupling’ (as devised by the author) alongside an interrupted zuihitsu and a sequence of found sonnets that explore these thematic territories through strategies of juxtaposition and syntactic subversion, some of which combine to reconfigure aspects of the numinous in contemporary settings. These formal constituents combine as a compositional technique through which the poems explore new ways of writing about nature, the city and the sacred. 4 5 Table of Contents Prologue 8 Introduction to the Thesis 15 Chapter 1 53 Landscape, Theophany and the Sacred Hybrid in Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris Chapter 2 87 Hybrid Hierophanies: Where Rastafari Meets Religious Ecology in Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion Chapter 3 109 Re-iterating the Sacred Centre and Transcending Nostalgia in Joy Harjo’s Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings Conclusion 139 Epilogue 150 Bibliography 151 Unreasonable Disturbances 187 Bibliography 259 6 All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. ‘Meditation at Lagunitas’, Robert Hass 7 Prologue It is a rainy Autumn evening in London, 2013. I am part of a procession along the edge of the river Thames, making its way towards and across the Millennium Bridge. The group has been assembled by the ‘mixed blood (Métis/Cree/German) artist and musician Cheryl L’Hirondelle’1 as part of a participatory performance at Ecocentrix: Indigenous Arts/Sustainable Acts2 – a strand of Royal Holloway’s five-year interdisciplinary project ‘Indigeneity in the Contemporary World: Performance, Politics, Belonging’3 led by Professor Helen Gilbert from the department of Drama, Theatre and Dance. I’m less aware of the context at this point, though, and more concentrated on what might happen next, as the group segues from passive theatre audience to active, ceremonial co- contributor. It transpires that together we are going to erect a tipi, but with candlelight, torches and burning sage sticks rather than animal hide and wooden poles. It is a performative event that draws on L’Hirondelle’s earlier work ‘Vancouver Songlines’4 and, as we point our battery-powered shafts of light skyward, Cheryl directs the beams so that they intersect to approximate the pole framework, each of which represents one of the four directions as a component of the tipi’s sacred architecture. Halfway through, I look up and a small flock of seagulls, perhaps as many as ten or twelve, is wheeling above us, high up in the 1 Cheryl Hirondelle website <http://www.cheryllhirondelle.com/about.html>, and <http://www.beatnation.org/cheryl-lhirondelle.html>. 2 Indigeneity in the Contemporary World website <http://www.indigeneity.net/ecocentrix/>. 3 See Indigeneity in the Contemporary World website for more details on this multi-participatory European Research Council Funded project <http://www.indigeneity.net/>. 4 See Vancouver Songlines Project website for details of the original <http://vancouversonglines.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/vancouver-songlines- project-will-launch.html>. 8 sky, but directly overhead. We see you. We are part of this. Keep going. This was the message from the birds. We carry this energy up to the sky. This is what I thought. This is what I felt. The question was how would I articulate this interspecial communication in its illogical entirety as research for a theoretical thesis and, along with that, a spiritual belief system I was yet to explore intellectually? That these ideas and, crucially, feelings would somehow infuse the poetry was not an issue. I’d spent months on a residency on a boat in the middle of the Thames the year before. I was drawn to the water and the urban wildlife that populates the river and its banks. Being on, in or near it was comforting to me, and part of a healing process that had needed to take place after a full-term stillbirth, which was the subject of my first book, An Aviary of Small Birds (Carcanet, 2014). One of the things that surprised me, as a life-long Londoner, was the prevalence of nature, or non-human organic life as one might more accurately describe it, in the collection. On reflection, I realised that these poetic emphases were a response to the shock and trauma of the loss. If the impetus behind An Aviary of Small Birds was to make a physically public yet emotionally intimate bereavement broadly accessible, then the inspiration behind Unreasonable Disturbances was to make a vast, collective and macro-political grief intimate. In an entry on the Carcanet blog I wrote: Thinking about it now, this connection with the natural world makes sense. Having experienced a sudden and unexpected bereavement it felt like all the certainties I might have believed in (hospitals are a safe place to have a baby; midwives/doctors know what they’re doing; I will, finally, have a family etc … ) were destabilised, if not obliterated. But the trees, the sea, a flock of birds, the moon: for me these things were part of a wider constellation, more profound and mysterious and interconnected than a 9 human society that so often fails us; these animals and elements were a constant, they wouldn’t disappear. Although of course, they are disappearing. In September [2014] a Zoological Society report5 revealed we’ve killed off half of the world’s wildlife in the past 40 years. Marine devastation is equally, if not more acute: as we empty the oceans of fish and sea life we are filling them with hazardous waste, plastic debris, endocrine disruptors and carcinogenic toxins.6 I grew up in a politicised family.