Edge Effects: Poetry, Place, and Spiritual Practices by Katharine Bubel B.A., Trinity Western University, 2004 M.A., Trinity Western University, 2009 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English Katharine Bubel, 2018 University of Victoria All rights reserved. This dissertation may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without the permission of the author. ii Supervisory Committee Edge Effects: Poetry, Place, and Spiritual Practices by Katharine Bubel B.A., Trinity Western University, 2004 M.A., Trinity Western University, 2009 Supervisory Committee Dr. Nicholas Bradley, Department of English Supervisor Dr. Magdalena Kay, Department of English Departmental Member Dr. Iain Higgins, Department of English Departmental Member Dr. Tim Lilburn, Department of Writing Outside Member iii Abstract "Edge Effects: Poetry, Place, and Spiritual Practices” focusses on the intersection of the environmental and religious imaginations in the work of five West Coast poets: Robinson Jeffers, Theodore Roethke, Robert Hass, Denise Levertov, and Jan Zwicky. My research examines the selected poems for their reimagination of the sacred perceived through attachments to particular places. For these writers, poetry is a constitutive practice, part of a way of life that includes desire for wise participation in the more-than-human community. Taking into account the poets’ critical reflections and historical-cultural contexts, along with a range of critical and philosophical sources, the poetry is examined as a discursive spiritual exercise. It is seen as conjoined with other focal practices of place, notably meditative walking and attentive looking and listening under the influence of ecospiritual eros. My analysis attends to aesthetics of relinquishment, formal strategies employed to recognize and accept finitude and the non- anthropocentric nature of reality, along with the complementary aesthetics of affirmation, configuration of the goodness of the whole. I identify an orienting feature of West Coast place, particular to each poet, that recurs as a leitmotif for engagement of such aesthetics and related practices. In chapter one, I consider a group of Jeffers’s final poems as part of a project he designated “our De Natura,” attending especially to his affinity for stones and stars. In chapter two, I investigate both Roethke’s and Hass’s configurations of ecospiritual eros in accord with their fascination for flora, while in chapter three, I employ the concepts of “aura” and “resonance” to explicate Levertov’s meditations on the “coming and going” Mount Rainier- Tacoma and Zwicky’s reflective iterations of the sea. iv Table of Contents Supervisory Committee .................................................................................................................. ii Abstract..........................................................................................................................................iii Table of Contents........................................................................................................................... iv List of Abbreviations ...................................................................................................................... v Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................... vi Dedication..................................................................................................................................... vii Introduction: Ecospirituality on “the Fringey Edge”...................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: The “Beautiful Secret in Places and Stars and Stones”: Jeffers’s “De Natura”.......... 28 Chapter 2: “Flowers drinking in their light”: Shapes of Eros in Roethe and Hass....................... 96 Chapter 3: Ambient Holiness: Levertov’s Mountain Aura and Zwicky’s Sea Resonance......... 201 Conclusion: Renewal at the Edge ............................................................................................... 319 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 325 v List of Abbreviations CL – Jeffers. Robinson. The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers, Volume One: 1890-1930. Ed. James Karman. 2 vols. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. Print. CP1 – The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Volume One: 1920-1928. Ed. Tim Hunt. 5 vols. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. Print. CP2 – The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Volume Two: 1928-1938. Ed. Tim Hunt. 5 vols. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989. Print. CP3 – The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Volume Three: 1939-1962. Ed. Tim Hunt. 5 vols. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. Print. CP4 – The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Volume Four: Poetry 1903-1920, Prose, and Unpublished Writings. Ed. Tim Hunt. 5 vols. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. Print CP5 – The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Volume Five: Textual Evidence and Commentary. Ed. Tim Hunt. 5 vols. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001. Print. SL – Jeffers, Robinson. The Selected Letters 1897-1962. Ed. Ann N. Ridgeway Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1968. Print. SP – Jeffers, Robinson. The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. New York: Random, 1938. Print. LP – Zwicky, Jan. Lyric Philosophy. 2nd ed. Edmonton: Brush Education, 2014. Print vi Acknowledgments “. an awakened sense of physical location and of belonging to some sort of place-based community have a great deal to do with activating environmental concern.” ––Lawrence Buell (Writing 56) This project has been sustained—admittedly, through a long gestation—by reverence, appreciation, and concern for the more-than-human community and for the creative word, first cultivated in me by my parents and two eldest sisters, whose memories I tend with gratitude. My sense of inspiration, “the dearest freshness deep down things,” springs from two locales: the absent presence of my childhood place on the edge of an Ontario woods, field, and escarpment, and the present place of my dwelling on the edge of a bay and a mountain range in British Columbia. For the gift of being there and here, daily doxology. My supervisor, Dr. Nicholas Bradley, educates, encourages, and expands my vision of place- responsive scholarship and art—best of all, by bright example. I am thankful, also, to the other members of my supervisory committee, Dr. Magdalena Kay and Dr. Iain Higgins, who have graciously provided suggestions and clarifying comments in process, and Dr. Tim Lilburn, whose contemplations have helped to light the way. To Lynn Szabo—my first and lasting academic advisor and doula—who embodies sophia and sees me through, I am happily indebted. For their patient and active support and making sure I come out to play, my gratitude goes to friends and family, but especially: Sandy and Malcolm; Terri and Doug; Karen and Yorke; Gayle and Roy; my walking-and-retreat companions Sandy, Gail, Sue, Angie, Jo; Tom and Kim; Randy and Carol; Trish and Lawrence; David and Kim; and “Dr. d.” Thanks, also, to my long-time TWU colleagues for cheering me on, especially Sara and Ken, Bob and Jennifer, Laura, Stephen, Holly, Jens, Connie, and Paula. vii Dedication To Roc, Aaron, and Dylan, for making home a place of faith, hope, and love. Introduction: Ecospirituality on “the Fringey Edge” “Here is the fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam.” —Annie Dillard (Holy the Firm 21) We are at home only so long as we are inhabited, alive only so long as we are lived in by the places where we are. —Robert Bringhurst, “Ursa Minor” (Selected 243) Insofar as I am “at home” in Robert Bringhurst’s sense, this work, Edge Effects: Poetry, Place, and Spiritual Practices, partakes of the same “fringey edge” region of Annie Dillard’s eccentric memoir, Holy the Firm. Following Dillard, I use the word “edge” both geographically and spiritually, to signal my focus on the intersection of the environmental and religious imaginations in the work of five poets who have written from the perspective of places on the Pacific coast they have called home: Robinson Jeffers, Theodore Roethke, Robert Hass, Denise Levertov, and Jan Zwicky. Like all the poets except for Hass, I migrated here from elsewhere. But for over twenty-five years, I have lived minutes away from a dike trail built along the eastern shoreline of Tsawwassen in southwestern British Columbia. As this place has helped to ground and orient my research, I will begin by acknowledging it. The name Tsawwassen is derived from the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ (or Downriver Halkomelem) word translated as “facing seaward” (Akrigg 273). The Salish Sea waters of Boundary Bay caress and, very occasionally, crash on this side of the peninsula, those of the Georgia Strait, on 2 the west and south side. Here the official boundary between Canada and the United States is naturally fluid. On a map, the forty-ninth parallel runs across the bay, making the southern tip of this peninsula a tiny land exclave of Whatcom County in the greater Puget Sound region of Washington State. The peculiarly isolated position of Point Roberts’s American residents is a reminder of the essentially arbitrary, abstract measures in the construction of the nation-states’ enclosing lines. But the waterfowl in the bay give a signal that grander