Sustainable Poetry

Four American Ecopoets

Leonard M. Scigaj

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813160047
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nella poesia

Focusing on the work of A.R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, W.S. Merwin, and Gary Snyder, author Leonard Scigaj shows that just as a sustainable society does not depreciate its resource base, so a sustainable poetry does not restrict interest to language. Over the past thirty years many poets have shown an increasing sensitivity to ecological thinking. But critics trained in poststructuralist language theory often fail to explore the substance of ecopoetry. Scigaj is the first to define ecopoetry as separate and distinct from nature or environmental poetry, marked by its concern with balancing the interests of human beings with the needs of nature. Just as science learned that the earth was not the center of the universe, ecopoetry insists on the recognition that humans are not at the center of the natural world.

1

Ecopoetry and Contemporary American Poetry Criticism

God’s in His

heaven, but not all is right with the world:
the nest’s foul, befouled: the planet’s

riddled, stink flows down the mighty rivers; dirty water
climbs sores up the children’s

legs

Ammons, Glare, 248

The Hands of Humans

In 1902, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Alfred Stieglitz exhibited his photograph “The Hand of Man” at his Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue, in New York. He passionately wanted his audience to reperceive the ordinary and transform its aesthetic potential into an art that would lift life beyond the decay of time and organic matter, as did William Carlos Williams in poems such as “The Rose” and “Spring Strains.” Stieglitz’s photo depicted a grimy locomotive belching smoke in a railway yard, but the compositional arrangement—the contrast of light and darkness, the tense, foregrounded lines of rails intersecting at the locomotive’s head, and the chuffing engine with its agitated column of smoke at the center balancing the rigid telephone poles to the left and the squat city building to the right—transformed the tawdry iron horse into a vibrant visual image reminiscent of the active space relished in Cubist art.

Dada Invades New York, the Dada retrospective at the Whitney Museum in the fall and winter of 1996-97, reminded us that one of the central impulses in the fabulous explosion of talent in modern art was to transform the aesthetic potential within the everyday, an everyday that included the technological extensions of the hands of humans—the machines, skyscrapers, bridges, and subways of urban life. But as I write in February 1998, at the end of this century, celebrating the hands of humans and their technological extensions has become a much more problematic endeavor. Today it is questionable to create poetry that purifies the ordinary natural world by transforming it into a superior aesthetic museum of art or limiting critical interest to language and textuality when that natural world is so stressed, so endangered by the hands of humans.

In December 1997, delegates from every major world nation convened in Kyoto, Japan, to produce the Kyoto Protocol, the first step in global cooperation to reduce the dangerous levels of carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gasses that ring the troposphere and produce global warming. The protocol stipulates that by 2012 the United States must lower its greenhouse emissions to seven percent below 1990 levels, whereas in 1996 our emissions were already 8.8 percent above 1990 levels (Brown 1998, 115). Meeting the protocol’s target will call for massive changes in the ways American consumers and industry use energy. With less than five percent of world population, the United States produces from its automobiles and factories, the technological extensions of the hands of humans, an incredible twenty-three percent of global carbon dioxide emissions (Brown 1997, 8; Gore 1992, 176). Further, 1998 was the warmest year on record, and the ten warmest years on planet earth occurred in the past twelve years. Deforestation in the Amazon rain forest, which adds carbon dioxide and methane pollution to the troposphere, increased thirty-four percent from 1991 to 1994 (Brown 1997, 15), and more recent statistics are not available because our government refuses to release the four hundred thousand dollars needed to analyze the Landsat photos. Apparently the recent deforestation is so staggering that some believe the statistics would embarrass the Brazilian government, the hosts of the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio (Astor 1997). Meanwhile Malaysian and Indonesian lumber companies have bought 8.6 million acres of the Brazilian Amazon to clear cut for mahogany and teak, hardwoods whose market price has tripled in recent years (Roanoke Times 1997). The hands of humans in developing countries have learned to mimic the hands of their former overlords, as they strip their own assets with capitalistic glee.

Scientists have compiled enough evidence to suggest that global warming causes such volatile weather that major companies in the insurance industry, an industry that invests most of its $1.4 trillion of yearly premium income, are openly advising all insurance companies to stop investing in fossil fuel conglomerates and shift investments to alternative energy and energy conservation enterprises (Hertsgaard 1996). This is in part a reaction to hurricane Andrew, which on one Florida day (August 24, 1992) created an estimated $30 billion of damage and bankrupted eight insurance companies (Brown 1996, 15, 26-28). Unpredictable and volatile weather patterns, a consequence of global warming, have also caused widespread floods and droughts that have damaged world crop harvests, left hundreds of thousands homeless, and created the conditions for epidemics that could outstrip our most advanced antibiotics and scientific deterrents.

In January 1998, sixteen hundred scientists from around the world signed a document stating that the ecological health of our oceans, which we once thought a limitless repository for wastes produced by the hands of humans, is severely endangered. Coral reefs, which provide shelter and food for fish, are dying, fish species and numbers are dwindling at an alarming rate, thirteen of the world’s fifteen major ocean fisheries are in decline (Brown 1996, 5), and one—the cod fishery off the shores of Newfoundland—has been so overfished that the Canadian government has closed it to commercial fishing. Red tide blooms and pfiesteria outbreaks, caused by warmed water and high nutrient levels in water, have killed countless fresh and salt water fish off the coast of Africa and in the rivers of the United States. Factories and chemical companies pour toxic waste into our rivers and oceans, and chemical runoff from agricultural lands and animal wastes from huge livestock farms (beef and dairy cattle, chickens, pigs) raise the nutrient content in water to levels that also poison fish. A National Resources Defense Council study found that sewage from antiquated municipal treatment plants deposits fecal coloform bacteria in our shoreline waters, causing more than two thousand beach closings in one year in America, though this is but a tiny fraction of what should be closed, since many states do not monitor shoreline water quality with any regularity (Roanoke Times, 24 July 1992). Not a single American company has been convicted at the federal level for illegally dumping toxic waste since the 1986 Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act took effect, for companies provide data voluntarily and the law lacks enforcement funding. Yet America produces more than half of the world’s toxic waste (Caldicott 1992, 66).

Preliminary research indicates that global warming, influenced by the hands of humans, aggravates the disastrous effects of El Niños. El Niños have occurred for centuries, normally alternating with La Niñas. But today El Niños occur with far greater frequency. Dubbed “the Christ child” by South American Catholics in the sixteenth century because its disastrous effects occur near Christmas, an El Niño occurs when the trade winds that blow across the Pacific Ocean weaken. When especially strong, these trade winds keep the warmest ocean water on the planet on the western end of the Pacific and create heavy but predictable (and needed) monsoons in Southeast Asia. During periods when La Niña (“the girl child”) prevails, the United States has a colder than normal winter. When the trade winds weaken, the warmest water in the Pacific slides eastward toward Peru and Central America and ocean currents take this water northward to the west coast of North America. In this El Niño scenario, the warmed water creates tumultuous storms and tidal waves on the west coast of the Americas and droughts in southern Africa, Indonesia, and western Australia. Hence the floods and mudslides in California in January and February of 1998 and the tornadoes in Florida that killed twice as many as Hurricane Andrew and cost fruit farmers hundreds of millions of dollars in crop failures when trees flowered too early and froze before sluggish bees could pollinate them.

Dr. Neville Nicholls of the Australia Bureau of Meteorology, in Melbourne, an acknowledged El Niño expert and the father of El Niño forecasting, has developed sophisticated computer models that reveal enhanced carbon dioxide levels to aggravate the volatility of El Niños. He also notes that, since the 1970s, we have had only two significant La Niñas, in 1975 and 1988. This parallels the carbon dioxide increases monitored on Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii: carbon dioxide counts have steadily risen during this period—by sixty parts per million in the past forty years. Doubling the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will cause El Niños every third year instead of the present five-year cycle and will ultimately create a positive feedback loop with global warming that could place our planet in a permanent El Niño (Bristow 1997). NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, has strung seventy high-tech buoys throughout an area of the Pacific twice the size of the United States to collect data that warns us of coming El Niños, but the force of this phenomenon is entirely beyond the technological capacities of the hands of humans. Our auto and factory exhausts are definitely altering the global climate in destructive ways.

Though we would like to believe that the above examples are simply problems in the politics of resource management, the hands of humans have so changed the environment of our entire planet that the problem cuts to the bone of what we can depict with honesty in our creative endeavors. We have despoiled nature, the necessary context for any aesthetic act, to the point where we must pause before composing poems that present nature as a benign and reliable backdrop for human quests for an authentic voice. We can no longer conceive of nature as a bucolic idyll, a type of Christian resurrection, a rational exemplar of God’s harmonious design, a romantic refuge from urban factories, an indifferent or hostile Darwinian menace, or an echoing hollow filled by poststructural language theory. What we need is a sustainable poetry, a poetry that does not allow the degradation of ecosystems through inattention to the referential base of all language. We need a poetry that treats nature as a separate and equal other and includes respect for nature conceived as a series of ecosystems—dynamic and potentially self-regulating cyclic feedback systems. These ecosystems sustain every moment of our lives, and, because they have been so bruised by humans, we cannot naturalize them into benign backdrops for human preoccupations or reduce them to nonexistence by an obsessive focus on language in our literary creations.

For more than a century, ecologists have labored to comprehend, as much as we can with human logic, the laws and operations of the ecosystems that humans need to survive on planet earth. As we inhabit the twenty-first century, we will need a poetry that does not ignore nature or simply project human fears or aesthetic designs on it. Nature must have its own voice, separate and at least equal to the voice of humans, in the quest to create a balance where both humans and nature can survive into the next century, when the hands of humans will become even more powerful. Today, more than ninety percent of world population increases come from developing countries (Sitarz 1994, 43) and, as the global population swells from 5.8 to 10 billion people by 2050, many of these developing countries will continue their rapid industrialization and strong economic growth, creating millions of middle-class citizens whose desire for consumer goods will place enormous stress on ecosystems. China alone has five times the present population of America; in 1995 it had two million cars on its roads, but it expects to have twenty-two million cars polluting earth’s atmosphere by 2010 (Brown 1997, 27).

At the end of the twentieth century the ubiquitous evidence of the worldwide despoliation of nature at the hands of humans boggles the mind. Evidence pours in like effluent and taxes the mind as well as the publishing industry. By the time this book reaches store shelves, all of the above examples of environmental deterioration will be outdated, almost always to be replaced with more alarming examples and statistics. Every week on network television news we watch still more examples of environmental stress or catastrophe somewhere in the world; they arrive with the numbing regularity of the body counts we watched daily during the Vietnam War.

With grim humor I will end this opening position statement with one final example before turning to literary criticism and theory. When humans recently tried to mimic nature and reproduce the ecosystems necessary for survival, the very revealing results placed the limits of our technological hands into perspective. Corporate investors in 1991 spent $150 million to construct Biosphere 2. In Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, scientists placed eight humans in a glass and steel greenhouse to determine whether modern technology could reproduce nature’s ecosystems and keep the eight alive and well. Though the integrity of the building’s seals was broached at least twice (once to expel dangerous levels of carbon dioxide and the other time to augment low food supplies), most called the experiment a success when all eight emerged alive two years later. Needless to say, the Biospherians did not deforest their land or produce the levels of air, soil, and water pollution that we have grown accustomed to on planet earth. Few noticed, however, that it took more than $9 million per person per year and an incredibly complicated network of technological gear to replicate the ecosystem services that nature offers all humans everyday for free (Avise 1994).

Humans cannot afford to take nature’s free services for granted. Nor can creative writers and literary critics ignore the environment by ensconcing themselves in claustral searches for the authentic human voice where they focus primarily on the logic of linguistic systems. The situation of poetry at the end of the twentieth century cries out for an appreciation of the authentic nature that grounds language and supports every human instant of aesthetic as well as ordinary consciousness. Because human hands so directly affect ecosystems, we cannot postulate a benign and reliable nature as the scenic backdrop for our aesthetic and linguistic quests. As Bill McKibben (1989, 18, 48, 58, 77-91) and Al Gore (1992, 30-34, 61, 73-74, 79, 90) have warned, the hands of humans are the coarchitects of nature, and we must comprehend, examine, and critique the whys and hows of our actions before regional environmental crises turn to planetary catastrophe. Because all that we know of ourselves happens through interacting with nature’s life support systems, we cannot ignore nature or conceive of it as a repository for human fears and projections. Nature must stand as a separate and at least equal other in our literary meditations. We cannot limit the other beyond the self in our literary creations to other humans, human institutions, and human culture. At the end of this century our new situation on planet earth brings with it a new imperative, a new need for an enhanced understanding and a finer appreciation of context, the referential world of nature.

From Nature Poetry to Ecopoetry

Poetry that addresses our connection to the natural world has enjoyed a renaissance over the past thirty years. Authors such as A.R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, Philip Booth, Brendan Galvin, Louise Gluck, Donald Hall, Joy Harjo, William Heyen, Susan Howe, Denise Levertov, W.S. Merwin, Mary Oliver, Robert Pack, Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, Pattiann Rogers, Gary Snyder, and others have written dozens of fine volumes exploring the many ways that humans relate to nature. Most of these treat nature not as a convenient background for human concerns but acknowledge that it sustains human, as well as nonhuman, life in ecosystems that have been deeply bruised by human exploitation and pollution. Many nature poets writing today are also environmental poets who have captured the attention of thousands of readers and have gained significant recognition: Ammons won the 1993 National Book Award for his book-length poem Garbage; Rich has since won a McArthur Award; and Merwin two six-figure poetry prizes, the Lila Wallace—Readers’ Digest Prize, and the Tanning Prize from the Academy of American Poets.

Humanistic research on environmental topics has also burgeoned over the past thirty years. Roderick Nash, in The Rights of Nature (1989), catalogued how, since the late 1960s, hundreds of British and American ecologists, theologians, philosophers, ethicians, sociologists, intellectual historians, philosophers of religion, anthropologists, creative writers, animal rights activists, ecofeminists, and environmentalists have engaged in interdisciplinary research and debate to extend environmental ethics to include all living beings on earth. Though areas of disagreement have appeared, most agree with Theodore Roszak’s statement in Person/Planet that for the survival of the earth and human civilization “nature must also have its natural rights” (1978, 32). Nash’s exhaustive research led him to conclude that the development of environmental ethics over the past few decades is “arguably the most dramatic expansion of morality in the course of human thought” (1989, 7).

Though the work of many contemporary American poets has been intimately involved with both nature poetry and environmental ethics, interest among senior American poetry critics has lagged far behind, possibly because poetry primarily concerned with the environment has not yet acquired the status of being a theoretically interesting subject. Though in journals significant studies of nature writers have appeared, incorporating theoretical approaches that range from awareness or consciousness-raising to the ecological, ethical, ecofeminist, ecopastoral, dialogical, phenomenological, history of ideas, and social constructionist, primers or handbooks summarizing the gist of these approaches have not been published. The very first Ecocriticism Reader (1996), edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, has just recently appeared. One will not find a single essay devoted to environmental poetry in the Contemporary Literature issues entitled “The Poetry of the Seventies” (fall 1982) or “The Poetry of the Eighties” (summer 1992).

The literary establishment still valorizes approaches dominated by poststructural language theorists. Dorothy Nielsen, for instance, placed an environmental essay on Snyder and Levertov in the winter 1993 issue of Contemporary Literature, but to gain acceptance she buttressed her argument with Paul de Man’s poststructural theory. She organized her essay around his term “prosopopoeia”—using personifications of nature to construct historicized and politicized voices for nonhuman life. De Man’s lofty theory, however, never knelt on the greenswards of life. Nielsen, in adopting a social constructionist stance, emphasized that Snyder and Levertov created “the illusion of intersubjective relationships between the poetic speaker and the world” (691). She followed Charles Altieri’s position that one branch of postmodern poetry is a “poetry of immanence,” where “ecological thinking” is limited to a subjectivist stance (Altieri 1973 [“From Symbolist Thought to Immanence”], 612).

Can nature ever be anything more than an impossibly alien “other,” trapped in a dualistic paradigm, that humans must subjectivize and personify, imbue with human qualities, in order to understand? The actual poetry written over the past thirty years often argues otherwise. Nature and environmental poets often record moments of nondualistic inhabitation in specific places where the experience occurs only when the noise of human ratiocination, including the fabrications of language, has been silenced or revel in moments of phenomenological participation in Being where the activity of seeing intertwines the human and nonhuman worlds. When Wendell Berry, for instance, desires to experience the prereflective world of his moment-to-moment experience, he knows he cannot articulate its colors in language, but he cannot otherwise communicate his silent experience. What he can do is bear witness to how the leaves fall with a “golden” silence, with “a sound / that is not a name” (“The Silence,” BCP 156). Or in meditation he frees himself of egocentricity so that he can “see” the interconnectedness of experience among all sentient beings in a given locale. He is “Seen by more than I see” (TC 26). Light becomes not only the reassurance of nature’s sustaining energy but contains a phenomenological dimension as the shared medium that enables ecologically interdepend...