Poetry and the Anthropocene

Ecology, biology and technology in contemporary British and Irish poetry

Sam Solnick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317376583
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

This book asks what it means to write poetry in and about the Anthropocene, the name given to a geological epoch where humans have a global ecological impact. Combining critical approaches such as ecocriticism and posthumanism with close reading and archival research, it argues that the Anthropocene requires poetry and the humanities to find new ways of thinking about unfamiliar spatial and temporal scales, about how we approach the metaphors and discourses of the sciences, and about the role of those processes and materials that confound humans' attempts to control or even conceptualise them.

Poetry and the Anthropocene draws on the work of a series of poets from across the political and poetic spectrum, analysing how understandings of technology shape literature about place, evolution and the tradition of writing about what still gets called Nature. The book explores how writers' understanding of sciences such as climatology or biochemistry might shape their poetry's form, and how literature can respond to environmental crises without descending into agitprop, self-righteousness or apocalyptic cynicism. In the face of the Anthropocene's radical challenges to ethics, aesthetics and politics, the book shows how poetry offers significant ways of interrogating and rendering the complex relationships between organisms and their environments in a world increasingly marked by technology.

1 Evolving systems of (eco)poetry

Gary Snyder’s book Earth House Hold is sometimes taken as an example of ecocriticism (and ecopoetry) avant la lettre. The title plays on the etymology of oikos (as house) and one section posits ‘Housekeeping on Earth’ as a mode of ecological survival, envisioning Earth as a household and the Earth as a house that we must hold onto, i.e. save for the future (1969: 127).¹ But the connotations of house or household are not necessarily appropriate to thinking about ecology – who is in the household, who is its head, does anyone leave home, are there neighbours, who built the family home and, if damaged, should it be restored or improved? These questions are only half facetious. The tensions in Snyder’s title between local and global, care and control, inclusion and exclusion, are reminders that while ecocriticism and ecopoetics have both proved popular neologisms, the direction that they take very much depends on what sense of eco, of oikos, is brought to bear by poet or critic. It is a problematic root – as we know all too well from analyses of that other oikos, the economy.

As both poetry and ecocriticism have developed, becoming more theoretically sophisticated and scientifically aware as they draw on other disciplines, descriptions of the oikos have evolved (Snyder’s work itself is a case in point). This chapter charts those changes and some of their implications. The first section tracks the key developments in ecocriticism (and related fields) as it has expanded its purview. Ecocriticism’s early focus on phenomenological engagement and specific places has been modified by more refined considerations of the complex relationships between local and non-local. Humanity’s enmeshment with different materials, objects and processes on multiple scales means that we have to consider what can be described as ‘non-human agency’ alongside more familiar issues such as environmental justice, sustainability or pollution, particularly when it comes to climate change. Also discussed in this section are the ways different poets and theorisations of poetry have responded to, or in some cases anticipated, these matters of concern. The second section focuses on technology, arguing that the ecological impact of technology is intimately related to the fact that, on a fundamental level, technologies always structure humans’ relationships with, and conceptualisations of, their environments. I then build on this posthumanist appraisal of technology to highlight some of the psychological, political and poetic challenges arising from an awareness of the ‘scale effects’ of quotidian technology use. In the third section I use systems theory to explore how ecology is communicated across different parts of society, and how this poses questions about disciplinarity, aesthetics and the sorts of claims we might make for poetry.

Thinking about the Anthropocene requires a constant consideration of different scales, systems, materials, discourses and technologies. Its interrelated concerns are rendered in contrasting ways by various types of writing. Perhaps it is unsurprising then that reading and writing about poetry in the Anthropocene often requires – to use another derivative of oikos that Snyder also highlights – a relatively ecumenical criticism. In order to explore how poetry’s diverse ways of happening articulate the Anthropocene and its discontents, we have to be prepared to negotiate multiple disciplines, theoretical paradigms and poetic traditions and to ask what sorts of awareness are facilitated, or indeed diminished, through any particular approach.

A non-local habitation and a name

Discussions about ecologically orientated poetry and poetics are marked by questions of terminology and focus. Various associations accrue around critical terms such as ‘post-pastoral’ poetry, ‘radical landscape poetry’ and ‘ecopoetics’. These questions of nomenclature are related to issues of scale – that is how different poetries address different spatial frames (landscape, global environmental systems, microscopic but ecologically significant substances) and different temporal spans (human, geological, evolutionary and so on).

Wordsworth’s line, discussed in the introduction, which graced the first issue of Nature has a peculiar resonance with early ecocriticism’s approaches. His ‘solid ground of Nature’, as Gillian Beer points out, ‘condenses the senses “earth” and “argument”’ (1999: 174–175). An association of Nature with a particular way of thinking and writing permeated the work of those academics such as Cheryl Glotfelty and Scott Slovic who helped formalise the study of literature and ecology in the 1990s by setting up ASLE (The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment). This organisation grew out of subscribers to ‘The American Nature Writing Newsletter’ and early issues of ASLE’s journal ISLE paid significant attention to the American tradition of literary representations of landscape and wilderness – to figures such as John Muir and Henry David Thoreau as well as their inheritors such as Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez. Lawrence Buell’s (2005) survey of the field called such work ‘first wave’ ecocriticism. Reading it often conveys the sense that through literary re-engagements with ‘earth’ an ‘argument’ emerges: a better mode of being, outside the domination of industrial modernity – and often critical theory too. Richard Kerridge described the first wave as characteristically asserting that ‘physical contact with wilderness is the antidote to modes of critical thinking that have become too abstract, theoretical and cultural-constructionist’ (2012: 26). It is important to highlight the dominant role that place, and its related category, landscape, played in the field, as indicated by Glotfelty’s introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader which asks whether in ‘addition to race, class, and gender, should place become a new critical category?’ (1996: xix).

While, particularly in America, the realism of Nature Writing often appeared to be the natural aesthetic partner for early ecocriticism, there was also an interest in poetry. Critics such as Jonathan Bate, Karl Kroeber, Kate Rigby and James McKusick focused on Romantic ecology, and McKusick in fact highlights the sometimes-unacknowledged influence of British Romanticism on American wilderness writing (2000: 5). Also, as Ursula Heise points out, ecocriticism was more interested in poetry ‘than other schools of criticism’ had been ‘in recent decades’, suggesting that possibly this was because ‘metaphor is a particularly easy way of establishing such connections between mind, body, and place’ (2006: 511)

From relatively early on there was an interest in poetry which in some way went beyond depictions of Nature into an engagement with contemporary ecological issues. Terry Gifford who, along with Bate, was one of the most influential early UK and Ireland-based, and orientated, scholars working in the field, spoke in the 1990s of ‘green poetry’ as ‘those recent nature poems which engage directly with environmental issues’ (1995: 3). Gifford’s statement was echoed in 2002 by J. Scott Bryson in a volume which brought together a variety of approaches to poetry and the environment that included essays on some of the most popular poets for ecocritical study such Snyder, A.R. Ammons, W.S. Merwin and Wendell Berry. Bryson describes this burgeoning field of ‘ecopoetry’ as ‘a subset of nature poetry that, while adhering to certain conventions of romanticism, also advances beyond that tradition and takes on distinctly contemporary problems and issues’. He goes on to posit three pervasive characteristics. The first is ‘an ecocentric [i.e. not anthropocentric] perspective recognizing the interdependent nature of the world; such a perspective leads to a devotion to specific places and to the land itself’. Second, ‘an imperative toward humility in the relationships with both human and nonhuman nature’, particularly in the face of that which might be said to exceed human agency. The third aspect Bryson identifies is ‘an intense skepticism concerning hyper-rationality, a skepticism that usually leads to an indictment of an over-technologized modern world and a warning concerning the very real potential for ecological catastrophe’ (2002: 5–6).

Bryson’s description is fairly typical of poetry-orientated ecocriticism of the period, and sketches out some of the issues that are still very much of interest to this book: how does the possibility of environmental catastrophe change how we address the tradition of poetry about Nature? How do we think about interconnection, interdependence and a corresponding sense of responsibility? What is the nature of non-human agency and the relationship between humans and their technologies? However, aspects of Bryson’s claims are also problematic, not least the emphasis on certain types of emotive response such as ‘humility’, or the supposition that ecological awareness in poetry is primarily a distinct subset of a tradition of ‘nature poetry’. Bryson’s vision is one that returns us to ‘specific places and to the land itself’, to the solid ground of Nature.

It is interesting that one of the key touchstone-texts for studies of poetry-orientated ecocriticism was published in the same year the as Crutzen and Stoermer’s first article on the Anthropocene. The coordinates for ecologically engaged readings of British and Irish poetry have shifted dramatically since Jonathan Bate’s arguments for the peculiar importance of poetry to ecology in The Song of the Earth (first published in 2000) and before that in Romantic Ecology (1991). While aspects of his work still resonate, others have become problematic. Both the focus and the terminology for poetry relating to ecological issues have evolved.

Although Bate’s concerns range from political issues like postcolonial ecojustice to aesthetic categorisations of Nature such as the picturesque, the core supposition across both his ecocritical books is essentially that poetry enables ‘readers better to enjoy or to endure life […] by teaching them to look and dwell in the natural world’ (1991: 4). Working off Heidegger’s notion that poetry ‘is the original admission of dwelling’, Bate argues that poetry offers better modes of thinking because it attunes humans to the Earth, enabling them to care for it (2001: 261). For Bate, Romanticism ‘regards poetic language as a special kind of expression which may effect an imaginative reunification of mind and nature’. In response to humans’ alienation from Nature, Bate positions poems as ‘imaginative parks in which we may breathe an air which is not toxic and accommodate ourselves to a mode of dwelling that is not alienated’ (2001: 45, 64). He models a deep-ecological integration, an imaginative return to Nature in order to save it:

Let us begin by supposing that we cannot do without thought-experiments and language experiments which imagine a return to nature, a reintegration of the human and the other. The dream of deep ecology [i.e. a state of Nature] will never be realized upon the earth, but our survival as a species may be dependent on our capacity to dream it in the work of the imagination.

(2001: 37–38)

Bate privileges this dream of reunion, ‘the controlling myth of ecopoetics is a myth of the pre-political, the pre-historic: it is a Rousseauesque story about imagining a state of nature prior to the fall into property, into inequality and into the city’ (2001: 266). For Rousseau this fall into culture is a fall into language and into meat eating. The ur-myth of return underscores Bate’s vision of what a poem does. His Heideggerian argument proposes that, in the face of the alienation wrought by modern technology – where Nature is enframed (Gestell) and shows up as standing-reserve (Bestand) – there are types of technē which can reconnect the human with the rest of natural world. For Heidegger, ‘technē is the name not only for the skills and activities of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Technē belongs to bringing forth, to poeisis’ (Heidegger, 1977: 13). In Bate’s work poetry goes back to a type of technē which was ‘attuned to the natural unfolding of things’, it ‘unconceals’ Nature. The work of the poem on a formal level is part of this unconcealing:

it could be that poesis in the sense of verse-making is language’s most direct path of return to the oikos, the place of dwelling, because metre itself – a quiet but persistent music, a recurring cycle, a heartbeat – is an answer to nature’s own rhythms, an echoing of the song of the earth itself.

(2001: 75)

It is unsurprising that John Burnside, the poet Bate claims ‘stakes out the ground for a “green poetry” that’ will be ‘essential to our century’, harbours a similar, Heidegger-inflected sense of the relationship between poetic and ecological thought (Bate, 2002). Along with Alice Oswald, Burnside is probably the most popular living British or Irish poet for ecocritical study. His poetry and prose chronicle the local and the numinous, which is not to say that they do not acknowledge environmental issues such as pollution. However, Burnside’s own criticism positions what he describes in terms of poetry as ecology: an ‘attempt to understand and describe a meaningful way of dwelling’, with poetry as ‘a technique for reclaiming the authentic, a method for reinstating the real, a politics of the actual’, where the ‘song of the earth is not a metaphor, but an actual sound, one that can be listened to’ (2006: 95, 105, 102). The local is privileged, as is that which is immediately available to the senses:

The starlit darkness of the actual night, the salt and physicality and achieved grace of real bodies, the pleasure of walking as opposed to driving. A view of identity that sets terrain and habitat before tribal allegiances, the integrity of place before the idea of nation or state.

(2006: 93)

This notion that the ecological value of poetry lies in the way it might tune the reader’s attention into ‘actual’ or ‘authentic’ Nature is a recurrent, but problematic, refrain – not least because it raises the question of what, exactly, readers are being attuned to. This is evident in another early theory of ecopoetics, Leonard Scigaj’s concept of ‘référance’. A purposeful differentiation from Derridean différance, ‘référance’ focuses on the world outside the text, it

turns the reader’s gaze toward an apprehension of the cyclic processes of wild nature after a self-reflexive recognition of the limits (the sous rature) of language. After this two-stage process, a third moment often occurs, the moment of atonement with nature, when we confide our trust in (s’en référrer) nature’s rhythms and cycles, where reading nature becomes our text.

(1996: 6)

Arguments such as Bate’s and Scigaj’s present the text as recalibrating the reader’s environmental awareness – but they are frequently selective and sometimes mistaken about the qualities of Nature that they read. Their latent Romanticism colours their sense of ecology, suggesting that consciousness comes into harmony with an environment which, as Dana Phillips has emphasised, is seldom as harmonious as is popularly believed and might in fact be typified by sudden, even catastrophic shifts and fluctuations. The values we associate with ecology ‘especially balance, harmony, unity and economy – are now seen as more or less unscientific, and hence “utopian” in the pejorative sense of the term’ (Phillips, 2003: 42).

Even as literary understandings of ecology have grown more sophisticated, the idea that poetry’s primary importance to ecocriticism is the ways it facilitates sensory re-engagement with Nature is not uncommon. In his 2012 study Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language, Scott Knickerbocker emphasises that ‘poetry and our close reading of it demands that we focus our thinking, pay attention with all our senses, and grow in imagination’. And while it is easy to endorse his argument that figurative language ‘can help us experience the world as more than inert, unresponsive matter’, his focus remains at a certain local scale, with his version of ecopoetics primarily concerned with ‘poetic devices which enact, rather than merely represent, the immediate, embodied experience of nonhuman nature’ (2012: x, 6, 16).

No matter what climate change denial blogs say, just because it is snowing on Wordsworth’s solid ground does not mean that average global temperatures are not rising. An ecological awareness interested in the non-local impacts of pollution (as with DDT or CFCs) or long term climate patterns is not necessarily well served by a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction: Poetry and science
• 1. Evolving systems of (eco)poetry
• 2. ‘Life subdued to its instrument’: Hughes, mutation and technology
• 3. ‘Germinal ironies’: Changing climates in the poetry of Derek Mahon
• 4. The resistant materials of Jeremy Prynne
• Conclusion: Evolution, agency and feedback at the end of a world
• Index