Ecopoetic Re-Action: Refurbishing Poetics

Humans are deceived in believing language is the organizer of the universe, Scigaj argues, quoting Synder: “when logos-orented philosophers uncritically advance language as a unique human gift which serves as the organizer of the chaotic universe—it is a delusion.” Instead, language—which comes after the universe—is a means to reorganizing our conception of the universe as it exists apart from us. Potentially, language (at best) may serve to ground us in the world by articulating or accurately reflecting experience in the natural world—originary experience. Thus, authentic language is that which reflects experience in the world, since the world is what it stems from. Language used this way always “looks back”—reminds the human what comes before the human. What follows from this logic is a humble notion that the honest or authentic voice is always writing in homage to what preexists it—to the source that present day resources derive from. For a poet, who must use her resources to get to the source, what does this mean?

There seems to be many competing “sources” –first and foremost to Scigaj is the natural world overlaid with “human hands” and the resulting environmental imperatives. While he prescribes for us the need to de“purify” (2) and reprioritize the aims of poetry—which is the very move he demonstrates in the five pages of reportage that follow his prescription, he must still “turn to literary criticism and theory” to activate his prescription. That there is another cannon he must turn to, in addition to the facts of the environment, which he must also acknowledge reinforces the binary between natural world / made world or world as text and suggest that the two exist as separate and often competing sources of language. Even if the goal of “depurification” is to remove the scaffolding of language, as Merwin often attempts to do, in order to access original experience in the world, such a goal first requires one to do the very thing that originary experience supposedly preempts. Isn’t this inherently a contradiction? That we always have to uncover originary experience with language (even if language is dismantling language), and then once we access “it” we can either experience it individually in “an active space” (perhaps the deep ecological/first-wave option) which must also be silence, or else, we can extend it outward/articulate/reflect—but only, again, through language. One of the primary and formative arguments Scigaj makes is that language is always AFTER “origin”ary experience; if it is always after the fact, isn’t language, then, always evidence of the gap between the original and the present / world experience and word experience? To acknowledge that writing then occurs in “the gaps”, as Magda says Hass and Graham do, seems more honest, authentic—and humble! than presuming one can access any other sort of present reality through or apart from language. At this point in time, where even Scigaj must take into account the world of literary criticism and theory as it competes with the environment as a foundation for knowledge and experience, it seems he would have to have a time machine, or else a really deep shovel in order to truly access the origin without simultaneously accessing the only means we can access it by. That the experience is originary demonstrates the impossibility of accessing the origin apart from what moves it. Here, the world occurs in the mind as it occurs outside it—always moving. How, then, can we truly transcend the movement that occurs apart from us? It seems we can only do it by constructing a space—however transient, ephemeral, and apart from “the world”—to meditate on the world. An “active space” as Snyder and other ecopoetics suggest, a necessity to return—to react—post-reflection.

So, it seems that ecopoetry attempts at that same discursive turning back and forth that Thoreau takes on in Walden—that active repositioning of the self in relation to the world through a language that most accurately reflects that passage between word and world. I think back to how Thoreau, in Economy, wants to eliminate “fuel” as a resource, and how he wants to disinherit all the associations and referents of the “outside” world or society. However, the reality is that he must return to The Village—and not only after but even during his two years in Walden—and he can only conceive of the world he wants to access in relation to the world he attempts to leave or put off. Each consecutive experience is colored by the one before it and nothing is devoid of associations. While in Walden, he makes sense of his surroundings in terms of a prior economy, and when he enters into The Village, he hears the sounds of carts and wheels and human agency as the sounds of birds he recalls from Walden. In essence, he is not disinheriting one world and inheriting another, nor is he separating the two, or abstracting one from the other, he is simply choosing to move back and forth between the two as they exist, turning and returning. The back and forth does reinforce a certain gap between two worlds , where one cannot take away or cover over the other, the sheer movement back and forth enables Thoreau to, as he says the fisherman do, “stitch the world together,”—even if only “in parts.” Furthermore, that the two worlds (natural and human as well as individual/society) cannot be collapsed, eliminated, abstracted, or fully stitched, despite the movement, implicates the human as the agent of their conceived relationship. It also shows such relationship-making to be somewhat arbitrary, futile, and completely unnecessary for nature’s sake. Ammons poetry shows that what underlies relationships are separations or differences –none of which the “whole globe” cannot “belong to.” Separations, then, like relationships are human devices for human ends and language is means for this closed circuit. Perhaps the goal of a “refurbishing” language in ecopoetics is to unstitch and restitch, if only to see the essential materials apart from the self stitching them? If refurbishing language is the poetic action, then what is the poems end? Is it still a poem after the action is complete? Magda referred to the poem as an "artifact" in class today. Perhaps, ecopoetry, at its best, refurbishes language to enact originary experience that will sustain action--what on earth does this look like? And does such a language provide a communicative function or is it merely a demonstration? Thoreau, according to Buell’s essay in ISLE, is an ecopoet insofar as his environmentalism is continuous with his aesthetics. I wonder what this means on paper and if the same is true with Ammons and other ecopoets.