EcoPoetics: the work of AR Ammons

In trying to focus our discussion on Ecopoetry next Tuesday, I was hoping we could begin with some central ideas to ecopoetry discussed in Leonard Scigaj’s fine book Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets with an emphasis on the work of A.R. Ammons. Let me explain how I’ve laid out the .pdf that Christoph posted on Oncourse in an attempt to help you make sense of it. The first two sections (pgs 1-41) lay some of the foundation of ecocritical/ecopoetic ideas with an emphasis on référance, original experience and the tendency of ecopoets to resist poststructural theories of language (and the insistence that all experience is mediated by language); pgs 83-94 offer critical insight and analysis into the work of A.R. Ammons as an ecopoet, which is followed by a sampling of A.R. Ammons’s poetry including a selection of the book-length poem Garbage, and the poems ”Corson’s Inlet” and “Tracing Out”; the final section of the .pdf includes a poem from W.S. Merwin, Wendell Berry and two from Joanna Klink. In the interest of time, please focus on Ammons’s poetry and the Scigaj exerpts that precede it first—I’d like for this to be our focus on Tuesday. And if we have time, we might focus on the other poems included to see how they are demonstrating/representing the ideas presented in the Scigaj exerpts. Below, I offer some questions to think about:

ECOPOETICS, the fundamental ideas:
In Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction by J. Scott Bryson, he defines ecopoetry in the following way (drawing from Buell, Scigaj and Gifford): “Ecopoetry is 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, thus resulting in a version of nature poetry generally marked by three primary characteristics: a) an emphasis on maintaining an ecocentric perspective that recognizes the interdependent nature of the world (with a devotion to specific places and to the land itself); b) an imperative toward humility in relationships with both human and nonhuman nature; and c) an intense skepticism concerning hyperrationality, a skepticism that usually leads to an indictment of an overtechnologized modern world and a warning concerning the very real potential for ecological catastrophe” (pgs 5-6). How does this definition of what ecopoetics centrally concerns itself with differ from the larger field of ecocriticism and/or how is it similar? How much of this definition suggests a certain level of activisim (that would excite a critic/activist such as Lindholdt)? To what extent do the poems I’ve included here from Ammons, Merwin, Berry and Klink exemplify/demonstrate this definition and its central tenants?

Ecopoets present nature in their poems as a separate and equal other in dialogues meant to include the referential world and offer exemplary models of biocentric perception and behavior, suggesting that both our human origin and the origin of language derive from the natural world and that the natural world is essential for our word-making—this is the idea of référance. What do we make of this? Leo Marx in his essay on Walden suggests that the text is all that there is without the necessity of the referential world (or as Derrida said, “there is nothing outside of the text”), thereby cutting Walden off from the environment. Ecopoets are appalled by this idea and resist it, insisting on, instead, the “self-reflexive recognition of the limits of language” (Scigaj, 38) … my question is, is an ‘original/nature-based’ experience necessary for world- or word-making? To what extent do the poems I’ve selected suggest this necessity and speak to it?

As it says in the section “A Poetry of Referance”, “the ecopoem is a momentary pause for a reconfiguration of perception” (Scigaj, 41) – how then does the ecopoem allow for this reordering of perception? What does that supposed moment of reconfiguration allow for? Is it as Bachelard suggests the opportunity to experience ‘new possibilities’ of language and imagination?

Is the ecopoem too ecocentric? Too first–wave to have any value? What might Buell say about this?

AMMONS’S POETICS:
Ammons once wrote that “poetry is not made out of ‘reality,’ but out of an invented system of signs” and “language, an invented instrument, is not identical with what it points to” – this idea seems to support the ecopoetic position that poststructural language theories have it all wrong, but does this suggest that there can be no outside-text (as Leo Marx insists is the only possibility) because the visible must be intertwined with each poetic act? How does the selection from Garbage speak to these ideas, that is, the necessity of the physical precept or a real referential event?

To complicate things a little, the heavy-weight critic Harold Bloom (a huge fan of Ammons’s work) says that Ammons never wrote ‘nature-poetry’ and that what Ammons calls ‘nature’ is no more natural than Emerson’s Nature was or Whitman’s either and that Ammons is truly a poet of the Romantic Sublime. What is the marked difference here between how Scigaj illustrates Ammons’s work and what Bloom is suggesting? The idea of transcendence that is integral to the sublime – how does that necessitate the natural world or un-necessitate it? Does Ammons’s work suggest transcendence?

“Corson’s Inlet” with its constant flip-flop from internal to referential worlds every few lines seems to underscore the necessity of referentiality (with Marx and Bloom negate). In this poem, Ammons seems to free himself from “separating inside/from outside.” The inner and outer swap around as he permits himself “eddies of meaning” where his “sayings” partake of “swerves of action/like the inlet’s cutting edge.” Can we ascertain from this poem that inner and outer worlds meet in a way that suggests humans are always in experience, not just as dominating exploiters and manipulators, but as partakers of motions and energies that cannot allow for complete/definite separation from the referential real world? Is this poem essentially a poem about direct experience?

Ammons is often posited against poststructural language poets like Hass and Jorie Graham with one of the differences being that Hass and Graham desire to write the gaps between concepts and the referential world—to write an originary language in the flash moment of creation, but some critics suggest that this ends up becoming a safe ‘anthropocentric refuge’ (Scigaj, 115) – is Ammons writing in this gap between concept and referential world or from some other vantage point? And how does the desire for referentiality avoid becoming sheer mimicry?

Note on “Antelope” by Joanna Klink:
In the “notes” section of Klink’s collection of poems, she writes: “Eighty-five antelope fell through thin ice and drowned on January 9, 2004, while moving south across Fort Peck Lake in Valley County, Montana. Antelope have been making the crossing for hundreds of years.