GT's
Essay B: a response to John Shoptaw's essay on ecopoetry
Published
in the January 2016 issue of Poetry (Chicago), John Shoptaw's
essay, 'Why Ecopoetry?' covers some helpful ground in accounting for
this relatively new poetry genre. Mulching over several key plots in
the current veg patch of US poetry, he points out the raised beds of
promise, the fecund spring bursts of colour and scent, the weedy,
gone-to-seed and bolted poems of yesteryear, the fallow ground where
environmental activism has taken hold in language.
By
now you're quite rightly thinking to yourself, 'You've exhausted the
soil of this metaphor, George. Get to the point!' For readers like
me, sceptical of the notion of poetry genres, there's a problem in
how a critical value system emerges through taxonomy. The
unacknowledged legislation in Shoptaw's essay is mainly signalled to
me by the failure to address why there's a need to genrify
ecopoetry.
A
key problem I have with 'ecopoetry' is that it struggles to separate
itself from 'nature poetry.' The same is true in Shoptaw's essay:
ecopoetry is both a subset of, but also distinct from, nature poetry.
Do we really need to say that the world has changed its way of
writing about nature because of climate catastrophe and
environmentalist awareness? Has every nature poem up to the invention
of the genre of ecopoetry been one bland long grass field mowed to a
fine metric, without variation? Every 'ecopoem' is also a 'nature
poem,' isn't it?
Shoptaw's
article starts from a negative response to that last question: an
ecopoem does, and must, challenge its readers to think morally and
politically about how we relate to nature, or relate culture and
nature. And not all nature poetry challenges.
But, but, I counter: every poem referencing 'nature', or,
preferably, human and nonhuman, matter living and nonliving, invites
engagement with the political and moral ramifications of the poet's,
the poem's and our own readerly values with respect to ecological
themes. This is Jameson 101, right? Even the avoidance of natural
imagery suggests a disengagement.
The
article sets out to establish a fourlegsgood/twolegsbad dichotomy to
evaluate poems. But this is critical elitism and does a mischief to
readers. Who's to say we can't think for ourselves, according to our
own terms? Argumentative readers, like me, might prefer to engage
afresh with eco-themes in poetry from any time or place, thinking
about today's particular eco-concerns by comparison. Instead, the
article hands over a badly made flail and tells us to start threshing
wheat from chaff.
A
covert problem behind genrifying ecopoetry is the lack of standards
in environmentalism. To say that you can define good and bad
environmentalism is like saying you could convince the CEO of Shell
to say, “You know, what the heck, I think we will keep it in
the ground!” Sure, there might be some extremes most of us would
agree on, but the question is decided by power structures, not some
distinct moral truth-object you can rub and make wishes come true
with. And I'd rather be allowed to formulate my own opinions on how
successfully any poem meets my highly subjective ecological
standards, than told what is wheat, what is chaff.
Every
nature poem can easily be argued to carry a response to the climatic
conditions, changes, developments, structural and content problems
inherent in the environment at the time of writing. Conscious or
unconscious, right or wrong. Even if the response now is to note
there's a bigger picture than the rough
winds shaking May's darling haws.
John
Clare's poem in the voice of Swordy Well lamenting the enclosure of a
piece of Northampton's commons doesn't need jazzing up by an ecopoet
for today. It's already a version of an environmental stance and
readers aren't so dumb as to be incapable of transposing a 200yr old
poem's message into relevant contexts today, be they digital (as,
e.g. Lewis Hyde noted of the new enclosures), or corporate land grabs
in developing countries.
*
Next part tomorrow!
1 comment:
Cannae wait for 2/5 eh
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