I Blame Romanticism talk from the 2010 Australian Poetry Festival, published 5 Bells Spring 2010 extract:
Extract
4. Ecopoetry
Aesthetics is so much broader than art. Ecopoetry can remind us and teach us the natural aesthetics of birds, clouds, trees, ecosystems. Our current glut of information, mostly sensational, is a trend Wordsworth attacked over 150 years ago, but Albert Borgmann warns that we are losing touch with natural information. And Manuel Castells shares these concerns, “Righting the balance of information and reality is the crucial task. It amounts to the restoration of eminent natural information.” As urban dwellers and buyers of foodstuffs we are losing touch with our ground, visible and invisible (genetic biodiversity, microbial processes, ecosystem functioning and soma-aesthetics for example) often without realising it. Poems work the world, more than mimesis or “passive representationalism, a purely objective recording of incidents in the natural world.” In this International Year of biodiversity, an astonishing number of species are threatened with extinction (25% of mammals), given this and global warming, we need all our tools, the ancient (poetry) and modern (sciences of ecology).
The pastoral, georgic, eclogue and lyric epiphanies fail in our relations with the natural world and deeper understanding of natural processes and our impact on them. The ecological crisis is not just a technological effect, but also a cultural crisis. Ecopoetry is not traditional nature poetry updated; it avoids the pathetic fallacy, seeks the ordinary not the sublime, the world not the word and uses findings of science and other discourses, as well as alert experience. Ecopoetry questions assumptions about poetry, about the world and how we belong. A precondition is what Gary Snyder calls ‘nature literacy’; we must be alert and have knowledge. There is a role for Hughes’ manifesto, written before Crow: "The descriptions will be detailed, scientific in their objectivity and microscopic attentiveness." Strange then that his most famous poem, ‘The thought-fox’ is about writing a poem - there is no fox: ‘The window is starless still; the clock ticks, / The page is printed.’ Focussing on art can lead to the self-referential, ethereal or Orphic. Take Rilke on angels:”The Angel of the Elegies is that being who assures the recognition of a higher order of reality in the invisible.”
Thoreau wrote Walden to alert us to our alienation from nature, and remind us of our power to act at the everyday local level. Ecopoetry is openly political, but as Gramsci wrote in a Prison Notebook: “Everything is political.” Incidentally, he is buried in the Protestant Cemetery furthest from Keats. I distrust the professionalisation of poetry. At Cambridge, Hughes changed from English to Archaeology and Anthropology. I similarly resisted. Poetry is disciplined as a discourse, institution and practice, but a healthy art is free of normative preconceived notions. We can’t leave history, politics or poetry to professionals. Susan Sontag argued ‘Against Interpretation’; Mark Edmundson argues ‘Against Readings’ (i.e. theory). Interpretation makes poems safer; theory makes poems less surprising and transformative. My PhD was a naturalistic Defence of Poetry. The poetic is embedded in language and infuses the everyday. Human creativity under capitalism/consumerism has been displaced, and segregated into creators and consumers, but “All of us are born poets.” There is room for poetry of the everyday, of the unexpected, genre bending, found, fragmentary and occasional - clumsy, improvised, inconsequential, room for Nietzche’s “childish, and blissful art”, as well as ambitious epics.
The aesthetic is performative, a matter of attention both to the poem and to the world. Like our lives, a poem is emergent, interactionist, developmental within its various environments. I write poems to learn what I don’t know or haven’t experienced or felt, and to communicate this.