Poetry, Ecology and "Ecopoetry," Whatever That Is

I began writing poetry out of a sense that language as it is typically deployed in the United States has become deformed, words have become bent by misuse in advertising, politics and cultural hyperbole, the economy of our verbal and written interactions has become impoverished and hollowed. Much of this I think is due to the mediated quality of most of the language we consume. To find out what is happening in Afghanistan we watch TV or listen to the radio. We read articles about books, music and politics. So much of what we ingest is indirect and secondhand, the veracity of which is not easily evaluated. Most of our knowledge of the world comes not from the thing itself, we are not there, but from someone whose integrity, good faith, intelligence and beliefs in most cases we cannot know and in nearly all others we will not bother to check because who has the time for that. So much is taken on faith. And yet this creates a disconnect that is most of the time ignored. We carry on with political debates about war and cultural debates about literature, necessarily, but without regard for the fact that most of our "facts" are perhaps not so factual. This conversation possesses a life of its own, creates its own terms and mostly refers only to itself and the facts it has accepted by invisible consensus. It becomes difficult to change or introduce new facts because of its very nature as a fact-producing system. Hence the creation of "conventional wisdom" in politics and culture and the weird box that separates the so-called acceptable or responsible interventions from everything else. It goes without saying that the institutions that decide what is acceptable and not are those with the most power and money.

This is a long way of saying that one of the ways out of this trap that I've discovered in my relatively short time on Earth, one of the areas of experience yet to be entirely swallowed by the machine is the wilderness, and I've become interested in how I could connect the lived experience of being outside (in the multiple senses of out of doors or in the mountains/deserts/plains and in a place where the mental categories we grow up into are shown so obviously to be as petty as they are) to connect this experience to a critique of language along the lines of the one in the previous paragraph. And to do this in poetry. Gary Snyder is the trailblazer on this route, at least among late-20th c. Americans (of course there are others, back to Thoreau and beyond the time and shores of N. America), but there has apparently been a recent generalized interest in conceiving an "eco-poetics" that incorporates an environmental critique into an aesthetic vision. Here and here are two short posts that attempt to stake out ground for such a project. I've yet to write my own manifesto, though I do believe any ecologically-based poetry must be rooted in specific locations rather than be floating in an atmosphere of vague statements of environmental ethics.