Unnatural Ecopoetics: Unlikely Spaces in Contemporary Poetry by Sarah Nolan (review)

Can text provide a window? Can words beg deeper engagement with a world committed to “the assumed parallel between ‘eco’ and ‘natural’” (122)? In this work of fourth wave ecocriticism, Sarah Nolan says indeed, they can. But, she adds, one must imagine a space where the word natureculture exists. Her recently published Unnatural Ecopoetics: Unlikely Spaces in Contemporary Poetry moves readers quickly and directly into the experience of natureculture—a term taken from scholar Donna Haraway—the place where the worlds of nature and culture “implo[de],” building on “material ecocriticism’s proposed breakdown of recognizable boundaries between natural and human spaces, objects, thoughts, and agencies” (4). Using a Frank O’Hara lunch poem as introduction, Nolan works from the foundations of ecopoetics to differentiate ecopoetry from ecopoetics, the former with a nearly exclusive focus on poetry about nature. Unnatural ecopoetics offers a textual experience of natureculture, presented initially through O’Hara’s poem about a vibrant, pulsating city at lunch hour—a meshing of the material and nonmaterial world.

For Nolan, unnatural ecopoetics delineates “extrapoetic forms and self-reflexive commentary” which counter “the failures of words to accurately express material reality” (4). This failure “foreground[s] naturecultures within the distinctly textual space […] where the agentic power of the material and nonmaterial world are revealed as equals” (4). Definitions of material and nonmaterial are critical to understanding her core premise—“material” referring to “all physical objects and places, whether man-made or occurring naturally in the world” and “nonmaterial,” representing “invisible, emotional, historical, political, and personal elements that influence the speaker’s experience of space and translation of it to the textual space of the poem” (4). Her use of unnatural poetry is grounded in a merger of the material and non-material to reveal the ways which “physical, cultural, technological and social shifts” have “broken down the nature/culture binary”—resulting in a textual space where this combining of elements can be experienced (10). Although natureculture is not a new idea, Nolan has introduced another layer of ecocritical complexity by using the natureculture perspective to analyze purposefully self-reflexive, unnatural poetic texts.

After Scott Slovic’s forward, which establishes contextual grounding for the book, Nolan proceeds through a substantive history of ecopoetics and new ecocritical theory before providing introductory material for the following four chapters. This organization is commendable, as the subject matter is dense and an historical perspective is warranted. The care with which she has arranged her material shows consideration for readers.

Unnatural ecopoetics offers four distinct poetic encounters with her unnatural ecocritical analysis. Beginning with perhaps the most obvious example of connection to the unnatural environment, A.R. Ammons’s Garbage takes the Florida trash heap off 1–95 as its subject, thereby “conflat[ing] the human and the natural worlds” (26). Arguing that the trash heap represents a “space of new creations,” Nolan’s critical analysis “recognizes both the role of nature in the garbage dump” and, specifically, “the alterations that occur as it fuses with cultural debris” (34). This reading ultimately reveals the role of language as an altered version of itself, having entered the trash heap and emerging “covered with the detritus of decay, filth, and dirt” (34). By focusing on the textual spaces created through Ammons’s self-reflexive commentary, Nolan argues that the poem fuses naturalcultural elements through its “persistent limitations of language” (37).

The chapter on Ly Hejinian’s My Life explores the poet’s life experiences, while the following chapter on Susan Howe’s The Midnight provides “middle space”—the latter a mix of culture, history, environment and genealogy. Hejinian, a widely acknowledged language poet, offers a self-aware “express[ion] [of] the complexity of real-word experiences,” an idea that Nolan argues “lies at the core of ecopoetics” (50). Howe’s poetic expression fuses an environment shaped by elements of landscape, history, and culture, creating a “middle ground” ripe for unnatural poetics (80). Nolan’s fourth and final poetic analysis of Kenneth Goldsmith’s Seven...