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Ecotone Four: Field Trips
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
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215 ecotone four Long pause. Well? Then that depopulated silence. That darker dark. – Don McKay, “Deep Time Encounters,” P 35 FIELD TRIPS Pause. Meditation. These related acts often occur in a space between. Pausing in the ecotone—a concise if incomplete description of what BC has been attempting—readies mind and body for encounters that have the potential to lead away from comfortable assumptions about the world. The pause of meditation attentive to the planet’s cadences, to the rhythmic patterns of land- and cityscape, requires deliberate focus not unlike the cautious multivalence of much ecocritical work. Stopping at a crosswalk on the way to the office, minus headphones as accompaniment, BC might notice how robins’ liquid trills insinuate themselves into an urban soundscape of water dripping from a nearby eavestrough, car brakes squeaking, dogs barking, buskers busking, sirens moving through the city like aural spider silk. He might experience a hill’s incline differently when wearing sandals instead of proper walking shoes, and the subtle shift in muscle tension once the ground evens out and reveals a panoramic view of the harbour. He might associate that view, the salty smell of ocean, the slight burn in his calves with the sound of his breathing and the way his heart beats in his ears for a few seconds while he stops to look around. The book sits on the desk. Light and shadow combine in Robert Banderheyden’s cover photograph to reveal a fossilized trilobite that lived approximately 540 million years ago. Paradoxides, the fossil and the book, rest uneasily as works of art “demanding to be read” (McKay P 40). 216 • Ecotone Four BC wonders about the way McKay’s interest in birds and avian poetics shifted to geology and geopoetry. How alike might these seemingly unlike focuses be? A challenge confronts BC while studying a poet in the midst of his most prolific phase: how to accommodate subtle (or not-so-subtle) shifts in McKay’s poetics while maintaining a focus on the announced topic. In both Deactivated West 100 and Strike/Slip, McKay began articulating his geopoetics, a poetry and poetics interested in how geologic forces, and humans’ capacity to comprehend geologic time, facilitate thoughtful responses to the more-than-human world. McKay borrows the term “geopoetry” from Harry H. Hess, a geologist who developed a theory of plate tectonics. In “Geopoetry” (DW 42–43), an entry in the prose poem/abecedarian “Between Rock and Stone: A Geopoetic Alphabet,” McKay writes about Hess’s request that other geologists “concede many suppositions in order to entertain the idea that seafloor spreading, driven by magma rising continuously from the mantle, accounts for both the movement of plates and the surprising youth of the ocean floor” (42). “Geopoetry,” writes McKay, was a “concession to sceptics,” a term that acknowledged the speculative nature of Hess’s theory.1 But in the wake of Hess’s theories having been proven, McKay wonders about the potential for geopoetry’s renewed relevance during a time when human arrogance threatens to push planet Earth beyond its capacity to accommodate us.“What better term,” he asks,“for those moments of pure wonder when we contemplate even the most basic elements of planetary dwelling, and our words fumble in their attempts to do them justice” (42). Geopoetry extends the paradoxical notion that poetry clatters, that words’“greatest eloquence lies in their failure” (DW 68). It resonates, too, with what McKay identifies in his foreword to A. F. Moritz’s Early Poems (2002) as the poet’s “profound anarchism, which denies the usual structures of knowing in the interests of opening a wider, phenomenal, sense of the real” (“Shipwreck” 14).2 By extension, therefore, McKay has been writing geopoetry for years; but he had not articulated it as a key aspect of his poetics until 2005.3 As he does with “Twinflower,” McKay uses poetry as a “critique of the Romantic idea of the sympathy of all things” and revises the Romantic paradigm rather than simply repudiating or rejecting it (Leckie 127–28). While his project is neither to support scientific practices uncritically nor to challenge them, much of his poetry enables readers to do both should they choose to follow the trail of referents he blazes. The information science provides—information about how three types of faults are [34.228.7.237] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:28 GMT) Field Trips • 217 produced by differing tectonic movements, for example—sprouts...