237 Notes Notes to Beginnings 1 Not everyone agrees on what ecocriticism is or whether the term—concise and functional though it is—sufficiently encompasses the ideas and practices that resonate in comparable names: environmental literary criticism, ecologically oriented/attuned/ conscious criticism, sustainable poetics, ecopoetics, green literary studies, evolutionary literary criticism (evocriticism, for short), ecofeminism, practical ecocriticism. Further, a critical mass of theory offers possibilities for individuals to focus, to (re)name, to fashion working definitions: Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm’s foundational anthology (and Glotfelty’s Introduction, which includes the concise definition of ecocriticism as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment”[xviii]); Laurence Buell’s trilogy of American ecocriticism; Greg Garrard’s Ecocriticism; numerous anthologies that seek to push the emerging discipline’s boundaries, take it farther afield, highlight its relevance to earlier times and literatures (Milton, Shakespeare, the Bible), not to mention other disciplines and cultures—all offer explanations and extrapolations on ecocriticism that render any attempt to summarize too cumbersome and, what is more, unnecessary and redundant. Among the numerous ecocritical publications are many that do not succumb to the urge to define—studies, in other words, that simply get down to the work of ecocriticism. I’m thinking of John Elder’s Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature (1985) and Reading the Mountains of Home (1998); W. H. New’s Land Sliding: Imagining Space, Presence, and Power in Canadian Writing (1997); Laurie Ricou’s Arbutus/Madrone Files: Reading the Pacific Northwest (2002) and Salal: Listening for the Northwest Understory (2007); Jenny Kerber’s Writing in Dust: Reading the Prairie Environmentally (2010); and scores of articles that offer readings of texts and cultural practice that fit nicely, if uneasily , into the wonderfully amorphous field of ecocriticism. 2 Broadly, I draw upon natural history and taxonomy, and I often refer to science in general when setting up a cross-disciplinary reading of a poem. While my appeals to natural history and taxonomy serve as much to satisfy my interest in language as to fulfill an ecocritical imperative, the language I appropriate tends to be highly specialized. Natural history, though in many ways still a thriving discipline, occupies a historical place in the trajectory of Western science; taxonomy represents a particularized language that enables natural historians and scientists alike to identify and study organisms with minimum confusion. An awareness of individual species taxonomies, of the function of the Latin binomials attached to all identified species of flora and fauna, indicates a critical interest in, if not utter acquiescence to, a system of organizing the world that seems foreign to most literary critics. That said, I do not devote much space to critiquing science and scientific language. As Glen Love writes,“If science has been employed for harmful and 238 • Notes destructive purposes, then that needs to be recognized and challenged as bad policy, not as an excuse for attacking ‘science’” (“Science” 71). Instead, I offer an experiment in listening to what scientists have to say about their encounters with avian, animal, botanical worlds. 3 “Birder,” as George Levine comments, is “the noun birders use to describe themselves. There is a related verb,‘to bird,’which I use a lot, and there’s a participial noun built from that verb,‘birding,’ which is what most of the essays in this book are about”(Lifebirds 3). 4 At times throughout this book, I find it necessary to refer to a poetics or aesthetics as uniquely McKay’s, that is, to deploy a proper adjective to indicate an association with him. For most writers, the adjectival form rolls off the tongue without the need to qualify the inflection: Derridean, Dickensian,Whitmanesque, and even Frygian have entered the critical vocabulary. For McKay, however, the inflection proved more complicated. I finally settled on McKavian rather than McKagian or McKayesque; I like the “avian” echo—its musicality and precision given McKay’s interests in birds and birding. 5 This is not to suggest that McKay is particularly elusive as a subject. Indeed, he has always seemed to make himself visible by giving readings and talks, has made himself available by taking up writer-in-residence positions and mentoring writers, and has engaged in discussion by giving interviews and chatting amiably with graduate students and aspiring writers. Given this openness, it was impossible for me not to have encountered McKay at some point during the writing of...