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Beginnings : An Introduction
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
xi Beginnings An Introduction what dew yu write abt abt treez n birds n nature I sd yu ar an idealist she sd iuv bin thru that – bill bissett [untitled poem] “Geoffrey Chaucer made conventional use of bird imagery,” intones the teacher who knows something about Chaucer and somewhat less about birds. – Michael Jenied, Chaucer’s Checklist What follows is a book in which I make a case for the value of critical attention across disciplinary lines, for the value of reading ecocritically . Though the work of Don McKay forms a central part of these essays, and poetry and poetics more generally receive a great deal of attention, the book as a whole argues for the capacity of ecocriticism to read across genres and disciplines, to listen to many different stories, and to speak/write polyphonically.1 It assumes, that is, that more than one discipline provides evidence, more than one story offers knowledge, and more than one writing style—more than one voice—expresses ideas. My strategy relies on two interconnecting focuses: one is an ecocriticism that refers to the language and the epistemological contributions of science (especially the life sciences);2 the other is the biological and ecological specificity evident in McKay’s writing, particularly as it relates to a tradition of English-language nature poetry and to a phenomenological response to the world. But my strategy also announces a scepticism that is meant to question the value of unchecked anthropocentric behaviour and reading practices. If Northrop Frye’s focus on Canadian poets’ “terror in regard to nature” (Conclusion xii • Beginnings 342) and Margaret Atwood’s claim that“Canadian writers as a whole do not trust Nature”(49) indicate anthropocentric as opposed to ecocentric models of Canadian identity formation, then McKay’s poetry and poetics operate in contradistinction to these progenitors of Canadian literary criticism. By looking back to the British and American poetry that informed much early Canadian poetry and continues to inform the work of someone like McKay, I hope to reveal the dynamics at work in those poems that clearly voice a simultaneous indebtedness to and suspicion of what has come before. I draw attention to the science and philosophy of ecology in the same spirit of connectedness. Poetry does not get written in a temporal, political, or epistemological vacuum. If science gets taken up as a subject in literary criticism, it tends to occupy a contrary position.“It is never what a poem says which matters,”writes I.A. Richards in Poetries and Sciences (1970), “but what it is. The poet is not writing as a scientist” (33). Frye helped devise a modern literary criticism by comparing nascent work in arts and humanities to earlier developments in science. “Science learns more and more about the world as it goes on: it evolves and improves,” he claims in The Educated Imagination (1963). “But literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model called the classic. Literature doesn’t evolve or improve or progress” (7). Nevertheless, both Richards and Frye think that writing about such perceived differences is a worthwhile practice, that, indeed, the places where science and literature meet reveal commonalities as well as differences. I offer these responses to science by literary critics to remind that “science” as a term has necessarily been vague while being rhetorically dominant. Neither Richards nor Frye defines science—Richards considers such a task to be“foolish”(8); Frye prefers listing examples of scienti fic fields, of which even literary criticism qualifies (Anatomy 8). While I understand the difficulty of accurately defining science and rather like the idea of identifying “a scientific element in criticism” (Anatomy 8), I want to clarify how I use the term in this book. When I refer to science, I refer to an inclusive epistemological and political entity: scientific ideas, language, and methodologies; the history and philosophy of science (more particularly of ecology and ornithology); the inventories of natural history; and the current taxonomies that enable access (through field guides and popular writing) to the material world. Such a broad, still somewhat vague definition is necessary , since one goal of this book is to develop a strategy for getting closer to the source material for ecopoetry, including field guides, scientific writing, and, in the case of Don McKay, birds themselves. [3.239.59.193] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:02 GMT) An Introduction • xiii Because the bulk...