Ecopoeisis

In an era of melting ice caps and a partially ratified Kyoto Treaty, Angus Fletcher's daring claim that some poems are complex environments into which the reader enters might seem at first glance a form of special pleading. The distinguished critic's concept gains traction when we grasp his central conviction that by living, however temporarily, within such horizon-bound verbal constructions, we not only recognize the complexity of their various and interconnected parts but stand some chance finally of escaping the ontological impasse between anthropocentric and ecocentric perceptions of the besieged planet. The kind of literature theorized in Fletcher's book "seeks expressions of various kinds of complete orders, as in an ecosystem," and these systems ultimately are "quite the opposite of an ideological fiction, which would derive poetic elements from fundamental axioms, obeying laws of consistent logical derivation" (226). Like Fletcher's book itself, the poetry commented here upon is noteworthy for the restorative generosity it promises: "The artistic aim" shared by Fletcher's poets "is to enable the reader, for a moment, to live inside the poem" (196).

At the center of the book's argument is what the critic terms the "environment-poem," a primarily American invention (though the fen-wandering English poet John Clare stands as a nominal godfather to the critic's tradition) worth celebrating for its Presocratic resistance to totalizing ideas. Environment-poems are not those familiar Romantic rhapsodies to a natural world that always seem to end up more imaginative projection and prophetic wish-fulfillment than careful description; environment-poems are environments. The vivid disarray and prodigious particularity of such poems—an aspect the late Murray Krieger considered of signal importance to aesthetic language's always-fragile ability to withstand more coercive forms of discourse—serves here in its accumulative procedure to conjure a surrounding wherein ideas are always "subordinate to things" (30), "where drama and story are not the issue, where emotion is subordinate to the presentation of the aggregate relations of all participants, rather than the striking enhancement of singular or single heroes or heroines" (123). While this seemingly new theory of poetry imagines aesthetic language as the closest human approximation to natural environments, Fletcher's book generates its greatest intellectual frisson by the inspired triangulation of his exemplary poets—Clare, Whitman, and Ashbery—who are shown in their various manners to write out of a sense of the overwhelming particulars of nature. If this impulse arguably results more from temperamental imperatives than any putative eco-sensitivity (Whitman especially seems torn between nature as soul and nature as spatial environment), the poems Fletcher chooses to read nevertheless achieve new stature and depths, illuminating his claim that such ecopoeisis withstands rigid ideological positioning or the equally immobilizing tether of allegory. These environment poets accomplish their respective feats primarily by according the natural world a reciprocal relationship in the making of poems, by heeding its directives and claims on the attention and by attempting to honor its formal qualities mimetically in the act of composition.

To grasp just how iconoclastic Fletcher's critical procedure is, we might compare it to the far more normative practice of Harold Bloom, whose hermeneutic emphasis invariably focalizes the heroic agon of poetic consciousness in its struggle to subdue the world (and the self) to prophetic (and often apocalyptic) vision. This vigorous anthropocentrism, rooted in Cartesian epistemology and authorized by various forms of individualism, undoubtedly energizes the vocational and visionary emergence of Bloom's poets. But it may also be understood to participate in a romantic tradition Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe see as uncomfortably proximate to a "transgressive desire" to "undo the West's economic and cultural order"—a desire that in its most extreme extensions has resulted in correlative acts of terrorism. Regardless of whether Fletcher would extend his argument this far (I suspect he wouldn't), he does espouse a newly imagined tradition in which the quest for sublime transcendence or heroic self-becoming is demoted...