Sustainable Poetry: Four Ecopoets by Leonard Scigaj (review)

ture, La Regle dujeu). This "little treatise," as the author humbly describes his project, sets out to clarify the functioning ofhuman thought and, as a result, reflects most interestingly on his own particular conceptions. ¿& Leonard Scigaj. Sustainable Poetry: Four Ecopoets. Lexington: University Press ofKentucky, 1999. 31 Ip. Anthony Flinn Eastern Washington University LeonardScigaj's SustainablePoetry: FourEcopoets, is a thoughtful, meticulous, wellwrought study ofWendell Berry, A.R. Animons, WS. Merwin, and Gary Snyder. It is also, to both its credit and detriment, an angry and impassioned book. In its effort to explore and promote the work ofimportant poets who try to re-connect the reader to the natural world, it is persuasive, even compelling. However, to reach those poets he finds the need to trample on the efforts ofpoets and critics whose focus is not on nature but on the mind's contact with itself, as well as on language as subject. Scigaj ultimately damns this latter school, most commonly identified with the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets andpostmodern critics such as CharlesAltieri and Marjorie Perloff, implicating their casts ofmind in the planets sorry ecological condition. That is, because non-ecopoets see themselves as separate from and outside nature, Scigaj argues that they abdicate their responsibility to the world they inhabit, ignoring the complex truth that nature includes us all and so must be afforded the same inherent worth, the same subjecthood, as language-wielding humans. Though the bulk ofthe book dwells on the work ofthe four ecopoets, the core of his argument resides in the opening theoretical chapters, which set forth the conflict between Derridean DifféranceandScigaj's moral and aesthetic touchstone, Refiérame. Deconstruction and its postmodern heirs are anathema to ecopoetry because Différancepermits us to deny the knowability ofnature. Iflanguage, therefore , evokes not the presence of nature but its absence, it can provide access to nature but only to itself, to the texts we construct to substitute for that access. No access to nature means no responsibility nor culpability for its decay. Refiérame, by contrast, is that epiphanic moment when one sees that language is "a reified, limited setofabstract rules and concepts, a productofhuman logic and reason, whose major function is to point us outward [emphasis his], toward that infinitely less limited referential reality of nature" (38). By diminishing the power and consequence oflanguage to a finite set ofrules, Scigaj grants nature, by contrast, a kind ofsublimity, however guardedly expressed as "infinitely less limited" than mental SPRING 2000 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW # 139 constructs. He wants us to embrace poetry that can reawaken a sense ofawe at the face ofthe nature. Language, then, ought not to be the subject ofpoetry, but subordinated , a tool: "For ecopoets, language is an instrument [emphasis mine] that the poet continually refurbishes to articulate his originary experience in nature" (29). However, Scigaj's claim for language's instrumentality is short-lived. For to evoke that "originary experience in nature," that Edenic, pre-nominal state of being, it is necessarily to summon up a faith as passionately as a mystic seeks a colloquy with God. In drawing upon the work of phenomenologist MerleauPonty , echoing rather than interpreting him, Scigaj refers to "a prereflective moment ofperceptual faith" in which "we float in the general sea of being of flesh anonymously sensing itselfthrough the five senses" (70). For such a moment to come into being, however, it must do so as an act ofwill, a desire, not because there exists an apriori condition to which language can connect us. How can we know, in fact, whether or not it is language itselfthat creates the "moment ofperceptual faith"?And how, too, can we even makesense ofthe exquisite impressionism ofphenomenological language such as this without responding to it as language : Language for Merleau-Ponty is "another flesh" that emanates from dehiscence and speaks not only the voices ofhumans but the sounds and colors ofthe referential world from which it grew. Language develops from the dehiscence or folding back on itselfofthe flesh ofthe world. (70) I would argue that this language creates the state it seems only to refer to, and thus that Refiérame is more desire than fact. Moreover, Scigaj's use...