| Informed by current environmental theory and cultural geography, this dissertation examines a new and emerging area of poetics: ecological poetry. It does so by historicizing the mode and setting down three defining characteristics that distinguish it from traditional nature poetry: an ecological and biocentric perspective on the world; a humility in regards to our relationship with nature; and an intense skepticism concerning hyper-rationality. The project's central argument is simple and two-fold: (1) that as a result of an ongoing, fundamental shift in the way humans view ourselves in relation to the rest of the world, a new type of nature poetry has begun to appear over the last half-century or so, one that can more accurately be called "ecological poetry"; and (2) that the primary motivation behind this new poetry is a paradoxical desire to create place---by which I mean making a conscious and concerted effort to know the more-than-human world around us---and to value space---by which I mean recognizing the extent to which that very world is ultimately unknowable. After setting up this theoretical framework, based on the work of cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, the dissertation explores the way this desire to make place and value space is manifested in three contemporary ecological poets: Berry, Harjo, and Oliver. What we discover through this analysis is that the place-space framework offers the means better to analyze, critique, and compare contemporary ecological poets.;In addition, the framework offers an alternative to the civilization-wilderness dichotomy recent theorists have found so problematic, one that allows us to discuss human/non-human interaction without reinforcing the nature-culture separation, thus avoiding much of the dualism inherent in the traditional terminology. It is a re-visioning of our relationship with the world, one that supplants the us-it dichotomy and replaces it with a perspective that views life as more of a continuum made up not of two opposites but of a wide variety of experiences and interactions, some of which help us feel at home, as though we know our world, and some that help us see that we do not, and in many ways cannot, feel anything more than visitors in that world. |
