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Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets (review)

Sustainable Poetry discusses A. R. Ammons,Wendell Berry,W. S.Merwin, and Gary Snyder in the ecocritical terms promoted in recent years by John Elder (in Imagining the Earth), by Lawrence Buell (in The Environmental Imagination), and by the essays collected in The Ecocriticism Reader (ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm). Scigaj adheres closely to the habits of mind established by earlier ecocritics; he begins as they have begun by charging theory, especially poststructuralism, with indifference to nature: ‘‘De Man’s lofty theory . . . never knelt on the greenswards of life.’’ This charge might be valid if kneeling on greenswards were something theory is meant to do. The ecocritical polemic is often off-point and skewed in this way, as when Scigaj complains about ‘‘the fashionably hermetic treatment of poetry as a selfcontained linguistic construct whose ontological ground is language theory.’’ Surely poetry treated ‘‘as a self-contained linguistic construct’’ is not thought to have an ‘‘ontological ground.’’ Phenomenology provides Scigaj’s counterweight to the theories he dislikes: De Man’s, Derrida’s, Lacan’s, and Wittgenstein’s, with the latter especially undeserving of the harsh treatment it receives. Scigaj’s tone is righteous because he believes that Merleau-Ponty trumped the skeptics one and all. If so, they seem not to have noticed. Scigaj’s strategy here is familiar: ecocritics objecting to the epistemological maunderings of contemporary theory often pitch upon the also-rans of philosophy as an alternative. Ecocritics seem eager to rejoin battles over language’s referential, realistic powers (Scigaj celebrates poetic ‘‘moments of référance’’ in rebuttal of Derrida). The first casualty of these battles is the ecocritical project’s coherence, as when Scigaj argues, contradictorily, that (after Merleau-Ponty) humans are a part of nature and so must treat nature as ‘‘a separate and equal other.’’ That would seem to require that humans be in two places at once. Again like other ecocritics, Scigaj uses dated notions borrowed from 1960sstyle ecology, notions of the balance and harmony or ‘‘homeostasis’’ of ecosystems, to support his arguments. The fact that ecocritics seem unaware that ecology currently emphasizes not the systematic character but the patchiness and the continual, chaotic disruption of natural environments casts doubts on their claims to be doing ‘‘interdisciplinary’’ work. Scigaj organizes the chapter he devotes to each poet as an overview of that poet’s embrace of ‘‘ecological’’ themes throughout his career. These overviews are necessarily a bit vague (specific points are often supported only