On the house that ecopoetics builds

In a note to ‘Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another’ (2003), Juliana Spahr explains her antipathy to nature poetry and how she discovered the alternative ‘tradition of ecopoetics’. My essay ‘Juliana Spahr's “Ecopoetics”’ argues that Spahr has been writing in this tradition ever since, though the substantial innovations that she brings to this tradition are largely unexamined. I investigate Spahr's radical reinvention of the refrain with which she interrogates the ecologies and politics of habitat construction, and the processes by which ‘we’ – an autonomous everybody – make an inhabitable world for ourselves. Combining a formal analysis of the poetic refrain with philosophical components of Deleuze and Guattari's territorial refrain, I examine the ecopoetic framework and critical effects of two of Spahr's most innovative poems: the above mentioned ‘Things’ and ‘Unnamed Dragonfly Species’ (2011).Keywords: EcopoeticsecologypoliticsrefrainterritoryView correction statement:Corrigendum AcknowledgementsI am most grateful to Lauren Berlant for first drawing my attention to the poetry of Juliana Spahr.Notes1 Jonathan Skinner, ‘Editor's statement’ Ecopoetics, 1 (Winter) (2001), pp. 5–8, 7 (http://ecopoetics.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/eco1.pdf).2 ‘Environmentalist’ culture has ignored most developments in poetics since Ezra Pound. The literature of this largely Anglo-Americans tradition (which can be found in many a Freshman composition reader) may be ‘eco’ (especially when it references an admirable praxis or, as it were, ‘walks its talk’), but it certainly comes up short in ‘poetics’ – demonstrating overall, for a movement whose scientific mantra is ‘biodiversity’, an astonishing lack of diversity in approaches to culture, to the written and spoken word’ (ibid.).3 Ibid. The masthead of Ecopoetics reads: ‘Ecopoetics is published seasonally and dedicated to exploring the creative-critical edges between writing (with an emphasis on poetry) and ecology (the theory and praxis of deliberate earthlings)’ (ibid., p. 2).4 Ibid., p. 7.5 Contributors to Ecopoetics include such notable proponents of Language Poetry and Poetics as Bruce Andrews, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Jerome Rothenberg, Rachel Blau Duplessis, Joan Retallack, Marcella Durand, Tina Darragh, and Peter Larkin. ‘This is hardly a poetic revolution’, Skinner qualifies. ‘Examples of sustained investigations of nature, and disciplinary crossing, can be found throughout ‘postmodern’ poetry – from Lorine Niedecker, through Charles Olson or Larry Eigner, to contemporary poets such as TA Clark, Christopher Dewdney, and Cecilia Vicuña. The work is out there; ecopoetics merely hopes to offer a site open to the contradictions such work often willingly engages and embodies’ (ibid., p. 6). See also: Brenda Ijima, ed., The Ecolanguage Reader (Lebanon, NH: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs and Nightboat Books, 2010); The Capilano Review 3.16 (Winter 2010), sp. issue on ‘Ecologies’; James Englehardt, ‘The language habitat: An ecopoetry manifesto’, Octopus Magazine, 9 (2009) (http://www.octopusmagazine.com/Issue09/engelhardt.htm).6 Juliana Spahr is an American poet, autobiographer, critic, and editor. She completed her doctoral research under the supervision of Charles Bernstein, acclaimed language poet and literary scholar. Her publications include Well Then There Now (2011) [poetry]; The Transformation (2007) [autobiography]; This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (2005) [poetry]; Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (2001) [criticism]; Fuck You–Aloha–I Love You (2001) [poetry], Response (1996) [poetry]; Nuclear (1994) [poetry].7 Juliana Spahr, Well Then There Now (Jaffrey, NH: Black Sparrow Press, 2011), pp. 52–72, 69. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text as WT. The quote is from Spahr's notes to the poem ‘Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another’, first published by Palm Press (2003).8 Juliana Spahr, ‘Unnamed Dragonfly Series’ Ecopoetics, 2 (Fall) (2002), pp. 146–149.9 ‘Overall the range of themes seems governed by an edge between what one might call Thoreauvian and Emersonian tendencies. Do we sound the pond or do we vision our will, examine the tangled bank or the locomotive. As Spahr has asked, is it more ecopoetic to write of the bird or to write of the bulldozer about to destroy the bird's habitat?’ Jonathan Skinner, Ecopoetics Blog (June 18, 2010), pp. 1–27, 6 (http://ecopoetics.blogspot.ca/).10 Juliana Spahr, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), p. 67.11 ‘The arrival to someplace differently’ is a refrain of Spahr's poem ‘Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another’ (WT, pp. 52–71).12 Jonathan Skinner, ‘Small fish big pond: lines on some ecopoetics’ Angelaki, 14.2 (August) (2009), pp. 111–113, 111.13 Jonathan Skinner, ‘Thoughts on Things: Poetics of the Third Landscape’ in Ijima (ed.), The Ecolanguage Reader, pp. 9–51.14 To advance the idea and practice of ecopoetics as ‘entropology’, Skinner invokes the thinking of Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, G.W. Leibniz, Claude Lévi-Strauss, David Quammen, Raymond Williams, as well as that of language poets Charles Bernstein and Barrett Watten. The intense, varied, and evolving interplay between poetry and theory in Skinner's work typifies that of ecopoetics in general. Spahr's ecopoetics displays an engagement with these and many other thinkers, including Deleuze and Guattari, but above all, with such post-colonial thinkers as Homi Bhabha, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Greg Dening, Epeli hau'ofa, Haunani-Tay Task, and Rob Wilson, to name a few.15 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 312.16 Ibid., p. 314. ‘The territory-house system transforms a number of organic functions – sexuality, procreation, aggression, feeding. But this transformation does not explain the appearance of the territory and the house; rather it is the other way around: the territory implies the emergence of pure sensory qualities, of sensibilia that cease to be merely functional and become expressive features, making possible a transformation of functions’ [Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 183].17 Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly illustrate their concept of the territorial refrain with reference to the Australian bowerbird or ‘stagemaker’ [Sceneopoeetes denitirostris] (ibid., pp. 315, 331, 336). See also What Is Philosophy?, p. 184.18 What Is Philosophy?, pp. 183–186.19 Elsewhere I use Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the refrain to investigate the ecological thinking that art and literature instigate and mobilise as distinct from science (see Dianne Chisholm, ‘The art of ecological thinking: literary ecology’ ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 18.3 (Summer) (2011), pp. 569–593. Critical studies in ecopoetics, ecocriticism, and humanities-based ecology, more generally, have recently begun to invoke the work of Deleuze and Guattari (see, e.g. Bernd Herzogenrath, ed., An Unlikely Alliance: Thinking Environments with Deleuze and Guattari [Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008]; Deleuze/Guattari and Ecology [London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009]; Dianne Chisholm, ed., ‘Deleuze and Guattari's ecophilosophy’ Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, 15 (Winter) (2007) http://www.rhizomes.net/issue15/index.html.20 Spahr cites Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) in Everybody's Autonomy (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2001), p. 48; and The Transformation, p. 221.21 Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, eds., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 1018.22 Ibid.23 Ibid.24 Ibid.25 See, e.g. Maureen N. McLane, ’Review of Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone with Lungs’ Zoland Poetry, 1 (2006), n.p.26 What Is Philosophy?, p. 187. Deleuze and Guattari stress deframing or the undoing of the refrain (‘frame’, ‘house’, ‘refrain’, ‘habitat’ are used interchangeably) as the immanent process, whereby chaos and territory encounter and affect one another on an ever-changing plane of composition or plane of Nature.27 Selections of the poem were previously published in Ecopoetics (as noted above) and The Poker. The entire poem first appears in Well Then There Now (72–93).28 ‘Acknowledgments and Other Information’ (WT, preliminaries). The cover of Well Then There Now features four rows of four Audubon-like drawings of different bird species in separate frames.29 Deleuze and Guattari speak of bodies in Spinozist terms of longitude and latitude. ‘Latitude is made up of intensive parts falling under a capacity, and longitude of extensive parts falling under a relation’ (original italics), A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 256–257. The territorial refrain is a body that has the intensive capacity to change (to affect and be affected) and the power to compose relations with other bodies (to grow and expand a weave – or rhizome – of connective symbiosis).30 Spahr, The Transformation, p. 197. A passage in The Transformation repeats some of the events of the poem, with some variation. For instance, the daffodils are sent from ‘Stuttgart’ instead of ‘Rotterdam’.31 Intensive cartography is an emerging field of geography inspired by Deleuze and Guattari. See Mark Bonta and John Protevi, Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2004). Also John Protevi, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).32 ‘Acknowledgments and Other Information’ (WT).33 Mitchell Thomashow argues that high-speed internet connections enhance viewers’ ‘biospheric perception’ on a global scale but diminish it on a local scale by distorting the ‘slow’ pace of events in the real time of places, where people actually live [Bringing the Biosphere Home: Learning to Perceive Global Environmental Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 137–162]. In contrast, Spahr frames into view both the local and the global dimensions and trajectories of environmental change, and with redoubled existential acuity.34 I allude to Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Heise explains this conjunction of senses as the effect of ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘cosmopolitianism’ (pp. 50–67).35 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 311–323.36 Juliana Spahr, Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another (Long Beach, CA: Palm Press, 2003).37 See Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, pp. 16–27, and A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 75–110.38 Spahr analyses recent translation and multilingual poetics that minorise English and other colonial languages in Pacific multicultural literature in ‘Connected Disconnection and Localized Globalism in Pacific Multilingual Literature’ Boundary 2 (31:3) (2004), pp. 1–100.39 Sphar's use of ‘patterns from the math that shows up in plants’ is not entirely improbable. Canadian poet and translator Robert Bringhurst's uses ‘ecolinguistics’, a system of translation based on plant morphology, to translate indigenous oral literature into written refrains of English [The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2006), pp. 159–176].40 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 5.41 Ibid.42 Cataloguing ecopoetics’ various forms of ‘procedural writing’, Skinner notes the ‘machine-based’ procedures of ‘Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another’ (Ecopoetics Blog, p. 8).43 Sphar uses the translation machine to compose ‘Some of We and the Land That Was Never Ours’ (WT, pp. 8–15). Flawed translations between English and French contort English syntax. The poem's first-person pronoun (‘we’), nouns (‘the small ones’, ‘the sparrows’, ‘this world’, ‘the land’, ‘the ground’, ‘the grapes’, ‘the grain’, ‘the green’), possessives (‘ours’, ‘theirs’), and infinitives (‘eating’, ‘planting’, ‘owning’, ‘settling’, ‘pecking’, ‘flying’, ‘moving’, ‘speaking’, ‘changing’, ‘to arrange’) are realigned in refrains that confound and query relations between nature and culture, territory and earth.44 What Is Philosophy?, p. 187.45 Kathleen Stewart, ‘Worlding Refrains’ in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds.), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 339–354.46 Ibid., p. 339.47 Ibid., p. 340.48 Ibid., p. 349.49 Ibid., p. 349

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  Open Access•Tim Cresswell•Geografiska Annaler Series B…•2022

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