Reviews

Ben Philipps

On ecopoetry

Rachael Allen. Kingdomland. Faber & Faber, 2019.

Rachael Allen. God Complex. Faber & Faber, 2024.

Isabel Galleymore. Baby Schema. Carcanet, 2024.

K. A. Hays. Anthropocene Lullaby. University of Chicago Press, 2022.

Daisy Lafarge. Life Without Air. Granta, 2020.

Chloë Proctor. Terra Forming. Broken Sleep, 2023.

Say there are two poetic traditions, which regard each other with a mixture of boredom, fear, and contempt. The first descends from the confessionalists of midcentury America: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton. It can convey, or assume, a progressive social agenda — exemplified by Adrienne Rich and Sharon Olds — but in form hews to lyric convention, with identifiable speakers and displays of compressed emotion. Today this tradition lives on as the de facto mode of MFA workshops, of most poetry readings, and of I don’t know who needs to hear this but virality. Its most cynical, vitiated form is the aphoristic doggerel of Instapoetry.

The second tradition likewise claims an august ancestry. Demanding and dense, it acknowledges Ezra Pound, and adores Gertrude Stein; it nods to Charles Olson, and, sometimes, peers across the Atlantic to J. H. Prynne. The lyric voice is ruptured, evaded, or denied; the vocabulary is often recondite, the allusions and ellipses occasionally impenetrable. This second tradition’s aims and antagonisms were theorized by the first generation of Language poets, who set themselves against what the late Lyn Hejinian called the “coercive, epiphanic mode” of the first tradition. (I’m reminded of William Stafford’s famous poem “Traveling Through the Dark,” whose speaker “thought hard for us all.”) For their part, the epiphanics sometimes disparage these experimental poets — not always unfairly —as an obscurantist and self-congratulatory clique.

So goes one story of contemporary Anglophone poetry, much repeated and by now a little threadbare. Plenty of poets don’t fit into either camp; some, like John Ashbery, are claimed by both. And each side’s perceived enemies — the programs and prizes of what Charles Bernstein calls “official verse culture” on the one hand, academics and their insular jargon on the other — were and are far more various than aesthetic warfare requires. If only by inertia, though, the broad outline holds up.

In search of significant territory, the conflict often latches onto questions about poetic voice, and about the self, or selves, from which that voice presumably sounds. (Or, as Theodor Adorno put it, the way “the subject sounds forth in language until language itself acquires a voice.”) Language poetry’s inheritors tend to regard any coherent, unitary I, within or outside a poem, as a bourgeois fantasy. Lyric poets might reply that no amount of kooky syntax or pronoun toggling can change the fact that words are put on the page by a real person (or sometimes, but surprisingly rarely, people). But if the argument is about what constitutes human experience, and the poetics and politics of its representation, what do we do with poetry that tries to notice, and even to transcribe, the nonhuman?

It’s then no coincidence that environmentally conscious poetry’s rightful place in this tale of two genealogies has never seemed quite clear. The category itself contains a microcosm of that broader division, with the distinction between the lyric and (small L) language traditions more or less mapping onto that between nature writing and ecopoetry. For the first group, think of Wordsworth, “wander[ing] lonely . . . / . . . o’er vales and hills.” Think of Thoreau, striking deep into the woods; of Robert Frost and Wendell Berry; or of the latter-day bestiaries of America’s most popular recent poet, Mary Oliver. Green thoughts in green shades. An exhortation to commune with the natural, for the sake of your soul — if also, somewhere in there, for nature’s sake too.