ungulate blood

the map was inconclusive and where

we were was a matter of

conversation, gesture, weather

the mother was looking not

for us but for shelter from

our knowing

anything

the books were still

the dull red spots in the snow

are not a cipher but the first

thing that a new world would know 

Thursday class

Remember we are supersizing next class (4:00 - 7:00 or so) to replace the class we missed. We will start with a presentation by Justin and then move into paper workshopping. Please email anything you would like commented on by me and peers by tomorrow suppertime so we have time to read. Given the time restraint, maybe keep the selection to under 5 pages?

Also, I have extended the deadline for papers to April 11 (instead of April 5). What are they going to do, fire me for getting marks in late? Humph. 

The Gap Dynamics of Lilburn Alighting

The only "eco" term Mohan K. Wali left out in his neat essay is "Ecoecology: The study of loop feedback between Ecology and Ecological Studies.”

Funny stuff aside (I hope): I'm expanding my ecotone presentation into research paper form, and thought I might share some thoughts in this forum.

From a paper on gap dynamics in northern Ontario by forest ecologist Mark Leithead:

"Climate change is expected to promote migration of species. In ecotones, areas of ecological tension, disturbances may provide opportunities for some migrating species to establish in otherwise competitive environments... The size of and time since disturbance may determine the establishment ability of these species ... We conclude that treefall gaps in this forest facilitate the establishment of northward migrating species, potentially providing a pathway for future forest migration in response to recent changes in climate."

So, as I chart the analogic realm of literature-as-ecosystem, I can't help but notice connections between for instance the pine-beetle disturbances, which I believe will create treefall gaps over the next decades in which Northern-moving plant species can take root, and the natural disturbance happening to the traditional he(d)gemony of our northern cultural landscape. There are cultural gaps, created by erosion of gender-monotone stands and shifts in utilitarian progress weather patterns, in which hitherto marginalized modes of being -- less crow-like in their aggressive insistence -- are prospering in new conditions of acceptance. Lilburn was a bird alighting in one of these gaps, and sharing nesting material with a brood of transition writers?

Tough Discussion of Lilburn

Linked here (read comments which includes a comment from PG poet Gillian Wigmore).

Place—Sometimes Gone But Not Forgotten

Guattari is clear: Place is about relationships and is in fact a “social construct.” As I continue to digest these ideas from The Three Ecologies, I have searched for some real-time/real-life scenarios. One such example immediately comes to mind. During the 2008 Forest History Association of BC’s Forest History conference at UNBC, a field trip to the Upper Fraser River communities of Willow River, Aleza Lake, and Giscome showcased the ease at which communities can be erased. Wandering past the defunct Eagle Lake Sawmill (once “the largest spruce sawmill in the world [that] operated from 1923 to 1972") and through the deserted, sagging community church, I was struck by the silence—a silence of forgone relationships, of place reluctantly abandoned. The memory of this encounter was resurrected today when I ran across an interactive National Film Board video of Pine Point, Northwest Territories—a single resource-based/owned town built to service Cominco’s lead/zinc mining operations. The mine was shut down in 1988 and the community's “buildings were removed or demolished.” Much the same thing had happened to Giscome in 1975. Pine Point not only is remembered in the video, Welcome to Pine Point, but also on the website, Pine Point Revisited. Both these websites bring into sharp focus Adrienne’s illuminating discussion yesterday on how we memorialize place (or not) through narrative.

PS: Check out Kent Sedwick's book on the town, Giscome Chronicle and C. S. Giscombe's award winning poetry in Giscome Road.

An old blog post from 2006: "Post-Geographic Poetics and the Globalized Aesthetic"

This view of Canadian & Prince George poetics comes out of discussions with Ken Belford about issues surrounding representations of place in poetry. 

A while ago I made the argument that a Prince George poetics had more to do with writerly influence than any sense of landscape or geography. I argued the poetics were less about logging and more about the vicarious presence of writers like Creeley and Spicer. At the time, this didn’t seem to be a problem but now I ask, why? Why wouldn’t the land affect poetics? What about our culture renders art for the most part un-placed? Is this placelessness akin to the way communities have become interchangeable because of the proliferation of chain stores and fast food restaurants? Is it another sign of our complete self-imposed alienation from the earth? Are poetics susceptible to a dominant global economic ideology that erases difference in the face of exchange value? 

On the one hand, lyric poetry has long erased the particulars of the land in favour of the pastel romanticisms and idealization needed for proper anthropomorphization. Early British-affected poetry transplanted names and descriptions from Europe over top the silenced and erased landscape underfoot. Contemporary nature writing often has no relationship with the land—it is described from a distance like painting in watercolour from a car. There is no engagement, knowledge, or vulnerability involved. The land is a thing to be aesthetically used. Nature writers become like travel writers with all the inherent traps present: generalization, stereotype, disrespect, consumption, misappropriation, etc. The ‘use’ of the land by “nature poets” is akin to our society-wide and violent ‘use’ of the land in other ways (logging, hunting, pollution, etc). It is representation that denies the land’s own subjectivity for our own pleasure/’truth’/ exploration. “Nature writing” has been around for centuries and so has the human plundering; the two are complicit. In postcolonial studies, one of things we’ve noticed is how often the colonizer romanticizes the colonized (the African, for example) and that romanticization becomes a tool in the colonizing process; the colonized is easily understood in certain safe terms and, so, controlled. Art becomes complicit with economic and military agendas. Are we doing the same when we invoke aesthetically pleasing images of nature? Belford’s alternative he has called “lan(d)guage poetry” because it enters into a dialogue with the land and explores how language has constructed “nature” for various purposes. Closed is that comforting but damaging distacne created between culture and land. 

Tim Lilburn articulates this distance as a kind of unapproachable strength but his application of superlatives (“infinity”) in the passage below describing land is also a kind of containment: “Augustine speaks of that world one enters when one prays as ‘the land or region of unlikeness.’ I think everything is the region of unlikeness. Everything is distant, far, discrete, itself, non-representative, ultimately non-colonizable, wild. In its wildness it also feels like infinity, it has the unspeakability of infinity. When you encounter that you're left with courtesy; you can't name it so you bow to it, give it regard. Regard replaces language.”

Language poetry and other avant-garde writing can be post geographic in their disavowal of the referent. Poems about larger language structures and other poems do not need to have any connection to the land. These poetics are typically urban and mirror the urban desire to erase place in favour of more cosmopolitan, international, or generic designs. 

There are some writers who have delved into the poetry of place in profound ways. Recently, Meredith Quartermain’s Vancouver Walking explores the urban place along personal and historical avenues. Daphne Marlatt in books like Steveston, has entered into a poetic dialogue with place. Barry McKinnon writes first and foremost about Prince George and the identity this place affords. These are all about place as urban or settled; McKinnon has very little affinity to the land outside city limits. Aritha van Herk, who is interested in cartography and narrative, wrote Places Far From Ellesmere, a book about her literary experience with the arctic island. Ken Belford writes about a land that is not urban, not even rural, but mountain and out there. Knowledgeable in the ways of the aboriginal, the Gitxan, and the intricacies of interior waterways and wildlife, Ken poetically connects land and language into “lan(d)guage poetry.” Even he, though, is connected via the internet and writes about places far from here; because of technology is afforded the ability to transcend place and write about Labrador. 

The danger here is that one might assume I am advocating that ALL poetry needs to be land based somehow, that postgeographic poetics is ‘bad’ and ‘lan(d)guage’ poetics is ‘good’. Not at all. It is the dominance of the postgeographic aesthetic that I am uncomfortable with. Is the prevailing poetic placelessness healthy? Might part of ‘poetic truth’ be to decode the language of oppression we’ve come to learn when addressing “nature”? Where, exactly, am I?


Cited:

Listening with Courtesy: A Conversation with Tim Lilburn. Interview by Darryl Whetter SCL/ÉLC, Volume 22.1:1997. 135-144
http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/SCL/bin/getPrint.cgi?filename=lil.html&directory=Vol22_1/

Guattari Angst

OK, I admit it; I was (am still) frustrated by Thursday's class. The dense, specialist jargon used by Guattari (and his translators) in The Three Ecologies has gotten me down. I want to understand his ecosophy; but I am lost in the convolutions of his language. Of course, all experts can be guilty of this tendency. Ever listen to a scientist ramble on with graphs and statistics?

As a student in this class, it behoves me to seek clarity. No sense in continuing to whine about Guattari’s use of language. So in the spirit of discovery, I went Internet exploring. Here are some links I found:

• the online journal rhizomes Issue 15, Winter 2007;
• a book review in the journal Speculations;
• another review on a blog entitled Rebarbazon;
• a blog on The Three Ecologies;
• an article, “C(ha)osmosan”;
• an online article “Anti-Globalization and Guattari’s The Three Ecologies”;
• a summary of The Three Ecologies; and
• an online version of the book, An [Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] with Deleuze|Guattari.

The last link is for the reading and publishing site, Scribd. On page 176 there is a chapter entitled “Guattari's Triplex Discourses of Ecology” by Erick Heroux. The author’s aim is “to provide a critique of Guattari's explicit turn toward ecology vis-à-vis the theoretical biology of Bateson, Maturana, Varela and of "complexity science" in general, and thence his enlargement of ecology, an ecology of the postindustrial mass-mediated globe by way of a political economy and psychology, resulting in something quite different for theory” (178).

Guess what I’m reading this weekend!