Unnatural Ecopoetics: Unlikely Spaces in Contemporary Poetry by Sarah Nolan

Author:Sarah Nolan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, General, Poetry, American, Subjects & Themes, Nature
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Published: 2017-04-28T00:45:36.319000+00:00

HOWE’S POETICS

As her career has developed from its origins in visual arts and theater toward an elaborate textual poetics, Howe’s work has been read for everything from its feminist undertones to its historical recordings to its formal techniques. Despite the poet’s objection, many critics identify her as a language poet because of her radically experimental forms, while others highlight her prominent fascination with history.2 Marjorie Perloff, Paul Naylor, Rachel Tzvia Back, and Peter Quartermain have specifically analyzed Howe’s poetics in its many forms, each illustrating that the poet’s work demands different theoretical lenses. For most critics working on Howe, the extreme ambiguity and radical experimentation of her writing provoke the reader toward interpretation, a process that not only enhances a poem’s meaning but requires it. And for many scholars, including Lyn Keller, Howe’s work engages with history and memory in an effort to draw out the underrepresented voices within it. Keller observes that Howe’s “writing embodies absence in its elliptical and disjunctive character, and in its dramatic use of space on the page. Absence is a thematic preoccupation as well, particularly in Howe’s concern with voices that have been silenced, figures who have been erased” (Keller 1995, 1). Keller’s reading demonstrates a fairly common conception of the poet’s work as primarily concerned with history and memory. However, Howe’s writing also garners attention for its concern with landscape or place, concepts that seem particularly foreign to her highly formalized avant-garde poetry. Certainly, history and memory as well as formal experimentation play vital roles in her poetics, but the poet’s interest in landscape is obscured by layers of cultural, personal, and historical exploration that dramatically alter material spaces.

Considering its muted role within the texts, material space is recognized in a surprising amount of Howe criticism. For instance, in Led by Language: The Poetry and Prose of Susan Howe, Back contends that the poet’s personal and family history have made her more aware of the important role that environments play in determining personhood and facilitating belonging (2002, 9). Commenting both on the poet’s unique formal techniques and her engagement with place, Back considers place a central element in the poet’s engagement with personal and cultural history. It is through place that the poet is able to examine her own histories. Critics like Naylor, though, view landscape as a much more contentious site in Howe’s work. In Poetic Investigations: Signing the Holes in History, he describes her work as engaging with the inability of poetry to ever express an unimpeded interaction with landscape and emphasizing the inability of words to shed their connotations (1999, 54). His reading argues that landscape and language in the poet’s work are deeply embedded in cultural, political, historical, and personal systems.

Yet, even when the poet’s engagement with landscape is noticed, it is not often granted adequate importance; most studies minimize the landscape’s influence in her work or the deep level at which her poetics is embedded within environments. The notable exception is Scott Knickerbocker’s limited treatment of Howe in

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