“The Word up from the Waves”


For pragmatically-minded thinkers and activists who grimace at second wave ecocriticism’s alleged hyperintellectualism or postmodernism, the idea that there’s as much nature in your bathroom as in your backyard as in a lagoon as in the Lagoon Nebula is troubling because it has, in effect, taken our eyes off the prize. If we turn our attention to seeking the natural in the cultural and the cultural in the natural, we neglect that which animated us in the first place: a real existential threat. If we understand even deforestation as a kind of natural we might stop doing what we can to stop it. Humanists are troubled by this logic, which has moved beyond paying attention to the vines growing on the façade of a house, or imagining solidarity between humans and flora and fauna, and lead instead to the thought that there might be little distinction, ultimately, between American culture and bacteria culture, between your agency and aesthetic contribution to causation and a fork’s. In recent thinking, anything that weakens our agentic resolve as humans or amounts to an argument against the arrogance of the human, or humanism, is a step in the wrong direction—it is, in this view, a step away from what has historically banded us together in the face of crisis. By thinking community with forks, we neglect thinking community with one another. By thinking through the complexity of our “mangle,” “network,” “mesh,” “transcorporeality,” “meshwork,” “assemblage,” “quadruple object, mapped via ontography,” or whatever you want to call our environment, we neglect what’s not so complex: our responsibility. [1] Furthermore, as Min Hyoung Song points out in his 2021 book Climate Lyricism, “for the vast majority of humans…many of whom have fought ferociously for the basic right to be called human and have questioned what this right might mean, an inflated idea of their power is not a problem they must overcome.” [2]

While these problems are real, I think they’re built on a general misreading of second wave ecocriticism, or an underestimation of its stakes. When Song critiques the “new materialisms” of second wave ecocritics like Timothy Morton and Jane Bennett because they “have questioned the power of human agency” and therefore trended toward a conception of “a will—usually alienated from itself—that must constantly negotiate with a complex being for what it needs and wants,” I think he misunderstands an amplification of the agency of nonhumans for the diminishment of the agency of humans. [3] If Song’s ultimate goal is to bolster “shared agency,” “to democratize agency to break the spell of powerlessness, so that thinking about climate change emboldens rather than leads to a shrinking back,” he’s actually on the same page as second wave ecocritics like Morton and Bennett, insofar as they aim to show precisely how wide shared really is and how sharing really works: not to reduce us to helplessness but to adequately conceive of the interrelatedness and complexity of our environments so that we might come up with new ideas about what help consists of. [4]

On these reactionary grounds, Song argues for what he calls climate lyricism (lyric poetry is a much-derided form for both first and second wave ecocritics for its anthropocentrism, anthropomorphism, romanticization, etc.). It’s a multivalent term for Song, but it draws primarily from one of the oldest senses of the lyric, which is that “it is finally… a demand for a response,” born from the poem as prayer or the love poem. [5] The idea is that climate lyricism, as a mode of “making” (writing) and “attending” (reading), is not that lyric mode which we have come to know as egocentric, solitary, and interior, but a lyric which draws attention to its own negative space, “the space between a first-person speaker and a second-person addressee,” and which can mitigate the extreme over-there-ness of ecological crisis and attune us to the everyday; scale it down; make us feel less helpless about it. [6]

What’s interesting to me is that this is essentially what Morton’s after in their rethinking of environmental aesthetics: to reject the extreme over-there-ness of nature (caused by Nature) and attune it to the everyday, make us feel more a part of it. In Morton’s case, though, there’s a tendency toward scaling up. Similarly, when Morton pays attention to what they term “ambient poetics,” an umbrella term “ecomimesis” falls under, which involves the ways texts “encode the literal space of their inscription” [7] and ultimately strive “to go beyond the aesthetic dimension altogether,” [8] resulting in “the reader glimps[ing] the environment rather than the person,” [9] this seems to rhyme with Song’s attention to the highlighted space between the I and the you (i.e., the environment) which some texts point to, resulting in the possibility for writer and reader to glimpse the environment in a way that doesn’t make them feel helpless. So while I don’t fully agree with Song, I think he’s absolutely right about the contemporary potentiality of “the revived lyric” as an ecological form relevant to nascent third wave ecocriticism. [10]

Another (final) trouble with second wave ecocriticism comes from the inside out, and it also results in an opening with strong potential for contemporary resonance. None of them have quite figured out their relationship with romanticism. They can’t love it or leave it. Generally speaking, first wave ecocritics mark the Romantic period as the beginning of ecological thought, and second wave ecocritics claim instead that this period marks the beginning of the end. For the first wave, the Romantics are championed for their back-to-nature and anti-civilization ideals, and, for the second wave, this disjunct between nature and civilization is precisely the root of the problem. But some second wave ecocritics have also tried to recuperate aspects of romanticism. For example, Morton locates both the emergence of hamstrung ecological thinking and the emergence of viable ecological thinking in texts from the same historical moment: “texts from the Romantic period” both “exemplify” and “do not accord with the various syndromes and symptoms which emerge from this period.” [11] Similarly, their work does not accord with romanticism in that “the point is not to attain any special state of mind” but, at the same time, it exemplifies romanticism in that “the point is to go against the grain of dominant, normative ideas about nature, but to do so in the name of sentient beings suffering under catastrophic environmental conditions.” [12] During the Romantic period the relationship between the subject and object became alienated, and thus contact with nature through the aesthetic was thought to reconcile this alienation. [13] But in the process, Morton claims, nature and the aesthetic became “interchangeable.” [14] This is the root of the problem and yet also a viable ground for its solution, for it is the aesthetic that thinkers like Morton and Song are still drawn to for its ability to reconcile subject and object, or to reveal that we’re already “coexist[ing] in an infinite web of mutual interdependence.” [15]

Song, too, owes some thinking to Romanticism despite its contribution to our contemporary ecological dilemmas. For example, he writes that he is drawn to the lyric because “it sees what is there and something else besides—a ‘transcendence in the ordinary,’” [16] and later writes that “the contemporary lyric…suggests it’s possible for people to attain a vantage point where they can rise above their lowliest analogies to look down at what otherwise wouldn’t be visible.” [17] Seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary and accessing heightened perspectives which reveal what is otherwise concealed are Romanticism’s hallmarks. Elsewhere, Song explicitly reveals his tether to the aesthetic categories of the sublime and the beautiful, also concepts central to the Romantic period, and typically disregarded today for their Burkean registers:

Perhaps these older aesthetic categories haven’t gone away but endure, supplemented by newer aesthetic categories but nevertheless framing an understanding of the present that fills me, at least, with a profound sense of intimidation at the sheer enormity of the transformations human activity is wreaking on the planet and a profound appreciation for what endures despite such transformations. The Earth remains full of the sublime and beautiful, bound together in inextricable ways. [18]

I think an attention to ambient, ecomimetic, climate lyricism and a degree of self-reflexive fidelity to the romanticisms that ecocritics owe themselves to (whether they like it or not) are exciting prospects for ecocriticism today. Perhaps they suggest what Frederick Buell has described in his definition of a nascent third wave of ecocriticism as both “an advance and… a return.” [19] This new wave figuration is “an advance in the sense of getting past all that long-since-tired recitation of how the industrial age erased the nature-culture borderline, if indeed that had not already happened centuries if not millennia before” and “a sort of return in the sense of entertaining a new kind of ecological holism, a post-humanist one, one that grants culture to nonhumans even as it insists that humanness including human ‘culture’ is embedded in eco­logical process.” [20]

Entertaining such holism, however, requires ways of seeing which must contend with unfamiliar scales of comprehension. Responding to Morton’s claim that climate change “refuses familiar scales of reference,” [21] Song positions Derek Woods’ concept of “scalar variance” as a helpful tool for perceiving the finitude of the supposedly infinite; for making sure hyperobjects “are no barriers” to human “perception.” [22] He refers to Ed Roberson’s poem “A Low Bank of Cloud,” from the 2010 book To See the Earth Before the End of the World, as an example of climate lyricism in which the speaker and reader undergo massive shifts in scale (similar to the “zoom effect” dramatized by Google Earth or the Charles and Ray Eames film, Powers of Ten) all the while having “little trouble understanding what they are seeing or their own relationship to it.” [23] While Roberson is, indeed, the scale shifting poet par excellence (in his syntax, especially), Song’s reading elides the ultimate aim of Roberson’s scalar sfumato. Roberson utilizes these shifts in scale to ask questions, not to offer answers, as in the poem “Sfumato,” from the same book, which ends: “Was eating a banquet of hummingbird eating / jasmine, / a sfumato of living in // brushed out limits of forms? / & where do we put it all?” [24] Song stops the poem “A Low Bank of Cloud” short in his quotation, which continues in the same vein as the poem “Sfumato” to offer a view “never in stillness”:

                        always the restoration to change,

from ice, from cloud, turning to clear

                        liquid—as is most of our body

                        water—            thinned sheet, layer

            that if written               on or with,       a bearing

a name chiseled on water

                        disappears. [25]

Roberson refers to the name writ in water of John Keats’ epitaph to write of a more complex bearing on the earth before the end of the world than Song gives him credit for; a bearing which a named chiseled on water, or any attempt at making finitude of the infinite, would disappear. In another cloudy poem from the same book, “A cloud is whatever it is,” Roberson suggests that scale (temporal, in this case, as he refers to “lasting”) “should be counted” by “whatever measure / fulfills its form,” with an emphasis on its, not ours. [26] Climate lyricism, and the perspective it offers, is perhaps an advance beyond forms which do little more than construct paratactic sprees which lack real vibrancy, and a renewed relationship with romanticism is perhaps a way to return to thinking ecological holism; to rendering what of it we can sense.





“So That I Make No Form of Formlessness”


Following Walt Whitman’s call in Democratic Vistas for “two or three really original American poets” to “arise, mounting the horizon like planets” and “give more compaction” to this state of affairs, I’ll turn now to the ecopoets A. R. Ammons, Brenda Hillman, and Arthur Sze to see how they might contribute to my intuitions.

In Forrest Gander and John Kinsella’s 2012 experimental collaboration Redstart: An Ecological Poetics, they keenly point out how contemporary ecopoetry (or what Fisher-Wirth and Street choose to term ecological poetry) employs strategies “which look a lot like innovative poetic strategies championed for the last hundred years,” such as “a dispersal of ego-centered agency,” “a stance of self-reflexivity,” “a rejection” of nature (or anything else, for that matter) as unified or permanent and an acceptance of its “entropic fluctuations” instead, and “a reorientation… toward intersubjectivity,” among others.[27] 

Though these categorizations ring pretty true and their defining qualities are useful, I’m particularly drawn to ecopoets who somehow write in what seem like mutually exclusive combinations: ecopoets who attempt to write about nature, as such, at the same time they verge on its entropic fluctuations; ecopoets who are engaged with politicized environmentalism and other causes, but also question the subject and the orientation and distribution of agency; ecopoets who try to extend lyricism and Romanticism within a postmodern idiom. Ecopoets such as A. R. Ammons, Brenda Hillman, and Arthur Sze write poems which are energized by this in-betweenness: an in-betweenness which rhymes with the ambient space between the I and the you of their poems (i.e., the environment) as well as the space of the poem where they flicker between form and content, subject and object, culture and nature, human and nonhuman, etc., like true Romantics. It is in this space that they can shake off certain romanticisms and keep the viable ones. Rather than this flickering concluding in dissolution or transcendence, as it might for certain Romantics, these writers show that flickering to be the environment itself.

Cary Wolfe writes of a lineage from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Wallace Stevens to A. R. Ammons in his 2020 book Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds. [28] If there is such a lineage, I think it should also include Emerson’s pupil Walt Whitman, and I think it extends further to two poets born a generation after Ammons: Hillman and Sze. Ammons’ poem “Corsons Inlet,” widely anthologized, and notably so in anthologies of ecopoetry like Fisher-Wirth and Street’s Ecopoetry Anthology and Neil Astley’s 2007 Earth Shattering: Ecopoems, is a beachy poem that speaks to Whitman’s own beachy poem, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” Whitman’s poem dramatizes the birth of a poet and, as a result, the discovery of a kind of Romantic ideal: he translates a mockingbird’s song into poetry, which awakens “a thousand singers, a thousand songs” within him, and he is therefore able to see “death” as “delicious;” as something not to “forget,” “but fuse.” [29] Ammons, too, witnesses birds on his beach: a “mottled gull,” a “white blacklegged egret,” “tree swallows.” [30] But in his poem, though he owes to Whitman, he refuses to translate them in any way; refuses to make “form of / formlessness.” [31] As he writes: “…Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events / I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting / beyond the account.” [32] This cannot be translated. Precisely because “in nature there are few sharp lines,” he mirrors it, instead of giving form to it; he finds what of it is already in him: “I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries, / shutting out and shutting in, separating inside / from outside: I have / drawn no lines.” [33]

Instead of imbuing entropy with order, as Whitman’s romanticism and (ultimately anthropocentric) ecocentrism leads him to do, Ammons bears witness to a strange in-betweenness: “an order held / in constant change: a congregation / rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable / as one event, / not chaos.” [34] This is not so much a Whitmanian fusion of a with b but a willingness to remain in between a and b. Morton writes that “ecological writing shuffles subject and object back and forth so that we may think they have dissolved into each other, though what we usually end up with is… ambience.” [35] Where Whitman tries to dissolve the subject and object of his poem, as in “the sea whisper’d me,” [36] Ammons “will / not run to that easy victory.” [37] And though, for climate humanists, this could read as a kind of stultification or Ammons surrendering his agency, the poem ends on what (rather romantically) follows an acute attention to what is: “a new walk,” or a new way to be in the world. [38] But importantly, Ammons renders this new walk as a kind of holism: “tomorrow a new walk is a new walk,” as if to say: each moment entails a new way to be in the world, or a new walk of life; each walk is new by virtue of being itself. [39] Between a and b, Ammons sees most clearly how a = a and b = b. Furthermore, this romantic sensibility—which echoes Henry David Thoreau’s “Walking,” the “Emersonian walk…of self-renewal,” [40] and Charles Baudelaire’s figure of the flaneur—is something to keep. It allows a path for an ecological holism where we can find ourselves outside.

The holistic thrust at the end of “Corsons Inlet” recalls other holistic thrusts in Ammons’ work. At the end of Ammons’ poem “Identity,” which thinks through the same themes but by looking at a spider web instead of walking on a beach, Ammons comes to much the same interpretive homology as in the previous poem: “order / diminishes toward the / periphery / allowing at the points of contact / entropy equal to entropy.” [41] Entropy equal to entropy is a stunning phrase whose abstraction, at first, might seem to suggest Morton’s idea that “environmental art… is hamstrung by certain formal properties of language,”[42]or Jonathan Bate’s description of romanticism as insisting both “that language is a prison house which cuts us off from nature” and that the poet can “create a special kind of language that will be the window of a prison cell.” [43] To me, this seems like a rejection of such a special kind of language. It seems like a rejection of the hamstring, too. If climate lyricism is offering a window to entropy equal to entropy, do we feel helpless when we look through it? Though it certainly doesn’t seem to scale the ecological down—in fact it seems to scale up, to zoom out from the center of the spider web—I don’t think it should make us feel helpless. I believe this phrase still operates as a kind of climate lyricism that works to attune the ecological with the everyday, the extraordinary with ordinary, but it doesn’t present its vision on any terms but its own. And it proves that its terms are also our own. The points of contact between the I and the you of the poem, or the writer and the reader, like the points of contact on a spider web’s periphery, are, in the end, entropy equal to entropy. When you push on the periphery of the poem itself, you get entropy equal to entropy. That Ammons can only utter a tautology suggests that the poem, rightfully, stops short of giving us a false thing-in-itself and instead leaves us, again, to entropy equal to entropy: the end of the poem, when we reenter the entropy equal to entropy, or constant state that is the individual reader’s own physical environment.

I’ll next consider Brenda Hillman’s poem “A Violet in the Crucible,” whose title refers to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry:” “Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet.” [44] Her poem begins: “Shelley wants you to visit Congress when he writes / a violet in the crucible.” [45] Hillman casts herself into congress, like a violet in a crucible, throughout her 2009 book Practical Water, enacting what she calls “reportorial poetics,” which involves writing poems (or “send[ing] back reports”) while attending, and protesting, Congressional hearings with the activist group CodePink. [46] She writes that “reportorial poetics can be used to record detail with immediacy while one is doing an action & thinking about something else” and that such “meditative states can be used to cross material boundaries, to allow you to be in several places at once, such as Congress & ancient Babylon.” [47] In other words, not only should a poem draw us nearer to the environment, but it should be written from it, too; functional climate lyricism should literally draw us nearer one another, close the gap between the I and the you, and even between a bee’s ability to “detect ultraviolet rays” and our ability to think about new “possibilities in language & government.” [48] Hillman takes Shelley literally when he famously writes in “A Defence of Poetry” that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” and goes to where the legislation happens to write poetry from there. [49] In the poem “Disasters,” George Oppen revises Shelley to claim that poets are “legislators of the unacknowledged world.” [50] Hillman flickers between both positions in her poem, showing how “experience crosses over with that which is outside experience.” [51] She attends both to the legislation of the “Congressman… feeding / in the Rayburn cafeteria with the lobbyist from Bechtel” and the legislation of “the philodendron with streaked / anemic arrows,” the “duskytail darter,” “the Indiana bat,” “the dwarf wedgemussel,” and “northeastern bulrush.” [52] And she sees that the “Congressman” “is [as] endangered” “as the eyeless shrimp Stygobromus hayi,” both of which are as endangered as “you” are. [53] Here, climate lyricism works in tandem with romanticism to see ecological holism, which is a kind of entropy equal to entropy.

Importantly, though, Hillman does translate Shelley at the ending of the poem, writing that “he means send the report with your body.” [54] And she reveals how this coming back to the body is not anthropocentric, but a refreshed kind of ecocentrism where the oikos we center includes us. In this, she echoes Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s sentiments in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, where he draws from the thinking of Michel Serres when he writes: “‘Contingency… means common tangency,’ haptic entanglement of body and world, knotted and multidimensional admixture, so that ‘knowing things requires one first of all to place oneself between them.’” [55]

Arthur Sze also shows us in his poems how “sometimes in gazing afar, / we locate ourselves.” [56] And by this, I take him to mean not only that we locate ourselves, but that we locate ourselves in the environment, and in relation to one another. Between the titled poems of his 2019 book Sight Lines, Sze includes occasional untitled pages which contain one line, punctuated on either side by em dashes. These lines eventually reappear later in the book, in the titular poem “Sight Lines,” a poem of long lines punctuated by em dashes that makes an ecological holism of the seemingly singular runaway lines which appear throughout the book. Their relation to one another is sometimes established through a kind of rhyming, for example: “the plutonium waste has been hauled to an underground site— / a man who built plutonium triggers breeds horses now—” and “I’m walking on silt, glimpsing horses in the field—.” [57] The image of a ditch also patterns the poem: “salt cedar rises through silt in an irrigation ditch—,” “when I come to an upright circular steel lid, I step out of the ditch— / I step out of the ditch but step deeper into myself—,” “though I step back into the ditch, no whitening cloud dispels the world’s mystery— / the ditch ran before the year of the Louisiana Purchase—.” [58]

Ditches seems like one way of understanding lines of sight: parallel, singular, fixed, much like the lines of the poem which appear as non sequiturs throughout the book. But at the end of the poem where these non sequiturs cohere, Sze writes: “though parallel lines touch in the infinite, the infinite is here—.” [59] This, finally, seems to be how Sze wants us to understand our lines of sight: touching, plural, in flux. But the simultaneity the poem insists on seeing is not articulated by a Romantic subjectivity (like Whitman’s on the beach) or a Romantic objectivity, like Emerson’s transparent eye-ball: “Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” [60] Sze’s poem flickers in between these, answering Gander and Kinsella’s provocative question, posed in Redstart: “What if structures of perception are not ‘subjective’ (that is, added by humans to raw data) or ‘objective’ (provided by things in themselves) but are articulated within a media of relation and interaction such that to speak is to surge up into a medium that isn’t projected, but is ongoing like an environment?” [61] Sight lines are not projected, but ongoing—simultaneous—like the environment. And the space between the I and the you of the poem, like lines of sight, also gives way to touching: “though you are visiting Paris, you are here at my fingertips—.” [62]

Buell argues that “where environmental writing and criticism intervenes most powerfully within and against standard conceptions of spatial apportionment is by challenging assumptions about border and scale.” [63] These three ecopoets utilize climate lyricism to insist on shared agency and ecological holism, but they do so not by scaling things down, but by scaling things up. Scaling up is not cause for helplessness, as what it reveals is actually common tangency: tomorrow, when a new walk is a new walk; contact, where entropy is equal to entropy; the body and the sightlines its fingertips.

Ultimately, Song’s revived lyric seems to say, as Hillman writes: “you could live on listen” in that expansive space between speaker and addressee. [64] This, to me, seems like one “[way] of being in the world that might lead to less exploitative and destructive histories.” [65] I suggest that part of this listening will involve entertaining a bit of romanticism, found and practiced in both poetry and criticism. As Hillman writes: “An ethics occurs at the edge / of what we know.” [66] Perhaps we need the romanticism of deep ecology, that ecocentric idea established by first wave ecocriticism that refuses the shallows and requires nothing less than a total “reorientation of thought that [hinges] on the bringing to consciousness of ‘the relational, total field-image’ of ‘organisms as knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations.’” [67] And we need poets like Ammons, Hillman, and Sze who bind such total reorientations of thought and scale to the poetics of the lyric, which continues, as ever, to pose questions that demand response, situating us, as Ed Roberson writes, “in relation… to other yet-positions.” [68] When Bate claims that “the dream of deep ecology will never be realized upon the earth, but our survival as a species may be dependent on our capacity to dream it in the work of our imagination” [69] and Morton claims that though second wave ecocriticism can be “read like a critique of deep ecology,” it aims for “really deep ecology,” [70] they hold on to some romanticism in order to find the ways that the first, second, and nascent third wave of ecocriticism might touch in the infinite, which is here.






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