MARIA LÖSCHNIGG ‘Nifty shades of green’: The Merits and Limits of Ecopoetry 1. Introduction In the late 1990s, Axel Goodbody diagnosed a lack of interest in environmental literature, especially on the side of German literary criticism. 1 If recognized at all, eco-literature was largely regarded as didactic, activist and documentary. The view that eco-literature was rather less satisfactory from an aesthetic point of view was supported by an almost exclusive focus on content in early eco-critical approaches. 2 1 See Axel Goodbody, ed., Literatur und Ökologie (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998), 13. See also J. Scott Bryson, who laments that environmental poetry in particular, while being a recognizable trend from the 1990s onwards, “was garnering almost no critical notice”: “Introduction,” Ecopoetry. A Critical Introduction, ed. J. Scott Bryson (Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2002), 1. However, and here I fully agree with Hubert Zapf’s model of literature as an element of a cultural ecology, it is the specificity of literary texts which determines, to a large extent, their unique cultural function. Thus, literature unfolds its main potential with regard to cultural transformations not only on a thematic or referential level, but also as an effect of “the specific structures and functions of literary textuality as it has evolved in relation to and competition with other forms of tex- 2 See for instance Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocritical Reader. Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1996). The danger of limiting the critical scope of ecocriticism to a thematic exploration of nature writing and the literature of wilderness has also been pointed out among others by Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace, eds., Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (Charlottesville, VA: U of Virginia P, 2001), 7. See also Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer, eds., Natur - Kultur - Text. Beiträge zu Ökologie und Literaturwissenschaft (Heidelberg: Winter, 2005), 17-18. crumble crumble oil and bumble liars churn and exxon valdez tumbles roadkill carcasses pile higher, mired, find reboot won’t do as tons of sewage carry pesticides, estrogen, prozac, pcbs into the kitchen stinks 1 MARIA LÖSCHNIGG 204 tuality in the course of cultural evolution.” 3 According to Zapf, literature “acts like an ecological principle or an ecological energy within the larger system of cultural discourses.” 4 On the one hand literature appears as a sensorium and imaginative sounding board for hidden problems, deficits and imbalances of the larger culture, as a form of textuality which critically balances and symbolically articulates what is marginalized, neglected, repressed or excluded by dominant historical power structures, systems of discourse, and forms of life, but what is nevertheless of vital importance to an adequately complex account of humanity’s existence within the fundamental culture-nature-relationship. On the other hand, by breaking up closed circuits of dogmatic world views and exclusionary truth-claims in favour of plural perspectives, multiple meanings and dynamic interrelationships, literature becomes a site of a constant, creative renewal of language, perception, communication, and imagination. (Emphasis in the original) This function largely shows itself in two different ways: 5 The lines quoted at the beginning of this essay, taken from the poem Sybil Unrest, achieve their powerful effect not primarily by means of the factual information which they contain. Rather, they do so through their radical defamiliarization of well-worn phrases, quotations, collocations and clichés, foregrounding and bringing to mind issues which have become ossified by habit and adaptation. Poems such as Sybil Unrest make visible the deficiencies of content-oriented approaches to ecopoetry, as it is obviously the poetic rather than the referential function which defines the strong environmental and political impact of this text. Indeed, the ludic element which characterizes Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s poetic dialogue is not restricted to the text but spills over to the recipient, who is called upon to create and re-create meaning from the poem’s polysemic elements. The effect of the reader’s active involvement in a complex interplay of word formation, sound effects, verbal associations, intertextual allusions and the shuffling of syntactic units, is one of revelation and shock as the poem uncovers and turns inside out what is normally hidden under the cover of a smoothly functioning verbal rhetoric. In the passage cited above, a suicidal obsession with automobiles is emphasized through an infernal scenario, like the seething cauldron of the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. At the same time, one finds references to actual environmental catastrophes such as the Exxon Valdez Disaster of 1989. In this connection, the glib transformation of kitchen sinks to “kitchen stinks” carries with it an olfactory reminder of an omnipresent pollution. 3 Hubert Zapf, “The State of Ecocriticism and the Function of Literature as Cultural Ecology,” Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies. Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocroticism, eds. Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), 55. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 56. ‘Nifty shades of green’ 205 In this article I shall focus on the specific cultural functions of eco-poetry, i.e. poetry which explicitly takes up environmental concerns, and demonstrate how these functions result from the very form of these poetic texts rather than from their contents. It is thus the literariness of eco-poetry as such which stands in the centre of my analysis. In order to render the relation between literature and political, cultural, and social contexts concrete, I shall concentrate on a topical environmental site: the Athabasca Tar Sands in Canada’s northern Alberta. Exploitation of the vast oil resources there and its environmental impact has provoked a great deal of critique in twenty-firstcentury Canadian poetry. I shall first briefly discuss two poems which deal with the consequences of unrestrained consumerism and neo-liberal policies in a more general manner, before discussing explicit renderings of the oil sands and of the environmentally detrimental extraction of petroleum in the area. 6 My approach to these texts, as mentioned above, is largely based on Hubert Zapf’s understanding of literature as an ecological force, and my aim is to provide a functional model for environmental poetry, thereby acknowledging the specific reconfigurative potential of lyric genres as opposed to dramatic or narrative text types. Also drawing on the reader-response model recently proposed by Eva Koopman and Frank Hakemulder (2015), I shall finally raise questions as to the limits of literature as cultural ecology, i.e. as a regenerating factor within the ‘cultural biotope.’ 2. The Rise of Eco-Poetry in Canada: Creating Semiotopes During the years when most of the poems here discussed were written, ecological concern in Canada often crystallized around the policies of former prime minister Stephen Harper. According to an article in the Vancouver Observer, Harper risked transforming Canada into “an international environmental pariah.” 7 More cynically, Rick Smith in The Toronto Star noted that Harper was “the best thing to happen to the environmental issue in Canada. Ever.” 8 6 For an extensive factual discussion of this site of ecological crisis see Andrew Nikiforuk, Tar Sands. Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent (Vancouver, Toronto, Berkeley: Greystone Books, 2010). Indeed, Harper’s aggressively ambitious policies clearly prioritised 7 Bell Warren (2015). “Stephen Harper Coninues to Make Canada an International Pariah.” Vancouver Observer. Online: http: / / www.vancouverobserver.com/ opinion/ stephen-harper-continues-his-path-transforming-canada-international-pariah [March 10, 2015]. 8 Rick Smith (2014). “Stephen Harper: The Environment’s best Friend.” The Toronto Star. Online: http: / / www.thestar.com/ opinion/ commentary/ 2014/ 07/ 31/ stephen_harper_the_env ironments_best_friend.html [November 12, 2014]. MARIA LÖSCHNIGG 206 economy over ecology, which raised much awareness of environmental issues in Canada, also causing shifts in political and cultural sensibilities. While scientists and environmental organizations expressed their concern in various ways, including statistically based reports or an open letter signed by 800 scientists, 9 Canadian authors used other forms of expression to make these developments visible and create alternate imaginaries. Margaret Atwood with her Maddaddam Trilogy (2003-2013) of dystopian novels is doubtlessly the most prominent example in Canadian letters of a writer speaking out against the cultural, social and environmental effects of neoliberal policies and exploitative consumerism. However, it is in particular within poetry that environmental concerns have been addressed, providing the most pointed examples across the literary genres for Zapf’s view of literary texts as “imaginary biotopes.” 10 Examples of such poetry are Di Brandt’s collection Now You Care (2003), Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s Sybil Unrest (2004), Dionne Brand’s long poem Inventory (2006), various poems from Karen Solie’s collection Pigeon (2009), and the poems collected in the 2009 anthology Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry. With Nancy Holmes’s Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems, another noteworthy anthology appeared in the same year. It assembles about 300 poems which focus on the precarious relationship between nature and civilization. Without doubt, the growing importance of ecoliterature has come to be recognized by literary criticism - a fact which is also reflected by the award of the prestigious CBC Poetry Prize to David Martin and his poem “Tar Swan” in 2014. Before, the “disproportionate imbalance” between the prominence of eco-literature on the one hand, and the sparseness of critical responses on the other, was still lamented by Simon Estok in 2009. 11 As I have pointed out elsewhere, one of the reasons for the lack of relevant criticism especially in Canada may be “the long-standing dominance of the wilderness as a Canadian cultural paradigm and the emphasis on a hostile nature in Canadian literature and criticism.” 12 9 Emily Chung: http: / / www.cbc.ca/ news/ technology/ foreign-scientists-call-on-stephen -harper-to-restore-science-funding-freedom-1.2806571 [March 10, 2015]. While in literature this “awareness of the fragility of nature and the necessity of ecological themes” is now visible in manifold ways, a desirable cross-fertilization between liter- 10 Hubert Zapf, Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie: Zur kulturellen Funktion imaginativer Texte an Beispielen des amerikanischen Romans (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002), 48. 11 Simon C. Estok, “Discourses of Nation, National Ecopoetics, and Ecocriticism in the face of the US: Canada and Korea as Case Studies,” Comparative American Studies 7.2 (2009): 85. 12 Maria Löschnigg, “‘NAFTA we worship you’: Conservationism and the Critique of Economic Liberalism in Twenty-First Century Canadian Poetry,” Zeitschrift für Kanada- Studien 34 (2014): 33. ‘Nifty shades of green’ 207 ary studies and environmental studies within a larger cultural framework is only slowly beginning to catch up. The task of eco-criticism as outlined in this paper is to show not only how eco-poems function as barometers indicating shifts in the cultural and political climate; it is also to explore their function as essential factors of transformation, which is not only a material process but also and even more so a mental one. In this supposition of the basic functions of literature within the larger framework of cultural and political discourses I largely follow Lawrence Buell’s ideas as articulated in his seminal study The Environmental Imagination: If, as environmental philosophers contend, western metaphysics and ethics need revision before we can address today’s environmental problems, then environmental crisis involves a crisis of the imagination the amelioration of which depends on finding better ways of imagining nature and humanity’s relation to it. 13 Along the same lines, the editors of Regreen argue that the poems collected in their anthology remind us to think not simply of the biosphere, but also of the semiosphere, of the world of signification in which we live. It is difficult to care about things we do not see, or that do not signify for us. Clearly, one of the imperatives of environmental activism must be to broaden fields of signification, expand horizons of significance so that creatures, places, and biodiversity matter in increasingly urgent ways. 14 Considering the increasing tendency of Western societies to confuse cultural standardization and economic globalisation with progress, it is essential to pay attention to cultural manifestations that operate outside the conventionalized discourse of ‘innovation’ and ‘development.’ The techniques used by eco-poetry undermine the pragmatism and one-dimensionality as well as the exclusionary and repressive tendencies of such discourses, and of cultural, social and political practices based on such norms. In the past two decades, the environmental crisis, which affects all parts of the world and which radically questions the notion of a dichotomy between culture and nature, has become one of the most pressing issues of contemporary societies. By focussing on a specific site of crisis and on imaginative responses to this crisis, I shall delineate the relationship between a cultural climate dominated by doctrines of the free market on the one hand, and the potential created by imaginative renderings of the cultural deficits inherent in monopolizing policies on the other. In fact, a closer look at these poems will show that their range of signification by far exceeds the immediate concern with Alberta’s 13 Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1995), 2. 14 Adam Dickinson (2009). “Introduction: ‘The Astronauts,’” Regreen: New Ecological Poetry, ed. A. D. and Madhur Anand (Sudbury: Your Scrivener Press, 2009), 15. MARIA LÖSCHNIGG 208 Oil Sands. The essential questions at stake in my analysis of poetic texts are, in what way do these Canadian poems address and counter the prevailing “dominant cultural reality system” 15 We may ask, at this point, whether we are not already flooded with and perhaps numbed by innumerable media reports on environmental damage and by scientifically based scenarios of future catastrophes. Is it really necessary, therefore, to also have poetry which deals with these matters? Indeed it is, I should say, since literature functions not only “as a sensorium for the deficits of the larger system of cultural discourses,” of twenty-first-century Canada, and through which poetic means do they constitute an indispensable complement to other critical discourses taking up the same cultural deficits? 16 but also constitutes a unique regenerative force: “Literary works of art,” in Zapf’s words, “are two things at the same time: they are laboratories of human self-exploration, in which, as it were, basic assumptions of prevailing systems of interpretation are ‘tested’ in the medium of simulated life processes; and they are imaginative biotopes in which the dimensions and energies of life neglected by these systems find symbolic space to develop and express themselves.” 17 3. The Rhetoric of Canadian Ecopoems Literature is thus an indispensable factor in the sensitive biotope of cultural ecology and as such it is important for our ‘environmental ethics,’ and thus perhaps (and in the long run) even for our physical survival on earth. Sybil Unrest is a “fit of glossolalia,” as Sophie Mayer puts it in her review of Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s volume. 18 The poem exposes the effects of economic globalisation and of an unrestrained capitalism through a radical ludism and an ‘explosion’ of language into multiple meanings. The entanglements of economic, ecological and ethical issues are compressed into neologisms like “global swarming,” (9) “sadomarketism,” (11) “polyglot postwhore girls,” (66) “homoerratic foreflay” (15) and “continental shrift,” (21) or are foregrounded by intertextual punning as in “lend me your tears,” (7) “love’s leper’s lost,” (14) “all the world’s a page,” (65) “a womb with a view,” (62) “in cod we trust” (34) and “the bleak small inherit the dearth.” (9) These polysemic words and word clusters are further charged with meaning through their subtle integration into the whole text, as for example in the following lines: 15 Zapf 2006, 63. 16 Ibid. 49 17 Ibid. 61. 18 “Review: Sybil Unrest by Larissa Lai and Rita Wong,” Chroma, January 31. Online: http: / / chromajournal.blogspot.co.at/ 2009/ 01/ review-sybil-unrest-by-larissa-laiand.html. [October 12, 2012] ‘Nifty shades of green’ 209 bird markets flew over the google mast mushed and bushed trampled by the swoosh in corporate predictability iconomic bust (13) In the first two lines, we may find an allusion, although strongly defamiliarized, to Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The sociocritical implications of the novel will thus automatically inform our reading of “bird markets” that fly “over the google mast.” The verbs “mushed,” “bushed,” and “trampled” all denote aggressive acts and can be linked to “bird market” and to the agent of these violent acts, namely “the swoosh,” i.e. the logo (“iconomic bust” [my emphasis]) of NIKE sports, which metonymically stands for all globalized corporations, while the “google mast” denotes the globalization of information. Simultaneously, the actual meaning of the word ‘swoosh’ implies the sweeping away of local businesses by the global market. If we translate “iconomic bust” as ‘economic failure,’ the word ‘predictability’ may well refer to the fact that infinite growth is impossible. Like Larissa Lai and Rita Wong, Karen Solie also addresses general issues of economic expansion at the cost of environmental, social and cultural concerns. In the four poems entitled “Four Factories” however, she is more specific as to the location of the business ventures she addresses, as each of the poems deals with an identifiable Canadian mega-factory in Alberta: one with a concentration of oil refineries east of Edmonton, referred to as “Refinery Row,” one with Frito-Lay, a gigantic Potato Chip Factory at the east end of Taber, one with an enormous Cement Plant in Kananaskis Country near Calgary, and the last with Alberta Beef, located in Calgary. Apart from their metonymic function of representing profit-oriented business enterprises in general, all four of these mega-plants have been embroiled in some minor or major scandal concerning ecological or humanitarian issues. Solie’s poems are serious in tone, largely refraining from the playfulness of Sybil Unrest; instead they create a more strongly documentary impact. However, the documentary level is soon abandoned when these mega-factory-sites become symbols of capitalism and exploitation, making it clear that they could be substituted by almost any other corporation: At the nominal limits of Edmonton, refineries wreathed in their emissions, huge and lit up as headquarters or the lead planet in a system, as the past with its machinery exposed - filters, compressors, conveyers, you name it - basement upon basement upon basement. Around them gather opportune spinoffs, low-slung by-product support outfits named in functional MARIA LÖSCHNIGG 210 shorthand. Altec, Softcom, Norcan, Cancore, subsidiaries crawling onto the farmland. Employees are legion, transient, and union, turning what happened before we existed into something we can use, a capacity day and night. As we sleep, they build our future. Which, as the signs say, belongs to all of us, is now. 19 In these four poems, Solie creates thought-provoking effects by means of concentration (brought forth mainly by repetition and asyndetic lists), but also through powerful similes which foreground the threatening immensity of these plants. The increasing accumulation of spin-offs evokes, in Solie’s poetic language, the image of a malignant growth which slowly infects the whole body and whose dangerous nature is stressed acoustically by an aggregation of voiceless velar plosives in their names (Altec, Softcom, Norcan, Cancore). However, Solie also works with irony when, in the concluding lines of the poem, she unmasks society’s blindness to the commodification not only of the physical environment but also of social values themselves, or when she builds up misleading expectations by using the jargon of the tourist brochure as in the “Frito-Lay” poem: “Worth leaving the highway for. Gorgeous / at sunset, really outstanding, / the potato chip factory at the east end / of Taber, which is a kind of town” (19). Apart from irony’s most obvious function of expressing the opposite of what is actually said, it is above all its “intimacy with the dominant discourses it contests” 20 With Mari-Lou Rowley’s 100-line poem “In the Tar Sands, Going Down” the focus shifts directly to the Athabasca Oil Sands. The poem offers intriguingly multivalent views of this afflicted region. “In the Tar Sands” is first of all characterized by a strikingly appellative quality which draws the reader into the text’s apocalyptic envisioning of place. This is achieved mainly by the communicative structure of the poem. Using phrases such as “Hey luscious baby,” or just “hey baby” which is here placed in the foreground. In other words, it is the ironic appropriation of the language of consumerism which works towards undermining exactly such jargon. Solie’s poems oscillate between documentary detail and poetic defamiliarization; they offer alternative ways of seeing and comprehending the fragile interconnection between economic, environmental and social interests through the evocation of strong images and threatening analogies and the exposure of deceptive surfaces. 21 19 Karen Solie, Pigeon (Toronto: Anansi, 2009), 19. , the lyric persona explicitly and in a very informal and colloquial manner addresses an unspecified, but tangible ad- 20 Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge. The Theory and Politics of Irony (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 15. 21 Mari-Lou Rowley, “In the Tar Sands,” Regreen. New Canadian Ecological Poetry, eds. Madhur Anand and Adam Dickinson (Sudbury: Your Scrivener Press, 2009), 63; 65. ‘Nifty shades of green’ 211 dressee. The frequent use of imperatives and of collective phrases (‘we,’ ‘let’s’) further enhances the conative dimension of the text, which, in fact, is one of the distinctive features of ecopoetry setting it off from earlier nature poetry. 22 Hey what’s that smell, sound, taste? […] Only two of us fondling under leaves mottled and falling under a sky mortally dazed under clouds weeping acid leaching moisture out of the trope trop troposphere. (ll. 20; ll. 27-33) Look up! look way up, nothing but haze and holes. Look down! bitumen bite in the neck arms thighs of Earth a boreal blistering, boiling soil and smoke-slathered sky. (ll. 34-40) In the lines quoted above, any sense of the romantic that may be evoked by the depiction of two lovers is brutally undermined through images of decay, drastically rendered through the vision of an anthropomorphized biosphere that “weeps acid / […] / Out of the trope trop troposphere.” What we have here, in fact, is the acoustic creation of a ‘semiosphere,’ as the sounds of the poem onomatopoeically reinforce the semantics, bleak and threatening. The global impact of impending environmental catastrophes is implied through the parallel between earth and sky, both showing signs of damage. These signs affect the reader mainly through the poet’s use of sound effects, in particular the correlative use of plosives and sibilants. As we learn from another passage in the poem (ll. 61-62), the personified earth shows “pock marks the size of countries” when viewed from outer space. Its body parts are listed asyndetically and without punctuation, which greatly speeds up the text. This syntactic acceleration in turn renders the impression of the speeding up of destructive economic processes. Ecocriticism, as Zapf suggests, should provide “innovational perspectives that transcend the one-dimensionality of the homo oeconomicus.” 23 22 See J. Scott Bryson, The West Side of Any Mountain. Place, Space and Ecopoetry (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2005), 3: “While ecopoems are indeed simply the latest in a long line of nature poetry, they also are in some ways a new type of poem, a new movement in poetry, one that seeks to stir readers to action in new ways.” It is therefore essential to look at “the process of aesthetic transformation” (55) in order 23 Zapf 2006, 49. MARIA LÖSCHNIGG 212 to render visible the specific ecocritical function of poetry in contrast to other texts taking up environmental issues. Thus, for example, the monopolizing worldviews and “exclusionary truth-claims” (56) of neoliberalist discourse are subverted and broken up by their aesthetic refraction in literary texts. The evocation of a dream future with “pipelines across continents and so many new / cars, jobs, cans of Dream Whip” (l. 11-12) is deflated and questioned through irony (“dream rivers of oil,” l. 14) and through the de-familiarization of well-known commercials: “oh white white teeth. / Pearly Whites, the adman grins, / for a smile you can sink your teeth into” (ll. 17-19). These lines disrupt the glossy surfaces we are offered daily by introducing a superordinate voice describing the “adman’s” smile as a grin, and the image evoked is that of a predator and its prey. Considering the context of the whole poem, this suggests that the earth itself is a victim into whose soil the teeth sink. Generally, the poem employs several isotopies which foreground the inextricable link between cultural, political and social factors in a condensed way. Thus, we can see, for example, a cluster of words and phrases referring to the cosmetics industry. This cluster is used as a source domain for metaphors while at the same time suggesting the link between a contemporary obsession with perfect beauty and the exploitation of the environment. The “brazil-waxed forests” of line 15 may serve as an example. While ‘brazilian waxing’ is a cosmetic method of removing body hair by the roots, the phrase also refers, in the context of the poem, to the disappearance of boreal forests as a consequence of oil mining and also to the detrimental effects on the globe’s oxygen balance caused by the dwindling of tropical rainforests (as indicated by “trope trop troposphere” of line 33). As this example shows, environmental poems which aim at capturing ecological catastrophes may attribute a pivotal role not only to the process of defamiliarization but also to that of familiarization. Thus the average twenty-first-century woman may not be able to picture the clearing of rainforests; however, the implied analogy with a familiar cosmetic treatment may make the actual referent of the image more comprehensible. 24 Irony is another device through which Rowley emphasizes the ignorance of authorities and of the proponents of economic expansion in the face of environmental crisis. In her poem, irony becomes “an important strategy of oppositional rhetoric” 25 not only because it is a “‘weighted’ mode of discourse in the sense that it is asymmetrical, unbalanced in favour of the silent and unsaid,” 26 24 So far, this essential function of environmental literature has been widely ignored by ecocriticism and I owe it to a discussion with Michael Basseler in May 2015 that I have become more strongly aware of this aspect. but also due to its judgemental attitude, which is responsible 25 Hutcheon 1994, 11-12. 26 Ibid. 37. ‘Nifty shades of green’ 213 for what Linda Hutcheon refers to as the ‘edge’ or the ‘sting’ of irony. According to her, it is this evaluative quality which distinguishes irony as a rhetorical device from other figures of speech. 27 In Rowley’s poem, it is mainly this quality which produces the text’s polemical verve, as the following lines show: Let’s wade in the tailing ponds slather our bodies with sludge and sand, light a cigarette, keep the motor running roll over like fish in the Athabasca bloated bellies toward a dazed sky. (ll. 82-86) The derisive tone of these lines results both from a ridiculing of those who actually engage in the activities suggested and from the feigned detachment of the speaker. At the same time, the aggressive subtext inherent in ironic criticism is here mitigated and made more palatable by the use of a collective speaker. In sum, however, the poem adopts a rather fatalistic attitude, conveyed in the lines above, by the provocative yoking together of pleasure and death. All the activities suggested by the numerous collective imperatives which punctuate the poem are revealed to be self-destructive and thus terminated. The bleak equation of ecocide and suicide which determines the last stanza of the poem could be read as expressing resignation, were it not for the anchoring of the ‘until’-lines in an unspecified point in the future: Until rivers dwindle to tears until wells gush blood [...] until raw and singed as the forestless bird as the fishless rivers as the speechless politicians as the songless, barren face of the earth we go down we go down. (ll. 90-91; ll. 94-100) “Mari-Lou Rowley,” as Madhur Anand (23) observes, “writes of the necessity of imagining a future based on the past but acknowledges its inherent difficulty.” This is rendered, in the following lines, by her use of language: “make me perfect, past / tense and release, past / learning from mistakes / pastpresent, future-perfect / oh perfector of defects / in flesh, water, air.” (ll. 4-9) Not only are different time-levels meaningfully and ambiguously connected, we also find, as so often in the poem, subtle deflections of meaning created by a counterpuntal use of poetic devices. Here, for example, in “flesh, water, 27 Cf. ibid. 15, 10. MARIA LÖSCHNIGG 214 air,” the evocation of the phonologically corresponding ‘fresh’ again results in a multiplication and concentration of meaning. Connections between past, present and future are also established poetically in David Martin’s “Tar Swan.” The six stanzas of the poem were inspired by a tour Martin took in 2010 of the historic Bitamount oil sands site north of Fort Murray, located on the Athabasca River in Alberta. The poem deals with the beginnings of oil mining in Alberta in the 1920s, then a smallscale enterprise driven by pioneers like Robert Fitzsimmons, who may also be seen as the speaker in Martin’s poem. 28 The poem offers scenarios of the conflict between the human and the natural and is informed by “the ambivalence of extending sympathy to both parties” (ibid.). Most of the oil pioneers had no idea about the future gigantic dimensions of oil mining in the area. While “Tar Swan” “acknowledges the human roots in the enterprise” (ibid.) it also foregrounds the devastating and increasingly uncontrollable consequences of profit-oriented expansion. As in Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s poem, complexity is created through intertextuality, as for example in the following lines from the third stanza: Threshing bitumen is the Devil’s Handkerchief followed by a question of Sympathy. Suckers agog, exposed by boreal thugs who conjure a terrible prophesy, stringing out Dionysian muck to smear on highway blacktop. Finally, by sleight of hand, they sluice foaming shades from the body as the stage manager skins his take. (stanza III, ll. 6-14) Othello’s handkerchief, perhaps the emblem of betrayal in English literature, is evoked in this tightly knit text, which not only alludes to destruction but also brings up the question of who is to blame - a question which ‘the Devil’ Iago so cunningly evades. The image of the stage manager, while again drawing on Shakespeare’s villain, apparently denotes those politicians and business tycoons responsible for the coming real of a ‘terrible / prophesy.’ In addition, the stage metaphor highlights the role of those who direct all this and ‘skin their take.’ Also, the analogy to the stage addresses the fact that what has been put up here can also be dismantled again, thus implicitly refuting the notion of a point of no return. The ‘tar swan’ of the title becomes a leitmotif in the poem, as does the black egg which the swan heralds “along slipshod / Athabasca” (stanza I, l. 28 See Dylan Schoenmakers, “Poet Profile: David Martin”; http: / / ifoa.org/ 2014/ by-ifoaauthors/ poet-profile-david-martin [31 March 2015]. ‘Nifty shades of green’ 215 10-11) and which appears in the first, fifth and sixth stanzas. 29 While in stanza four the speaker “submit[s] Nature’s Supreme Gift to Industry,” (l. 11) an act rhetorically foregrounded by a frightening list of oilmining facilities (see ll. 2-10), the last two stanzas, as mentioned above, feature a dream scenario. In this surreal vision, the speaker is haunted by a monster which he desperately tries to fight and which bears a striking resemblance to the equipment used for oil extraction. Even though first “nothing would cripple / the monster” (stanza V, ll. 7-8) the speaker, in the end, manages to retrieve an egg from the defeated beast, an egg which is still black, covered in tar, and which materializes as the most powerful symbol in the whole poem when in the last stanza children demand from the speaker to give back the egg (see l. 9). However, in his nightmarish vision, the speaker and possibly also the Athabasca region are beyond rescue. The persona of the oil pioneer Fitzsimmons is confronted with his own suicidal participation in Already in the title the conflict between nature (as represented by the swan) and human interests (tar) is introduced. The choice of the swan as a metonymic representative of nature conveys a number of additional associations, including those of beauty and death - the latter evoked in particular in the last stanza, where the swan’s song is used to imply the fate of the speaker himself, who in the dream scenario depicted in the last two stanzas compares himself to “a swan that sinks / into song” (stanza VI, ll. 5-6). In the first stanza, however, the bird is used to create empathy, and to focus on one specific site of suffering. By using “cygnet,” “cob” and “pen” to denote the swan family, a closer analogy is created between the animal sphere and that of humans. Again we have a case here, of the poetic text’s familiarizing effect, as with the suffering of the swan baby drowning in oil, Martin finds an image which makes the ungraspable immensity of the consequences of aggressive oil-mining communicable. In a similar way, the synaesthetic description of sobs “skip-dripp[ing]” from the swan baby’s “sockets” (stanza I, ll. 5-6) creates a strong emotional impact because it manages to translate an analogically encoded sensation, that of pain, into a digital code und thus makes suffering graspable in a manner difficult to convey by factual description. This effect is further enhanced by the reference to the “doodle-buggers / and orange worms” that “will soon mine his blistered lore” (ll. 7-9). The choice of words for the vermin and the explicit localization of the region they will infest enhances the emotional impact of the poem. The use of the word ‘mine’ in this context, which evokes associations with the oil industry, rather encourages the reader to reflect on causal connections between the mining of the boreal soil and the bird’s suffering. 29 The title may also include a reference to the Tar Baby in the Uncle Remus story, and the derivational meaning of ‘a complicated situation which only gets worse the more one engages with it.’ MARIA LÖSCHNIGG 216 the increasingly uncontrollable mechanisms of business expansion when “wheels turn” (l. 6) and pull him “into [the] undercarriage” (l. 14). When the economic wheel of fortune has reached its climax, a downward movement will inevitably follow, as the poem suggests. Even though the last two stanzas envision but a dream, the implication that this nightmare of the oil pioneer may have become true in the meantime, that the whole oil enterprise has run out of control, leaves a lasting and thought-provoking impact on the reader. 4. Poetry and Cultural Change The cultural significance of the poems I have discussed can be described in terms of the triadic model devised by Zapf. First, they function as “cultural critical metadiscourse” by representing and foregrounding cultural and social deficits; secondly, they also function as “imaginative counter-discourse” as they draw attention to aspects usually marginalized “in the dominant culture reality system.” 30 Examples would be the foregrounding of the swan baby or the speaker’s dream-vision in David Martin’s poem. Finally these tar sands poems function as “reintegrative interdiscourse” (65; emphases in the original) - not only due to the juxtaposition and meaningful fusion of conflicting elements, ideas and aspects, but also because, as a whole, these poems can be regarded as symbolic manifestations of creativity and regeneration. While Zapf’s triadic model provides a general basis for the functional description of eco-literature, I would like to expand it by proposing generically defined differentiations. While it is of the utmost importance to define the functions of eco-literature, it is equally necessary to explain how these functions are achieved and which functional potential each literary genre can offer. Even though there are criteria which apply to literature in general, many literary devices are genre-specific, fulfilling specific tasks in the cultural ‘semiotope.’ The following table assembles a list of rhetorical functions as they can be observed in the eco-poems I have introduced and which render the transformative potential of this genre in the context of cultural ecology comprehensible. Rhetorical functions in eco-poetry: 1. Strong appellative impact - reader is directly addressed and called upon to (re)act; brought forth, for example, by ► explicit addressees; ► collective speakers; 30 Zapf 2006, 62-63. ► imperatives. ‘Nifty shades of green’ 217 2. De-familiarizing devices - open up ossified and automatized patterns of thinking; have a re-configurative effect on cognitive processing; brought forth, for example by ► neologisms; ► unusual collocations; ► juxtaposition of seemingly disparate and/ or incompatible concepts; ► surreal elements - lead to aesthetic distance. 3. Familiarizing devices - make extreme scenarios of crisis graspable; create empathy; help to visualize and comprehend abstract concepts; brought forth, for example, by ► imagery (symbols, anthropomorphizing and synaesthetic metaphors, personifications, metonymies…); ► narrowing down of focus (from global to local; from collective to individual); ► intertextuality - creating analogies between the familiar and the strange 4. Polyvalence - the creation of multiple meanings counters unilinear patterns of viewing and evaluating the world; brought forth, for example by ► ambiguity - implication of various meanings which cannot be fused into one single meaning (denotative ambiguity, ambiguous connotation etc.); ► irony - “the making or inferring of meaning in addition to what and different from what is stated, together with an attitude towards both the said and the unsaid”; 31 ► intertextuality - multiplication and variation of voices and cultural codes; expansion of semantic signification. 5. Rhythmic, phonological and syntactic devices - translate semantic structures into acoustic correlatives and thus double and intensify meaning; brought forth, for example, by ► compressed syntactic structures; ► accumulation of stresses; ► onomatopoeia. In sum, by means of such devices, which distinguish literary texts from pragmatic and expository discourses, these eco-poems function as ferment within a cultural climate characterized by standardization and homogeneity, leading to an ongoing process of cultural recycling and regeneration as sug- 31 Hutcheon 1994, 11. MARIA LÖSCHNIGG 218 gested by a model of literature as an element of cultural ecology. However, even if we agree that poetry, as this table of transformative strategies suggests, has a particularly high potential to serve as a motor for cultural change we must pose the question: Who reads poetry? “Various scholars,” as Eva Koopman and Frank Hakemulder begin their 2015 article on reader responses, “have made claims about literature’s potential to evoke empathy and selfreflection, which would eventually lead to more pro-social behaviour.” “But is it indeed the case,” they continue, “that a seemingly idle pass-time activity like literary reading can do all that? ” 32 Koopman and Hakemulder, whose aim was to find out if, to what extent, and by what means literature could bring forth change, real-world empathy and pro-social behaviour, base their empirical studies on the three categories of narrativity, fictionality and foregrounding. Narrativity, according to this study, leads to role-taking, which in turn generates affective empathy. The second factor, fictionality, contributes to aesthetic distance, i.e. “an attitude of detachment, allowing contemplation to take place” (101). While readers consume factual texts to “update their world-knowledge,” fictional texts encourage “an imaginative construction of hypothetical events and scenarios” (88). Like role-taking, aesthetic distance leads to affective empathy, but also simultaneously increases cognitive empathy, i.e. reflection and self-awareness. Foregrounding, which leads to defamiliarization, however, can be seen as the most important factor with regard to self-reflection. In this context, Koopman and Hakemulder refer to an experiment carried out by Willie Van Peer, Jèmeljan Hakemulder and Sonia Zyngier, who “found higher cognitive reflection in response to a poetic sentence when it contained more deviating linguistic features (‘foregrounding’).” 33 32 Eva Maria Koopman and Frank Hakemulder, “Effects of Literature on Empathy and Self-Reflection: A Theoretical-Empirical Framework,” Journal of Literary Theory 9.1 (2015): 79-111, 79. While a lot of the empirical data presented in Koopman and Hakemulder’s article must indeed be seen as a valuable contribution to the definition of literature and its social, political and cultural function, the multi-factor model also raises essential questions concerning the limits of reader response approaches. With its division of the impact of literary reading into ‘stimulus,’ ‘reading experience’ and ‘after effects,’ this model runs the risk of persuading us to see direct and immediate cause and effect relations between reading a story or a poem and their impact on real life behaviour. Such an approach to ecopoetry would result in just the kind of countable superficiality these poems claim to counter, apart from the fact that such effects cannot be measured in the first place. Too many factors play a role here, apart from 33 Koopman and Hakemulder 94. See also Willie van Peer, Jèmeljan Hakemulder and Sonia Zyngier, “Lines on Feeling: Foregrounding, Aesthetics and Meaning,” Language and Literature 16 (2007): 197-213. ‘Nifty shades of green’ 219 the fact that many effects are manifested in much too implicit and indirect a manner. The merits of poetry thus lie somewhat paradoxically in its limits. Poetry represents an element of a cultural ecology because of its difference from other, more factual, documentary, informative, pragmatic and/ or expository discourses, i.e. due to the fact that it offers alternative symbolic significations, because it either presents the familiar in an unfamiliar shape or makes the unfamiliar and incomprehensible, familiar and graspable. Since reading literature (and poetry in particular) is not a mass phenomenon confirming, as mass phenomena usually do, popular tastes and trends, ecopoetry is powerful not because it is best-selling, like Fifty Shades of Grey, but rather because it offers ‘nifty shades of green.’ These may not be seen by many, but they may keep the cultural biotope, or rather, ‘semiotope,’ as diversified and alive as possible. Thus, coming back to environmental issues, the many counter-discursive voices which challenge the one-dimensional and rationalizing discourse of political power and economic growth will not, as I see it, lead to ecological protest on a large scale. Neither will they stop oil mining in northern Alberta - at least not in the near future. 34 Rather, these poems, in symbiosis with other critical discourses such as scientific reports, documentary films, protest letters, fiction, drama, travelogues etc. will help prepare a mental climate that will be - as it has been before - the creative basis for transformation and regeneration. 34 One may be tempted, though, to see Justin Trudeau’s surprise victory in October 2015 as a sign that such a mental change has indeed taken place in Canada. Concerning the Tar Sands, Trudeau has at least claimed that he wanted to “include climate concerns.” (See Brian Palmer (2015). “Is Justin Trudeau Canada’s Climate Savior? ” Online: https: / / www.nrdc.org/ onearth/ justin-trudeau-canadas-climate-savior [March 22, 2016]. MARIA LÖSCHNIGG 220 Works Cited Primary: Anand, Madhur and Adam Dickinson, ed. Regreen. New Canadian Ecological Poetry. Sudbury: Your Scrivener Press, 2009. Brand, Dionne. Inventory. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006. Brandt, Di. Now You Care. Toronto: Coach House Press, 2003. Holmes, Nancy, ed. Open Wide a Wilderness. Canadian Nature Poems. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009. Lai, Larissa, and Rita Wong. Sybil Unrest. Burnaby: Line Books, 2008 (2004). Martin, David. “Tar Swan.” http: / / www.cbc.ca/ books/ canadawrites/ 2014/ 09/ 2014-cbc-poetry-prize-tar-swan-by-david-martin.html. [March 10. 2015] Solie, Karen (2009). Pigeon. Toronto: Anansi, 2014. Secondary: Anand, Madhur. “Introduction: ‘Gap Dynamics.’” Regreen: New Ecological Poetry. Ed. M.A. and Adam Dickinson. Sudbury: Your Scrivener Press, 2009. 19-28. Armbruster, Karla, and Kathleen R. Wallace, eds. Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Charlottesville, VA: U of Virginia P, 2001. Bryson, J. Scott. The West Side of Any Mountain. Place, Space and Ecopoetry. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2005. ---, ed. Ecopoetry. A Critical Introduction. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2002. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 1995. Chung, Emily: http: / / www.cbc.ca/ news/ technology/ foreign-scientists-call-onstephen-harper-to-restore-science-funding-freedom-1.2806571 [March 10, 2015]. Dickinson, Adam. “Introduction: ‘The Astronauts.’” In: Regreen: New Ecological Poetry. Ed. Anand Madhur and A.D. Sudbury: Your Scrivener Press, 2009. 9-18. Estok, Simon C. “Discourses of Nation, National Ecopoetics, and Ecocriticism in the face of the US: Canada and Korea as Case Studies.” Comparative American Studies 7.2 (2009): 85-97. Gersdorf, Catrin, and Sylvia Mayer. “Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Defining the Subject of Ecocriticism - an Introduction.” In: Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies. Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism. Ed. C.G. and S.M. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2006. 9-21. Gersdorf, Catrin, and Sylvia Mayer, eds. Natur - Kultur - Text. Beiträge zu Ökologie und Literaturwissenschaft. Heidelberg: Winter, 2005. Glotfelty, Cheryl, and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader. Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens, Ga.: U of Georgia P, 1996. Goodbody, Axel, ed. Literatur und Ökologie. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998. Hutcheon, Linda. Irony’s Edge. The Theory and Politics of Irony. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. ‘Nifty shades of green’ 221 Koopman, Eva Maria, and Frank Hakemulder. “Effects of Literature on Empathy and Self-Reflection: A Theoretical-Empirical Framework.” Journal of Literary Theory 9.1(2015): 79-111. Löschnigg, Maria. “‘NAFTA we worship you’: Conservationism and the Critique of Economic Liberalism in Twenty-First Century Canadian Poetry.” Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 34 (2014): 28-45. Mayer, Sophie. “Review: Sybil Unrest by Larissa Lai and Rita Wong.” Chroma, January 31 (2009). Online: http: / / chromajournal.blogspot.co.at/ 2009/ 01/ review-sybilunrest-by-larissa-lai-and.html. [October 12, 2012]. Nikiforuk, Andrew. Tar Sands. Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent. Vancouver, Toronto, Berkeley: Greystone Books, 2010. Palmer, Brian (2015). “Is Justin Trudeau Canada’s Climate Savior? ” Online: https: / / www.nrdc.org/ onearth/ justin-trudeau-canadas-climate-savior [March 22, 2016]. Schoenmakers, Dylan. “Poet Profile: David Martin.” Online: http: / / ifoa.org/ 2014/ byifoa-authors/ poet-profile-david-martin [31 March 2015]. Smith, Rick (2014). “Stephen Harper: The Environment’s best Friend.” The Toronto Star. Online: http: / / www.thestar.com/ opinion/ commentary/ 2014/ 07/ 31/ stephen_harper_the_environments_best_friend.html [November 12, 2014]. Van Peer, Willie, Jèmeljan Hakemulder and Sonia Zyngier. “Lines on Feeling: Foregrounding, Aesthetics and Meaning.” Language and Literature 16 (2007): 197-213. Warren, Bell (2015). “Stephen Harper Coninues to Make Canada an International Pariah.” Vancouver Observer. Online: http: / / www.vancouverobserver.com/ opinion/ stephen-harper-continues-his-path-transforming-canada-internationalpariah [March 10, 2015]. Zapf, Hubert (2002). Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie: Zur kulturellen Funktion imaginativer Texte an Beispielen des amerikanischen Romans. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ---. “The State of Ecocriticism and the Function of Literature as Cultural Ecology.” Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies. Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocroticism. Ed. Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2006. 49- 69. IV. Literary Change and/ as Cultural Change