NEVER AGAIN WOULD BIRDS’ SONG BE THE SAME, OR, ECOPOETICS WHEN “THERE IS NO WORLD”

Abstract

This essay rethinks the meaning of ecopoetics by exploring poems about birds’ song – one of the most canonical themes in all of poetry – and how their poetics may be understood in relation to our growing ornithological knowledge about birds and how, why, and what they sing. While ecocriticism has traditionally thought such questions in terms of the experience – and the representation of the experience – of an auditor who, in her rapt attention, establishes the well-known bird/bard matrix familiar from the poetic tradition (both poet and bird are songsters, and both carry a message from a realm apart from the mundane and everyday), this essay argues for a non-representationalist ecopoetics in which poem and birds’ song share a common infrastructure of iterability. This helps us locate the ecological dimension of poetics rather differently, and it also opens onto the non-representationalist understanding of our experience of “world” in both deconstruction and systems theory, which long ago replaced the concept of “nature” with “environment.”

Keywords:

• ecocriticism
• poetics
• deconstruction
• systems theory
• animal studies

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. I, trans. Geoffrey Bennington; eds. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009) 236. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.

2 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills; ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham UP, 2008) 24, 28, 30, 125.

3 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. II, trans. Geoffrey Bennington; eds. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011) 8–9. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.

4 See, for example, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2012); Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013).

5 Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010) xxviii. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.

6 See Cary Wolfe, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2013) 63–86. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.

7 For an expanded discussion of what falls between the dashes here – and in relation to Stevens’s poetry specifically – see Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? chapter 10.

8 Specifically, in both Before the Law (57), and in my forthcoming book on Wallace Stevens and ecopoetics, which features a lengthy chapter on deconstruction and theoretical biology. For relevant current work in theoretical biology see, among others, Stuart Kauffman, Humanity in a Creative Universe (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017), esp. chapters 3 and 4; Denis Noble, Dance to the Tune of Life: Biological Relativity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017).

9 The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged, ed. Edward Connery Latham (New York: Holt, 1979) 338. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.

10 John Hollander, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975) 42. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.

11 See in this connection Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am and the well-known discussion of “carnophallogocentrism” in “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida” in Who Comes After the Subject?, eds. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991) 96–119.

12 Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1992) 36–37.

13 Robert Kern, “Frost and Modernism,” American Literature 60.1 (Mar. 1988): 15. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.

14 See Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003) 78–94.

15 See Cary Wolfe, “Wallace Stevens’s Birds, or, Derrida and Ecological Poetics” in Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy, eds. Matthias Fritsch, Philippe Lynes, and David Wood (New York: Fordham UP, 2018) 317–38, esp. 322–23. For Stevens’s review of Williams, see the essay “Williams” in Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, rev. ed., ed. Milton J. Bates (New York: Random, 1990) 213–15.

16 The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Random, 1982) 534. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.

17 Robert Morgan, “Mockingbird” in Trunk & Thicket (Fort Collins, CO: L’Epervier, 1978) 35.

18 Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds (New York: Penguin, 2016) 140. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.

19 David Wills, Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2016) 266–67, 258.

20 In this connection, see the notes on the poem in Eleanor Cook, A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007) 314.

21 Yeats’s Poems, ed. Norman B. Jeffares (London: Macmillan, 1989) 301. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.

22 Martin Hägglund, “The Arche-Materiality of Time: Deconstruction, Evolution, and Speculative Realism” in Theory After “Theory,” eds. Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 2011) 270. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.

23 Quoted in Hägglund 274–75.

24 And here I think it’s worth noting that even Morgan’s poem, beginning as it does, comes round to the same assertions, unpacking and ramifying iteration and recombination in the situated organism/environment relationship, handled here more in terms of phylogenesis than the ontogenesis that opened the poem so stunningly, and ramping up the premium on how the technicity of the trace traverses the organic/inorganic relation. Morgan writes: “Don’t try / to filibuster nature. The art of culture / is always substitution. The knife must / turn to keep its honey” (38).

25 In “Wallace Stevens’s Birds” 321–22.

26 Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, rev. ed., trans. Robert Paolucci; foreword J.Z. Young (Boston: Shambhala, 1998) 29.

27 Derrida’s characterization occurs in Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff; trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and Samuel Weber (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988) 113.