Polyphony and ecology: The green world in Robert Bringhurst’s New World Suite No. 3

ABSTRACT

Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst found inspiration for New World Suite No. 3, a complex poem for three voices in four movements, in the natural polyphony of the Earth and in the vast world of polyphonic music. This article examines the elementary lessons this poet-philosopher learnt from musicians and the world to be able to produce a polyphonic poetry which is intellectually alert to the damage that the human species is doing to the ecosphere. It analyses the role of nature in the Suite and looks into polyphony as a poetic strategy designed to capture the multifariousness of a green world that is being constantly assailed by greed-driven capitalism and the practices of neo-liberalism. Concerned with preserving the integrity of the Earth, the Suite is ultimately a denunciation of an anthropocentric logic of domination and a reminder that dwelling on Earth with responsibility is simply a moral imperative.

KEYWORDS:

• Robert Bringhurst
• lyric
• polyphony
• biosphere
• ethics
• ecopoetics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Bringhurst’s view of language as an outgrowth of nature has striking similarities with that of Snyder (2000), who affirms: “languages were not the intellectual inventions of archaic schoolteachers but are naturally evolved wild systems” (127).

2. The impact of Old World illnesses on the native peoples and the aggressiveness of the imperialist ideology of the European settlers led to a catastrophe of gigantic proportions in the Americas (see Wilson 1998, 283).

3. In Other Destinities, Louis Owen highlights that the First Nations placed “essential value upon the totality of existence, making humanity equal to all elements but superior to none and giving humankind crucial responsibility for the care of the world we inhabit” (quoted in Schweninger 2008, 1).

4. Goody (1977) claims that alphabetic writing is a powerful technology that “changes the nature of the representations of the world” (28) and gives supremacy to discourse. As Manes (1996) maintains, the epistemological inference appears to be that “meaning somehow resides in human speech [ … ], not in the phenomenal world” and that “only humans can act as speaking subjects” (19), which betrays the anthropocentrism deeply ingrained in the western Weltanschauung.

5. Bringhurst’s polyphonic song of being is the singing of all species and is closely related to Johann Gottfried Herder’s notion of “Earth’s poesy” (see Rigby 2016, 54).

6. Bringhurst’s intimation that physics is probably the only possible ontology (that the real is real and it is alive) is reminiscent of Soper’s (1995) staunch defence of the existence of nature independent of its cultural representation: “it is not language that has a hole in its ozone layer” (151).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leonor María Martínez Serrano

Leonor María Martínez Serrano is a lecturer in the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Córdoba. Her research interests include Canadian literature, ecocriticism, high modernism, First Nations and oral literatures. She has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Toronto and British Columbia (Canada), the University of the West of Scotland (UK), the University of Białystok (Poland) and the University of Oldenburg (Germany).