Poetic Co-operation in the Works of “Nature Writers of Our Own Time”

This paper invites several U.S. nature writers—notably Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams and Gary Snyder—to outline the contours of a “land poetics” in keeping with Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic”. How can the writer-poet reach for a “middle voice” which would sound both, and with equal significance, the nature writer and nature itself, turning the latter into a subject rather than an object of discourse? While sketching out the intellectual context, in the field of ecocriticism, which has made it possible to imagine such a common “middle voice,” this paper argues that the voice cannot materialize without some form of ritual conversion. The writers it looks at are committed to such a ritual—and not just thematic or formal—practice of poetic discourse, which first calls for a sacrifice, usually performed in the presence of an animal figure: that of the individual, sovereign figure of the Western self. This undoing releases the rhythmic materiality of language, discourse and narrative from the strictures of the self to open them up to life at large. In this context, the poetic statement acts like an offering, a momentary concretion, or “fruiting” (Snyder), in the energetic flow by means of which the ecosystem keeps realigning itself