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September 25, 2006
In previous posts I have connected Heidegger's understanding of dwelling to Puritjarra as a place and Heidegger's understanding of releasement to painting the country by aboriginal artists. I have done this by relying on Strata: Deserts, Past, Present and Future,an environmental art project about a significant cultural place.
Now I want to do the same with Heidegger's understanding of eco-poetics. We can turn to a paper entitled Earthsongs: Ecopoetics, Heidegger and Dwelling by Michael Peters and Ruth Irwin to get a grasp of eco-poetics. They start by introducing Jonanthan Bate's The Song of the Earth, which Bates says is a book about:
why poetry continues to matter as we enter a new millennium that will be ruled by technology. It is a book about modern Western man's alienation from nature. It is about the capacity of the writer to restore us to the earth which is our home.
Peters and Irwin interpret Bates to be arguing that restoring us to the earth is what good ecopoetry can do and ecopoetics (rather than ecocriticism) is not just the pastoral theme, which Bates asserts, following de Man, may be "in fact, the only poetic theme," it is poetry itself . Ecopoetics is more phenomenological than political and while its force does not depend upon versification or metrical form, it constitutes the most direct return to the place of dwelling. Bate explains:
Ecopoetics asks in what respects a poem may be a making (Greek poiesis) of the dwelling place -- the prefix eco- is derived from the Greek oikos, "the home or place of dwelling." I think of this book as an "experiment in ecopoetics". The experiment is this: to see what happens when we regard poems as imaginary parks in which we may breath[e] an air that is not toxic and accommodate ourselves to a mode of dwelling that is not alienated.
Peters and Irwin say that when Bate uses the concept "dwelling" he is self-consciously drawing on his earlier understanding of Wordsworth---for Wordsworth "remains the founding father for a thinking of poetry in relation to place, to our dwelling on the earth"---and running this sense of place together with the special sense that Heidegger gives the term in two essays based on lectures delivered in the early 1950s (Building Dwelling Thinking (1950) and Poetically Man Dwells 1951). This gives us a peculiar set of relationships between place, poetry, and bioregion.
Instead of Wordsworth and poetry we can turn to the paintings of Puritjarra, which is beyond Haasts Bluff, some seven hours travelling west of Alice Springs, which were included in the Strata: Deserts, Past, Present and Future project.
Strata: Deserts, Past, Present and Future is an environmental art project about a significant cultural place--- Puritjarra
Daisy Napaltjarri Jugadai, My Country, Acrylic on canvas,
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