"A line of Snyder's from Mountains and Rivers Without End: there can be no true hunger without a painting of hunger."
This reminds me of a favorite line from Levinas: "What's written in souls is first written in books."
It's possibly no coincidence that nature writing and appreciation of same declined in tandem with the deterioration of our ecosystem during this last century. Perhaps that's a chicken-and-egg thing, but it does not bode well either way.
FWIW, Snyder recently told me that he got his poetics more from Pound than from his study of Asian poetry, and seemed to express mild/bemused annoyance at the confusion about this; he also talked about The Cantos as a "flawed" poem.
Best to you & yours,
D.
That makes sense to me, Don. But I'm not sure if that helps or hurts Brogger's argument: is Snyder's "reticence" learned from Pound or an improvement on Pound, or is just a refinement of Pound's particular Orientalism?
Doodle (Doodle?): It seems to me that, in terms of market share, "nature writing" and nature specatorship (the Discovery Channel, et al) are actually as popular or more popular than ever. It's sentimental, second-order Romanticism, for the most part.
Beautiful Levinas line, Ben.
Just for fun, a bit of Oppen on nature (Nature?):
"yes, Nature, stone nature and the empty space must be th emother from which we were born since the others are deserted too outside a closed door of nothingness and therefore presumably our brothers..." (Selected Letters)
... Mother, / Nature! because we find the others / Deserted like ourselves, and therefore brothers. (- eventually part of "Blood from the Stone")
Plenty of 2nd-rate romanticism in ecocriticism, too, from the sound of it.
Was this the Poetic Ecologies conference in Brussels? Sounds interesting.
Oppen mentions Snyder in his Daybook V after a note 'the self importance of artists':
'Snyder
he likes mountains
Which is genuine
And in the mountains he likes to remember the tremendous adventure of the monasteries and someone saying something like "the universe is in the shape of a conch-shell"
it isn't unattractive'
Commenting by HaloScan
