Ecopoetic Practice

Introduction: Illusions, Desires, and Detachments

Several threads are woven together, like a braided stream, in the article that follows. One thread charts my search for connection with the River Murray, an important part of my and the Australian nation’s sense of identity. Another draws from the deep well of scholarship and writings about place and landscape to consider how ecopoetic writing may contribute to both personal and social understandings about the significance of “place” in human lives. A final thread reflects upon the contribution that this kind of work might make to research endeavors that strive to reveal how the future of human lives are dependent on and deeply intertwined with landscapes where people live.

A few years back I completed a series of four canoe journeys that traveled the length of the River Murray in Australia. The four trips totalled 70 days of paddling to cover the river’s 2500-km length. The first two trips were completed alone, the third with my eldest daughter (who was 14 years old at the time), and the final trip was with a group of my undergraduate outdoor education students. The River Murray, and its tributaries throughout the Murray–Darling basin, forms an iconic Australian landscape. The watershed covers much of eastern Australia, and it is the most productive agricultural region in the country. Agriculture is conducted on a large and industrial scale throughout the region and is mostly irrigation based. This has brought vast changes to the local landscape, culture, and ecology of the river and its floodplain.

During my paddling journeys I kept a “river” journal of observations and experiences to not only have as a “record” of my travels but also as a meaning-making exercise. I used writing as a way of trying to make sense of the physical, emotional, and metaphorical journey I was experiencing. The entries in my journal varied from seemingly simple notes about a particular day’s progress or as environmental observations about things seen along the way. Occasionally, longer narratives or drafts of poems were written. Some of the notes and narratives were used later, along with further background research, to write complete poems, each one representing a small but significant part of the larger experience. Eventually the poems became a collection that was subsequently published as The Song of the Wounded River (Wattchow, 2010). I will draw excerpts from some of these poems throughout the article to provide examples of the theoretical themes being discussed. Part of my intention was to write river and travel poetry of the “everyday” encounter with the river’s swirling waters, dry sandy banks, the surrounding forests and farms, and the chance encounters with animals and people along the way. The journal and the poems represented a serious attempt to explore and understand the experience of a river, in terms of both the physical and emotional journeys encountered.

I have visited “the River,” as it is simply known to locals, for more than 20 years as an outdoor and environmental educator and river guide. But my memories of it stretch further back to my South-Australian childhood. My great grandfather Hermann Wattchow and his family established a farm on the south bank of the River, between Waikerie and Morgan, around the time of Federation (in Australia the different colony states became a federated commonwealth in 1901). Although the farm was sold during my father’s youth I began to get to know the region through camping and canoe trips, and the river remained a topic of discussion around the family dinner table.

Years later I became familiar with the section of the river, far upstream from the family farm, where it flows through a region known as the Barmah Forest (the largest remaining wetland and red gum forest on the river). I guided many canoe trips there with university undergraduates and became fascinated with its history, got to know some locals, and continue to feel a strong sense of connection with this landscape. I also walked extensively through the river’s headwaters and paddled many of its tributaries. Ultimately the journey I undertook down the river was an attempt to connect these disparate experiences into a whole. But the apparent simplicity of following a river, any river, like a coherent line through the landscape, is a deception, even when it is just starting out as a small stream in its headwaters.

Falling water chuckles ‘cross a bar

Of orange, pink and brown stones.

Their edges wave beneath the stream,

Dissolve—reform, where

A silver sheen of riverskin

Holds apart the words,

Water and Air.

Then the River falls

Rises to a crest and then a wave.

In perfect stillness it repeats,

Over and again,

Out of the mouth of the curling wave

The River sings a perfect chord,

Forever unwavering across

The surface of the pool.

This excerpt from the poem The Curling Wave hints at a romantic, pristine river high up in its watershed. Veronica Strang (2004), in her ethnographic study of the River Stour in Britain titled The Meaning of Water, described the “mesmeric qualities of water” (p. 51) and how the human observer may enter a meditative state while transfixed by the flickering light and color of moving water. Reflecting upon her attempt to get “beneath the surface” of the Stour, Strang (2004) comments that

What emerges . . . is a picture of a highly complex relationship with water, in which physical, sensory and cognitive experiences articulate with cultural meanings and values. (p. 3)

What we see, perhaps, in The Curling Wave is the echo of a romantic impulse that clings to notions of the picturesque and the idea of nature as sublime—the antithesis of the industrial city. Yet this is, of course, an illusion. The inland rivers of Australia are a vast lacework of channels, anabranches, and backwaters that flow, dry out, and flow again, across vast floodplains. Almost all of them have been significantly modified by settler Australians. This is certainly true for the Murray. The river can no longer be considered either wild or pristine. Even high in its watershed the river flows have already been captured, piped, redirected, stored, and released to meet the needs of human settlement and food production. The process of “regulating” the river’s flows began with the construction of irrigation projects and locks in the early 1900s and culminated with the building of the Hume Weir in the 1930s and the Snowy Mountains Hydro Eclectic Scheme in the 1950s. Collectively, these projects have “tamed” the wild river and converted its waters into a commodity that can be traded in the market place. The following excerpt from the poem The Gigalitre Dream suggests that, culturally, there is more than water that has been traded away in this transaction.

There’s no well-spring in the mountains,

No sacred source,

For the gigalitre dream.

But it’s out there flowing,

Heading downstream,

Cresting watersheds,

Swelling on the draftsman’s clean page,

Pulsing on the website screen.

In the gigalitre dream,

It runs straight where

Rivers used to snake,

And the water right

Rewrites an older dream

As simple property.

The River Murray historian, Paul Sinclair (2001), suggests that Australians now need to acknowledge and learn to live with two versions of the same river. The preregulation river, he argues, still inhabits our collective memory and infiltrates our thinking and desire for how we want to encounter the river. But in reality, it is a vastly altered and degraded river system that we find when we travel its waters in the postregulation era. The story of European settlement along the river is one of dire ecological consequences and cultural impacts upon the original Indigenous inhabitants. The river is a product of complex natural and cultural forces interacting over vast periods of time. Yet the “reality” of the river today is very much a result of the dreams and desires that settler Australians have held for it in the past 150 years. Perhaps the central issue here is that many settler Australians are still to connect deeply with the land (and the water) that they rely on to live from day to day. A fresh way of looking at this issue is to consider the role of human subjectivity in the making of the places we have wounded so badly.

Toward an Ecopoetics of Place

Two major intellectual traditions, continental philosophy and human geography, gathered momentum in the second half of the past century and led to the emergence of an interdisciplinary scholarship of place. The “phenomenological turn” in geographical studies highlighted the role that human subjectivities play in place identities and was led by Yi Fu Tuan, Edward Relph, and David Seamon. The work of the latter two in particular has been influenced by the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. “The word ‘place’ is best applied,” writes Edward Relph (1992, p. 37), “to those fragments of human environments where meanings, activities and a specific landscape are all implicated and enfolded by each other.”

Edward Relph’s (1976) seminal work Place and Placelessness has given us another way of considering how individuals and communities respond to the places that sustain them. Places are never static; they are always emerging and becoming. Places are the product of the land itself, time, and the actions and desires of those who live on it, work it, dream about it, and change it. As a result, those people and communities are also changed by that place. The individual, the community, and the land, with all of its “more-than-human” inhabitants (Abram, 1996), exist in a dynamic phenomenon—this unfolding phenomenon is what creates a place. Ivan Brady (1995) has argued that although poetry can never fully escape the biases inherent in language it is its use of metaphor that has the potential to immerse us in the “relations among things” (p. 998), to get us closer toward the emergent thing that is a place.

a poetic immersion of self in the experience of a much-traveled and culturally marked ancient place has a better chance of getting at a realistic account of such experiences primarily because of its devotion to sensuous particulars. (Brady, 1995, p. 998)

The Australian landscape has famously been described by the poet Dorotheah Mackellar (1908) as a land of “droughts and flooding rains.” In the following excerpt from the poem Floodplain Acoustics we see the river and its floodplain regain some of its past meaning in a flood event. Culture and nature wrestle with each other and emerge changed. The word “Country” has special resonance here for it is a European word that has been co-opted by Indigenous Australia. In the contemporary vernacular it no longer indicates colonial values and nationhood. Instead it has come to suggest a sense of indivisibility between indigenous people and land.

A distant pulse of snow and rain,

silent for years behind the wall,

returns the rhythm of its voice, again.

The water climbs the banks, and

curls into the grass,

launching dried insect cases,

It seeps into the forest,

turning country into river,

River into Country.

For those of us who no longer live all of our lives in deep association with one place, it requires a special effort to learn country. According to Relph (1976), empathetic insidedness can be achieved through “training ourselves to see and understand places in themselves” (p. 55). In seeking insidedness we are not fooling ourselves that we can take the place of an indigene, but we realize that through apprenticing ourselves to a place (Wattchow & Brown, 2011) we can at least begin the process of reattachment.

And then—quiet.

The whispering banks

are speaking, to those

Who silence themselves

upon the cusp of deafness,

and that is where we find them, listening.

When we listen deeply to a landscape we become aware of the balance of natural and cultural forces that make up a place. We may begin to see, and indeed experience, the dynamism of a place and how it changes through time and how we are changed as a result. Further downriver I paddled past the decaying wrecks of old paddle steamers, the silent steel winches on the old bridges that used to be raised by the resident bridge keeper to let the steamers pass, and the omnipresent din of irrigation pumps pulling water from the river to grow produce that is carted away in huge air-conditioned trucks to distant markets beyond the horizon. These remnants and ruins of the past hint that places change rapidly, beneath our feet, and before our gaze.

On a twisting night a steamer skipper is

Trapped inside a vicious bight,

Keeping the Tooleybuc

Bridge Keeper’s children awake

In the little square house by the River.

Two bedrooms only for the keeper and his wife

And thirteen children listening

For the beat of the paddle wheels

Coming then going, coming then going,

That finally send Father into the night

To work the winches

That raise the bridge this one last time.

Then from the steamer’s

Upstream passage,

A thump-thump receding,

A thump-thump receding.

Now the working river falls quiet

Beneath a rattle of diesel pumps

Each calling out its water right,

Answering the green desert dream.

It too was cargo on the long sail south,

As all night long

The road trains hum their songs of haste

Upon a tar sealed highway.

The skippers must have seen it coming,

Talking softly ‘cross their billies

Of river water tea:

“The end’s in sight, lad.”

When rail and road

Bridge the run to market:

“Three to one, lad.”

“Three bloody river miles to every one.”

The skippers’ voices fade,

The old dreams die.

A sensitivity for place reminds us about the inevitability of change—change to the lives of individuals and families, to communities, and the river and floodplain ecologies that sustain them.

The old paddle wheelers that once carted wool downriver to the ports of Goolwa and Morgan have been replaced by modern industrial-scale agriculture. My journey down the river was embodied, intellectual, and emotional. Physical rest was accompanied by reflection. Poetic writing served as a form of synthesis for experiences and events. Place, movement, and language became entangled in each other. What can this practice of poetry offer? Perhaps Jonathon Bate (2000, pp. 75-76) has said it best.

Eco-poetics asks in what respects a poem may be a making (Greek poiesis) of the dwelling-place—the prefix eco—is derived from Greek oikos, “the home or place of dwelling” . . . it could be that poiesis in the sense of verse-making is language’s most direct path of return to oikos, the place of dwelling, because metre itself, a quiet but persistent music, a recurring cycle, a heartbeat—is an answering to nature’s own rhythms, an echoing of the song of the earth itself.

Bate (2000) argues that poetry allows us to awaken “the momentary wonder of unconcealment” (p. 258). In his book The Song of the Earth, Bate (2000) reflected on Western culture’s indebtedness to the Romantic poets and considered the development of ecopoetics as crucial to reimagining of how humans lives might be lived in accord with the parameters of places. “For Heidegger,” Bate continues, “poetry can, quite literally, save the earth” (p. 258). As Heidegger wrote, in his famous essay Poetically Man Dwells (2000, p. 93), “poetry builds up the very nature of dwelling. Poetry and dwelling not only do not exclude each other; on the contrary, poetry and dwelling belong together, each calling for the other.” For Heideggar, dwelling amidst the fourfold of the earth, sky, the divinities, and other mortals is what we must strive to practice. The Australian ecocritic and scholar Kate Rigby (2004, p. 432) explains,

The poet admits us into dwelling precisely to the extent that she allows even the most familiar things to appear in all their strangeness, as if encountered for the first time. Only thus might things cease to be mere equipment; only thus might they be revealed as a gathering of the fourfold, the matrix of dwelling.

For Judy Pinn (2003) poetry offers an intensity of language, which is nondualistic, vulnerable, and brings us close to a sense of embodied experience. It can “provide an enfolding of self with place, of the outer with the inner” (p. 45). It offers a way of pursuing knowing that has often been suppressed and relegated to the margins (Pinn, 2003, pp. 45-46). It is “tied to the context of the immediate and the immanent,” writes Michael Brady (2005, p. 991), “to the processes of ‘being there’ and sensual saturation.”

I feel the river quiver through my paddle

I feel the river sliding past my shins

I feel her streaming in my skin

my skin upon her skin

for twenty times a thousand years

I feel the river sliding I feel the river quiver

(Excerpt from the poem Double Helix)

Poetic writing offers the opportunity of representing the emotional and sensual depth of human experience. This provides a compelling reason for considering the contribution that it may make to autoethnographic research. It is, perhaps, the best form of representing the subjective experience of relationships, even when those relationships are between humans and landscapes. Yet it has been argued that language traps us in the world of texts and severs “direct,” primordial, or sensory experience from its linguistic and discursive representations (Csordas, 1999). More than any other genre of writing, poetry provides ways of exploring human subjectivities that are difficult to articulate. Poetic use of language has the peculiar power to speak “earth” (Bate, 2000), returning us to our sensual and earthen experience (Jardine, 1992). The poetic writer abandons any sense that language can serve as a neutral conduit of content. Rather the poem hints and gestures through image and metaphor. The writer is exploring, revealing, and learning about his or her experience of the world through the “poetising project” (van Manen, 2001, p. 13). For Max van Manen (2001), poetic writing as a form of research activity relies on a paradox; it “distances us from lived experiences but by doing so it allows us to discover the existential structures of experience” (p. 127). In turn, these revelations give us deeper insights into the worlds of our experience.

Singing the Wounded River

Throughout the canoe journey I strove to write about what I found in the slow-flowing muddy water or felt during the long days in the sun, paddling downstream. I scribbled in my journal while sitting on clay banks and resting in sandy campsites. Even on short stops, I would jot down a short “word picture.”

Three pelicans climb a cumulous sky,

Tracing a late afternoon spiral

That is vanishing, vanishing.

Later, those lines, would make sense as part of a larger narrative recorded in a poem or a story. As I traveled further down the river, the experiences, and hence, the stories, become more layered and complex. Of course, the landscape of the river is so vast and has so many twists and turns, backwaters, and contested histories that any telling can only be partial. But that does not diminish the value of each attempt to craft a poem and tell the stories found there. The North American nature writer Barry Lopez (1988) has written insightfully on the virtue of this kind of work.

I think of two landscapes—one outside the self, the other within. The external landscape is the one we see—not only the line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but also its plants and animals in season, its weather, its geology, the record of its climate and evolution. . . . The second landscape I think of is an interior one, a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape . . . the speculations, intuitions, and formal ideas we refer to as “mind” are a set of relationships in the interior landscape with purpose and order; some of these are obvious, many are impenetrably subtle. (pp. 64-65)

Poetry and story then, both in their crafting and retelling, serve to reconcile these inner and outer landscapes:

The purpose of storytelling is to achieve harmony between the two landscapes, to use all the elements of story—syntax, mood, and figures of speech—in a harmonious way to reproduce the harmony of the land in the individual’s interior. Inherent in story is the power to reorder a state of psychological confusion through contact with the pervasive truth of those relationships we call “the land” (Lopez, 1988, pp. 67-68).

I was well down the river, not too far from the end of the river’s own journey at the ocean, when I came to the old family farm that my great grandfather Hermann pioneered over 110 years ago. The farm was marked on the old paddle wheeler captain’s charts as “Wattchow’s Landing.” Paddle wheelers would pull in to buy firewood on their travels up and down river. The wood was cut by hand by my ancestors to clear the land for wheat farming. They were making the current landscape that we now see and take for granted. On this leg of the journey I was travelling with my 14-year-old daughter. The long physical and emotional journey and the work of writing had blend together body, mind, river, pen, and paper. A landscape is the product of our desires and actions. In the same vein we are “produced” by our landscapes, their contested histories, and changing ecological reality.

A part of the reconciliation we must undertake with our landscapes is to embrace once again the more ancient forms of language—poetry, prayer, and intergenerational story telling—which have outlasted our postmodern severing of text from experience. We may yet reclaim an appropriate, though delicate, relationship with the places that sustain us.

VII

Now, a hundred years along,

We’re in our third native century Hermann, and

We’ve come back to the River.

‘Though we’ve been scattered by our university degrees

We still watch and pray for the dark cloud to burst,

For the season to break, for wheat waving in the sun.

We still pray for a surge of water to come

Down from the faraway mountain.

We still listen for the sound of running water in the night.

So, the day I bring my daughter to the old farm

There’s nobody home.

The place probably goes by another name now, and

Wattchow’s Landing has been erased from the Pilot.

But we place our hands on the old stone.

It pulses, it trembles,

Beside the old gum that marked the High Rivers,

We gaze at the shimmering water and

She listens to the old stories.

Look upstream.

We carry the memories of all those songs

Inside us now,

Of all the turns and towns,

All those yarns of wrecked steamers

And bullock drovers,

Of camps and heat,

Laughter and tears,

Of sweat and blood,

Pumps and sun and vines

And fruit ripening on the trees.

Now she stares downriver into tomorrow

And I see her muscles tense with new strength

As she lifts her paddle, once again.

How many more sweeping bends?

How many more camps?

Overhead, three pelicans circle on invisible heat

Above the old farm, above the white graves.

She wears their feathers in her hat now.

Her tongue does not know the shape of the old words

But she reads their inscriptions, everywhere.

She sees, she sees

And begins to love

The Song of the Wounded River.

(Excerpt from The Song of the Wounded River)

A Poetics of Possibility

What then can the practice of ecopoetics offer to new and emerging possibilities in ethnographic research? An ecopoetics is, quite naturally, an extension of a cultural poiesis, which has been described as a way of giving attention to the generativity of emergent things (Stewart, 2005). Poetry of culture gets us close to the affective and the embodied nature of our daily experience. The application of poetic representation in the field of sport and human movement studies has already been clearly articulated (Sparkes & Douglas, 2007), as it has in educational research (Cahnmann, 2003). The important distinction here is that an ecopoetics extends our notions of what it means to be human to include the more-than-human-world (Abram, 1996) with which we exist in an inevitable and reciprocal webwork of relationships. The method here is one of “immersion and self-conscious saturation” rather than a “clinical distancing” (Brady, 1995) often called for in other forms of writing. This offers enormous potential to access and represent aspects of human experience that would otherwise be impossible to realize in the research process.

a poetic stance always starts with the truth of raw experience, with life as lived and seen from the inside, from the role of the participant, not from some disembodied tortured analytic imposed from the outside on the premise that our sentient selves get in the way of discovery. (Brady, 1995, p. 1003)

When we become open to the significance of our sentient selves we are simultaneously connecting to the world of which we are a part. Ivan Brady (2005) has explored this topic at length. In a chapter titled “Poetics for a Planet,” Brady suggests that we are “grounded by perceptions in the current moment of our existence” (p. 982). “That is the sine qua non of a poetics of place, of being-in-place,” writes Brady, “and it starts in the ultimate home—the embodied self (p. 982). Brady’s poetics returns us to Merleau-Ponty’s (2002) assertion that the essence of our experiences in the world is one of an embodied relatedness:

We witness every minute the miracle of related experience, and yet nobody knows better than we do how this miracle is worked, for we are ourselves this network of relationships. (p. xxiii)

The Western philosophical tradition of an incorporeal intellect, which persisted still in Heidegger’s hermeneutics and all too often in our attitudes to the use of language in research, becomes transformed into “the possibility of a truly authentic phenomenology, a philosophy which would strive, not to explain the world as if from outside, but to give voice to the world from our experienced situation within it” (Abram, 1996, p. 47). According to Abram it is within Merleau-Ponty’s investigations into the human experience of perception as a reciprocal relationship between the “body, and the entities that surround it” that we discover that we are in a “silent conversation that [we] carry on with things, a continuous dialogue that unfolds far below [our] verbal awareness” (p. 52). We come nearest to giving that conversation a voice, when we practice an ecopoetics of place.

There is an unpredictable pace and rhythm to poetic writing that mimics the natural rhythms and cycles that we may have lost sight of in the headstrong rush of culture. Like the river it can feel ponderous and patient work, or it can suddenly quicken as if a pulse of floodwater had come down from the distant mountains. Much of the poetic writing that went into The Song of the Wounded River was done sitting at my desk several hundred kilometres from the river. But that distance does not lessen the pull the river has on me. The initial inspiration for a poem is often hard to trace. Where the drafting and redrafting work that goes into a poem might feel painstaking, the onset of the first “image” comes like an epiphany. That which was invisible becomes visible.

For me, poetic writing most often begins with a kind of “emotional picture” at the edge of rational thought. Then a few lines, a rhyme perhaps, dipping back into the river journal, reflecting on the webwork of interconnections between an observation and its surroundings—these things get the poem started. Then the pace of the poem quickens, the pen dancing over the blank page, exploring. At some point in this practice of writing there will be a moment of clarity, when the possibility and structure of the whole poem becomes clear, even if there is still much work to be done. If this moment does not come then the writing fails and there is no poem. But when it does, a poem has been uncovered, unearthed, and we realize our indebtedness to the more-than-human world. With the crafting of the poem comes a sense of reconnection, a revelation of some aspect of the relationship with a place that had not been as clearly understood before. The threads are drawn a little closer together, and with their tightening they become something greater than the sum of their parts.