The mind is all the animals it has attended: limitrophy and porous borders in the poetry of Robert Bringhurst

ABSTRACT

As an ecopoet intellectually alert to the conundrums posed by the Anthropocene, Canadian poet-philosopher Robert Bringhurst explores in his work the entanglements of the perceiving subject and the perceived world as mutually constitutive and coevolving entities in a vast material-semiotic continuum. Drawing on David Abram’s ecophilosophy, on the insights of the new materialisms about the vitality of matter, on posthumanist thought, and on Bringhurst’s meditations on ecology, polyphony and meaning, this article offers an ecocritical reading of “Sunday Morning,” a poem central to the poet’s oeuvre. At the heart of “Sunday Morning” is the firm conviction that poems are primarily born out of a sensuous immersion of an embodied self within a polyphonic Earth that is communicative and speaks languages other than human. Countering human exceptionalism, Bringhurst ends up by dispelling the hierarchy of being established by anthropocentrism in our Western mindset and blurring any clear-cut borders between the human and the nonhuman. His ecopoetics embraces ontological humility, as well as a biocentric view of nature where homo sapiens is just one more species amongst a myriad of other species on Earth.

KEYWORDS:

• Robert Bringhurst
• more-than-human
• ecomimesis
• vibrant matter
• limitrophy
• posthumanism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Originally published in Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music (1986), “Sunday Morning” was then reprinted with no textual variants in several publications and revised in subsequent textual incarnations in The Calling: Selected Poems 1970–1995 (1995) and Selected Poems (2009).

2. The Aristotelian concepts of bios and zoe are also central to other contemporary philosophers’ thinking. As Giorgio Agamben notes in Homo Sacer, the ancient Greeks had two “semantically and morphological distinct” (1998, 1) words to refer to the concept of “life”: “zoē, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group” (1998, 1).

3. Abram’s postulates on humans’ embodied and enworlded existence in Becoming Animal recall Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s insistence on the need to dispel the boundaries of the human by “becoming animal” and participate in what they called a “continuum of intensities” (1986, 13) that allows for the crossing of thresholds.

4. Incidentally, this is a paradigm of aviary migration that the solitary pelican seems to depart from in veering “from its normal migration route.” In ways that evoke the revolutions of the sun and the moon in the skies, pelicans as a species follow the same route instinctively every year. However, this specific pelican that has prompted Bringhurst’s meditation has strayed away from the normal path, which confers on it some sense of individuality, even if it is that of swerving away from an ancestral migration route.

5. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –/I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference” (Frost 1995, 103).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leonor María Martínez Serrano

Leonor María Martínez Serrano is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Córdoba (Spain). Her research interests include Canadian Literature, American Literature, Ecocriticism, High Modernism, and Comparative Literature. She has co-edited Modern Ecopoetry: Reading the Palimpsest of the More-than-Human World (Brill, 2021) and authored Breathing Earth: The Polyphonic Lyric of Robert Bringhurst (Peter Lang, 2021).