Hear my ideas go pop, bam, fizz, siz z z z le...

I've been toying with the idea of composing a creative thesis for a couple weeks, and by toying I mean that I've batted the notion of doing and not doing one back and forth in my mind without any real, solid consideration of what a creative thesis might constitute should I undertake one. Until today. As I mentioned in my last post, I've begun sifting through ecocritical writings, principally those in Cheryll Glotfelty and Harlod Fromm's Ecocrtitcal Reader, with the hope of expanding my understanding of what ecocriticism looks like and how I might apply it to my thesis work on Romantic poetry. This morning I began reading William Ruekert's piece in the anthology, Literature and Ecology. Given the title its little wonder I settled on this piece to read- literature and ecology are after all exactly the two fields I am interested in bridging with my thesis. But Ruekerts's essay offered me more than the critical frame work I expected from its title; it offered me what I think might be a door into a creative approach to exploring Romanticism and the environment.

Poetry, Ruekert suggests, "is stored energy, a formal turbulence, a living thing, a swirl in a flow," (108).


A swirl in a flow.


Poetry, he tells me,
is part of the energy that sustains all life.

It feeds community and creativity.
These its greatest recipients.
Ruekert explains, "poems are a verbal equivalent of fossil fuel
(stored energy),
but
they are a renewable source of energy,
coming as they do, from those ever generative
twin matrices, language and imagination," (108).
Language provides a container
for the imaginative energy that it expresses;
it is
the imagination then, not language, that is
the potent fuel of creative energy.

Through reading, the exchange of energy
from poet,
through poem,
to reader
the energy is translated from entropy
(the dissipation or loss of potential)
to sustain the community that depends on a constant flow
of creative energy. It is through the movement
of energy through poetry to the human community,
Ruekert romantically suggests, the higher ideals of literature
might
be
accomplished (111).



Building on these ideas,
I find the following passage from the essay particularly inspiring:




"Green plants...
are among the most creative organisms on earth.
They are nature's poets....
Poems are the green plants among us;
if poets are suns (the vibrant sources
of imaginative creativity), then poems are
green plants among us
for they clearly arrest energy
on its path to entropy and in so doing, not only
raise matter from lower to higher order,
but help to create a self-perpetuating and evolving
system. That is they help
create creativity and community,
and when their energy is released and flows
out into others, to again raise matter from lower
to higher order (to use the most common description of what
culture is)..." (111--- parenthetical insert mine).

Ruekert goes on to explain that following from this line of thought, teaching becomes a vital means of intesifying and perpetuating the process of creative transfer from poetry to human minds, by as he says "providing an the environment in which the stored energy can be released to carry on its work of creation and community," (111). I love the notion of poetry a ball of sustainable imaginative and creative energy with the potential to animate the creative minds of human communities. I love the notion of a poem, like a mouthful of of the richest fruit or a spark from the vaporous finger of a electrified cloud, energizing people to action. And while I do not think that this is how Romanitic poets conceived of the effect of poetry, this is I believe (honestly I believe) the potential power of their poetry on the creative minds its recipients. A great example is I think the fair assertion that romantic nature writing fueled the creative, and active work of later environmentalist writers in at least in America.

But how does this apply to my project? I think I would like to draw from this ecological metaphor to compose creative responses to the renewable creative fuel of the romantic poetry I will investigate. My responses could take many forms. As I am often a writer deeply influenced by the convulsions and densely layered activity of my place in history my writing shifts shapes and resists neat categorization. I might therefore produce poetic prose, free-from poetry, and maybe even include snatches of my own nature writing and reflections from journals and from blogs. All of which though would spring up in response to the poetic meditations of the writers at the center of my project. Sort of like a tangible representation of the creative potency and continuing relevance of the poetry to my own struggle to reconcile the relationship between myself/humanity and nature, which is now just as alluring, estranged, and symbolically important to the way we see ourselves and our place in the world.

Call this is an idea under construction. Call this a serious attempt to enlist my ideas in the construction of something new, something maybe not perfect or tidy but something important I think...at least to me.