{"id":31475,"date":"2013-08-09T15:01:20","date_gmt":"2013-08-09T19:01:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=31475"},"modified":"2016-05-04T15:23:22","modified_gmt":"2016-05-04T15:23:22","slug":"on-frye-and-don-mckay-ecopoet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2013\/08\/09\/on-frye-and-don-mckay-ecopoet\/","title":{"rendered":"On Frye and Don McKay, Ecopoet"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mckayatpodium\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Don McKay (photo by Shelley Banks; the original copyright photo appeared on http:\/\/latitudedrifts.blogspot.ca\/2013\/05\/sage-hill-poetry-colloquium-spring.html)<\/strong><\/p>\n

We are delighted to publish the following article. John Nyman is a graduate student and Toronto-based poet. He is currently beginning PhD studies in Theory and Criticism at Western University.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Frye’s Social Function of Literature and the Ecopoetry of Don McKay<\/em><\/p>\n

John Nyman<\/p>\n

When Northrop Frye claims, in The Educated Imagination<\/i>, that \u201cliterature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment\u201d (12), his vision seems radically disconnected from that of the nature poet or ecopoet, who seeks to represent or even protect nature by portraying it in literary language. For example, \u201ccom[ing] to grips with the practice of nature poetry in a time of environmental crisis\u201d is the central concern of Vis \u00e0 Vis<\/i> (9), the first of three books of philosophical and field notes by Don McKay, one of Canada\u2019s foremost ecopoets. In accordance with this aim, McKay begins his book with an ethical stance against<\/i> the \u201cone pole of our relations to material existence\u201d he calls \u201cmat\u00e9riel,\u201d a \u201csecond-order appropriation\u201d which \u201caddress[es] things in the mode of utility\u201d (Vis<\/i> 20)\u2014an address which feels very much like an important part of Frye’s literature as the language of \u201cwhat [we] want to construct\u201d (Educated<\/i> 7). Considering these key images in both thinkers\u2019 works, Frye\u2019s vision of the social function of literature and McKay\u2019s deployment of poetry appear to come up against each other in deadlock. However, a deeper reading of these thinkers shows that Frye\u2019s and McKay\u2019s bodies of thought coalesce on an understanding of nature and society as ethically inseparable, which gives shape to their shared vision of poetry. While each thinker approaches this model from a different direction\u2014Frye from a central interest in humanism and McKay from the political standpoint of ecology\u2014reading their understandings with rather than against each other helps us produce a fuller and more fruitful picture of the relationship between humanity and our natural environment.<\/p>\n

In Frye’s most direct discussions of the social function of literature, all of the elements he incorporates into his model are linked to the human and defined by their relationship to the human, initially making his perspective very different from McKay’s. In Words with Power<\/i>, Frye argues that literature is significant because it engages with the language of myth\u2014the \u201csacred ground\u201d of human society which defines what a human subject \u201cmust know\u201d (as an assumption, not a prescription) in the first place (41)\u2014to focus attention on what he calls \u201cprimary concerns\u201d: food, sex, property\u2014\u201cin the sense of what is \u2018proper\u2019 to one\u2019s life\u201d\u2014and \u201cliberty of movement\u201d (51). In this way, literature moderates society’s normally overwhelming focus on less important \u201csecondary concerns,\u201d which \u201cinclude patriotic and other attachments of loyalty, religious beliefs, and class-conditioned attitudes and behavior\u201d (Frye, Words<\/i> 50). But primary and secondary concerns are still both human concerns, and both the language of mythology and the dialectic or logos<\/i> Frye opposes it to are human forms; nowhere is the nonhuman implicated in the work of the poet. In contrast, McKay\u2019s explorations of poetic practice highlight a concern with \u201cwilderness,\u201d which is essentially nonhuman and unknown, before even the understanding of \u201cplace.\u201d At the outset of Deactivated West 100<\/i>, McKay explains the contours of his central aim, which involves thinking a perspective outside of Frye\u2019s \u201csacred ground\u201d of human society:<\/p>\n

Suppose we try to define place without using the usual humanistic terms \u2013 not home and native land, not little house on the prairie, not even the founding principle of our sense of beauty \u2013 but as a function of wilderness. Try this: \u2018place is wilderness to which history has happened.\u2019 Or: \u2018place is land to which we have occurred.\u2019 Our occurrence to the land \u2013 the act which makes place place \u2013 could be a major change (homestead, development, resource extraction) or a smaller claim (prospector\u2019s stake, survey marker, plastic tape, souvenir stone), but it shifts the relationship; it brings the wild area into the purview of knowledge and makes it \u2013 perhaps momentarily, perhaps permanently \u2013 a category of mind. (17-18)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This explanation is corroborated by further elaboration of McKay\u2019s concept of wilderness, which he describes in Vis \u00e0 Vis<\/i> as \u201cthe capacity of all things to elude the mind\u2019s appropriations\u201d (21). \u201cWilderness\u201d is an element of what we commonly call nature which is before or beyond humans\u2019 \u201cprimordial grasp,\u201d the gesture which leads us to create our non-natural identity by marking nature as \u2018other\u2019 and \u201cestablish[ing] the place<\/i> where representation and recollection occur\u201d (McKay, Vis<\/i> 22). Wilderness also, then, stands against the extreme form of human \u201cgrasping\u201d which is the ruthless appropriation or utilization of the natural world amounting to \u201cthe colonization of its death\u201d or \u201ca denial of death altogether\u201d (McKay, Vis<\/i> 20). This process, for McKay, is the making of \u201cmat\u00e9riel,\u201d or \u201cmat\u00e9rielization\u201d (McKay, Vis<\/i> 20).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

For McKay, poetry is meant to reach out to or register this wilderness which has been hidden by the act of \u201ctaking place,\u201d or transforming nature into \u201ca category of mind.\u201d But despite appearing principally nonhuman, McKay\u2019s focus in this claim begins to intersect with Frye\u2019s around both thinkers\u2019 descriptions of metaphor, which are worth analyzing in detail. Several commentators (Coles, Bushell) have noted the dominant role of metaphor in McKay\u2019s poetry, so it is not surprising that it is a recurrent theme in his works of nonfiction. For McKay, metaphor is a device which reverses language’s functioning as a tool which creates, claims, and appropriates knowledge to mat\u00e9rielize what it names. Instead, metaphor always represents a way that we \u201coccur to the land\u201d we use language to point to. This is because \u201cmetaphor\u2019s first act is to un-name its subject, reopening the question of reference\u201d by using \u201csameness against itself to bring the other […] into the totality\u201d (McKay, Vis<\/i> 69), where this \u201cother\u201d is the \u201cunnameable\u201d sense of wilderness (McKay, Vis<\/i> 66). \u201cThanks to metaphor,\u201d McKay says, \u201cwe know more; but we also know that we don\u2019t own what we know<\/i>\u201d (Vis<\/i> 69). It is this function which allows metaphor to take part in the act of \u201cnam[ing] without claiming\u201d which is the goal of the poetic use of language. In Kevin Bushell\u2019s terms, \u201c[m]etaphor acts for McKay as a springboard into wilderness\u201d (71). The effect of this, and its importance to poetry, is summed up in McKay\u2019s quotation of Adam Zagajewski, who says that \u201cpoetry allows us \u2018to experience astonishment and to stop in that astonishment for a long moment or two\u2019\u201d (Deactivated<\/i> 58). Astonishment is for McKay both the awe felt in the presence of wilderness and the ability to turn towards and register that wilderness, wherein we can reconsider its otherness and our relationship to it.<\/p>\n

In The Educated Imagination<\/i>, Frye agrees with McKay\u2019s claim that metaphor fundamentally \u201cisn\u2019t rational\u201d (McKay, Vis<\/i> 69), stating that metaphor means \u201cturning your back on logic and reason completely\u201d through \u201ccrude, primitive, archaic forms\u201d (Frye 16). However, he contradicts McKay when he says the poet uses these forms \u201cbecause his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind\u201d (Frye, Educated<\/i> 16). How can we reconcile these ideas? Ameliorating his initially bombastic statement, Frye draws a comparison which tempers his exclusion of McKay\u2019s wilderness from the poet\u2019s work. Frye says that the poet<\/p>\n

produces what Baudelaire called a \u2018suggestive magic including at the same time object and subject, the world outside the artist and the artist himself.\u2019 The motive for metaphor, according to Wallace Stevens, is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know. (Educated<\/i> 16).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Several phrases are important here. First, the connection between Frye\u2019s final lines and McKay\u2019s insistence on \u201cknow[ing] that we don\u2019t own what we know<\/i>\u201d demonstrates that both Frye and McKay highlight language that humbles its own ability to grasp, claim, and encapsulate that which it names. Significantly, this strategy is part of what is for both thinkers an essential process of \u201cidentify[ing] the human mind with what goes on outside it,\u201d or bridging the gap between place and wilderness. Seeing Frye\u2019s connections to McKay\u2019s ecological concerns in this light allows us to more fully understand his precise use of \u201cwith\u201d in the claim quoted above. For Frye, \u2018identifying with\u2019 does not imply a merger or takeover of wilderness by human imagination and language; rather, it is a process of identifying two equally important kinds of being simultaneously, and with a more complete and productive knowledge of their relationship to each other. Wilderness, or \u201cwhat goes on outside\u201d the human mind, is necessary for Frye. Though \u201cthe imagination won\u2019t stop until it\u2019s swallowed everything\u201d (Frye, Educated<\/i> 47-48), without the outside, or the remainder of this \u201ceverything,\u201d the imagination does not function (and in fact enters a stagnant condition called idolatry, which we will discuss later). In the condition where \u201cthe signposts of literature always keep pointing the same way, to a world where nothing is outside the human imagination\u201d (Frye, Educated<\/i> 48), what they are more literally pointed towards is exactly this \u201coutside,\u201d or wilderness, and in this sense the constitution of literature as dependent on wilderness as it is on what is inside the human imagination. In McKay’s work, this simultaneous importance of the inside and the outside is captured by his emphasis on home as \u201cfar from being a concretization of self, […] the place where it pours itself out into the world, interiority opening itself to material expression\u201d (Vis<\/i> 23), or, elsewhere, poetic language\u2019s need to \u201cwear ears on the outside of the statement\u201d (Vis<\/i> 66). Greatly helping us to understand the ethical resonance of McKay\u2019s stance, Frye connects this attitude directly to the social function of literature: if \u201c[t]he fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life […] is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in\u201d (Educated<\/i> 86), such a vision is impossible without turning towards the outside, or wilderness, which is the location of those possibilities we have not yet fully incorporated into human understanding.<\/p>\n

It is especially important to McKay that this kind of balance between the inside and outside of human understanding is not so much a stable state as a commitment to moving between the two, aligning oneself to both simultaneously. We get a strong sense this motion in the distinction between McKay’s astonishment and what he describes as petrification. Both ideas come to the fore in the opening pair of poems from his collection Strike\/slip<\/i>, \u201cAstonished\u2014\u201d and \u201cPetrified\u2014\u201d:<\/p>\n

Astonished\u2014<\/em><\/p>\n

astounded, astonied, astunned, stopped short<\/p>\n

and turned toward stone, the moment<\/p>\n

filling with its slow<\/p>\n

stratified time. Standing there, your face<\/p>\n

cratered by its gawk,<\/p>\n

you might be the symbol signifying eon.<\/p>\n

What are you, empty or pregnant? Somewhere<\/p>\n

sediments accumulate on seabeds, seabeds<\/p>\n

rear up into mountains, ammonites<\/p>\n

fossilize into gems. Are you thinking<\/p>\n

or being thought? Cities<\/p>\n

as sand dunes, epics<\/p>\n

as e-mail. Astonished<\/p>\n

you are famous and anonymous, the border<\/p>\n

washed out by so soft a thing as weather. Someone<\/p>\n

inside you steps from the forest and across the beach<\/p>\n

toward the nameless all-dissolving ocean.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Petrified\u2014<\/em><\/p>\n

your heart\u2019s tongue seized<\/p>\n

mid-syllable, caught by the lava flow<\/p>\n

you fled. Fixed,<\/p>\n

you stiffen in the arms of wonder\u2019s dark<\/p>\n

undomesticated sister. Can\u2019t you name her<\/p>\n

and escape? You are the statue<\/p>\n

that has lost the entrance into art,<\/p>\n

wild and incompetent,<\/p>\n

you have no house. Who are you?<\/p>\n

You are the crystal that picks up<\/p>\n

Its many deaths.<\/p>\n

You are the momentary mind of rock.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(You can also watch a video of McKay reading \u201cAstonished\u2014\u201d and \u201cPetrified\u2014\u201d on the Griffin Poetry Prize website: here<\/a>)<\/p>\n

McKay\u2019s distinction between astonishment and petrification is basically figured in the difference between stone and rock, the words\u2019 roots: for McKay, \u201ca stone is a rock that\u2019s been put to use […]. What happens between rock and stone is simply everything human […]\u201d (Deactivated<\/i> 59). What is integral to stone is that it represents the presence of a wild material\u2014wild because of its unknowable formation, and inscription of the structures of that formation, outside of human history in the realm of \u201cdeep time\u201d (McKay, Shell<\/i>)\u2014in a materiality which is also used and comprehended by humans. This is what happens when \u201ctools exceed the fact of their construction and exemplify an otherness beyond human design,\u201d or a \u201cwilderness\u201d (Vis<\/i> 57), or when \u201c[a]rt occurs whenever a tool attempts to metamorphose into an animal\u201d (McKay, Shell<\/i> 141). This remnant of human concern in astonishment is crucial to its value, and also explains McKay\u2019s repeating metaphor of \u2018turning\u2019 in \u201cAstonished\u2014.\u201d If the process of astonishment is one in which its subject is \u201cstopped short \/ and turned towards stone,\u201d then it is an experience of otherness that is temporary and (eventually) reversible, since the subject\u2019s initial focus\u2014their goal, or the human concerns they were initially turned towards\u2014remains in the field of possibilities. Astonishment is ultimately a splitting of the subject towards wilderness, where \u201c[s]omeone \/ inside you steps from the forest and across the beach \/ toward the nameless all-dissolving ocean,\u201d but where the subject\u2019s humanity or sense of place and home is also preserved. The subject is physically transformed by the experience, or even made unrecognizable\u2014\u201c[her] face \/ cratered by its gawk\u201d\u2014but this transformation opens a series of questions, or an interstitial space between human concerns and wilderness which the subject is momentarily able to \u201cturn\u201d through. Here, the possibility of imagining deep time\u2014as \u201cslow \/ stratified time\u201d or in the way \u201cyou might be the symbol signifying eon\u201d\u2014or the seeming infiniteness of wilderness (as opposed to the \u201chereness\u201d McKay poses against it in The Shell of the Tortoise<\/i> (117)) is realized, but does not define the subject\u2019s entire experience. Instead, it creates \u201cthe capacity to think backward or forward from place to its mothering wilderness\u201d (Deactivated<\/i> 26), a motion we can even see in the bridging sibilant movements of the \u2018as\u2019 sounds in the poem\u2019s title and its first words, \u201castounded, astonied, astunned.\u201d<\/p>\n

Contrary to this sense of movement and possibility, \u201cPetrified\u2014\u201d (which appears on the reverse side of \u201cAstonished\u2014\u201d, not its facing leaf) emphasizes stillness and loss. The subject of petrification\u2019s humanity (her \u201cheart\u2019s tongue\u201d) is \u201cseized,\u201d she is \u201c[f]ixed,\u201d she \u201cstiffen[s],\u201d and she loses the ability to \u201cname\u201d and \u201cescape.\u201d Recalling McKay\u2019s discussion of metaphor as a technology which reconnects language (as a tool) to its wilderness, petrification stifles one\u2019s ability to re-cross this bridge. The subject is left stranded, without a \u201chouse\u201d in more than one sense\u2014in her isolation, her being lost in wilderness or infinity, and her inability to exercise the \u201cclaiming\u201d that makes \u201chome.\u201d She loses hold of her humanity, as she is asked by a now unquestionably other subject, \u201cWho are you?\u201d and thus becomes \u201cwild and incompetent.\u201d This is \u201cthe vertigo which can afflict us when stone suddenly and unexpectedly reverts to rock, when we are not simply astonished, as in moments of geopoetic insight, but petrified\u201d (Deactivated<\/i> 47). It is thus also akin to the romantic notion of the sublime (McKay, Shell<\/i> 43), or what a Canadian literary context recognizes as \u201cbeing \u2018bushed,\u2019 overwhelmed by wilderness energy and made strange to human society\u201d (McKay, Shell<\/i> 44). Linking this figure to the central character in Earle Birney\u2019s poem, \u201cBushed,\u201d who \u201ccould only \/ bar himself in and wait \/ for the great flint to come singing into his heart\u201d (quoted in McKay, Shell<\/i> 45), McKay shows that this petrification involves the subject\u2019s being taken from her own humanity, into wilderness, where she encounters a kind of evacuation of life similar to that perpetrated on objects in the process of mat\u00e9rielization, but from the opposite direction. Petrification, then, as \u201cwonder\u2019s dark \/ undomesticated sister,\u201d involves being grasped by the wilderness that refuses to give its subject back, transforming her into \u201cthe momentary mind of rock,\u201d fully isolated from human intervention. Though it brings the human subject towards wilderness, it also fully evacuates her claim to humanity. Petrification, then, is the risk of fixedness or objectness that accompanies the poetic striving for astonishment.<\/p>\n

Within Frye\u2019s conceptual framework in The Double Vision<\/i>, petrification and astonishment can be mapped to the \u201csingle vision\u201d of idolatry and the more advanced \u201cdouble vision\u201d which ultimately brings human society closer to the literature of primary concern. In \u201cThe Double Vision of Nature,\u201d idolatry involves our \u201ccontinually sliding back into a state of nature\u201d (Frye, Double<\/i> 27) in which \u201cwe no longer feel part of nature but are helplessly staring at it\u201d (Frye, Double<\/i> 25). Like McKay’s petrification, it is about stillness or stagnancy, and an inability to progress or develop as a society. More significant, however, is Frye\u2019s claim that idolatry is a \u201csingle vision\u201d which cannot simultaneously perceive the natural and the human environment (Double<\/i> 25). In other words, idolatry involves being engrossed with nature in such a way that we lose perspective, causing our worldview to collapse into singular categories; for McKay, these categories are the infinite or the \u201canonymous.\u201d Frye’s \u201cdouble vision,\u201d however, is a perspective that maintains at least two visions of the world simultaneously\u2014that of the inward human world and the outward world of the non-human or wilderness. We could also say it maintains the possibility of moving between them, as Blake does in the verse that provides the title for Frye’s book:<\/p>\n

For double the vision my eyes do see,<\/p>\n

And a double vision is always with me:<\/p>\n

With my inward eye \u2019tis an old man grey;<\/p>\n

With my outward a thistle across my way. (Double<\/i> 22)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For McKay, this possibility of this movement is precisely the \u201cgeopoetic insight\u201d of astonishment, a \u201cturning toward stone\u201d which leaves available \u201cthe capacity to think backward or forward from place to its mothering wilderness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although idolatry stems from an obsession with nature, Frye says that it more precisely means \u201cregarding [nature] as a mirror of ourselves, from within the prison of Narcissus\u201d (27). Idolatry, then, (along with McKay\u2019s petrification) is not essentially defined by the content or direction of one\u2019s perception, but by the collapsing of one\u2019s perceptive distinctions into a \u201csingle vision\u201d which accompanies this state. In other words, humans exist in a state of idolatry both when they are caught up in \u201cthe illusions of staring at nature\u201d and<\/i> when their attempts at \u201cbuilding a human world of culture and civilization\u201d \u201cha[ve] not achieved any genuine rapprochement with nature itself, but simply regard nature as an area of exploitation\u201d (Frye, Double<\/i> 26-27), a situation frighteningly similar to McKay\u2019s mat\u00e9rielization. Whether the subject is trapped in nature, in herself, or in a Narcissistic mirror she believes to be the natural world, the fact that any outside to her perception is excluded from thinking means that she will be unable to think past the narrow, incomplete logic of the single vision. In contrast, Frye’s double vision sees both sides of the divide between nature and humanity simultaneously, moves sympathetically between them, and recognizes them as part of a complete system. This in turn means \u201ca steady process of work that transforms the natural environment into a human one\u201d and ultimately leads to \u201cthe fulfilling of […] human primary concerns\u201d (Double<\/i> 27-28). In Creation and Recreation<\/i>, Frye names this process of building a human identity with<\/i> nature \u201crecreation\u201d\u2014\u201canother creation,\u201d on the heels of the wilderness we might call the unnameable creation of God, \u201cwhich involves human effort,\u201d and whose \u201cidealized forms […] are again projected on the future\u201d (21). Where we can see Frye\u2019s and McKay\u2019s theories working together, this kind of vision completes our understanding of what is at stake in McKay\u2019s \u201chome-making,\u201d which is more broadly a home-making for the fulfilment of humanity\u2019s primary concerns in life to come.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/p>\n

Bushell, Kevin. \u201cDon McKay and Metaphor: Stretching Language Toward Wilderness.\u201d Don McKay: Essays on His Works<\/i>. Ed. Brian Bartlett. Toronto: Guernica, 2006. 59-80. Print.<\/p>\n

Coles, Don. \u201cA Gift for Metaphor.\u201d Don McKay: Essays on His Works<\/i>. Ed. Brian Bartlett. Toronto: Guernica, 2006. 55-58. Print.<\/p>\n

Frye, Northrop. Creation and Recreation<\/i>. Toronto: U Toronto P, 1980. Print.<\/p>\n

—. The Double Vision<\/i>. Toronto: U Toronto P, 1991. Print.<\/p>\n

—. The Educated Imagination<\/i>. Toronto: House of Anansi, 1997. Print.<\/p>\n

—. Words with Power<\/i>. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 1990. Print.<\/p>\n

McKay, Don. Deactivated West 100<\/i>. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2005. Print.<\/p>\n

—. Strike\/slip<\/i>. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006. Print.<\/p>\n

—. The Shell of the Tortoise<\/i>. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2011. Print.<\/p>\n

—. Vis \u00e0 Vis<\/i>. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2001. Print.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Don McKay (photo by Shelley Banks; the original copyright photo appeared on http:\/\/latitudedrifts.blogspot.ca\/2013\/05\/sage-hill-poetry-colloquium-spring.html) We are delighted to publish the following article. John Nyman is a graduate student and Toronto-based poet. He is currently beginning PhD studies in Theory and Criticism at Western University. Frye’s Social Function of Literature and the Ecopoetry of Don McKay John […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nOn Frye and Don McKay, Ecopoet - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2013\/08\/09\/on-frye-and-don-mckay-ecopoet\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"On Frye and Don McKay, Ecopoet - The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Don McKay (photo by Shelley Banks; the original copyright photo appeared on http:\/\/latitudedrifts.blogspot.ca\/2013\/05\/sage-hill-poetry-colloquium-spring.html) We are delighted to publish the following article. John Nyman is a graduate student and Toronto-based poet. He is currently beginning PhD studies in Theory and Criticism at Western University. 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