Dividing up the Land: Mapping Mateer onto Williams

Dividing up the Land: Mapping Mateer onto Williams

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William Carlos Williams is often held up as a forbearer for American ecopoetics in his reshaping of the natural image towards Blood Pressure Kits establishing a poetic gaze that is resistant to anthropocentrism.Writing half a century later, the poetics of the transnational poet John Mateer also wrestles with the intersection of the human and the natural.This paper performs a reading of Mateer through the lens of Williams to demonstrate the legacy of Williams, across cultures, in constructions of the natural in poetry.A comparative approach is necessary in a time of globalization and similarly this is not a simple prosodic exercise for, as it will be shown, the post-modern language turn has meant that just challenging the pathetic fallacy, as Williams does, is no longer sufficient to embed a poem with respect for the alterity of the natural world.This paper proposes the theory of Jean-Luc Nancy Course a pied - Femme - Vetements - Manteau - Lamine as a way of accessing the difference between the poets and of driving ecocritical thinking forward.