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.