RE-INHABITING THE ISLANDS - The University of North Carolina at ...

Western mythos that Derek Walcott depicts in Omeros. If the modern poet balanced the
mythic past with the human situation, the ecocritical poet balances the mythos with the
biocentric present. Both modern and ecocritical poet‘s renew the mythos by naming the
historical nightmare from which the oppressed try ―to awake‖ (Joyce 28). Environmental
literature impelled me to enlarge my view of who and what could be oppressed. My work
in ecocriticism is motivated to integrate anthropocentric history and the bioregional
subjects excluded from its march—historicist critique for the oppressed and the ―rest of
nature‖ (Adams 1) too. Snyder‘s biocentric and historiographical poetics circa 1970 turn
away from linearity and towers for ―flows and spirals‖ (Snyder, Regarding Wave 24),
because these symbols express a coherent sense of place in an archipelago, on Suwanose-
Jima and Turtle Island.
In chapter one, I prepare for Snyder‘s post-Tsimtsum return to Turtle Island by
reading Regarding Wave, analyzing how he developed a thangka style of poetry to revise
place archetypes from rocks to waves in order to initiate a more balanced culture in
harmony with natural rhythms. I argue that he was able to do this because of his firsthand
experience living on a volcanic island with the Amami people and Buzoku, spearfishing
and sweet potato-farming. Suwanose is also the island on which he married Masa
Uehara, and the overtly linked Regarding Wave demonstrates the poet‘s thematic shift
from masculine searcher to family man. In order to address the contemporary scene of
West Coast poetry and environmentalism, I contend that he fused Suwanose‘s
archipelago knowledge of a balanced animal-human household with Buddhism for a
vision of life as a bioregional member of the ―great / earth / sangha‖ (Turtle Island 73),
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