Better Nature

By Fenn Stewart

Much of the language that makes up Better Nature—the first book-length poetry collection by writer and academic Fenn Stewart—is drawn from a diary that Walt Whitman wrote while travelling through Canada at the end of the nineteenth century.

But rather than waxing poetic about the untouched Great White North, Stewart inlays found materials (early settler archives, news stories, email spam, fundraising for environmental NGOs, and more) to present a unique view of Canada's "pioneering" attitude towards "wilderness"—one that considers deeper issues of the settler appropriation of Indigenous lands, the notion of terra nullius, and the strategies and techniques used to produce a "better nature" (that is, one that better serves the nation).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bookhug Press
• Release date: Sep 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9781771663397

Book preview

9781771663880.jpg

first edition

Copyright © 2017 by Fenn Stewart

all rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

The production of this book was made possible through the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. BookThug also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Book Fund.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Stewart, Fenn, author

Better nature / Fenn Stewart. -- First edition.

Poems.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77166-338-0 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77166-340-3 (PDF).--

ISBN 978-1-77166-341-0 (Kindle).--ISBN 978-1-77166-339-7 (HTML)

I. Title.

PS8637.T494453B48 2017 C811’.6 C2017-904676-4

C2017-904677-2

cover image by Reed Stewart

author photograph by Anton Nonin

hey buddy,

Do you love, or are you fond of, woods and forests?

Do you take full delight in careful contemplation?

Are you a naturalist of close and patient study?

The dictionaries have a name for those like you.

It is the exclusive property of man, to contemplate and to reason on the great book of nature. She gradually unfolds herself to him…

— Carl Linnaeus¹

It’s like this vast wonderful Canada we have! White Canadians look at it, and they say, Oh, this is an unused national resource! Let’s go and cut down the trees! Let’s go and mine! Let’s bring out the uranium! […] No one is using it. Look at this wild rice here: it’s an unused natural resource[!][…] They never think! They never think that this is someone’s home.

— Lenore Keeshig-Tobias²

---

1

Charles Linné [Carl Linnaeus], A General System of Nature through the Three Grand Kingdoms of Animals, Vegetables and Minerals, tr. William Turton (London, UK: Lackington, Allen, and Co., 1802), 1.

2

2 Quoted in Hartmut Lutz, Contemporary Challenges: Conversations with Canadian Native Authors (Saskatoon, SK: Fifth House, 1991), 82.

Preface

much of the language in BETTER NATURE comes from a diary Walt Whitman wrote while travelling through Canada (Ontario and Québec) in the summer of 1880.³

Whitman’s descriptions of the land, the lakes, the grass and trees and bushery⁴

reflect the qualities that make his poetry so striking: extravagant language, galloping syntax, endless catalogues of his own gloriousness, and that of the world around him.

The diary also reflects the qualities that make Whitman, in many ways, a typical late-19th-century white settler—a subject produced through the legal and social regimes that figured (some) Europeans,