THE BIRDS, THE BEES, AND KRISTEVA: AN EXAMINATION OF SEXUAL DESIRE IN THE NATURE POETRY OF DAPHNE MARLATT, ROBERT KROETSCH, AND TIM LILBURN

You have become wise, like a god, Enkidu. Why did you range the wilderness with animals? The Epic of Gilgamesh So Enkidu, Gilgamesh's wild-man companion, is asked by the courtesan who lures him out of the wild and into culture. Chomsky's theories of generative grammar and linguistic competence remind humans that our species is as hard-wired to acquire language as it is to reproduce in order to survive, while Shakespeare's Caliban (not to mention a May barnyard stroll) suggests that sexual desire is biological before it is linguistic. Since Gilgamesh, sexual metaphors and episodes in poetry have often illustrated the prelinguisticality of sexual desire and its comparability to the sublimity of nature. Julia Kristeva's conception of a "poetic language"--consisting in part of a "heteronomous space" in which "the naming of phenomena (their entry into symbolic law)" is brought together with "the negation of these names (phonetic, semantic, and syntactic shattering)"--can be used to illustrate how the ironic acknowledgment of the provisionality of language demanded by a poetic treatment of prelinguistic desires expands the poem into a dialogical poetics (Kristeva 70). By embodying a logic of "distance and relationship" (71), composed of linguistic heterogeneity, simultaneity, and "transfinitude," poetic language reveals the heterogeneity of not only desire but also the speaking / desiring subject. In the poetry of Daphne Marlatt, Robert Kroetsch, and Tim Lilburn, the heterogeneity of desire (indicated syntactically and/or episodically) clearly propels the poem into what Kristeva describes as "metaphorical shifting," through which metaphors and episodes become "carnivalesque" (65). The logic of multiplicity and the implicit acknowledgment of the Other found in poetry of the carnivalesque suggests an alternate ontology in which being is (an always) becoming. Several of the essays in Kristeva's Desire in Language propose attributes to "poetic language" which should be paraphrased and clarified to establish this essay's crucial belief in a non-binary poetic logic. In "Word, Dialogue, and Novel," Kristeva states: A literary semiotics must be developed on the basis of a poetic logic where the concept of the power of the continuum would embody the 0-2 interval, a continuity where 0 denotes and 1 is implicitly transgressed. Within this "power of the continuum" from 0 to a specifically poetic double, the linguistic, psychic, and social "prohibition" is 1 (God, Law, Defin