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 Ecopoetry
A Critical Introduction

Edited by —
J. Scott Bryson

Foreword by
John Elder

The University of Utah Press

Salt Lake City
© 2002 by The University of Utah Press
All rights reserved

Acknowledgments:
Scott Bryson. Some of the editor’s introductory material orginally ap-
peared in altered form in “Seeing the West Side of Any Mountain: Thoreau
and the New Ecological Poetry,” from Thoreau's Sense of Place: Essays in Amer-
ican Environmental Writing, edited by Richard J. Schneider (University of lowa
Press, 1999).

W. S. Merwin. “The Saint of the Uplands,” “For a Coming Extinction,” and

“Finding a Teacher,” from The Second Four Book of Poems (Copper Canyon
Press, 1993), copyright 1993 by W. S. Merwin.

06 05 04 03 02
54321

Library of Congrss Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ecopoetry : a critical introduction / edited by J. Scott Bryson.

p. cm.
1. American poetry—History and criticism. 2. Nature in literature.
2. English poetry—History and criticism. 4. Environmental protection
in literature. 5. Environmental policy in literature. 6. Nature
conservation in literature. 7. Wilderness areas in literature. 8. Landscape
in literature. 9. Ecology in literature. I. Bryson, J. Scott, 1968—
PS310.N3 E26 2002
811.009'36—dc21
2001005653
For my parents
Contents

Foreword
John Elder 1X

Introduction
J. Scott Bryson 1

Forerunners of Ecopoetryce
Regarding Silence: Cross-Cultural Roots of Ecopoetic Meditation
David Gilcrest 17

Emerson, Divinity, and Rhetoric in Transcendentalist Nature Writing

and Twentieth-Century Ecopoetry
Roger Thompson 29

Landscape and the Self in W. B. Yeats and Robinson Jeffers

Deborah Fleming 39

William Carlos Williams, Ecocriticism, and Contemporary American

Nature Poetry
Mark Long 58

Contemporary Ecopoetsce>
Gary Snyder and the Post-Pastoral
Terry Gifford Te

Earth’s Echo: Answering Nature in Ammons’s Poetry

Gyorgyi Voros 88

“Between the Earth and Silence”: Place and Space in the Poetry of
W. S. Merwin
J. Scott Bryson 101

Panentheistic Epistemology: The Style of Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir

Leonard M. Scigaj Nis
 Contents Cw Vii

The Pragmatic Mysticism of Mary Oliver

Laird Christensen 135

“Everything Blooming Bows Down in the Rain”: Nature and the

Work of Mourning in the Contemporary Elegy
Jeffrey Thomson 153

Genocide and Extinction in Linda Hogan’s Ecopoetry

Emily Hegarty 162

Expanding the Boundariesce>

“The Redshifting Web”: Arthur Sze’s Ecopoetics *eh.
Zhou Xiaojing 79

In Her Element: Daphne Marlatt, the Lesbian Body, and the Environment
Beverly Curran 195

Postcolonial Romanticisms: Derek Walcott and the Melancholic Narrative

of Landscape
Roy Osamu Kamada 207

A Woman Writing about Nature: Louise Gliick and “the absence of intention”
Maggie Gordon 221

How to Love This World: The Transpersonal Wild in Margaret Atwood’s

Ecological Poetry
Richard Hunt 232

Primary Concerns: The Development of Current Environmental

Identity Poetry
® Bernard W. Quetchenbach 245

Contributors 263

Index 267
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John Elder

Oe>Foreword

The attempt to combine words as reverberant as ecology and poetry, or to de-

fine one in terms of the other, can make people nervous. Ecologists worry
about having their science taken to be an ethical or aesthetic system. Teachers
and critics of literature may wonder whether a new technical frame of refer-
ence will interpose jargon between reader and text. But the present volume re-
veals how valuable such a compound approach can be, so long as one views it
as a dialogue and an adventure rather than as an easy connection of any kind.
Specifically, the success of this collection stems from the clear, concrete ways
in which: ‘the>
authors explore two specific propositions. One is that poetry de-
rives from the living.earth as surely as our, ‘human bodies and
a minds do. The
‘health and beauty of culture are ultimately inseparable from those of nature.
The second is that poetry itself can manifest the intricate, adaptive, and
a evolv-
ing balance of an ecosystem. This ccan be trueinthe case of individual poems;
in
the sometimes surprising wholeness of a given poet’s oeuyre; and in the on-
going process through which long-established writers and powerful new ones
enrich each others’ meanings—a process akin to the mutual honing of popu-
lations within a shared bioregion, ; '
One of the reasons scientists rightly resist taking the term ecological as nor-
mative in any narrow sense is that ecosystems are, above all, shifting fields of
sna Populations respond continuously both to each other and to
changes in the topography, hydrology, soils, and climate of their bioregions.
Similarly, it is important to note that the present collection conveys asingle
vivid moment within a field of study that has rapidly evolved and that will
continue to do so. One narrative of this evolution—among several implied. by
Scott Bryson’s thoughtful table of contents-follows the emergence of ecolog-
ical poetry from the work of Emerson and his circle. The. transcendentalists
scoured-and resculpted the terrain of American literature, with Wordsworth a as
the sustained blizzard from which they gathered’ force. ‘Yeats and Williams, as
well as Stevens, Frost, Bishop, and Moore, reforested the twentieth century. like
the spruce and
i fir that follow ina glacier’ s wake. Jeffers, amid the stony shelves
and} outcroppings that he loved, announced an affinity between poetry and
wilderness that many writers continue to affirm today. The second of this
4 ce John Elder

collection’s three sections focuses on and celebrates a remarkable group of

contemporary poets. Such figures as Snyder, Ammons, Wright, Merwin, Berry,
and Oliver have, over the past several decades, directly inspired many of the
_new approaches to literary scholarship represented in this book. .
That is one good way to tell the story. But biologists remind us to think of
evolution as a web, not a single strand, as a proliferation with no center and
no fixed goal. We may thus also find it helpful, as readers, to think of our own
relationships with poetry as evolving ecosystems.oA myself entered into the
ecotone between literature and the natural world through discovering the
work of Gary Snyder while I was a student in college. Although I had already
‘read Emerson and Thoreau, the great modernists were still in store for me. In
part because of Snyder’s inspiration, the conversation between poetry and the
earth has also included, for me, a long journey out of the Western tradition—
toward the lineage of Basho. The 1990 publication of Mary Oliver’s House of
Light was an exciting new flinging-open of doors; it helped me both to under-
stand the relationship between American and Japanese poetry more fully and
to reground my reading in New England, where, like Oliver, my family and I
live. In the first and last essays of this volume, as well as in the essays of the
entire third section,I have glimpsed new possibilities for “expanding [my]
“boundaries.” Specifically, I come away from this collection with an enhanced
realization of the connection between cross-cultural and ecological interpre-
tations of literature; with an awareness of the pertinence of Gliick and
Atwood, authors I have admired in other connections, to ecological poetry;
with a fuller appreciation of Walcott and Sze’s historical and ecological
visions; and with a desire to read Daphne Marlatt, whose approach to the
concepts of interdependence, surprise, and relocation feels enlivening and
original.
I have ventured this personal sketch by way of transition to another level
on which our critical conversation is itself an ecosystem. It is a dialogue that
arises from and shifts with our own eccentric evolutions as readers; it exfoli-
ates as our readings encounter one another. One of the greatest advantages of
an ecological approach to poetry may in fact be that it releases us from the
fractiousness of the prevailing scholarly ‘culture. Sometimes academic dis-
course can feel like a conversation doomed to be carried out in rebukes and
thus to have limited prospects for mutual understanding and growth. Perhaps
respect for intellectual differences may be yet another value implicit in Aldo
Leopold’s great phrase “thinking like a mountain.” Neither in the biological
nor in the cultural realms does diversity mean, in any settled way, the Peace-
able Kingdom. A. R. Ammons’s “Corsons Inlet” records the gusty, insecure
 Foreword Ce Xi

energy of life along the Jersey shore. But the poem also affirms that, amid the
precarious beauty of such a world, “risk is full.” Any discussion along the wa-
vering shoreline of ecological poetry will likewise be marked by skirmishes
and uncertainty; people have entered into the conversation from many differ-
ent angles, and our different expectations will sometimes collide. We may be
helped to celebrate such intersections and divergences by remembering
the world of vectors that have sharpened the falcon’s dive and that have tuned
the tremulous rapture of a hare listening to the night. As readers, writers,
and teachers, we too are encompassed by the process, described in “Corsons
Inlet,” of

pulsations of order
broken down, transferred through membranes
to strengthen larger orders.

Most of the writers in this collection are, as many of its readers will be,
teachers. The poets discussed here, and the terms of that discussion, may help
us to conceive of education, too, in ecological terms. A pedagogy that focuses
on a class as an ecosystem, and on each student’s experience within it as
another, is likely to end up challenging the assumptions about lecturing,
grading, and the separation of scholarly disciplines that are such dominant
features of most colleges and universities. Here, as in our conversation about
ecological poetry, experimentation, constructive disagreement, and collabora-
tion will all be required before we can find an approach to teaching that is
appropriate to the insights and themes of the poets celebrated here. Perhaps a
hallmark of literary criticism in this area will come to be direct discussion of
the pedagogy implicit in a certain kind of reading. Perhaps, too, the land-
scapes of reader and writer alike will be more commonly acknowledged as el-
ements within the ecosystem of a poem’s meaning. Once one has begun to
draw certain kinds of connections, as tenuous and shifting as they may be,
there is a bracing awareness of living not simply in a niche but in the circling
seasons of a watershed.
J. Scott Bryson

Ce>/ntroduction

The original vision for this book arose in the summer of 1997 as I prepared
for my Ph.D. qualifying exams, one of which covered contemporary American
nature poetry. As I read the work of the best-known contemporary nature
poets, I was not surprised to discover that at a time when problems such as
‘overpopulation, species extinction, pollution, global warming, and ozone de-
pletion sppes almost dailyin national headlines, writers who are considered
“nature poets” were less and less composing traditional romantic nature lyrics
and were more and more taking up ecological and environmental issues. What
did surprise me, however, was that as far as I could tell, this widespread and
significant trend was garnering almost no critical notice. I was aware that the
very young field of ecocriticism was exploding onto the critical scene, and as I
read poetry that seemed to represent a departure from traditional nature po-
etry—at the time I wanted to call it “ecological poetry”—I assumed secondary
sources existed that would introduce me to this field. Instead, my research
demonstrated that within the new world of ecocriticism, scholars were largely
ignoring the work of ecologically oriented poets and were focusing almost ex-
clusively on nonfiction and some fiction, examining the works of Thoreau,
Leopold, Dillard, Abbey, and other prose nature writers. _
~My research did turn up a handful of helpful secondary texts, the two most
useful being John Elder’s compelling and widely read Imagining the Earth: Po-
etry and the Vision ofNature and Terry Gifford’s Green Voices: Understanding
Contemporary Nature Poetry. Both are excellent works and provided the bulk
of the theoretical grounding I was to receive in the field, yet as important as
they were in providing some critical underpinnings for my scholarship, they
stood alone as relevant examinations of the field' In addition, I encountered a
handful of anthologies containing contemporary nature poetry, but for the
most part these were simply collections of poems rather than treatments of
the genre.’ I also found that some fine work had been produced exploring the
writing of individual nature poets but that very little attention had been paid
to the genre as a whole.
Within the last few years, though, some interesting and evocative work that
examines ecopoetry itself has begun to appear. In 19971. Gyorgyi Voros pub-
lished Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, in which
2 Cx J. Scott Bryson

she employs contemporary environmental theory to argue for “an ecological

poetic,” applying it to the work of Stevens. Then in 1999 appeared Leonard
Scigaj’s Sustainable Poetry: Four Ecopoets, the first book to take ecopoetry as its
primary subject. The following year two additional studies appeared:
Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth, in which Bate examines a wealth of
world literature in light of what he presents as an “ecopoetics’s and Bernard
W. Quetchenbach’s Back from the Far Field: American Nature Poets in the Late
Twentieth Century, which examines contemporary nature poetry in general
and focuses on three contemporary U.S. poets—Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, and
Wendell Berry. These four excellent works offer sophisticated treatments of
the field and lay the foundation for future studies of ecopoetry.’
Thus, the situation has quickly evolved from its state of only a few years
ago, when young scholars trying to educate themselves in the field’s critical
milieu discovered that the academic community was largely ignoring one of
the most vibrant and dynamic expressions of contemporary literature. More
and more voices have appeared as of late to engage in an exchange of ideas re-
garding ecopoetry. This book seeks to further that conversation by gathering
some of the most significant established and emerging critical voices currently
working in the field.
One of the first questions to confront is, Exactly what is ecopoetry? This
question has uch to do with the history of nature poetry in general, which
can be traced back to the roots of language. For centuries, what has loosely
been termed “nature poetry” dominated English literature. From Beowulf to
Blake, much of the literature produced by English-speaking writers contained
heavy doses of natural subject matter and imagery. Yet as Robert Langbaum
has pointed out, by the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part
of the twentieth, what was considered an overly romantic nature poetry—
steeped in pathetic fallacy—had lost credibility, largely as a result of nine-
teenth-century science and the drastic changes in the way Westerners envi-
sioned themselves and the world around them, Darwinian theory and modern
geology, after all, would hardly allow readers to accept a poem that unselfcon-
sciously anthropomorphized nonhuman nature or that celebrated nature’s
benevolence toward humans, By the early part of the twentieth century, there-
fore, anything resembling romantic nature poetry was rarely written, and if it
was, it was even more rarely taken seriously.’
However, in response (and in opposition) to this older, romantic vision of
nature, a new form of nature poetry began to emerge, produced primarily by
such} \antiromantics as Frost, Jeffers, Stevens, Moore, Williams, With these and
other modern poets in mind, Langbaum wrote (in 1959) that the best twentieth-
 Introduction Cw

century nature poetry “defines itself precisely by opposing, or seeming to op-

pose, the pathetic fallacy (one cannot perhaps get round it). He went on to
explain that “to feelin nature an unalterably alien, even an unfeeling, existence
isto carry empathy several steps farther than did the nineteenth-century poets
who felt in nature a life different from but compatible with ours.” Out of this
conviction arise lines like that of Stevens, from “The Snow Man,” about a lis-
tener beholding “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,” and like
that of Moore, from “A Grave,” that contends “the sea has nothing to give” to
the perceiving human “but a well excavated grave”
In the latter half of the twentieth century, proceeding out of these modern
poetic voices, a whole new generation of poets began to take up the theme of
nature in a manner that diverged even further from that of nineteenth-
century nature poets like Wordsworth and Longfellow. As the American pop-
ulation grew more aware of ecological and environmental issues such as nu-
clear proliferation, species extinction, and other potential disasters, poets
began to speak to such matters in ways they had rarely spoken before. This
new-sounding poetic voice coincided with a growing spirit of protest that ap-
peared in the mid-twentieth century, along with the new freedom regarding
“poetic subject matter” that surfaced as a result of the emergence of the Beat
poets. Indeed, some of these poets—most notably Gary Snyder—became and
have remained leading voices in the environmental movement. As that move-
ment grew and the poetry of writers like Jeffers and Snyder was more widely
read (along with prose works by authors like Rachel Carson), other poets in-
creasingly took up many of the environmental themes these authors espoused,
thus setting up the offshoot of nature poetry we are calling ecopoetry.
(a precise definition of ecopoetry has not yet been established. However,
feast of us recognize, intuitively if by no other means, that this newer brand
of nature poetry differs in many ways from the traditional romantic nature
poetry produced by writers like Wordsworth or Whitman. When we read Gary
Snyder describe commercial land developers as rapists who say to the land,
“Spread your legs,”® or when we come across Denise Levertov’s description of
the earth as “a beaten child or a captive animal” who lies “waiting the next
blow,”’ we know that we are encountering a poem essentially different from
“Tintern Abbey” or Bradstreet’s “Contemplations.” Although in many ways
ecopoems fall in line with such canonical nature lyrics as “Contemplations,”
“Intimations of Immortality,’ and “Ode to a Nightingale,” they just as clearly
take visible steps beyond that tradition.
Compare, for instance, Whitman’s treatment of the razing of a forest,
in “Song of the Redwood-Tree,” with W. S. Merwin’s treatment of the same
Cw = J. Scott Bryson

general subject in his well-known poem “The Last One.” Whitman’s speaker
tells of a redwood’s “song” that contains these lines, addressed to the other trees:

Farewell my brethren,
Farewell O earth and sky, farewell ye neighboring waters,
My time has ended, my term has come.

Nor yield we mournfully majestic brothers,

We who have grandly fill'd our time;
With Nature’s calm content, with tacit huge delight,
We welcome what we have wrought for through the past,
And leave the field for them.
For them predicted long,
For a superber race, they too to grandly fill their time,
For them we abdicate, in them ourselves ye forest kings.*

Notice that the poem becomes a propagandistic justification for the clearing
of centuries-old redwoods, who are portrayed as willingly yielding to human-
ity, abdicating their thrones so that members of a “superber race” can “grandly
fill their time.” Now compare Whitman’s treatment with Merwin’s in “The
Last One,” a poem that also renders the removal of a forest but speaks out of a
much different vision of the world. The opening lines set the tone for the en-
tire poem as they describe the humans who approach the forest:

Well they’d made up their minds to be everywhere because why not.

Everywhere was theirs because they thought so.
They with two leaves they whom the birds despise.
In the middle of stones they made up their minds. They started to cut.
Well they cut everything because why not.
Everything was theirs because they thought so.’

As the poem continues, we notice that, just as in Whitman’s poem, human and
nonhuman nature interact. But instead of offering a benign natural world that
cares for the advancement of the human race, Merwin’s parable attempts to
render the consequences we can expect from cutting down “the last one,” the
final tree in the forest (emblematic of the numerous natural “resources” my-
opically wasted and destroyed). As the final tree falls and the loggers take it
away, its shadow remains and the people around it are unable to escape its
darkness.
 Introduction Ow

What becomes clear in the examination of these two poems is that al-
though both “Song of the Redwood-Tree” and “The Last One” can technically
be labeled “nature poems,” their approach to nature is drastically different.
One endorses the cutting of trees by giving them a voice that not only absolves
but even celebrates humankind for its actions; the other takes as its starting
point a condemnation of humanity for the same deeds, then spends the ma-
jority of the poem rendering the disastrous consequences. Although I find the
rhetoric of Merwin’s narrative much more persuasive (at least for our histori-
cal situation) than that of Whitman, my argument here is not that one poem
is a better or worse nature poem but that the visions offered in the poems are
different, and extremely different at that. A poet working from an ecologic#i
perspective on the world would not be able to present the poem as Whitman
has; an ecopoet, in order to continue to write poems of nature, must neces-
sarily alter his or her poetics. Granted, I have chosen extreme examples to clar-
ify this point. However, differences such as these appear time and again in
ecopoetry, as writers attempt to address contemporary issues and concerns
that earlier nature poets have either been unaware of or have not been forced
to deal with. In the work of these contemporary poets we get a perspective on
the human-nonhuman relationship that distinguishes them from their nature
poetry ancestors and marks them as ecopoets.
Any definition of the term ecopoetry should probably remain fluid at this
point because scholars are only beginning to offer a thorough examination of
the field. A few initial definitions have emerged in recent years. Gifford assigns
the term green poetry to “those recent nature poems which engage directly
with environmental issues.”"® And Scigaj writes that we “might define ecopo-
etry as poetry that persistently stresses human cooperation with nature con-
ceived as a dynamic, interrelated series of cyclic feedback systems.” Lawrence
Buell sets down overarching characteristics for “environmentally oriented
works” in general—the presence of the nonhuman as more than mere back-
drop, the expansion of human interest beyond humanity, a sense of human
accountability to the environment and of the environment as a process rather
than a constant or given—and these characteristics presumably apply to po-
etry as well.”
The definition I offer here coincides with those of Gifford, Scigaj, and
Buell: Ecopoetry is a subset of nature poetry that, while adhering to certain
conventions of romanticism, also advances beyond that tradition and takes on
distinctly contemporary problems and issues, thus resulting in a_version of
nature poetry generally marked by three primary characteristics. The first is
an emphasis on maintaining an ecocentric perspective that recognizes the
6 Cex J. Scott Bryson

interdependent nature of the world; such a perspective leads to a devotion to

specific places and to the land itself, along with those creatures that share it
with humankind. This interconnection is part of what Black Elk called “the
sacred hoop” that pulls all things into relationship, and it can be found
throughout ecopoetry. Levertov’s “Web,” for example, demonstrates this inter-
connection, ostensibly describing the literal web of a spider but pointing also
to what Levertov calls the “great web,” which is

Intricate and untraceable,

weaving and interweaving,
... designed, beyond all spiderly contrivance,
to link, not to entrap.”"

The “great web” here is the one that moves through and connects all people
and things, both human and nonhuman. Levertov’s web represents what
Mohawk poet Peter Blue Cloud calls “the allness of the creation,” and it
points toward the same lesson Joy Harjo offers in her famous poem “Remem-
ber,” which concludes with its speaker imploring her audience to “Remember
you are all people and all people are you. / Remember you are this universe
and this universe is you.””°
This awareness of the world as a community tends to produce the second
attribute of ecopoetry: an imperative toward humility in relationships with
both human and nonhuman nature. You won’t hear ecopoets endorsing
Emerson’s statement, “Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and
estate. It is his, if he will.”” Instead, ecopoets are more likely to echo Frost’s re-
minder of how little control we actually have over the wildness of nature:
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”'* So instead of what Albert Gelpi
describes as romanticism’s inherent “aggrandizement of the individual ego,””
we read a Jeffers ecopoem that depicts extravagant royal tombs, then con-
cludes with the lines, “Imagine what delusions of grandeur, / What suspicion-
agonized eyes, what jellies of arrogance and terror / This earth has absorbed,”
And we hear Blue Cloud define stars as “fire vessels / the universe happening /
regardless of man.””'
Related to this humility is the third attribute of ecopoetry: an intense skep-
ticism concerning hyperrationality, a skepticism that usually leads to an in-
dictment of an overtechnologized modern world and a warning concerning
the very real potential for ecological catastrophe. Harjo, for example, criticizes
time and again the effects of what Edward Abbey dubs modern “syphiliza-
tion,” mourning in one poem for those in the cities who are “learning not to
 Introduction Cw

hear the ground as it spins around / beneath them.”” Snyder is more direct in
his reproach, condemning Japan, that “once-great Buddhist nation,” for
“quibbl[{ing] for words on / what kinds of whales they can kill.” and
“dribbl[{ing] methyl mercury/ like gonorrhea / in the sea.””
These three overarching characteristics—ecocentrism, a humble apprecia-
tion of wildness, and a skepticism toward hyperrationality and its resultant
overreliance on technology—represent a broad definition of the field exam-
ined here. This volume explores the ways contemporary ecopoets deal with
these concerns and issues. Exactly what name to give the current manifesta-
tion of contemporary nature poetry varies from critic to critic. Most of the
authors in this volume call it ecopoetry or ecological poetry; some call it envi-
ronmental poetry, some simply nature poetry, and Gifford, in his essay, intro-
duces the term post-pastoral. Regardless of the terminology, each of the essays,
in one way or another, deals with the present version of nature poetry that
takes into account environmental and ecological lessons we have learned (or
are currently learning) regarding the interaction between human and nonhu-
man nature.
The book is divided into three major sections that intersect and bleed into
one another.

Section One: Forerunners of Ecopoetry

The first section explores the background of the field and examines the inter-
section between ecopoets and those who have come before. In the opening arti-
cle David Gilcrest examines what he calls the “cross-cultural roots of ecopoetic
meditation.” Using the work of Chinese poets Han-shan and Ssu-K’ung T’u,
along with that of Plato, Augustine, and Basho, Gilcrest demonstrates that al-
though contemporary ecopoets’ uncomfortable relationship with language re-
veals certain postmodern sensibilities, the desire to transcend language and lin-
guistic limitations is actually an ancient one. Roger Thompson’s following essay
narrows that historical focus slightly but still offers a wide-angle view of history,
surveying the last two centuries of rhetoric and poetry about the nonhuman
world. Thompson points out that for nineteenth-century transcendentalists like
Emerson, poetry and rhetoric were “conflated as unique expressions of divine
eloquence”; in contrast, the work of most contemporary nature poets has be-
come a more “consciously rhetorical act, whose purpose is social change.”
Next, Deborah Fleming compares the poetry of Yeats to that of Robinson
Jeffers, the poet whom many consider the father of ecopoetry. Fleming points
out that Yeats employed landscape in his poetry in an effort to create a fresh
8 ce = J. Scott Bryson

and original literary tradition in Ireland, whereas Jeffers “celebrated the earth
primarily” in his work. Mark Long then argues that the work of William Car-
los Williams can serve as something of a corrective for contemporary ecopo-
ets who prize a poetics of presence but neglect to pay attention to the role lan-
guage and imagination play in that poetics. As Long explains, a “passionate
commitment to the environment” must be combined with “a genuine com-
mitment to language and its domain of human culture” in order for a poem to
articulate more than its own local point of view.

Section Two: Established Ecopoets

Section two analyzes well-known poets who write from an ecological perspec-
tive and would appear in virtually any anthology of contemporary nature
poets. Some of these authors are more overtly environmental and politically
involved than others, but the group coheres around the commitment to ex-
amining the relationship between human and nonhuman nature and to writ-
ing out of the ecopoetic principles outlined above. In this section’s first
essay Terry Gifford argues for a “post-pastoral” literature that “avoids the traps
both of idealization of the pastoral and of the simple corrective of the anti-
pastoral.” Offering the best work of Snyder as his primary example, and work-
ing from numerous other well-known texts from British and U.S. poetry,
Gifford defines and explores the questions raised by post-pastoral poetry.
Gyorgyi Voros then looks at A. R. Ammons’s poetic attempts “to effect a
sustainable ecological relation between human and nonhuman Other.” After
demonstrating that, for Ammons, mirroring and other ocular imagery ulti-
mately fail to achieve this goal, Voros turns her attention to “acts of voicing” in
Ammons’s verse. Working from Jungian psychologist Patricia Berry’s reading
of the Echo and Narcissus myth, Voros maintains that for Ammons it is the
human voice, “however impervious nature is to ‘hearing’ it,” that offers us the
best chance to connect human and nonhuman nature. My own essay follows
and explores similar themes in W. S. Merwin’s poetry, examining it through
the theoretical lens of cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Like most ecopoets,
Merwin attempts to harmonize in his poetry two principal concepts: a com-
mitment to place, and a humble awareness of the linguistic and epistemologi-
cal obstacles a writer faces when he or she attempts to render an experience
with the natural world. However, as a result of Merwin’s expressed inability to
achieve such a harmony, his poems have throughout his career consistently
turned toward silence.
Leonard M. Scigaj works with another of the best-known ecopoets, Wen-
 Introduction Ow

dell Berry. Scigaj likens the vision presented in Berry’s A Timbered Choir to
that offered by Christian mystics, explaining that Berry’s vision reverses nor-
mal perception by allowing a biocentric viewpoint to produce lessons that
nonhuman nature teaches the poet rather than perceiving the poet as interro-
gating nature, the poem’s subject. Scigaj argues that the crucial movement that
takes place in Berry’s poetics is the recognition of the “panentheistic” quality
of the world, a concept Scigaj borrows from theologian Matthew Fox. By view-
ing the world from a panentheistic perspective and comprehending, in Scigaj’s
words, “the biocentric holiness of creation,’ Berry perceives the holiness
therein and thus necessarily chooses to be seen by it and to allow it to alter
him. In another cross-disciplinary essay, Laird Christensen explores the meld-
ing of postmodern and ecological approaches in Mary Oliver’s poetry, assert-
ing that her ecopoetry serves as a postmodern curative to outdated notions of
human independence. As Christensen explains, Oliver views herself as one of
many subjects in a multisubjective world, thus “constructing a subject posi-
tion based on ecological interdependence,” which Christensen calls “a clearly
postmodern project undertaken to correct the destructive illusion of human
independence from ecosystems.”
In his essay on the contemporary elegy Jeffrey Thomson asserts that the
ecological vision offered by certain current nature poets offers the opportu-
nity for a different type of elegy. Using the work of Oliver and Jane Kenyon,
Thomson examines contemporary elegies and argues that they achieve their
power by resisting the false dialectic of either elevating nature to a naively
benevolent position or submitting to utter sorrow. Rather, elegies in the work
of poets like Kenyon and Oliver provide a third alternative that allows the
speaker to recognize herself or himself as a member of the natural world and
its life cycle. Thus, meaning emerges out of grief. In this section’s final entry,
Emily Hegarty uses government statistics and independent research to estab-
lish the historical reality of Native American genocide, then elucidates Linda
Hogan’s response to this modern horror. Contextualizing the poet’s work
within the broader realms of ecopoetry in general and native poetry in partic-
ular, Hegarty contends that Hogan’s writing aims “to counteract the effects of
physical and cultural genocide” and “reproduce for future generations Native
American culture and the viable environment with which it is entwined.”

Section Three: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecopoetry

The six essays in the book’s final section explore the environmentally con-
scious work of poets who are either not known primarily as ecopoets or who
10 Ce J. Scott Bryson

are now emerging as poets worthy of critical study. Looking at the list of
ecopoets covered in this section, one notices the breadth and diversity of the
poets currently writing ecopoetry. Whereas nature writing has often been la-
beled a “privileged white male” venture, this grouping illustrates the inaccu-
racy of that labeling by examining the diversity within the ecopoetic branch of
nature writing.
In her article on the American Indian influence on Arthur Sze’s ecopoetry,
for example, Zhou Xiaojing looks specifically at the way Sze uses metaphysics
and quantum physics to articulate a worldview based on an understanding of
the chaotic nature of the world. By abandoning a linear view of time and em-
phasizing the inherent interrelationality of human and nonhuman nature, Sze
explores alternative modes of understanding humanity and its place in the
larger world. In the following essay Beverly Curran also explores the subver-
sive tendency of certain types of ecopoetry. Analyzing the poetry of Canadian
author Daphne Marlatt, Curran explores the connections between Marlatt’s
lesbian verse and the sense of place that pervades it, explaining that Marlatt’s
poetry highlights connections between lesbian and ecological consciousness
in order to challenge “the dominant power structures that have rendered
workers exploited, lesbians invisible, and the environment subject to destruc-
tion in the name of economic dominance.” In doing so Marlatt’s work breaks
down borders dividing prose from poetry, words from worlds, subject from
object, human from nature.
Roy Osamu Kamada then offers a postcolonial reading of the work of the
Caribbean Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott. Kamada examines Wal-
cott’s juxtaposition of a romantic desire to find beauty and the sublime in
natural landscapes with the historical awareness of the dispossession and
trauma his country and people have undergone. In Kamada’s words, Walcott
“explores landscape even as he explores the problematics of a postcolonial
subjectivity.” Next, Maggie Gordon, acknowledging that Louise Gliick would
not consider herself a nature writer, argues for considering the ecofeminist
tendencies that pervade Gliick’s poetry. Using the work of Charlene Spretnak,
Gordon illuminates these tendencies that guide Gliick’s poetry—namely “the
sense of the interdependence of human and nonhuman nature and the pro-
found awareness of human bodily nature’—and shows that despite Gliick’s
“absence of intention,” her poetry highlights these ecological themes. Richard
Hunt then makes a compelling argument for considering Margaret Atwood
an ecopoet. Traveling from her earliest books to her most recent poetry,
Hunt renders the ecological vision Atwood has been working from since
her earliest period. Using the terminology of philosopher Warwick Fox,
 Introduction Cw ih

Hunt argues that the ethical premise underlying Atwood’s poetry is an adher-
ence to a “transpersonal ecology” that leads to an identification among all
entities.
The book concludes with Bernard Quetchenbach’s essay, which effectively
draws all three sections together. Quetchenbach looks at the work of what
he calls “current” poets, whom he distinguishes from “contemporary” poets.
Drawing from the verse of such diverse writers as Jimmy Santiago Baca, Adri-
enne Rich, Paula Gunn Allen, Li-young Lee, Primus St. John, Marilyn Chin,
and Simon Ortiz, Quetchenbach explores the assumptions made by current
poets concerning the relationship among writer, subject, and audience. He
demonstrates that, in their retention of the personal quality of contemporary
poets, and in their increased emphasis on writing identity- and subject-based
poems, current poets allow for a broadening of appeal for ecopoetry in that
these recent developments set the work of ecopoets “in a new, more expansive,
and less-isolated context.”

Finally, a few words concerning the book’s compilation are in order. First, it
would obviously be impossible for a single volume to include analyses of all of
the ecopoets working today. Some important ecopoets have therefore neces-
sarily been excluded, poets like Denise Levertov, Robert Bly, Leslie Marmon
Silko, Galway Kinnell, Pattiann Rogers, Joy Harjo, Theodore Roethke, to name
only a few. Decisions regarding inclusion in the volume were based on its
overall goal. That is, no effort was made to offer some sort of exhaustive cov-
erage of the field (as if that were possible); we offer, rather, an introduction,
more of an invitation really, to this vibrant and diverse mode of literature.
Therefore, what appears here is an amalgam of historical and emerging poets,
combined with those ecopoets whose critical reputations demand that they be
included in such a collection. One should not conclude, based on the fact that
a majority of the poets whose work is studied in this volume live in the United
States, that ecopoetry is a strictly American phenomenon. Although much of
the current critical attention on ecopoetry is focused on U.S. writers, this col-
lection demonstrates the intriguing work that can appear when we use an eco-
logical perspective to gaze beyond U.S. borders.
Generally speaking, the scholars here avoid offering conclusions that might
shut down discussion of the field. Ours is something of a midterm report.
Contemporary ecopoets, like the mode itself, are still coming into their own,
still developing and defining who they are, how they present themselves, and
how they relate to their subject matter. The same goes for these analyses of the
field. They are introductory forays into the genre, ones that we hope will spark
12 ce J. Scott Bryson

conversation and argument, for the field of contemporary ecopoetry is large

and has yet to be studied anywhere near adequately.

Notes

1. John Elder, Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature (Athens: Univer-
sity of Georgia Press, 1996); Terry Gifford, Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary
Nature Poetry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Two other studies of
note appeared in 1991: Guy Rotella’s Reading and Writing Nature: The Poetry of Robert
Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop (Boston: Northeastern
University Press); and Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environ-
mental Tradition (New York: Routledge). Each is a first-rate work providing a good in-
troduction to some of the issues facing contemporary poets of nature, but neither ac-
tually focuses on working ecopoets.
2. See, for instance, Robert Bly’s News of the Universe: Poems of a Twofold Con-
sciousness (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1980); Sara Dunn and Alan Scholefield’s
Beneath the Wide Wide Heaven: Poetry of the Environment from Antiquity to the Present
(London: Virago, 1991); Christopher Merrill’s The Forgotten Language: Contemporary
Poets and Nature (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1991); Robert Pack and Jay Parini’s
Poems for a Small Planet: Contemporary American Nature Poetry (Hanover: Middle-
bury College Press, 1993); and John Daniel’s Wild Song: Poems of the Natural World
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998).
3. Gyorgyi Voros, Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997); Leonard M. Scigaj, Sustainable Poetry: Four
Ecopoets (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999); Jonathan Bate, Song of the
Earth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Bernard W. Quetchenbach, Back
from the Far Field: American Nature Poets in the Late Twentieth Century (Char-
lottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000). Along with these works three disserta-
tions of note have also appeared: David Gilcrest’s “Greening the Lyre: Environmental
Poetics and Ethics” (University of Oregon, 1996), Laird Christensen’s “Spirit Astir in
the World: Sacred Poetry in the Age of Ecology” (University of Oregon, 1999), and my
own “Place and Space in Contemporary Ecological Poetry: Berry, Harjo, and Oliver”
(University of Kentucky, 1999). One other valuable venue offering consistent examples
of work on ecopoetics has been the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature
and the Environment.
4. Robert Langbaum, “The New Nature Poetry,’ in The Modern Spirit: Essays on the
Continuity of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford, 1970),
101-126. First published in American Scholar 28, no. 3 (summer 1959): 323-340.
 Introduction Cw 13

5. Langbaum, 104 (page citations are to the reprint).

6. Gary Snyder, Turtle Island (Boston: Shambhala, 1993), 32.
7. Denise Levertov, The Life around Us: Selected Poems on Nature (New York: New
Directions, 1997), 20.
8. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, and Selected Prose, ed. Sculley Bradley (New York:
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1949), 174-175.
9. W. S. Merwin, The Second Four Books of Poems: The Moving Target, The Lice, The
Carrier of Ladders, Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (Port Townsend, Wash.:
Copper Canyon Press, 1993), 86-88.
10. Gifford, 3. _
11. Scigaj, 37.
12. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and
the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 7-8.
13. L use the term ecocentric here to describe a worldview that, in contrast to an ego-
centric or anthropocentric perspective, views the earth as an intersubjective commu-
nity and values its many diverse (human and nonhuman) members.
14. Levertov, 17.
15. This line appears in Blue Cloud’s “voice play” entitled “For Rattlesnake: A Dia-
logue of Creatures,” from The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary Na-
tive American Literature, ed. Geary Hobson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1980), 23.
16. Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1997), 40.
17. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12 vols.,
ed. Edward W. Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-1904), 1:20.
18. Robert Frost, North of Boston, 2nd ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 1915), 11.
19. Albert Gelpi, A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910-1950
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 518.
20. Robinson Jeffers, “Iona: The Graves of Kings,” in Selected Poems (New York: Vin-
tage, 1965), 52.
21. Blue Cloud, “fire/rain,” in Hobson, 20.
22. “For Alva Benson, and for Those Who Have Learned to Speak,” in Harjo, 18.
23. “Mother Earth: Her Whales,” in Snyder, 82.
Forerunners of
Fcopoetryce.
David Gilcrest

Cw Regarding Silence
Cross-Cultural Roots of Ecopoetic
Meditation

In his poem “Ars Poetica” Charles Wright finds himself between two worlds—
the green world of pepper tree and aloe vera, and this other world of words,
language, poetry:

ARS POETICA
I like it back here

Under the green swatch of the pepper tree and the aloe vera.
I like it because the wind repeats itself,
and the leaves do.

I like it because I’m better here than I am there,

Surrounded by fetishes and figures of speech:

Dog’s tooth and whale’s tooth, my father’s shoe, the dead weight
Of winter, the inarticulation of joy...

* The spirits are everywhere.

And once I have them called down from the sky, and spinning and
dancing in the palm of my hand,
What will it satisfy?
Pll still have

The voices rising out of the ground,

The fallen star my blood feeds,
this business I waste my heart on.

And nothing stops that.’

18 ce David Gilcrest

Wright’s situation is in fact an increasingly familiar one to contemporary writ-

ers and readers of environmental poetry. The distinction between res and
verba, between the things of this earth and our words for them, has taken on
epistemological and ultimately ethical import as we grope our way back to the
more-than-human world.
“T like it back here / Under the green swatch,” announces the poet. He likes
it because he is “better” here than “there,” better and perhaps better off in the
natural here and now than over there where the seemingly unnatural artifacts
of “fetishes and figures of speech” surround him, hold sway. The poet prefers
the realm of “organic” metaphor, the natural repetition of wind and leaf
rather than the “artificial” redoubling of linguistic metaphor, language turned
back on itself in its figuration.
As a statement of his poetic art, Wright presents in “Ars Poetica” an ironic
perspective on the ostensible merits of his craft. Here the poet is quite capable
of calling down the “spirits,” which are “everywhere,” and which are identified
syntactically with the “fetishes and figures of speech” that surround him; how-
ever, these “spirits,” which the poet compels to descend from the sky to spin
and dance in the palm of his hand, satisfy nothing. The heavenly words of the
poet cannot answer the “voices rising out of the ground,” the utterly inarticu-
late yet insistent tongue of the earth. The spirits of poetry cannot satisfy the
body, the “fallen star my blood feeds,” unfed by aerial turns of phrase. The
spirits of poetry fail even to satisfy the ambitions of the art, “this business I
waste my heart on,” the occupation and preoccupation of poetry itself.
The final line is, of course, ambiguous. Nothing keeps the poet from calling
down his words and nothing stops the earth and the body from making de-
mands that cannot be met yet must be answered if the business of poetry is to
continue. The poet’s place, Wright suggests, is both between world and word
and between desire and the impossibility of its satisfaction, especially through
the offices of language.
The claim of a state of being removed from, and perhaps prior to, language
aligns this poem with a poetics that has received some critical attention of late.
Wright’s gesture beyond the pale of language in “Ars Poetica,” and other
poems identifies him as an “ecopoet” in the sense Leonard Scigaj gives the
term. According to Scigaj, the ecopoet works to direct our gaze “beyond the
printed page toward firsthand experiences that approximate the poet’s intense
involvement in the authentic experience that lies behind his originary lan-
guage.” Such a gesture is predicated on experience of the world unmediated by
language. The ecopoets Scigaj addresses in Sustainable Poetry—Ammons, Berry,
Merwin, and Snyder—affirm that “human language is much more limited than
 Roots of Ecopoetic Meditation ce. 19

the ecological processes of nature” (11). Ecopoets “recognize the limits of lan-
guage while referring us in an epiphanic moment to our interdependency and
relatedness to the richer planet whose operations created and sustain us” (42).
The result of such affirmation and recognition is the sustainable poem: po-
etry that “presents nature as a separate and at least equal other,” that “offers ex-
emplary models of biocentric perception and behavior,” and that “does not
subordinate nature to a superior human consciousness or reduce nature to
immanence” (78-79).
Scigaj suggests, at least, that the sustainable poem is largely the product of
a contemporary poetic consciousness and poetics. His choice of ecopoets re-
inforces his sense that such poetry functions within and against the postmod-
ernist sensibilities of the past thirty years or so and especially the “postmod-
ern critique of language.” Against charges that ecopoets are guilty of semiotic
naiveté, Scigaj argues that ecopoets are not in fact “indifferent to language or
to poststructural critiques of the function of language.” Rather, ecopoets
“argue the reverse of the poststructural position that all experience is medi-
ated by language. For ecopoets language is an instrument that the poet con-
tinually refurbishes to articulate his originary experience in nature” (29).
Specifically, ecopoets deploy “postmodern self-reflexivity to disrupt the fash-
ionably hermetic treatment of poetry as a self-contained linguistic construct
whose ontological ground is language theory” (11). The sustainable poem
thus brings to bear some of the tools of the postmodern critique of language
in order to break out of the prison house of language. .
But as his own treatment of these contemporary poets suggests (and espe-
cially his work on Merwin and Snyder), the historical roots of ecopoetics
run much deeper than the epoch claimed by postmodernism. These poets’
encounters with Taoist and Zen ideology, practice, and aesthetics, explicitly
acknowledged in their work, and exhaustively explicated by their critics, offer
a much larger cultural context for ecopoetry.
In these affiliated but not identical traditions the ability to bracket lan-
guage is cultivated, a discipline that allows for unmediated and often
epiphanic experience. By quieting the mind, silencing the chatter of language,
repudiating its propensity for attachment and discrimination, one experiences
loss of self and a concomitant ecstatic synthesis in the world. Such an experi-
ence entails a radical shift in perspective, in the Zen tradition called satori (or
wu in Chinese), which D. T. Suzuki has defined as “an intuitive looking-into,
in contradistinction to intellectual and logical understanding . . . the unfold-
ing of a new world hitherto unperceived in the confusion of a dualistic mind.”
In terms of aesthetics, poetry written from this kind of experience serves as a
20 ce David Gilcrest

record of the intuitive moment, the gesture toward presence, a reminder of

what is possible. Satori achieves a measure of articulation in the language of
poetry written by those who value such experience.
Consider, for example, the following poem written by Han-shan in the sev-
enth century:

My mind is like the autumn moon

shining clean and clear in the green pool.
No, that’s not a good comparison.
Tell me, how shall I explain?*

Here Han-shan reaches for a very traditional simile to describe the state of in-
tuitive, nondualistic consciousness: the moon “shining clean and clear in the
green pool.” The first two lines capture the calm yet attentive aspect of intu-
itive awareness. Note that the poet’s mind is identified with both the reflective
surface of the pool and the autumn moon reflecting in it; no distinction is
made between the “objects” of consciousness and the “medium” of conscious-
ness. Or that might seem to be the ambition of these first two lines, but as the
balance of the poem indicates, such a simile, albeit graceful and suggestive,
cannot capture in language this state of nondualistic awareness. One is left
with the autonomy of distinct nouns, the moon and the pool, and the syntac-
tic tyranny of subject and predicate. Han-shan is moved to stop the figure in
its tracks, criticizing his own simile. “Tell me,” he asks, “how shall I explain?”
At the edge of language, the poet arrests himself, inviting the reader to con-
sider the dilemma at hand.
In this second poem Han-shan is much less hesitant to characterize the
quality of meditative consciousness:

The clear water sparkles like crystal,

you can see through it easily, right to the bottom.
My mind is free from every thought,
nothing in the myriad realms can move it.
Since it cannot be wantonly roused,
forever and forever it will stay unchanged.
When you have learned to know in this way,
you'll know there is no inside or out!°

Here the experience of the unencumbered mind is identified explicitly as a

unique way of knowing, a meditative or contemplative epistemology. The
 Roots of Ecopoetic Meditation ce, wk

poem emphasizes that this meditative epistemology serves to frustrate that

most basic of dualisms, the distinction between inside and outside, ultimately
between self and other, human and nature. As many ecocritics have noted,
such a decomposition of the autonomous self leads us to discover a new sense
of identity, the relational identity of the “ecological self” with implications
that are epistemological, ethical, and political.
A final poem by Han-shan reaffirms the distinction between the natural
world and the world of books:

My house is at the foot of the green cliff,

my garden a jumble of weeds I no longer
bother to mow.
New vines dangle in twisted strands
over old rocks rising steep and high.
Monkeys make off with the mountain fruits,
the white heron crams his bill with fish
from the pond,
while I, with a book or two of the immortals,
read under the trees—mumble, mumble.’

In this poem the poet and his demesne have gone to seed, the poet having
given up whatever ambition he might have had to domesticate the dynamic
world around him, no longer bothering to mow his garden. In his retirement
the poet witnesses the flourishing world that surrounds him: “New vines dan-
gle in twisted strands / over old rocks rising steep and high” as “Monkeys make
off with mountain fruits” and “the white heron crams his bill with fish from
the pond.” The final image of the poet sitting under the trees reading “a book
or two of the immortals” is comically pathetic, the literary magnificence of the
immortals’ artifice is reduced to mere mumbles in the presence of “wild” na-
ture. The poem asks, How can words, even the best words, compete with this
green world?
The ninth-century poet Ssu-K’ung T’u poses a similar question in his
prayer “Animal Spirits”:

That they might come back unceasingly,

That they might be ever with us!
The bright river, unfathomable,
The rare flower just opening,
The parrot of the verdant spring,
22 ce, David Gilcrest

The willow-trees, the terrace,

The stranger from the dark hills,
The cup overflowing with clear wine. ...
Oh, for life to be extended,
With no dead ashes of writing,
Amid the charms of the Natural,
Ah, who can compass it?*

What is writing but “dead ashes” in comparison to life, the natural world? And
who can “compass” the beauty and fecundity of the world, especially in words?
Moved beyond words, the poet leaves us with his gentle plea that such beauty
bound by mystery might abide.
The explicit debt contemporary ecopoets owe to poets like Han-shan and
Ssu-K’ung T’u might tempt us to look no further. Certainly the central place
occupied by poets such as Merwin and Snyder in the ecopoetic canon focuses
our attention on its Asian roots. But I would like to suggest that the Taoist and
Zen influences observed in contemporary ecopoetry, although obviously im-
portant, offer only a partial context for understanding the poetics that under-
writes it.
The ancient European contribution to both the linguistic skepticism and
the meditative epistemology of contemporary ecopoetry has received scant
critical attention. We have tended to view the European tradition as hopelessly
logocentric, in love with the Word (not the World), hostile to unmediated ex-
perience, in short, antithetical to the ecopoetic aesthetic. The easy dismissal of
the European tradition often rests on a simple-minded caricature of what is
in fact an enormously diverse body of wisdom. While giving the devil his
due, I would like to argue that the ancient European tradition, despite its his-
torical biases, offers models of both linguistic skepticism and meditative epis-
temology.
Let us consider first of all Plato, the putative father of (phal)logocentric ex-
cess. As early as the Phaedrus Plato takes pains to underscore the limitations of
language in both its written and spoken forms. Written language comes in for
an especially tough time in the Phaedrus; Plato worries that relying overmuch
on the written word serves only to atrophy the memory. He complains that
one cannot ask questions of a written text as one can of a living interlocutor.
Finally, he says that writing leads only to the “delusion” that we have wide
knowledge and cripples our ability to make real judgments. Plato also argues
that even the spoken word is functionally limited; having little merit on its
own, it must be tailored to serve the ultimate end: the meeting of minds (es-
 Roots of Ecopoetic Meditation ce, 23

pecially the mind of one who knows with one who doesn’t) in the realm of
pure Idea.
In the Cratylus Plato refines his theory of language further by staging a
showdown between the rival linguistic theories of his day. The conventionalist
position of the Eleatic philosophers (and the sophist Gorgias) is presented in
the person of Hermogenes, who confesses to Socrates that he

cannot come to the conclusion that there is any correctness of names other
than convention and agreement. For it seems to me that whatever name
you give to a thing is its right name; and if you give up that name and
change it for another, the later name is no less correct than the earlier .. .
for I think no name belongs to any particular thing by nature, but only by
the habit and custom of those who employ it and who established the
usage. (384D)?

Plato then moves Socrates to refute Hermogenes’ conventionalist position, ar-

guing that “the giving of names can hardly be, as you imagine, a trifling mat-
ter, or a task for trifling or casual persons,” and further, that Cratylus must be
“right in saying that names belong to things by nature and that not every one
is an artisan of names, but only he who keeps in view the name which belongs
by nature to each particular thing and is able to embody its form in the letters
and syllables” (390D).”°
Although Plato is often taken to sympathize with the naturalist position of
Cratylus in this dialogue, Plato’s own position is rather more complex." As we
noted in the Phaedrus, the key to Plato’s epistemology is that knowledge and
language proceed on different tracks. Those tracks may diverge, as when the
written word steers us away from real understanding. Alternatively, the tracks
of knowledge and language may, in the best of all possible worlds, parallel one
another. At the end of the Cratylus he fantasizes about a more perfect language
in which words, or names, correspond more directly and with less ambiguity
to their referents. Such an ideal language would ultimately facilitate knowl-
edge by pointing directly and unproblematically to the only real manifestation
of truth: the ideal Forms.
In developing his theory of language as an explicit alternative to conven-
tionalist doctrine, Plato does not simply adopt Cratylus’s rather naive natural-
ism. Indeed, Plato’s naturalistic tendencies are strategic; even as it flirts with
conventionalist heresy, Plato’s embrace of language carries him beyond the
ken of linguistic structures into a realm of knowledge subject to very different
rules.
24 ce David Gilcrest

On this account the conventionalist attitudes of pre-Socratic intellectuals

like Democritus and Gorgias, and in a very qualified way Plato’s own linguis-
tic theory, stake out positions at least sympathetic to the linguistic skepticism
we have noted in latter-day ecopoetry. But before I stand accused of dyeing
Plato green, I need quickly to acknowledge the signal reason why Plato does
not generally receive good reviews in the ecocritical press. I refer, of course, to
the transcendentalist bent apparent even in his treatment of language. For
Plato’s theory of Forms discounts the sensible, material world in ways that
make lovers of nature cringe. Plato argued that the natural world that we labor
to love is in fact nothing but a pale imitation of the really real, a shadow of ul-
timate Form that lies outside of space, time, and the vagaries of human per-
ception and cognition.
Given the unfortunate and ultimately tragic way any such transcendental-
ism effaces the world on which all life, including the lives of philosophers, de-
pends, it is easy to see how Plato and his ilk have come to serve as lightning
rods for environmentalist ire. But again, the demonization of European (and
American) transcendentalists tends to overlook the transcendentalism of
other, ostensibly more earth-friendly traditions. Consider the case of Basho,
the most celebrated of haiku poets. The choice is appropriate given that haiku
is arguably the most quintessential of ecopoetic forms, parlaying as it does
concise moments of unmediated perception grounded in actual time and
place. Nobuyuki Yuasa, in the foreword to his translation of The Narrow Road
to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, reminds us that before Basho set
out on his many journeys, he suffered, and wrote about, the materiality of the
so-called floating world (that is, the world of sensible, everyday objects) only
with great dissatisfaction, eventually rebelling against it.’* Yuasa describes
what was for Basho a spiritual crisis, a longing for something in excess of the
ordinary world before him. It was at this time that he began to practice Zen
meditation in earnest. Yuasa writes, “Whether Basho was able to attain the
state of complete enlightenment is a matter open to question, for he repeat-
edly tells us that he has one foot in the other world and the other foot in this
one” (27).
What can we make of this talk of two worlds? We have reached the point
where prudence dictates caution; even though the rhetoric appears to be sim-
ilar, speculation concerning what Basho, or Plato, means by reference to
realms that supplement or supplant the mundane must be deferred, at least
for a moment.
Thus I will put aside, temporarily, the question of transcendentalism and
 Roots of Ecopoetic Meditation cw 25

turn to the status of meditative epistemology in the European tradition. Al-

though every age may be said to harbor its mystics, for a complete elucidation
of a meditative epistemology we inevitably turn to Augustine. As one critic has
noted, Augustine is responsible for nothing less than redrawing the epistemo-
logical map.” For Plato the primary epistemological struggle is between cer-
tain knowledge (episteme) and mere belief or opinion (doxa). One arrives at
certain knowledge primarily by virtue of one’s rational capacities. In contrast,
Augustine’s epistemological theory exploits the tension between reason and
faith. According to Augustine, the power of rational understanding is essen-
tially limited; scientia, or classical knowledge, is corrected and completed by
divine or Gospel wisdom (sapientia).
Augustine's meditative epistemology is invoked in the rhetoric of intro-
spection, contemplation in the realm of silence. Rist points out that Augustine
was not the first to advocate introspection as a legitimate way of knowing;
such a position is in fact a common feature of Neoplatonic doctrine. The nov-
elty of Augustine’s approach is found in his claim that God is within, an asser-
tion that has the effect of “anchoring” introspection.”* Rist observes that

4 major objection to introspection, as Augustine knows, is that one cannot

see within oneself without distorting what one sees, simply because the
viewer is also the object of vision. But Augustine’s idea that God is within
us implies that one’s inward eye is not merely looking at oneself as an
object, and thus creating an image: it is also looking at something inde-
pendent of the self, namely God, an ever present object which will always
“resist’ human misrepresentation. (89)

As in the meditative epistemology of Taoism and Zen, Augustine’s path of

knowledge through introspection serves to disintegrate and deprivilege the
autonomous self. But what the inward turn anticipates, or discovers, is not
Nature but God. Introspection, as a turn toward the indwelling God, is very
explicitly a turning away from the natural world that is seen, as in Plato, as un-
trustworthy. For although “nature and the knowing mind are informed by God
... the knowledge of nature does not necessarily disclose but may in fact ob-
scure God” Sapientia is opposed to scientia because the understanding of the
rational mind is “limited to changing objects of knowledge in the external
world” For Augustine introspection affords us the opportunity to reach, “to
some degree—a vision of Truth, that is of God, within ourselves though be-
yond ourselves. Hence we are able to reach something fixed and unchanging,
26 Ce David Gilcrest

something within us which is not an image constructed from our defective

readings of ourselves and of the external world, but a meeting (which can be
misunderstood and misinterpreted) with the unchanging God.””
We now confront the full force of the problem postponed only a moment
ago: how do we account for epistemologies that, although similar, lead in rad-
ically different directions? That is to say, Why does Taoist and Zen epiphany,
predicated on the bracketing of language and the cultivation of intuitive un-
derstanding, ground the self in the material world (for Basho, whatever his
transcendentalist credentials, never shifts his focus from the material),
whereas Platonic understanding and Christian epiphany, both predicated on
the bracketing of language and the cultivation of intuitive understanding, lead
one away from nature?
The answer is probably less mysterious than the question, and it is instruc-
tive. It demonstrates a fundamental truth that the field of environmental stud-
ies is particularly suited to articulate: ethics precede, and inform, epistemolo-
gies (and the poetics based on them). We should expect differing cosmologies,
and the different social and environmental relationships they articulate, to
structure ways of being and ways of knowing. Experience and knowledge are,
in this sense, tautological. Plato comes to discover the Forms that he “knew” to
exist independent of any kind of Being-in-the-World. As a theist Augustine
“discovers” the God within, a divine presence that supercedes its own creations.
The idealist epiphany of Plato and the theist epiphany of Augustine both
stand in stark contrast to what we might call the materialist epiphany
recorded in Taoist and Zen literature. One might suppose that the materialist
epiphany is underwritten by a basic pantheism (whether “theological” or “sci-
entific”) that can never stray too far from the sensible world.
The historical hegemony of idealism and theism in European and Ameri-
can experience served to direct understanding away from the material. But
when our basic conception of the cosmos and our place in it began to change
(egged on by industrialization and its excesses and a shift in our scientific
thought from the Newtonian to the ecological) the meditative epistemology
and linguistic skepticism that underwrite the aesthetics of ecopoetry, and that
previously served only the transcendentalist fetish, finally appeared useful in
forging a vital connection to phenomenal nature.
In a very real sense we (post)moderns who remain spellbound by the spir-
its called down by the traditions that claim us are just beginning to (re)dis-
cover worlds of wisdom well lost. The search for sustainable poetry, and more
generally, sustainable cultural practices, is redirecting our attention in many
 Roots of Ecopoetic Meditation ce. 27

directions simultaneously: toward the acumen of a diverse past, toward con-

temporary expressions of environmental discretion, and, ultimately, toward
the insight made possible through our own experience of an interdependent
and interanimating world. The real work at hand consists in cultivating the
powers of judgment that will allow us to recognize the wisdom we need, wher-
ever it dwells.

Notes

1. Charles Wright, from The Southern Cross (New York: Vintage/Random House,
1981), 43.
2. Leonard Scigaj, Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets (Lexington: Univer-
sity Press of Kentucky, 1999), 41.
3. D. T. Suzuki, “Satori, or Acquiring a New Viewpoint,” in The World of Zen, ed.
Nancy Wilson Ross (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1960), 41.
4. Han-shan, Cold Mountain: 101 Chinese Poems, trans. Burton Watson, 2nd ed.
(Boston: Shambhala, 1992), 127. é
5. Ibid., 115.
6. See Neil Evernden, “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy.” North
American Review 263, no. 4 (winter 1978): 16-20; Freya Mathews, The Ecological Self
(Savage, Md.: Barnes and Noble, 1991); George Sessions, ed., Deep Ecology for the
Twenty-First Century (Boston: Shambhala, 1994), 226; Jack Turner, The Abstract Wild
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996); Laird Christensen, “Spirit Astir in the
World: Sacred Poetry in the Age of Ecology” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 1999),
esp. chap. 5, “Always a Knit of Identity: Invoking the Ecological Self”
7. Han-shan, 100.
8. Ssu-K’ung T’u, in Taoist Tales, ed. Raymond Van Over (New York: Mentor/New
American Library, 1973), 236.
9. Plato, in Plato with an English Translation, trans. H. N. Fowler (London: William
Heinemann, 1926), 9-11.
10. Ibid., 31.
11. See Nicholas P. White, Plato on Knowledge and Reality (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1976), esp. 117-156.
12. Nobuyuki Yuasa, introduction to The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other
Travel Sketches (New York: Penguin, 1966), 25.
13. John M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 44.
28 ce David Gilcrest

14. Ibid., 89.

15. Robert E. Cushman, “Faith and Reason,” in A Companion to the Study of St.
Augustine, ed. Roy W. Battenhouse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 293.
16. Rist, 89.
17. Ibid., 86.
Roger Thompson
CxFEmerson, Divinity, and Rhetoric
in Transcendentalist Nature Writing
and Twentieth-Century Ecopoetry

In the fall of 1993 I attended a reading by W. S. Merwin at Baylor University.

At the time I had had little contact with Merwin’s writings and went to the
reading on the advice of a professor who knew my interests well. I remember
an intense excitement about seeing a poet, as though I were about to come into
contact with a prophet who would utter profound and universal truths about
nature and spirit. As Merwin began his reading, however, I was struck by what
I considered (at the time) a lack of lyricism in his poems and a complete ab-
sence of soul-shattering, divine utterances. I left the reading feeling that I had
gone to see an activist speak, not a poet.
Since that reading I have realized that my conceptions of poetry descended
from the traditional curriculum in which I was educated: the poet was the ro-
mantic messenger of God, not civic spokesperson. Even so, I have never for-
gotten the discomfort I felt at Merwin’s reading. In fact, a similar discomfort
is often expressed by my students, who conceive of poetics as distinct from
rhetoric, lyricism divorced from overtly persuasive appeals. The reason that
the lines of demarcation between poetics and rhetoric are drawn so strictly is
historical, wrapped in a lineage of criticism from the eighteenth century
through much of the twentieth century that insists on a view of poetry as di-
vine or romantic inspiration and rhetoric as materialist, sophistic persuasion.
And although these differences obscure some shared traits between poetics
and rhetoric, they also highlight the significant difference between nature
poets of the nineteenth century and nature poets of the twentieth century;
they indicate the fundamental differences between poets such as Whitman
and Merwin or Emerson and Snyder.
For the nineteenth-century transcendentalists in particular, poetics and
rhetoric are conflated as unique expressions of divine eloquence, and both
arts prioritize the role of the individual in his or her connection to the divine.
By the mid-twentieth century, the focus on the individual and his or her
connection to divinity has slowly given way to a predominant view of poetry
as a consciously rhetorical act, whose purpose is social change. In terms of

29
30 cx Roger Thompson

contemporary environmental poetry this shift from a conflated poetry and

rhetoric to an overtly rhetorical poetics highlights a fundamental shift in con-
ceptions of self and social responsibility. Whereas the nineteenth century
might be seen as an era of “nature as inspiration,” or even “nature as divine
metaphor,” the twentieth century increasingly conceived of the environment,
at least in part, as the location of revolution, as source of scientific inquiry,
and as location of metaphoric connections among social classes. Indeed,
transcendentalist nature poetry can hardly be called ecopoetry in the contem-
porary sense, the term ecopoetry being so deeply saturated with rhetorical
purpose that it diverges significantly from the explicit purpose of transcen-
dental poetics—the communication of the divine without regard to social
action.
Transcendentalist writers conceive of nature as metaphor for the divine. As
Emerson writes:

1. Words are signs of natural facts.

2. Particular natural facts are symbols of spiritual facts.
3. Nature is the symbol of spirit.’

Emerson constructs here the metaphorical value of nature by assigning spiri-

tual power to all nature symbols. The transcendentalist nature poet, following
from Emerson’s formulation, takes as his or her subject divine immanence.
Walt Whitman describes the poet’s responsibility: “The land and sea, the ani-
mals, fishes and birds, the sky and heaven and the orbs, the forests mountains
and rivers are not small themes . . . but folks expect of the poet to indicate
more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects.
...[T]hey expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls.”?
With nature as divine subject, social activism is subjugated to fortunate by-
product of poetry’s ultimate goal: contemplation of spiritual essence. Nature,
therefore, is the location of reflection and divine illumination, and the hope
for any sort of social action remains secondary.
Because social action is secondary to contemplation of the divine, the usual
art of civic activism, rhetoric, is conflated with poetry in order to ensure that
spirituality remains at the center of the arts. Emerson articulates most clearly
the nineteenth-century conflation of rhetoric and poetics through a reliance
on divine insight. In “The Poet” he declares:

This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a

very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect
 Emerson, Divinity, and Rhetoric Ces 31

being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuit of things
through forms, and so making them translucid to others. The path of
things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them? A spy they will
not suffer; a lover, a poet, is the transcendency of their own nature,—him
they will suffer. The condition of true naming, on the poet’s part, is his re-
signing himself to the divine aura which breathes through forms, and ac-
companying that. (3:30)

Emerson configures poets as “liberating gods” (35) and “the true and only
doctor” (14) because they have a special connection to the divine. In “Shake-
speare; or the Poet” he explicitly seeks this connection through a “poet-priest,
a reconciler,’ which betrays the transcendentalist hope for a unifying vision of
the world through divine immanence (4:209).
Emerson’s conception of the poet as the articulator of the divine parallels
his conception of the orator as communicator of divine mission. In “Elo-
quence” Emerson defines the orator’s power as overflowing spiritual power:
“Thus it is not powers of speech that we primarily consider under this word
eloquence, but the power that being present, gives them their perfection, and
being absent, leaves them a merely superficial value. Eloquence is the appro-
priate organ of the highest personal energy” (7:81). For Emerson the “highest
personal energy” results from self-reliance that has at its heart an immanent
God. So to express the personal energy is to express universal laws and princi-
ples: the orator has “an immortality of purpose,” and he speaks of “nothing
less than the grandeur of absolute ideas, the splendors and shades of Heaven
and Hell” (7:97, 61).
Emerson’s twin conceptions of eloquence and poetry surface through the
explicit conflation of the two arts throughout his work. For example, in “The
Poet” he calls the poet “the true and only doctor” (3:14), and in “Eloquence”
he labels the orator “the physician” (8:113). Perhaps more clearly, in “The
Method of Nature” Emerson compares the eloquence of debaters and the lit-
erature of poets, describing both as “authoritative and final” (1:201), and in
“The Poet” he lists the orator alongside the “epic rhapsodist” as among those
artists who seek to express themselves “symmetrically and abundantly” (3:41).
The power of the poet and the power of the orator are at root the same.
The significance of this conflation is that it situates the purpose of both po-
etry and rhetoric outside the realm of materialist and sophistic persuasion.
Emerson denounces firmly that poetry and rhetoric whose purpose is simply
persuasion. In “Eloquence” he argues that such rhetoric is base: certain levels
of rhetoric are prioritized so that the top level, yoked to the divine, outstrips
32 ce Roger Thompson

lower levels that involve only the day-to-day affairs of humankind. In the
transcendentalist vision of poetry and rhetoric, persuasion is a result of divine
workings in the world—social action a useful by-product of the divinely in-
spired poet. As he writes in “Shakespeare; or the Poet,’ “A poet is no rattle-
brain, saying what comes uppermost, and, because he says every thing, saying,
at last, something good; but a heart in unison with time and country” (4:181).
Poets are connected to their place and time, but they ultimately transcend
those times through universal expression. To conceive of an art that fails to in-
voke the divine is to fail to transcend the material realm that binds the artist,
and transcendence ultimately has the persuasive force of a true rhetoric.’
In terms of transcendentalist nature poetry, then, the divine power in na-
ture is prioritized over its rhetorical function; indeed, the rhetorical function
is disavowed in favor of the configuration of nature as exclusively divine
metaphor.‘ This disavowal can be most clearly seen in poems that concern ob-
viously rhetorical topics but that shift the focus of rhetoric away from social
action and back to reflection on the power of divine nature. For example,
Charles Timothy Brooks’s “Channing” constructs the outspoken and eloquent
W. E. Channing in natural metaphors for spiritual power. Reflective of the life
of Channing (who had secured a church position for Brooks and whom
Emerson lauded as a preeminent orator), the poem self-consciously moves
from nature-based, divine power to a suggestion to social change, but that call
for change remains invariably tied to a conception of nature as metaphor for
divine. The opening stanza ensures that the place of the divine in Channing’s
life is prioritized:

From the pure upper world to-day

A hallowed memory meets us here, —
A presence lighting all our way
With heavenly thoughts and lofty cheer.°

Channing’s connection to the “pure upper world” has practical results in the
material world in that he lights his parishioners’ way. Even so, his guidance is
couched in traditionally spiritual terms: “lighting our way” and “heavenly.” As
the poem progresses, it becomes clear that Channing’s connection to divinity
results from a unique connection to nature that allows an in-flowing of spiri-
tual power:

And in the broad blue sky above,

In the large book of Nature, then
 Emerson, Divinity, and Rhetoric Ces 33

He felt the greatness of God’s love

Rebuke the narrow creeds of men.

Communing there with Nature’s word,

Beside the vast and solemn sea,
With awe profound his spirit heard
The holy hymn of Liberty.*

Here the power of nature as divine again leads to “Liberty” so that Channing’s
power as orator, preacher, even poet has concrete rhetorical results. Nonethe-
less, those results remain couched in terms of divine, natural metaphor.
In fact, the rhetorical results depend on the connection to a spiritualized
nature.
This interplay between social action and divine, natural metaphor is borne
out in Emerson’s poetry so that in “Ode, Inscribed to W. H. Channing” Emer-
son refutes social activism in favor of contemplation of divine laws. Although
speaking of a different Channing from Brooks, Emerson situates his claims for
social change, like Brooks, in the immediacy of divine power, not a base
rhetoric. Emerson declares he cannot leave his “honied thought / For the
priest’s cant, / Or the statesman’s rant,’ and he argues that his studying Chan-
ning’s “Politique” angers his own muse and results in confusion. He argues, in
a famous phrase, that “Things are in the saddle / And ride mankind,” reflect-
ing a belief in the primacy of natural power, a spiritual metaphor, over the po-
litical powers of the “blindworm.” Ultimately, Emerson returns to his own
place in nature to reject the appeals of an empty rhetoric:

Yet do not I invite

The wrinkled shopman to my sounding woods,
Nor bid the unwilling senator
Ask votes of thrushes in the solitudes.

The final stroke is that the universal law divides the world on its own accord,
so to seek out action is to fail to connect to universal truths:

He who exterminates
Races by stronger races,
Black by white faces,—
Knows to bring honey
Out of the lion.
34 ce Roger Thompson

Action is literally the natural result of connecting to divinity in nature, and

“The astonished Muse finds thousands at her side” because the spiritual power
makes the division possible and supplies the muse with her might.’
Ultimately the rhetorical power of transcendentalist nature poetry is best
called the power of the divine; spiritual movement may (or may not) result in
civic action. This is not to say that nineteenth-century American nature po-
etry is not rhetorical; indeed, poems such as Emerson’s “Ode” demonstrate
clearly that a desire for radical change in social structures was desired by, in
particular, the transcendentalists. The point here is that poetry and rhetoric
are conflated because both are conceived of as issuing from the divine and as
acting in accordance with universal principles and essences. When Whitman
writes in “Song of the Redwood-Tree,” for example, that he sees in the red-
wood tree “certain to come, the promise of thousands of years, til / now de-
ferr’d, / Promis’d to be filfill’d [sic], our common kind, the race,” he engages in
an act of persuasion, but the force of the argument is in its appeal to universal
laws that transcend sophistic appeals to social action; even the falling trees
sound “of voices ecstatic, ancient and rustling,” and echo across the world even
“to the deities of the modern henceforth yielding.”* The spirit of the work, the
Poetic, is intended to move the audience to contemplation and, if properly
moved, a reconfiguration of social structure. The purpose is ecstasy, the result,
possibly, persuasion.
This prioritization of divine ecstasy is absent in most contemporary ecopo-
etry, and its absence bespeaks an entirely different worldview, one in which
nature is seen as location of argument for social change and for dynamic cen-
ter of revolutionary new visions of civic duty.’ Indeed, the name ecopoetry
highlights its rhetorical roots, deriving from environmentalist movements
whose purposes are a cultural reconfiguration of the value of nature. Nature,
even if vaguely divine for the ecopoet, needs social action to halt its rapid
destruction; thus, poetry needs explicitly rhetorical movements to enact that
action.
W. S. Merwin’s ecopoetry (paralleling his outspoken opposition to the Viet-
nam War) illustrates how poetry becomes an increasingly overt vehicle for so-
cial change. In “For a Coming Extinction” nature might be lamented as lost
heavenly host, but the power of the poem is in its direct appeals for change; in
other words, persuasion is the purpose more than the contemplation of the
spiritual force of nature. Hank Lazer suggests that the persuasive element of
Merwin’s poetry in The Lice, including “For a Coming Extinction,” is at root
political, closely tied to Merwin’s opposition to the Vietnam War. For Lazer,
however, Merwin transforms the political into a broad mythology reliant on
 Emerson, Divinity, and Rhetoric Ces 38

spiritual themes.” This maneuver to the mythological, however, too easily

leads to a reading of Merwin as a poet of contemplation; instead, the move to
the mythological highlights the rhetorical function of the poem. The opening
lines demonstrate the polemic:

Gray Whale
Now that we are sending you the End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing.

The invocation of deity here is accusatory, immediately condemning human-

ity for breaking its own civic virtues. The gray whale represents nature and the
future connection to divinity, but the certainty of the whale’s extinction drives
within the poem a call for reform. So in the final lines of the poem the con-
demnation culminates in an ironic request that the whale, at its death, tell the
god “That it is we who are important.” The irony that humanity is essentially
the more significant of the creatures creates a shift of worldview and calls ex-
plicitly for change.”
Wendell Berry has driven to the heart of this call for change in terms of ex-
plicit rhetorical purpose by shifting the idea of morality and virtue from con-
templation of transcendental signifiers to social action: “Moral value, as
should be obvious, is not separate from other values. An adequate morality
would be ecologically sound; it would be esthetically pleasing. But the point I
want to stress here is that it would be practical. Morality is long-term practi-
cality.’"” The conception of morality as practicality has a profound effect on
conceptions of poetics and its role in social activism. Although Emerson and
the transcendentalists might see morality as necessarily linked to experience of
nature, that experience is not necessarily yoked to practical, social virtue;
Whitman can declare with force that “the greatest poet does not moralize
or make applications of morals. . . . [H]e knows the soul.” By contrast,
Berry’s morality insists on use, so that what is moral in terms of ecology must
have some practical purpose. Poetry, then, if it is to be part of a virtuous eco-
logical moral system, must have a practical purpose. In short, it needs to be
rhetorical.
So with Merwin poetry becomes ecological rhetoric. The poem, shifting
clearly from its romantic roots, enters the world of pragmatism so that in
works such as “Witness” nature is tied to the practical world of language to
36 ce, Roger Thompson

ensure a clear signifier between language and nature: language must provide a
persuasive message about a slowly ebbing environment:

I want to tell what the forests

were like

I will have to speak in a

forgotten language."

Although the poem posits a lost language at the root of understanding nature,
the poem’s rhetorical turn projects a “forgotten language” if current condi-
tions continue. In fact, the language of the poem attempts to capture that dis-
appearing natural world and its lost language in order to suggest the need for
change.
Merwin’s rhetoric is not unique among ecological poets. Leonard Scigaj, in
distinguishing between linguistic essentialism and referentiality, asserts that
Wendell Berry “is deeply suspicious of those who sever language from its inti-
macy with action and referentiality.”’° Similarly, William Rueckert argues that
in Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island “|e|very poem is an action which comes from a
finely developed and refined ecological conscience and consciousness. The
book enacts a whole program of ecological action; it is offered (like Walden)
as a guide book.”'* What both Scigaj and Rueckert approach, in vastly different
theoretical analyses, is the rhetorical roots of ecopoets, their need for environ-
mental reform. To suggest that Turtle Island is a “guide book” for “ecological
action” illustrates the degree to which poetry becomes an overt rhetorical doc-
ument.
Ultimately, the ecopoet might be called cause-centered, declaring the nat-
ural world as center to societal reform. Ecopoets are, in fact, ecocritics them-
selves, shelving notions of nature as solely metaphoric divinity in favor of a
conception of nature as potential action, possible location of human reform.
Whereas the nineteenth-century nature poet might self-consciously attempt
to make the divine real through natural metaphors, and in so doing attempt to
obscure the rhetorical act by calling it poetical, the twentieth-century ecopoet
increasingly writes overtly rhetorical poems. The poem becomes the location
of argument for social change and environmental awareness—not an argu-
ment embedded in conceptions of divine poetics and eloquence but an argu-
ment self-consciously rhetorical and openly persuasive.
Walter Jost has argued that Robert Frost’s “Two Tramps in Mud Time” is a
rhetorical document, and he suggests that to best understand the poem, schol-
 Emerson, Divinity, and Rhetoric Ces 37

ars must use rhetorical criticism.” Jost’s argument suggests distinctions be-
tween what is rhetorical and what is poetical while simultaneously attempting
to break down those distinctions. The exercise is useful, not only because it
shows the rhetorical vector of poetry (which is so often conceived of as non-
rhetorical) but because it highlights how a culture’s conceptions of the two
arts has significant impact on ideas of selfhood and social responsibility. The
distinctions between rhetoric and poetry are ultimately bound by different
time periods, so to discuss poetry and its relationship to rhetoric depends
largely on the era of literature. The difference between rhetoric and poetics of
nineteenth-century environmental writing and twentieth-century ecopoetry
highlights the shift from conceptions of nature as divine metaphor to nature
as location of social responsibility and action. With this move the poet be-
comes a new kind of prophet: no longer is the poet messenger of God, but he
or she is instead messenger of civic virtue. In this way the ecopoet might be
called uniquely American or, at least, uniquely democratic, because ecopoetry
is less about specialized, priestly incantations and more about accessibility to
people whom the poet hopes to call to action, not simply contemplation.

Notes

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12 vols., ed.
Edward W. Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-1904), 1:31. Subsequent cita-
tions of this work will be referenced parenthetically in the text proper.
2. Walt Whitman, “Preface to 1855 Edition of “Leaves of Grass,” Leaves of Grass and
Selected Prose, ed. Sculley Bradley (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1949), 458.
3. I see this “true rhetoric” as part of a tradition beginning with Plato and running
through such figures as St. Augustine and Emerson. These rhetoricians distinguish
between a “true” rhetoric and a false rhetoric based on rhetoric’s referentiality to the
divine. The contrast is most striking in Plato’s Phaedrus and Gorgias, but it is also
apparent in Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana and Emerson’s “Eloquence” essays and
“The American Scholar.”
4. Stephanie Sarver has argued that Emerson advances a social agenda in his lecture
essay “Farming,” but she (rightfully, I think) indicates that “the farmer ultimately re-
mains simply one entity among many within the larger natural cosmos” (162). Sarver
indicates that commune with nature was the priority with Emerson, not social action,
perhaps best illustrated by his skepticism of Brook Farm. Stephanie Sarver, “Agrarian
Environmental Models in Emerson’s “Farming,” in Reading the Earth: New Directions
in the Study of Literature and the Environment, ed. Michael P. Branch, Rochelle
38 ce Roger Thompson

Johnson, Daniel Patterson, and Scott Slovic (Moscow, Idaho: University of Idaho
Press, 1998), 155-164.
5. Charles Timothy Brooks, Poems, Original and Translated. With a Memoir by
Charles W. Wendte, ed. W. P. Andrews (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1885), 126.
6. Ibid., 127.
7. Emerson, 9:71—74.
8. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 177, 176.
9. Ecopoetry often continues to rely on a type of spirituality for its power, especially
the work of Mary Oliver, whose American Primitive is at root a call for a spiritualized
nature. Even so, works such as those by Merwin demonstrate a tendency toward overt
and activist poetry, and even Oliver’s poetry emerges from a culture demanding polit-
ical purpose within the spiritual struggle. In this way the spiritual angle of the work
still moves toward persuasion rather than contemplation as an end to poetry.
10. Hank Lazer, “‘For a Coming Extinction’: A Reading of W. S. Merwin’s The Lice,”
ELH 49, no. 1 (spring 1982): 262-285.
11. W. S. Merwin, The Lice (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 68—69.
12. Wendell Berry, “Discipline and Hope,” in Recollected Essays: 1965-1980 (San
Francisco: North Point Press, 1980), 217.
13. Whitman, “Preface,” 460. This is not to say that Emerson does not recognize the
value of practical ends of ethics. Indeed, “action” is one of the key features of The
American Scholar. Even so, Emerson’s conception of nature’s relationship to social re-
sponsibility differs vastly from Berry’s and those of many contemporary ecopoets
largely because Emerson’s culture of nineteenth-century New England saw little need
for sweeping environmental reform. Current contingencies make Berry’s rhetoric nec-
essary in a way not possible in Emerson’s time; specifically, the study of the destruction
of the environment has been foregrounded in the contemporary media in such a way
as to create a kairos for activist poetry.
14, W. S. Merwin, The Rain in the Trees (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 65.
15. Leonard M. Scigaj, “Contemporary Ecological and Environmental Poetry: Dif-
férence or Référance,” Isle 2, no. 3 (1996): 7.
16. William Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism,” in
The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and
Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 116.
17. Walter Jost, ““The Lurking Frost’: Poetic and Rhetoric in “Two Tramps in Mud
Time,” American Literature 60, no. 2 (May 1988): 226-240.
Deborah Fleming
CwLandscape and the Self
in W. B. Yeats and Robinson Jeffers

Although W. B. Yeats never met Robinson Jeffers, the two poets barely missed
meeting each other several times. Yeats visited California in 1919 on a lecture
tour to raise money for Tor Ballylee’s new roof, the same journey during
which he received messages from ghostly “instructors” through his wife’s au-
tomatic writing that led to the creation of A Vision. Jeffers, meanwhile, was
building Tor House in Carmel. The Jefferses visited Tor Ballylee in 1929, 1937,
and 1948; on the first visit they sought out the house twice although Yeats was
not there.’ From Yeats’s example Una Jeffers conceived the notion of her hus-
band’s building a tower in imitation of TorBallylee. The interesting similarity
of their choosing towers as dwelling places informs their creation of the sym-
bolism of landscape. Yeats bought and restored Thoor Ballylee, an eleventh-
century Norman tower, in 1917; Jeffers helped build Tor House in 1919 and
during the following decades built Hawk Tower. Gilbert Allan suggests that
both tried to make their houses adequate symbols: “Yeats renovates, in order
to reaffirm what strikes him as most admirable within the cultural past; Jeffers
builds, in order to express in cultural terms a geological history that human
beings habitually ignore.””
Both Yeats and Jeffers found it necessary to place their poetry in specific
landscapes, and in doing so they challenged one of the fundamentals of mod-
ernism. Robert Zaller points out that at the heart of the modernist credo lies
the primacy of aesthetic art or redemptive potential,’ and Charles Altieri as-
serts that the two related modes of romanticism that helped to generate mod-
ernism were Wordsworth’s “immanentist” mode and Coleridge’s “symbolist”
mode. Most modernists chose the symbolist mode with its allegiance to the
“creative mind as the source of value.‘ Robinson Jeffers of course rejected the
notion that art could possess independent or transcendent value; he em-
braced, on the other hand, the idea that artistic beauty could be derived only
from natural beauty.’ As Jeffers makes clear in “Love the Wild Swan,” artistic
beauty is in his view secondary to the natural. He did not ignore history and
culture—his long narratives are testaments to his knowledge of them; rather,
he valued history, society, and culture through their relationship to nature. He

39
40 oe Deborah Fleming

certainly rejected the modernist tendency to interpret nature poetically

through human perception, as Wallace Stevens does in “The Idea of Order at
Key West,” where the setting exists only as the speaker interprets it through his
artistic sensibility. For Jeffers poetry does not create the significance of place,
as does, for example, the poetry of Stevens or William Carlos Williams; in-
stead, for Jeffers place creates the significance for poetry.
W. B. Yeats, whose work more closely follows Coleridge’s “symbolist” tradi-
tion, found it necessary nevertheless to locate his poetry in Irish tradition. Ex-
plaining his artistic choice in nationalistic terms, he wrote in 1888: “You can
no more have the greater poetry without a nation than religion without sym-
bols. One can only reach out to the universe with a gloved hand—that glove is
one’s nation, the only thing one knows even a little of.” And in 1890: “The first
thing needful if an Irish literature more elaborate and intense than our fine
but primitive ballads and novels is to come into being is that readers and writ-
ers alike should really know the imaginative periods of Irish history.”° To cre-
ate this “elaborate and intense” Irish literature, Yeats knew that he needed to
infuse his writing with a sense of place, the land from which the Irish ballads
and mythologies had sprung. So although he, unlike Jeffers, embraced the
symbolist mode of romantic poetry, he nevertheless insisted that art be
grounded in place and tradition. Jeffers, on the other hand, although certainly
peopling his narratives with extraordinary characters and describing the cul-
ture and traditions of the places he wrote about, nevertheless always valued
the land itself more than any human construct.
William Nolte claims that both Yeats and Jeffers attempted “with un-
matched success in this century—to give to their own locale an infinitely
7
translatable meaning.”’ Critics have noted that Jeffers without Carmel is as
“unimaginable as Frost without New England,”* but the same must be said of
Yeats without Ireland. Furthermore, Jeffers cannot be identified with Califor-
nia merely but with the Big Sur coast’—not the sun-drenched south, the fer-
tile valley of Steinbeck’s writings, the wine country of Jack London, or the
northern Cascades. Similarly, although Yeats places several important poems
in different locations in Ireland (Dublin in “Easter, 1916” and “To a Shade”;
the rock of Cashel in “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes,” for example),
when he wants to emphasize place he inevitably goes to Sligo (as, for example,
in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland,” and
“The Hosting of the Sidhe”) or to Galway (“The Tower,” “Coole Park, 1929,”
“Coole and Ballylee, 1931,“ and “The Wild Swans at Coole”). Some poems, for
example “The Stolen Child,” contain descriptions of the natural setting and
folklore that clearly locate them in the west of Ireland even though the poet
 Landscape and Self in Yeats and Jeffers cw 4]

does not literally place them there. In fact, Jeffers’s and Yeats’s landscapes re-
main far more important to their aesthetic than the New England landscape
does to Frost’s. Any landscape would have served Frost’s purpose. Jeffers, un-
like Frost, takes his theme from landscape, celebrating the land as he does and
creating it for the reader although at the same time making clear that the
poem does not stand in the place of landscape. The poem is separate, and the
landscape is the greater of the two.
For Yeats, on the other hand, the greatness of art stems from the richness of
cultural tradition inevitably associated with place. Landscape also figures
hugely in his aesthetic. Although readers may insist that Yeats recreated the
Irish countryside (and people) to suit his own idea of what Irish literature and
the Irish nation should have become, it is nevertheless clear that no other
landscape and no other nation could have enabled him to write much of the
work he did. Yeats found direction not only in his own aesthetic but also in the
folk literature of his country. The poetry and the landscape are involved in a
dialectic: the land speaks through the poems, and the poems speak through
the land.
In the same way, Jeffers’s landscapes established locale; Terence Diggory ar-
gues that Jeffers is one of several American poets to have found encourage-
ment for his poetry of regionalism in Yeats’s example.” Robert Zaller goes so
far as to claim that landscape is Jeffers’s abiding hero." In “The Place for No
Story,” for example, the “place” is the hero:

No imaginable
Human presence here could do anything
But dilute the lonely self-watchful passion.”

Jeffers describes the hills with their “scant pasture,” a rock “shaped like flame,”
the cows grazing, the ocean beneath, and the air above, “haunted with hawks,”
as if they were spirits. The landscape itself is the hero: “This place is the no-
blest thing I have ever seen.” “Gray Weather,” moreover, although describing
the Pacific coast as place, becomes a metaphor of landscape and the human.
Watching the sea, Jeffers sees no shining or dark, just the essential; all emotion
suspended, he “explores deeper than the nerves or heart,” to the very bone:

It is true that, older than man and ages to outlast him, the Pacific surf
Still cheerfully pounds the worn granite drum;
oor ere eee eee eee ee ee eee eo

The stormy conditions of time and change are all abrogated, the essential
42 ce Deborah Fleming

Violences of survival, pleasure,

Love, wrath, and pain, and the curious desire of knowing, all perfectly
suspended.
In the cloudy light, in the timeless quietness,
One explores deeper than the nerves or heart of nature, the womb or soul,
To the bone, the careless white bone, the excellence.”

Looking at the Big Sur coast and knowing it will endure far longer than
human beings enables the poet to understand that he is part of nature, that his
consciousness need not separate him from it.
In the same way, Ireland is a protagonist of sorts in Yeats’s work as a whole,
not only as landscape but also as a nation emerging from a past full of lin-
guistic and political domination, gaining a sense of ethnic and historical na-
tionhood. In “A General Introduction for My Work,” for example, Yeats artic-
ulates the fact that everything he loved (mostly literature) had come to him
through English and that his hatred tortured him with love:

[N]o people, Lecky said at the opening of his Ireland in the Eighteenth Cen-
tury, have undergone greater persecution [than the Irish], nor did that per-
secution altogether cease up to our own day. No people hate as we do in
whom that past is always alive, there are moments when hatred poisons my
life and I accuse myself of effeminacy because I have not given it adequate
expression. It is not enough to have put it into the mouth of a rambling
peasant poet. Then I remind myself that though mine is the first English
marriage I know of in the direct line, all my family names are English, and
that I owe my soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake, perhaps to
William Morris, and to the English language in which I think, speak, and
write, that everything I love has come to me through English; my hatred
tortures me with love, my love with hate."

Thus deprived of his national language, lamenting his own fate as a writer in
a colonial nation, and determined to revivify a sense of Irish nationhood, Yeats
felt the necessity of creating a literature firmly imbued with the sense of place.
In “The Celtic Element in Literature” he writes that the Irish poets’ “natural
music” stemmed in part from their ancient worship of nature and the cer-
tainty that beautiful natural places were visited by spirits:

Men who lived in a world where anything might flow and change, and be-
come any other thing; and among great gods whose passions were in the
 Landscape and Self in Yeats and Jeffers = ce. 43

flaming sunset, and in the thunder and the thunder-shower, had not our
thoughts of weight and measure. They worshipped nature and the abun-
dance of nature, and had always, as it seems, for a supreme ritual that tu-
multuous dance among the hills or in the depths of the woods, where un-
earthly ecstasy fell upon the dancers, until they seemed the gods or the
godlike beasts, and felt their souls overtopping the moon; and, as some
think, imagined for the first time in the world the blessed country of the
gods and of the happy dead. They had imaginative passions because they
did not live within our own strait limits, and were nearer to ancient chaos,
every man’s desire, and had immortal models about them.”

Thus, the development of a vigorous folklore and mythology cannot be sepa-

rated from the land.
The literary treatment of the landscape of a nation engenders questions
about the separation of observer from the observed. Raymond Williams, in
The Country and the City, emphasizes the idea of separation that he believes is
fundamental to romantic pastoralism and to nature writing in general. More-
over, Williams continues, writing about landscape implies observation sepa-
rate from the land.” Just as an observer of landscape must view it from a van-
tage point removed from the scene in order to appreciate it, the writer about
landscape must achieve aesthetic distance from the subject in order to capture
its beauty. Such distance necessarily implies objectivity.
We may ask how much of Yeats’s and Jeffers’s relationship to the landwas a
result of their distance from it. Jeffers constantly alludes to the separation he
feels from the natural world (as in “The Answer,” “The House,” and “Con-
sciousness”) and longs to become part of it, whereas Yeats uses that separation
to create aesthetic tension. He is not one of the swans in “The Wild Swans at
Coole” that embody the youthfulness he longs for; the woods of Coole may
hide the squirrels from old age, he says in “I walked among the seven woods of
Coole,”” but they cannot work such magic on the poet. Although he can never
be one with nature, however, he can achieve transcendence through the poem.
Sometimes, of course, he wishes to escape from nature (or time) entirely as in
“Sailing to Byzantium,” but the famous last line asserts that even immortal art
takes its form from nature. Yeats wishes to transcend mortality through the
creation of art, yet he knows he can never escape nature in doing so; for Jeffers
immortality lies in the permanence of nature and ie natural cycles that in-
clude mortality.
Landscape, as pointed out by W. J. T. Mitchell in “Imperial Landscape,”
changes the way people see, as well as what they see. Landscape employed as a
de cw Deborah Fleming

verb means to use the land in order to shape ideas, attitudes, and perceptions.
Mitchell speaks of landscape painting, a recent and decidedly Western form of
art, a “pseudohistorical myth” in which “the discourse of landscape is a crucial
means for enlisting ‘Nature’ in the legitimation of modernity, the claim that
‘we moderns’ are somehow different from and essentially superior to every-
thing that preceded us, free of superstition and convention, masters of a uni-
fied, natural language epitomized by landscape painting.” Yet landscape may
also be used in the same way by poets to create artistic power. Yeats invents the
idea of an Irish aristocracy by incorporating ancestors not his own (Burke,
Grattan), raising the importance of his own real ancestors (George Pollexfen;
his father, John Butler Yeats), and appropriating local landowners involved in
art or politics (Lady Gregory, Hugh Lane, the Gore-Booths) to create an Ire-
land that existed primarily in his own mind. The poems express a culture that
he believed should belong to Ireland. To find a tradition for himself, he
restored Tor Ballylee and created a history for it out of both fact and legend,
enabling himself to achieve poetic power.
Ironically, Yeats borrowed from British aristocratic values in order to estab-
lish his poetic and national traditions. The importance of the Pollexfens’ Sligo
estate, the Gore-Booths’ Lissadell, and Lady Gregory’s Coole Park issues from
the idea of noble householder-landowners who are generous, courteous, and
faithful, who fulfill expectations although their rank allows them to do other-
wise, who preside over estates that are both beautiful and bountiful. Such
an estate and landlord appear in Jonson’s “To Penshurst,” one of the first and
certainly one of the most important landscape poems that itself affirms—
perhaps even creates—the ideal it describes. To this tradition Yeats adds artis-
tic patronage and patriotism.
Although it was Jeffers’s purpose to describe landscape apart from the
human and to emphasize his belief in separation of the land itself from the
anthropocentric vision of it, there can be no doubt that the Big Sur coast and
its human as well as geologic history empowered Jeffers not only to create but
to sustain his poetic vision. His artistic power is founded in identifying him-
self with the landscape even as colonists occupy land and transform it to their
own purposes. Location thus enables both Jeffers and Yeats to achieve their
poetic purpose, but, in addition, their poetry in part creates the place they
write about, for themselves and for the generations who succeeded them.
The most striking similarities between the two poets are Yeats’s and Jeffers’s
identifying themselves with the mountainous, rocky west coasts of their coun-
tries—Yeats with Sligo and Galway, Jeffers with Big Sur. Because the rocky soil
restricted agriculture, both locations afforded poor livings for most of their
 Landscape and Self in Yeats and Jeffers cw 45

inhabitants before the dawn of tourism. These western locales were therefore
sparsely inhabited (Ireland not having recovered from the population deple-
tions of the nineteenth century) yet at the same time scenic and endowed with
folk history and local culture. Both western coasts had the added advantage
(for purposes of poetry) of being far from the civilized centers in the east.
Yeats and Jeffers munificently describe their coastal regions’ rocky slopes and
forests, as well as the animals, both tame and wild, that inhabit them. Few
poets have as keen an eye for bird life, partly because of the abundance of
habitat that coastal regions afford: Jeffers names herons, pelicans, eagles,
swans, grebes, gulls, sea parrots, vultures, sparrows, cormorants, and, of
course, hawks. In the poem “Birds” alone he names sparrow hawks, seagulls,
falcons, and hawks, whose flight he praises as “nothing gracefuller. . . Their
wings to the wild spirals of the wind-dance,” because “a poem / Needs multi-
tude, multitudes of thoughts, all fierce, all flesh-eaters, musically clamorous.””
He implies that the poem lives only because of the natural world. W. B. Yeats,
meanwhile, also chooses symbols from the natural world because without it a
national poetry cannot exist. Nation, rather than nature, may be his ultimate
concern, but, again, nation and place cannot be separated. Yeats’s bird symbols
include moor-hens, herons (cranes), linnets, stares (starlings), jackdaws, and
especially swans. In addition, both poets describe the native inhabitants of
their regions—not from an anthropologist’s perspective perhaps but from the
poet’s view of those who live on and earn their living from the land. For Jef-
fers these are small farmers and ranchers of Big Sur; for Yeats they are peas-
ants, small farmers, tinkers, and beggars of western Ireland.
Both Jeffers and Yeats, moreover, created themselves as protagonists in their
own poetry and described themselves in the landscape. The earth was at the
center of Jeffers’s aesthetic, whereas the realization of a new Ireland created
from the old traditions remained at the center of Yeats’s. Winfield Townley
Scott remarks, “Only Yeats in modern poetry could so powerfully make him-
self his own protagonist,” as had Jeffers, Wordsworth, and Whitman. They all
created a poetic voice so distinctive that one is never tempted to refer to a
speaker other than the poet himself.
Terence Diggory argues that in order to become its own tradition, the self
required a heroic dimension.” It was Yeats’s tower that finally allowed him to
explore fully the consequences of the tradition of the self. Although he had
been incorporating autobiographical detail into his poetry for at least a
decade, for the most part he could not express the self as fully as the tower—
which was chosen and created—enabled him to do. The tower offered poetic
authority, a seemingly traditional source but actually a new one that allowed
46 ce Deborah Fleming

Yeats to claim spiritual ancestors.” Diggory explains that criticism of Yeats’s

identifying himself with ancestors who weren't his in fact misses the point;
Yeats’s claim to the tradition creates a new tradition.
Whereas Yeats adopted both personal and impersonal roles (the personal
in, for example, “The Tower”; the impersonal in works such as “The Man Who
Dreamed of Faeryland”), Jeffers decided, as Yeats had, that the personal role
was the one that best defended against the modern world. Diggory argues,
however, that in conceiving of himself as a tradition, Jeffers in fact preserves
an impersonal aesthetic: “Tradition, as a dimension of the self, is a larger-
than-life dimension such as Jeffers had sought to incorporate in the characters
of his narratives and plays. As in his early lyrics, Jeffers is still playing a role,
presenting a self that has been made, not born . .. a role based on his own life”
(132). For Yeats the poetic individual must be created: “he is never the bundle
of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as
an idea, something intended, complete.” This is true for Jeffers as well. As
Diggory remarks, “It is appropriate that Jeffers’s first intimation of that role
and his final recognition of it both involve the building of his house and
tower, a symbolic act that can be traced directly to Yeats.”™
From their respective towers Jeffers and Yeats project themselves and their
imaginative beings onto the landscape. They created poetic roles and personae
from the self and adopted their respective towers as symbols but also as real
constructs. In “The Tower” Yeats takes fullest advantage of landscape; he
“send[s] imagination forth / Under the day’s declining beam” to call forth im-
ages to question: Mrs. French whose servant clipped an insolent farmer’s ears;
Mary Hynes, the peasant girl and legendary beauty; and Red Hanrahan him-
self, a character from Yeats’s own stories who is patterned on the legendary
Owen Rua O'Sullivan.” The landscape signifies the place where all this hap-
pens, where memory and present time coincide, where the tradition he cre-
ated is ongoing.
Mary Hynes, a local peasant girl who lived long before (“Some few remem-
bered still when I was young”), was so beautiful that she was “commended by
a song.” She lived “somewhere upon that rocky place” isolated and away from
civilization. She became an emblem of beauty, and if she walked among the
crowd at the fair, “[f]armers jostled,” not so much because of Mary herself but
because “[s]o great a glory did the song confer.” And certain men, transported
emotionally by poetry (“maddened by those rhymes”) or else by their collec-
tive mythology (“by toasting her a score of times”), declared that they must
“test their fancy by their sight’—find out the truth concerning her beauty.
The vision, however, overwhelms them (“Music had driven their wits astray”),
 Landscape and Self in Yeats and Jeffers = cw. 47

and one was drowned in “the great bog of Cloone.” He had mistaken the
moon's brightness (poetry) for the “prosaic light of day” (reality) and would
never be able to “test his fancy” (imagination). Yeats compares blind Raftery,
the poet who created the song about Mary Hynes, with Homer and Mary with
Helen of Troy:

Strange, but the man who made the song was blind;
Yet, now I have considered it, I find
That nothing strange; the tragedy began
With Homer that was a blind man,
And Helen has all living hearts betrayed.

He thus links the Irish and Greek folktales and hence, by means of the poem,
the literature and traditions of Ireland with those of ancient Greece. The char-
acters imagined from the top of the tower are not only isolated by their land-
scape but speak from it.
In the next section the poet recreates his own mythology: “And I myself
created Hanrahan / And drove him drunk or sober through the dawn / From
somewhere in the neighbouring cottages.” It is significant for Yeats that his
character emerges from among “the neighbouring cottages,” that is, near the
tower, in Yeats’s immediate and imagined landscape. An enchanted old man
shuffled cards and bewitched young Hanrahan, newly engaged to be married,
so that he wandered witless into the night after a magical hare and hounds
and so forgot his engagement. Doomed to wander for the rest of his life, Han-
rahan is a figure of the hedge schoolmaster and wandering poet of eighteenth-
century Ireland—persons inseparable from their landscape. Yeats thus estab-
lishes his own myth from the folklore of the place.
Yeats then recalls the ancient master of the house and his rough men-at-
arms who once billeted in the tower and whose ghosts, playing with great
wooden dice, disturb the current sleepers. They are types whose “images” are
stored in the Great Memory just as are the farmers and beautiful peasant girl.
Yeats desires to question them all—Oisin (“old, necessitous, half-mounted
man’), Raftery (“beauty’s blind rambling celebrant”), Mrs. French, and the
man destroyed by the image of beauty itself who drowned “[w]hen mocking
muses chose the country wench.” Yeats’s questions involve old age and love—
that is, death and desire—and he needs their “mighty memories,’ the relation-
ship to history and the land. The answers enabled him to write the powerful
final section of the poem in which he “creates” an ancestry and tradition
for himself. He chooses “upstanding men / That climb the streams” like the
48 ce Deborah Fleming

idealized fisherman of the poem of that title who has become the repository of
an ancient culture of aristocracy and peasantry.” The poems following “The
Tower” continue the theme of creation of tradition: “Ancestral Houses,” “My
House,” “My Table,” “My Descendants,’ “The Road at My Door.” He continues
to build and construct his “tradition,” half imaginative, half taken from the
history of the place.
Even in poems not as personal as “The Tower” Yeats turned to the Irish
landscape to locate his images. Yeats’s “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland”
is a veritable map of Sligo, the man’s experience taking place in the here and
now and yet also within the timelessness of faery lore.” Lissadell, Tober-
scanavin (shortened to “Scanavin” in the poem), and Lugnagall are in Sligo,
and Dromahair is immediately across the border in Leitrim.” Lissadell House,
the home of Yeats’s friends the Gore-Booths, is named for the barony of Lis-
sadell in County Sligo. The well of Scanavin is in County Sligo, as is Lugnagall,
“The Hollow of Foreigners,” a town land in Glencar Valley in County Sligo.
The dreamer, caught up in desire for the beauty and timelessness of faeryland,
nevertheless has a good life: he is successful in love and commerce, and his cel-
ebrated fiery personality is “a country tale.” Just as he achieves success, how-
ever, the faeries enter his life in the forms of common things—fish, lug-
worms, knot-grass, worms—in each stanza something lowlier than the last.
The man achieves no happiness because he has been “glammoured”—his soul
is paralyzed by the imagined beauty of faeryland, which he is never allowed to
enter.”
In “The Wild Swans at Coole” the speaker identifies himself with the place,
is careful to note exactly the number of years (nineteen) he has been visiting
Coole and gazing on the swans, and even counts them as if the loss of a single
one would bring some tragedy.” He asks among what rushes they will build—
where they will be—when he “awakes” as if from slumber to find them gone.
A poet may locate romantic allegory in any traditional, beautiful, or natural
scene, but Yeats chooses Galway and the estate of his friend Lady Gregory in
order to place the image in the land that holds for him the greatest signifi-
cance. His dream of the creation of an Irish literature involved more than
recalling the old legends and making them known to all classes in Ireland; it
involved the poetic recreation of Ireland itself, which transcends the establish-
ment of a merely political nation.”!
Jeffers uses the same image of wild swans in “Love the Wild Swan” to ex-
press his Inhumanist philosophy. He declares in this poem that he hates his
verses for not being as beautiful as the natural world:
 Landscape and Self in Yeats and Jeffers ce. 49

Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try

One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.”

Calling it “The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings,” he
declares that better poets than he have failed to realize their imaginative vi-
sion. At least, he concludes; love your eyes that can see the majesty of nature:
“Love the wild swan.” In Yeats’s poem the water itself “Mirrors a still sky”
within the “October twilight” and the sound of the swans’ wings is “clam-
orous,” whereas with Jeffers it is “storm.” Jeffers seems in fact to be “mirroring”
Yeats’s poem, providing this difference: Yeats laments the passing of romanti-
cism and youth; Jeffers celebrates natural beauty exclusively, dismissing the
value of any human construct.
Yeats’s aesthetic, however, is not so very far from Jeffers’s on the issue of the
value of natural beauty. Lady Gregory’s estate contained not only the wild
swan lake but also seven woods, which Yeats carefully names in several poems,
such as “In the Seven Woods” and “To a Squirrel at Kyle-na-no,” in order to es-
tablish not only tradition but tradition associated with place. The introduc-
tory verses to The Shadowy Waters name all seven woods and the source of
their distinctiveness:

Shan-walla, where a willow-bordered pond

Gathers the wild duck from the winter dawn;
Shady Kyle-dortha; sunnier Kyle-na-no,
Where many hundred squirrels are as happy
As though they had been hidden by green boughs
Where old age cannot find them: Pairc-na-lee,
Where hazel and ash and privet blind the paths;
Dim Pairc-na-carraig, where the wild bees fling
Their sudden fragrances on the green air;
Dim Pairc-na-tarav, where enchanted eyes
Have seen immortal, mild, proud shadows walk;
Dim Inchy Wood, that hides badger and fox
And marten-cat, and borders that old wood
Wise Biddy Early called the wicked wood:
Seven odours, seven murmurs, seven woods.”
50 oe Deborah Fleming

Although the poet had not “enchanted eyes” he dreamed that “beings happier
than men” moved in the shadows, and at night his dreams “were cloven by
voices and by fires,” and the images of The Shadowy Waters moved round him
in those voices and fires. He asks, apostrophizing either the woods or waters
that become the shadowy images with which he peoples the poem, “How shall
I name you, immortal, mild, proud shadows? / I only know that all we know
comes from you, / And that you come from Eden on flying feet.”* Thus, “all we
know comes from you’—from woods, water, and the spirits that dwell there.
All he knows comes from the earth, the tradition associated with place and
created through human emotion and experience.
In The Winding Stair Yeats further examines the interrelationship of place
and tradition in the companion poems “Coole Park, 1929” and “Coole and
Ballylee, 1931.” Certainly it is an interior landscape that Yeats describes in the
former, although he is careful also to describe the western landscape amid
trees and wildlife, “A sycamore and lime tree lost in night / Although that
western cloud is luminous.”” He celebrates Coole Park because of its notable
visitors who have ensured the sacredness of the place even when they and the
house are gone: “When all those rooms and passages are gone, / When nettles
wave upon a shapeless mound / And saplings root among the broken stone”
(423). Thus he envisions the future when traveler, scholar, and poet will visit
the place and calls upon them to dedicate “A moment’s memory to that lau-
relled head” (423). The writing of the poem itself creates the tradition that
Yeats labored assiduously to create—one of nobility, art, and history in order
to inform and enrich the culture.
“Coole and Ballylee, 1931” spiritually links the two locations in Galway. It
may be spurious geology, but Yeats declares that the stream joins estate and
tower, running beside Tor Ballylee and then underground:

darkening through “dark” Raftery’s “cellar” drop,

Run underground, rise in a rocky place
In Coole demesne, and there to finish up
Spread to a lake and drop into a hole.”

The places are connected by the lives lived there: a solitary poet who seeks to
establish tradition in his dwelling place and a playwright and essayist who
brought talented people together to create the Irish Literary Theatre. The
stream itself spiritually connects not only the two artists but also the two
places that are imbued with history.
For Jeffers, on the other hand, history is natural history, of which the expe-
 Landscape and Self in Yeats and Jeffers = ce. 51

rience of individuals and cultures is a mere part. In “Granite and Cypress” Jef-
fers envisions the future as “one piece with the past.”” In “Tor House” he imag-
ines the future in which the poem’s eponymous house and Hawk Tower have
fallen (as Yeats envisioned the future in which Coole Park’s house is “broken
stone”). What remains, Jeffers says, will be the planted forest of eucalyptus or
coast cypress, “haggard / With storm-drift.” The foundation of “sea-worn
granite” may remain after “a handful of lifetimes,” but the traveler who visits
after ten thousand years will find no foundation, only the

granite knoll on the granite

And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the Carmel
River-valley, these four will remain
In the change of names.”

Passing time, which brings with it destruction of human creations, is not to be

lamented; Jeffers celebrates the natural processes and what will remain—the
rock, river valley, and water itself.
As Yeats in “The Tower” paced “under the day’s declining beam” on the bat-
tlements and called forth images, Jeffers from the top of Hawk Tower recalls
the story of Margrave:

On the small marble-paved platform

On the turret on the head of the tower
Watching the night deepen...
is ee ee ie 6.yal ee @ 6. 9 'e

I lean on the broad worn stones of the parapet-top.”

No clearer allusion to Yeats exists in Jeffers’s work. Like Yeats, Jeffers includes
two related poems—“Point Joe” and “Point Pinos and Point Lobos”—in the
same volume, Tamar (1920-1923). Point Joe is distinguished by fierce and
solitary beauty: “Walk there all day you shall see nothing that will not make
part of a poem.” The point has teeth (rocks) that have torn ships. Fog and
light suffuse upward. Jeffers describes every detail carefully, the debris of ship-
wreck, desolate sea meadows riotous with flowers and wind-beaten pines, and
the golden light beating upward. One other person moved there, a Chinese
man who gathered seaweed and spread it on the rocks to dry:

Permanent things are what is needful in a poem, things temporally

Of great dimension, things continually renewed or always present.
52 cw Deborah Fleming

Ce ee

Fashionable and momentary things we need not see nor speak of. (90-91)

Grass that renews itself annually is as great as the mountains; moreover, the
man “gleaning food between the solemn presences of land and ocean” (90) is
as great as the mountain in past and future for he engages, like Yeats’s fisher-
man," in one of the timeless activities of human beings.
Separated by one poem, “Gale in April”—a song to the harsh beauty of na-
ture—”Point Joe” and “Point Pinos and Point Lobos” both praise the beauty
and permanence of nature and tradition, but the second poem identifies the
presence of God in nature. Jeffers carefully locates the poem named for two
sacred places:

A lighthouse and a graveyard and gaunt pines

Not old, no tree lives long here, where the northwind
Has forgot mercy. All night the light blinks north,
The Santa Cruz mountain redwoods hate its flashing,
The night of the huge western water takes it,
The long rays drown a little off shore, hopelessly
Attempting distance, hardly entering the ocean.
The lighthouse, and the gaunt boughs of the pines,
The carved gray stones, and the people of the graves.”

The poem, a philosophical meditation on God, is divided into three sections,

the first describing the tortured Christ—the dying god who struggles still to
redeem people—and section 2 contemplating the legacy of Buddha. The final
stanza in this section, however, returns to place, even alluding to Jeffers’s own
creation, the girl Tamar, whose narrative is included in the same volume:

The evening opens

Enormous wings out of the west, the sad red splendid light beats upward
These granite gorges, the wind-battered cypress trees blacken above them,
The divine image of my dream smiles his immortal peace, commanding
This old sea-garden, crumble of granite and old buttressed cypress trunks,
And the burnt place where that wild girl whose soul was fire died with
her house. (97)

Finally, in the third section, Jeffers chastises both great teachers and reli-
gious founders, Buddha and Christ, “One striving to overthrow his ordinances
 Landscape and Self in Yeats and Jeffers = cw. DS

through love and the other crafty-eyed to escape them / Through patient wis-
dom” (97). The poet banishes both love and wisdom as human constructs,
almost as he imaginatively views both rocky points (Pinos and Lobos) as the
real entities to be worshiped. Although these great teachers—Christ and
Buddha—are wiser than other human beings, they are still more foolish than
the “running grass” that “fades in season and springs up in season.” God is not
made manifest through love or wisdom:

For the essence and the end

Of his labor is beauty, for goodness and evil are two things and still
variant, but the quality of life as of death and of light
As of darkness is one, one beauty, the rhythm of that Wheel, and who can
behold it is happy and will praise it to the people. (97)

God is manifest in nature’s beauty, however fierce and violent it appears.

Just as Yeats visits the scenes where he had located his narratives and
poems, Jeffers returns to the landscape of his earlier work. “The Loving Shep-
herdess” visits scenes from earlier narratives and observes characters from the
perspective of time past. The coast itself, although beyond tragedy and human
consideration, is so beautiful that it cries out “for tragedy like all beautiful
places.”* The opening stanza in “The Dead Man’s Child” celebrates place:
“The track across the desert runs vague toward the north star and then more
firmly / Along the clipped butt of the mountain; it curves into a bay of the
cliff, where natural cisterns / Keep the water in the streaked rock; the people
call them las tinjas altas—the high water-jars—.’“ In “Bixby’s Landing” the
poet describes an abandoned mine and an iron car on a long cable. Although
the laborers have gone, “a good multitude / Is here in return”: lichened rocks,
stone-crop, ocean voices, cloud-lighted space. In the broken boiler lizards
lighten, and

a rattle-snake flows
Down the cracked masonry, over the crumbled fire-brick. In the rotting
timbers
And roofless platforms all the free companies
Of windy grasses have root and make seed; wild buckwheat blooms
in the fat
Weather-slacked lime from the bursted barrels.
Two duckhawks darting in the sky of their cliff-hung nest are the voice
of the headland.
54 oe Deborah Fleming

Wine-hearted solitude, our mother the wilderness,

Men’s failures are often as beautiful as men’s triumphs, but your
returnings
Are even more precious than your first presence.”

These last two lines demonstrate conclusively that for Jeffers, the human ex-
perience is a metaphor for the natural, not the other way around.
Jeffers creates a spiritual association with the Irish landscape in his series
called “Descent to the Dead.” “Oisin’s Grave” compares the coasts of Antrim
and Carmel and his own death with that of the hero, linking both coasts
metaphorically. Jeffers is ambivalent about his return: “And I a foreigner, one
who has come to the country of the dead / Before I was called, / To eat the bit-
ter dust of my ancestors.” The poet of California, unable to feel the same
sense of living tradition that Yeats does, recalls the spirits of dead heroes who
lived more fully than contemporary people could. The ghost of Oisin says to
the newcomer,

Oh but we lived splendidly

In the brief light of day
Who now twist in our graves.

We dead have our peculiar pleasures, of not

Doing, of not feeling, of not being.
Enough has been felt, enough done, Oh and surely
Enough of humanity has been. We lie under stones
Or drift through the endless northern twilights
And draw over our pale survivors the net of our dream. (109)

All the survivors’ lives are “less / Substantial” than even one of the heroes’
deaths:

they cut turf

Or stoop in the steep
Short furrows, or drive the red carts, like weeds waving
Under the glass of water in a locked bay,
Which neither the wind nor the wave nor their own will
Moves; where they seem to awake
It is only to madden in their dog-days for memories of dreams
That lost all meaning many centuries ago. (109-110)
 Landscape and Self in Yeats and Jeffers ce. SY)

Jeffers responds with Oisin’s refrain, “Oh but we lived splendidly / In the brief
light of day,” Oisin hunting on the mountains or drinking with princes, Jeffers
living “on the western cliff / In the rages of the sun.” Oisin lies “grandly” under
stones, but Jeffers eats “bitter bread with the dust of dead men” in a country
grown weak with too much humanity, “In a uterine country, soft / And wet
and worn out, like an old womb / That I have returned to, being dead” (110).
Oisin nevertheless insists that he lived “splendidly,” that the mountains—
Tievebuilleagh, Trostan, Lurigethan, and Aura—are alive, and that a few of the
dead in fact live “A life as inhuman and cold as those” (110). Jeffers does not
answer Oisin’s last protest but instead follows “Oisin’s Grave” with “The Low
Sky,” in which he compares the low (clouded) sky of Ireland with the lid of a
tomb and concludes that because the sky is low and the earth old, he can lie
down in its tomblike space and allow his mind to dissolve and his flesh to fall
to the ground. As dead Oisin speaks of life-in-death, Jeffers’s life in Ireland
seemed to encompass death-in-life.
In old age Yeats returns to his Sligo landscape to ask fundamental questions
about his poetry and nation;” Jeffers, describing in “An Irish Headland” the
tragic events that took place there, concludes the poem as he does when he
sees the California coast that cries out for tragedy “like all beautiful places.”
In Ireland Jeffers recalls the massacre at Rathlin, saying it was “nothing; not a
gannet-feather’s / Weight on the rock; the mood of this black basalt has never
turned since it cooled.” In the next stanza he recalls the tragedy of Drogheda:

The most beautiful woman

Of the northern world made landfall under this cliff when she came
to the bitter end that makes the life shine,
But the black towers of the rock were more beautiful than Deirdre.
Weep for the pity of lovers and the beauty of bereaved men, the beauty
of earth is too great to weep for. (172)

For Jeffers, the earth is greater and more beautiful than all human tragedy.
Thus, whereas Yeats turned to the landscape to create a new literary tradi-
tion for Ireland, Jeffers celebrated the earth primarily. Both poets were able to
realize their artistic aims by locating their work in specific landscapes through
which they could in part establish their poetic identities. At the same time,
their choosing their dwelling places as emblems of those landscapes enabled
them to delve more fully into the consequences of the activity of writing.
56 ce Deborah Fleming

Notes

1. Robinson Jeffers, The Selected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, 1897-1962, ed. Anne N.
Ridgeway (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 155, 179.
2. Gilbert Allan, “Passionate Detachment in the Lyrics of Jeffers and Yeats,” in
Robinson Jeffers and a Gallery of Writers: Essays in Honor of William H. Nolte, ed.
William B. Thesing (University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 62.
3. Robert Zaller, “Robinson Jeffers, American Poetry, and a Thousand Years,” in
Centennial Essays for Robinson Jeffers, ed. Robert Zaller (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 1991), 36.
4, Charles Altieri, Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry during
the 1960s (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1979), 29.
5. Zaller, “Robinson Jeffers,” 36.
6. W. B. Yeats, Letters to the New Island (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1934), 103-104, 107, 174.
7. William H. Nolte, “Robinson Jeffers as Didactic Poet,” in Critical Essays on Robin-
son Jeffers, ed. James Karman (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), 218. First published in Vir-
ginia Quarterly Review 4, no. 2 (spring 1966).
8. J. S. Porter, “Robinson Jeffers and the Poetry of the End,” Antigonish Review 92
(winter 1993): 27.
9. Ibid.
10. Terence Diggory, Yeats and American Poetry: The Tradition of the Self (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1983), 124.
11. Robert Zaller, The Cliffs of Solitude: A Reading of Robinson Jeffers (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), 225.
12. Robinson Jeffers, “The Place for No Story,’ in The Collected Poetry of Robinson
Jeffers, ed. Tim Hunt, vol. 2 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), 157.
13. Robinson Jeffers, “Gray Weather,” in Hunt, 2:485.
14, W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York, Collier, 1961), 519.
15. Ibid., 178.
16. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1973), 120.
17. W. B. Yeats, introductory verses to The Shadowy Waters, in The Collected Works
of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 405.
18. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T.
Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 13.
19. Robinson Jeffers, “Birds,” in The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Tim
Hunt, vol. 1 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), 108.
20. Winfield Townley Scott, “Jeffers: The Undeserved Neglect,” review of The Begin-
 Landscape and Self in Yeats and Jeffers ce, 57

ning and the End (1963), in New York Herald Tribune Books, June 16, 1963, 10; repr. in
Karman, 173.
21. Diggory, 122.
22. Ibid.
23. Yeats, Essays, 509.
24. Diggory, 132.
25. W. B. Yeats, “The Tower,” in Finneran, 194—200.
26. W. B. Yeats, “The Fisherman,” in Finneran, 148.
27. W. B. Yeats, “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland,” in Finneran, 43-45.
28. Frank Kinahan, Yeats, Folklore, and Occultism: Contexts of the Early Work and
Thought (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 66.
29. Ibid., 71.
30. W. B. Yeats, “The Wild Swans at Coole,” in Finneran, 131-132.
31. Yeats, Essays, 517.
32. Jeffers, Collected Poetry, 2:410.
33. Yeats, Shadowy Waters, in Finneran, 405-406.
34. Ibid., 406.
35. W. B. Yeats, “Coole Park, 1929,” in Finneran, 242-243.
36. W. B. Yeats, “Coole and Ballylee, 1931,” in Finneran, 245.
37. Jeffers, Collected Poetry, 1:105.
38. Ibid., 408.
-39. Ibid., 2:160.
40. Ibid., 1:90.
41. Yeats, “The Fisherman,” 148.
42. Jeffers, Collected Poetry, 1:92.
43. Jeffers, Collected Poetry, 2:98.
4A, Jeffers, Collected Poetry, 1:384.
45. Ibid., 388.
46. Ibid., 109.
47. W. B. Yeats, “Man and the Echo,” in Finneran, 345-346.
48. Jeffers, “Apology for Bad Dreams,” in Collected Poetry, 1:208-211.
49. Jeffers, Collected Poetry, 2:172.
 Mark Long
Ce>William Carlos Williams,
Ecocriticism, and Contemporary
American Poetry

I could not be a poet without the natural world.

—Mary Oliver

Without the human, how would I ever know nature?

—Ansel Adams

Most readers come to William Carlos Williams by way of a red wheelbarrow.

This indelible image has come to stand in for the significance and distinctive-
ness of Williams’s literary project. “So much depends” upon the wheelbarrow,
and the qualities sustained in the image—

glazed with rain

water
beside the white
chickens.'

Similarly, generations of readers have come to understand Williams’s poetics

through the phrase “No ideas but in things,” those deceptively simple words
found in the opening lines of the book-length poem Paterson. The phrase sig-
nifies a poetics predicated not on ideas but rather on things, underscoring a
poetic project that seeks immediate contact with the world. But so much more
depends upon “The Red Wheelbarrow” in its unexcerpted place in a twenty-
seven-section poetic sequence imbedded within the prose of “Spring and All.”
A survey of critical accounts of Williams’s poetics will show a surprisingly
consistent acceptance of Williams’s romantic quest for immediate contact. It
will come as no surprise, then, that studies of the social implications of
Williams’s project have concluded that Williams’s social aim, in the words of
one contemporary critic—“to free his readers’ imaginations so that they could
experience the world with sensual immediacy—is profoundly apolitical, even
asocial.”

58
 William Carlos Williams and Ecocriticism Cw 59

This aim to free the imagination as the prior condition to experiencing the
world with sensual immediacy has been instrumental in determining the crit-
ical conversation about environmental and ecological poetry.’ Yet, as John
Elder suggests in Imagining the Earth, nature poetry, at best, does not simply
reflect but shapes our vision of nature. “Poetic form,” writes Elder, “secures a
plot where the fruitful decay of order and intentions may occur; an unsus-
pected landscape rises through the traces of a poem’s plan.4 Poetic form is, in
this deffnition, an especially promising site for more than simply renewing
awareness—“the fruitful decay of order and intentions” depends on encoun-
tering an alternative to our necessarily limited experiential and cognitive
frames. A poem is understood here as not merely a site for reflecting on our
limits but as a space in which we might learn to construct alternative ways of
thinking and acting in the world. Seeking primary, preverbal experience, then,
is perhaps a necessary but in no way sufficient end for the environmentally or
ecologically inclined poet.
More recent studies of nature poetry develop this connection between the
experiential and referential function of literature and the politically and so-
cially inflected rhetoric of poets whg explicitly seek to reorient language to-
ward the biocentric laws of nature.;Writers such as AR. Ammons, Wendell
Berry, Denise Levertov, W. S. Merwin, Gary Snyder, and Adrienne Rich have
now been read as ecological poets whose vision of nature seeks to fashion al-
ternatives to the pathropecentiic consciousness of modern high culture. {thhis
vision, as expressed by Leonard Scigaj in Sustainable Poetry, is informed by a
belief “that language is a positive instrument that can promote authentic so-
cial and environmental relations between humans and their environment—
relations that can lead to emancipatory social change” These ambitions are,
of course, part of a more general 1national and international strain that worked
in twentieth-century modernism to change the direction of poetry and art, in
the words of Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, “as a necessary condition for
changing the ways in which we think and act as human beings.” copoets,
more specifically, work from the conviction “that poetry is a part of a struggle
to save the wild places—in the world and in the mind—and the view of the
poem as a wild thing and of poetry and the poet as endangered species."
Theories of writing and reading poetry that underscore language as a func-
tion of poesis suggest the inadequacy of the view that language separates us
from the world—the idea that all human patterns of thought, schemas, and
generalizations are impositions on a preexisting state we call nature. Yet criti-
cal statements regarding the purpose of poetry will always risk parochialism
or, more precisely, narrowing the purpose of poetry to promoting authentic
60 ce Mark Long

relations between the aesthetic object and its extrapoetic referent. Indeed, the
pragmatic rhetoric of promoting nature as it is apart from human culture
risks underestimating the problem of representation. Ecocritics, Dana Phillips
cautions, share “assumptions about the ontological gulf between culture and
nature, and the metaphysics of representation supposedly required to bridge
that gulf?” And if poetry is “a manifestation of landscape and climate, just as
the ecosystem’s flora and fauna are,” in the words of Elder, then the determi-
native analogy between a poem and an ecosystem may narrow the role of ec-
ocritics to arbiters of the authentic.”
The distinctive modernist project of William Carlos Williams provides an
exemplary occasion for reflecting on contemporary American poets with eco-
logical and environmental concerns. Williams can help us to reflect on the
ambitious attempts to link a poetics of presence with an ecologically informed
project for social change." In fact, Williams may prove to be a significant fig-
ure as we explore the assumptions that link the craft of poetry with the craft-
ing of ecological change.” Charles Olsen has made the case that a poet's
“stance toward reality” is crucial to the structuring of a poem; and a better
understanding of Williams’s stance toward the world might prove especially
relevant to enriching the premises and practices of contemporary ecopoetics.
But although the critical consensus regarding Williams’s quest for immed-
iacy may appear congruent with ecocriticism, I will underscore precisely
Williams’s argument against the idea that poetry might help us reestablish
a more immediate contact with the world. My intent is to suggest how
Williams’s acute critique of the view that poetic language offers a less-
mediated relation to the world might contribute to expanding the range and
power of environmental and ecological reflection in contemporary American
poetry.
David Walker argues, I think rightly, that “Williams is primarily interested
not in the physical world itself, but in the dynamic relationship between the
world and the life of the mind as it apprehends and responds to that world.””
This drama of relation energizes Williams’s early poetics. In the opening lines
of his 1923 text “Spring and All,” for example, Williams concludes that “there
is a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate
contact with the world.”“ This precise formulation does not rule out the
reader’s immediate contact with the world; at the same time, he cautions, we
cannot be conscious of that immediate contact. We need not deny immediate
contact because the very possibility of cognizing a relation to the world is
predicated on the presence of the world. But Williams’s formulation does not
obscure the important fact that immediacy is logically equivalent to an ab-
 William Carlos Williams and Ecocriticism Cw 61

sence of relation. Further, it needs to be understood in this context that the re-
lation is not simply between matter and form or the mind and the world. Any
attempt to recover immediacy (what Williams called “the reality that we feel in
ourselves”) requires a third term, a representational medium that will never-
theless prove once more to be “a covering over” or, in Williams’s stronger
terms, another “dangerous lie.”
Williams’s 1925 book In the American Grain further explores the process of
mediation required to come to terms with the world. American history has al-
ways been mediated by our attempts to know it, despite the fact, Williams
adds, that the “productive ground . . . the common thing . . . is anonymous
about us” (JAG, 213). Yet, Williams insists, historical intelligibility must always
involve reestablishing a “ground” by breaking through dead layers of under-
standing. To “break through dead layers” the writer must “have the feet of his
understanding on the ground, his ground, the ground, the only ground that he
o
knows, which is under his feet.” This concern with placing “the feet” of one’s
understanding is to be understood in the fundamental sense of poesis, or hav-
ing to do with the making, building, or constructing of something. For the
poet the construction must take place in the structural body of the poem, as a
question of language and structure. The revolution, Williams presses, must be
in the poem. “There is no poetry of distinction without formal invention, for
it is in the intimate form that works of art achieve their exact meaning ... to
give language its highest dignity, its illumination in the environment to which
it is native.”"°
Williams returns to this problem of locating one’s self in the environment
in his 1934 essay “The American Background.” Here Williams recounts the
psychological condition of the English settlers who had come to the North
American continent: “They found not only that they had left England but that
they had arrived somewhere else: at a place whose pressing reality demanded not
only a tremendous bodily devotion but as well, the more importunately, great
powers of adaptability, a complete reconstruction of their most intimate cultural
make-up, to accord with the new conditions. The most hesitated and turned back
in their hearts at the first glance.” Strange and difficult, Williams continues, “the
new continent induced a torsion in the spirits of the new settlers, tearing them be-
tween the old and the new.” The old was the existing European frame of refer-
ence; the new was the very environment that surrounded them. The conjunc-
tion of a “pressing reality” and the immigrants’ lack of “adaptability” follows
Williams’s description of how the settlers of the continent “saw birds with
rusty breasts and called them robins.” (They were thrushes. “Meanwhile, nostal-
gically, erroneously, a robin.”) “Thus, from the start,” Williams concludes, “an
62 ce Mark Long

America of which they could have no inkling drove the settlers upon their past.
They retreated for warmth and reassurance to something previously familiar.”
But at a cost.
The cost was—and is—a failure to understand that “the new and the real,
hard to come at, are synonymous” (SE, 143). Here Williams presses us to con-
sider the pedagogical function of our experience in constructing a relation to
place. One does not learn (or does so only partially) by assuming that what
one needs are more facts, more information, or a closer, more qualitatively
precise relationship to one’s surroundings. The problem in American history
has been “the success of the unrelated, borrowed, the would-be universal
culture which the afterwave has run to or imposed on men to impoverish
them, if it has not actually disenfranchised their intelligence” (149). Instead,
what one needs is a genuinely new means of representing one’s experience
of place—a means of rendering the world intelligible. In a 1950 letter to
Columbia University professor Henry Wells, Williams explains that a poem
is “an attempt, an experiment, a failing experiment, toward assertion with
broken means but an assertion, always, of a new and total culture, the lifting
of an environment to expression.”"* The imagination works with the “broken
means” of language not simply through the difficult and consequential
work of recovering experience but by moving from experience to its represen-
tation.
The new and the real, one might say, become possible. However, for
Williams, “Americans have never recognized themselves. How can they? It is
impossible until someone invents original terms. As long as we are content to
be called by someone else’s terms, we are incapable of being anything but our
own dupes” (IAG, 226). Such an attempt at placement in the world as a neces-
sary means of self-definition is exemplified in Williams’s book-length poem
Paterson. Williams understands well, with Blake, that the condition of the
imagination is loss, and he is similarly dedicated to the productive or consti-
tutive function of imaginative work within these limits. Williams’s case is,
more simply, that a “poetics of presence” is a flat contradiction in terms. Con-
sider the opening lines of the preface to book 1 of the poem: “Rigor of beauty
is the quest. But how will you find beauty when it is locked in the mind past
all remonstrance?”” The phrase “rigor of beauty” leads to the suggestion that
beauty cannot be found. The quest for beauty involves the rigorous task of its
demonstration—in this case, in the structural body of the poem. Williams im-
mediately follows his question with a solution. His answer begins as the poem
breaks into measured lines of verse:
 William Carlos Williams and Ecocriticism Ces 63

To make a start,
out of particulars
and make them general, rolling
up the sum by defective means— (P, 3)

As Williams elaborates, seeking beauty involves moving from a formal system

of measurement to the constituent parts of a system, a movement “from
mathematics to particulars” (4). The movement involves a quest into the lan-
guage of the poem—an incursion rather than an excursion. As Paterson begins
to exemplify this incursive process we come to experience the movement of
the poem as it begins to accomplish what the controlling speaker is seeking to
overcome: “the language! / is divorced from their minds, / the language . . . the
language!” (12). Williams animates divorce as “the sign of knowledge in our
time, / divorce! Divorce!” (17). The question of direction in such a condition
is in fact a question. In fact, Williams says, “There is no direction. Whither? I /
cannot say. I cannot say” (17). The divorce is also between the idea and the
thing, despite the presence of

the roar of the river

forever in our ears (arrears)
inducing sleep and silence, the roar
of eternal sleep. (17)

Our estrangement from the language we need to represent the world is com-
pounded, Williams suggests, by the ever-present “mass of detail” (19). The
problem is “to interrelate on a new ground,” and the difficulty “Divorce (the /
language stutters)” (21). The drama of these opening sections of the poem is
precisely the struggle with representation, as we are tempted to fall back on an
outmoded formula. “A chemistry, corollary / to academic misuse, which the
theorem / with accuracy, accurately misses” (36).
Williams identifies a crucial problem in the opening pages of Paterson. Po-
etry always and necessarily must attend to the problem of our separation from
speech. Rather than being alienated from the world (we are always already in
the world, Williams insists), we have not found our way to the resources of
our native tongue. We need to begin, in the words of Gary Snyder, by recog-
nizing how wonderful it is “to be born to be a native speaker, to be truly a na-
tive of something.” His insight does not suggest poetry as simply the place of
sentimental attachments, the place of literal topographies. Rather “the place
64 ce Mark Long

of poetry,” to borrow an apposite formulation from Heather McHugh, “is

nothing less than the place of love, for language; the place of shifting ground,
for human song; the place of the made, for the moving.”” We go nowhere
when we seek to use poetry to transcend itself—to misuse language as a vehi-
cle for a remedial course in immediacy. Not so much, but everything, depends
on the responding sensibility. In this way we come to understand the content
of a poem, in the words of Charles Bernstein, as “more an attitude toward the
work or toward language or toward the materials of the poem than some kind
of subject that is in any way detachable from the handling of the materials.
Content emerges from composition and cannot be detached from it; or, to put
it in another way, what is detachable is expendable to the poetic.”” Otherwise
there is no distinctive claim for the poem.
Williams emphasizes poetry as a condition for changing the way we think
and act as human beings. He is a poet not a philosopher, yet he is confident
that the world lies beyond our conceptualizations of it. And he is adamant
that the idea of an external world is in fact necessary to the subsequent inter-
nal formation of a relation and the embodiment of the relation in the struc-
tural invention we come to know as the poem:

Without invention nothing is well spaced,

Unless the mind change, unless
the stars are new measured, according
to their relative positions, the
line will not change, the necessity
will not matriculate: unless there is
a new mind there cannot be a new
line, the old will go on
repeating itself with recurring
deadliness: (50)

Recall T. S. Eliot, who observed that “when I say.‘invent’ I should use inverted
commas, for invention would be irreproachable if it were possible.” The prob-
lem for the poet is invention, a term Williams uses to describe the need to
break free from the repetition of the old. The poem continues:

without invention
nothing lies under the witch-hazel
bush, the alder does not grow from among
the hummocks margining the all
 William Carlos Williams and Ecocriticism Ces 65

but spent channel of the old swale,

the small foot-prints
of the mice under the overhanging
tufts of the bunch grass will not
appear: without invention the line
will never again take on its ancient
divisions when the word, a supple word,
lived in it, crumbled now to chalk. (50)

For Williams invention begins where we are: with the materials at hand and
within the symbolic complex we use to measure our place in the world. The
loss of presence is indeed a result of how the already-been-formulated shapes
the formulations that follow. The difficult problem is that we are habituated to
receiving the presence of the world in the terms of what we already know. In-
vention thus begins with the recognition that invention is necessary but only
with the knowledge that there are always more to the prototypes of experience
than we have acquired. Invention, for Williams, begins with the figure of de-
scent into the limited frames of perception and cognition we use to craft our
experience. Invention then moves toward the need for a form or structure for
that experience. For Williams invention restores both the world and the per-
son using the resources of language and who is in constant struggle with the
limits of those resources.
Although Williams may have been sympathetic to the idea that poems
might offer us ways into the world, he insists that the problem of literary rep-
resentation cannot be understood as an exchange between something outside
the poem and the poet. Representation is demanding precisely because it re-
quires the poet’s imagination. But the imagination must find a way to free it-
self. If we agree that the imagination is a constructive power, simply freeing
the perceptive faculties to imagine possible versions of experience does not ac-
count for the more difficult problem of constructing a form in which to make
intelligible (and to offer for reflection) the formal dynamics of a particular set
of relations. The crucial point is that Williams’s poetics look not back at
reestablishing a lost connection with the world because, as I have said, we are
always already in that world. Rather the problem the poet faces is looking for-
ward to the ways we are able to become present to the possibilities of the phe-
nomenal world where we have been living all along. The poet must discover
the dynamic substance of the world by representing it as intelligible in the
originary structure of the poem. Williams demands a radical commitment to
the distinctive human power of language use and to developing the resources
66 ce Mark Long

of poetic structures. It follows that the ever-present risk of any poetic theory
is to define a priori a vital cultural practice. In advocating the distinctiveness
of the poem as a “field of action” Williams challenges us in the permanently
transitional space between the already known and the as yet unrealized poten-
tial of our lives.
The breathtaking structural movement of Williams’s best poems (the field
of action is in the poem)—and his restless commitment to poetic innova-
tion—offers contemporary environmental and ecological poets an inspiring
commitment to poetic innovation. The genre of ecopoetry might find a place
for Williams in its historical development by using his work to refine its most
common assumptions and foundational beliefs. But in his study of the “sus-
tainable” poem, Scigaj construes a more narrow definition of the distinctive-
ness of ecopoetry. The ecopoem, in Scigaj’s definition, “persistently stresses
human cooperation with nature conceived as a dynamic, interrelated series of
cyclical feedback systems” The tradition of nature poetry is in this way un-
derstood as distinct from the environmental poetry written in an age in which
environmental concerns were becoming manifest in the poetic imagination.
Thus his argument is historical in that it locates in the poetry of the past thirty
years an increasing awareness of ecological crisis. Following up Elder’s insights
about the tradition of American poets whose work concerns the human rela-
tion to nature, Scigaj seeks further to “explore new ways of developing a theo-
retical position” for ecopoetry that would “critique poststructuralist language
theory and provide an alternative” (xiii). Scigaj then admonishes, “We need a
sustainable poetry, a poetry that does not allow the degradation of ecosystems
through inattention to the referential base of all language. We need a poetry
that treats nature as a separate and equal other and includes respect for nature
conceived as a series of ecosystems—dynamic and potentially self-regulating
cyclic feedback systems” (5).
In the face of environmental crisis, Scigaj concludes, we are no longer able
to naturalize these ecosystems “into benign backdrops for human preoccupa-
tions or reduce them to nonexistence by an obsessive focus on language in our
literary creations.”™ The theoretical framework provided by Scigaj here (which
is different from the practice of the poets and poems he discusses) therefore
potentially determines the kinds of thinking—the subject matter—that would
qualify under the rubric of ecopoetry. If the concept of a sustainable poetry is
articulated as attentive to the “referential base” of all human activity, ecopo-
etry would by design “refer” the reader’s perception beyond the printed page.
The poem is thus understood by the poet, and by implication the reader, as at
once pointing to the world as well as to the possible transparencies of lan-
 William Carlos Williams and Ecocriticism Ce 67

guage. The affective power of poetry is, in this view, narrowly construed.
Williams addresses the practical limits of such a position regarding the con-
tent and the affective domain of language in general and the poetic in partic-
ular in “The Poem as a Field of Action,” his address to Theodore Roethke’s stu-
dents at the University of Washington in 1948. Williams insists that you “can
put it down as a general rule that when a poet, in the broadest sense, begins to
devote himself to the subject matter of his poems, genre, he has come to an end
of his poetic means” (SE, 288). Williams’s exemplary efforts to see poetry as a
distinctive form of cultural practice underscore how the ecological poet must
not be limited to a subject matter such as the environment or to the ideologi-
cal shape of a belief such as saving the environment.
It will come as no surprise that among postwar American poets with envi-
ronmental and ecological concerns, one finds a renewable source of interest in
Williams’s work. Denise Levertov’s 1972 essay “Williams and the Duende,” for
instance, praises Williams’s constant (and consistently changing) attempt to
take “up the challenge to deal with his time and place”; and Gary Snyder com-
ments in “The New Wind,” an essay from the 1960s, that Williams “has been
the largest single influence on the present generation of writers.”” For poets,
singular influence can often be traced to the urgent formal intensity of a sin-
gle poem—an exceptional poem that lives in its demonstration of a new pos-
sibility in the art form. For critics, a poet’s significance is often understood in
terms of what Harold Bloom has called the revisionary ratios of poetic influ-
ence. But a poet such as Williams shapes a tradition more fundamentally than
by simply providing exemplary poems or by influencing a single poet or po-
etic school. Williams creates a singular set of conditions for poetic innovation
during the second half of the twentieth century.
Adrienne Rich’s recent collections of poems attempt to experience and
constitute a series of intelligible relations at the local level to reflect on exist-
ing patterns of self-knowledge within a larger sense of the social and political
world in the process of unfolding. In her poem “Natural Resources,” to take an
example, Rich writes,

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:

so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.”
68 ce = Mark Long

Yet my interest is less in thematic concern than in Rich’s breathtaking alle-

giance to her craft in these lines as a pledge to a poetics rooted in what Gary
Snyder calls the common ground, our native place, of language. Her commit-
ment to the confusing, disorienting, and painful location in and from which
she writes reflects an abiding commitment to integrating the descriptive (per-
sonal, reflective) and persuasive (political, oratorical) functions of poetry. In
An Atlas of the Difficult World Rich shows her readers where she is through a
Whitmanesque catalog of failures (“These are the materials”) and the neces-
sity of the possibilities of personal and collective redemption (“What does it
mean to love my country?”). Drawing inspiration from Muriel Rukeyser’s ex-
ample (“There are roads to take”), Rich admonishes us “to catch if you can
your country’s moment, begin.”
Rich’s two essays on placement—” Blood, Bread and Poetry: The Location
of the Poet” and “Notes Toward a Politics of Location’—elegantly and force-
fully trace “the possible credibility of poetry” through her own personal evo-
lution from a conviction of uniqueness as a young poet to her emerging “un-
tutored and half-conscious rendering of the facts of blood and bread, the
social and political forces of my time and place.”* In her sequences of poems
in An Atlas of the Difficult World Rich further displays her commitment to the
aesthetic I have traced out of Williams. These poems demonstrate how per-
sonal and political relationships and territories can be mapped and how, in
the words of James Baldwin that she uses as inspiration, “Any real change im-
plies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that
gave one an identity, the end of safety” (BBP, 176). Rich’s distinctive commit-
ment of the heart and mind to a poetics that calls into question our best ver-
sion of self and world suggests a definition of the poetic arts “not as a com-
modity, not as a luxury, not as a suspect activity, but as a precious resource to
be made available to all, one necessity for the rebuilding of a scarred, impov-
erished, and still-bleeding country” (BBP, 185). The rebuilding is accom-
plished, for Rich as a poet, with the materials of the poem.
Rich categorically rejects poetry as simply seeking, in the satiric words of
E. E. Cummings, to “live suddenly / without thinking.” For imagining a state
of mindless immediacy must suppose that we can depend on our senses, and
intuition, to transport us back to a direct, if not more certain, place in the
world. Nostalgia for the world in and of itself misses the fact that the world in
and of itself is precisely what we already have. Williams can help us to under-
stand that we can know the world, and we can know it differently; the thing in
itself is precisely what we do experience and see. The problem will always be
how we will come to an awareness of the thingness of the world we have in
 William Carlos Williams and Ecocriticism Ce 69

common by bringing it into form in a particular way. Everything depends,

Williams demonstrates—and I think convincingly—on the relations that are
established, as there can be no final categorical distinction between the real
and the represented. Our representations, although self-sufficient, are never
all-sufficient. There are, however, linguistic representations, always the prod-
uct of an abductive process of inference, that do not prove “sustainable.” As
Robert Hass reminds us, metonymy is the characteristic form of the poetic
image “because all our seeing is metonymic.”” Yet the way to most fully expe-
rience the sudden moments in our lives is by reflecting on the meaning of their
partiality and staying open to possible revisions of the meanings we make.
Williams’s commitment to his art is grounded in his abiding faith in hu-
manity. His restless attempts to refine the resources of his language can inspire
poets and readers to live beyond their limits by discovering what they do not
already know. In this sense Williams’s aesthetics is political,’ a term Robert
von Halberg defines as making categorical thinking difficult. “Poets who are
satisfied with rousing simplifications or confirmations of their audience’s
views sell short the possibilities of their art.”” A passionate commitment to the
environment is perhaps a necessary risk for a poet who wishes to challenge ex-
isting modes of human relation to the world. But Williams demonstrates that
without a genuine commitment to language and its domain of human culture,
a supposed poetics of presence will slide into its relatively insignificant place,
unable to articulate other than its own already known and local point of view.
This essay only begins to suggest how Williams’s insights into the way lan-
guage renews itself as a specific form of cultural practice might create a spe-
cific set of conditions for overcoming these limited forms of artistic practice,
especially in poems that are intentionally addressed to the environment and
environmental concerns. Williams suggests the limitations of using poetry to
disclose phenomenological presence. To expand, not diminish, the affective
range and power of poems requires not the mystical one of knowing the
world, of seeking something before making. On the contrary, Williams re-
minds us that the practice of poetry is a part of the constant development of
a cultural reality from the potentiality of experience through particular lin-
guistic acts.

Notes

1. William Carlos Williams, Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Di-
rections, 1970), 138.
70 Ow Mark Long

2. David Frail, The Early Politics and Poetics of William Carlos Williams (Ann Arbor:
UMI Research Press, 1987), 92.
3. Important critical studies in the American tradition of poetry include John Elder,
Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1985); Guy Rotella, Reading and Writing Nature: The Poetry of Robert Frost, Wal-
lace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop (Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 1991); Terry Gifford, Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry
(New York: Manchester University Press, 1995); Gyorgyi Voros, Notations of the Wild:
The Poetry of Wallace Stevens (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997). Also see
Bernard W. Quetchenbach, Back from the Far Field: American Nature Poetry in the Late
Twentieth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000); Jonathan Bate,
Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (New York: Routledge,
1991). Anthologies that have helped to define the field include Robert Bly, ed., News of
the Universe: Poems of a Twofold Consciousness (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1980); Sara
Dunn and Alan Scholefield, eds., Beneath the Wide Wide Heaven: Poetry of the Environ-
ment from Antiquity to the Present (London: Virago, 1991); Robert Pack and Jay Parini,
eds., Poems for a Small Planet: Contemporary American Nature Poetry (Hanover, N.H.:
University Press of New England, 1993); John Daniel, ed., Wild Song: Poems of the Nat-
ural World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). Among the dissertations on the
subject see David Gilcrest, “Greening the Lyre” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon,
1995) and Laird Christensen, “Spirit Astir in the World: Sacred Poetry in the Age of
Ecology” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 1997).
4. Elder, 215. Elder is important as one of the first voices pointing the way toward
recent developments in the field of ecocriticism in general and the study of ecopoetry
more particularly.
5. See Rotella’s historical and intellectual survey of the changes and continuities of
American poets’ attitudes toward epistemology, aesthetics, and nature that lead to the
poems written in the period between the publication of Robert Frost’s first book of
poems in 1913 and Elizabeth Bishop’s final collection in 1976. Also see Green Voices, in
which Terry Gifford asks, “What, then, have emerged as the criteria for valuing one
‘green language’ rather than another?” (143). In his detailed and illuminating exposi-
tion Gifford identifies “connection,” “commitment,” and “responsibility” as the domi-
nant constituents in the nature poetry of Kavanagh, MacLean, Heaney, Hughes, et al.
For a comparable attempt to define a set of criteria for valuing ecopoetry, see Gyorgyi
Voros’s discussion of ecology in the poetry and poetics of Wallace Stevens, in which she
describes Stevens’s sense of relationships as ecological and defines a list of six familiar
aspects of Stevens’s work that “readily lend themselves to an ecological reading”
(83-86).
 William Carlos Williams and Ecocriticism Ce 71

6. Leonard Scigaj, Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets (Lexington: Univer-

sity Press of Kentucky, 1999), 33.
7. Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg, eds., Poems for the Millennium: The Univer-
sity of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, vol. 1, From Fin-de-Siécle to
Negritude (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 2.
8. Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg, eds., Poems for the Millennium: The Univer-
sity of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, vol. 2, From Postwar to Mil-
lennium (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 12.
9. Dana Phillips, “Ecocriticism, Literary Theory, and the Truth of Ecology,” in the
special ecocriticism issue of New Literary History 30, no. 3 (summer 1999): 575-602.
Phillips discusses the antitheoretical spirit of ecocriticism, pointing to examples of ec-
ocritics who “treat literary theory as if it were a noxious weed that must be suppressed
before it overwhelms more native and greener forms of speech” (579). He cites
Lawrence Buell’s seminal book The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writ-
ing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1995), in which Buell asks, “Must literature always lead us away from the physical
world, never back to it?” (11). Phillips provides a generative critique of the theoretical
assumptions behind Buell’s project. Using Buell as a case study, Phillips observes that
“the result is not so much a new kind of blessedly untheoretical discourse as it is a dis-
course propped up here and there by some distinctly shaky theory” (579). Phillips also
provides an incisive set of observations regarding Elder’s analogy between poem and
ecosystem—an analogy, Phillips argues, that “is faulty on scientific as well as literary
grounds” (581). For a brief response by Buell to Phillips, see “The Ecocritical Insur-
gency,’ New Literary History 30, no. 3 (summer 1999): 703, 711 n. 11.
10. Quoted in Phillips, 581.
11. I take the phrase “poetics of presence” from Charles Altieri, “Denise Levertov
and the Limits of the Aesthetics of Presence,” in Enlarging the Temple: New Directions
in Poetry during the 1960’s (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 26;
repr. in Albert Gelpi, ed., Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1993). Altieri’s exploration of postmodern poetics raises important
questions regarding the philosophical adequacy of a poetics of presence. “Considered
as metaphysical or religious meditation, the poetry of the sixties seems to me highly so-
phisticated; it takes into account all the obvious secular objections to traditional reli-
gious thought and actually continues and extends the inquiries of philosophers as di-
verse as Heidegger, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein. This very success, however, makes it
disappointing that the poetry fails so miserably in handling social and ethical issues.”
For a critique of Altieri’s assumptions more generally as exemplifying the limits of
postmodern language theory, and specifically in reference to the second major period
72 ow Mark Long

of W. S. Merwin’s poetry, beginning with the 1967 book of poems The Lice, see Scigaj,
18-28, 176-177. Scigaj sets the project of ecocriticism against poststructuralist lan-
guage theory, arguing that environmental poetry must emphasize its referential ground
and “contain an activist dimension to foreground particular acts of environmental
degradation and degraded planetary ecosystems” (21, my emphasis). Scigaj argues for
the phenomenological approach of Merleau-Ponty as the proper theoretical model to
elucidate the value of such poetry. Yet despite Scigaj’s trenchant insights regarding Al-
tieri’s assumptions, in targeting Altieri’s “aestheticism” he effaces the specificity of Al-
tieri’s readings he chooses not to cite, such as his treatment of Levertov’s struggles to
adapt her poetics to the pressing political issues in the Vietnam era.
12. The demand for an ethical extension from the relation of individuals, and the
relation of individuals to society, to the relation between individuals in a biotic com-
munity that includes human beings is predicated on Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic,” which
provides practitioners in the field of ecocriticism with a “mode of guidance” that
“changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain
member and citizen of it” (Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac [New York: Oxford
University Press, 1949], 204). The study of literatures of the environment is signifi-
cantly informed by the understanding that “current environmental problems are
largely of our own making, are, in other words, a by-product of culture” (Cheryl Glot-
felty and Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocritical Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology
[Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996], xxi). The ethical and cultural implications
of ecocriticism therefore demand more than simply a rigorous interdisciplinary study
of environmental literatures precisely because the cultural rhetoric of environmental-
ism is practiced with an urgent and irrepressible desire for personal, political, and eco-
nomic transformation.
13. David Walker, The Transparent Lyric: Reading and Meaning in the Poetry of
Stevens and Williams (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 118.
14. Williams, Imaginations, 88.
15. William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (New York: New Directions,
1956), 1 (hereafter cited in text as IAG).
16. William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Vol. 2,
1939-1962, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1998), 55.
17, William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays (New York: New Directions, 1969), 134
(hereafter cited in text as SE).
18. William Carlos Williams, The Selected Letters, ed. John C. Thirlwall (New York:
New Directions, 1957), 286.
19, William Carlos Williams, Paterson, rev. ed. (New York: New Directions, 1992), 3
(hereafter cited in text as P).
20. Gary Snyder, No Nature: New and Selected Poems (New York: Pantheon, 1992), v.
 William Carlos Williams and Ecocriticism Ce 72

21. Heather McHugh, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (Hanover: Wesleyan
University Press, 1993), 1.
22. Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 8.
23. Scigaj, 17.
24. Ibid. At its strongest the field of literature and environment provides formida-
ble theoretical insight into the relation between language and the world. At its weakest
the field risks limiting its inquiry by pursuing the desire to imagine a more primary
mode of conscious experience. The “loss of the world”—its immediacy, its presence—
leads to the desire to lose the word; and in response to this estrangement from what we
call nature, including our own naturalness, we attempt a solution by seeking primary
or unmediated experience—a wholly understandable desire, it is important to add,
given the overwhelming evidence that such estrangement has led to environmental ig-
norance and ecological irresponsibility. To expand the theoretical insights of environ-
mental literature and the prospects for the practice of ecological literary criticism re-
quires much more than what Dewey called “eulogistic predicates,” those structures of
thought that seek nostalgic and sentimental attempts to overcome anthropomorphic
versions of experience. Williams provides a means of conceptualizing the problem of
nostalgically or sentimentally longing for a lost sense of place in the world. (Rather
than the redemptive project Northrop Frye described as the myth of the good old days,
when people were closer to nature and got their milk from cows instead of bottles, the
fields of environmental literature and ecological literary criticism require the distinctly
human power of constructing better versions of human experience.) The critical risk
for ecopoetry is isolating a canon of poets that encourages our attempt to transcend
the linguistic structure of our conceptual life and thereby take us away from that world
we wish to feel, understand, indeed preserve. The determinate power of predication
gives language the capacity to construct sustainable relations with a world we wish to
know and be responsible citizens of rather than enacting the cyclical historical ritual
Milan Kundera has called “man’s longing not to be man” (Milan Kundera, The Un-
bearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim [New York: Harper, 1984],
296). Williams argues, to the contrary, that poetry needs to be more human, which is
not to say less natural, because we need not simply to reflect on our actions but the
conceptual structures that determine how it is we determine what should be done.
25. Denise Levertov, “Williams and the Duende,” in New and Selected Essays (New
York: New Directions, 1992), 37; Gary Snyder, “The New Wind,” in A Place in Space:
Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds: New and Selected Prose (Washington, D.C.: Counter-
point, 1995), 15.
26. Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language (New York: Norton, 1978),
264. Coincidentally, Scigaj refers to sections of Rich’s Atlas of the Difficult World as “ar-
chetypal” ecopoetry (37).
74 ow Mark Long

27. Adrienne Rich, An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991 (New York:
Norton, 1991), 12.
28. Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985 (New York:
Norton, 1985), 171 (hereafter cited in text as BBP).
29. E. E. Cummings, Complete Poems: 1904-1962 (New York: Liveright, 1991), 159.
30. Robert Hass, Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (New York: Eco,
1984), 290.
31. The political aesthetic is his refusal to separate a concern with poetry and place
from an inquiry into the place of poetry. A stronger way of putting this equation would
be to subordinate the literal discussion of poetry and place to the place of poetry. For
a more detailed treatment of the problem of Williams’s political aesthetics, especially in
relation to the early experimental writing, see my essay “‘no confusion—only difficul-
ties’: William Carlos Williams’s Poetics of Apposition,” William Carlos Williams Review
23, no. 2 (fall 1997): 1-27. In a useful overview essay Robert von Halberg discusses the
strengths and limits of Rich’s and Snyder’s political aesthetics in “Poetry, Politics, and
Intellectuals,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 8, Poetry and Crit-
icism, 1940-1995 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 9-212. See especially
33-39.
32. Halberg, 26.
Contemporary
Ecopoetsc~w,
Terry Gifford

Me Gary Snyder and the Post-Pastoral

. . language as wild system, mind as wild habitat, world as a “making”

beadealy poem as a creature of the wild mind.
—Gary Snyder, A Place in Space

When Lawrence Buell describes American pastoral as “simultaneously coun-

terinstitutional and institutionally sponsored, he is returning pastoral to its
original Greek function.' The poet Theocritus wrote the Idylls in the third cen-
tury B.c. in order to use the mode of shepherds’ songs in his native Sicily to in-
directly critique the sophisticated court in Alexandria. An apparent retreat
into what has come to be known as the “idyllic” is, in fact, a device for subtly
suggesting reforms to an urban audience. What was institutionally sponsored
from the court poet produces a poetry that is counterinstitutional. Buell ar-
gues from the example of Thoreau that the critiques made by American pas-
torals have tended to be taken onboard institutionally—“dissent can get co-
opted as an aspect of consensus”’—and the artist is encouraged to retreat
again to the wilderness, the frontier, or its representative landscape. Thus a
cycle that not only endorses but demands the pastoral, in continuously chang-
ing forms for each era, is posited not only by Buell but by Leo Marx as “a di-
alectical mode of perception” that has evolved as an essential cultural tool that
can help us find a right relationship with the earth.’
English critics tend to be more skeptical about the pastoral, pointing out
that in English literature the idyll of Arcadia is not only a successful and at-
tractive strategy, but itis also fundamentally flawed by its artifice and idealiza-
tion. The function off pastoral poetry in England has been to endorse the sta-
tus quo of a stable society, from ‘Sydney’ ’sArcadia (1590), to Pope’s Windsor
Forest (1713), to Isabella Lickbarrow’s Poetical Effusions (1814), to the contrib-
utors to Georgian Poetry (1912-1922), and to George Mackay Brown’s Fisher-
men with Ploughs (1971). In response there has grown a corrective literature of
anti-pastoral poetry, from Stephen Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour (1736), to
Mary Collier’s The Woman’s Labour (1739), to George Crabbe’s The Village
(1783), to Byron’s Don Juan (1819), to Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger
(1942), to Ted Hughes’s Moortown Diary (1979).! Perhaps American anti-
pastoral poetry is produced by those writers J. Scott Bryson refers to in his

Te
78 cw Terry Gifford

introduction to this volume as “antiromantics”: Frost, Jeffers, Stevens, Moore,

Williams.
But even for American pastoral the dangers of idealization in what Buell
now prefers to call “pastoralism” remain. The classical modes of pastoral—the
eclogue, the paean to a patron’s estate—may now be “obsolescent conven-
tions,” as Buell puts it; but the dangers of idealization can undermine cele-
bration, and a certain smug coziness can infect the poetics of the most “right-
on” of the ecopoets who, in Leonard Scigaj’s words, “distill ecological
processes into aesthetic techniques to restore our lost sense of connectedness
to the planet that bore and sustains us.”* This is especially true for a celebrant
such as Gary Snyder, recently described by the English critic Jonathan Bate as
“the most ecologically self-conscious of twentieth century poets.”’ The primi-
tivism of the “Hunting” poems of Myths and Texts, for example, might well be
read as impossibly regressive for a twentieth-century California man who will
not actually “drink sea-water” or “sleep on beach pebbles in the rain” in a
shamanistic journey of penance for killing deer.’ This may be a reference to
coastal Salish practices, as Patrick Murphy suggests,’ and may act as a meta-
phor for earning the right to take life in order to sustain life, but Snyder’s
learning from Native American and Zen Buddhist myths and disciplines can
be too easy in its assumptions about the way readers might relate metaphors
to practice. In pastoral poetry metaphors can remain aesthetic rather than
conceptually challenging, endorsing complacency. Blakean celebratory poetry
can function as pastoral escapism for, say, the Californian Web-site developer
I met on her air commute to Chicago, whose way of marking the seasons was
to program changes in her screensaver.
So over the last few years I have felt the need for a term that characterizes
literature that transcends the closed circle of the pastoral and anti-pastoral
modes. Post-pastoral started out as a parody of all those “post-” theories until
I found that I needed to take it seriously because it worked to characterize lit-
erature, like the best of Gary Snyder’s poetry, that avoids the traps both of ide-
alization of the pastoral and of the simple corrective of the anti-pastoral."
Thus post-pastoral is not necessarily postmodern. The heart of Blake’s work is
post-pastoral, as is the prose of John Muir and of Rick Bass’s Fiber (1998). Pre-
twentieth-century post-pastoral work anticipates ecological poetry in the way
that Muir’s vision, embedded in the poetic style of his prose, is, as I have ar-
gued elsewhere, protoecological.'' Of course, much myth and oral literature
in many cultures is post-pastoral. Patrick Murphy’s multicultural project
for ecofeminism will reveal new dimensions to the range of post-pastoral
literature.”
 Gary Snyder and the Post-Pastoral ce, 79

So what is post-pastoral poetry? Currently I think of it as poetry that im-

plicitly raises six questions for the reader. But before I enumerate them by way
of Gary Snyder’s work I need to remind myself that I am not speaking of the
way questions would be raised in philosophy, or ecology, or politics. This dis-
course has to work as poetry first. There is a danger that I may appear pro-
grammiatic in my analysis, demanding a set of ideas from poets. To put it the
other way around, as a poet myself I have to remind myself that the post-pas-
toral is not a manifesto but a reflection on a series of challenges to my own
creative work. So in my present role as reader and learner responding to Gary
Snyder’s work, it is important that these six questions are not boxes to be
ticked but implications embedded in the poetry to be pondered further. I
quite expect other readers to reply to me that post-pastoral texts really raise
twelve questions, or one, or that these are not questions at all. While waiting,
however, I offer the present six-part definition of Gary Snyder’s post-pastoral
}y poetry. First I ought to explain my own sense of “poetry working as poetry.”
y.) « Ted Hughes, the preeminent British ecopoet of the twentieth century, ad-
J T mitted to me in correspondence that when he tried to address ecological issues
“y directly in his poetry, the poetry tended to suffer. In a poem titled “Lobby
- under the Carpet,” published in the Times before an election, Hughes at-
tempted to draw attention to “a 40% drop / in the sperm count of all Western
males.” This is an important indicator of insidious toxic pollution that threat-
ens our species, but when I criticized this poem’s quality as poetry, Hughes
wrote, “I’ve tried to write sort of semi-protest pieces of verse about this sort of
thing, but I don’t think it works. It may work as propaganda for a little bit for
some people, for some readers, but I don’t think it can ever be the real thing.””
Jonathan Bate has recently made much the same point about a poem by Gary
} “Snydert He says of “Mother Earth: Her Whales,” “The poem has been written
as an expression of a set of opinions, not as an attempt to transform into lan-
guage an experience of dwelling upon the earth. In this respect it is not what I
call an ‘ecopoem. . . . The language itself is not being asked to do ecological
work.” Bert Almon has also said of this poem, “[It] strikes me as a good prose
essay mysteriously incarnated as a bad poem.”” Bate quotes as evidence the
third, fourth, and fifth stanzas of a fourteen-stanza poem that deliberately
moves among different discourses, including rhyming simplicity, an English
\, ballad, lyric imagism, open field form, a public chant, and manifesto prose.
4 The fourth stanza is a superb alliterative imagist celebration of whale behav-
ior that is Snyder’s poetry at its best, working with all the resources of height-
éned language, doing nothing but “transform into language an experience of
dwelling upon the earth,” as Bate demands of ecopoetry. It may be that both
80 ce = Terry Gifford

Bate and Almon are failing to notice the complex nature of this poem: the way
the language and forms in the poem might be deliberately raising questions
about its content. But their anxieties emphasize the proper demand that post-
pastoral poetry must work as poetry. And this must be remembered as the
mode in which the six questions that define post-pastoral poetry are raised for
the reader.
Fundamental to Snyder’s Buddhism is a position of humility that emerges
from a contemplation of the huge complexity behind the simplicity of the
natural world we inhabit with the other species, forms, and energies. The his-
tory of Western Christian civilization has largely been one of exploiting the
earth to the point that we have alienated ourselves from our home. In Britain
we have been producing nuclear waste by reprocessing other countries’ pluto-
nium at Sellafield, a site that is notoriously leaky but that through the market-
ing of its Visitors’ Centre now rivals Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage as a tourist
attraction in the Lake District. We do not know how to dispose of the toxic
waste stored in surface tanks there, yet we go on producing more of it. We
need to be reminded of our hubris by the Victorian Christian poet Gerard
Manley Hopkins: “And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; /
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil / Is bare now, nor
can foot feel, being shod.”"* This devastatingly simple image of our species’ ul-
timate alienation from the earth on which we tread demands that we learn
again to tread lightly and sensitively on the soil by recognizing what Hopkins,
in the poem’s title, calls “God’s Grandeur,” whether it be the “bright wings” of
dawn, or “the ooze of oil.”
Gary Snyder’s mode of learning whether he can gain the humility that
comes from awe—the first question of post-pastoral poetry—is most obvi-
ously explored in his early “Cold Mountain Poems,” first published in autumn
1958. More than simply translations from the first-century Chinese of Han-
shan, these poems represent Snyder’s process of absorbing the Asian influ-
ences that have dominated his work to the present day. Significantly, these
poems were begun when Snyder was studying Oriental languages at Berkeley
and revised at the beginning of his ten years of Zen studies in Japan. So it is
with the irony of hindsight that we now read Snyder’s translation of Han-
shan: “In my first thirty years of life / I roamed hundreds and thousands of
miles.”"” The experience summed up in the first few lines of the poem is clearly
shared by both poets:

Walked by rivers ...

Entered cities...
 Gary Snyder and the Post-Pastoral ce 81

Tried drugs...
Read books . . . (25—26)

The next two lines clinch a deeply felt humility that is to be learned from tun-
ing in to the energies of nature: “Today I’m back at Cold Mountain: / I'll sleep
by the creek and purify my ears” (26). The asceticism by which purification
comes through sleep on the ground of Cold Mountain is a learned discipline
of openness toward the energy of the creek. The complex nature of creek en-
ergy might be examined by the second question posed by post-pastoral po-
etry: what are the implications of recognizing the creative-destructive cycles of
the universe of which we are a part?
Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” attempted to provocatively (“by the
infernal method of corrosives”) cleanse “the doors of perception” in order to
be able to celebrate the “infinite” in everything, even in the predators—the
serpent and the tiger—so that the “fearful symmetry” of a creative-destructive
universe could be accepted within the self.'* It is not only with breathtaking
awe, but with “fearful” respect for the implications that Blake asks of the tiger,
“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”” John Muir received the same rev-
elation in the swamps of Florida: “although alligators, snakes, etc., naturally
repel us, they are not mysterious evils. They dwell happily in these flowery
wilds, are part of God’s family, unfallen, undepraved, and cared for.”” Muir
wrote in the manuscript that was on his bed when he died that the great cold,
crushing glaciers of Alaska actually create beauty in their destructiveness:
“what we in our faithless ignorance and fear call destruction is creation finer
and finer.” A recognition of the death process in nature so horrified Mathew
Arnold in the poem “Dover Beach” that he sought refuge in the integrity of
love,” not having listened to the “creek energy” in the conclusion of the folk-
song “The Seeds of Love”: “And I gained the willow tree.”” In the 1955 poem
“Milton by Firelight” Snyder is happy to accept a universe without Christian
purpose and to put his faith in the material reality of creative-destructive
“weathering” and the flux of nature represented by the sky: “No paradise, no
fall, /Only the weathering land, / The wheeling sky.’” In a poem first collected
in the 1992 Selected Poems Snyder is hiking “At Tower Peak” and learning di-
rectly from his glaciated environment: “A kind of ice age, spreading, filling val-
leys / Shaving soils, paving fields, you can walk it / Live in it, drive through
it.” Shaving and paving are a characteristic pairing of symbolic verbs that are
actually lived by the human species here, whatever their mode of activity.
Growing and eroding is lived by each of us in what Ted Hughes called “the el-
emental power circuit of the universe.””
82 cw Terry Gifford

If it is the case that our inner lives echo the ebbs and flows of growth
and decay in the natural world around us, how can we learn to understand the
inner by being closer to the outer? This is the third question of the post-
pastoral. It is why nature imagery has always been the thinking tool of poetry
since before writing, as a traditional song like “The Seeds of Love” demon-
strates. Why do hospital patients recover more quickly, with less need for
medication, if they look out at a tree through the window rather than a con-
crete wall? Why was it thought good for children of my generation in England
to keep a short-living hamster as a pet? “The woods decay and fall,” observed
Tennyson in “Tithonus,” a poem that rejects the Christian desire for immor-
tality and tries to understand the death process: “Man comes and tills the
earth and lies beneath.”” He might have continued, “And after many a sum-
mer dies the hamster.” For Snyder all this is a source of joy, often caught in a
simple but profound effect like “creek music, heart music” in the poem “For
All” The Gaelic post-pastoral poet Sorley Maclean recognized in his famous
poem “The Woods of Raasay” that science knows much about woods (“The
way of the sap is known”), but, he wrote, “There is no knowledge of the course
/ of the crooked veering of the heart.”” The veering of the creek and the music
of its flux are one way to understand the flux that is “heart music.”
“For All” concludes with an acceptance of the poet’s commitment to “the
soil” and “the beings” with which he lives in the ecological community that
Snyder calls “Turtle Island,” preferring a Native American term for his native
land:

one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
with joyful interpenetration for all.”

Much of Snyder’s prose work has been exploring the implications of that in-
terpenetration for human culture and for poetry in particular. More than any
poet since Wordsworth, Snyder has been meditating on the fourth question of
post-pastoral poetry: if we all live in one ecosystem of diverse cultures, isn’t
nature culture and culture nature? The modern version of this question is:
how can we use our culture, our imagination, specifically our poetic imagina-
tion, as a tool for healing our alienation from nature?
Wordsworth believed that his poetry could mediate nature. Before decon-
struction he could not say that nature poetry constructs nature for us, mak-
ing, in a linguistic sense, nature culture. But in “Home at Grasmere” he made
 Gary Snyder and the Post-Pastoral Ces 83

the rather breathless discovery that culture is nature in that human mind,
which for the Enlightenment separated (they would say elevated) us from na-
ture, in fact, is itself nature. Wordsworth said he was

Speaking of nothing more than what we are—

How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
(Of the whole species) to the external world
Is fitted; and how exquisitely too—
Theme this but little heard of among men—
The external world is fitted to the mind.”

Snyder says in the epigraph to this chapter that the mind is a wild ecosystem.
This is why the leading American nature poet can title his selected poems No
Nature. All products of the human mind are, in a sense, the products of na-
ture, although obviously some are more destructive of holism than others. It
follows that the imagination is the tool nature has given us to allow us, if we
now choose to heal the wounds of the past, to reconnect our culture with the
wider ecosystem of which it is a part. So the poetry of Gary Snyder is, in a
sense, nature thinking us back into nature:

This living flowing land

Is all there is, forever

We are it
It sings through us.”

These lines from “Frazier Creek Falls” are deceptively simple. For further elab-
oration I would refer readers to Snyder’s essays, where, in “Tawney Grammar”
for example, he explores notions like “Wild nature is inextricably in the weave
of self and culture,” and conversely, “When humans know themselves, the rest
of nature is right there.”
In the essay “Some Points for a ‘New Nature Poetics” Snyder follows up his
>»

statement that nature writing “has the potential of becoming the most...
morally challenging kind of writing” by suggesting that ecological poets not
only inform themselves from science, especially “the emergent new territories
of science,” but “go further with science.’ His thinking here is confronting the
fifth question implicit in post-pastoral poetry: if our evolved consciousness
gives us conscience, how should we exercise our responsibilities toward our
84 cw Terry Gifford

material home? Snyder is aware that new scientific evidence is continuously

informing our revision of precisely what responsible behavior is. What was
once good to eat becomes bad for us then becomes good again for different
reasons. So it is with our relationship with the land. Because we are present in
the land, some concept of land management seems responsible. If we have
stopped suppressing natural forest fires, for example, should we also suspend
our use of wood altogether and stop all logging?
Even sleeping on the ground out in the forest, Snyder catches the sound of
the 4 A.M. log trucks interrupting his “dreaming of health”: “The log trucks re-
mind us, / as we think, dream and play / of the world that is carried away.””
Snyder’s “Little Songs for Gaia,” of which this is a part, are an example of the
way post-pastoral poetry reminds us of the complexities of our responsibility
toward the biotic community we inhabit. How can we live in it without in
some manner “carrying away” some of it? What does it mean to “carry
away” the world? Is our health, or the health of the world, ultimately served
by logging? What, then, are our dreams? What is our healthiest manner of
“play”?
All these difficult and necessary questions bring us to the sixth and final
question that post-pastoral poetry asks: how can we best address the issue that
ecofeminists in particular have helped us understand better—that our ex-
ploitation of our environment has emerged from the same mind-set as our ex-
ploitation of each other? In Europe around the time of the collapse of the
communist states it was fashionable to declare that radicalism had moved
“from red to green.” Ecofeminists have shown us that this was dangerously
mistaken thinking, especially, for example, for those women in the world
whose quality of life as women is directly linked to the quality of their envi-
ronment. Blake knew this too in the mode of his own time. In his poem “Lon-
don” the harlot’s curse is heard in the final line, “blight[ing] with plagues the
Marriage hearse”; the first stanza tells us, “Near where the charter’d Thames
does flow.”* In a short poem Blake does not include such detail for back-
ground color. What begins and ends the poem are images of the unnatural
causing, his audience cannot fail to know, physical and moral ill health. A river
that is a “charter’d” sewer is produced by the same society that has fouled mar-
riage and the individual lives of infants, chimney-sweepers, soldiers, and
youthful prostitutes.
To find Gary Snyder’s global exploration of this issue we have to return to
“Mother Earth: Her Whales” and what Jonathan Bate sees as embarrassingly
unpoetic discourse:
 Gary Snyder and the Post-Pastoral ce. 85

Solidarity. The People.

Standing Tree People!
Flying Bird People!
Swimming Sea People!
Four-legged, two legged, people!”

Snyder’s playfulness can mislead the earnest literary critic. It should be clear
by now that his sense of play is both light and thoughtful, joyous and serious.
His play with discourses in this poem extends to a ridiculously long single
line: “North America, Turtle Island, taken by invaders who wage war around
the world” (237). One could argue that this is an outpouring of heartfelt rage
to justify this long line and one can point to the alliteration to justify it as po-
etics. In fact, this apparently prosaic line is one extreme in the poem’s pushing
at the whole range of what poetry can do on the page. What is important is its
easy comprehension that war is being waged by America on both land and
people, both within and without the continent that once was a sacred land
called “Turtle Island.” Such complex content can only be achieved by the play-
ful seriousness of Snyder’s poetry commanding the full resources of poetics.
In his introduction Scott Bryson defines ecopoetry as informed by—and
responding ‘to—modern ecological knowledge and concepts. This clearly is
the agenda that Gary Snyder has been urging on us in his essays and exploring
in his poetry. The advantage of placing Snyder’s work within the broader
frame of post-pastoral literature is to see its continuities back to Blake and
across to the prose of John Muir. It also helps to establish the ways in which
Snyder’s poetry has transcended the traps of the pastoral to imaginatively,
playfully, confront the difficult questions of our time—as he urges other
poets: “be crafty and get the work done.”*

Notes

1. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1995), 50.
2. Ibid.
3. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 44.
4. See Terry Gifford, Pastoral (New York: Routledge, 1999).
5. Lawrence Buell, “American Pastoral Ideology Reappraised,’ American Literary
History 1, no. 1 (spring 1989): 23.
86 cw Terry Gifford

6. Leonard M. Scigaj, Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets (Lexington: Uni-

versity Press of Kentucky, 1999), 12.
7. Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000), 246.
8. Gary Snyder, No Nature: New and Selected Poems (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 50.
9, Patrick Murphy, Understanding Gary Snyder (Columbia: University of South Car-
olina Press, 1992), 33.
10. I first developed the notion of the post-pastoral in relation to the poetry of Ted
Hughes. See Terry Gifford, Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry
(New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995).
11. Terry Gifford, introduction to John Muir: The Eight Wilderness-Discovery Books
(Seattle: Mountaineers Press, 1992).
12. Patrick D. Murphy, “‘The Women Are Speaking’: Contemporary Literature as
Theoretical Critique,” in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism, ed. Patrick D. Murphy and
Greta Gaard (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 23-48.
13. Quoted in Gifford, Green Voices, 132.
14. Bate, 200.
15. Bert Almon, “Buddhism and Energy in the Recent Poetry of Gary Snyder,” in
Critical Essays on Gary Snyder, ed. Patrick D. Murphy (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991), 87.
16. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), 27.
17. Snyder, No Nature, 25.
18. William Blake: The Complete Poems, ed. W. H. Stevenson (London: Longman,
1971), 114.
19. Ibid., 215.
20. John Muir: The Eight Wilderness-Discovery Books, 148.
21. Ibid., 841.
22. See Gifford, Pastoral, 117-120.
23. A. L. Lloyd, Folksong in England (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1967), 183.
24. Snyder, No Nature, 7.
25elbidiy3 73:
26. Ted Hughes, interview in London Magazine, January 1971, 9.
27. The Poems of Tennyson (London: Frowe, 1904), 614.
28. Snyder, No Nature, 308.
29. Sorley Maclean, From Wood to Ridge (Manchester: Carcanet, 1990), 183.
30. Snyder, No Nature, 308.
31. William Wordsworth, “Home at Grasmere,” in The Oxford Authors: William
Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 198.
32. Snyder, No Nature, 234.
33. Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), 68.
 Gary Snyder and the Post-Pastoral ces 87

34. Gary Snyder, A Place in Space (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1995), 172.
35. Snyder, No Nature, 289.
36. William Blake: The Complete Poems, 213-214.
37. Snyder, No Nature, 237.
38. Snyder, A Place in Space, 172.
 Gyorgyi Voros
CewEarth’s Echo
Answering Nature in Ammons’s Poetry

. nothing here shows me the image of myself.

—A.R. Ammons, “For Harold Bloom”

Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries

do. In the interval between reach and grasp ... the absent presence of
desire comes alive.
—Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

Although much ecocritical analysis in recent decades has focused. on the

Western attitude of domination toward physical nature, the model of con-
quest and exploitation describes only one (albeit prevailing) stance toward na-
ture. Carolyn Merchant has shown that this version itself arose when “a mech-
anistic world view in which nature was reconstructed 4s dead and Passive, to
be dominated and controlled“by humans” feplaced an earlier conceit of an
“organic ¢cosmos witha livingfemale earth. atits center.”' Yet otherversions of

rents in the culture, occasionally burbling to thes

ST to cleanse the old
metaphors, refresh and challenge the life of the imagination, and tedirect
human energies. One sherman
Book of Job, and with which the poet A. R Ammons has spent a career grap-
pling} iisnature as unattainabléOther, unanswerable to human-need-or desire,
with whom the human exists in a state of awe, fear, or, as is most often the case
in Ammons, erotic longing {ammons frames questions of how to live with,
and within, the vast inhuman Otherness of nature in two recurring tropes:
mifror and echoing voice, Where mirroring and the ocular metaphors related
to it fail poetically to effecta sustainable ecological relation between human
and nonhuman Other, tropes arising from acts of voicing—speaking, singing,
echoing—realize a provisional equilibrium. .
Early on, the theme of the futility of seeking any semblance of the human
in nature gains expression in certain moods of the English romantics and
American transcendentalists. For Shelley this is the nature that “dwells apart

88
 Nature in Ammons’s Poetry Cw 89

2
in
in its_tranquility if:Remote, serene, and inaccessible”;’ for Thoreau, it is the
“Earth, of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old. Night ... the
home, this of Necessity and Fate.”* In twentieth-century American dere the
consciousness of nature’s Otherness strongly colors the work of several signif-
icant postromantic American nature poets before Ammons: Robinson Jeffers,
‘Robert Frost (in his “Once by the Pacific” humor), and Wallace Stevens. Of
these, Stevens struggles most ardently with the issues of the proper human re-
lation to)nonhuman n natureeand with, the role of language and poetry in a non-
verbal universe. Stevens lays the groundwork for a deliberately nonanthro-
pocentric poetry. ‘Always adamant iin his rejection of the pathetic. fallacy. and
every other humanizing tendency, Stevens from the first dismisses the notion
‘that physical nature emulates the human: “The world? The inhuman as
human? That. which thinks not.Feels not, resembling thought, resembling
feeling? es Recognizing. that any “response” > from the natural world can only be
human projection} Stevens petitions the world for silence: “If there must bea
god in
i the house, let him be one / that will not hear us when we speak.” The
most valuable function for human.imagination, in Stevens’s view, is the decre-
ative one of imagining the world without the encrustations of human imagi-
nation (that is, without layers of human conceptualization): “Let’s see the very
thing and nothing.else. ... // Trace the gold sun about the whitened. sky /
Without evasion by a ucla metaphor?® } )
A.R. Ammons is Stevens's successor in both linguistic and ecological con-
cerns. The heir apparent, schooled ini the sciences, deft in incorporating both
the language and methods of biology, astronomy, and ecology in the poems,
witty and innovative in his poetic demonstrations of higher mathematics,at
‘work (Marjorie Perloff applies both fractal geometry and chaos theory to Am-
mons’s poems, and Roger Gilbert likens Glare to a Mobius strip),’ Ammons
seenis ever less inclined than Stevens to impose correspondences between
physical nature and human mind. Yet the central paradox for both Ammons
and Stevens is that the condition of unrequited ove does not preclude loys it-
self. Stevens professes devotion for what he calls his “ultimate inamorata”: “the
indefinite, the impersonal, atmospheres and oceans and, above all, the princi-
ple of order.’* Ammons frames his love in homier terms when he harks back
to his early years on a farm: “I love the land and the terrible dependency on
the weather and the rain and the wind. ... That’s where I got my closeness and
attention to the soil, weeds, plants, insects and trees.”” This sense of intimacy
with natural phenomena and processes that cannot respond in kind is a dri-
ving force in both poets’ work. However, where Stevens achieves a sort of res-
olution within his imagination/reality dialectic, concluding that “Poetry is a
90 Ow Gyorgyi Voros

~ nature created by the poet,” Ammons’s work remains charged with alternat-
ing currents of despair and rapture.
These poles of feeling in Ammons’s poetry derive from the fundamentally
erotic nature of his linguistic pursuits,, Whenever the poet’s role is to woo,
mirror, embrace, or seek to be subsumed within a nature that appears to have
within it no trace of the human,) and/ that the savvy poet refuses anyway to an-
thropomorphize, that is at best‘‘communicative, but not with human
sound," then the relation between the poet and nonhuman nature is inher-
ently erotic, Anne Carson writes that “the Greek word eros denotes ‘want,
‘lack, ‘desire for that which is missing. The lover wants what he does not have.
Itis by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is
had, it is no longer wanting”! Or more succinctly:\"A space must be main-
tained or desire ends.”"’ Thislack, or space, or desire for that which iis miss- &

ing—namely, congruence between human experience and nonhuman na-

ture—informs the ecopoetry of A. R. Ammons, who himself renders the
observation in more dispassionate terms: “a poem is a linguistic correction of
disorder. . . . The disorder may be sensed as an incongruence between our
nonverbal experience or reality and our language reflection of it.” Either way,
incongruence—the space that must be maintained—lies at the heart of the
poetry.
Consider a small poem, “Reflective,” a linguistic sleight-of-hand that at
least initially appears to depict a state of perfect congruence between human
and nonhuman worlds. “I found a / weed,” begins the poet, “that had a // mir-
ror in it.” He slyly suggests at the outset a natural world capable of reflecting
the human. The next lines continue buoyantly to blur the distinction between
subject and object: the weed itself looks at

a mirror
in

me that
had a
weed in it.””°

The poem’s surface charm evokes a sprightly optimism: how wholesome and
satisfying that the speaker can see in nature his perfect counterpart. And how
right that he should perform the same affirmative function for nature, itself
matched in the speaker’s visage. On closer inspection the odd fact emerges
 Nature in Ammons’s Poetry Cw 91

that it isn’t speaker and weed communing in a mutually transfixed gaze; it’s
mirror reflecting mirror:

that
mirror

looked in at
a mirror
in

Instead of mutual affirmation, a veritable funhouse hall of mirrors tunnels to-

ward an infinity of hollowness. As Herbert Grabes baldly puts it, “It is the fact
that the mirror has no image of its own which makes it a mirror.” In this light
the poem’s beatific smile extolling harmony between humans and nature con-
geals to a mocking leer: clearly, all sentient beings trapped in their own per-
ceptions are destined to see nothing but themselves reflected in the shards of
a fragmented world.
Mirror imagery is in itself multivalent and contradictory: in Grabes’s ty-
pology mirrors may reflect things as they are, show things the way they should
or should not be, show things the way they will be, or show what exists only in
the mirror or the beholder’s imagination.” Reflection contains at least the first
and last of these implications within its lithe structure. The title—a pun con-
necting the act of thinking with the visual phenomenon of mirroring—con-
tains, too, the central epistemological problem described by Richard Rorty in
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Rorty ascribes to “the historical phenom-
enon of mirror-imagery ... the story of the domination of the mind of the
West by ocular metaphors. ... Without the notion of mind as mirror, the no-
tion of knowledge as accuracy of representation would not have suggested it-
self?’* Mirror imagery, by extension then, is also the story of the domination
of nature by the West.’? When Eve makes air the mirror of herself in Stevens’s
“Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” she assures that humanity will forever seek
its own face in nature, remaining blind to what is already “Venerable, articu-
late and complete.”
Ammons both employs and critiques ocular metaphors throughout the
poems, although his strongest bent is toward shattering them. “Laser,” for
example, anguishes over the exclusionary function of the mind’s eye-beam
92 Oe Gyorgyi Voros

(an image for the sort of focused, fragmented knowledge that makes Western
positivism possible): “the mind’s light,” as kinetic and unstable as “surf / or
ocean shelves,” voraciously consumes all in its path, “gathers up, / parallelizes,
focuses / and in a rigid beam illuminates the image.” One wants to read “par-
alyzes” for “parallelizes.” The poem goes on to narrate how

the head seeks in itself

fragments of left-over light
to cast a new
direction

but is unable to do so; “any found image falls / back to darkness” (58). It seems
the mind’s function in this poem is to rend and dissect; fixed on one spot, it is
unable to assimilate any other direction or “contradicting image.” Fittingly, the
light emanates from a detached head. Having created a paralytic order, the
mind seeks its opposite in an image of natural orders open to flux, repeatedly
shattering and bursting out of order: “mountain / rapids shattered with sound
and light” or “wind fracturing brush.” The powerful beam, though, “folds all
energy in: / the image glares filling all space” (58). The human image obscures
whatever reality was there before. A glare suggests reflected light so bright as
to blind; in “Laser” it grows into a black hole sucking “all energy in” (58).
Elsewhere, too, Ammons links the act of reflection with a disarticulated
world. “Gravelly Run’s” mirror imagery leads the poet to “look and reflect, but
the air’s glass / jail seals each thing in its entity.” The same poem turns the
human aspiration toward knowledge on its head by qualifying the great Del-
phic injunction to “Know thyself!” More important to Ammons than knowing
the self is knowing it

as it is known
by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it. (11).

In later poems as well Ammons repeatedly shatters the mirror of anthro-

pocentric human knowledge and self-knowledge. Sphere, the poem inspired
by the first NASA images of the planet Earth floating in space like a great eye-
ball and witness to human activity, asks “when we have made the sufficient
mirror will // it have been only to show how things will break: know thyself //
and vanish!”” In his last book, Glare—a disgruntled, curmudgeonly work in
 Nature in Ammons’s Poetry Ce 93

which the poet’s countenance assumes just the expression the title suggests—
Ammons asserts that he is ready to “fracture the mirror” of human perception
because it “has no truth to see except its own, / its own splits and deflections.”
The poem goes on to argue that when human vision seeks, and sees, only its
own visage projected onto nature, it loses touch with the very mystery that is
key to fully experiencing the world’s complexity.
Vision in Ammons, then, expressed in tropes of looking, seeing, and mir-
roring, is most often the mechanism for failed negotiations of the incongru-
ence between human and nonhuman worlds. For a poet as receptive to flux,
process, and motion as Ammons is, the sense of sight entails all that an eco-
logical consciousness of nature eschews: it is spatial, atemporal, privy only to
surfaces and exteriors, fragmented in that only one of many angles is available
to view at a given time, and it emphasizes separation between subject and ob-
ject.” Another class of tropes centered on poetic voice and related acts of lis-
tening, speaking, and singing serves Ammons in creating still problematic but
more often satisfying resonances, however provisional, between human expe-
rience and nonhuman nature.
This is not to say that tropes centered on voice do not themselves engender
incongruities within Ammons’s oeuvre. In one instance, for example, the
poet’s recollections of his solitary woodland wanderings as a child in North
Carolina portend the adult’s respect for and curiosity about otherness, a seem-
ingly uncharacteristic (anthropomorphizing) longing for “speech” from and
“presence” in that inhuman Other, and the concurrent recognition that that
speech is but a “rhetorical device”: “One can search out another’s ‘presence’ for
its otherness or for its sameness. I was alone enough as a child to want to know
something besides myself. It was easy for me later to adopt the rhetorical de-
vice of ‘speaking’ mountains and winds: I recognized them as presences and
wondered, if they spoke, what nature they would speak out of.”
One passage in Glare addresses the same longing poetically, attributing a
moral, parental, and paternalistic authority to a nature that suggests a soon-
to-be-lost paradise. When he was young, “under the apple trees,” the poet
writes, “the very whispering of the / breezes” seemed to him “parental (and /
societal) authority,” a situation that led him to become “hooked on the nature
of things.””’ Even here, the attribution of authority is put in terms of “seem-
ing,” not being. Ammons, it is true, imputes these anthropomorphizing ten-
dencies to a younger self. The earliest works in which Ammons speaks fully in
his own adult poetic voice—the Ezra poems—show him in a much more Jo-
bian frame of mind. When the poet announces himself to the sea with a
booming “I am Ezra,” there are “no echoes from the waves, and “The words
94 cw Gyorgyi Voros

were swallowed up / in the voice of the surf.’ “So I Said I Am Ezra” falls
within the tradition of the stoical anti—pathetic fallacy poem (Stevens’s “The
Snow Man” is another example). In contrast to the rather passive dismay of
this Ezra poem, the later long poems, Garbage most explicitly, express anxiety
and rage that language is not only futile when one is seeking dialogue with na-
ture but may itself be a wasteful by-product of twentieth-century consumer
society, cluttering up the cultural landscape, embalming ideas (as landfills
mummify material waste), adding to the junk heap of culture: at worst the
poem “becomes a relic . . . // a real stick in the fluencies: a leftover light that
hinders the light stream.””
Long before venting his spleen at poststructuralist sophistry and language’s
obstructionist capabilities, though, Ammons laments a voice subsumed by na-
ture’s vastness. One of Ammons’s figurations for the place of human voice in
nature—”The Pieces of My Voice”—evokes the myth of Echo and Narcissus.
Echo, in love with an unattainable self-enclosed, self-reflexive otherness in the
person of Narcissus, eventually attenuates down to a pile of bones and a dis-
embodied voice. In Ammons’s poem the poet’s voice, like that of the nymph
Echo, has become mixed with the elements: “The pieces of my voice have been
thrown / away,’ cries the poet. Canvassing hedgerows and ditches, he asks,
“Where do the pieces of / my voice lie scattered.” Although it could be said
that this poetic voice has achieved its goal of becoming integrated with nature,
oneness comes at the cost of losing all individual identity (a problematic that
itself forms another of Ammons’s major themes throughout the work). The
eventually recovered scraps of voice in the poem accrue to a silence much
emptier than the “unwasting silence” of the surrounding hills: “I am broken
over the earth— / so little remains / for the silent offering of my death,”
mourns the poet.”!
As Ammons’s poetic inquiry into the place of the human voice within na-
ture deepens and develops, he grows more, not less, like the mythic Echo who
exists as a voice in air. For one thing several of Ammons’s most characteristic
poetic moves—the chiasmus,” repetends, and other forms of wordplay—sim-
ply sound very echo-y. To wit (to offer some wholly random examples): “tur-
bulence / livens our passion for clearing, clearing for / turbulence”®; “the tini-
est kiss / at the world’s end / ends the world”; or the lovely poem “Small
Song,” in which

the reeds give

way to the
 Nature in Ammons’s Poetry =Ce. 95

wind and give

the wind away.”

In view of the negative connotations of Ammons’s mirror imagery, it is in-

_ teresting to note that the chiasmus, in its reversal of linguistic elements in a
line or a phrase, registers as a sort of aural mirroring. Mirroring, as has been
argued above, connotes an anthropocentric, detrimental relation to nonhu-
man nature. Crucial differences exist, though, between the ocular and aural
tropes. Unlike an image in an ocular mirror, chiasmic phrases occur in time;
the rhetorical inversion’s temporality assures that the completion of the poetic
utterance is processive. Moreover, the echoing voice doesn’t pretend to con-
gruence; it follows, and is dependent on, the original, as human productions
follow and derive from the natural world. The second phrase of the figure,
then, modifies the first, changing the meaning of the whole. Thus it might be
said that the figure of speech is an aural rendition of a processive, mutually
defining interrelationship between human beings and nonhuman nature. As
Leonard M. Scigaj has persuasively argued, the chiasmus in Ammons signifies
a “characteristic crisscrossing of inner and outer energies in the moment of
perception and artistic composition that constitutes the heart of Ammons’s
ecological poetic.”
Echo, the mythic embodiment (or disembodiment, rather) of the kind of
speech acts under consideration here, has herself usually been regarded as
pitiable: destined always to mimic, her love a lost cause. However, as the Jun-
gian psychologist Patricia Berry demonstrates in her archetypal reading of the
Echo and Narcissus myth, even Echo’s circumscribed condition models a way
of being in the world, and not a wholly unsatisfactory way of being at that. Al-
though it is true that Echo has no “identity” of her own, Berry suggests that
the merits of identity, as that term is understood in our culture, are vastly
overrated: “Self-identity implies an entity distinct from surroundings and
other persons. It implies an essential sameness, oneness, and internal unity of
personality.”” Narcissus has plenty of self-identity. Echo, by contrast, “needs
surroundings in order to speak.”* She is relational; she has, according to
Berry, loose boundaries; she is context dependent. (One thinks of Wallace
Stevens in “Theory”: “I am what is around me.”” And elsewhere: “The world
is myself:”’) In this regard her status may be seen as ecocentric.
Ammons’s poem “Identity” addresses the same valence between fixedness
and formlessness personified by Echo: in the poem the point of equilibrium is
a spiderweb, trope for both poetry and for the human relation to the nonhu-
man world. The spiderweb is “beyond destruction / because created fully in no
96 Ce Gyorgyi Voros

/ particular form.” Were its shape preset, it might not fit into its environment;
were it “perfectly adaptable, / if freedom and possibility were without limit,” it
would “lose its special identity.” As the web is the spider’s expression of itself,
so is the human voice in general and the poet’s voice in particular the medium
of interplay and interaction with what Kant (and Stevens) called the “enor-
mous a priori.” Both the mythic Echo and Ammons’s spiderweb taken as
tropes for manners of speaking (being) in the world urge creativity through
adaptability to the given. Berry again:

The echo of what one means is not literally what one says but could in
nuance and situation .. . be any or everything, depending on the shape of
what’s around, the shape of the line, the stanza, the situation. . . . So imita-
tion is a mode of creating and shaping psychic heat. The psyche is in this
way an artist—a shaper, maker, a creator of beauty within itself... . But im-
portant to this shaping of heat is also the shape of surroundings. As Echo
shapes, she is shaped by what’s around her.”

The condition of mutuality suggested by the myth of Echo remains, of course,

ultimately unconsummated: her voice is destined never to be wholly congru-
ent with the surroundings that give rise to it (she never wins Narcissus), just
as no poetic voice ever fully articulates the world it seeks to express. (“It was
she and not the sea we heard,” says Stevens in “The Idea of Order at Key
West.”* And Ammons: “keep this / poem, this reminder not of keeping but of
not keeping.’“) However, precisely because “Echo’s passion requires a dis-
tance, a space between her and her beloved,”* she remains a figure for erotic
connection: her voice configures a bridge spanning the space between her and
her beloved. To invoke Carson again, “A space must be maintained or desire
ends.”** Paradoxically, space assures the connection by ensuring desire.
Ammons at his most sanguine both acknowledges the disjunction between
human utterance and that which it seeks to articulate, and affirms that human
language may nevertheless perform a necessary function—if not necessary to
nature then necessary to creating the proper, that is, ecologically right and
binding, human relation fo nature. An excerpt from Glare sounds a cautionary
note about human attentiveness and the dangers of its lack but also wryly as-
serts the practical value of language. Material reality may “communicate” itself
in its own, nonhuman way: hills, for example, “communicate / by abrupt con-
cretions, not words”—an uncomfortable state of affairs for the poet, given
that hills’ “concretions / are roughish.””
In a later passage Glare concedes that human response is a wholly different
 Nature in Ammons’s Poetry =Ces 97

category of experience from whatever it might speak to or represent but posits

that the dialogue—“queries and responses”—encourages circulation (blood
flow) between human and nonhuman Other. Although “an answer is not the
same thing as a / mountain falls or rose,” it is possible that “queries and re-
sponses give / circulation to the things that sit still and / be.” The human
voice, in Ammons, then, however impervious nature is to “hearing” it, remains
the best expression of the desire that connects human to nonhuman Other.
Nowhere does Ammons model a way of lending human voice to nature’s
already articulate silence more than in section 13 of Garbage. The passage
below follows a diatribe against exploitive forms of language—“surface-min-
ing words ”#__snoken by the “blabbermouth” who crashes through “sophistic
woods . . . verbal provinces of pure dissemblance” (78). Having spent his
venom, the poet subsides into a state of profound attention to the things of
the world, even as those things often communicate their unwillingness to
communicate: the rocks, the poet writes, “came up to me in a wall saying they
would say / nothing”; tree tops sway into silence; a brook babbles unintelligi-
bly. The poet discovers, as he always does, that in nature there is “no saying /
and no listening either.” The task he finally designs for himself—to derive “the
nature / of each thing from itself” and to make “each derivation / speak” —is
Echo-like in that what he produces is not originative but derivative. Yet in
honoring “each derivation,” the poet creates, in Patricia Berry’s words, the
“echo that completes the word to itself”? When Ammons describes, in the
poem, giving tongue to adder’s tongue, periwinkel, and jimminycricket, and
writes that the “tongues rang in my head / as in a chanson delicate of essence
and point,” he not only suggests an erotic act but also the act of making
music. If the music rings only in his own head, if that as in the last quoted line
carries the Stevensian burden of a necessary fiction, so be it: only through this
mediation of human voice can human desire for relation with the nonhuman
be consummated.
This essay began by alluding to different metaphoric constructions of na-
ture, channeling human energies and actions toward nature in different ways.
A mechanical conception of the physical world implies very different values
and uses than an organic one does. Where are those metaphoric constructions
born and nurtured if not first in the body and then the body’s issue—the
breath: poetry? Words, names, images, utterances, even the rhetorical archi-
tecture of a figure like the chiasm, all frame different relations to the Other-
ness in which we dwell as human beings. Ammons’s poetry, in the way it
transmutes ocular metaphors of mirroring to aural metaphors of echoing,
and in the ways it makes human voice resound among the resonances of
98 Ce Gyorgyi Voros

natural phenomena, shows how poetry can effect an ecological relation to the
world. And it discloses how human desire can create the relation it needs to
live in the world soundly and, at moments, fulfilled.

Notes

1. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revo-
lution (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), xvi.
2. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” in John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley: Com-
plete Poetical Works (New York: Modern Library), 573.
3. Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods, ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer and Edwin
Moser, with Alexander C. Kern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 71.
4. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1982), 493.
5. Ibid., 328.
6. Ibid., 373.
7. See Marjorie Perloff, “How a thing will / unfold’: Fractal Rhythms in A. R. Am-
mons’s Briefings,” in Complexities of Motion: New Essays on A. R. Ammons’s Longer
Poems, ed. Steven P. Schneider (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
1999), 68-82; Roger Gilberg, “Mobius Meets Satchmo: Mixed Metaphors, Form, and
Vision in lare,” in Schneider, 183-213.
8. Samuel French Morse, introduction to Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose by
Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1982), xxxii—xxxiii.
9. A. R. Ammons, “An Interview,” by William Warsh, in Set in Motion: Essays, Inter-
views, and Dialogues, ed. Zofia Burr (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 60.
10. Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose, new ed., revised, en-
larged, corrected, ed. Milton J. Bates (New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 1989), 192.
11. A. R. Ammons, Garbage (New York: Norton, 1993), 84.
12. Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1986), 10.
13. Ibid., 26.
14. A. R. Ammons, “A Note on Incongruence,” in Burr, 8-9.
15. A. R. Ammons, The Selected Poems: Expanded Edition (New York: Norton,
1986), 53.
16. Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror-Imagery in Titles and Texts of the
Middle Ages and English Renaissance, trans. Gordon Collier (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), 111.
17. Ibid., 39.
 Nature in Ammons’s Poetry =Cw 89

18. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1979), 12-13.
19. On the metaphoric implications of sight, see Walter J. Ong, Interfaces of the
Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1977); Hans Jonas, “The Nobility of Sight Philosophy and Phenomeno-
logical Research 14 (1954): 507-519; Evelyn Fox Keller and Christine B. Grontkowski,
“The Mind’s Eye,” in Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Meta-
physics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, ed. Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hin-
tikka (Boston: D. Reidel, 1983), 207-224.
20. Stevens, Collected Poems, 383.
21. Ammons, Selected Poems, 58.
227 lbids li:
23. A. R. Ammons, Sphere: The Form of a Motion (New York: Norton, 1974), 31.
24. A. R. Ammons, Selected Poems, 74.
25. For discussions of the metaphor implications of the senses of sight and hearing,
see Jonas; Keller and Grontkowski; and Ong.
26. Quoted in Scigaj, 88 (from Shelby Stephenson, “An Interview with A. R. Am-
mons,” Pembroke Magazine 18 [1986]: 196-202).
27. Ammons, Glare, 21.
28. Ammons, Selected Poems, 1
29. Ammons, Garbage, 109. For a full discussion of Ammons’s language = garbage
metaphor, see Gyorgyi Voros, “Wallace Stevens and A. R. Ammons as Men on the
Dump,” Wallace Stevens Journal 24, no. 2 (2000): 161--175.
30. Ammons, Selected Poems, 3.
31. Ibid.
32. For a detailed discussion of the ecopoetic implications of Ammons’s chiasmic
constructions, see Leonard M. Scigaj’s chapter “Homology and Chiastic Energy in the
Lived Body: A. R. Ammons,’ in his invaluable study, Sustainable Poetry: Four American
Ecopoets (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 83-127.
33. Ammons, Garbage, 99.
34. A. R. Ammons, Brink Road (New York: Norton, 1996), 138.
35. Ammons, Selected Poems, 69.
36. Scigaj, 89.
37. Patricia Berry, Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology
(Postfach, Switzerland: Spring Publications, 1982), 113.
38. Ibid.
39. Stevens, Collected Poems, 86.
40. Stevens, Opus Posthumous (1989), 192.
100 ces Gyorgyi Voros

41. Ammons, Selected Poems, 28

42. Berry, 120-122.
43. Stevens, Collected Poems, 129
44. Ammons, Brink Road, 111.
45. Berry, 123.
46. Carson, 11.
47. Ammons, Glare, 30.
48. Ibid., 238-239.
49. Ammons, Garbage, 74.
50. Ibid., 81-82.
J. Scott Bryson

Ow “Between the Earth and Silence”

Place and Space in the Poetry of
W. S. Merwin

In his short poem “Utterance” W. S. neeriein writes of sitting “over words” and
hearing a sound, “a kind of whispered sighing,” that transcends language. This
sound exists somewhere beyond the earth and the poet’s ability to convey it
but still not in the realm of silence, where it cannot be heard—it is “spinning
its one syllable / between the earth and silence.”’ Merwin’s dilemma is to com-
municate his experience with the unarticulable sound that has so moved him,
while still honoring its ultimate unattainability. From his earliest work Mer-
win has repeatedly explored this tension, attempting to address issues of con-
sequence while highlighting the ineptitudes of the very language he employs.
Like many other ecopoets, he deals with this conflict by offering a vision of the
world that values the interaction between two interdependent and seemingly
paradoxical desires. In the words of cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, these two
desires are (1) to create place, making a conscious and concerted effort to
know the more-than-human world around us and (2) to value space, recog-
nizing the extent to which that very world is ultimately unknowable. In other
words, most of the project undertaken by Merwin falls somewhere within
these two objectives: to know the world and to recognize its ultimate un-
knowability. But whereas many ecopoets find a way to balance these two con-
cepts in their work, Merwin’s poetry displays a consistent uneasiness when it
comes to finding this equilibrium. Because of his skepticism concerning
human language and its ability to communicate something meaningful about
the world, Merwin often displays a reluctance toward offering finalizing state-
ments, even about matters for which he feels intensely passionate. Instead, his
poetry consistently tends toward silence.
To flesh out this claim, I am going to rely heavily on the work of Tuan, who
in his landmark Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience explains,
“<Space’ is more abstract than ‘place’ What begins as undifferentiated space
becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.”’ For ex-
ample, a neighborhood “is at first a confusion of images to the new resident; it
is blurred space ‘out there.’ Learning to know the neighborhood requires the

101
102 ce = J. Scott Bryson

identification of significant localities, such as street corners and architectural

landmarks, within the neighborhood space” (17-18). Thus, says Tuan, “En-
closed and humanized space is place” (54).
When viewed through Tuan’s framework, Merwin can be perceived as a
place-maker, attempting to move his audience out of an existence in an ab-
stract space, where we are simply visitors in an unknown neighborhood, and
into a recognition of our present surroundings as place and thus as home. Like
most ecopoets, Merwin attempts to depict the world as a community founded
on reciprocity between human and nonhuman nature. As he commented in a
1998 interview, “I think that it’s a great delusion to feel that we are separate
from the world. I mean, what we see on the outside and what we are on the in-
side, we can’t tell where the one starts and the other one goes on, and if we
damage one we damage the other. We can’t make that separation.”’ Through-
out his career Merwin has looked to articulate this relationship with the world
around him, as in “Burning Mountain” from Drunk in the Furnace, where he
personifies a mountain, highlighting its mutual bond with the humans
around it and emphasizing its “heart” and “veins.”* And in a poem from Rain
in the Trees he writes, “by the tree touching the tree I hear the tree / I walk with
the tree / we talk.”> Merwin has repeatedly stressed this interdependent quality
of the relationship between himself and the nonhuman world around him, as-
serting that the earth “is still a very beautiful place; it’s seldom enough that it’s
seen [in and of itself]. It’s seen as an object of exploitation, rather than as
something of which we are a part. We are neither superior nor inferior, we are
a part of it. It is not different from us. So when we treat it with contempt and
we exploit it, we are despising ourselves.”* This attitude demonstrates the
essence of a Tuanian sense of place, one that assigns a high priority to viewing
the world as a community connected in a symbiotic web.
It follows, then, that Merwin’s awareness of the reciprocal relationship be-
tween himself and a more-than-human world would result in a sincere at-
tachment to that world. His lyrics consistently return to this affection. Notice,
for example, the attention to details and the appreciation of place in “Sheep
Passing,’ from The River Sound, where the poet images “Mayflies hover[ing]
throughout the lone evening” and tells of a winding lane in which

the stream of sheep runs among shadows calling

the old throats gargling again uphill
along known places once more and from the bells
borne by their predecessors.
 Place and Space in W. S. Merwin ces 103

The music from these bells is “dull as wood” and “clonk(s] to the flutter of all
/ the small hooves over the worn stone.”’ In Tuanian terms this description—
of the lane, the sheep, the hooves, the worn stone, the sound of the bells worn
by generation after generation of sheep—is not a confusion of images to a
new resident but a significant locality endowed with value by one familiar
with the neighborhood.
Especially in The River Sound, a collection largely devoted to the past, Mer-
win frequently returns to a nostalgia about his former places. The center-
piece of the collection, the long poem “Testimony,” focuses particularly on
this affinity for place. Speaking to his wife, Paula, for instance, about their ex-
periences with the land around them, Merwin describes the two of them lis-
tening to

the long notes of those nightingales

as we lie watching the moonlight

that has remembered everything
the stones of the old house shining
the cloud of light veiling the hill
and the river below shining upwards as though it were still.”

The details Merwin presents in this depiction of the experience, along with the
quiet but fervent emotion he attaches to it, communicate his place-awareness.
His connection to his place is manifested through the details he describes and
the emotional attachment with which he describes them.
Just as often, though, we see the flip side of this issue, as Merwin’s poetry
laments the “placelessness” of modern society, whose members often seem
completely unaware of the bond between themselves and the rest of the world.
One of the best examples appears in “Native Trees,’ which begins with the
lines “Neither my father nor my mother knew / the names of the trees / where
I was born.” The poet tells of asking, as a boy, the names of the trees around
him, but his parents failed even to look where he pointed. The poem con-
cludes in the voice of the child, asking whether trees existed where his parents
were children and whether they had seen them. The parents’ answer typifies
the placelessness Merwin condemns in this and many other poems, for he
knows that “when they said yes it meant / they did not remember” (6). The
boy asks the names of those trees, “but both my father and my mother / said
they never knew” (6). The fact that they cannot name each species or the
individual trees is not, of course, the issue for Merwin. Rather, it is the lack of
104 ce J. Scott Bryson

attention to and awareness of the more-than-human world around us that he

laments in this poem.
He takes up the issue of placelessness again, albeit less subtly, in “Airport.”
In this poem the airport is described as “devoted to absence in life,” in that
“the building is not inhabited it is not /home except to roaches / it is not loved
it is serviced”; the airport “is not a place / but a container with signs / direct-
ing a process.” Then, after describing the building, the poet turns to its con-
sumers and, in first person, concludes the poem by saying, “we travel far and
fast / and as we pass through we forget / where we have been” (55). The impli-
cation is clear: by delivering ourselves up to such a placeless lifestyle, we lose a
sense of ourselves, as well as an awareness of our past, of “where we have
been,” and thus of who we are.
Consequently, this placelessness can lead to a lack of connection to the
nonhuman world. Some of Merwin’s best-known poems deal with the disap-
pearance of species that results from this lack of place-awareness, like the
shore birds he references, which, “While I think of them ... are growing rare."
The opening lines of “Orioles” underscore the same issue: “The song of the
oriole began as an echo / but this year it was not heard afterward.”” And as he
points out in “The Asians Dying,” the exploitation and destruction of parts of
the nonhuman world offer serious consequences for the human world as well,
for “When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains.” Jane Fra-
zier explains that for Merwin “the epistemological and physical distance be-
tween ourselves and nature that we have increasingly created has divided us
from our most important psychic resource and the basis of our being. Hu-
mans are a part of a collective universe, and by shaping the world to accom-
modate our immediate desires we have gone far to eliminate the original con-
ditions that we need for a complete, healthy environment.” Clearly, much of
Merwin’s poetry works from this assumption that a commitment to place
helps prevent such physical and psychological disasters, whereas placelessness
has the potential to produce them.
Simultaneously, though, Merwin’s writings encourage readers to appreciate
and even revere space. Although most critics readily discuss place in nature
writing, we often denigrate space rather than value it, primarily because we
typically interpret it as the opposite of place and thus as placelessness. As Tuan
puts it, “Spaciousness is closely associated with the sense of being free. . . .
Being free has several levels of meaning. Fundamental is the ability to tran-
scend the present condition.” Based on this explanation, “spaciousness”
would indeed appear to be a value that environmentally minded poets would
deemphasize and even criticize, arguing that the last thing we should do is
 Place and Space in W. S. Merwin ce 105

attempt to transcend our present situation. Rather, we have to learn to live in

and with our environment.
Yet Tuan’s explanation of spaciousness does not stop with the idea of
transcendence; in fact, Tuan goes on to argue that this supposed ability to
“transcend the present condition” is actually fool’s gold in that the freedom as-
sociated with spaciousness only appears to offer the means to master the
world beyond us. As we move into space, it ironically demonstrates for us the
extent of our limitations, rather than our freedom: “Imagine a man . . . who
learns first to ride a bicycle, then to drive a sports car, and eventually to pilot
a small aircraft. He makes successive gains in speed; greater and greater dis-
tances are overcome. He conquers space but does not nullify its sensible size;
on the contrary, space continues to open out for him.’'® Thus the more we
move into space, the more we recognize its vastness as it expands before
us, helping us to understand our own smallness and producing an attitude of
humility.
Although the process of place-making is a crucial activity in the work of
Merwin, that process is often overshadowed by a space-conscious awareness of
the limitations of human insight, language, and even poetry itself. This ever-
present Tuanian space-consciousness, perhaps the most prominent character-
istic of Merwin’s poetry, is much different from the placelessness discussed
above, for it is based on a fundamental humility in terms of what we can and
cannot know, can and cannot control. Space-consciousness emerges from a
mindful relationship with place because a deep knowledge of place produces a
humble awareness of our own limitations.
In Merwin’s work this awareness of Tuanian space results in a prizing of ig-
norance, which represents the path to wisdom. Merwin makes this case in his
interview with Folsom and Nelson, where he references Thoreau’s essay
“Walking” and argues that

a real poem comes out of what you don’t know. You write it with what you
know, but finally its source is what you don’t know. There’s a passage where
Thoreau says, “How can someone find his ignorance if he has to use his
knowledge all the time?” The arrogance would be the assumption that
what you know has some kind of final value and you can depend on it, and
it will get rid of a whole world which you will never know, which really in-
forms it.”

This appreciation of ignorance guides Merwin’s verse, resulting in lines where

he speaks of “the beam of some / star familiar but in no sense known” or
106 ce = J. Scott Bryson

where he hears the song of a wren but makes sure to point out that he hears it
“without understanding.”
“The Saint of the Uplands” takes ignorance as its primary theme. The
speaker of this poem, the saint himself, tries to explain to his followers that the
ignorance of humanity is a gift to be appreciated. He states that his support-
ers’ devotion to and reliance on him have actually cost them an understanding
of themselves, explaining to the reader, “I gave them / Nothing but what was
theirs.” He describes the people’s eyes as “empty” and says that for them vi-
sion “[m]ight not come otherwise / Than as water” (20). He then metonymi-
cally links this vision-bringing water with ignorance and mystery as he tells of
teaching the people that they have their own streams of water, their own ig-
norance:

I took a single twig from the tree of my ignorance

And divined the living streams under
Their very houses. I showed them
The same tree growing in their dooryards.
You have ignorance of your own, I said.
They have ignorance of their own. (20)

Here New Testament language such as “living streams” suggests a theme of re-
demption. With tree images calling to mind both the tree of good and evil and
the crucifixion, and vision being “divined” from under these trees of igno-
rance, the speaker implies that the ignorance that brings vision, understand-
ing, and redemption comes as a result of acknowledging the mystery that ex-
ists within everyone.
The poem concludes with the saint despondent over his ultimate inability
to teach the people anything at all:

I taught them nothing.

Everywhere
The eyes are returning under the stones. And over
My dry bones they build their churches, like wells. (20)

Instead of understanding the ignorant vision the saint speaks of, the followers
forsake their own streams of ignorance and build churches over the “dry
bones” of the dead teacher. In their efforts to understand the religion and
achieve salvation, the people have actually lost their own truth. By searching
for the light, they have missed the meaning in the darkness.
 Place and Space in W. S. Merwin Ces 107

Merwin’s work continually returns to this theme, reminding readers to

value ignorance and recognize that experience cannot be captured, even by
the poet. The Heraclitus quote Merwin chose as the epigraph to The Lice is a
prime example: “All men are deceived by the appearances of things, even
Homer himself, who was the wisest man in Greece; for he was deceived by
boys catching lice: they said to him, ‘What we have caught and what we have
killed we have left behind, but what has escaped us we bring with us.” In his
reading of this passage Thomas B. Byers says that the epigraph sets up “a po-
etics not of self, but of self-restraint.”” For Merwin, writes Byers, “[p]oems
must not consent to the catching and killing of final statement or formal
closure. Rather, they must ‘escape’ authority—go beyond the poet’s largely
delusive powers to fix and order—if they are to accompany the self on its
journey” (81).
Allowing the subjects of his poems—for Merwin, both human and nonhu-
man nature—to “escape authority” is a fundamentally space-conscious act. He
stressed this idea in a 1983 interview:

I think that poetry, and maybe all writing, certainly everything we do to

some degree, does not come out of what you know, but out of what you
don’t know. And one of the great superficialities of positivistic thinking is the
assumption that things really evolve out of what you know. Nothing evolves
out of what you know. You don’t move from what you know to something
else you know. And it’s the unknown that keeps rendering possibilities.”

To accept that the unknown renders possibilities is to practice the apprecia-

tion of space.
What often appears in ecopoetry, indeed, what most ecopoets strive for, is
a harmonization of place and space. Merwin also seems to find this goal at-
tractive, if sometimes impossible. As he put it in a 1988 interview with David
Elliot, a lack of place-awareness leads to a deprivation of reverence for the
nonhuman world, which could potentially lead to the destruction of the earth:

If we’re so stupid that we choose to destroy each other and ourselves, that’s
bad enough; but if we destroy the whole life on the planet! And I’m not
talking about a big bang; I’m talking about it—the destruction of the seas,
the destruction of species after species, the destruction of the forests. These
are not replaceable. We can’t suddenly decide years down the line that we
made a mistake and put it all back. The feeling of awe—something that we
seem to be losing—is essential for survival.”
108 ce J. Scott Bryson

What is necessary, in other words, is a space-conscious “awe” combined with

and resulting from a place-centered commitment to the world itself.
Often Merwin is able to achieve such a synthesis in his verse. Consider, for
example, the title poem from The Vixen, in which the poet expresses his won-
der at his encounter with the fox. The vixen becomes representative of the
larger, nonhuman world Merwin loves, and the poem serves as something of a
paean to the animal as Merwin prays that his words “find their own / places”™
in the silence that follows his exposure to the world beyond him. We hear his
enthusiastic fondness for the fox as he addresses her: “even now you are un-
harmed even now perfect / as you have always been now when your light paws
are running / on the breathless night on the bridge” (69). Coupled with this
sense of connection to the nonhuman world is Merwin’s customary wonder at
the ultimate unknowability of the vixen, whom he describes as an “aura of
complete darkness,”

keeper of the kept secrets

of the destroyed stories
the escaped dreams the sentences
never caught in words. (69)

In this lyric Merwin presents us with a model for a balanced combination of

place and space: proceeding out of his passionate attachment to the vixen is an
intense appreciation for the fox’s dark, secretive, uncatchable nature.
This combination surfaces frequently in Merwin’s verse. The first line of
the first poem of The River Sound, which fittingly uses bridges as one of its
primary symbols, establishes the volume’s place-space theme. In “Ceremony
after an Amputation” the poet addresses “Spirits of the place who were here
before I saw it.”” With this line he asserts a point he repeatedly revisits in the
collection: that his “place,” the world around him, existed long before the in-
dividual speaker arrived to describe it or address it or even care for it.”° This
lone sentence articulates both Merwin’s dedication to a Tuanian sense of
place, as can be heard in the reverence with which he addresses the spirits, and
his recognition of the “spaciousness” of the larger world, in that it is greater
than his ability to understand or communicate it. This space-consciousness
remains present throughout the opening stanza; the speaker goes on to tell the
spirits of place, “You have taught me without meaning,” and he describes them
as “unpronounceable as a face.”
Take as another example a stanza from “Testimony,” where Merwin narrates
(in third person) a moment from childhood when he looked from a hilltop
 Place and Space in W. S. Merwin ces 109

over “a green valley that shone / with such light all the words were poor / later
to tell what he had known.” It is the very wonder he feels regarding this expe-
rience with place that convinces him that the feeling is not articulable—“the
words were poor.’ But notice that it is merely the articulation that is marred by
the linguistic limitation; the lack of sufficient words does not color or under-
mine the experience itself. Rather, the words are simply inadequate to render
“what he had known.” There is no uncertainty here. The space-consciousness
is certainly present, but it coexists with the poet’s commitment to place.
Merwin often, however, is unable to present such a harmonizing vision in
his poems, as his space-consciousness threatens to override his place sensibil-
ities. Consider, for instance, the famous “For a Coming Extinction,” in which
Merwin addresses a gray whale that “we,” humans, are sending to “The End.”
In this poem we see clearly the primary tension informing most of Merwin’s
ecopoetry. On one hand, the poet displays a postmodern awareness of lan-
guage and its inability to communicate something important. He tells the
whale, “I write as though you could understand / And I could say it.”” Cou-
pled with this is the absence of moral imperatives that results from a stripping
away of transcendent foundations. The speaker commands the whale that
when it meets “That great god” at “The End,” it must

Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing.

Tell him
That it is we who are important. (123)

Yet on the other hand, this postmodern skepticism regarding language and
morality is problematized by an ecologically minded belief that there is some-
thing important that must be conveyed, that a real world, not just a mere po-
etic construction, is at stake. A real-life species is near extinction, and its erad-
ication will “Leav[e] behind it the future / Dead / And ours” (123). The other
casualties of this dead future include the “irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
/ And foreordaining as stars,” creatures like “The sea cows the Great Auks the
gorillas” (123).
Awareness of these sometimes conflicting issues places Merwin, along
with other ecopoets, in a difficult situation. For he is well aware of the linguis-
tic and epistemological issues that have now come to bear on the current
generation of poets and other thinkers, issues that call the very existence of
110 ce J. Scott Bryson

“knowledge” and “truth” into question. Yet simultaneously, he is also intensely

aware of the importance of communicating something, and of the impending
loss if he does not speak. These two sets of issues—both postmodern and eco-
logical—form the crux of Merwin’s difficulty in writing as a contemporary
ecopoet. Jonathan Bate explains this tension: “Postmodernity proclaims that
all marks are textmarks; ecopoetics proposes that we must hold fast to the
possibility that certain textmarks called poems can bring back to our memory
humankind’s ancient knowledge that without landmarks we are lost.” And
much of the evocative power of “For a Coming Extinction” and other Merwin
poems stems from the fact that we hear both a place-consciousness and a
space-consciousness; but in these poems, unlike the poems discussed above, a
discord exists between place and space.
The problem for Merwin is not that his sense of place is overcome by his
space-consciousness. In other words, it is not that he loses sight of his devo-
tion to the nonhuman world and what takes place around him. Rather, his
awareness of Tuanian space, that is, the humble awareness of his own and hu-
manity’s limitations, sometimes prevents him from fully articulating that de-
votion to place; thus, in his poems the harmony is not always apparent. We
know from his other writings, and from many of his poems, that an attach-
ment to place is crucial to his poetics. But his skepticism regarding human
language, human intentions, and human knowledge is so great that he be-
comes extremely dubious regarding our ability to fully interact with, commit
to, and communicate our place in the world as a home.
Most of this skepticism centers on language and its inability to articulate
accurately and fully the poet’s experiences with the world. The words and their
objects do not match up. Frustration with this linguistic difficulty appears
throughout the Merwin canon. He speaks of “having a tongue / Of dust” and
elsewhere calls the tongue “[t]he black coat that fell off the wall / With sleeves
trying to say something.” He also depicts himself as an inept describer of the
world: “My blind neighbor has required of me / A description of darkness /
And I begin I begin. . . .”*» Cheri Davis offers what she calls “the basic existen-
tial, linguistic, and spiritual problem Merwin faces in his poetry”:

This is Merwin’s parable for our time: After God created Adam and Eve, He
instructed them to give names to the animals. He brought the animals to
them one by one, and they were named. The names were magical in that
they had rapport with the spiritual being of each animal, but unfortunately
since then language has lost its original symbolic function. It, like man, fell.
Call a wild animal by its name today. What happens?”
 Place and Space in W. S. Merwin ces 111

The problem is that the poet comprehends the communal nature of the world
and the connection that exists between himself and the animals, whom he re-
gards as “the very embodiment of the miraculous in the common”;* yet he
feels that no language exists with which to assert the reality of this connection.
Merwin conveys this frustration in the three-line poem “The Old Boast,”
from the aptly titled Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment:

Listen natives of a dry place

from the harpist’s fingers
rain”

In this complex lyric the poet indicates his awareness of his own limited pow-
ers. Although his poetry may approximate an individual version of reality, it is
ultimately no more an accurate reproduction of reality than a harp’s note is of
actual rain. Thus we hear Merwin repeatedly bemoaning the fact that lan-
guage (along with human understanding in general) is not up to the task of
rendering an experience he has undergone. As he puts it, “the words I say /
sometimes are heard another way / as nothing is dependable.” Each experi-
ence is, in the words of the title of Merwin’s fifth collection of poems, The
Moving Target.”
This issue is highlighted throughout Merwin’s verse, so much so that the
very form of his poems acknowledges the impossibility of “capturing” the
poet’s experience with the world around him. The poems’ maze-like enjamb-
ment, turning virtually each line of each poem into something of a riddle; the
almost complete lack of punctuation and capitalization; the often-cryptic ti-
tles; the difficult syntax; the abandonment of what Peter Davison calls “the de-
vices of journalism—the who-what-when-where-why” that traditionally pro-
vide context for the poem’s subject:* All of these qualities reinforce the
concept that experience surpasses the signifiers we ascribe to it, that the world
itself is greater than the words with which we attempt to articulate our under-
standing of and connection to it. Put simply, the very form of the poems dis-
tances the reader from their content, thus emphasizing disconnection.
Therefore, in response to this feeling of disconnectedness, Merwin’s poems
exhibit a fervent appreciation for silence, so much so that the conclusion of
many poems finds the speaker sitting in silence, listening, waiting, not speak-
ing. For decades Merwin critics have discussed his use of silence, darkness,
and absence in his poetry. As Richard Howard has said, “a silence lines
his speech.”® And Byers points out that this silence is “made literal in the
poems’ appearance on the page, with their short, halting lines, wide margins,
112 ce J. Scott Bryson

frequent stanza breaks, and vast amounts of white space after the last word.”
In Tuanian parlance, this silence proceeds out of a deep devotion to place and
a resultant space-conscious humility in the face of the poet’s inability to com-
municate or fully understand that place.
Take, for example, Merwin’s narrative poem “Finding a Teacher,” which
opens with the speaker coming on “an old friend fishing,’ to whom he asks
a question. The friend answers only, “Wait” (285). The speaker tells us that
it was

a question about the sun

about my two eyes my ears my mouth
my heart the earth with its four seasons
my feet where I was standing
where I was going

and that “it slipped through my / hands as though it were water / into the
river” and flowed away (285-286). The closing lines emphasize the lesson the
speaker learned from the nonanswer he received from the fisherman: “I no
longer knew what to ask / I could tell that his line had no hook / I understood
that I was to stay and eat with him” (286). We see here the rational intellect
being replaced by a respect for waiting and silence. The reason-based question
appears, disappears, then dies away; then night falls, bringing with it the les-
son of waiting and, symbolized by the unbaited hook, a voluntary surrender
of control. And ultimately, even the lesson learned goes unexpressed.
At times another form of silence, darkness, is employed by Merwin. “By
Day and by Night,” from The Moving Target, suggests that the shadow, the
“index of the sun,” is in fact superior to the light in that it is omnipresent,
whereas the light is transitory. Addressing the shadow itself, Merwin writes
that it sets up the sun’s absence “like a camp. / And his fire only confirms you.
And his death is your freedom.” In this preference for darkness over light
Merwin affirms that it is often better to remain in shadow and silence than to
make pronouncements concerning issues about which we cannot have more
than limited knowledge.
In “Finally” the poet relates the moment he decides to confront his own
darkness, which he calls “[m]y dread, my ignorance, my / Self.” He recognizes
this unseen Self as his own identity, saying “Come, no longer unthinkable. Let
us share / Understanding like a family name.” The speaker goes on to demon-
strate his hope in the meaning that lies in this darkness:
 Place and Space in W. S. Merwin) ces 113

Come. As a man who hears a sound at the gate

Opens the window and puts out the light
The better to see out into the dark,
Look, I put it out.*

The speaker decides to confront and acknowledge his own “no longer un-
thinkable” and to accept that often the only authentic response to an experi-
ence with the world is to embrace and take refuge in the mystery of darkness
and silence.
The alternative is to ignore the mystery, the shade, the absence, the silence.
In “Native Trees,” discussed above, when the young Merwin asks his parents
about the place they live and the names of the trees, they do not hear his ques-
tions, in fact do not even look where the boy points. The reason is that their
attention is held by their present, familiar surroundings so much that they no
longer acknowledge the world’s mystery:

across the room they could watch

walls they had forgotten
where there were no questions
no voices and no shade.

The absence of questions, voices, and shade means that frightening mystery is
no longer acknowledged there, a mystery that of course appeals to the young
Merwin but frightens the parents who look to avoid such unknowns. The
poem therefore highlights the fact that a lack of a space-consciousness that
embraces the unknown can lead to a lack of connection to place as well.
Ultimately, then, as in most ecopoetry, place and space interact in Merwin’s
verse. The interaction leads to harmony at times, but more often the best the
poet can do is to take refuge in silence. Still, the question for Merwin is how to
honor his experience with the more-than-human world and still recognize his
ultimate inability to communicate that experience. Leonard Scigaj writes that
Merwin’s poetry’s

self-reflexiveness is very postmodern, but the thrust is not centripetal, to-

ward the world of words as a self-contained synchronic system. It mourns
the loss of a naive encounter with nature as it foregrounds the impedence
[sic] of language and conceptuality. It wishes it could recover something
more from the silence, to convey the quality of a silent apprehension of the
114 ce J. Scott Bryson

earth, and therefore the thrust is centrifugal, towards the nature that lies
beyond the power of language.”

This reading lines up well with the closing lines of “Testimony.” As the autobi-
ographical poem concludes, Merwin recounts the story of his mother showing
him, as a boy, the Empire State Building. She instructs him to view the entire
height of the building “as the time the earth existed / before life had begun on
it,” telling him that the lightning rod on the roof would then represent the
short amount of time since life began. Switching metaphors, his mother then
compares the entire structure to a large book, explaining to the young Merwin
that “the whole age when there had been / life of the kind we knew which we
/ came to call human and our own” would rest on top of “that closed book” “as
thick as one stamp that might be / on a post card” (108).
The poem then closes with Merwin’s characteristic questioning acceptance
of mystery, as he and his mother walk along the street “over the stamp I had
not seen”:

where would the card be going to

that the stamp was to be put on
would I see what was written down
on it whenever it was sent
and the few words what would they mean
that we took with us as we went (108)

The poem thus concludes with a question, and an unanswered one at that.
Once again, mysterious silence reigns over Merwin’s verse. Yet as he said in the
Folsom and Nelson interview, “The human can not exist independently in a
natural void; whatever the alienation is that we feel from the natural world, we
are not in fact alienated. . . . We're part of that whole thing.”” This place-
centered conviction that “we’re part of that whole thing” pervades Merwin’s
writings. But because he can never move beyond his mother’s space-conscious
lesson of the postage stamp, his poetry continually tends toward silence.

Notes

1. W. S. Merwin, The Rain in the Trees (New York: Knopf, 1992), 44.
2. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (St. Paul: University of
Minnesota Press, 1977), 6.
 Place and Space in W. S. Merwin ce 1S)

3. W. S. Merwin, ““This Absolutely Matters’: An Interview with W. S. Merwin, inter-

view by J. Scott Bryson and Tony Brusate, Limestone (1998): 1-2.
4. W. S. Merwin, The First Four Books of Poems: A Mask for Janus, The Dancing
Bears, Green with Beasts, The Drunk in the Furnace (New York: Atheneum, 1975),
254-255. Sandra M. Guy provides a fuller reading of this poem, along with an exami-
nation of Merwin’s use of the four elements, in “W. S. Merwin and the Primordial Ele-
ments: Mapping the Journey to Mythic Consciousness,” Midwest Quarterly 38, no. 4
(summer 1997): 414.
5. Merwin, Rain in the Trees, 7.
6. W. S. Merwin, “W. S. Merwin: An Interview,” interview by Michael Clifton, Amer-
ican Poetry Review, no. 4 (July-August 1983): 22.
7. W. S. Merwin, The River Sound (New York: Knopf, 1999), 120.
8. Ibid., 88.
9. Merwin, Rain in the Trees, 6.
10. Ibid., 55.
11. Merwin, The River Sound, 124.
12. Ibid., 117. ;
13. W. S. Merwin, The Second Four Books of Poems: The Moving Target, The Lice, The
Carrier of Ladders, Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (Port Townsend, Wash.:
Copper Canyon Press, 1993), 118.
14. Jane Frazier, From Origin to Ecology: Nature and the Poetry of W. S. Merwin
(Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999), 41.
15, Tuan, 52.
16. Ibid., 53.
17. W. S. Merwin, “Fact Has Two Faces’: Interview,” interview by Ed Folsom and
Cary Nelson, in Regions of Memory: Uncollected Prose 1949-82, ed. Ed Folsom and Cary
Nelson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 335-336.
18. Merwin, “The Wren” in The River Sound, 114.
19. Merwin, Second Four Books, 20.
20. W. S. Merwin, The Lice (New York: Atheneum, 1967), epigraph.
21. Thomas B. Byers, What I Cannot Say: Self, Word, and World in Whitman,
Stevens, and Merwin (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 81.
22. W. S. Merwin, “Possibilities of the Unknown: Conversations with W. S. Mer-
win,” interview by Jack Myers and Michael Simms, Southwest Review 2 (spring 1983):
168.
23. W. S. Merwin, “An Interview with W. S. Merwin,” interview by David L. Elliott,
Contemporary Literature 39 (spring 1998): 6.
24. W. S. Merwin, The Vixen (New York, Knopf, 1996), 69.
25. Merwin, The River Sound, 3.
116 ce J. Scott Bryson

» «
26. See, for instance, “Harm’s Way,’ “Wanting to See,” and “Chorus” for other poems
that highlight this theme.
27. Merwin, The River Sound, 3.
28. Ibid., 52.
29. Merwin, Second Four Books, 123.
30. Jonathan Bate, Song of the Earth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 175.
31. W. S. Merwin, Second Four Books, 83.
32. Ibid., 99.
33. Cheri Davis, W. S. Merwin (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 42.
34. Merwin, Second Four Books, 43.
35. Ibid., 233.
36. Merwin, The River Sound, 87.
37. Leonard M. Scigaj makes this point in his discussion of Heidegger, explaining
that “even the most successful poetic quest leaves the quester cognizant of the fact that
language does not reveal its origins, and Being conceals as it reveals glimpses” (Sus-
tainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets |Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
1999], 181).
38. Peter Davison, “Merwin Hears the Immortality of Echo, review of The River
Sound, by W. S. Merwin, Boston Globe, January 24, 1999, sec. G, p. 3.
39. Richard Howard, Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United
States since 1950 (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 380.
40. Byers, 109.
41. Merwin, Second Four Books, 285.
42. Ibid., 14.
43, Ibid., 24.
44, Merwin, Rain in the Trees, 6.
45. Scigaj, 183.
46. Merwin, The River Sound, 108.
47. Merwin, “Fact Has Two Faces,” 323.
Leonard M. Scigaj
CwxPanentheistic Epistemology
The Style of Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir

After inventorying 1980s environmental disasters such as the mercury conta-

mination of the Rhine River and poisoned fish in the Mediterranean, the
Christian theologian |Matthew Fox concluded in The Coming of the Cosmic
Christ that “the killing of Mother Earthi in our time is the number one ethical,
spiritual, and human issue of our planet. > Fox attributed the root cause of our
planetary environmental degradation to a loss of offaith in
i the living cosmology
articulated throughout the New Testamentitand in the textsofmedieval mys-
tics.” Fox followed the work of Jaroslav Pelikan’ in arguing that, since Augus-
tine and the fourth-century patristic writers, Christianity has gradually lost
that sense of a living cosmology by excessively focusing
on guilt and personal
salvation. The rationalism of the Enlightenment tolled the final death knell;
according to Fox and Pelikan, it split the Western religious psyche into a dual-
istic preoccupation with objective fact, sexual guilt, and the search for the his-
torical Jesus.’
«To heal that split and forestall planetary environmental catastrophe, Fox
followed Pelikan and Teilhard de Chardin’ in asserting that’ we must reinvigo-
rate a belief in the living cosmology articulated by the earliest Christian writ-
ers in the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and St. John’s Revelation—a cos-
mology last revived by the medieval mystics. In these works we find a Cosmic
Christ whose metanoia or new insight is the nondualistic, compassionate,
often mystic apprehension of the panentheistic divine wherein, as Sehdev
Kumar once stated, “God is in all things and all things are in God.”* The Cos-
mic Christ is for Fox “the divine pattern that connects.””He fosters a sense of
environmental interdependence that we can find in Old Testament prophets
(Jeremiah 23:23-24—“Do I not fill heaven and earth?” says the Lord),
and most New Testament writers (see, for instance, God as “all in all” in 1
Corinthians 15:28 and St. John’s vision of God as “Alpha and Omega,’ who
creates a “new heaven and a new earth” in Revelation 21).
One finds similar statements of visionary interdependence in the majority
of the medieval mystics, especially in St. Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of
Brother Sun,” Hildegard of Bingen’s Illuminations, Dante Alighieri’s Divine

117
118 ce Leonard M. Scigaj

Comedy, Meister Eckhart’s Meditations, and Mechtild of Magdeburg’s Medita-

tions.’ Ten years after Fox’s Cosmic Christ, we find the same cosmological
metanoia in the Sabbath meditations of Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir’
Berry began writing his Sabbath poems in 1979, and he published two earlier
volumes of these meditations in 1987 and 1992." Berry and Fox were follow-
ing the same historical zeitgeist, responding similarly, although from different
disciplines, to the same problem: what Berry characterized in A Timbered
Choir as “the destruction of the world / in our own lives that drives us / half
insane, and more than half." Why did this destruction occur so quickly, and
what can we do to rectify the problem?
Berry’s Christian environmental vision developed gradually, in part as a di-
rect response to the medieval historian Lynn White Jr’s essay about the nega-
tive environmental effects of Christianity. Thirty years ago White startled en-
vironmentalists and traditionalists alike with his argument that the roots of
our ecological crisis concern the assumptions of medieval Western Christian-
ity about the dominance of humans over the natural world. According to
White, Christianity fostered dualism and a linear technology, both of which
eroded an individual’s reliance on sensual participation in nature in the pre-
sent moment. Moldboard plowing, which “attacked the land with such vio-
lence that cross-plowing was not needed,” illustrations of human mastery over
nature on medieval Frankish calendars, the Genesis account of Adam’s domi-
nation over the creatures he named (1:26—28), the attribution of religious mo-
tives for the investigations of New Scientists such as Leibnitz and Newton, and
the extirpation of pagan animism by Christians—all of this evidence indi-
cated to White that “Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood
of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.”
Christianity was not, of course, the only religion that resulted in the despo-
liation of nature, and the economics and power politics of individuals and na-
tions throughout human history have certainly bent and in many cases sub-
verted religious doctrine to underwrite environmentally suspect goals. Yet
White’s challenge remains; given that “no creature other than man has ever
managed to foul its nest in such short order,’ it is certainly worthwhile to con-
sider his point that “human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our
nature and destiny—that is, by religion.””
Of the many direct responses to White’s argument concerning the ecologi-
cal effects of Christianity, Wendell Berry’s in the title essay of The Gift of Good
Land is one of the most eloquent and most incisive/' Berry argued that, al-
though Adam was given dominion over other orders of nature, the Bible
nowhere says that he was given power to destroy the land or any of the crea-
 Panentheistic Epistemology Ce» 119

tures living on it. Berry points us to Genesis 2:15, where Adam, newly exiled
from Eden, is given the earth that he may “dress it and keep it” by the sweat of
his brow. This for Berry implies a stewardship role for humans, and Berry
reads the subsequent historical books of the Old Testament as the Israelites’
slow growth to an understanding of how to acquire the Promised Land and
keep it responsibly. Berry asserts that a story that begins in dark rapacity gains
a “vein of light” that “still accompanies us”: “this light originates in the idea of
the land as a gift—not a free or a deserved gift, but a gift given upon certain
rigorous conditions.” The Bible explicitly presents the Promised Land as “a di-
vine gift to a fallen people,” and continuing to enjoy that gift depends on “eco-
logical discipline”—on (1) their “faithful, grateful, and humble” memory, so
that they continue to “bless the Lord thy God for the good land which he hath
given thee” (Deuteronomy 8:10); (2) on their neighborly honesty and gen-
erosity; and (3) on the daily practice of good stewardship or sustainable hus-
bandry, in preserving the health of the land for future generations, for “all
Creation exists as a bond,” an interdependent whole within which humans
function as just one of many dependent parts."
In the poems of A Timbered Choir Berry explores his belief that we must
respond to the gift of good land with sustainable stewardship. Berry’s latest
Svcs teeetag

tions. The 1987 volume contained a helpful two-page appendix of notes, un-
fortunately not reprinted in A Timbered Choir, that chronicle many of the
deliberately placed biblical echoes in poems dated from 1979 through 1986. In
his preface to A Timbered Choir Berry calls himself an “amateur poet”: he
shuns the experimental, following traditional forms such as the quatrain and
stanzas of rhymed couplets, with an occasional sonnet or use of terza rima.
The real artistry exists in the drama of perception, where Berry complicates
the spareness and directness of his presentation with overlays of imagery that
achieve the complexity of a fugue.
For rest from weekday farm and literary labor Berry developed a habit of
hiking into the hilly woods above his Port Royal, Kentucky, home, to compose
austere, meditative poems. From 1979 through 1997 Berry completed one to
twelve poetic meditations per year. Frequently in A Timbered Choir he refers to
the land as the Creator’s free gift.'° God’s “unabused // Gift that nurtures and
protects” joins “the Giver and the taker” (14). Harmony occurs when humans
respond to that gift with labor and caring for other orders of sentient nature.
This is the land that humans were “given / in trust” (98), but in “our unravel-
ing century” (14) greed and exploitation can make the slow leaf-growth of soil
120 ce Leonard M. Scigaj

disappear very quickly: “The growth of fifty thousand years undone / In a few
careless seasons, stripped to rock / And clay” (16).
Light, darkness, tree, seed, work, and song imagery knit the poems of this
lengthy sequence together with fugal complexity. Light imagery appears on al-
most every page of A Timbered Choir; it often functions as a symbol of the
continual bestowal of God’s grace, his free gift, as the all-important transfer of
energy that ensures the continued life of ecosystems, and as the slow coming
of illumination in humans concerning the wisdom of stewardship, where hu-
mans assist in the drama of renewal within creation. Frequently light imagery
oscillates dialectically with imagery of darkness, which can signify either a
positive potential for new creation, as in Lao Tzu (1, 20, 21)” and in the soil
cycle, or negatively as the limits of human understanding that artificially en-
close God’s creation in concepts and machines. Trees are the living intersec-
tions of divine light and dark soil and are thus emblematic of all created be-
ings. Work imagery affirms that the best course of action for fallen humans is
to respond to the energy that God continually invests in creation with labor
and good stewardship. Seed imagery in consort with light and darkness im-
agery celebrates the God-ordained cycles of husbandry and the slow growth to
illumination in humans who learn to see cosmologically. Song imagery, espe-
cially birdsong, is most cosmological in that it suggests the harmony of all cre-
ation that humans can perceive only by courting the state of silence, where
human ratiocination evaporates and one listens attentively to nature’s sounds.
We believe in these poems in part because Berry has lived his life deliber-
ately, complicating his academic life as a university professor with an even
more demanding life—living sustainably on a farm in Port Royal, Kentucky,
where he has plowed and tended his fifteen arable acres, grown most of his
family’s food, cared for his lambs and sold them locally, and cut his own fire-
wood for the past thirty-five years. The long poem “The Farm” in A Timbered
Choir catalogs the cycle of labor-intensive tasks that Berry completes each year
to keep his farm productive and nearly self-sustaining. Another reason that
readers may believe in these meditations is the graceful calm of presentation
where Berry often suffuses his perceptions, diction, and imagery with a cos-
mology borrowed in part from the same Christian scriptural and mystical tra-
ditions that Fox championed. The source of the cosmological design concerns
Berry’s perception, ubiquitous in the poems, that God’s animating energy in-
habits all creation and that humans can perceive how creation, unless fouled
by humans, sings the praises of its Creator through a harmonious intercon-
nectedness. Fox calls this mystic perception of God’s animating energy suffus-
ing all creation panentheism." Fox prefers panentheism to pantheism, because
 Panentheistic Epistemology ces 121

pantheism, heretical to Christians, robs God of transcendence by equating his

essence with his material creation—hence “everything is God and God is
everything.” Adding the Greek en results in the acceptable assertion that “God
is in everything and everything is in God.”” Lines celebrating God’s animating
spirit as light-giving energy and sustenance occur with noticeable frequency
in Berry’s Sabbath meditations:

What are we but forms

of the self-acknowledging
light that brings us
warmth and song from time
to time?”

A richness from above,

Brought down, is held, and holds
A little while in flow.
Stem and leaf grow from it. (57)

the Presence that we come into with song

is here, shaping the seasons of His wild will. (73)

The dark
Again has prayed the light to come
Down into it, to animate
And move it in its heaviness.

So what was still and dark wakes up,

Becomes intelligent, moves, names
Itself by hunger and by kind,
Walks, swims, flies, cries, calls, speaks, or sings.
We all are praising, praying to
The light we are, but cannot know. (75)

In The Prose of the World Merleau-Ponty argued that style concerns the
process of individual human perception, as unique and distinctive as one’s
handwriting, especially the ability to create a “system of equivalences,” for
our glances explore or “prospect” our surroundings because our corporeal
bodies express themselves prereflectively in the very act of establishing contact
with that lived space." Hence style is not a set of techniques but a mode of
22 oe Leonard M. Scigaj

perception, the way the persona habitually interlaces the objects and events
presented in poems or paintings. The more we investigate Berry’s use of light,
darkness, tree, seed, work, and song imagery in A Timbered Choir, the more we
notice an epistemological process in which the poet’s darting perceptions in-
terrogate his world, only to reverse direction and let a biocentric viewpoint
develop where he lets those elements of the natural world instruct him about
how to live. The more he sees the more he realizes that he is “Seen by more
than I see.””
The purpose of Berry’s reversals of epistemological inquiry within his “sys-
tem of equivalences,” seen especially in the most recent group of Sabbath
poems, 1991-1997, is to learn to inhabit the world so deeply that he comes to
know his own mortality and thereby lose as much as possible his selfish ego in
a spirit of giving in response to God’s charity. Berry’s style, his continual em-
phasis on perception and his ability to interlace light, darkness, tree, seed,
work, and song imagery, gradually coaxes his readers to see as he sees and thus
praise God’s panentheistic energy, his continual gift that animates all created
matter.
More than thirty years ago, in section 15 of “Window Poems,” from his
1968 volume Openings,” Berry offered clues to his epistemological style. Here
he meditates on one of the two sycamores that bookend his “long-legged
house” or writing cabin on the Kentucky River. He hopes to “see beyond his
glances,” with their “distorting geometry / of preconception and habit.” He
wants fervently to know that sycamore “beyond words,” yet “All he has learned
of it / does not add up to it.’* To know that sycamore “beyond words” Berry
must be “of it,” as Merleau-Ponty suggests in The Visible and the Invisible°-—
he must lose his anthropocentric bias and inhabit the earth, not dominate it.
Of his residence in Port Royal, Kentucky, since 1964, Berry once said, “If I be-
longed in this place it was because I belonged fo it.”** Thirty years later, in A
Timbered Choir, Berry time and time again shows his readers how to perform
perceptual reversals where we learn of our humanity by enacting environ-
mental versions of the Christian paradox that one must lose oneself to find
oneself (Luke 17:33). Inhabiting the nonhuman world and learning values
from that nonhuman world becomes a reliable guide to self-knowledge and
self-conduct.
The volume title refers not only to line 4 of the first 1986 poem, but to
poem VI in 1979, in which Berry in his 1990 North Point edition notes refers
us to 1 Chronicles 16:32—33, where the trees sing the praises of the Lord. To
gain an appreciation of this harmony, one must “leave behind / the six days’
world,” and come alone, without weapon, tool, or preconception, into the bio-
 Panentheistic Epistemology Ce 123

centric world of the woods. In this world one finds, as Berry echoes St. Fran-
cis, “the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.”” Berry’s emphasis on
sight, accentuated throughout his meditations, suggests that seeing the “new
heaven and a new earth’ is a matter of revising one’s perceptions. Berry refers
to Revelation 21:1 in his notes to the 1987 edition as a gloss on line 6 of poem
VI in the 1979 group. In the woods one might exist in such a state of biocen-
tric harmony with nonhuman nature that one might encounter a deer “face to
face,”* as God spoke to Moses—“as a man speaketh unto his friend” (Exodus
33311):
Although Berry’s lines seldom sustain the taut, clairvoyant visionary stare
or exalted emotional outpourings of the writings of the medieval mystics, in
both imagery and thematic substance many similarities exist. Both stress the
potential of mystical moments to occur at any time within the ordinary every-
day. Meister Eckhart wrote that “God is here—in this very place—just as
much incarnate as in a human being long ago.”” Similarly, Berry writes that
the farmer must be aware, when he opens the barn door in the cold before
daybreak, “that we / Ourselves are living in the world / It happened in when it
first happened,” for mortals can have visionary encounters with the manger
scene, and the Christ child en famille, bathed “in light / That lights them from
no source we see.”*” Even the winter wren “Breathes in the great informing
Breath,” with Berry in his biblical notes pointing out an allusion to Job
34:14-15: “If he set his heart upon man, fhe gather into himself his spirit and
his breath; All flesh shall perish together, and man shall turn again unto dust.”
Many New Testament writers and medieval mystics use light imagery to
signify both the continual outpouring of God’s power and glory, or doxa, that
promises a Second Coming” and his grace, his continuous gift that illuminates
the world, grants us the wisdom to discern his workings and sustains every liv-
ing creature. Such is the case, Fox notes, in the majestic opening of St. John’s
Gospel and in Christ’s assertion in John that “I am the light of the world”
(8:12, 9:5), in the risen Christ’s return in St. Mark’s Gospel (8:38), and in St.
Paul’s image of how God’s spirit is at work every moment, transfiguring us
into a glorious radiance that surpasses his appearance to Moses (2 Corinthi-
ans 3:18). For Hildegard of Bingen Christ is the illuminating, animating intel-
ligence of the world—”Every creature becomes illuminated by the brightness
of his light”—and for St. Francis Christ is “the light who enlightens all who
have life”; for Dante Christ is the “Eternal Light” that reflects light from the
Creator.”
Frequently in these Christian authors light imagery also conveys a mystic
apprehension of panentheism, the nondualistic belief that God’s animating
124 ce Leonard M. Scigaj

energy suffuses all living creatures. Meister Eckhart stated that “God is in all
things. The more divinity is in things, the more divinity is outside of things.”
Mechtild of Magdeburg wrote that “The day of my spiritual awakening I saw
all things in God and God in all things.” Mechtild believed that “God’s word is
in all creation, visible and invisible. / The Word is living, being, spirit, all ver-
dant greening, all creativity.’™
Compare Mechtild’s belief with the following moment in A Timbered
Choir, when Berry seeks nature and a reversal occurs. In the Merleau-Pontyian
“system of equivalences” of A Timbered Choir the intersections of major im-
agery clusters and the reversals of perception that constitute his style in these
meditations, Berry habitually perceives light displaying a panentheistic ani-
mating energy. When he relinquishes his egocentric preoccupation with tasks
and schedules, he can concentrate on the activity of perception, and he soon
realizes that “There is no vision here but what is seen: /White bloom nothing
explains / But a mute blessedness” wherein “The fresh light” is “stained a
hundred shades of green.” Immediately the spiritual dimension of this mo-
ment of perception opens for Berry, and he recognizes that “This is no hu-
man vision / Subject to our revision; / God’s eye holds every leaf as light is
worn’ (11).
When Berry relinquishes his human dominance, he gains an intimacy with
all of Being. Here he specifically refuses to identify this quiet mystical moment
as his vision; he has relinquished his anthropocentric ego to achieve a percep-
tion of biocentric relatedness, where he fuses with the entire natural world,
the “what is seen.” The emphasis on God’s sustaining presence as a perceptual
process, an “eye” that “holds” all creation within its animating energy, under-
scores the panentheistic vision of A Timbered Choir.
Berry’s panentheistic theme begins and ends with light. Early in his medi-
tations Berry perceives the “light-filled leaves,” and this reminds him of the
original Sabbath, when God rested and took pleasure in his creation—a time
when, before Adam’s fall, “the Maker’s radiant sight / Made radiant every
thing he saw” (8). The “Art” of the “First Sabbath light” is an art that “makes
new again and heals”; it is especially illuminating in Christ's redemptive pat-
tern, “The light made flesh and blood” (27)—Fox’s “divine pattern that con-
nects.” All earthly creatures are leaves that use light, fall into the dark, and re-
turn to light again in the renewal of the carbon cycle. This “calling of all
creatures is design” (19), and Christ’s travail in the dark of death for three days
(analogous to winter and the underground germination of seed) is the origi-
nal “seed,” the pattern of work and growth for all creatures to once again “fill
with light / Like opened eyes. He rests in rising” (25). Love’s energetic craving,
 Panentheistic Epistemology Ces 125

the “yearning of body for body” that dies and is renewed, is “unending light”
(177), for it expresses the Divine Plan. Light is the guarantee of heaven’s “for-
ever” that a brass bowl can hold “for a while” (189). The spiritual light resid-
ing in humans is more important than the willful machinations of the human
ego or the lights of sprawling cities; but “if we will have no light / but our
own,’ we will “make illusory / all the light we have” (198).
The woods where Berry meditates contain old trees that are themselves
“weighty creatures made of light” (73), plants created by sunlight and photo-
synthesis. These woods are evidently virgin forest, never clear-cut (89), and re-
side in an area whose soil type Berry tells us in his notes to the 1987 volume
consisted of “Eden Shale.” Here he finds the wild—nature undomesticated by
human use—“where, in their long dominion, / The trees have been left free”
(9). Once again we have a biocentric reversal. Humans were given dominion
over other orders of nature before Adam’s fall (Genesis 1:26—28), but accord-
ing to Berry’s biocentric light or understanding the trees are elders, older and
longer-lived on this planet, who will remain after humans have made their exit
in the march of geologic time. Once again the accent is on perception, on rec-
ognizing human limits within a less limited, biocentric whole. Speaking to
himself, Berry acknowledges the trees as his “seniors.” “Acknowledged in [his]
eyes, the trees stand as his “praise and prayer.” His “rest” or contentment is “in
this praise / Of what you cannot be / And what you cannot do” (147). These
trees supply a sense of permanence, of continuity, and they stand in perpetual
praise of nature’s ecocycles of renewal (21). They sing the praises of their
Maker, with branches pointing upward like arms outstretched in praise or
prayer (83).
Like the tepee center pole or the Cosmic Tree of many early cultures” trees
in A Timbered Choir hold together Berry’s religious cosmology. These “Apos-
tles of the living light” are “Uprisings of their native ground, / Downcomings
of the distant light.”” Berry’s style is most epistemological as his perceptions of
trees accrete in significance throughout the volume. Merleau-Ponty argues in
The Visible and the Invisible that all our views of nature are necessarily per-
spectival.** We cannot see into the flesh of trees or see what exists behind trees,
for instance, for the trees preexist our contemplation: they are a part of na-
ture’s density and independent of our conscious scrutiny. So Berry conveys
dozens of darting glances at trees to assess what they mean for ecosystems as
well as humans and how they provide clues to an apprehension of God’s cos-
mological purpose. In another panentheistic passage of A Timbered Choir
Berry reminds us of John 20:15, where Mary Magdalene, the first to see the
risen Christ, mistakes him for a gardener. Here the light, darkness, tree, seed,
126 cw Leonard M. Scigaj

work, and song imagery find their origin (once again Fox’s “divine pattern that
connects”) in the risen Christ’s redemptive labor, to which the poems of A
Timbered Choir, another “figured cloth of song,” stand as testament and praise:

A man who seems to be

A gardener rises out of the ground,
Stands like a tree, shakes off the dark,
The bluebells opening at his feet,
The light a figured cloth of song.”

Several times in A Timbered Choir Berry bemoans the rampant clear-cut-

ting of ancient trees that proves the myopia of humanity’s “controverting will”
(29). The destruction of the ancient forests in our time “is our madness” and
a visible judgment upon us; one can only pray for Christ’s forgiveness
(97-98). But even in “the lamed woods,” where the great trees fell, “The
shadow of old grace returns,” and “Beams reaching down” soon “animate” the
dark, creating maples. Berry voices his panentheistic faith in the “light” that all
living creatures are, but we “cannot know” this light, for its operations defy
our limited understanding (75). At another Sabbath moment, when his dart-
ing interrogation of the trees takes another turn, Berry distances himself from
the getting and spending of the workday week, and the trees of the woods in-
struct him to relax his analytic intellect, reverse his inquiry, and see himself as
part of a larger harmony, a biocentric whole, rooted in a distinct bioregion. A
paradox reinforces the contrast. By resting “apart” from the workday week,
Berry finds himself “a part of the form / of the woods always arriving / from
all directions home,” a form that includes birdsong and “the hush of the trees”
in a single “cell of wild sound” (101).
This soon leads to a meditation on a field that once was plowed but has
now returned to forest. The reappearance of trees gives Berry more than a re-
assurance of nature’s power of renewal; it also conveys a perspectival appre-
hension of elemental Being at the heart of the visible: “Where human striving
ceased / The Sabbath of the trees / Returns and stands and is” (106). Even
when Berry clears thickets for planting, he is careful to “spare the seedling
trees” (120) and thus hasten the conversion back to forest after his death. Fol-
lowing nature’s pattern brings peace to Berry, but the reader should not derive
from these poems the Pollyanna belief that nature’s bounty will heal all indus-
trial wounds, for in his essays Berry is fully aware of how urban sprawl, sub-
urban parking lots, and industrial exploitation may soon create ecological cat-
astrophe. Like Fox, Berry rails several times in A Timbered Choir at our
 Panentheistic Epistemology Ce. 127

post-Enlightenment proliferation of machines and bureaucracies that create

inefficiency, waste, and pollution. The human intellect, “blind in what it sees,”
detaches the mind from the body, and lets it rest in abstractions and machine
logic that darken the light.”
Seed imagery, on the contrary, teaches us to believe in the God-ordained
work of germination in the soil, where we trust that the darkness will one day
bear light. Just as Christ’s travail in death, “pent in seed,” leads to a rising that
fills all creation with light, so seeds must rest in darkness in order that the
“dark come to light.” After the twinleaf blossoms fall, “the hinged capsules of
seed // grow big” to ensure a cyclic renewal. And in the “resurrection / of
bloodroot” one finds a flower that is also “a lamp,” an illuminating guide
(154-155). Reworking a theme from his seventies poetry, Berry considers
marriage analogous to the growth of plants in the soil. He celebrates his
twenty-fifth wedding anniversary to his wife, Tanya, as “Two kernels folded in
one shell” that over the years have loved and learned to move “Darkly . . . to-
ward light” (50). When Tanya travels without him, Berry feels “Dark in the
ground” but is ready to “rise up alive” when she returns (157). Humans have
their best chance at comfort and satisfaction when they trust in God’s panen-
theistic energy and live in harmony with his cyclic pattern.
God’s energy is most visible in his continual work of remaking creation.
Because humans have “unmade” creation through the Fall, we are “fallen like
the trees, our peace / Broken.” But the outpouring of God’s grace in the cyclic
pattern of creation is where “The Maker comes to His work” (74). Our best
path is to “join our work to Heaven’s gift” and thereby continue creation’s
“song,” the “old light held in soil and leaf” (49). Our joyous visions of harvest
can be realized only through “our ten thousand days of work” (18, 136). Work
in creating a clearing to plant crops “bind[s] the mind” to creation’s seasonal
cycle, creating a work of art that creation reclaims with forest after our death
(17, 59, 119). Human work can “make / A harmony between forest and field,”
thus realizing “The world as it was given for love’s sake” and leaving
“unabused” the Giver’s “Gift that nurtures and protects” (14). Meditations in
the woods can restore an understanding of how “the world’s being made” (35)
without human hand, nurtured by the living light of God’s gift. By responding
to God’s grace through work at home, one becomes so married to Fox’s “di-
vine pattern that connects” as to be almost invisible, like the Amish farmer
(28, 146, 190-191). Our six weekdays of work culminate in a Sabbath that it-
self is God’s gift: “We cannot earn or buy it” (29). Berry’s greatest satisfaction
lies in a silent appreciation of his house and farm—all that his vision and
work have joined (108).
128 cw Leonard M. Scigaj

Song imagery abounds in A Timbered Choir. It testifies to the possibility of

living in harmony with the earth. More important, birdsong regularly initiates
biocentric reversals where Berry’s gaze leads him to quiet his mind and listen
to nature’s speech. Here the birds in their singing are most at one with nature.
Birdsong heard in the quiet is “Best of any song,” but “first /you must have the
quiet” (207). Berry’s farm flowers in the spring when all the fields are mowed
and fresh with dew. With “bird music all around” Berry experiences a Sabbath
vision of harmony by realizing “The possibility / Of human life whose terms”
are not those of anthropocentric humans but “Heaven’s and this earth’s”
(136). If we wish a portion of eternal life, we must give up the “known life,” the
little light that the human will and decision making can produce, and court
the dark that, like the Tao, “conceals all possibilities.” By following the bird-
song, we will experience a biocentric reversal: “As the known life is given up,
birdcall / Become the only language of the way, / The leaves all shine with sud-
den light, and stay” (21). Stalwart trees, in harmony with their environment
and bending as the wind blows, express a faith in their biocentric fate. “Bird-
song / Is all they wanted, all along” (134).
On at least two occasions in A Timbered Choir, birdsong reveals the bird so
intimately at one with its environment that Berry’s perception approaches a
mystic vision of unity with the earth. The first occurs at the opening of a Sab-
bath meditation, when Berry visits his “woodland never felled.” Here the bird-
song that suffuses everything becomes a living expression of panentheistic en-
ergy pervading creation. While climbing through a thicket, Berry hears “a
bird’s song somewhere within it” and reflects that not only is the “singer un-
found within the song” but also that the song might come from “anywhere /
from everywhere.” The song permeates all creation, and the “whole air” is “vi-
brant with it, every leaf a tongue” (89). A similar instance occurs later in the
volume, where “A bird the size / of a leaf” (202) fills the entire evening with its
song, and the song becomes the entire poem.
As Merleau-Ponty continues his discussion of style in The Prose of the
World, he recounts a story of a chimpanzee to suggest that desire works
through visual means in a living body engaged in a task. A body working
through the visible, tactile world creates new connections with its faculty of
sight to achieve one’s goal:

The chimpanzee who learns to use a branch to reach his goal ordinarily
does so only if the two objects can be seen in a single view, if they are
within “visual contact.” This means that the new meaning of the branch is a
bundle of practical intentions which join it to the chimpanzee’s goal. The
 Panentheistic Epistemology Ce» 129

meaning lies in the immanence of a gesture, that is, in the index of the ma-
nipulation. The new meaning is born in the circuit of desire between the
chimpanzee’s body and what it seeks. .. . [Thus] the signification which de-
velops in objects . . . is a signification only for a body engaged at a given
moment in a given task.”

Wendell Berry’s task in A Timbered Choir is to offer a vision of biocentric har-

mony in his virgin woods meditations through a Christian “system of equiva-
lences.” The intersections of light, darkness, tree, seed, work, and birdsong im-
agery move with panentheistic fluidity throughout the text and with such a
regular insistence on the process of perception that before long the reader sees
the connections through Berry’s own eyes—and with such luminance that the
reader almost replaces Berry himself, walks in his worker’s coveralls, so to
speak. Like the chimpanzee using his vision to connect branch to banana,
means to goal, Berry uses his panentheistic vision to create so many intersec-
tions of his basic imagery patterns that we move as he does toward the goal of
a Christian biocentric harmony.
The imagery is most casual and paradoxically most intense in the last sec-
tions of A Timbered Choir, the poems from 1991 to 1997 that did not appear
in either early volume of Sabbath meditations. Here Berry, entering the au-
tumn of his life, practices what Lao Tzu called the art of “losing” (20, 48), a
process of gradually eliminating conventional analytical knowledge to enter a
quietude and tranquility where, according to Chung-Yuan Chang, “one strives
to return to the deep root of his being and become aware thereby of the deep
root of all things. It is a process of seeing and delving into the maternal depths
of nature.” This leads to an awareness of “a Heavenly radiance within. It is light
in darkness.”
Often in this last section Berry loses himself in visions of biocentric won-
der at creation, as in the frequent imagery of seed and resurrection,” or bird-
song, or meditations on how the Maker’s grace, “Spirit in love with form,” is at
work daily since the Fall, resurrecting the forest “Where the great trees were
felled” (133). Sleeping well at times becomes a problem in one’s mature years,
but after nights when Berry sleeps well he experiences a Sabbath in selfless
unity with his environment: “I rest in unasking trust / Like clouds and ponds
and stones and trees” (187). The tall trees that really want only birdsong direct
Berry’s perceptions beyond self-interest and teach him to lose himself in
praising creation (147). At other times Berry recognizes that in his golden
years he has achieved nearly all the potential he had. He realizes that “Less and
less you are / that possibility you were.” This recognition of loss leads to a
130 ce Leonard M. Scigaj

biocentric reversal in a moment of almost mystic unity with a tree: “And so

you have become a sort of tree / standing over a grave.” This perception
teaches him to lose himself in further moments of biocentric unity with what-
ever happens in each day: “Every day you have less reason / not to give your-
self away” (167). Berry finds in marital love another “longing of the self to be
given away” (149). Conversely, Berry remembers a moment in his early adult-
hood where a strong sense of place, a moonlit moment of unity with the land
of his forebears, gave him such a sense of “selfless / happiness” that he lost
himself in that moment and for that moment forgot “the misery of a boy’s
love / inevitably selfish” (200).
In the poems that recount the last seven years of Sabbath meditations in A
Timbered Choir, the theme of losing the self appears most directly in Berry’s
meditations on the Amish and on the death of his mother. In “Amish Econ-
omy” Berry recounts comments from his Amish friend David Kline: “We
Amish, after all, don’t try / To find ourselves. We try to lose /Ourselves” in daily
labor and familial love (190). Deaf and infirm, Berry’s mother delighted in
telling her son before her death (March 14, 1996) that “finally you lose / every-
thing”—“parents, husband, and friends, youth, / health, most comforts, many
hopes” (211). Best is to merge with maternal nature, as Lao Tzu advised, to be-
come that tree standing over a grave, wanting only birdsong. To do so is to
merge with the root of maternal nature, especially with its pattern of eternal
recurrence, in a mystic moment, a paradoxical unity of opposites, a moment
when one perceives “dark within light, light / within dark” in the penultimate
poem about the stone carving that “doubles / the superficial strip of Mobius”
(214-215). In such moments Lao Tzu’s “way” becomes a “place,” as in the final
poem—the place where the Kingdom of God resides (within you—Luke
17:21), as well as at one’s home (Port Royal, Kentucky). But Berry’s final rest-
ing place is also the book wherein his poetic praise of creation stands shining
as a timbered choir.
One final question remains. To what extent must the reader accept Chris-
tianity in order to appreciate the poems in A Timbered Choir? For many Chris-
tian readers of this writer’s generation, the failure of most denominations of
Christianity to condemn the Vietnam War during the years of America’s active
engagement resulted in permanent disaffection. Many denominations still do
not offer women equality in the celebration of religious services, and the
strong stance against abortion and contraception in many denominations
makes Christianity impossible to accept for environmentalists concerned with
overpopulation. But Berry himself was an early and staunch critic of the Viet-
nam War (see, for instance, “Against the War in Vietnam” and “Window
 Panentheistic Epistemology Ces 131

Poems” in Berry’s 1968 volume Openings), and he expressed his strong dissat-
isfaction with institutionalized Christianity in a 1993 essay, “Christianity and
the Survival of Creation.”
In the essay Berry asserted that “organized Christianity” has no idea of
what economic and social practices would foster “the holiness of life” and that
“the certified Christian seems just as likely as anyone else to join the military-
industrial conspiracy to murder Creation” because “Christian organizations to
this day, remain largely indifferent to the rape and plunder of the world and of
its traditional cultures”—as indifferent as they were during the time of the
conquistadors.* Christianity today “has become willy-nilly the religion of the
state and the economic status-quo.” It “presumes to save the soul as an eternal
piece of private property,’ and “because it has been so exclusively dedicated to
incanting anemic souls to heaven, it has been made the tool of much earthly
villainy. It has, for the most part, stood silently by while a predatory economy
has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and
plundered human communities and households” (114-115). In organized
Christianity the physical edifice of the church becomes the only holy place, so
the rest of physical creation—including the human body—becomes part of a
devalued secular world that one can pollute and plunder at will (103). But for
Berry the faulty dichotomies of body/soul and secular/holy, as well as Lynn
White Jr.s environmentalist indictment of Christianity, derive from an inade-
quate reading of the Bible. If Christians would read the Bible carefully, they
would revise their practices, for they would discover what Elihu saw in Job
34:14-15, the panentheistic energy of God suffusing all creation. They would,
in Berry’s own panentheistic words, “discover that the Creation is not in any
sense independent of the Creator, the result of a primal creative act long over
and done with, but is the continuous, constant participation of all creatures in
the being of God” (97). “God is present in all places to hear prayers,” asserts
Berry, and his church is not a physical edifice but wherever “two or three are
gathered together in my name [Matthew 13:20]” (100-101). Christ preached
most often in the great outdoors, Berry observed, and “the great visionary en-
counters did not take place in temples but in sheep pastures, in the desert, in
the wilderness, on mountains, on the shores of rivers and the sea, in the mid-
dle of the sea, in prisons” (102). We must understand that humans are “living
souls,” that the world is a “divine gift,” and that work is “a form of prayer.”
A Timbered Choir is thus Berry’s secular extension of a biblically endorsed
way of perceiving the holiness of all creation. Like Fox’s “divine pattern that
connects,” Berry wants his readers to perceive God’s panentheistic energy
without the dogma and pronouncements of institutionalized Christianity—to
132 ce Leonard M. Scigaj

perceive the way the early Christians and medieval mystics perceived all cre-
ation. Paul Klee once stated in his Notebooks that the twentieth-century artist
did not render representational reality; he “makes secret vision visible”
through style and organization.” Berry accomplishes this through his stylistic
emphasis on how the act of perception makes visible the connections among
the instances of light, darkness, tree, seed, work, and song imagery. Berry revi-
talizes a way of seeing the holiness of creation without preaching or heavily
foregrounding biblical quotation. The simple, unadorned lines create an ap-
pealing, accessible freshness, and the ingratiating honesty of tone convinces.
The poems of A Timbered Choir model a way of revising our perceptions to
comprehend the biocentric holiness of creation. The major premise of both
Fox and Berry is unassailable: if we learn to perceive all creation as holy, in our
everyday habits we would refrain as much as possible from polluting that holy
creation. We would then live more harmoniously near choirs of forests far less
subject to the logger’s cry.

Notes

1. Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ (San Francisco: HarperCollins,
1988), 144.
2. Ibid., 82-128.
3. Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1985).
4. Fox, Cosmic Christ, 77-78, 108, 128.
5. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of Matter (New York: Harcourt Brace Jo-
vanovich, 1978).
6. Quoted in Fox, Cosmic Christ, 50.
7. Ibid., 133-135.
8. Ibid., 109-128.
9. Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems: 1979-1997 (Washington,
D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998).
10. Wendell Berry, Sabbaths (San Francisco: North Point, 1987); Sabbaths:
1987-1990 (Ipswich, England: Golganooza, 1992). In the five 1979 notes at the back of
the 1987 North Point edition of Sabbaths (page 97), the references to poem numbers
and lines are not accurate. I have therefore used in my text the following corrected ref-
erences for the five 1979 notes: IV, line 26; VI, lines 2—4; VI, line 6; VI, lines 8—9; VII,
line 14.
11. Berry, Choir, 98.
 Panentheistic Epistemology Ces 133

12. Lynn White Jr. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155
(March 10, 1967): 1203-1207.
13. Ibid., 1204-1205.
14, Wendell Berry, “The Gift of Good Land,” in The Gift of Good Land (San Fran-
cisco: North Point, 1981), 267-281.
15. Ibid., 269-270, 272-273.
16. Berry, Choir, 14, 16, 29, 49, 66, 98, 121, 149.
17. Lao Tzu, The Way and Its Power: A Study of the “Tao Te Ching” and Its Place in
Chinese Thought, ed. and trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Grove, 1958).
18. Fox, Cosmic Christ, 50-51, 57, 117-118, 124-126, 194.
19. Matthew Fox, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality Presented in
Four Paths, Twenty-Six Themes, and Two Questions (Santa Fe: Bear and Company,
1983), 90. I am indebted to J. Scott Bryson for locating this source.
20. Berry, Choir, 55.
21. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill, ed. Claude
Lefort (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 59-64, 74-77.
22. Berry, Choir, 26.
23. Wendell Berry, Openings (Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968).
24. Wendell Berry, Collected Poems: 1957-1982 (San Francisco: North Point, 1984),
85-86.
25. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, ed.
Claude Lefort (Evanston, IIl.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 100, 123, 134-137.
26. Wendell Berry, Recollected Essays (San Francisco: North Point, 1981), 52.
27. Berry, Choir, 77.
28. Ibid., 26.
29. See Matthew Fox, trans. and ed., Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart’s Creation Spiri-
tuality in New Translation (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980), 66; Fox, Cosmic
Christ 122
30. Berry, Choir, 94.
31. Ibid., 79.
32. Fox, Cosmic Christ, 95.
S3elvid. Il; 1135120:
34 bids, 57, LIL.
35. Berry, Choir, p. 10.
36. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R. Trask
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 120, 269-274.
37. Ibid.
38. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 30-31, 77, 113-124, 136.
39. Berry, Choir, 43.
134 ces Leonard M. Scigaj

40. Ibid., 7, 9-10, 29-30, 117-118, 125, 127, 160, 190-191.

A Valbidis 20525, 1275 1305 159)
42. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 104.
43. Chung-Yuan Chang, Creativity and Taoism: A Study of Chinese Philosophy, Art,
and Poetry (1963; repr. New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 48-49.
44. Berry, Choir, 154-155.
45. Wendell Berry, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” in Sex, Economy,
Freedom, and Community (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 94, 100.
46. Ibid., 106, 109, 111.
47. Paul Klee, Notebooks, vol. 1, The Thinking Eye, trans. Ralph Manheim, ed. Jurg
Spiller (New York: George Wittenborn, 1961), 93.
Laird Christensen

CwThe Pragmatic Mysticism of

Mary Oliver

Although postmodern theory and ecology may appear to be at odds with one
another—one questioning the very notions of reality in which the other is
grounded—it is useful to consider how these two ways of understanding the
world are complementary.’ Ecology discourages the belief that any organism
exists independent of its ecosystem, whereas postmodern theory challenges
the concept of an essential individual identity, redefining the “self” as a con-
stellation of subject positions that reflect a variety of overlapping social and
cultural influences. Once we add to this composite identity the cycles of oxy-
gen, water, minerals, and energy necessary to life, a postmodern sense of self
can help correct our cultural delusions of detachment from ecological com-
munities. This is urgent work, for only by imagining ourselves existing apart
from our sustaining ecosystems have we been able to justify actions that de-
grade them. An ecological reconstruction of identity is part of a larger re-
sponse to the crisis of consciousness that has left Western culture disoriented
as our traditional explanations of human significance continue to erode be-
neath a steady stream of scientific and historical revisions. By now most con-
temporary Western theorists and writers are done mourning the loss of stabil-
ity that so absorbed our modernist predecessors. Rather than sifting
nostalgically through the fragments of outdated narratives, postmodern writ-
ers are beginning to flesh out the stories suggested by new forms of knowl-
edge. In particular, ecologically informed authors such as Mary Oliver devise
strategies for cultural survival by proposing functional alternatives to narra-
tives that no longer make sense in light of our evolving knowledge. Oliver’s
poetry replaces the old, pernicious myth of human independence with an eco-
logical tale of inclusion in acommunity of interrelated presences.
During the last seven decades the West has revised its narrative of organ-
isms and environments a number of times. Charles Elton’s 1927 concept of
ecological communities introduced the notion of food chains and niches, and
this model enabled a theory of ecosystems within which “all relations among
organisms can be described in terms of the purely material exchange of en-
ergy.” Scientists began to measure the currents of energy within ecosystems

135
136 ce. Laird Christensen

then to describe the transfer of energy between trophic levels of producers,

consumers, and decomposers.’ This evolution of thought has radically altered
our understanding of relationships and our fundamental notions of self and
other, as J. Baird Callicott demonstrates in “The Metaphysical Implications of
Ecology”: “[E]cological interactions, primarily and especially trophic relation-
ships, constitute a macrocosmic network or pattern through which solar en-
ergy, fixed by photosynthesis, is transferred from organism to organism until
it is dissipated. Organisms are moments in this network, knots in this web of
life... . [W]e may say quite literally and unambiguously that organisms are, in
their entire structure—from subatomic microcosm to ecosystemic macro-
cosm—patterns, perturbations, or configurations of energy.’* When organ-
isms are understood in this context, there is no longer any possibility of an in-
dependent self, at least in conventional terms.
Systems theorist Joanna Macy proposes that it is more useful to understand
the self as “a metaphoric construct of identity and agency, the hypothetical
piece of turf on which we construct our strategies for survival.’ Clearly the
distinction between self and other is complicated by ecology, requiring pro-
found adjustments in our worldview. Equally damaging to the traditional
Western emphasis on human significance is the collapse of hierarchy in a
world where even secondary consumers inevitably fall prey to the decom-
posers. Especially since the time of Darwin, Western science has played the
role of a frantic editor—scribbling and erasing and tearing out entire pages of
those stories we have long relied on to explain our identity and purpose on
this planet. So, anxious and unable to find ourselves in this unrecognizable,
ongoing revision, we turn to writers like Mary Oliver for “the sustaining truths
and feelings that conventional religion and modern society seem unable to
provide.”®
Oliver, like many of our best contemporary poets, wants to help us feel at
home in a world that looks dramatically different through ecologically in-
formed eyes. We may have lost our mythic birthright when the hierarchy of
species collapsed, but Oliver offers abundant compensation by teaching us to
embrace our participation in the community of all life. The dynamic dance of
energy that Oliver’s poetry celebrates—that “white fire of a great mystery”’—
is the same one that science describes less ecstatically through its laws of ther-
modynamics. Physics challenges us to imagine that the atomic building blocks
of matter are actually tightly interwoven whorls of energy, and if we admit our
ignorance about the source or purpose of this energy, we may conclude quite
simply that all things manifest a mysterious power. It only remains to figure
this power as divine and we have arrived at pantheism. To Mary Oliver hu-
 Pragmatic Mysticism of Mary Oliver = ce. 137

mans are no longer merely favored by a divine power, as our Judeo-Christian

heritage suggests; we are inextricable constituents of it.
As she attempts to shift the basis of personal value from individual to col-
lective identification, Oliver follows the lead of American romantics such as
William Cullen Bryant and Walt Whitman in figuring physical mortality as re-
demptive regeneration. Traditional distinctions between mortality and im-
mortality quickly break down in Oliver’s poems as the material elements of
each being are transformed into the elements of other bodies. This is the dy-
namic process that Oliver finds so redemptive: fish “rise from the water insep-
arable / from the gannets’ wings,” and the “rat will learn to fly” in the muscles
of an owl.’ Nor do the knots of energy that we call human cease when strands
untangle, for the first law of thermodynamics promises that “energy can be
changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created and it cannot be
destroyed.’ Oliver recasts this doctrine in her poem “Skunk Cabbage,” where
she reveals that

the secret name

of every death is life again—a miracle
wrought surely not of mere turning
but of dense and scalding reenactment.”

Oliver’s choice of adjectives emphasizes that this ceaseless transubstantiation

is no ethereal dissipation of unwoven energy. Indeed, scalding vividly evokes
the image of skin—the “border guard” between self and other, in Gary Sny-
der’s words''—blistering and giving way, destroying any final pretense of sep-
aration. Moreover, the verb wrought insists that even in death something is
being made.
As Jean Alford observes, Oliver redefines human immortality “as a self-
denying mortal life in communion with the eternal processes of nature.’” This
continual reintegration of individual into the whole denies any abiding sense
of discrete identity, and Oliver’s investment in cultivating a collective identity
is especially evident in “Bone Poem,” from her 1979 collection Twelve Moons:

The litter under the tree

where the owl eats—shrapnel

Of rat bones, gull debris—

Sinks into the wet leaves
138 ce, Laird Christensen

Where time sits with her slow spoon,

Where we becomes singular.”

Oliver’s description of the owl’s bezoar as “shrapnel” evokes the explosion of

individuality as all beings are reduced again to fuel, either in the belly of an
owl or in the simmering meld of minerals patiently stirred by personified
time. The final clause explicitly replaces a limited degree of individuality with
a more comprehensive sense of identification, and as the bones begin their
“long fall back to the center,” Oliver’s careful diction reveals how the dissolve
of identity quickens as it nears the ultimate denial of hierarchy: “The seepage,
the flowing, // The equity” (46). When at the close of the poem Oliver predicts
that “The rat will learn to fly, the owl / Will be devoured” (46), she proposes
an ecologically revised doctrine of the transmigration of souls. For the soul
in Oliver’s poetry more closely resembles what was originally designated by
the word spirit—breath of life—than any lingering essence of a distinct
psyche.
We find Oliver’s clearest rejection of the Western tradition of exclusively
human souls in “Some Questions You Might Ask,” which opens her 1990 col-
lection, House of Light. The poem begins by asking, “Is the soul solid, like iron?
/ Or is it tender and breakable, like / the wings of a moth in the beak of an
owl?”" Although these questions may seem to extend a generous range of pos-
sibilities, the implicit question is not whether a soul exists but how durable it
is. It is worth noting that the solid extreme of this range is compared to a
manufactured substance used to fashion tools of unnatural strength. Simi-
larly, the next simile does more than just establish the fragile extreme of the
range. David Barber has correctly observed that animals in Oliver’s poetry
“have turned totem,” and the owl is one of Oliver’s most frequently used sym-
bols, representing the suddenness of death;' moths, on the other hand, repre-
sent human thoughts in a poem such as “Sleeping in the Forest.” Thus, Oliver
may in fact be asking whether the soul is merely a product of consciousness
that vanishes at the moment of death.
“One question leads to another,” until near the close of the poem the
speaker wonders,

why should I have it, and not the camel?

Come to think of it, what about the maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?"
 Pragmatic Mysticism of Mary Oliver = ce, Is)

The linear descent from a fellow mammal to obviously animate plants to ap-
parently inanimate stones dismantles our traditional hierarchy and demon-
strates how our estimation of value might be extended in a world where all
matter is composed of the same energy. Even Oliver’s depiction of the stones
reinforces this project, for the diminutive adjective prepares the reader to sym-
pathize even more with the stones when they are animated by the verb sitting.
Moreover, the possibility of being “alone in the moonlight” when the adjective
all emphasizes the plurality of the stones suggests that any sense of isolation is
illusory. Every aspect of the earth has a soul, Oliver insists, or none do, as she
makes clear in the title essay of her 1999 collection, Winter Hours: “I believe in
the soul—in mine, and yours, and the bluejay’s, and the pilot whale’s. I believe
each goldfinch flying away over the coarse ragweed has a soul, and the rag-
weed too, plant by plant, and the tiny stones in the earth below, and the grains
of earth as well. Not romantically do I believe this, nor poetically, nor emo-
tionally, nor metaphorically . . . but steadily, lumpishly, absolutely.”” Clearly,
the only definition of a soul broad enough to suit her is the energy manifest in
all entities.
Mary Oliver’s ecological pantheism will remain merely an attractive theory,
however, unless the enactment of her poetry can induce an actual transforma-
tion in how readers engage the world. As Ben Howard observes, Oliver is most
inspired by “those numinous intersections of the self and the natural world,
those meetings in the woods and by the ponds, which engender a sense of rev-
erence and awe.”"* Howard’s choice of the word intersections suggests a much
more immediate relationship between subject and object than we are accus-
tomed to and thus clarifies the mystical nature of Oliver’s project. But it also
highlights the problem of trying to communicate such experiences. Because
these “numinous intersections” are relational rather than objectified, only a
poor caricature of the experience can be rendered in the clumsy building
blocks of language. But poetry enables language to transcend objectification,
Oliver insists, by creating “an arrangement of words in which an experience or
an insight [waits] to be felt through, and I mean in an individual and personal
way.” It is not so much the words of a poem that enact such experiences in the
reader’s mind but rather the constellation of emotions and implications that
accrue to those words and flicker through the spaces between them. Language
may be inherently imprecise because it depends on artificial objectification,
but Oliver has no other means of sharing the news of her intersections with
other presences in the ecological community.
Martin Buber carefully distinguishes between the two ways that humans
perceive the world and their identity. “There is no I as such,” Buber explains,
140 ce Laird Christensen

only a sense of I in relation to those things which I am not.” Most of those

things are perceived as objects, and Buber designates this as the I-It world. It
is how we commonly order experience, and it emphasizes differences to dis-
tinguish this It from those Its (55). Language is both product and servant of
the I-It world. But there is another way of experiencing that which I am not,
and that is our unobjectified relation to another presence. To experience a You
is to open oneself to a reciprocal engagement that does not require interpreta-
tion, for Buber explains that “nothing conceptual intervenes between I and
You” (62). I-You moments produce the surges of deeply felt, precognitive re-
sponses that are poorly translated to specific labels in an I-It world. The feel-
ing high behind one’s sternum, for example, when one is overwhelmed by the
presence of an intimate companion will simply not fit into the box tagged
“love.” Moreover, when we relate to a You it remains a presence only so long as
we resist objectifying it; once we do, it is transformed into an object. Of course,
we rely almost completely on distinctions between objects to make the most
basic decisions necessary to survival, and therefore we must spend most of our
lives in an I-It world. Indeed, Buber admits that “without It a human being
cannot live. But,” he adds, “whoever lives only with that is not human” (85).
Despite the fact that language necessarily diminishes presences to objects,
Oliver clearly believes that poetry can call attention to the fact that we dwell in
a world of presences. Indeed, encouraging such intimacy with the world is the
central project of her poetry, as she demonstrates most succinctly in “Spring”:
“There is only one question: / how to love this world.” The question is not
how to know this world as thoroughly as possible, although as a fine natural-
ist she encourages this kind of familiarity as well. Even the most extensive
knowledge, however, merely locks the object of study in a more elaborate cage,
whereas love suggests the resistance of objectification. Her careful attention to
her subjects is informed by the kind of innocence that Annie Dillard describes
as “the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any
object.”” Oliver’s devotion leads her from observation of an object to the
recognition of intersection with another presence; the trick, of course, is reen-
acting such an experience in the reader.
As Diane Bonds observes, “Oliver’s ‘mystical’ explorations are always firmly
located in the materiality of nature.” A typical Oliver poem begins with a
narrow perceptual focus that frames an animal, a plant, or a portion of land-
scape. The speaker’s precision of attention leads the reader along a well-worn
transcendentalist path from direct observation toward revelation and an en-
hanced recontextualization. However, because the language of an I-It world
cannot hope to capture that mystical moment when object dissolves into pres-
 Pragmatic Mysticism of Mary Oliver = ce» 141

ence, Oliver relies on the space between objectified attention and a retrospec-
tive reflection to suggest what has transpired. There is a necessary leap, but by
leading up to the moment of departure and then revealing where the experi-
ence has led the speaker, Oliver leaves open a space for presence to occur. As
readers detect a consistency in the direction of these leaps from poem to
poem, the current deepens the channel and so invites future streams of imag-
ination to flow that way.
“The Ponds,” from House of Light, provides a fine example of the epiphanic
leap from specific observation to metaphysical speculation, as the speaker
considers the various imperfections of lily pads that look so perfect from a
distance. Even as Oliver introduces the possibility of perfect lilies in the open-
ing lines, she dangles from the stanza break a prescient threat to this illusion:

Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe

their lapped light crowding

the black,
mid-summer ponds.”

Oliver frequently employs a rhetorical question to announce a shift in tone

and focus, and in this case she dismisses the possibility of flawlessness by ask-
ing, “But what in this world / is perfect?” (58). Closer investigation of the lilies
reveals that “one is clearly lopsided,” another “wears an orange blight,” and still
another “is a slumped purse / full of its own / unstoppable decay” (58). As the
precision of observation dismantles the illusion of perfection, the corrections
to the picture grow increasingly tragic—from mere asymmetry to disease and
finally to the certainty of death.
It is at this point in the poem that direct observation ceases and reflection
begins. What is the speaker—or the reader—to adduce from this recognition
that an apparently perfect scene of white flowers afloat on a pond is actually a
vivid portrait of imperfection and a reminder of mortality? The adverb an-
nouncing the transition from observation to reflection affirms a resilient
hope:

Still, what I want in my life

Is to be willing
142 ce, Laird Christensen

To be dazzled—
To cast aside the weight of facts

And maybe even

to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

Into the white fire of a great mystery.

I want to believe that imperfections are nothing—
That the light is everything—that it is more than the sum
Of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do. (59)

Oliver stretches the lines out as the speaker moves deeper into reflection, leav-
ing behind the “short, pulsing lines” that John Elder suggests keep observation
so strictly focused.” It is clearly “the weight of facts” that prevents the speaker
from floating “above this difficult world,” and her desire to dispense with them
may seem escapist if read carelessly. But this confession is not a denial of life’s
difficulties; it is an embrace of an expanded context within which the careful
distinctions of the I-It world carry less weight. The “white fire of a great mys-
tery’—that energy that fuels and finishes each of its individual manifesta-
tions—does not hide or abolish the imperfections, but it diminishes them by
being “more than the sum / of each flawed blossom rising and fading.” This vi-
sion of wholeness beyond “the weight of facts” is accessible to her through the
act of belief, as she underscores in her final clause. The desire and, finally, the
ability to believe respond to the earlier confession, “I can hardly believe,” but
the speaker’s repetition of what she wants defines belief as a choice. This
choice is essential to Oliver’s poetic vision.
In a postmodern age we have more freedom than ever to determine how we
will interpret our perceptions of the world, so long as our subject positions re-
main consistent with what we believe to be true. Indeed, a postmodern per-
spective insists that it is grounded in a culturally influenced set of beliefs—not
in facts. Of course, over time beliefs have a way of petrifying into something
that looks very much like fact, and thus Diana Fuss warns that “we need both
to theorize essentialist spaces from which to speak and, simultaneously, to de-
construct these spaces to keep them from solidifying.’*° We must never forget
that they are contingent, designed with a specific purpose in mind. As Janet
McNew demonstrates, Oliver strategically constructs a subjectivity in her
poems that denies any essential “separation from a world of objects””—a
 Pragmatic Mysticism of Mary Oliver = cw 143

clearly postmodern project undertaken to correct the destructive illusion of

human independence from ecosystems. This revised subjectivity is perhaps
most evident in “Sleeping in the Forest,” which opens Twelve Moons.
The poem begins by announcing the speaker’s belief that she has recovered
a lost intimacy with the earth:

I thought the earth

remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts.”

The personification of the earth as feminine is not without its problems, as

many critics and historians have been quick to point out.” But in Oliver’s
poem it pushes the emotional quality of this event far beyond just another re-
union; the implicitly maternal quality of the earth identifies this as the most
fundamental of homecomings. It is the lap of the mother that welcomes the
speaker.

I slept
as never before, a stone
on a riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees.”

Oliver’s description of the stars mirrors “the white fire of a great mystery” that
is the sum of all parts in “The Ponds.”” Because there is nothing between the
speaker and this white fire but her thoughts, Oliver suggests how human cog-
nition tends to obscure our integration in the comprehensive web of energy.
Her decision to represent these thoughts as “light as moths” emphasizes their
basic insubstantiality, and at the same time the linear proximity of the images
of moths and white fire suggests an inevitable subsumption of the self into the
mystery—the collapse of individual identity into the consuming and regener-
ative wholeness.
Furthermore, the analogy of “a stone / on a riverbed” plays off its line break
to add an unexpected dimension to the cliché of sleeping like a rock. A stone
in a river channel both shapes the current and is shaped by the current, sug-
gesting that a similar process occurs as the universal energy flows through
144 ce. Laird Christensen

each conduit. The more obvious reading of the phrase is not viable, for al-
though the speaker sleeps “as never before,” her sleep is not at all restful:

All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.”

If the stars above the speaker do indeed represent the dynamic, reintegrative
source of all being, then the significance of “luminous doom” on a night
where no moon is mentioned becomes clear. The white fire is her destiny, ul-
timately and immediately. It is especially important to note that the speaker’s
process of “grappling / with a luminous doom” is directly responsible for the
rising and falling that allows her to vanish “into something better.’ Her
“movement is earthward and toward immersion in a forest floor that so en-
gulfs her that she feels ‘as if in water,” McNew observes; indeed, the speaker’s
transformation is precisely “the opposite of transcendence,’ leading to “a vi-
sionary dissolution of her human identity.”” This dissolution should not be
mistaken for the attainment of a sustained selflessness, though. Rather, the
speaker’s dismantling of an essentialized self precedes a strategic reconstruc-
tion of subjectivity built on an expanded identity. The poem succinctly and
powerfully demonstrates the recontextualization that occurs when the speaker
casts off her assumed identity, vanishing again and again into “something bet-
ter” than an unsustainable illusion of individuality.
Strategically constructing a subject position based on ecological interde-
pendence will obviously influence how we see the world and how we engage
it. Oliver demonstrates how such a construction can empower us in her poem,
“The Swan,” from House of Light. After an evocative rendering of the swan as

a slim
and delicate

ship, filled
with white flowers,

the trajectory of the speaker’s leap from objectification past presence is indi-
cated by her recollection of a remark by William Blake’s wife: “I miss my hus-
band’s company— / he is so often / in paradise.™ As the swan approaches—
 Pragmatic Mysticism of Mary Oliver =ce 145

and continues to approach, even as the poem ends—the exquisite pleasure of

anticipation overwhelms the speaker, convincing her that paradise is as avail-
able to her as it was to Blake:

Of course! The path to heaven

doesn’t lie down in flat miles.

It’s in the imagination
With which youperceive
This world,

And the gestures

With which you honor it. (17)

In a postmodern world, where the guiding cosmological narrative has been

stripped of the old idea of eternal reward, Oliver seizes on the capacity of the
imagination to create a paradise here on earth—if only we can learn to love
this dynamic tangle of energy in all its manifestations.
Her insistence that the earth can be a paradise, however, deserving of a love
we can best demonstrate through the joy of unmediated engagement, never
denies the existence of pain or the necessity of death. In “Poppies,” from New
and Selected Poems, Oliver juxtaposes the bright yellow “roughage” that
“shines like a miracle / as it floats above everything” with the “cold, // black,
curved blade . . . hooking forward,” admitting that “loss is the great lesson.””
Even though the term roughage implies the certain ingestion of these fulgent
flowers back into the earth, Oliver uses the brief brilliance of these flowers to
propose that

happiness
when it’s done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive. (39-40)

The explicitly religious diction of these lines suggests the possibility of finding
salvation in this life, saved from sin in its New Testament sense of “a separation
or missing of the mark.”* Oliver’s example offers salvation from the belief that
we are divided from this world, salvation from despair in the face of mortal-
ity. The poem closes in ecstatic defiance—not of death but of despair:
146 ce Laird Christensen

I am washed and washed

in the river
of earthly delight—

and what are you going to do—

what can you do
about it—
deep, blue night?”

This baptism recuperates the adjective in “the river / of earthly delight” from
the pejorative taint it acquires when opposed to a heavenly alternative. Oliver
denies this opposition by revealing heaven to be a particular way of engaging
the earth.
As attractive as such an attitude may be, it may appear to overlook the pain
and suffering that are a part of life on earth. However, these elements are very
much a part of Oliver’s vision, for as John Elder notes, “There is no place for
sentimental love or simple affirmation in a world like ours.”* Throughout
Oliver’s poetry violent death waits as the owl in every tree or as the snapping
turtle beneath the calm face of the pond. But Oliver’s predators are never evil,
no matter how much readers may cringe at the terrible pain of the rabbit
crumpling in the beak of an owl. Oliver clarifies her attitude toward such vio-
lence in her essay “Owls”:

In the night, when the owl is less than exquisitely swift and perfect, the
scream of the rabbit is terrible. But the scream of the owl, which is not of
pain and hopelessness and the fear of being plucked out of the world, but
of the sheer, rollicking glory of the death-bringer, is more terrible still.
When I hear it resounding through the woods, and then the five black pel-
lets of its song dropping like stones into the air, Iknow I am standing at the
edge of the mystery, in which terror is naturally and abundantly part of life.
... The world where the owl is endlessly hungry and endlessly on the hunt
is the world in which I live too. There is only one world.”

The closing sentence of this passage recalls Oliver’s only question: “How to
love this world.” So how does one love a world such as this? For Oliver the
answer involves recognizing that even an owl is acting out of love. The preda-
tor and the prey are driven by the same force, as Oliver demonstrates in “Gan-
nets,” where she writes that “nothing in this world moves / but as a positive
power,” and even those fish that feed the gannets “are only interrupted from
 Pragmatic Mysticism of Mary Oliver =ces 147

their own pursuit / of whatever it is / that fills their bellies.”*' Observing the vi-
olence in Oliver’s poems, John Elder recognizes that she “is drawn to such mo-
ments not simply because of a desire to present the whole picture honestly,
but also because in the predator’s single-mindedness she recognizes a special
purity of concentration and intention.” Oliver consistently figures this degree
of intentionality as “love”: not only is it what the anteater feels for “her chil-
dren,” but “perfect love” is also attributed to the black bear “coming / down the
mountain, / breathing and tasting.”
Oliver most clearly identifies such “purity of concentration and intention”
as an act of love in “Writing Poems,” from House of Light. Here Oliver uses the
conceit of bees emerging pollen-dusted from “the frills of a flower” to describe
the way that poets share their engagement with the world.“ The intensity with
which the bees are drawn to the instant beauty of new rhododendron blooms
leads the speaker to ask, “Is there anything more important / than hunger and
happiness?” (29). Although she admits not knowing “if the bees know that
otherwise death / is everywhere,’ she watches them go about their business
“with no small amount of desperation—you might say: love” (29). Oliver’s
unexpected reinterpretation of desperation reveals love to mean giving oneself
over completely to the business of living, and throughout her poetry bees ex-
emplify this attitude. In “May,” for example, from American Primitive, the
speaker observes the bees as they dive into moccasin flowers:

Mute and meek, yet theirs

the deepest certainty that this existence too—
this sense of wellbeing, this flourishing
of the physical body—rides
near the hub of the miracle that everything
is a part of, is as good
as a poem or a prayer, can also make
luminous any dark place on earth.”

Oliver’s choice of imagery here recalls Whitman’s own emphasis on the holi-
ness of physical forms in “Song of Myself,” where he proclaims that “there is
no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe.” The power em-
bodied in the bees’ devoted intention to flourish is clearly a holy act for Oliver,
and by comparing it to “a poem or a prayer” she identifies precisely how this
power functions among humans. Although poems enact new possibilities of
how we might make sense of our experiences, prayers more confidently shape
our patterns of interpretation through the agency of belief. Both poems and
148 ce, Laird Christensen

prayers, then, illuminate the dark places by readjusting our orderings of per-
ception. Thus Oliver, like Wordsworth, reminds us of our power to half-create
the lives we experience. We can choose to dwell in paradise if we are willing to
reconstruct the way we see ourselves and our world, for as we have seen in
“The Swan,” heaven is always accessible through

the imagination
with which you perceive this world,

and the gestures

with which you honor it.”

But as members of a culture that has cushioned itself so effectively from the
struggle to survive, how are we to enact such a love, such purity of intention?
Oliver shows that by opening ourselves to the presence of others, we may fol-
low our threads of connection back toward the fundamental integration that
is our larger self. She demonstrates this process in her account of a meeting
with two deer in “Five A.M. in the Pinewoods,” which she identifies as “a poem
about the world / that is ours, or could be.“ In structure and theme the poem
closely resembles “A Blessing,” written by Oliver’s mentor, James Wright (to
whose memory she dedicated American Primitive). Wright’s title would fit
equally well atop Oliver’s poem, for both describe incidents in which the
speakers are able to transcend the illusion of separation by opening them-
selves to the animal presence. In Wright’s poem it is a pair of ponies that
“come gladly out of the willows” to the speaker.” “I would like to hold the
slenderer one in my arms,” he writes, “For she has walked over to me / And
nuzzled my left hand” (135). Oliver’s poem features a pair of deer that the
speaker has observed

walking
like two mute
and beautiful women toward
the deeper woods.”

She waits for them in the dark before dawn, and when they approach her “one
of them—I swear it!—// would have come to my arms” if not warned away by
the other (32-33).
The closest and most significant parallel between the poems is found in
their conclusions. Warmed by the intimacy he feels while caressing the pony’s
 Pragmatic Mysticism of Mary Oliver = ce. 149

ear, which is “as delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist,” Wright’s speaker sud-
denly realizes that “if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blos-
som.” This burst of reflection on a vivid moment of intersection with an-
other presence evokes both the opportunity and the fear that accompany such
pure engagement. Breaking into blossom may have marvelous connotations,
but one must relinquish the comforting belief in a closed identity to achieve
this. The speaker’s self-conscious reflection suggests that he has caught him-
self in time, although the abbreviated length of the final line does encourage
the possibility that he has let himself go and that his absence has cut short the
poem. The closing lines of Oliver’s poem offer a more controlled—but hardly
less ecstatic—version of the same sense of pure engagement. The deer have al-
ready vanished, so the speaker’s observation has given over to reflection by the
time she confesses thinking: “so this is how you swim inward, / so this is how
you flow outward, / so this is how you pray.’” The motion inward is depicted
as more strenuous because it demands an opening of the self, a willing per-
meability to other presences. Once this relationship has been established,
however, the flow outward is as easy as exhalation. Oliver’s identification of
this encounter as a prayer suggests how opening oneself to presences shapes
the way we see and experience the world, enabling our admission into the par-
adise of complete inclusion.
Being fully present in a world of presences is the most spiritual of acts to
Oliver. It is also an utterly practical act because of our urgent need to develop
sustainable ways of imagining the human role on the earth. Ecology provides
a model that allows us to expand our circles of identity, so perhaps at last we
may assume accountability for our actions. Poems like Oliver’s are rituals to
help us enact this expansion. “We need those orderings of thought,” she ex-
plains, “proclaiming our sameness.”” The importance of this evolution of
consciousness cannot easily be overstated. But Oliver’s poetic vision offers
more than just a path to ecological inclusion. It gives us permission to choose
happiness in our lives. For even in the most miserable of lives, Oliver
promises,

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted.”

Of course, neither relinquishing the security of belief in an enduring, distinct

identity nor embracing the promise of individual mortality is easy. Indeed, to
150 ce Laird Christensen

creatures whose attitudes have been shaped by a long succession of stories

deeply invested in emphasizing our essential distinction from a material earth,
loving it can seem positively unnatural. But Oliver’s answer to the only ques-
tion is to show that when we defeat a way of seeing that leaves us frightened in
our separation, we can begin to live more fully. Thus we find the speaker of
“Starfish” challenging herself to engage even those aspects of the earth that re-
pulse her. In the end, as the speaker’s fear begins to fade, Oliver invites us to
join her,

reaching
into the darkness, learning
little by little to love
our only world.»

Notes

1. SueEllen Campbell considers some intersections of ecology and poststructuralist

literary theory in “The Land and Language of Desire: Where Deep Ecology and Post-
Structuralism Meet,” in Western American Literature 24, no. 3 (November 1989):
199-211.
2. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: The Roots of Ecology (Garden City, N.Y.: An-
chor Books, 1979), 297, 302.
3. Ibid., 303-307.
4. J. Baird Callicott, “The Metaphysical Implications of Ecology,” in Companion to
“A Sand County Almanac”: Interpretive and Critical Essays, ed. J Baird Callicott (Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 109.
5. Joanna Macy, “The Greening of the Self,” in Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays in
Buddhism and Ecology, ed. Allen Hunt Badiner (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1990), 53.
6. Anthony Mansousos, “Mary Oliver,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Ameri-
can Poets since World War II, ed. Donald J. Greiner (Detroit: Gale Research, 1980), 114.
7. Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 93.
8. Ibid., 29, 195.
9. Penelope and Charles ReVelle, The Environment: Issues and Choices for Society,
3rd ed. (Boston: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 1988), 728.
10. Mary Oliver, American Primitive (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1983), 44.
11. Gary Snyder, Turtle Island (New York: New Dimensions, 1974), 84.
12. Jean Alford, “The Poetry of Mary Oliver: Modern Renewal through Mortal Ac-
ceptance,” in Pembroke Magazine 20 (1988): 286.
 Pragmatic Mysticism of Mary Oliver = ces 151

13. Mary Oliver, Twelve Moons (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 46.
14. Mary Oliver, House of Light (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 1.
15. David Barber, review of House of Light, by Mary Oliver, Kenyon Review 13, no. 1
(winter 1991): 235.
16. Oliver, House of Light, 1.
17. Mary Oliver, Winter Hours (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 107-108.
18. Ben Howard, “World and Spirit, Body and Soul,” in Poetry 158, no. 6 (Septem-
ber 1991): 343.
19. Mary Oliver, Blue Pastures (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 108.
20. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Scribner’s, 1970),
54,
21. Oliver, House of Light, 6.
22. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press,
1974), 82.
23. Diane S. Bonds, “The Language of Nature in the Poetry of Mary Oliver,” in
Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 21, no. 1 (1992): 7.
24. Oliver, House of Light, 58.
25. John Elder, Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature, 2nd ed.
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 221.
26. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York:
Routledge, 1989), 118.
27. Janet McNew, “Mary Oliver and the Tradition of Romantic Nature Poetry,” in
Contemporary Literature 30, no. 1 (spring 1989): 72.
28. Oliver, Twelve Moons, 3.
29. The discussion effectively begins with Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land:
Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1984). It is continued in a more explicit context of environ-
mental philosophy in Patrick Murphy’s Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Cri-
tiques (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995). Louise Westling provides the broadest literary and
historical context in the opening chapter of The Green Breast of the New World: Land-
scape, Gender, and American Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).
30. Oliver, Twelve Moons, 3.
31. Oliver, House of Light, 59.
32. Oliver, Twelve Moons, 3.
33. McNew, 62.
34. Oliver, House of Light, 16-17.
35. Oliver, New and Selected Poems, 39-40.
36. Elder, 224.
37. Oliver, New and Selected Poems, 40.
152. ce Laird Christensen

38. Elder, 220.

39. Oliver, Blue Pastures, 20.
40. Oliver, House of Light, 6.
41. Oliver, New and Selected Poems, 28.
42. Elder, 220.
43. Oliver, House ofLight, 1, 7.
44. Ibid., 29.
45. Oliver, American Primitive, 53.
46. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold Blodgett (New
York: Norton, 1973), 86.
47. Oliver, House of Light, 17.
48. Ibid., 32.
49. James Wright, Collected Poems (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
1971), 135.
50. Oliver, House of Light, 32.
51. Wright, Collected Poems, 135.
52. Oliver, House of Light, 33.
53. Mary Oliver, “The Place of Poetry: Symposium Responses,” Georgia Review 35,
no. 4 (winter 1981): 733.
54. Mary Oliver, Dream Work (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), 7.
55. Ibid., 37.
Jeffrey Thomson

Ce “Everything Blooming
Bows Down in the Rain”
Nature and the Work of Mourning in the
Contemporary Elegy

The elegy traditionally moves from grief to reconciliation, from loss to con-
solation. The poet, writing an elegy, and the reader, vicariously participating
in that act, receive a kind of solace—a replacement figure—in the form of a
linguistic structure that substitutes for the dead, and nature is the traditional
ground from which that replacement figure is drawn. When Milton turns
Lycidas into “the Genius of the shore,” or when Whitman articulates a vision
of that “great star” drooping in the West in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloom’d,” they are engaging in the “work of mourning.” Each learns to “repre-
sent absence... by the means of a substitutive figure.” So argues Peter Sacks in
The English Elegy.' In both of the previous examples the poet returns the
beloved dead to nature, and this new, “natural” position allows the dead in re-
turn to offer the poet and reader solace for their deaths. The replacement fig-
ure overcomes death as the poet places him or her along the shore or in the
sky watching over the world, delivering it from its attendant grief.
In the twentieth century, an age of skepticism and science, such consolation
rang perilously false. Most twentieth-century elegies resist consolation; they
turn away from nature and its possibilities for solace. Consider Elizabeth
Bishop’s “One Art,” her elegy for Lota Soares, her longtime companion and
lover. Bishop suggests, at the end of the poem’s recitation of absence and loss,
that the forfeiture of nature—“two realms I owned, two rivers, a continent”—
isn’t a disaster. The loss of a beloved environment, her home in the cliff city,
Persepolis, Brazil, the surrounding rivers and beneficent rainforest, is derided
as inconsequential. It is the human loss that tears through the surface of the
poem, forcing Bishop (unsuccessfully one might argue) to reassert her self-
control over her grief:

Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

153
154 ce Jeffrey Thomson

The art of losing isn’t too hard to master

Though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.’

There is no consolation here, even as Bishop looks for something to abet her
loss. Bishop tries to assert poetic control over her loss, yet it explodes out of
the poem as if in a choking sob. The stuttering repetition of the final simile
surrounding the strident parenthetical command (or rebuke—it can be read
either way) suggests the depth of the human grief and the difficulty of cover-
ing it over so simply. As Jahan Ramazani writes in The Poetry of Mourning:

At its best, the modern elegy offers not a guide to “successful mourning”
but a spur to rethinking the vexed experience of grief in the modern world.
We should turn to it expecting not so much solace as fractured speech, not
so much answers as memorable puzzlings. Anything simpler or easier
would betray the moral doubts, metaphysical skepticisms, and emotional
tangles that beset the modern experience of mourning and self-conscious
efforts to render it.’

Bishop’s efforts to contain and control her grief fail because, in modern terms,
they must; we wouldn't believe her otherwise. As in many contemporary ele-
gies, Bishop’s use of nature becomes a backdrop for the more serious human
suffering. Nature exists not as participant or attendant muse to support the
poet in mourning. It is shoved aside, a mere pittance in the face of true grief.*
The problem with these views of the elegy is that, although they accurately
depict the situation presented by many poets, they close the door to others.
Once one limits the elegy to these two patterns, one is presented with a false
dialectic—either one must elevate nature (and the dead) above the living,
putting them in a position to offer consolation to the grieving world, or one
must refuse solace, refuse any comfort (and comfort from nature specifically)
in the face of terrible, human loss. In this model there is no way to balance an
all-too-powerful grief and a sense of natural salvation. I will argue that there
is a third possibility—one that does not deny the potency of grief but still of-
fers consolation, one that depends on a sense of correspondence with nature
and the natural cycle rather than the veneration of it. Before we get to this
third option, however, there is one critical hurdle that must be overcome.
As a matter of course in this new century, we distrust the traditional
reunion with nature as a means of solace. The belief in the efficacy of the “re-
placement figure” has dwindled. Part of the difficulty in poetically connecting
nature to grief lies in our unquestioning acceptance of the concept of the pa-
 Mourning in the Contemporary Elegy =ce. 155

thetic fallacy. Nature exists separately from us, the argument goes; we can know
it only distantly and inconsequentially, and it certainly does not join us in our
grief. To suggest otherwise is to risk foolishness and a kind of adolescent bathos.
Even when modern poets make use of the pathetic fallacy, argues Sidney
Burris in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, they do so ironically
to emphasize “the loss of communication between the individual and the natural
world; and in its implied envy of an older world where such communication
once existed, it resurrects yet another remnant of its ancient origin, pastoral
nostalgia.”’ This argument assumes that there is a separation between human
beings and nature; it suggests as teleology that nature and culture simply do
not (or at least no longer) mix. It seems that there is a basic, functional prob-
lem with this supposition. There is a primary and necessary division (post-
Edenic?) that is assumed to lie between nature and human nature, one that
cannot be taken for granted. In an aesthetic sense poetry works by arguing
metaphorically—one thing is another; thus, poems demand a suppleness in
the relationship between the poet and the world at large. It may not be true, to
paraphrase Emerson, that nature wears the colors of the spirit, but it is cer-
tainly true that many contemporary poets (pathetic fallacy be damned) wear
the colors of nature. Their observations of the natural world find those objects
that most fit the emotional pattern of the poem and present them to the
reader for immediate recognition—good poets do this intuitively; they find
the connections that hide beneath our day-to-day consciousness and present
them to the reader as something akin to memory. .
Thus we arrive at the third option—a form of elegy that grieves deeply and
fully and finds a commensurate consolation in nature but not in the form of a
figured replacement. Poets such as Jane Kenyon and Mary Oliver make pow-
erful use of nature and present the natural world as a participant in suffering,
going so far as to unite the personal and the natural within metaphors of loss
and sorrow. However, there is no sense in their work that nature replaces grief
or even alleviates it in some way. In the recognition of the patterns and move-
ment of nature their elegies turn away from the unsatisfied protests of most
late elegists. For these poets nature is not simply the drapery of emotion; it is
the very structure of emotional power.
For Kenyon and Oliver the work of mourning is a successful participation
in nature. They connect death and loss to natural systems and images, provid-
ing a stance from which to engage in emotion and death. A poem like
Kenyon’s “Heavy Summer Rain” is a tender suggestion of nature’s sympathy
with grief. The poem begins: “The grasses in the field have toppled, / and in
places it seems that a large, now / absent, animal must have passed in the
156 cw Jeffrey Thomson

night.” Immediately, Kenyon presents the natural world. This elegy doesn’t
start with death but rather with fecundity and disarray. The grasses are plas-
tered down by the weight of the night’s rain, and, in the midst of this pastoral
scene, there lies a looming sense of loss—the “large . . . animal” that “must
have passed in the night.” Her play on passed—the word connotes both pass-
ing by and passing on, movement through and death—and the assertive must
suggests that the poem’s natural world is already complicit with the loss that
will follow.
The poem turns quickly, however: “The hay will right itself if the day //
turns dry. I miss you steadily, painfully” (42). The regeneration of the field be-
lies the loss of the “you” of the poem, presumably Kenyon’s father, who was di-
agnosed with cancer and is evoked earlier in the collection Let Evening Come.
The grass will rise given sunlight; the absent dead will not, no matter what
they are given. No longer will she hear

your blustering entrances

or exits, doors swinging wildly
on their hinges, or your huge unconscious
sighs when you read something sad,
like Henry Adams’s letters from Japan,
where he traveled after Clover died. (42)

Here we are given the measure of the loss, that figure who stormed joyfully
through houses, smacking doors open and, equally, found deep, emotional
connections through language and reading. A kind of elegy within an elegy,
Kenyon presents but doesn’t deify the dead here. He is remembered in a rosy
afterglow but certainly presented as something human.
The last stanza returns to the natural world, seemingly aware of the grief
and sorrow that now dominate the poem. But this is no gesture of replace-
ment—no angelic star hovering over the western sky or totemic spirit of the
shore safeguarding sailors.

Everything blooming bows down in the rain:

white irises, red peonies; and the poppies
with their black and secret centers
lie shattered on the lawn. (42)

Nature in this poem, although suggesting a kind of homage to the dead—

everything bows down”—evokes the dark secret of human grief. The fact of
 Mourning in the Contemporary Elegy ce. 157

cancer—our “black and secret center”—is that our own cells destroy us. Our
natural bodies are complicit with our deaths. The black center of our lives,
Kenyon argues, is what we carry with us every day. It is the heart of the flower
shattered across the lawn; it is the absence in the field where something living
has passed; it is the cancer that turns bodies inside out with pain.
Contrary to the traditions of elegy, Kenyon doesn’t try to devalue this new
awareness of the natural parity of grief by elevating it to an untouchable, nat-
ural grace. Neither does she refuse its undeniable presence. Instead, Kenyon’s
elegy turns the work of mourning outward to nature and addresses its com-
plicity in both our grief and solace. Nature is why we die—our organic bodies
turn against themselves or fail, simply shut off, overworked or damaged be-
yond repair—but also why we live. Life, the bloom of it, is what bows down in
the dark rain, but it is the very fact of darkness that lets the light exist. So, as
Kenyon suggests in another poem from the same collection, “If it is darkness /
we are having let it be extravagant.”” Death may blow down the grasses in the
field; it may take your father’s life and then your own, but such trials are the
only way to know the light.
What one finds in Kenyon’s elegies is neither that peculiar elevation of the
dead in an attempt to replace the lost figure with a naturalistic pantheon nor
the refusal of solace; she elegizes by meshing with the loss, by descending into
it and finding its equivalent in the surrounding natural world. Nature in her
poems is neither the backdrop for her deeper human grief nor her possible re-
demption. It is a partner in ruin, her equivalent foundation.
The elegiac mode in Mary Oliver’s American Primitive is even more re-
fined.* Human grief, distinct and personal, rarely enters into her equations at
all. Nature and the natural world define both the path and function of the
work of mourning. The tone of the collection is reverential—the poems be-
come sacraments of the dark animal life within the human being and vice
versa. Her elegies are barely elegies at all. From the bear-like “paws” and
“happy tongue” gathering blackberries in “August,” to the mushrooms that
rise up like zombies from the soaked earth willing the people to follow them
back beneath “the shining fields of rain,” American Primitive celebrates the
communal essence of the world (3-4). The human and the natural are far
from separate in her work; their gestures blend and synchronize and finally
seem to be nothing more than variations on a theme. Nature’s death-into-life-
into-death function finds its place in the human world, and the human do-
main of art and song is echoed in the dazzle and splash of humpbacks and
white blossoms. It would seem that the very idea of elegy is entirely absent
here. Almost, but not quite.
158 ce Jeffrey Thomson

In poems like “University Hospital, Boston,” the elegiac asserts itself. The
poem describes a visit to a hospital “built before the Civil War,” where a friend
of the speaker (perhaps her father, as with Kenyon) lies slowly dying. The
ghosts of the countless dead, victims of the century’s many wars, linger in the
rooms and hallways while the speaker and the dying man hold hands beneath
the trees, pretending he is getting better. “I look into your eyes,” she writes,

which are sometimes green and sometimes gray,

and sometimes full of humor, but often not,
and tell myself you are better,
because my life without you would be
a place of parched and broken trees.’

The tension between this metaphor of the trees and the rest of the collection
is striking. Rarely in Oliver’s work is nature damaged or barren in this way.
The loss of this poem’s subject, she suggests, would break down the natural
cycle, would deprive the speaker of the sense of luminous beauty that fills the
rest of the collection. Until this poem death has been a kind of gossamer ab-
sence or a tender joining. Here, specific human grief enters and demands
recognition. Nature cannot heal this, Oliver seems to say.
This tension kindles the elegiac motion of the collection. From this mo-
ment forward a much more palpable sense of loss and emotional clarity in-
forms the poems. It is this human loss (although defined in very natural
terms) that creates the need for elegy. Earlier poems, such as “Mushrooms”
and the quasi elegy for the buffalo, “Ghosts,” suggest a cycle of life-death-
rebirth and do not acknowledge the terror of death and the loneliness of life.
They are celebratory and full of rejuvenating power, but “University Hospital,
Boston” demands a different kind of understanding. The emotional concen-
tration of death, as well as the palpable history of it in the hospital, functions
as a distinct counter to the gentle, natural cycle presented in earlier poems:

Yesterday someone was here with a gasping face.

Now, the bed is made all new,
the machines have been rolled away. The silence
continues, deep and neutral,
as I stand there, loving you. (43)

This peculiar combination of modifiers, “deep and neutral,” argues for both
the seriousness of the human situation and the absence of empathy one finds
 Mourning in the Contemporary Elegy ces 159

in the world. This is our fate, she seems to say, to die anonymous and alone,
gasping like fish for air. And the only thing we can do in the face of this stark
and lonesome truth is to love.
This is what the hospital teaches, but what does the world teach? Strangely
enough, it is the same lesson. Through “In Blackwater Woods,” one of the last
poems of the collection, Oliver combines the twin gestures of loss and rebirth
and evokes the true work of her mourning. “Look,” she says,

the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment. (82)

In a fall season, the dying time of year, the trees exult in their own self-immo-
lation as the human control of nature begins to disappear:

every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now. (82)

The natural world is slipping away from the human; such linguistic absence is
a “salvation, /whose meaning / none of us will ever know” (82). There is noth-
ing to replace the vanishing world, no names to be given that will keep it by
our side. The promise of solace is gone. But there is something to be learned—
the comfort of this contemporary elegy—a trinity of meanings:

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
160 ce — Jeffrey Thomson

against your own bones knowing

your own life depends on it;
and when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go. (82)

The first two commandments are human ones; they suggest the patterns of
elegy we have seen before: the love of the mortal and the refusal of solace. The
third commandment is nature’s, and it is the most important. To love and
hold are human traits, but letting go, that is the heroic task. It is the difficult
province of nature, and the work of mourning in Oliver’s work is to master
“Jetting go” through an intimate and personal connection with the natural
world.
What the elegies of Jane Kenyon and Mary Oliver present is a third possi-
bility for grief—one devoted not to a surrogate nature benevolently smiling
on the human race nor to an implacable grief that resists healing and succor.
Their elegies demand attention not because they try to avoid sorrow but be-
cause they recognize in sorrow part of the pattern of the natural world. This
elegiac work offers a new flavor to the tradition, as Oliver says, “a taste / com-
posed of everything lost, in which everything / lost is found” (57). In these ele-
gies grief exists not to torment or so that rapture can transpire; loss exists so
gain can follow.

Notes

1. Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Bal-
timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 8, 11 (emphasis in original).
2. Elizabeth Bishop, The Collected Poems of Elizabeth Bishop (New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 1969), 178.
3, Jahan Ramazani, The Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to
Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), ix-x.
4. Elizabeth Bishop writes in a letter to Anny Baumann that one of the things she
“didn’t get into the villanelle that I feel I have also lost, and that I really regret most of
all, is that I don’t think Pll ever be able to go back to that beautiful island in Maine any
more—this is too complicated to go into, but it really breaks my heart.” In one sense lost
nature exists only outside of the poem—it’s impossible for her to even fit it in. One Art:
Letters Selected and Edited, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Noonday Press, 1994), 602.
 Mourning in the Contemporary Elegy Cw 161

5. Sidney Burris, “Pathetic Fallacy,” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and
Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1993), 889 (italics mine).
6. Jane Kenyon, Let Evening Come (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf, 1990), 42.
7. Ibid); 13:
8. Mary Oliver, American Primitive (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983).
9. Ibid., 43.
 Emily Hegarty
Oe>Genocide and Extinction in
Linda Hogan’s Ecopoetry

Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw poet and novelist, is one of the leading articulators
of the theme of genocide, an “all-pervasive feature” of Native American po-
etry.' Hogan is also one of the most vital ecopoets writing today. This essay ex-
plores the ways in which Hogan connects the Native American experience of
genocide with the contemporary threat of extinction posed by the destruction
of the global environment.
Genocide is a fair word to use about the Native American experience in the
United States. Estimates of the Native American population before European
contact range from one million to forty-five million people. The 1890 U.S.
census recorded the Native American population as only 250,000. Even dou-
bling that figure to 500,000 to adjust for underreporting and using the lowest
precontact figure of one million results in a halving of the Native American
population under colonization. By 1990, Native Americans made up about 1
percent of the total American population and experienced poverty and its as-
sociated health problems at a rate more than twice the national average. Na-
tive Americans die of treatable diseases such as alcoholism, tuberculosis, and
diabetes at a rate hundreds of times greater than the general population. Dur-
ing the 1970s the Indian Health Service sterilized many Native Americans
without their informed consent. Estimates of the number sterilized range
from 25 percent to 42 percent of Native American women and about 10 per-
cent of Native American men.’
Hogan addresses these genocidal conditions throughout her work. Her
1995 novel Solar Storms opens with a “giveaway” ceremony to mark a woman’s
grief over a lost child. The ritual becomes symbolic of “all the children lost to
us, taken away.”’ Native American “grief over the lost children” is part of the
litany of international human-rights atrocities in Hogan’s poem “Workday.”
In another poem, “Folksong,” Hogan compares Native American trail songs
and Latvian dainas and suggests that the “folksongs” of exploited ethnic
groups are in reality coded war songs, a way of disguising anger from the op-
pressor.’ Hogan’s internationalism reflects the holistic worldview of much Na-
tive American writing, in which the sufferings of all people are seen as related

162
 Linda Hogan’s Ecopoetry ce 163

experiences. We see a similar synthesis of global oppressions in Creek poet Joy

Harjo’s homage to Audre Lorde in “Anchorage”:

who would believe

the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival
those who were never meant
to survive?®

Hogan pushes such comparisons further. She compares folk songs to bird-
songs, suggesting that “the sweet songs of sparrows” are actually “blood feuds”
in the birds’ territorial disputes.’ In this, “Folksong” emphasizes two concerns
central to Hogan’s work. The comparison of humans and birds indicates, as
we shall see, the importance of connections across species boundaries.
The concept of the “blood feud” brings us to the question of the uses
Hogan makes of racial memory. Hogan’s poem “The Truth Is” describes the
psychological turmoil of having a mixed racial heritage in a country with a
history of genocide. In this frankly autobiographical poem (“Linda, girl, I
keep telling you”),* Hogan writes of failed attempts to view mixed ethnic iden-
tity as a fruitful blend of differences, figured as “a tree, grafted branches / bear-
ing two kinds of fruit”: “It’s not that way.” Instead, the poet is preoccupied by
concerns “about who loved who / and who killed who.” She seeks “amnesty”
rather than peace or forgiveness and not so much for the actual historical
crimes as for remembering them.’ The awareness of racial history becomes a
terrible psychological burden. Doing justice to that awareness becomes an eth-
ical problem for a writer committed, as Hogan is, to portraying all beings—
even the oppressor and oppressed—as holistically interconnected. In this
sense “The Truth Is” is reminiscent of Choctaw poet Jim Barnes’s “A Season of
Loss,” also written in the first person, in which presumably assimilated and/or
mixed-race Native Americans lament their disconnection from nature: “Our
blood was now too thin to know / ... our skin too pale.” Their attempts to
connect to nature are “frail” because their “fathers’ blood pulsed slow,” and
they are left “[o]nly human.”” The denigrating tone of only is complicated by
the use of human as a category transcending racial difference. Like Hogan’s,
Barnes’s poem belies its self-indictment of failure. Barnes’s poetic invocation
of nature implies that a connection remains, and Hogan’s dramatized internal
discourse suggests an interracial conversation containing the “truth” of
the title.
The conundrum of “who loved who / and who killed who” is a particular
concern of Hogan’s. Much of her work focuses on various threats to Native
164 cw Emily Hegarty

American reproduction. Her historical novel Mean Spirit is a narrative of the

corruption, greed, and violence stirred by the discovery of oil on lands allot-
ted to Osage people in Oklahoma. The resulting land rush comes in the form
of white men seeking oil-rich Osage wives. Alongside the novel’s evocation of
government-sponsored exploitation is a poignant portrait of a community
whose personal relations both within and between races have been tainted by
suspicious motives: love or money? This theme of the problematics of Native
American intermarriage has been at issue in American literature since John
Rolfe married Pocahontas. In “The Truth Is” Hogan tellingly describes her left
hand as a “Chickasaw hand,” which “rests on the bone of the pelvis,’ while re-
assuring us (and herself?) that the white hand in her right pocket is “mine /
and not some thief’s.”"" Throughout her work we see Hogan worrying at the
concept of preserving Native American genetic reproduction from those who
would steal it, even though her holistic vision excludes any kind of separatism.
At the end of Mean Spirit the protagonists of the Graycloud family have been
driven from their home, which burns behind them. Many of their family
members have been murdered. But their triumph lies in having preserved
their lives. Because they “carried generations along with them,” their genetic
line has survived.”
Hogan’s concern for genetic continuance has a specifically environmental
component. One consequence of the current environmental crisis is that
chemical poisons and radiation have compromised human reproductive
health. The Conservation Foundation cites “industrial pollutants as contribu-
tors to rising infertility, clusters of birth defects, ‘hot spots’ of miscarriages,
and the unusually early onset of menopause among some women.”" It is now
estimated that every human being under forty years old has some exposure,
often beginning in the womb, to toxic chemicals that include hormonally ac-
tive compounds."
Although these are alarming figures for everyone, environmental racism
exacerbates Native American concerns. Native American reservation lands,
primarily Navajo, contain half of the known uranium deposits in the United
States but well over half of the uranium mines. Since the 1960s, improperly
disposed radioactive wastes from these mines have seriously contaminated
Navajo and Lakota lands and water supplies. The contamination is increased
by nearby nuclear missile sites and alleged nuclear waste dumping by the U.S.
military, often on land held to be sacred. A radioactive accident on the Navajo
reservation in New Mexico in 1978 caused greater contamination than Three
Mile Island. The cancer rate for Navajo teenagers is seventeen times the na-
tional average. In Nevada there have been at least one thousand atomic explo-
 Linda Hogan’s Ecopoetry ce 165

sions on Shoshone lands. Nor is all the contamination in the western deserts.
In upstate New York a leaking Superfund site on reservation land has resulted
in a 200 percent greater concentration of PCBs in the breast milk of Mohawk
and Akwesasne women than in the general population." In a 1985 interview
Hogan said that “most Indian people are living the crisis of American life, the
toxins of chemical waste, the pain of what is repressed in white Americans.”"®
Hogan describes this tainted landscape in her poem “The Other Side” as a
wasteland of darkness, broken tree limbs, and dying cows. Telling puns con-
demn what few things grow: trees are “radiating” new leaves, and eggs grow
“radiant” in nests. The title of the poem refers to “the other side of creation,”
which we can only assume is the atomic “sudden light” of destruction.” The
blight of “The Other Side” is allegorized in “The Alchemists,” which depicts
the discovery of radioactive mercury as the “fool’s gold” of deluded pseudo-
scientists. This scene of scientific folly is juxtaposed with the voice of a hospi-
talized father comparing the description of a surgical procedure to a poem.
Hogan’s voice rejects this comparison because if the surgeon’s diagnostic
speech “had worked / we would kneel down before it / and live forever.” For
Hogan the doctor is just another alchemist, and the cancers of radiation poi-
soning are iatrogenic diseases. “The Alchemists” can be read alongside Adri-
enne Rich’s 1974 poem “Power,” which also compares medical and nuclear sci-
ence. Rich laments the blindness of Marie Curie—both her literal blindness
from radiation sickness and the emotional blindness that let her die “denying
her wounds.” Like Rich, Hogan is determined to speak over the denial that
allows physical and cultural destruction to go unchecked.
It is telling that “The Alchemists” appears in a collection titled The Book of
Medicines. “The Alchemists” rejects the comparison of medical discourse and
poetry because, for Hogan, it is poetry that is truly healing. In English’s im-
perfect translation of Native American concepts, the term medicine refers to a
practice that operates both physically and spiritually. One of the primary
practices of healing medicine is the use of healing chants, which are poetic in
that they are an arrangement of words with a supramundane meaning but are
not strictly poems in the sense that they are not, or not only, art. They are for-
mulae intended and expected to have an actual effect in the physical and spir-
itual worlds. The relationship between such efficacious and religious language
practices as medicine chants and the Western concept of poetry is one of the
main disputes in Native American literary studies. The issue is further com-
plicated by troubling problems of translation and by the relation between oral
tradition and contemporary theories of textuality.
Hogan has described poetry as “a form of divine utterance that moves us to
166 ce Emily Hegarty

action, that is action itself.” She believes that “language contains the potential
to restore us to a unity with earth and the rest of the universe.” Her novel
Mean Spirit features a heroic gospel writer, Michael Horse, who adds a new
gospel to the Bible, writing “for those who would come later, for the next gen-
erations and the next, as if the act of writing was itself part of divination and
prophecy, an act of deliverance.” In “The Alchemists,” and in her poetic prac-
tice generally, Hogan presents the holistic Native American view of language
as affecting the world. This view of language as efficacious is shared at least
implicitly by most ecopoets, who consider their work to have extraliterary
connections to environmental movements. Many also consider ecopoetry a
spiritual practice.
A particular spiritual aspect of Hogan’s work is her use of poetry to lend a
voice to her ancestors. In “All Winter,” for example, she alludes to historical
genocide when she remembers “how the white snow / swallowed those who
came before me” but insists that the dead “sing from the earth. / This is what
happened to the voices.”” In “It Must Be” she describes herself as almost pos-
sessed by the ancestor spirits who live within her: “all the old women / who
live in the young house of this body.’” The poem directs its anger at the
pathologists, doctors, and psychiatrists who view her haunted condition as a
disease rather than as a spiritual condition. The speaker is ambivalent about
the ancestors, who are as distressing as they are comforting, and the ambigu-
ity of the title points to the confusion between diagnosis and fatedness. In this
sense “It Must Be” echoes “The Alchemists” in its use of Native American spir-
ituality to condemn medical discourses.
One of Hogan’s most powerful ancestral poems is “Tear,” which describes a
genetic memory of the Chickasaws’ forced removal to Oklahoma. The sor-
rowful march is described in detail, although the speaker admits not having
been born then, being “only a restlessness inside a woman’s body. At the end
of the poem, she explains that her ancestors survived the march for her sake,
and for the sake of her unborn children. Furthermore, both past and future
generations are with her in the present: “The world behind them did not close.
/ The world before them is still open.”* Here the technique of repetition com-
mon in Native American poetry and often associated with traditional chant-
ing also suggests the replication of generations following generations in an
unbroken line, using the medicine of poetry to weave together the generations
ripped apart by genocidal history.
Some of Hogan’s most environmental work unites the voices of past gener-
ations with the voices of the earth. “To Light” listens to the voices of “the great
seas” that
 Linda Hogan’s Ecopoetry Cw 167

have journeyed through the graveyards

of our loved ones,
turning in their graves
to carry the stories of life to air.”

“The Direction of Light” continues this theme of intergenerational connec-

tion, with each generation growing out of the bodies of the previous one:
“Children grow inch by inch / like trees in a graveyard.” Hogan implies that
language, too, grows out of past speech: “let this word / overthrow the first.””®
In “The Other Voices” the voices of pine needles and night crawlers are indis-
tinguishable from her own—”they are mine / and they are not mine”—but
their testimony will not be silenced: “even police can’t stop earth telling.”” The
speaking earth is a quintessentially environmental and Native American ges-
ture. One example besides Hogan is Harjo’s poem “For Alva Benson, and for
Those Who Have Learned to Speak,” in which generations of women hear and
“speak for the ground” when they give birth.” By disclaiming any singular
ownership of voice, Hogan, like Harjo, gains the consensus authority of a
community of voices. The resulting chorus effect lends great power to her
poetry.
Outside of Native American traditional knowledge, the speaking earth has
been promoted by Gary Snyder as the ecopoetic concept of biomass. Biomass
is an ecological concept that refers to biological information stored at the cel-
lular level in both human and nonhuman nature. According to Snyder, taking
biomass into account means “there is more information of a higher order of
sophistication and complexity stored in a few square yards of forest than there
is in all the libraries of mankind.” This information is of a “different order”: “It
is the information of the universe we live in. It is the information that has
been flowing for millions of years.”” In an article on the ecopoetry of Snyder
and Denise Levertov, Dorothy Nielson suggests that biomass is an environ-
mental revision of the poetic conventions of lyric voice. Snyder’s essay on bio-
mass specifically cites Native American thought as an influence on his own. It
is through concepts like biomass that Snyder and other ecopoets attempt to
avoid the hazards of representation entailed in speaking for nature in their
work. However, because for Snyder biomass tends to vocalize in the archetypal
and “prehistoric” symbols of traditional Native American culture, the hazards
of representation are reintroduced within the complex colonial context of
speaking for indigenous peoples.” Leslie Marmon Silko and other Native
American writers have upbraided Snyder and others on precisely these
grounds.” In contrast to these conundrums, the Native American model of
168 ce Emily Hegarty

holistic interpenetration, in which the earth’s voice, the spirit’s voice, and the
human’s voice are always already interwoven, avoids representational hazards
and focuses instead on being heard through the din of the dominant culture’s
materialist and hierarchical pronouncements.
Native American poetry’s emphasis on ancestors leads to a concern with
the passage of evolutionary time, a concern shared by much ecopoetry. For ex-
ample, in his poem “Spreading Wings on Wind,” Acoma Pueblo poet Simon
Ortiz describes the western landscape as seen from an airplane’s window. The
sight of craters gives rise to a comparison between prehistoric meteors that
crashed to the earth, causing mass extinction, and the arrival of Europeans in
the West: “one day there was a big jolt, / flame, and then silence.”” In Yaqui
poet Anita Endrezze’s “The Language of Fossils” Endrezze worries that her
language will be extinct, merely a fossil curiosity for the future.” Hogan like-
wise inserts her own life into the monumental processes of evolution. Her
poem “Partings” echoes Ortiz’s planetary scale in comparing the separation
between mother and daughter to the rupture of the continental divide or of
the ancient break between the earth and its asteroid moon.* In “What’s Liv-
ing?” she describes her relationship with her daughter as so primal that it re-
turns them to their prehistoric roots of “feathers and scales.” The poem ends
in an Ourobouros image of the snaky mother swallowing herself and her chil-
dren in an endless cycle of rebirth.” “Crossings” compares two miscarriages
and marks the common physical features of a whale fetus and a human fetus,
emphasizing a common evolutionary ancestral connection.” Except for the
poems celebrating the appearance of the next generation, most of these evo-
lutionary tropes conjure images of extinction and death.
Describing Native Americans as “vanishing” or facing extinction is a classic
trope in American literature. In Walt Whitman’s “Yonnondio,” “the aborig-
ines” are “flitting by like clouds of ghosts, they pass and are gone in the twi-
light.” Likewise, Whitman hints, “the cities, farms, factories” will also “fade”
and be “utterly lost.”” Such texts can be read as complicit in the national era-
sure of the continent’s genocide because they substitute for the violence of
colonization the seemingly scientific and impersonal process of evolution and
extinction. Michael Hatt argues that the imagery of the “vanishing” Native
American in American art is “an implicit consolidation of white power” in
that the focus of such texts on extinction bespeaks “white history, white
progress, white geographical expansion.””* Even in invoking some frightening
future (white) extinction, as Whitman does, such texts can work to portray
white American identity as under siege and in need of protection not from the
corporate polluters who really threaten it but from a demonized racial other.
 Linda Hogan’s Ecopoetry ces 169

Ecopoetry has made wide use of a variation of the “vanishing Indian” motif
in the figure of the “ecological Indian.” The “ecological Indian” is a contempo-
rary version of the Noble Savage stereotype, which emphasizes the supposed
inherent environmentalism of Native American peoples, thereby connecting
Native Americans in an essentialist fashion to nature and connecting the
genocide of Native Americans to the destruction of nature deplored by envi-
ronmentalism. A typical example of the ecological Indian figure is found in
Mary Oliver’s poem “Tecumseh,” in which she drinks from a polluted river in
homage to the dead Shawnee chief and imagines that if he were to come again,
we (white readers) would know him by his anger. Here the identification with
Tecumseh is meant to suggest the death wish implicit in contemporary Amer-
ican society’s acceptance of a polluted environment:

Sometimes

I would like to paint my body red and go out into

the glittering snow
to die.”

Native American writing eschews the “vanishing Indian” and “ecological

Indian” stereotypes in favor of addressing the root causes of genocide, which
are, given the holism of Native American thought, generally overlapping.
Harjo, for instance, in the poem “Backwards,” eerily envisions standing on a
moon that is being butchered by a “whiteman” who throws the meat/
moon/world to the dogs.” More important than condemning the evils of the
past, however, is limning the evils of the present. In this sense Hogan’s focus
on the extinction of animals both marks her environmentalism and resists any
kind of universalizing death wish. Hogan is a wildlife conservation activist
and obviously sees the preservation of wildlife as part of the same project as
preserving human life. Her most recent novel, Power, concerns the inter-
twined fates of the Native people of Florida and the endangered Florida pan-
ther.’ In this intertwining sense her animal extinction poems foreshadow
human extinction, but there is no hierarchy of value regarding who should be
preserved—all humans and all animals are holistically interconnected.
In “Bees in Transit: Osage County” Hogan compares Osage women mur-
dered for their oil-rich land to doomed bees that have escaped from hives
being transported by truck. Both populations, having lost the protection of
their hive or community, are bewildered, confused, and face “[d]esertion’s sor-
row” and “death cold.” That the bees were being transported even suggests the
170 ce Emily Hegarty

sad history of forced Indian removals. The speaker feels their “compound
eyes” looking at her and wishes she could either return them to their homes or
deny their connection to her.” Another complex human/animal connection is
found in “Mountain Lion,” wherein the speaker recognizes in the endangered
mountain lion’s fear of humans her own fear of those who do not share her
holistic worldview. Hogan interrogates the definitions of wild and, by implica-
tion, civilized:

I was the wild thing

she had learned to fear.
Her power lived
in a dream of my leaving.
It was the same way
I have looked so many times at others.

The speaker has no more hope of finding a world free of deadly “single vision”
than the mountain lion has of finding a world free of humans. They share “the
road / ghosts travel / ...in the land of the terrible other.” Ultimately, they turn
away from the despair they recognize in each other.”
The analogy between Native Americans and endangered animals is re-
peated in “The Fallen,” in which the speaker watches an asteroid fall and finds
a pregnant wolf dead of starvation in a steel trap in an “eroded field.” She con-
trasts the Native American and Western views of the wolf as symbol. For Na-
tive Americans the astronomical figure of the “Great Wolf” was the “mother of
all women,” but in Western cosmology the wolf “was the devil, falling / down
an empty / shrinking universe.” The wolf as Lucifer is connected to the guilt
(“failings”) of those who would kill the earth and each other. The speaker tries
to throw the demonic asteroid back into the sky, but it drops back to the earth:
“Sky would not take back / what it had done.” Western astronomy, like the rest
of the Western worldview, has become the dominant paradigm and even rules
the sky, which looks down on “the swollen belly / and dried up nipples of a
hungry world.” Especially in wordplay on failing and falling Hogan implicitly
criticizes the Christian cosmology that demonizes the earth and the material
world. “The Fallen” concludes: “That night, / I saw the trapper’s shadow/ and
it had four legs.“ As in “Mountain Lion,” the boundaries between human and
animal and between hunter and hunted are unclear. The dangerous vision of
“the trapper’s shadow” links the fates of the speaker and the wolf. The empha-
sis on the visual properties of sight and shadow remind us of the dangerous
“single vision” of “Mountain Lion.” In her essay “Deify the Wolf” Hogan
 Linda Hogan’s Ecopoetry Cw 171

writes that “wolves carry much of the human shadow. ... More than any other
animal, they mirror back to us the predators we pretend not to be.”
The status of the Great Wolf as a maternal deity is significant to Hogan’s
environmentalism. The role of Native American maternal deities is not con-
fined to biological reproduction. Instead these deities, such as Spider Grand-
mother and Thought Woman, govern all types of creation, even the destruc-
tion necessary for new creations. In many instances these deities bring forth
life not biologically but through chanting and singing, methods that make
their appearances especially resonant in poetry. Paula Gunn Allen emphasizes
that the maternal role is in this sense one of great ritual power, not of mute bi-
ological fecundity. In this sense, then, the pregnancy of the dead wolf sug-
gests not only the deaths of future generations but also the destruction of the
Native American world and cosmology. The poem is a likely allusion to an in-
cident in South Dakota in which starving Nakota people were reduced to eat-
ing the poisoned animal carcasses used to bait wolf traps and died of strych-
nine poisoning.”
Hogan’s critique has obvious commonalities with the environmental cri-
tique of Judeo-Christian traditions about the earth.“ The title suggests a lost
Eden, further critiquing the Western cosmology that could conceive of a par-
adise that must always already be lost, only to impose that punitive narrative
on colonized territories. In this respect “The Fallen” might be compared to
William Stafford’s “Traveling through the Dark,” wherein the speaker finds a
dead but pregnant doe by the side of the road. Stafford also juxtaposes the
pregnant carcass with images of Western expansion, specifically a slightly de-
monic automobile emitting glowing red exhaust. In pushing the doe’s warm
carcass off the highway, Stafford’s speaker is concerned to prevent the traffic
accidents that “might make more dead” and deliberates “for us all” about the
value and quality of an orphaned fawn’s life. There is no redemption in this fa-
mously ambivalent poem, and Stafford also critiques Western philosophy
through his description of thought itself as a type of accident-prone “swerv-
ing.” Stafford and Hogan share an emphasis on the connections between
the deaths of animals and of humans, as well as a sense that carelessness about
the former bodes ill for the fate of humans on an earth that has become a
shambles.
Hogan’s sense of the power of this connection is apparent in “The Ritual
Life of Animals,” wherein humans internalize the predatory life of animals:
“Something inside gets down on its haunches.” This “world of animal law” is
also “the house of pelvic truth.”® It is not only the cruel history of genocide
that has threatened genetic continuance but also the ongoing death-culture of
2 ce Emily Hegarty

contemporary American society. In many ways generational and genetic con-

tinuance and the transmission of cultural knowledge are Hogan’s methodol-
ogy, as well as her artistic motivation. Her writing is an effort to counteract the
effects of physical and cultural genocide and an attempt to reproduce for fu-
ture generations Native American culture and the viable environment with
which it is entwined.

Notes

1. Paula Gunn Allen. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian
Tradition, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 155-156.
2. Since the sterilizations ended, Native American reproductive health has im-
proved, and Native Americans served by the federal Indian Health Service in 1993 had
a birthrate 65 percent greater than the general population. The maternal mortality rate
has dropped 86 percent since the 1970s, and the infant mortality rate has dropped 61
percent in the same period, although it is still 30 percent higher than the general pop-
ulation’s. As of 1998 the Native American population had increased 14 percent since
1990, as compared to 8 percent for the general population during the same period, and
the rate of increase is expected to continue through 2020 because of the young median
age of Native Americans. Some analysts feel that the population increase is not entirely
because of increased births but also because of differences in the methods used by the
Census Bureau and an increased propensity for individuals to identify themselves as
Native American. None of these population statistics include changes resulting from
the federal recognition of “new” tribes, nor do they include populations of First Nation
peoples in Canada. Overall, Native Americans continue to constitute only 1 percent of
the U.S. population. These statistics and those in the text represent my own synthesis
of several sources. See Allen, Sacred Hoop, 189. See also essays in The State of Native
America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Boston: South
End Press, 1992). Census information was taken from U.S. Department of Commerce,
Census Bureau, “American Indian Heritage Month: November 1-30,” press release,
October 26, 1998 <http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/cb98ff13.html> (accessed
February 24, 2001); and U.S. Department of Commerce, Census Bureau, We the
First Americans, September 1993 <http://www.census.gov/apsd/wepeople/we-5.pdf>
(accessed February 24, 2001); and U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services, Indian Health Service, Trends in Indian Health 1997
<http://www.ihs.gov/PublicInfo/Publications/trends97/tds97ptl.pdf> (accessed Feb-
ruary 23, 2001). On the scandalously underreported topic of Indian Health Service
 Linda Hogan’s Ecopoetry ces WB

sterilizations see Charles R. England, “A Look at the Indian Health Service Policy of
Sterilization,1972-1976,” Red Ink 3 (spring 1994). Available: The People’s Paths
<http://www.yvwiiusdinvnohii-.net/articles/ihslook.htm> (accessed March 3, 2001).
3. Linda Hogan, Solar Storms (New York: Scribner, 1995), 17.
4. Linda Hogan, “Workday, in Savings (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1988), 43.
5. Linda Hogan, Seeing through the Sun (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1985), 8.
6. Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1983), 15.
7. Hogan, Seeing through the Sun, 8.
8. In an autobiographical sketch Linda Hogan writes: “My father is Chickasaw and
my mother is white, from an immigrant Nebraska family. This created a natural ten-
sion that surfaces in my work and strengthens it.” See the interview with Hogan in
Laura Coltelli, Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1990), 71.
9. Linda Hogan, “The Truth Is,” in Seeing, 4-5.
10. Jim Barnes, “A Season of Loss,” in Harper’s Anthology of Twentieth Century Na-
tive American Poetry, ed. Duane Niatum (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1988),
61.
11. Hogan, “The Truth Is,” 4.
12. Linda Hogan, Mean Spirit (New York: Atheneum, 1990; repr., New York:
Ivy/Ballantine, 1992), 375 (page citations are to the reprint edition).
13. Lin Nelson, “The Place of Women in Polluted Places,” in Reweaving the World:
The Emergence of Ecofeminism, ed. Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein (San
Francisco: Sierra Club, 1990), 177.
14. John Peterson Myers, “Exposure Is Ubiquitous,” Our Stolen Future, February 17,
2001 <http://www.osf-facts.org/NewScience/ubiquitous/ubiquitous.htm> (accessed
February 23, 2001). The Web site continually updates the information presented in the
original book Our Stolen Future. See Theo Colburn, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Pe-
terson Myers, Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and Sur-
vival? (New York: Dutton, 1996).
15. These statistics represent a synthesis of information from several sources. See
Ward Churchill and Winona LaDuke, “Native North America: The Political Economy
of Radioactive Colonization,” in Jaimes, 241-266; Mindy Pennybacker, “The First En-
vironmentalists,” review of All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life, by
Winona LaDuke, and three other books, Nation, February 7, 2000, 29. Available: Info-
trac, A59680016 (March 3, 2001); Judith Todd, “On Common Ground: Native Ameri-
can and Feminist Spirituality Approaches in the Struggle to Save Mother Earth,” in The
Politics of Women’s Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power within the Feminist
174 ce Emily Hegarty

Movement, ed. Charlene Spretnak (New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1982), 430-445. En-
vironmental menaces on Native American lands are so commonplace as to defy any
comprehensive cataloging here.
16. Quoted in Coltelli, 75.
17. Linda Hogan, “The Other Side,” in Seeing, 27.
18. Linda Hogan, The Book of Medicines (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1991),
55-56.
19. Adrienne Rich, The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984
(New York: Norton, 1984), 225.
20. Linda Hogan, “Who Puts Together,” in Studies in American Indian Literature:
Critical Essays and Course Designs, ed. Paula Gunn Allen (New York: MLA, 1983),
176-177.
21. Hogan, Mean Spirit, 341.
22. Linda Hogan, “All Winter,” in Savings, 6.
23. Linda Hogan, “It Must Be,” in Savings, 22.
24. Linda Hogan, “Tear,” in Book of Medicines, 59-60.
25. Linda Hogan, “To Light,” in Seeing, 35.
26. Linda Hogan, “The Direction of Light,” in Book of Medicines, 79-80.
27. Linda Hogan, “The Other Voices,” in Savings, 46.
28. Joy Harjo, “For Alva Benson, and for Those Who Have Learned to Speak,” in She
Had Some Horses, 18-19.
29. Gary Snyder, Turtle Island (New York: New Directions, 1974), 108.
30. Dorothy M. Nielson, “Prosopopoeia and the Ethics of Ecological Advocacy in
the Poetry of Denise Levertov and Gary Snyder,” Contemporary Literature 34 (winter
1993): 691-713.
31. See, e.g., Leslie Marmon Silko, “An Old-Time Indian Attack Conducted in Two
Parts: Part One: Imitation ‘Indian’ Poems, Part Two: Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island,” in
Nothing but the Truth: An Anthology of Native American Literature, ed. John Purdy and
James Ruppert (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 2001), 166-171; Wendy Rose,
“The Great Pretenders: Further Reflections on White Shamanism,” in Jaimes, 403—421;
and Ward Churchill, Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema, and the Coloniza-
tion of American Indians (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1992). Snyder is
singled out in these critiques because he is the most prominent ecopoet. However, even
his Native American critics acknowledge his respect, sensitivity, and poetic gifts. The
Native American critique of literary colonialism extends far beyond Snyder.
32. Simon J. Ortiz, “Spreading Wings on Wind,” in Harper’s Anthology of Twentieth
Century Native American Poetry, 141-142.
33. Anita Endrezze, “The Language of Fossils,” in Harper’s Anthology of Twentieth
Century Native American Poetry, 320-322.
 Linda Hogan’s Ecopoetry Ce 75

34. Linda Hogan, “Partings,” in Book of Medicines, 71-72.

35. Linda Hogan, “What’s Living?” in Seeing, 49.
36. Linda Hogan, “Crossings,” in Book of Medicines, 28.
37. Walt Whitman, “Yonnondio,” in Leaves of Grass (New York: Norton, 1973), 524.
38. Michael Hatt, “Ghost Dancing in the Salon: The Red Indian as a Sign of White
Identity,’ Diogenes 177 (spring 1997): 93-121. Available: Infotrac, A19713133 (accessed
February 24, 2001).
39. Mary Oliver, “Tecumseh,” in New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press,
1992);
40. Joy Harjo, “Backwards,” in She Had Some Horses, 20.
41. Linda Hogan, Power (New York: Norton, 1998).
42. Linda Hogan, “Bees in Transit: Osage County,” in Seeing, 60.
43. Linda Hogan, “Mountain Lion,” in Book of Medicines, 27.
44. Linda Hogan, “The Fallen,” in Book of Medicines, 42-43.
45. Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World (New York: Nor-
ton, 1995; repr., New York: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 1996), 71 (page citations
are to the reprint edition).
46. Allen, Sacred Hoop, 14-15, 27+28.
47. Hogan, Dwellings, 68.
48. The classic environmentalist critique of Judeo-Christian cosmology is Lynn
White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” in The Ecocriticism Reader:
Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: Uni-
versity of Georgia Press, 1996), 3-14. Other critiques are available in Diamond and
Orenstein’s Reweaving the World. It is also worth noting that there has been a Judeo-
Christian response to this criticism. See, for example, Wendell Berry’s essay “Christian-
ity and the Survival of Creation,” in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (New
York: Pantheon, 1992).
49. William Stafford, The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems (St. Paul, Minn.: Gray-
wolf, 1998), 77.
50. Hogan, Book of Medicines, 45.
Expanding the
Boundariesce>
oD
Zhou Xiaojing
cw “The Redshifting Web”
Arthur Sze’s Ecopoetics

In “The Redshifting Web,” the title poem of his sixth book of poetry, Arthur
Sze writes:
The gold shimmer at the beginning of summer
dissolves in a day. A fly mistakes a
gold spider, the size of a pinhead, at the center
of a glistening web. A morning mushroom
knows nothing of twilight and dawn?

You may puzzle

as to why a meson beam oscillates, or why
galaxies appear to be simultaneously redshifting
in all directions, but do you stop to sense
death pulling and pulling from the center
of the earth to the end of the string?’

These lines are characteristic of Sze’s poems, in which familiar images of na-
ture are mingled with those of metaphysics and quantum physics. By titling
his sixth volume of poetry The Redshifting Web, Sze articulates a worldview
that underlies his poetics. The term redshift describes the astronomical phe-
nomenon that occurs when stars are moving away from us and the light emit-
ted from them shifts toward the red end of the spectrum. In fact scientists
have discovered that most galaxies appear to be “redshifted”; that is, nearly all
galaxies are moving away from us and from one another. This indicates that
the universe is not static; it is expanding. The distances among galaxies are in-
creasing all the time.’ Sze uses the term redshift to suggest his sense of the con-
stant motion, change, and transformation of things in the universe and in our
everyday experience. At the same time, all things in the universe and their con-
stant changes, including those in the human world, are intricately connected,
interacting with one another and mutually influencing each other’s transfor-
mation. This concept of the world, based on the quantum principle, parallels
the basic philosophy of Daoism and the Native American view of the universe.

179
180 ce Zhou Xiaojing

Sze is familiar with all three frames of reference—natural sciences, Chinese

culture, and Native American culture—and he absorbs them in his poetics,
which might be called “ecopoetics.””
The term ecopoetics foregrounds the interconnectedness of all things in
Sze’s poetry, which embodies ecological concepts. This intricate relation of
multiplicity and oneness is more than a theme in Sze’s work; it shapes his aes-
thetics, particularly the structure of his poems. In this respect Sze’s work is
similar to what Leonard M. Scigaj calls “ecopoetry.” In his book Sustainable
Poetry: Four American Ecopoets, Scigaj contends that fostering a “sense of in-
habitation and connectedness with planetary processes occurs in both the aes-
thetic and phenomenological dimensions of ecopoetry."* Not only have
ecopoets broken away from the view of a subject-vs.-object relationship be-
tween human beings and nature, Scigaj notes, but they have also departed
from the Western logocentric poetic tradition, which is limited by its depen-
dence on the logic of linguistic systems for uttering experience and represent-
ing phenomena. Furthermore, Scigaj observes, “Ecopoets present nature in
their poems as a separate and equal other in dialogues meant to include the
referential world and offer exemplary models of biocentric perception and be-
havior” (11). Sze’s poetry shares many characteristics with ecopoetry as Scigaj
has defined it; however, nature in his poems is not “a separate and equal
other,” and the modes of perception or activities he represents are multicentric
rather than “biocentric.” The multiplicity in Sze’s poetry entails cross-cultural
experiences and multicultural activities that are part of the heterogeneous
phenomena in the universe.
Take, for example, the title poem of Sze’s fifth book of poetry, Archipelago,
which interweaves East Asian and Pueblo Native American cultures into the
fabric of its text saturated with nature. But these cultures are mobilized into
actual experiences and events that are merged and set in motion with the nat-
ural world. According to Sze, the book was inspired by the Rock Garden at
Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto, famous for its fifteen stones set in a sea of raked
gravel. When he visited the garden in 1990, Sze was struck by the fact that as
he walked back and forth along the walkway, he could not see all fifteen stones
at the same time. “The stones are positioned into clusters and at such angles
that the totality can never be seen at once.’ The configuration of the stones
resembles that of an archipelago, consisting of a cluster of apparently separate
islands, which are in fact part of the same submarine land mass and of the
earth’s crust. Sze realized that he “could develop a book” by creating “a series
of poems where each poem resembled a rock in a garden. Each poem or clus-
ter of poems would have its unique configuration, but they would all be
 Arthur Sze’s Ecopoetics Ce» 181

‘islands’ and would fit into a larger whole. . .. The archipelago is thus ‘the one
and the many.””® This concept is reflected in the content and structure of Arch-
ipelago, as its title poem illustrates.’
“Archipelago” consists of nine sections, each of which can be read as a sep-
arate poem, without any sequential narrative or rhetorical connections from
one poem to another. Yet all the sections are linked in a way by two simulta-
neous but independent temporalities: the poet’s persona walking in the Rock
Garden at Ryoanji Temple and Pueblo women dancing in New Mexico. These
two activities, particularly the Pueblo dance, also have the function of creating
a sense of time passing, hence a sense of movement within the poem’s syn-
chronic structure of collage juxtaposition. Just as these two activities are rep-
resented as concurrent, so are the speaker’s memories, reflections, and a range
of phenomena:

I walk along the length of a stone-and-gravel garden

and feel without looking how the fifteen stones
appear and disappear. I had not expected the space
to be defined by a wall made of clay boiled in oil
nor to see above a series of green cryptomeria
pungent in spring. I stop and feel an April snow
begin to fall on the stones and raked gravel and see
how distance turns into abstraction desire and ordinary
things: from the air, corn and soybean fields are
a series of horizontal and vertical stripes of pure color:
viridian, yellow ocher, raw sienna, sap green. I
remember in Istanbul at the entrance to the Blue Mosque
two parallel, extended lines of shoes humming at
the threshold of paradise... .
In the distance, I feel drumming
and chanting and see a line of Pueblo women dancing
with black-on-black jars on their heads; they lift
the jars high then start to throw them to the ground.’

The gesture of Pueblo women smashing the objects with which they are danc-
ing has a metaphorical meaning and effect that Sze attempts to materialize in
his poem. According to Sze, this ceremonial dance is a real-life incident. It oc-
curred in the San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico, after alcohol-related vio-
lence broke out (one man was stabbed) following a wedding in a church. “The
women of the pueblo felt so bad that they created black-on-black pots and
182 cw Zhou Xiaojing

invited the public to a ceremony where they raised the pots to the crowd and
then threw them on the ground.” Sze explains that the “throw,” which often
occurs at the end of a dance, is meant to “connect the dancers to the public
and the world at large.”"’ In “Archipelago” Sze attempts to make connections
between his poem and the reader, and between his art and the world, by con-
stantly breaking the form and style in order to connect to the reader and the
world.
The second section of the poem is a good example of this kind of break, or
rather “throw.” There is no narrative, no reflection, not even a single complete
sentence in this section. Rather, the section is made up of fragmentary and
heterogeneous images, which help produce multiple temporalities. At the
same time, Sze’s use of collage juxtaposition enables him to create space and a
sense of distance that paradoxically suggest an underlying connection among
these seemingly separate phenomena:

Rope at ankle level,

a walkway sprinkled with water
under red and orange maples along a white-plastered wall;

moss covering the irregular ground

under propped-up weeping cherry trees;

in a corral
a woman is about to whisper and pat the roan’s neck;

an amber chasm inside a cello;

a woman wearing a multicolored dress of silk-screened

naked women
about to peel an egg;
three stones leading into a pond."

Sze represents these varied, fractional images in such a way that they all seem
to be caught in a moment of time, thus suggesting a simultaneity that en-
hances the invisible connections among them. At the same time, the collage
juxtaposition and arrangement of single and multiple lines have the effect of
giving equal importance to each phenomenon. Thus, human beings and their
activities are only part of all things in motion in the universe, and the poet’s
presence does not claim centrality but, rather, recedes into the background.
 Arthur Sze’s Ecopoetics =e. 183

Indeed, the poet’s thoughts and feelings are merged with the surrounding
world throughout the poem.
In addition to collage juxtaposition, Sze employs modes of simultaneity to
achieve the effect of connecting the “I” to others and to blend the metaphysi-
cal with the material world. For instance, he uses the images of Pueblo cere-
monial drumming, chanting, and dancing as a rhythmic device to punctuate
the speaker’s meditation and to indicate, as well as generate, changes in both
the inner and outer worlds. In section 5 of “Archipelago,” Sze interweaves the
scene and movement of a Pueblo ceremonial dance with the speaker’s experi-
ence and imagination, thus creating a simultaneity that links two spiritual
journeys undertaken separately yet concomitantly, one communal, the other
personal. Although the Pueblo ceremonial dance is taking place in its own lo-
cation and at its own pace, it intersects the speaker’s different spatial-tempo-
ral experience, stimulating his imagination and transforming his perception:

Men dressed in cottonwood leaves dance

in the curving motion of a green rattlesnake.
I am walking along a sandstone trail
and stop in a field of shards: here is a teal zigzag
and there is a blood-red deer’s breath arrow.
Women dancers offer melons to the six directions
then throw them to the ground. A wave
rocks through the crow as the melons are smashed open.
I know I have walked along a path lit
By candles inside open-mesh cast-iron carp.

As a cornmeal path becomes a path to the gods

Then a cornmeal path again, I see the line
of women dancing with black-on-black jars on their heads.
They raise the jars with macaw and lightning patterns
to the six directions then form a circle
and throw them down on the center-marking stones. (79)

The speaker’s spiritual experience is accompanied by the Pueblo women

dancers’ gesture of offering “melons to the six directions” and of smashing the
melons and the jars to make connections to the crowd and the world. The “six
directions” refer to Pueblos’ view of the world, which is made up of “above,
below, north, west, south and east”; hence, “In the pueblo, one can be in the cen-
ter of a three-dimensional world?” And in making offering to the six
184 ce Zhou Xiaojing

directions, the Pueblo dancers are making contact with the “other worlds” of
gods and spirits, as well as the human world.” The closing lines of this section
foreground Sze’s philosophy of “the one and the many,” which underlies his
ecopoetics in terms of the Archipelago configuration. As the dancers throw the
jars down “on the center-marking stones,” the center of their activity resonates
with many others where there is “a silence in the shape of a rake,’ “a shaggymane
[is] pushing up through asphalt,” and “a mutilated body was found behind the
adobe church.” These centers and others are like the islands of an archipelago.
In accordance with this ecological concept, the Pueblo dance, although
central to the structure and aesthetic of the poem, is represented as one of the
multifarious phenomena in the universe. As the Pueblo ceremonial dance
opens into a social dance in section 8, the dance becomes one of the multi-
tudinous images and activities taking place in Asia and America, in the human
world and in nature:

Mating above the cattails, red dragonflies—

sipping litchi tea, eating fried scallion pancakes—

bamboo slivers under the fingernails—

playing ping-pong by candlelight in a greenhouse—

digging up and rotating soil in the flower beds—

pulling and pulling at her throat until it bleeds—

archipelago:
an expanse of water with many scattered islands—

a python coiling around sixteen white oblong eggs—

waking in the dark to pungent hyacinths—

blooming the pure white curve of blooming—

dancers are throwing

licorice, sunflower seeds, pot scrubbers, aprons, plastic bowls. (83)

By using lines rather than stanzas as distinct units, Sze, again, gives equal
weight to each phenomenon. The fragmentary images, in fact, contain all the
 Arthur Sze’s Ecopoetics Ce» 185

basic elements from the previous sections, suggesting a link among these dis-
parate things. Just as the Pueblo dancers throw objects to open the ceremony
to the spectators, Sze intends to connect his poem to the reader and the world
by making “a ‘throw’ of images out to the reader at the end of the poem, but
also at the end of the book.””® His way of ending a poem or a book with im-
ages enacts his aesthetics that resists closure and the privileging of the mind
over nature.
The ninth and final section of the poem begins with the objects that the
dancers throw at the crowd in the previous section. But these objects immedi-
ately give way to numerous images of motion and change and to thoughts and
sounds:

the shadow of a hummingbird—

crab apple blossoms scattering in the street—

js.-w ol ep ee pip 6):0).0\.0..¢ & Le 68 0. 60 0 6 0 6

black, blak, blaec—

following the thread

of recollection through a lifetime—

the passions becoming the chiming sounds of jade—

blue corn growing in the field of sand—

the chug chug, ka ka of a cactus wren—... .”°

Sze’s metaphorical “throw” of images at the reader here incorporates a series

of empty spaces that enhance the significance of each phenomenon taking
place in its own time-space. Sze again creates a poignant sense of coexistence
and connection among all things through collage juxtaposition of multiple
temporalities. The fragmented syntax also helps produce “a resonance and
erasure of time.””” Sze evokes the resonance of time through images such as
“the shadow of a hummingbird” and the collating of three versions of the
same word: black followed by the Middle English spelling blak and Old Eng-
lish blaec, which have exactly the same pronunciation as black. The connec-
tions among these words resonate with “the thread / of recollection through a
lifetime,” suggesting a time line that is erased by other images in other space-
186 ce Zhou Xiaojing

time. Perhaps, by leaving empty spaces and by erasing a unifying time line, Sze
invites the reader to fill in his or her own memories. At the same time, a multi-
centered world emerges from the collage of disjunctive images. Hence, aban-
doning a unified, absolute, and linear concept of time is crucial for Sze’s de-
velopment of an ecopoetics of which synchronic structure is a salient feature
in his composition.
Although this structure resists a hierarchical order, it also entails more pos-
sibilities for Sze to open the poetic form to include diversity in the world. As
the speaker says in “Viewing Photographs from China,” included in an earlier
volume, Dazzled:

And instead of insisting that

the world have an essence, we
juxtapose, as in a collage,
facts, ideas, images."

Collage composition also resists presenting the world through a logically or-
ganized sequence that tends to eliminate connections among radically dis-
parate things. For Sze an ecological, or Daoist, view of the world demands a
new mode of making poetry. In another early poem, “The Leaves of a Dream
Are the Leaves of an Onion,” Sze makes unlikely connections among all things
in the universe, articulating an ecological view that provides the ground for
his bold experiment with poetic form in his later volumes. In section 2 of this
poem Sze insists on connecting the human world, including scientific discov-
ery and development of technology, to the world of nature:

A Galapagos turtle has nothing to do

with the world of the neutrino.
The ecology of the Galapagos Islands
has nothing to do with a pair of scissors.
The cactus by the window has nothing to do
with the invention of the wheel.
The invention of the telescope
has nothing to do with a red jaguar.
No. The invention of the scissors
has everything to do with the invention of the telescope.
A map of the world has everything to do
with the cactus by the window.
The world of the quark has everything to do
 Arthur Sze’s Ecopoetics Cw 187

with a jaguar circling in the night.

The man who sacrifices himself and throws a Molotov
cocktail at a tank has everything to do
with a sunflower that bends to the light.’

Here Sze is arguing for an ecological view of the world, but he breaks away
from the rhetorical tradition of logical argument, depending instead on juxta-
posing images, rather than reasoning through images, to make his point.
It is precisely in rejecting a dichotomous relationship between culture and
nature that Sze’s ecopoetics differs from that of traditional pastoral poetry. In
her discussion of the relation between the natural world and the objectivist
poets’ pastoral poetry, Judith Schwartz observes, “Pastoral poetry and Objec-
tivist poetry both explore the potentially destructive contact between human
artifice and an idealized nature.”” Although human destruction of nature oc-
casionally appears in Sze’s poems, his view of the relation between culture and
nature neither emphasizes the former’s potential destruction of the latter nor
idealizes nature. In fact this binary view of culture and nature runs counter to
Sze’s ecological view of all elements in the universe. Rather, Sze is concerned
with exploring alternative modes for understanding the world and the self in
which human beings and nature are part of its “redshifting web.” “The world
is more than you surmise,” says the speaker in “The Leaves of a Dream Are the
Leaves of an Onion.” For the speaker, as for Sze, “No single method can de-
scribe the world; / therein is the pleasure / of chaos, of leap of the mind.” Al-
though “The pattern of interference in a hologram” can replicate images of
natural objects, it “misses the sense of chaos, distorts / in its singular view.”
In resisting a single view of the world and everything in it, Sze not only de-
velops a poetics of synchronic structure and serial representation, but he also
incorporates vocabulary and concepts of physical science into his poetry. Take
for example these lines from “Every Where and Every When”:

Is it true an anti-matter particle

never travels as slow as the speed of light,

and, colliding with matter, explodes?

The mind shifts as the world shifts.

I look out the window, watch Antares glow.

The world shifts as the mind shifts;
188 ces Zhou Xiaojing

or this belief, at least, increases

the pleasure of it all—the smell of espresso

in the street, picking blueberries,

white-glazed, blue-black,

sieved gold from a river, this moment

when we spin and shine.”

Sze’s mixing of scientific vocabulary with everyday language enables him to

break away from the dichotomized paradigm for representing the relations
between culture and nature, between the city and the country, and between
the corrupted urban society and the simple rural land in pastoral and objec-
tivist poetry.”
While exploring alternative modes for representing the interconnected-
ness of all things, Sze develops what might be called an ecological aesthetics.
Peter Harries-Jones, in his essay “Aesthetics and Ecology: A Nonfictional
View,” observes, “Today ecological aesthetics has moved . . . towards the idea
that the beauty of living lies in active participation. The new existential unit
is that of self plus nature as a single field of relations and processes.”* Of the
several perspectives of ecological aesthetics that Harries-Jones discusses,
three share some similarities with Sze’s. One of them is Arnold Berleant’s
“participatory ecological aesthetics,” which is developed from the recognition
that “[o]ur bodies respond and reestablish us as we move through space and
time in active engagement with changing conditions” (434). At the same
time, Harries-Jones adds, “the paradigms and categories of space, time, and
movement which are necessary for any active perception of environment are
embedded in cultural practices” (434). Berleant’s aesthetics thus challenges
the privileging of vision over other sensual experiences and reveals the mu-
tually constituent relationship between human beings and their environ-
ment. Similarly, in Sze’s poems sound and smell are as important as sight;
both the vision and action of the speaker alter with the motions in the envi-
ronment. All these are in constant processes, changing with different time-
space. “The mind shifts as the world shifts,” says Sze’s persona, but that “The
world shifts as the mind shifts” may be a “belief” that enhances the pleasure
of experience.
The second perspective of ecological aesthetics Harries-Jones discusses is
developed by Arne Naess, who combines “insights drawn from natural science
about relations in an electromagnetic or quantum field . . . from psychology of
 Arthur Sze’s Ecopoetics Cw 189

perceptual gestalts, and extends there to ethical and spiritual perspectives

about unity in nature” (435). Like Naess, Sze incorporates insights drawn
from natural science, philosophy, and spiritual beliefs into his development of
an ecological aesthetics, but he differs from Naess in embracing chaos rather
than seeking “unity in nature.” Sze’s ecological aesthetics also departs from
that of Berleant and Naess in its multicultural perspectives. In this respect
Sze’s aesthetics shares more similarity with that of Fritjof Capra. According to
Harries-Jones, Capra believes that a new aesthetics developed after the discov-
ery in quantum physics that “destroyed the concept of an independent world”
and changed our role in nature from an “observer” to a “participator.”* Fur-
thermore, “Capra evokes the Eastern worldview and the mystical traditions of
Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism to demonstrate parallels between their
views about the interconnectedness and interdependence of natural phenom-
ena and the views of modern physics. Both describe a universe where all
things and events are ultimately related.” These kinds of parallels between
modern physics and Eastern and Native American worldviews are precisely
the epistemological basis for Sze’s ecological aesthetics.
Another serial poem, “The Silk Road,” illustrates well this aspect of his aes-
thetics and reveals another dimension of Sze’s ecopoetics, which has absorbed
elements from physiology, Daoism, and other aspects of Chinese culture.”
The title of the poem alludes to the historical route of cross-cultural interac-
tions, but the poem “is ultimately a journey into the deepest self to recognize
death and use it as a point of transformation.” But rather than trying to reach
“the deepest self” in the “poet-I” through contemplation, Sze seeks to confront
it through multiple selves of more than one person in different cultures and
time-space. Eventually, this search for the deepest self in the quest to. under-
stand the meaning of death becomes an exploration of the fact that death and
life are to be understood as one, coexisting in all things at various moments.
As Scigaj says of ecopoets who “are much more concerned with affirming
the integrity of the lived body of quotidian, prereflective experience as the
base of all thinking,” Sze begins “The Silk Road” with the bodily experience
of a diabetic:

The blood in your arteries is contaminated with sugar.

You may hate the adrenal reduction of the mind to
the mind of a dog, but sic, run may be forms of sugar.
You may whet for the smell of rain on a clear summer night.
You may whet for the sugar in red maple leaves.
« @ ee 6 ee cleleie © 6 4166 0 6 © 6 0 6 6 0 8.0
190 ce Zhou Xiaojing

but discard dream structure for a deeper asymmetry,

You thirst in your mind for an insulin, death:

death in the yellow saguaro flower opening at midnight,

death in a canyon wren’s song at sunrise,

death in red carp swimming in a clear pool of water,

death in an April moonrise. Now the figure-of-eight knot, . . .””

Rather than privileging the mind over nature, Sze shows that the mind de-
pends on material substances for its basic functions. To explore something
deeper than dream—death—the diabetic yearns “for an insulin” that will en-
able him or her to understand the paradox of death in the fullest moment of
life. Yet the meaning of death is like “the figure-of-eight knot.” A sideways fig-
ure of eight is the mathematical sign for the infinite. Sze combines this sign
with the image of a knot to convey a Daoist view of infinite mystery of life and
death beyond any single definition through logical reasoning.
Sze explores metaphysical questions of death not only in relation to physi-
ology and imagination but also in terms of multiple temporalities. This plu-
rality in space-time enables him to explore death in different forms and from
varied perspectives. In section 2 Sze indicates that nuclear tests have created
new forms of dying and disorientation unlike that of the diabetic: “A turtle
pushes onto the sand of Bikini Island, / and, disoriented by radiation, pushes
further and further / inland to die.”*' The mortal effect of nuclear radiation on
life in nature is also affecting human lives in different ways: “This sand was
black and silver shining in the megalight. / Now the radiation is in my hands
and in your face” (15). But how is one to understand the immanence of death
when it is manifested or hidden in so many different forms?

To argue that you must know the characteristic

that makes all birds birds before you can identity

a bird—and here you must discard antinomies—

postpones auk to that indeterminate time in the fallout

of the future when you shall have knowledge of the form Death. (15)

Here Sze alludes to Plato’s concept of “form” as an independently existing pure

essence of being, while questioning its assumption of universal, totalizing
 Arthur Sze’s Ecopoetics Cw 191

knowledge. He subverts a Western philosophical tradition based on mono-

lithic universalism and a unified, absolute concept of time by juxtaposing the
Platonic notion about knowledge with the Daoist notion of reality and time:
“A merchant from Xi’an brought ceremonial caps to Kuga, / but the Kuga peo-
ple shaved their heads and tattooed their bodies” (15).”

Ow

There are apricots beginning to drop from branches to the earth;

there are apricots not yet beginning to drop from branches;
there are apricots not yet not yet beginning to drop.”

“The Silk Road” and Sze’s other poems incorporate these concepts of multiple
values, realities shaped not simply by different space-time but also by memory
and imagination.
Arthur Sze develops an ecopoetics with insights derived from natural sci-
ences, philosophies, imagination, and everyday experience. His poetry itself is
like a redshifting web, connecting vastly dissimilar things and opening to
those beyond our immediate surroundings:

I find a rufous hummingbird on the floor

of a greenhouse, sense a redshifting
along the radial string of a web.

staring through a skylight

at a lunar eclipse;
a great blue heron,
wings flapping,
landing on the rail of a float house;
near and far:
a continuous warp;

hiding a world in a world:

1054, a supernova.”

There are worlds without boundaries in this poem, in which Sze expands a
moment of perception by dislodging it from a single space-time and situating
it in juxtaposition to a wide range of phenomena in the universe, where past,
present, and future collapse into one and multiple simultaneities. This and
other poems illustrate that Sze’s ecological poetics of “the one and the many”
192 ce Zhou Xiaojing

resists homogeneity and breaks down binaries such as culture vs. nature, East
vs. West, and margins vs. centers. Such an ecological concept of the world,
then, offers much more than a new mode of poetics. As our globalized eco-
nomic, cultural systems are expanding, an ecological concept of the world en-
ables us to reconceptualize the past and to reimagine the future by providing
us with a necessary alternative to binary, hierarchical systems of thought. In
this sense Arthur Sze’s ecopoetics embodies a politics that seeks to transform
and renew.

Notes

1. Arthur Sze, The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (Port Townsend, Wash.: Cop-
per Canyon Press, 1998): 227.
2. See Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time from the Big Bang to Black Holes
(New York: Bantam, 1990): 38-39.
3. Arthur Sze, a Chinese American, used to be a science major. While studying
physics at MIT, he decided that writing poetry was much more challenging. He then
took intensive courses in Chinese literature at the University of California at Berkeley,
where he also studied poetry with Josephine Miles. His translations of classical Chinese
poetry appeared in two volumes: The Willow Wind (Berkeley: privately printed, 1972)
and Two Ravens (Gudalupita: Tooth of Time, 1976). He had a special relationship with
Native American culture in the West, for he was married to a Hopi weaver for seven-
teen years and had a son with her. Also, he is professor of creative writing at the Insti-
tute of American Indian Arts at Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he has been teaching for
more than fourteen years.
4. Leonard M. Scigaj, Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets (Lexington: Uni-
versity Press of Kentucky, 1999), 10.
5. Arthur Sze, letter to the author, December 22, 1996.
6. Ibid.
7. A longer and slightly different reading of this poem appears in my article “Inter-
cultural Strategies in Asian American Poetry,” in Ruth Hsu et al., eds., Re-placing Amer-
ica: Conversations and Contestations (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000):
92-108.
8. Arthur Sze, Archipelago (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 1995), 75.
9. See “Arthur Sze,” interview, in Eileen Tabios, Black Lightning: Poetry-in-Progress
(New York: Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 1998), 8.
10. Sze, letter to the author, April 23, 1997.
11. Sze, Archipelago, 76.
 Arthur Sze’s Ecopoetics cw 193

12. Tabios, “Arthur Sze,” 8.

13. The Pueblo concept of the six directions corresponds to the traditional Chinese
view of the world, which also consists of six directions: east, south, west, north, plus
heaven and the netherworld. See I-Ching, or The Book of Changes.
14. Sze, Archipelago, 76, 80.
15. Sze, letter, April 23, 1997.
16. Sze, Archipelago, 84.
17. Tabios, “Arthur Sze,” 13.
18. Arthur Sze, Dazzled (Point Reyes Station: Floating Island, 1982), 13.
19. Arthur Sze, River River (Providence: Lost Roads, 1987), 14.
20. Judith Schwartz, ““The World Is the Greatest Thing in the World’: The Objec-
tivists’ Immanent’ Pastoral,” in Patrick D. Murphy, ed., Literature of Nature: An Inter-
national Sourcebook (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998), 33.
21. Sze, River River, 15, 18.
22. Ibid., 24.
23. See Schwartz, 33-35.
24. Peter Harries-Jones, “Aesthetics and Ecology: A Nonfictional View,” in Murphy,
434, ,
25. Ibid., 437. See also Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Ris-
ing Culture (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982): 47-49.
26. Harries-Jones, 438.
27. According to Sze, the poem was inspired by the Chinese composer Tan Dun’s
combination of Beijing opera singing with unusual Chinese instruments “to create
provocative tonal effects.” See Arthur Sze, notes on “The Silk Road,” in Patterns/Con-
texts/Time: A Symposium on Contemporary Poetry, ed. Phillip Foss and Charles Bern-
stein (Santa Fe: TYUONYI, 1990), 224. Sze developed a performance piece with the
collaboration of Joan La Barbara (New Music soprano), Shi-Zhen Chen (Chinese
opera vocalist), Christopher Shulties (leader of the New Mexico Percussion Ensemble),
Yao An (zheng/Chinese zither player), and Tan Dun, who scored for himself (Chinese
pottery pipe) and Chinese fiddle. This performance premiered at the Center for Con-
temporary Arts, Santa Fe, on April 1 and 2, 1989. Sze’s reading of “The Silk Road” was
part of this performance. For Sze’s description of it see his notes on “The Silk Road.”
28. Sze, letter to the author, January 12, 1997.
29. Scigaj, 11.
30. Sze, Archipelago, 11.
31. Ibid., 12.
32. The merchant from Xi’an, capital of the Tang Dynasty, situated at one end of the
Silk Road, represents one reality, which coexists with another of a different culture in
another location: Kuga, a site of remote wilderness on the actual silk road. The fact that
194 ce Zhou Xiaojing

the ceremonial caps of people in Xi’an become useless for people of Kuga suggests that
there is another reality beyond one’s knowledge limited by geography or circum-
stances. These lines actually allude to a passage in a text attributed to Zhuangzi. See
Chuang Tsu: Inner Chapters, trans. Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English (New York: Vintage
Books, 1974), 15.
33. Sze, Archipelago, 14. These lines allude to Zhuangzi’s concept of time, which
subverts the linearity of time in a unified form of past, present, and future: “There is a
beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning
to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning.” See Complete Works of Chuang-Tzu, trans.
Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 19.
34. Sze, The Redshifting Web, 233-234.
Beverly Curran

Ceo!ln Her Element

Daphne Marlatt, the Lesbian Body,
and the Environment

catch
in the mesh of a net we refuse to see, the accretion of all our
actions, how they interact, how they inter/read (intelligence),
receive, the reading the sea, a vanishing marsh, a dying river,
the mesh we are netted in, makes of us.
—Daphne Marlatt, Steveston

All my poetics are, is connections.

—Daphne Marlatt, “Given This Body”

Over the past three decades the writing of Canadian poet Daphne Marlatt
has revealed a deep interest in the local and in the poet’s finding her place in
it. Marlatt has described her ongoing writing project as a process of transla-
tion, of translating text into context in an awareness of “the extensiveness of
that cloth of connectedness we are woven into.”' For Marlatt such a transla-
tion’s priority is not faithful accuracy but rather a foregrounding of the differ-
ence and slippage of meaning that occur between authorial intention and the
play of words in the act of writing, and in reading. Marlatt has suggested that
writing can be more intercommunicative by “reading what we are in the
mi(d)st of, reading the world,” through an articulation of an individual’s
porous self and collaborative relationships with others and the environment.’
Such a praxis has implications that extend beyond writing to propose a differ-
ent view of how we live in and with the world around us.
Marlatt’s interest in place and “the notion of here, what being here means”
is evident in her early writing from the 1960s.’ Along with other Vancouver
poets such as George Bowering and Frank Davey, Marlatt was inspired and in-
fluenced by William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson, es-
pecially by their “sense of place, of ‘locus’ as Olson would have put it, a sense
of the crucial relations among themselves, their community, and their lan-
guage.” In Vancouver Poems, her long poem unearthing the “buried” history

195
196 ce Beverly Curran

of Vancouver, she explores the remnants of cultural memory still clinging to

“this present / city, as a residue we / Cannot, rid our selves of.”’ Excavations of
collective memory continue in Steveston, her long poem about a Japanese fish-
ermen’s community. The poem weaves documentary interview fragments of
individual life stories into a discernible social design of dispossession and ex-
ploitation of human and natural resources.’ By including others’ speech in her
poems, Marlatt creates in her writing a collaboration of voices, with her au-
thorial self interacting with others as she reads from where she stands “in this
body at this moment in this place marked by, bearing traces of, the places, mo-
ments and people lived with, in and through to this point.””
In the 1980s, as Marlatt’s writing rereads Steveston through a feminist lens,
the nets of commercial exploitation that entrap the lives of salmon and mar-
ginalized fishermen and cannery workers are extended to explicitly include
women. Critics have noticed links between Marlatt’s Steveston and Williams’s
Paterson,’ and Marlatt has acknowledged connections with Olson’s Maximus
Poems; but as Brenda Carr has pointed out, Steveston also reveals affinities
with H. D?s Trilogy and a feminist long-poem tradition.’ Marlatt will begin to
consciously work out of this tradition, “salvaging” poems she had written
about Steveston and rereading them as “shoreline poems . . . written on that
edge where a feminist consciousness floods the structures of patriarchal
thought.””° Informed by feminist critical thought and a lesbian consciousness,
Marlatt’s interest in the energy of place develops into a relational lesbian po-
etic that is still profoundly ecological. Her writing attempts to tell a story of
the present that resonates with past and future, and the interdependency of all
living beings, to participate in “a certain luminosity of being (as Virginia
Woolf would put it)” that undoes “oppositions in a multivalent desire for re-
lationship, whether with women or men, children, cats, trees, the particular
slant of light in a street or a breaking wave.”" Writing against callous exploita-
tion, Marlatt asserts the erotic rhythms of the earth and somatic sensory con-
nections. She immerses herself in the medium of language, listening to the
words that come and letting silence, too, find a place in her text. Drifting
where the words take her, Marlatt lets her thoughts be taken by surprise, lets
her writing be relocated. In this essay I will consider the porous drift of Mar-
latt’s poetic, which listens as much as it speaks, and how it shapes the writer’s
sense of place as an interactive field of worlds and words, of touch and tongue,
where any body can feel at home in its element.
Marlatt’s poetics of place has its beginnings in her own life story. Born in
Australia, she spent her early childhood in Malaysia before immigrating with
her family to Canada when she was nine. In the transition from a privileged
 Daphne Marlatt ce. 197,

colonial childhood to suburban North Vancouver, where her “foreign” lexicon

was a liability, Marlatt was suddenly aware of herself as many selves and the
place she occupied as multidimensional. The poet recalls how her “immigrant
imagination” began to grasp the mutable nature of the world and language
when she moved to Canada: “When you are told, for instance, that what you
call earth is really dirt, or what you have always called the woods (with English
streams) is in fact the bush (with its creeks), you experience the first split be-
tween name and thing, signifier and signified, and you take that first step into
a linguistic world that lies adjacent to but is not the same as the world of
things.”
In her novel Ana Historic Marlatt invents “a historical leak, a hole in the
sieve of fact” to imagine lesbian lives left out of historical records and to enter
their stories. She creates Mrs. Richards and her lover, Birdie Stewart, and
writes them into the local history of Victorian British Columbia. In doing so
she seeks to connect the private act of imagination with “the public act of per-
forming a recognizable self”” on the stage of history. In Steveston, more than
a decade earlier, Marlatt employed a collaboration of voices to make space for
Asian immigrant workers marginalized by race and language; in Ana Historic
she weaves lives marginalized by sexuality into the history of that place, estab-
lishing a context that holds both past and present lives as it holds both legends
of the sacred salmon and salmon rivers polluted with dioxins: the context is
“huge, a living tissue we live together with/in.”" Marlatt conflates lesbian con-
sciousness and ecological concerns in her re-vision of the world as a shared
narrative that challenges the dominant power structures that have rendered
workers exploited, lesbians invisible, and the environment subject to destruc-
tion in the name of economic dominance. “The cave speaks, the desert sings
and the unexamined world which was merely background for his exploits sud-
denly becomes so live, so resonant with alternative givens, there is no longer
any sure footing in the old order of things.” Her writing uncovers the hidden
and lets a multiplicity of voices connect as speaking subjects, not as a unified
whole but as threads that extend the limits of what constitutes community.
In Steveston this network of connection was formally signaled in the col-
laboration between Marlatt and photographer Robert Minden. The long
poem and black-and-white photographs reveal a tension between the muta-
bility of poetry and the moment “taken” by the camera: “The poems have ver-
bal vestiges of their subjects embedded in them (their own words) but they do
not shimmer with this sense of actual presence and are not located in time as
a photograph is.”"® Minden’s photographs focus on the faces and human ac-
tivity of the Japanese fishing community of Steveston, a small town at the
198 ce Beverly Curran

mouth of the Fraser River, just outside Vancouver, British Columbia. Marlatt’s
poems share the photographer’s interest in that largely male population of
workers, in the context of “how they inhabited that place, their relationship to
the place itself, not just as a human community, but as an ecological site, the
whole ‘river-ing’ ecology, going out to sea and back.’” For Marlatt the fishing
community embodies a different order, based on the primacy of the environ-
ment, that resists the notion of the individual “at the centre of his world as
dominant figure controlling by will &/or authority,” a position the poet per-
ceives as the basis for capitalist exploitation of the land and of each other, a
position destructive because it “ignores the reverberation of any action within
the web (e.g. how our pollution comes back to us).”"* Marlatt’s use of the first-
person plural admits her own membership in the culture of consumerism and
her complicity in the damaging of the environment, but it also seeks out her
reader in an act of collaborative resistance. Her poetic act of reading the cul-
tural other is simultaneously an act of being read as part of a collective envi-
ronmental text, what “the sea, a vanishing marsh, a dying river, / the mesh we
are netted in, makes of us.””
In spite of her interest in the community of Steveston, it was the river that
seduced the poet. In Steveston the prose poems flow with the river, acknowl-
edging worlds beyond words, beyond human stories, and situating lives within
an ecosystem, “the largest sense of what we’re involved in as living beings.”” In
a 1997 interview Marlatt recalls an early visit to Steveston and her initial en-
counter with a system not built on a human scale: “First of all, you're standing
on an island that’s below sea level so it’s an incredibly liminal place between
water and earth. But especially if you're standing there in the Spring, with the
freshet pouring down the Fraser, you get an incredible sense of the power of
that water moving out to the sea." The medium of Steveston is water: the
river and the delta, where the salt of the sea and the freshet mingle, where
“water swills, / endlessly out of itself to the mouth / ringed with residue,” and
the ocean, where men search for fish.” In the Steveston poems Marlatt tries to
write the flow of the river in extended lines. Her attempts are simultaneously
searches to find a home in the immediacy of language and in the moment of
writing, as well as extensions of that home beyond temporal constraints and
the limits of the printed page. Like the river, “the poem . . . is constantly trying
to arrive in the now, bringing all of the past it has passed with it.” Against and
with the flow of the line, “mouths,” “rings,” and “residue” voice a different ver-
sion of time, evoking the somatic “memory” that perpetuates the cycle of
spawning salmon that swim upstream to birth and, dying, drift downstream
to the sea again. Marlatt’s poetic interconnects words and place in rings of
 Daphne Marlatt ce, 199

relationships among human beings, their languages, and their surroundings.

The small fishing community of Steveston, built on the banks of the Fraser
River, is subject to seasonal flooding. At times the lines of Steveston overflow
as well, as the poem, like the river, strains “at its container, uncontainable.””™ In
Steveston’s “Pour, pour” the title spills into the body of the poem; it bursts
open a parentheses leaving one agape. From its repetitive opening line the
poem grows and gains force; lines run on until they look like paragraphs,
gathering voices and languages (“This river is / alive, he says”; and “goku
goku,” the Japanese onomatopoeic term for drinking in great gulps), and
names: “Roberts Bank past Albion Dyke, then Woodward Reach opposite
Woodward Landing (where the ferry ran),” residual fragments that enter a
human history into the flow of the river. All of these are caught up in the
movement of the river/poem: “this river is rivering.” Amid this pouring, tu-
multuous flow are words sealed inside parentheses, drifting like flotsam in the
current of the poem: (renew), (hence renewable), (unable), (bunkhouse),
(source), (need as cash), (is he? accountable?), (money). The poem is a pol-
luted river cluttered with the debris of commerce, “swollen with filth, with
sewage, milldirt,” disrupting the homing desire of the fish who “seek their
source, which is, their proper place to die.”” Marlatt explores contradictory
currents in her awareness of the organic growth of the poem. Although she is
fascinated by how the poem catches “all kinds of things as it’s rolling along
...1: what entered the poem through the movement of the sentence, just that
jumping from word to word, from phrase to phrase,” she is also aware that the
homing instinct of the salmon is inhibited by the clutter, “knots of, black
chunks of history,’ introduced into the river flow.” Critical but still playing
with the commercial connotations of words like renew and accountable, Mar-
latt is able to translate them through association into a lexicon of ecological
“accountability,” her network of connections compounding interest in the ac-
cumulation of different meanings.
In Steveston the “multiplicity simply there: the physical matter of the place
(what matters)”” shows Marlatt’s resistance to the lines of reasoning and air-
tight logic that render so much invisible or irrelevant. Thus, “[r]educed to the
status of things, We orient / Always toward the head, & the eyes (yes) of know-
ing, & knowing us, or what / we do” (23). It is this tendency, suggests Gemma
Corradi Fiumara, in The Other Side of Language, that has helped write an eco-
logical history that has consisted “of an uninterrupted series of acts of domi-
nation which have been performed by means of a symbolic superiority ...a
linguistic power that in the long run becomes an end in itself and that ulti-
mately stiffens and becomes inertial, thus impeding an equilibrium of survival
200 cw Beverly Curran

and coexistence.” In lieu of masters (or mistresses) of the universe Marlatt

proposes a “network of salvagers” that sustains context in life and writing by
paying attention “to systems of meanings that matter,’ that is, ecosystems.”
Even in writing poetry Marlatt is aware of and immersed in the medium
that collaborates in writing the poem. She explains:

Once we get into the water, which is a foreign element to us, we're very
aware of the difficulty of moving thru that element. That’s like poetry. You
are aware that you are moving in an element in a medium, & that there is a
constant resistance to your going forward. And that, in fact, any moving
forward you make is thanks to that element that you’re moving in. So that
language . . . writes the story as much as you do.”

In writing, then, Marlatt is acknowledging the gifts that come as a surprise to

the writer and take the poem in new directions. She finds the imagination
more useful than intellectual rigor in the project of transforming her relation-
ship to the literal place she finds her “selves” in. The associative network that
links language, somatic and textual bodies, and the environment is “a form of
thought that is not rational but erotic because it works by attraction.” Using
etymology to trace the root and growth of words, and similes of sound and
sense to draw words together and create shifts in meaning, Marlatt lets lan-
guage call up connections as lovers do, through touch and provocation. As
Pamela Banting has said, this use of attraction is a “translating forward” to
form new alliances.” For Marlatt change and slippage, not permanence, are
the principles of place: “changing ground changing channel . . . the fish come
and go, as the river does—land & water’s recreation of form outlasts this
species’ need to fix it, own it—because we are subject to death.”®
In writing the poems of Steveston Marlatt felt the river as a distinctively fe-
male presence, a “creature, swelling up & birthing, huge, past all their plans
and plants, / its urgency to meet the sea where men go, when they are able, like
the / fish.”* The language of pregnancy and birth has ecological resonance for
Marlatt, who considers her own pregnancy one of her “first in-body experi-
ences of a kind of limited ecological consciousness,”* raising her awareness of
“the nameless interbeing we were born with,” the experience of being inter-
woven with another. As Marlatt points out, “Even in nursing there’s still such
an amazing phenomenon because the infant’s nursing actually heals the
mother’s womb, so the interbeing is still happening even though it’s two sep-
arate bodies and two separate skins.””
Almost a decade after Steveston Marlatt was coming out as a lesbian in her
 Daphne Marlatt ce. 201

life and in her writing, and the “interbeing we were born with,” which had
been played out in the (amniotic) sea of the womb between child and mother,
was being reconfigured in the lesbian relationship. As she attempted “to illu-
minate poetics with feminist theory”* and to write a lesbian erotic in Touch to
My Tongue, she found both her theory and poetry haunted by the rhythms of
the river/poem Steveston.

What struck me when Istarted working on “Touch to My Tongue” was that

the rhythms in those poems very closely echo the rhythms of the poems in
Steveston, and here it’s a lesbian erotic. And I knew it had something to do
with the movement of the river. I mean, I didn’t think of it in terms of a les-
bian erotic when I was writing Steveston; I just knew there was something
very female about it.”

“Touch to My Tongue” and “musing with mothertongue” are both concerned

with the connections between the body, the body of language, and the imagi-
nary: “putting the living body of language together means putting the world
together, the world we live in: an act of composition, an act of birthing, us, ut-
tered and outered there in it.””
Therefore, the erotic and the ecological attract each other in Marlatt’s les-
bian poetics. The “raw power” of the erotic is “a current surging through my
body surging beyond the limits of self-containment, beyond the limits of syn-
tax and logic and of the daily order that keep me organizing time into small
manageable chunks tailored to the work at hand. .. . Like water or fire, it seeks
to go beyond limits, above all the limits of self as distinct from other." Love
of place and love of women fuse in Marlatt’s writing. She locates both “in the
body because the body doesn’t speak in systems of power, its ‘speaking,’ an
upheaval, breaks through the codes that repress it.” This excess, this flood of
feeling, makes an intimate connection between loving bodies immersed in the
imagining of a context that includes bodies with or without words. As Lor-
raine Weir describes it, Marlatt’s “ecology of language” is about our bodies
being inhabited by language and how “when a response comes which is not si-
lence but the discovery of place in an/other, [it] makes possible community
which is con/text.”** This dynamic, both ecological and erotic in Steveston, be-
comes an explicitly lesbian poetic in Marlatt’s later writing as she makes inter-
textual connections between women and the texts they read, without losing
any of its ecological consciousness in “our connectedness to what surrounds
us, the matter, the matrix of our shared lives, our ecosphere, the multidimen-
sional ‘ground’ we stand on and with.“
202 ce Beverly Curran

In her foreword to Salvage Marlatt discusses the “aquatic” process of

rereading the poems from Steveston and rewriting them by “working with the
subliminal currents in the movements of language whose direction as “direc-
tion’ only became apparent as i went with the drift, no matter how much flot-
945
sam seemed at first to be littering the page. Litter.wreckage.salvage,” for ex-
ample, rewrites Steveston’s “Imperial Cannery, 1913” with a different
consciousness of women’s roles and ecological responsibility. “Imperial Can-
nery, 1913” begins with a young girl “standing inside the door” of the cannery,
so confident of her own erotic power, and the security of her future as a mar-
ried woman, that she imagines herself free. Although conscious of her sexual-
ity and its power, the girl is unaware of the social controls orchestrating her
“destiny”; although she feels she is “in her element,” her dream is of rings of
dependency: “sails, her father’s or a friend’s son, at the Imperial which owns
their boat, their net, their debt.“ Even in this prefeminist poem Marlatt is jux-
taposing the image of the hopeful girl leaning into the future, “into the
threshold, waiting for work and marriage” (15), with an image of her mother
inside the cannery “working, with the smallest one standing by her skirt in
grubby dress” (15), caught like the fish on the cutting board she works.
In “Litter.wreckage.salvage” the days of a “cannery boomtown: ‘salmon
capital of the world’”” are over, along with the teeming schools of fish that fed
the industry. The poem does not start with the image of the young girl but
“below water level, behind,” to recall a community left behind: “Steveston: /
your women invisible, your men all gone.” The women do not linger in door-
ways in a languor of anticipation, but “swim / in long slow gleams between
blinds, day incessant with its / little hooks, its schemes inconsequential fi-
nally.” The dreams built on the flow of progress, a young girl’s ineluctable
movement toward marriage has ebbed: “What matters, mattered / once has
seeped away.” Instead of the confidence in a (falsely) secure future, the voice of
the young woman in this poem is full of fear “of the marketplace, of going
outdoors . . . of leaving home. ‘the phobia of every day. she trembles like a
leaf” as she recognizes her value in patriarchal society as a commodity, just
like the salmon. Leakage and loss have depleted the big picture of its certainty
and reduced it to her “tidal pool” in which

the small things of her concern still swim alive alive-oh-

The salmon homing in this season, spring, the sewer out-
falls upstream, oil slick, the deadly freight of acid rain—
she reads the list of casualties in the ongoing war outside
her door.*
 Daphne Marlatt ce 203

This seepage in fact is a gift, which, like the “excess, spillage and loss of signi-
fiers and signified in translation,” has relocated meaning. Instead of looking
inside the door of the cannery, and finding her future waiting for her in the
repetition of a fate depicted by her mother on the cannery floor, the woman in
“Litter.wreckage.salvage” looks outside her door and recognizes her connec-
tions with an ailing earth. Nature is not idealized here, but in an “attempt to
form a meeting ground on the very fractured margins” she inhabits, this
woman imagines the possibility of being a part of all that surrounds her: “i
want to imagine being in my element, she said.”*” Drawn into this, too, is the
(woman) reader, who is invited to “imagine her in her element,” not to be
taken in its restrictive sense as home (is her, closed in). No longer stranded by
the ebb of an old destiny script, any woman can let her line drift and find her
“in her element in other words,” words that alter “his definition of her.”
To open ourselves to answers other than those anticipated; to listen with
our bodies and drift beyond cognition to the feeling of home in the skin, with
“the body being in its place”; to “open our minds, and take in everything
around it without getting caught up within analysis” is Marlatt’s ongoing writ-
ing project.” The body, the present, the body in the present, is a shifting place
with a feeling of home where the sensual lives like otters “who live here with
all the pleasure of beings who belong ... sliding into the water, their dark coats
slicked back,” like lovers “undoing nipples, lips with tongue talk.”*' To find that
liminal home requires unraveling the “linear version of our lives . . . this plot
we're in, wrapped up like a knife fork & spoon,” and listening for the spiri-
tual resonance of a place, “the interaction between the eternal & what’s time-
bound, & what’s particularly local.””
In rethinking writing as immersive, collaborative, and imaginative, Marlatt
offers “the expression of erotic power as a transforming energy we revel in
each time we move our lovers, our readers and ourselves to that ecstatic surg-
ing beyond limits.’™ Recognizing difference and common ground—“her story
& our history”*°—the writer and her reader are balanced “between i and we—
and neither capitalized nor capitalizing on the other.” In the “threads of our
collective life, is where we find the weave of each life” (4), where the imagina-
tion transports us here, to this liminal place where, drifting, we find our ele-
ment in an “immersion as / complete as the pouring of water into water” (4).
204 cw Beverly Curran

Notes

1. Daphne Marlatt, “Self-Representation and Fictionalysis,” Tessera 8 (1990): 15.

2. Daphne Marlatt, “Writing Our Way through the Labyrinth,” in Readings from the
Labyrinth (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1998), 34.
3. Daphne Marlatt, Ghost Works (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1993), vii.
4. Caroline Bayard, The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec: From Concretism to
Post-Modernism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 104.
5. Daphne Marlatt, Vancouver Poems (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1972), n.p.
6. The fragments come from interviews collected as part of an oral history project
initiated by the Provincial Archives of British Columbia. Many of the interviews were
conducted in Japanese and translated. They have been published as Steveston Recol-
lected: A Japanese-Canadian History, ed. Daphne Marlatt (Victoria: Provincial Archives
of British Columbia, 1975).
7. Daphne Marlatt, “Accountability and Audience,” in Readings from the Labyrinth,
206.
8. See Chris Hall’s “Two Poems of Place: Williams’ Paterson and Marlatt’s Steveston,”
in Canadian Review of American Studies 15 (1984): 141-157.
9. Brenda J. Carr, “Daphne Marlatt’s Salmon Texts: Swimming / Jumping the Mar-
gins / Barriers” (Ph.D. diss., University of Western Ontario, 1989), 129. Carr notes that
Marlatt reviewed Trilogy for Open Letter and explored the work extensively in corre-
spondence with writer Penn Kemp in 1975.
10. Daphne Marlatt, foreword to Salvage (Red Deer: Red Deer College Press, 1993),
n.p.
11. Daphne Marlatt, Readings from the Labyrinth, 66.
12. Daphne Marlatt, “Entering In: The Immigrant Imagination,” in Readings from
the Labyrinth, 23.
13. Marlatt, “Accountability and Audience,” 206.
14. Marlatt, “Fictionalysis,” 15-16.
15. Daphne Marlatt, “Old Scripts and New Narrative Strategies,” in Readings from
the Labyrinth, 65.
16. Daphne Marlatt, “On Distance and Identity: Ten Years Later,” in Daphne Mar-
latt and Robert Minden, Steveston (Edmonton: Longspoon Press, 1984), 93.
17. Daphne Marlatt, interview by author, Victoria, B.C., August 18, 1999.
18. From Marlatt’s Steveston journals, cited in Carr, 141.
19. Daphne Marlatt, “Intelligence (as if by radio?),” in Steveston, 70.
20. Daphne Marlatt, interview by author, August 27, 1997.
21. Ibid.
22. Daphne Marlatt, “Imagine a Town,” in Steveston, 14.
 Daphne Marlatt ce 205

23. Marlatt, “On Distance and Identity,” 93.

24. Daphne Marlatt, “Pour, pour” in Steveston, 17.
25. Ibid.
26. Marlatt, interview, 1999. ;
27. Daphne Marlatt, “Steveston as You Find It,” in Steveston, 23.
28. Gemma Corradi Fiumara, The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening,
trans. Charles Lambert (London: Routledge, 1990), 39.
29. SueEllen Campbell, “The Land of Language and Desire: Where Deep Ecology
and Post-Structuralism Meet? in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecol-
ogy, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1966), 134.
30. Daphne Marlatt, “Given This Body: An Interview with Daphne Marlatt,” inter-
view by George Bowering, Open Letter 4, no. 3 (1979): 62.
31. Daphne Marlatt, “musing with mothertongue,” in Touch to My Tongue (Edmon-
ton: Longspoon Press, 1984), 45.
32. Pamela Banting, “The Reorganization of the Body: Daphne Marlatt’s ‘musing with
mothertongue,” in Relmagining Women: Representations of Women in Culture, ed. Shirley
Neuman and Glennis Stephenson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 221.
33. From Marlatt’s Steveston journals, cited in Carr, 140-141.
34. Marlatt, “Pour, pour,” 17.
35. Daphne Marlatt, letter to the author, March 14, 1998.
36. Daphne Marlatt, Taken (Concord: House of Anansi Press, 1996), 21.
37. Daphne Marlatt, interview by author, August 28, 1997.
38. Marlatt, “musing with mothertongue,” 49. Touch to My Tongue consists of
“Touch to My Tongue,’ a collection of poems, and “musing with mothertongue,” a cre-
ative theoretical “essay-ing.”
39. Marlatt, interview, 1999.
40. Marlatt, “musing with mothertongue,” 49.
41. Marlatt, “Fictionalysis,” 123.
42. Marlatt, Labyrinth, 15-16.
43. Lorraine Weir “Daphne Marlatt’s ‘Ecology of Language,” Line 13 (1989): 62.
44. Marlatt, Readings from the Labyrinth, 147.
45. Marlatt, foreword to Salvage, n.p.
46. Daphne Marlatt, “Imperial Cannery, 1913,” in Steveston, 15.
47. Daphne Marlatt, “Steveston, B.C.,” in Steveston, 85.
48. Ibid.
49. From Marlatt’s introduction to Telling It, cited in Smaro Kamboureli, On the
Edge of Genre: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1991), 158.
206 ce Beverly Curran

50. Marlatt, interview, 1997.

51. Marlatt, Taken, 15.
52. Daphne Marlatt, “How Hug a Stone,” in Ghost Works (Edmonton: NeWest Press,
1993), 131.
53. Marlatt, “Given This Body,” 58.
54. Marlatt, Readings from the Labyrinth, 49.
55. Poet Phyllis Webb’s description of Marlatt’s “How Hug a Stone,” quoted in Read-
ings from the Labyrinth, 3.
56. Marlatt, Readings from the Labyrinth, 137.
Roy Osamu Kamada
Ce>Postcolonial Romanticisms
Derek Walcott and the Melancholic Narrative
of Landscape

In Arctic Dreams Barry Lopez describes his journey aboard a cargo ship tak-
ing supplies to an arctic mine. While leaning over the calm waters of Melville
Bay, he reflects on the icebergs surrounding his ship, comparing their im-
placable austerity to the gothic magnificence of European cathedrals; he cites
the building of cathedrals as a wild leap of spirit, an impassioned attempt to
illustrate how “the cathedrals, by the very way they snared the sun’s energy,
were an expression of God and of the human connection with God as well.”!
He says that the beauty of the icebergs struck terror in him but that the very
attempt to apprehend the sublime, cathedral or iceberg, was indicative of love,
of “a humble and impassioned embrace of something outside the self” For
Lopez, appealing to a universalized experience of awe, this revelation is pow-
erful but simple and uncluttered by historical or cultural baggage. Describing
a seascape that lacks history, he is able to imagine his own relationship to that
environment in fairly simple terms: the self reaches out to an Other in an em-
bracing gesture of longing. Similarly, two centuries earlier, Wordsworth
sought out a “simpler” world where “the passions of men are incorporated
with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.”’ He declares the natural
world a place where

the ever-living universe

And independent spirit of pure youth
Were with me at that season, and delight
Was in all places spread around my steps.’

Lopez, along with a cadre of other writers, such as Terry Tempest Williams,
Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, to name just a few, has been at the creative fore-
front of a developing trend in literature that considers the many implications
of the relationship between the human and nonhuman worlds. In literary crit-
icism this trend has been met with an increasing number of critical studies
devoted to the themes and problems of environmentally oriented literary

207
208 ce, Roy Osamu Kamada

studies. Anthologies of critical essays have been published that engage the
wide variety of methodologies employed by ecocriticism; landmark texts have
appeared by Lawrence Buell, Jonathan Bate, and Leonard Scigaj; and issues of
PMLA, New Literary History, and the Chronicle of Higher Education have de-
voted a large number of pages to ecocritical concerns. As William Slaymaker
observed in a recent PMLA article, “‘ecocrit’ and ‘ecolit’ have arrived.”° Slay-
maker has also observed that despite the growth in environmentally oriented
literary studies, the “tide” of ecocriticism has “had only minor ripple effects”
in the black Atlantic communities.* He notes that this has been, in part, be-
cause of the “lack of nature writing traditions” (1100) in the diasporic African
communities. Slaymaker also notes that “ecocrit and ecolit appear to many
academic and literary observers positioned around the margins of the black
Atlantic as another whiteout of black concerns, by going green” (1101).
Dominic Head expresses a similar concern about the intersections of eco-
criticism and cultural studies in his reading of J. M. Coetzee.’ Head does sug-
gest that there are potential connections and parallels between postcolonial-
ism and ecologism, yet he warns against the recentering and privileging of the
object (in the case of ecologism, the planet or the “natural” world). Thus al-
though Lopez (or Wordsworth) might undertake a romantic quest to tran-
scend the solipsistic bounds of self, and although that quest might be re-
marked on by the ecocritic as indicative of a larger, nonhuman, ecologically
oriented ideology, that quest and critique are at risk of simply reversing the
human/nonhuman, subject/object hierarchy. Such literary and critical ma-
neuvers risk recentering the Enlightenment subject that postmodernity has
worked so hard to decenter, or at the very least, replacing the Derridean cen-
ter with “Nature” instead of the Enlightenment subject. And although Slay-
maker might argue the absence of nature writing traditions in the black At-
lantic communities, the romantic quest to transcend the solipsistic bounds of
self in its experience in the “natural” world is made powerfully complex in the
work of postcolonial writers such as Derek Walcott.
Walcott, like Lopez or Wordsworth, shares concerns and themes that the
ecocritic might consider ecologically oriented; however, Walcott is not just
writing about the human encounter with a natural world to which he may or
may not completely belong. His concerns are also historical. Walcott, also
writing about a sublime landscape, is unable to detach that landscape from its
history of colonialism and all the attendant consequences of that history. For
although Lopez does discuss the human history of the Arctic along with its
neocolonialist consequences elsewhere in his book, he remains a detached ob-
server, able to sunder his appreciation for the landscape from his knowledge of
 Derek Walcott Ce 209

history. Walcott has no such luxury. The landscape he writes about is neces-
sarily politicized; his own subjectivity is intimately implicated in both the nat-
ural beauty and the traumatic history of the place; he must directly acknowl-
edge the history of St. Lucia and the Caribbean, the history of diaspora, of
slavery, of the capitalist commodification of the landscape, and the devastat-
ing consequences this history has on the individual.
This essay examines the ways that Walcott, in his poem The Schooner Flight,
explores landscape even as he explores the problematics of a postcolonial sub-
jectivity. In this poem, which prefigures his obsession with The Odyssey, Wal-
cott yokes together the identity of his poet/speaker, Shabine, with descriptions
of the landscape to create a notion of self that, like the landscape he describes,
is capable of containing multiple and conflicting terms.’ Refusing more sim-
plistic, nativist, and ultimately essentialist models of identity, Walcott creates a
character whose very nature is a dynamic model of postcolonial identity, a
model that finds its mirror in Walcott’s presentation of the problematic rela-
tionship between a sublime landscape and a history of dispossession and
trauma. Rather than close off the ontological possibilities for either the land-
scape or the postcolonial subject, Walcott offers us a melancholic narrative of
identity and landscape where the traumas of the past remain legible in a lim-
inal yet continually present fashion. The ghosts of history are kept present in
landscape and subject; they are not consigned to the oblivion of “that which is
past.” Instead, trauma and history are subjected to what I am calling a kind of
“healthy” process of melancholic identification where trauma is not “gotten
over,” but neither does it disable the formation of subjectivity. Walcott sug-
gests just such a liminal legibility in his personified description of History:
“History” is

a parchment Creole, with warts

like an old sea bottle, crawling like a crab
through the holes of shadow cast by the net
of a grille balcony.”

Walcott figuratively suggests that history, here characterized in an almost

gothic fashion, is in a continual state of emergence, constantly crawling out of
the dark of the past, making itself known and remembered. Through an aes-
thetics informed equally by political and formal concerns, he maintains the
imperatives of memory even as he immerses himself in the sublimity of the
landscape.
Robert Young observes that “since Sartre, Fanon and Memmi, postcolonial
210 cx Roy Osamu Kamada

criticism has constructed two antithetical groups, the colonizer and colonized,
self and Other ...a Manichean division that threatens to reproduce the static,
essentialist categories it seeks to undo.” Young argues that we need “organic
metaphors of identity or society” to counter the tendency toward fragmenta-
tion and dispersion that arises from the construction of these two groups. He
“suggests a different model from that of a straightforward power relation of
colonizer over colonized.” The model that Young suggests is that of “the struc-
ture of pidgin—crudely the vocabulary of one language superimposed on the
grammar of another” (5). According to this model, cultural contact, here rep-
resented synecdochically by the languages of two cultures layered on one an-
other, is implicated in an interactive and dynamic process. Walcott seeks to
enact a similar process of contact, intrusion, interpenetration, and disjunction
between terms of identity and metaphors for the landscape. He creates a poem
that, like the creolized English in which Shabine speaks, layers the vocabulary
of history over the grammar of the landscape. However, we cannot forget that
like Young’s linguistic model, the representation of postcoloniality needs to
take careful account of the modalities of history and power implicit in models
of cultural contact.
In his evocationof a sublime landscape that is nonetheless cathected with
the traumas of history, Walcott employs a kind of postcolonial romanticism.
He seeks a redemption in the landscape even as some romantics did; however,
Walcott deploys, at times ironically, this romantic trope of landscape with the
interventionist sensibilities of the postcolonial. Referring to the retribution he
intends to bring on those who exploit the economic vulnerabilities of the
postcolonial state, Shabine declares, “Ministers, businessmen . . . I shall scatter
your lives like a handful of sand, / I who have no weapon but poetry and / the
lances of palms and the sea’s shining shield!” (16). His threat suggests a certain
belief in the efficacy of poetry, but also, and most important for my purposes,
it suggests that a poetic evocation of the landscape itself will be part and par-
cel of the technology of his retribution. Walcott, like a number of other con-
temporary postcolonial writers, evokes the landscapes of the postcolonial state
in ways that recall the landscapes imagined by eighteenth-century British ro-
mantics: sublime, beautiful, and threatening."’ However, Walcott’s evocation
marks a contemporary romanticism inflected with the historical concerns of
the postcolonial; it requires that we consider the Caribbean landscape not
only as a place of beauty but also as a place where the Middle Passage ended
and the horrors of North American slavery began. To stage these imperatives,
Walcott figures the landscape and the postcolonial subject as having a kind of
melancholic relationship to a history of trauma. To parse this, I will turn
 Derek Walcott Ce 211

briefly to Freud and Anne Cheng’s rereading of his 1917 essay “Mourning and
Melancholia.”
Reversing established notions of mourning and melancholia, Cheng notes
that Freud’s essay offers a potentially effective lens through which the prob-
lematic of race and historical dispossession can be viewed. Cheng interrogates
the problematic of mourning: “For Freud, mourning entails, curiously
enough, a forgetting. . . Upon a closer look, the kind of healthy ‘letting go’
Freud delineates goes beyond mere forgetting to complete eradication. The
successful work of mourning does not only forget, it reinstates the death sen-
tence.”” Such mourning effaces the materialism of a historical event. As Cheng
points out, such “‘getting over’... means, in a sense, never getting over those
memories [of the originary traumatic event], so that health and idealization
turn out to be nothing more than continual escape, and nothing less than the
denial and pathologization of what one is” (50, emphasis mine). Such attempts
at mourning, at getting over, at inscribing narrative closure to a historical site
that confounds articulation risk disarticulating the event and reducing it to a
narrative fragment.
For Cheng “melancholia provides a provocative metaphor for how race in
America or more specifically how the act of racialization works” (50).’? Melan-
cholia, for Freud, is essentially an economy of loss, an economy that prevents
the melancholic from abandoning the object of loss. Instead, the melancholic
incorporates the object of loss into his or her own ego. “In this way an object-
loss [is] transformed into an ego loss.’ Thus, “[t]he wounded subject, finally,
is imprisoned within the brooding cell of melancholy ... unable to abandon
the lost object of desire, unable to return to it, and unable to erase the marks
of its degradation from his own person.” Cheng argues that “minority iden-
tity reveals an inscription marking the remembrance of absence,”"* and it is
precisely this remembrance of absence, of the object-loss or trauma of racial-
ization, that informs the postcolonial experience. And although such melan-
cholic identification is not free of problems, it does allow for the opportunity
to interrogate the historical materiality of an object of loss or an event of
trauma. Thus the minority subject is a kind of “haunted” subject, haunted by
a past of trauma and cultural dispersion. But it is the nature of this haunting
that is so essential to the confrontation with that past; the postcolonial, like
the landscape itself, must be represented as haunted to escape the bind of
mourning. This revised Freudian form of melancholic identification allows us
to trope loss in a specifically historical fashion that Young’s model of hy-
bridized linguistic layering doesn’t quite allow for.
For Walcott the landscape of the Caribbean, like Shabine himself, bears the
ZZ ce Roy Osamu Kamada

history of loss within it; both are subjects haunted by the melancholic imper-
atives of history. The character of Shabine seeks, through a process of impli-
cation and interrogation of dualities, to transcend the polarized oppositions
of colonial/postcolonial, black/white, and self/other. Shabine is a character
who on all levels straddles oppositional forces; he is of mixed racial back-
ground, simultaneously both black and white but remaining neither; he is a
poet and a sailor, a tender sentimentalist and a vicious fighter; he, in the
course of the narrative, journeys between life and death with apparent ease; he
loves both his wife and his mistress; and, like Odysseus, he is a figure of both
everyman and no man (“either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation” [4]); he is simul-
taneously the representative of a communal sensibility and a concrete individ-
ual. Even as Shabine seeks to resolve these oppositions within his own charac-
ter, so too does Walcott seek to unravel his relationship to the landscape; for
even though he understands the historicity of the landscape and the devasta-
tions brought on by colonialism, he strives to imagine the sublimity of the
landscape while remaining conscious of these devastations. Thus, in Freudian
terms he follows the imperatives of mourning while retaining the melancholic
affect.
So just as Shabine himself cannot be conveniently identified as black or
white, as poet or sailor, as faithful husband or adulterer, so too does the land-
scape that the poem engages resist any easy figuring. For like Shabine the land-
scape of the poem is a dynamic site where conflicting terms come together. Al-
though it is a place once considered a “paradise,” now the “slums of empire”
hold sway; where Shabine might entreat “the fierce salt” of the “Green Islands
... [to] let my wound be healed” (14), he finds instead visions of the skies
aflame and “leprous rocks .. . and the noise of the soldiers’ progress through
the thick leaves” (15). The landscape in this poem is hardly the image that a
tourist board would generate. Furthermore, the very act of imagining the
landscape is implicated in the project of colonialism. Earlier in the poem,
Shabine, recalling the many names given to stands of trees leaning out toward
the sea, allows that these trees have been named and renamed many times.
Suggesting a kind of analogous colonial remaking of himself and his people,
he says, “we live like our names and you would have / to be colonial . . . / to
know the pain of history words contain” (12). Here Shabine suggests that it is
the violence of this remaking and renaming produced by the process of colo-
nialism that results in the corrupted landscape and in the corrupted and de-
graded people: “we, / if we live like the names our masters please, / by careful
mimicry might become men” (12). Here Shabine laments the adoption of the
names, of the terms of identity imposed on him. Saying, however, “we live like
 Derek Walcott Ce 2B

our names,” he also confesses his own complicity and passivity in accepting
these terms. He implicates himself in this corrupted landscape.
Yet it is also within this same landscape that Walcott’s poet/sailor finds a
kind of redemption. For when, at the poem’s start, Shabine is weary of living
under a corrupt government, in a corrupt society (“they had started to poison
my soul / with their big house, big car, big time bohbohl” [4]), he leaves the is-
land and goes down the road to enlist on the schooner Flight. And saying “I
taking a sea bath,” as he walks down the road to start his odyssey through the
Caribbean and through history, Shabine announces his intention to undergo
a cleansing process, a kind of baptism where he might be washed clean of the
very corruption he despises. And although ultimately figuring both landscape
and character as caught in a collapsing moment of transcendence, a moment
made possible only by imagination and sacrifice, Walcott nevertheless seeks
redemption and resolution and the establishment of a postcolonial identity
capable of containing the multiple histories of trauma and beauty. He seeks to
mourn while remaining a melancholic.
The narrative of the poem follows Shabine through “a veritable Odyssey”
that, like the Homeric epic, begins in medias res and is ultimately the story of
a journey home.” Shabine is inscribed linguistically and racially as a figure of
two cultures:

I...arusty head sailor with sea-green eyes

that they nickname Shabine, the patois for
any red nigger....
I’m just a red nigger who love the sea
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me. (4)

Here Shabine describes not only his racial duality but also his possession of
what Dorothy Hale calls a Du Boisian double consciousness, in which the per-
sonal identity of the black man is encoded in two contradictory impulses: for
Shabine the love of the sea and the demands of a colonial education."* How-
ever, despite this dual nature, Shabine is not accepted by either of his cultures,
the black or the white. “After the white man, the niggers didn’t want me / when
the power swing to their side” (8). He also critiques the racist cultures that
both generate in their false formulation of oppositional relations. In the “Rap-
ture of the Deep” section of Walcott’s poem Shabine narrates his experience as
an employee of O’hara, the big-government man who is an emblem of the
corrupt postimperial official who, while investigating a scandal he himself is
214 ce Roy Osamu Kamada

responsible for, appoints “himself as chairman investigating himself” (6).

Shabine later generalizes about the corrupt structure of the postimperial gov-
ernment:

You saw them ministers in The Express,

guardians of the poor—one hand at their back,
and one set 0’ police only guarding their house,
and the Scotch pouring in through the back door. (6)

Similarly, Shabine’s vivid, almost cinematic, description of the revolutionaries

taking up arms against this postimperial corruption is not free of critique. For
although the revolutionaries are earnest, they are also doomed:

I no longer believed in the revolution.

... Young men without flags
using shirts, their chests waiting for holes.
They kept marching into the mountains, and
their noise ceased as foam sinks into sand,
They sank in the bright hill like rain, every one
with his own nimbus, leaving shirts in the street,
and the echo of power at the end of the street.(9)””

Mirroring this situation of mutually implicated corruption and impotence

is Walcott’s evocation of a lush tropical landscape, itself corrupted by the con-
sequences of history. Shabine remarks that

this Caribbean so choke with the dead

... [that] I saw them... the dead men.
I saw that the powdery sand was their bones
ground white from Senegal to San Salvador. (7)

Shabine is made firmly and fully conscious of the corruption around him. Re-
jected by both of his cultures, unable to access either’s essentialized mythic
identity, and caught in this double bind illustrated by the degraded landscape
mirroring the corruption and impotence of the postcolonial human society,
Shabine turns to imagination and language to generate his own self. Haunted
by visions of “dead men . .. their bones / ground white from Senegal to San
Salvador” and by hallucinations of the “great admirals, / Rodney, Nelson, de
Grasse, [and] the hoarse orders / they gave those Shabines [the slaves on their
 Derek Walcott Ce 215

ships]” (11), and convinced that he is heir to no tradition, Walcott’s narrator

declares his only inheritance and legacy to be his poetry. Speaking to his wife,
whom he has abandoned for another woman, Shabine says, “I have kept my
own / promise, to leave you the one thing I own / you whom I loved first: my
poetry” (13). Shabine develops and asserts his own subjecthood through a po-
etic and imaginative act. He says, “my common language go be the wind, / my
pages the sails of the schooner Flight. .. . 1 had no nation now but the imagi-
nation” (5-8).
However, subjecthood is. available only at the moment of its utterance, at
the moment of the act. Walcott denies, in the section titled “Maria Concep-
cion & the Book of Dreams,” the ability of language to fully decode any trau-
matic experience, even a dream. “She said: ‘I dreamt of whales and a storm, /
but for that dream the book had no answer” (15). Even this seemingly harm-
less dream, this experience, resists the decoding that a book, that language,
might provide. And later, when Shabine wakes “screaming and crying, my
flesh / raining with sweat” (16), the “Book of Dreams” is unable to find any
meaning in his trauma. Thus, placing priority on the moment of utterance
and the transitory and momentary respite from postcolonial trauma, Shabine
sings:

All you see me talking to the wind, so you think I mad.

... All you fate in my hand,
ministers, businessmen, Shabine have you, friend,
I shall scatter your lives like a handful of sand,
I who have no weapon but poetry and
the lances of palms and the sea’s shining shield! (16)

The poetic act, the utterance of an imaginative construct, is not the only
thing necessary in this poem for the constitution of subjecthood. Shabine, al-
though a figure of authority and learning in the poem, learns the lesson of
self-sacrifice from his captain. Near the end of the poem, as the schooner
Flight is caught in a great storm, Shabine and the rest of the crew prepare
themselves for death and the destruction of their subjecthoods. However,
through the Christ-like devotion of their captain as he is bound to the helm,
“crucif[ied] to his post” (18) the crew survives. Walcott, invoking the virtue
and primal power of self-sacrifice, establishes the second condition necessary
for transcending oppositional dualities: one must be willing to be devoured by
the very forces of history that one seeks to, at least, momentarily decode.
Once Shabine has survived his adventures and avowed the contingent
216 ce Roy Osamu Kamada

nature of his subjectivity and willingness to submit that subjectivity to the

melancholic memory of historical trauma, he declares, “I am satisfied / if my
hand gave voice to one people’s grief” (19). He is able, drawing on complex
and contradictory terms of identity, to articulate, for a moment, the cry of a
postcolonial; he mourns the past while imagining that past in melancholic
terms: trauma remains but does not disable. And although Walcott, like
Shabine, notes that there are “more islands there, man, / than peas on a tin
plate, all different size” (19) and implies the unfinished work of recovery that
remains, he successfully articulates, momentarily, a postcolonial subjecthood
that admits to the trials and travails of colonialism and then transcends them.
The transitory and fléeting nature of this subjectivity is, in the end, a necessary
aspect of Walcott’s project. For him to posit some lasting transcendence of
trauma would be for him to implicate his project in a narrative of mourning,
a narrative of “getting over” the past, of denying and pathologizing history. By
allowing only a momentary transcendence, and an incomplete one at that,
Walcott retains the essential affect of the melancholic: the object of loss, while
figured alongside the beautiful and transcendent, remains present.
At the end of the poem, Shabine sets down his poems, abandons his
speech, and studies the stars:

Sometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam

as the deck turn white and the moon open
a cloud like a door, and the light over me
is a road in white moonlight taking me home. (20)

Thus although Shabine is able to successfully articulate his subjecthood de-

spite the internal contradictions of the postcolonial, he does in the end set
aside his linguistic tools and surrender himself to the world. And although this
final moment of the poem is clearly an indication of redemption and tran-
scendence, of Walcott’s narrator finding himself, at last, able to imagine a way
home, a way to a physical and an emotional place of refuge, this remains a mo-
ment that, with the absence of a permanent transcendence, is collapsing and
transitory. For although “the moon open / a cloud like a door” and the light
over Shabine is a road home, it is only a pathway to a destination; it is not the
actual destination, the actual permanent transcendence of earthly and histor-
ical concerns. The final lines, despite the lyric rapture suggested, are ulti-
mately, once again, a deferral of Shabine’s rest. For even as Odysseus, at the
end of Homer’s epic, suggests that although he has come home to Ithika, he
must, according to Teiresias, “take an oar / and trudge the mainland”” until he
 Derek Walcott Ces PAVE

makes the proper sacrifice to Poseidon, so too does the end of Walcott’s poem
suggest that Shabine’s journey is incomplete. The postcolonial’s subjectivity,
then, is troped as what Stuart Hall refers to as a “diasporic identity”: “cultural
identities [that] are the points of identification, the unstable points of identi-
fication or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and cul-
ture .. . [nJot an essence, but a positioning.” Like the landscape of the
Caribbean, Shabine’s subjectivity contains multiple and sometimes contradic-
tory constitutive elements; their articulation within the text of the poem is un-
stable, momentary, and articulated through the retention of a melancholic af-
fect. There are suggestions of a transcendence of historical trauma, both in the
subject of Shabine and in the sublimity of the Caribbean; however, these sug-
gestions are only strategic and provisional. The possibility of “getting over” the
past, of a “healed” and “only beautiful” subject and landscape, is continually
deferred, yet this deferral does not result in some kind of Joycean paralysis. In-
stead, although a desire for a prelapsarian landscape or subjectivity remains as
problematic as ever, Shabine, the prototypical postcolonial melancholic, re-
tains his agency, continually reforms and recasts his subjectivity, and persists
in his “vain search for one island that heals with its harbor / and a guiltless
horizon, where the almond’s shadow / doesn’t injure the sand” (19). For
Shabine, as for Odysseus, the ideal of home and hearth remains, necessarily
unfulfilled but still sought after.

Notes

1. Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape

(New York: Bantam Books, 1986), 248.
2. Ibid., 250.
3. William Wordsworth, “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1802),” in Romanticism: An
Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 252.
4. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 6:701-705. I do not mean to suggest, by any
means, that this is a homogenous conception of landscape for the romantics. John Bar-
rell contrasts the “sense of place” in John Clare’s poetry to Wordsworth’s sense of place.
He characterizes Clare as having an almost mournful sense of Helpston that focused
on “one particular landscape [that] might be inseparable from the whole of man’s
knowledge” (The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730-1840 [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1972], 182). In contrast Barrell observes how close
“Wordsworth [was] to the picturesque travellers whom he despised. .. . [H]e opens up
the landscape and explains its mysteries in a way not substantially different from the
218 ce Roy Osamu Kamada

way William Gilpin . .. might have reclaimed a similarly rough, secluded landscape for
the metropolitan imagination” (183).
5. William Slaymaker, “Ecoing the Other(s): The Call of Global Green and Black
African Responses,’ PMLA 116, no. 1 (January 2001): 129.
6. William Slaymaker, “Letter,” PMLA 114, no. 5 (October 1999): 1100.
7. Dominic Head, “The (Im)possibility of Ecocriticism,” Writing the Environment:
Ecocriticism and Literature, ed. Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells (London: Zed
Books, 1998), 27—39.
8. Walcott would go on to produce Omeros, as well as a stage version of The Odyssey
during the 1990s. In both texts he restages the Homeric quest for “home” in the con-
text of a postcolonial’s continual and unfulfillable quest for a prelapsarian bliss—a bliss
that would imply the constitution of an almost Cartesian subjectivity set in a sublime
landscape. See John Thieme’s Derek Walcott (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1999), esp. 151-197. Thieme says, “the traveling Odyssean protagonist . . . increasingly
becomes a vehicle for expressing his [Walcott’s ] sense of the need to escape static, es-
sentialist constructions of personality. ... [This] Odyssean protagonist is a metonym
for [Walcott’s] complex beliefs about cultural affiliation. ... He is a figure who not only
crosses lines of longitude and latitude at will, but also engages in a similar movement
along a discursive continuum which offers emancipation from ... Manichean binaries”
(152);
9. Derek Walcott, The Star Apple Kingdom (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
1979), 8-9. Subsequent quotations from this work are referenced parenthetically in
the text.
10. Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London:
Routledge, 1995), 5.
11. My purpose in tracing this particular theme is not to indicate any kind of “debt”
that Walcott bears in regard to his colonial cultures but rather to resituate his aesthet-
ics within an already established tradition of opposition to modernization. The use of
such “Western” tropes is not, of course, without its critiques. Although the question of
imposing a conceptual framework whose origins lie in the very culture that has spon-
sored the colonial encounter is an important point, the postulation that comparative
postcolonial criticism is a false homogenizing practice overlooks the dialectical nature
of the postcolonial state. See Graham Huggan’s “Philomela’s Retold Story: Silence,
Music, and the Post-Colonial ‘Text,’ Journal of Commonwealth Literature 25, no. 1
(1990): 12-23. Huggan observes that

the tendency of some of the more extreme nationalist critics to wish away the exis-
tence of a European cultural heritage, however distorting and/or debilitating that
heritage may have been, seems not only to divest post-colonial writing of much of
 Derek Walcott Ce 219

its oppositional power in exposing and critiquing the material conditions which
govern its cultural production, but also to risk corralling nation- or race-based lit-
eratures into separate, jealously protected territories which resist intrusion to the
extent that they become accessible only to those “exclusive insiders” possessed by
virtue of birthright or immediacy of experience of an intimate knowledge of their
own “field.” (20-21)

Additionally, romanticism itself has been troped as a discourse of opposition to mod-

ernization. See Saree Makdisi’s Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture
of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Makdisi observes that
even as the culture of modernity was beginning to consolidate under the indices of
capitalism and imperialism, romanticism emerged as a salient ideological discourse
that had the capacity to contest the homogenizing historicization occurring under the
rubric of modernization. Romanticism, according to Makdisi, operates as a critique of
modernization. He does, however, take to heart Marilyn Butler’s observation that “ro-
manticism is inchoate because it is not a single intellectual movement but a complex of
responses to certain conditions which Western society has experienced and continues
to experience since the middle of the eighteenth century.” See Marilyn Butler’s Roman-
tics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760-1830 (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 184. Makdisi does remark that as the romantic
period in Britain marks “the moment of the emergence of the culture of moderniza-
tion .. . romantic engagements were dialectically bound up with modernization, and
contributed to its development as a cultural dominant” (7). In my larger projectItrace
the entanglements of romanticism and postcoloniality in a larger scope.
12. Anne Cheng, “The Melancholy of Race,” Kenyon Review 19, no. 1 (winter
1997): 53.
13. Judith Butler remarks in Gender Trouble that “Freud revises this distinction be-
tween mourning and melancholia and suggests that the identification process associ-
ated with melancholia may be ‘the sole condition under which the id can give up its ob-
jects” (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [New
York: Routledge, 1990], 19). In other words, the identification with lost loves charac-
teristic of melancholia becomes the precondition for the work of mourning. The two
processes, originally conceived as oppositional, are not understood as integrally related
aspects of the grieving process.
14. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (Lon-
don: Hogarth, 1953-1974), 14:247.
15. Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 184.
220 ce Roy Osamu Kamada

16. Cheng, 52.

17. Ned Thomas, “Obsession and Responsibility,” in The Art of Derek Walcott, ed.
Stewart Brown (Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan: Seren Books, 1991), 86.
18. Dorothy J. Hale, “Bakhtin in African American Literary Theory,’ ELH 61 (1994):
451-453.
19. The dynamic imagery describing these failed revolutionaries contrasts the stag-
nation of the postcolonial bureaucracy. Walcott goes on:

Propeller-blade fans turn over the Senate;

the judges, they say, still sweat in carmine,...
In the 12:30 movies the projectors best
not break down, or you go see revolution. (9)

Ironically, in the end the only thing that might startle the bureaucrats out of their coma
of inaction is the denial of their entertainment, their “spaghetti West- / ern with Clint
Eastwood” (9). He suggests that a corrupt bureaucracy will react only to a threat to its
own selfish and trivial interests. Even as the young revolutionaries are doomed to fail,
so too are hopes for governmental reform.
20. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Anchor Books, 1963),
438.
21. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colo-
nial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), 395 (Hall’s emphasis).
Maggie Gordon
OwA Woman Writing about Nature
Louise Gltuick and “the absence of intention”

I’m not the enemy.

Only a ruse to ignore
what you see happening
right here in this bed....

... 1 was here first,

before you were here, before
you ever planted a garden.
And [Il be here when only the sun and moon
are left, and the sea, and the wide field.
—Louise Gliick, “Witchgrass”

Louise Gliick would perhaps no more consider her work “nature writing”
than she would consider herself a “woman poet.” In fact, she writes, “If there
are such differences [between the writing of women and that of men], it seems
to me reasonable to suppose that literature reveals them, and that it will do so
more interestingly, more subtly, in the absence of intention.”' Some years ago
a comment by Robert Hass about “nature writing” lent proof in my mind to
this theory of Gliick’s. Responding to a question about his “environmental
work” (he had been named Educator of the Year by the North American Asso-
ciation on Environmental Education in 1997) posed during a discussion ses-
sion after a reading, Hass talked about River of Words, a poetry contest for
U.S. elementary-school children he founded during his tenure as poet laure-
ate. Then, considering his poetry, he said, “Of course, I’m not a ‘nature
writer.” I understood the distinction he was making—he went on to discuss
what he referred to as the “thematically driven” work of Barry Lopez, Annie
Dillard, and Gary Snyder—yet the remark took me by surprise, knowing how
rooted Hass’s poetry is in the spirituality of day-to-day living and in an aware-
ness of the interdependence of human and nonhuman nature. Perhaps he was
correct to emphasize in his response that he does not seek to confront explic-
itly environmental issues in literature the way some do. Yet it is evident

221
Apap) ce Maggie Gordon

throughout his poetry, from Field Guide in 1973 to Sun under Wood in 1996,
that Hass’s way of being in the world engages ecological principles and that a
personal sense of the sacred interconnectivity of all life does inform his work.
Perhaps, then, the ecological vision revealed by the poetry is in fact made more
richly complex by the kind of “absence of intention” of which Gliick writes.
In the same way, it is precisely because Gliick does not self-consciously
write about nature as a woman—although she is always a woman writing
about nature—that her poetic career illuminates the ecofeminist movement it
parallels. Gliick’s career, from 1968's Firstborn to the present, spans approxi-
mately the same period as the emergence and development of American
ecofeminism and embodies some of the core values of ecofeminist philosophy
and theology. In the nearly three decades since Francgoise d’Eaubonne coined
the term ecofeminisme in “Le Féminisme ou la mort,” there have been, generally
speaking, three paths to ecofeminism: the study of political theory and his-
tory; exposure to nature-based religions; and environmentalism.’ As a social
change movement, like the environmentalism and second-wave feminism
from which it partly derives, ecofeminism develops out of experience, whether
it be academic study, religious practice, or social activism. Similarly, the
ecofeminist vision of Gliick’s poetry—the sense of the interdependence of
human and nonhuman nature and the profound awareness of human bodily
nature—emerges from the physical and psychological experience of being a
woman in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Ecofeminism challenges conventional perceptions of subjectivity and rela-
tionality, and although, as Carol J. Adams suggests, we might rightly speak not
of ecofeminism but of ecofeminisms, Ynestra King’s classification of shared
concerns provides a useful framework for articulating what it is that is
“ecofeminist” about Gliick’s poetics.’ King writes that ecofeminist thought in
its myriad forms is marked by the following shared beliefs: “one) the oppres-
sion of women and the building of “Western industrial civilization’ are inter-
related through the belief that women are closer to nature; two) life on earth
is heterarchical, ‘an interconnected web’; three) a balanced ecosystem of
human and nonhuman ‘must maintain diversity’; four) species survival neces-
sitates a ‘renewed understanding of our relationship to nature, of our own
bodily nature and nonhuman nature around us. ”* Gliick’s contemplation of
bodily experience fosters such ecofeminist appreciation of the shared materi-
ality of the earth body and the personal, particularly the female, body.
This ecofeminist awakening comes early in her career, as meditations on
the exclusively female experiences of adolescent anorexia and maternity re-
form the poet’s understanding of identity and relationship.’ In her first four
 Louise Gliick’s “absence of intention” ces 223

collections—Firstborn, The House on Marshland (1975), Descending Figure

(1980), and The Triumph of Achilles (1985)—Gliick draws the kinds of
ecofeminist conclusions King identifies regarding the relationship between
human and nonhuman nature and human bodily nature, and such conclu-
sions function as the basis of her poetics. The poet treats maternity in her first
volume, Firstborn, and adolescent anorexia in her third, Descending Figure, as
threshold experiences, the discoveries of which foster the speaker’s identifica-
tion with nonhuman nature, prompting a fresh understanding of subjectivity,
corporeality, gender, and spirituality. It is this intensified awareness of the het-
erarchical nature of all life and appreciation for the shared materiality of the
personal and earth bodies that leads to the use of a myth-narrative lyric that
becomes a hallmark of her career. Like that of so many contemporary femi-
nists and environmentalists, Gliick’s thought—specifically, her ecopoetics—
emerges from a personal experience of being a daughter, a sister, a lover, a
wife, and a mother. With the notable exception of The Wild Iris, the 1992 col-
lection for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Gliick has rarely taken
the actual or assumed relationship between women and nature as the explicit
subject of her poetry and is, of course, not a “nature writer” in the conven-
tional sense. Yet an ecofeminist perspective clearly informs her poetry and
shapes her poetics throughout her career, which, with 1999’s Vita Nova, spans
eight collections and more than thirty years. That it does so in the “absence of
intention” illuminates the ways that for so many women in the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries the personal has become the ecological and
the ecological in turn become political.
Gliick’s consideration of maternity in her earliest work leads to an appreci-
ation for the heterarchical nature of all life that informs the poet’s character-
istic use of narrative personae. As Gliick emphasizes in her representations of
pregnancy in Firstborn and The House on Marshland, in maternity the repro-
ductive body highlights the natural cycle of birth, life, and death common to
all living things. As we see in poems such as “The Wound,” pregnancy alienates
the speaker from the human community and suggests instead an affinity with
reproductive elements of the nonhuman natural world. “Faking scrabble”
with neighbors, the speaker is detached from the human world, observing her
husband “clutch [his] blank” and dismissing the other couple, “both on Nem-
butal / the killer pill””* Pregnant, she cannot identify with these impotent and
incapacitated others but rather sees herself reflected in the nonhuman, first in
the wallpaper, “paisley, like a plot / Of embryos” (11-12), then in nature be-
yond the walls of her confinement, where shrubs and hedges “grow / Downy,
bloom and seed” (15-16) and “[rJipe things sway in the light” (30).’
224 ce Maggie Gordon

Poems about the speaker’s own pregnancy in Firstborn are echoed by simi-
lar treatments of other experiences of maternity—specifically, those of her own
mother (in “For My Mother”) and of the Virgin Mary (in “Nativity Poem”)—
in Gliick’s next collection, The House on Marshland. “For My Mother,” for ex-
ample, has the speaker ostensibly recalling the initial experience of the mater-
nal body: prior to her own birth. Her mother’s experience mirrors the
maternity presented in Firstborn, and the last lines of the poem associate the
maternal body with nonhuman nature in an image reminiscent of the “[r]ipe
things” of “The Wound,” as “Schools of spores circulate / behind the shades,
drift through / gauze flutterings of vegetation.’* In poems such as “The
Wound, “The Egg,” “For My Mother,” and “Nativity Poem,” the female bodily
experience of pregnancy suggests a kinship with nonhuman nature to a woman
feeling alienated from the human community because of her experience.
This sense of kinship extends beyond pregnancy itself, as we see in “The
Egg,” a poem that, in its three parts, represents the maternal body before, dur-
ing, and after birth. In the third section, having given birth, the speaker per-
ceives her postpartum body as having been emptied out; she sees fish coming
in to the beach:

... Without skins

Without fins, the bare

Husks, husks... .
... Through gaping mussels.
Pried flesh.’

Here the nonhuman natural world mirrors not only the pregnant, but also the
postpartum, body, suggesting that the sense of interconnectivity first experi-
enced during pregnancy lastingly shapes the speaker’s perception of her rela-
tionship to nonhuman nature.
Just as reflections on maternity suggest an ecofeminist understanding of
interconnectivity in these first two collections, in Gliick’s third volume, De-
scending Figure, poetic consideration of another decidedly female bodily expe-
rience, adolescent anorexia, prompts the kind of “renewed understanding of
[human] bodily nature” of which King writes. The poet’s analysis of her own
experience of anorexia reinforces the appreciation for the heterarchical nature
of all life prompted by maternity, and the recovered anorexic’s deepened un-
derstanding of mortality highlights the shared materiality of personal and
earth bodies.
 Louise Gliick’s “absence of intention” Ce» 225

Charlene Spretnak writes that it is in light of the association and degrada-

tion of women’s bodies and the earth body that “[d]epression, fear, [and] self-
loathing are common psychological themes for women raised under patri-
archy.’”” For the adolescent female raised under patriarchy, such psychological
themes often become manifest in anorexia. For many cultural ecofeminists
and feminist theologians, to recover from such self-loathing, women must
recognize their feelings as an internalization of the patriarchal assertion that
the personal (particularly woman’s) body and earth body are degraded.”
Throughout her work, and especially in poems such as “Witchgrass” and
“Jeanne D’Arc” (in which Joan believes her burning at the hand of the Inqui-
sition is the playing out of God’s will on her body), Gliick is critical of what
she perceives as the Church’s sanctioning of the persecution of women on the
basis of their bodies. In “Witchgrass” she writes:

as we both know,
if you worship
one god, you only need
one enemy.”

Gliick embodies the voice of the persecuted other (literally, here, a weed in the
garden) in these lines and those quoted in the epigraph above, making overt a
central ecofeminist critique: the historical association, and subsequent op-
pression and domination, of women and nature. “To the issues of sexism,
racism, classism, and heterosexism,” Adams writes, “ecofeminists add natur-
ism—the oppression of the rest of nature.” For the “witchgrass” that itself
speaks the eponymous poem, such “-isms” represent merely “another / way to
blame / one tribe for everything.” Like the personae of “Gretel in Darkness”
and “Jeanne D’Arc” (both from The House on Marshland), this speaker recog-
nizes sexism as merely one manifestation of a process of demonization not
only condoned by, but, according to the poet, in fact a product of, a monothe-
istic worldview that codifies binary thinking.
Gliick’s treatment of anorexia in Descending Figure and her discussion of it
in the essay “Education of the Poet” suggest that in her experience anorexia is
not so much an attempt to attain a culturally dictated body image (as it is
popularly represented) but rather an internalization of a dominant ideology
that perceives the body and soul as discrete and the female body as particu-
larly foul. In “Dedication to Hunger” the poet describes anorexia, the “devia-
tion” of “certain female children,” as “fear of death, taking as its form / dedica-
tion to hunger”;" in other words, for adolescent girls in particular, according
226 ce Maggie Gordon

to Gliick, anorexia is an attempt to deny mortality by denying one’s physical-

ity, as evidenced by the reliance on food for survival. In “Education of the
Poet” Gliick takes the experience of and recovery from anorexia as metaphor
for her poetry and states that ultimately the anorexic’s effort “proves not the
soul’s superiority to but its dependence on the flesh.”"*
For Gliick the anorexic’s recovery fosters in her an intense awareness of her
own corporeality, evidencing as it does that the spirit and the flesh are one.
Through examination of the anorexic’s refusal to accept her own bodily na-
ture, the poet arrives at a deepened appreciation for the inseparability of soul
and body. Recovery from anorexia thus signifies a rejection of Western patri-
archal assumptions about the body and an acceptance of physicality. Spretnak
discusses a similar awareness of the inextricability of body and soul and affir-
mation of the relationship between personal and earth bodies in “women who
[drift] out of patriarchal religion.”””
This appreciation of shared materiality between human and nonhuman re-
curs throughout Gliick’s work following Descending Figure. The association of
personal and earth body seen in “Dedication to Hunger,” in which the horri-
fied speaker realizes that “a woman’s body / is a grave,” is echoed in the bur-
ial of the family patriarch in 1990's Ararat. Gliick’s four most recent collec-
tions—Ararat, The Wild Iris, Meadowlands (1996), and Vita Nova—are poem
cycles, volumes in which theme, recurrent motifs, personae, and imagery, and
consistencies of tone, syntax, and vocabulary, bind the poems together in a
whole. (In The Wild Iris, for instance, the poems are set over the course of a
single seasonal cycle of the garden, and in Meadowlands, The Odyssey is used
to parallel the dissolution of a modern marriage.) Given the importance of
Araratin this context, it is significant that its core theme is funeral, a commu-
nal ritual in which the body is returned to the earth. In funeral, the shared ma-
teriality of personal and earth body is ritually made sacred. In The Wild Iris,
the volume following Ararat, flowers themselves speak of their own death and
burial. “Lover of Flowers” (among others) from Ararat seems to foreshadow
The Wild Iris, as Gliick writes of a sister obsessed with planting flowers at their
mother’s house following the death of their father. Their mother pays for the
flowers because, Gliick writes, “it’s her garden, every flower / planted for my
father. They both see / the house as his true grave.”’” The importance of fu-
neral recurs most recently in “The Open Grave” (Vita Nova), in which the
speaker now gives her mother’s body to the earth as well. Such ritualized
recognition of corporeality as we see in burial—both in funeral and in gar-
dening—makes sacred the material kinship of human and nonhuman nature.
According to Spretnak, women who reject the Western patriarchal division
 Louise Gliick’s “absence of intention” Ce. Doi,

of body and spirit, as does Gliick’s recovered anorexic speaker, and in fact ac-
cept and celebrate corporeality are able to “view culture not as a struggle in
Opposition to nature but as a potentially harmonious extension of nature, a
human construction inclusive of creative tensions and reflective of our em-
beddedness in the Earthbody and the teachings of nature: diversity, subjectiv-
ity, adaptability, interrelatedness. Within such an orientation—let’s call it eco-
logical sanity—the bodily affinity of females and males with nature is
respected and culturally honored, rather than denied and scorned.” Gliick’s
recognition and acceptance of ecofeminist principles regarding heterarchy
and physicality foster in the poet an “I-Thou” relationship with human and
nonhuman others that informs her poetics, particularly her characteristic use
of narrative and mythic personae.
In The Wild Iris the human gardener speaks of feeling

... passionately
attached to the living tree, [her] body

almost able to feel

sap frothing and rising.”

The first of the volume’s many “prayers,” “Matins” sets the tone for the collec-
tion, in which the poet speaks not only in the “I” voice of conventional lyric
but also, alternately, as elements of nonhuman nature (as in “Witchgrass”), a
woman gardener praying in poems titled “Matins” and “Vespers,” and a voice
that seems at times to be responding to the prayers.” This is, of course, not
Gliick’s first use of personae; in fact, it becomes a characteristic poetic strategy
as early as the middle section of Firstborn, titled “The Edge,” following the
poems of maternity in the volume’s first section, “The Egg.” The difference in
their use in The Wild Iris, then, is a matter of degree, not kind, as here she
seeks to embody and give voice not to mythological or fictional characters but
to plant life and even abstract concepts.
The woman gardener’s attachment to the “living tree” evokes the “I-Thou”
relationship of which theologian Martin Buber writes: “[I]f will and grace are
joined .. . as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree
ceases to be an It. The power of exclusiveness has seized me.”” It is in such an
“I-Thou” relationship that Gliick speaks as (rather than for) aspects of the
nonhuman natural world in The Wild Iris. Establishing this sense of intercon-
nectivity here in this first prayer poem of the collection illuminates the poet's
assuming of various “personae” throughout her career and especially in this
228 ce Maggie Gordon

radically heteroglot volume. A sense of the heterarchical nature of all life sug-
gests that individual identity is itself fluid, yet because the lyric persona de-
pends on at least the illusion of a Cartesian fixed, stable identity—a voice to
speak the “I” of the poem—such understanding of ecological subjectivity nec-
essarily shapes Gliick’s poetics. The ecopoetics shaped through the discoveries
of relationality and physicality early in her career are the basis for a poetics in
which the poet is constantly shifting among identities, from, for instance, that
of a seventeenth-century prioress in “The Cell” in Firstborn to that of an en-
tire field of “Daisies” in The Wild Iris.
Throughout her career, both in her poetry and in her prose, Gliick’s pre-
vailing metaphor for her poetry is as a vocation. For Gliick it is a vocation that
demands a commitment to engage the materials of this world—language, ex-
perience—in an effort to make contact. The recognition and acceptance of the
relationality of personal and earth bodies authorizes artistic creativity, which
for Gliick is a manipulation and interaction with organic materials; in the
metapoetic Meadowlands, for instance, the poetic craft is paralleled by the
cooking done by the modern wife and the ancient Penelope’s weaving. In
“Phenomenal Survivals of Death in Nantucket,” from Firstborn, the speaker
returns from the threshold of human experience with the knowledge of the
materiality of the human body, as the ocean and, the metaphor implies, the
earth, as well, intermingle with the “material” of the speaker herself:

Here in Nantucket does the tiny soul

Confront water. Yet this element is not foreign soil;
I see the water as extensions of my mind

Awake I see Nantucket but with this bell

Of voice I can toll you tokens of regions below visible.*

Gliick’s poetry is set in a New England and eastern coastal landscape through-
out her career, and, as we see here, it is a world infused with the numinous, to
which the poet offers the reader insight. From the island towns of her earliest
work to the Vermont farmland of The Wild Iris and Meadowlands, and, most
recently, the cultural landscape of the Cambridge to which the poet moves
after a second divorce, Gliick sees herself as not entirely separate and is there-
fore able to offer the reader access to spiritual, invisible, realms. In light of her
developing appreciation for the heterarchical and corporeal nature of earthly
existence, the poet perceives the interconnectedness of elements: “soul?
“water,” “soil,” “mind.” Having established such a relationship to her materials,
 Louise Gliick’s “absence ofintention” Ces 229

the poet transforms what she consciously sees (Nantucket), using poetic con-
structions (the “voice” that is a “bell”) to give form to the abstract. In the
above lines we see Gliick’s characteristic evocation of the mythic within the
ordinary, the “toll” and “tokens” of “regions below visible” simultaneously
suggesting the journey to hell and a subway ride.
In light of such an apparently ecofeminist ideology at work in her poetics,
it is important to note that although she gives voice to many classical gods and
goddesses and other mythological figures throughout her work, Gliick never
explicitly turns to the so-called goddess spirituality often associated with cul-
tural ecofeminism. In fact, she writes critically of Czeslaw Milosz, “The pa-
ganism he defends is maternal. Earth centered. Moon centered. Fruitful. Pre-
dictable. Cyclical. This is the same fecund earth Hass reveres. Both approve it
as the wise man approves woman, radiant in otherness.” Gliick dismisses this
kind of “maternal paganism” in her male contemporaries as equally reductive
as the degradation of the female/earth body that she has so often criticized in
Judeo-Christian thought and practice.
Although she arrives at apparently ecofeminist conclusions regarding het-
erarchy, human bodily nature, and the relationship between Western patriar-
chal ideology and the connected oppression of women and exploitation of na-
ture, Gliick’s foremost concern is poetic rather than political. That is to say,
her work is not driven overtly by themes of feminism and environmentalism.
Yet, as we have seen, her poetics emerges from the personal bodily experience
of being a woman in the latter half of the twentieth century, and it is in the
kind of “absence of intention” of which Gliick suggests gender difference may
emerge in writing that an ecofeminist vision shapes her poetics and informs
her poetry.

Notes

1. Louise Gliick, “Education of the Poet,” in Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry
(Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1994), 7.
2. Charlene Spretnak, “pcofeminism: Our Roots and Our Flowering,” in Reweaving
the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, ed. Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Oren-
stein (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), 3-14, esp. 5-6.
3. Carol J. Adams, introduction to Ecofeminism and the Sacred, ed. Carol J. Adams
(New York: Continuum, 1993), 1.
4. Quoted in Patrick D. Murphy, Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques
(New York: SUNY Press, 1995), 7-8.
230 cx Maggie Gordon

5. Eating disorders, including anorexia, are of course not restricted to any particu-
lar gender, race, age, or socioeconomic class. Yet because adolescent anorexics experi-
ence the “disorder” during a period in which sexual maturation catalyzes a gender-
identity crisis, Iwould suggest each experience of anorexia is, in some sense, gendered.
The anorexia Gliick presents in Descending Figure and in the essay “Education of the
Poet” specifically pertains to female sexual development and to the adolescent’s more
sophisticated recognition and interrogation of cultural gender roles and therefore may
be considered “exclusively female.”
6. Louise Gliick, “The Wound,” in The First Four Books of Poems (Hopewell, N.J.:
Ecco, 1995), 20-24.
7. “The Wound” echoes Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in
which the narrator, Jane, suffers postpartum depression and is similarly treated conde-
scendingly and made to “convalesce.” Like Gliick’s speaker, detached from human in-
teraction, Jane sees her own circumstance reflected in the wallpaper. For an insightful
discussion of the “domestic carceral” and contemporary rhetoric on pregnancy, see
Helena Michie, “Confinements: The Domestic in the Discourses of Upper-Middle-
Class Pregnancy,” in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed.
Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, 1997), 57-69.
8. Gliick, “The Wound,” 25-27.
9. Louise Gliick, “The Egg,” in First Four Books, 6-8.
10. Charlene Spretnak, States of Grace: The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern
Age (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), 119.
11. See, especially, Spretnak, States of Grace; and Carol P. Christ, Rebirth of the God-
dess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality (New York: Routledge, 1997).
12. Louise Gliick, “Witchgrass,” in The Wild Iris (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1992), 11-14.
13. Adams, introduction, 1.
14. Gliick, “Witchgrass,” 8-10.
15. Louise Gliick, “Dedication to Hunger,” in Descending Figure (Hopewell, N.J.:
Ecco, 1980), 49 (emphasis added).
16. Gliick, “Education,” 10.
17. Spretnak, States of Grace, 136.
18. Gliick, “Dedication to Hunger,” 52-53.
19. Louise Gliick, “Lover of Flowers,” in Ararat (New York: Ecco, 1990), 15-17.
20. Spretnak, States of Grace, 136.
21. Louise Gliick, “Matins [2],” in The Wild Iris, 9, 12-13. Eight poems in The Wild
Iris are titled “Matins.” I include page numbers for clarity.
22. The titles of the poems of this last speaker (e.g., “Retreating Wind,” “Early Dark-
«
ness,” “September Twilight”) suggest that it is an embodiment of an abstract concept of
 Louise Gliick’s “absence of intention” Ce 231

the sacred rather than an anthropomorphic being; and, given the critical tendency to
refer to this speaker as “the god,” or even “God,” it is important to note that not even
the gardener uses such terms. Furthermore, it is only the titles assigned the poems, and
not the poems themselves, that identify the gardener’s poems as “prayers.” Ironically,
only the flowers use the word god (as well as father and master), and they do so appar-
ently in reference to the human.
23. Quoted in Christ, 114.
24. Louise Gliick, “Phenomenal Survivals of Death in Nantucket, in Firstborn, 1-3,
11-12.
25. Louise Gliick, “Obstinate Humanity,” in Proofs and Theories, 65-71, esp. 66.
 Richard Hunt

CexHow to Love This World

The Transpersonal Wild in Margaret Atwood’s
Ecological Poetry

Asked how ideas come to her, Margaret Atwood once said, “You put your left
hand on the earth and hold your right hand in the air. Sooner or later, you will
get an idea.”' And although one might dismiss this response as rather glib,
much of Atwood’s poetry does appear to have been generated with her left
hand so situated.
Consider, for instance, “Frogless,” from Morning in the Burning House,
which speaks of a future without frogs. Biologists tell us that frogs, a primary
indicator of an ecosystem’s health, now seem to be vanishing in many parts of
the world. But in Atwood’s poem far more than just frogs are at risk; we see,
for instance, a deformed eel, born with “a dead eye / grown from its cheek.”
Trees become “sore” from “a hot gauze of snow” that sears their roots. Even the
worms are “drunk and burning” from the “pure antifreeze” in the streams.
And what of the humans in this place? They “eat sick fish / because there are
no others. Then they get born wrong.”
“This is home,” Atwood reminds us.’ Yet perhaps we are more fortunate
than she; although this is her vision of the future, it is not yet necessarily ours.
Still, she says, it’s coming: “Travel anywhere in a year, five years, / and you'll
end up here” (56-57). “Here”: a landscape barren of frogs, barren of edible
(read “healthy”) fish. Some years earlier Atwood had recalled Northrop Frye’s
observation that the question “Who am I?” is often subservient to the question
“Where is here?”* The “here” in “Frogless” is severely damaged; it can only lead
to an equally severely damaged “I.”
The environmental awareness in “Frogless” is not an isolated occurrence in
Atwood’s work. If it comes as something of a surprise to think of Atwood as a
nature writer, perhaps it is because American readers, for the most part, think
of her as primarily a novelist; and of her novels only Surfacing would likely be
included in a course in environmental literature. But throughout her career
attentiveness to the natural world has been a recurring and important feature
of her poetry. Atwood’s interest in the natural world goes back to her child-
hood: her father, an entomologist, “used to bring home these ‘things” for her

232
 Transpersonal Wild in Margaret Atwood ce. 233

to study. “Later on,” she says, “I studied chemistry and biology and zoology,
and if I hadn't been a writer I’d have gone on with that.”
But if it is clear that the natural world often plays a role in Atwood’s work,
it is often less clear just what role it plays. Critics have tended to see Atwood’s
use of nature primarily as a metaphor for human relationships. Coral Ann
Howells, for instance, argues that Atwood’s nature serves a Canadian national-
ist purpose. The wilderness, she writes, is “a crucial feature of Atwood’s con-
struction of Canadian identity.”* John Wilson Foster considers Atwood’s nature
poetry in terms of a journey “inwards, an exploration of the self and its rela-
tionships.”” Also arguing for a psychological reading, Gary Ross sees an “un-
specified conflict between the poet and landscape” in which “the wilderness
world comes to stand for the outside correspondent of some internal state.”* Fi-
nally, although Judith McCombs does look at Atwood as a “nature writer,”
comparing her work with that of Annie Dillard, among others, she too casts the
work in terms of gender, in which “[t]he relation of the J to nature shifts from
the men’s sexual power struggle to the women’s identification and alliance.”
Although these responses to Atwood’s nature poetry differ greatly, each
proceeds from a commonly held anthropocentric understanding of the nat-
ural world. More, they presuppose in Atwood a similar view. I will argue, how-
ever, that Atwood is far from anthropocentric in much of her nature poetry,
that she is often highly attentive to environmental issues, and that indeed nei-
ther the intensity nor the direction of her environmentalism has yet been fully
recognized. .
Nature typically plays one of two roles in Atwood’s poetry. In the first,
which predominates in her earlier work, nature serves primarily as setting or
background for poems dealing with other issues. But although even a look at
the way nature serves as background can illuminate a writer’s understanding
of the natural world, I prefer instead to focus on nature’s second role, in which
the natural world is the subject of a particular poem. As we will see, those
poems often address explicitly environmental issues, from the exploitation of
resources and animal rights in the earliest work to environmental degradation
and species extinction in more recent poems.
The Circle Game, winner of the Governor General’s Award in 1967, was the
first of Atwood’s works to see wide circulation.” Although most of the poems
feature nature as background, we can still see the beginning of Atwood’s un-
easiness with the effects of human intervention in nature. “The City Planners,”
for instance, critiques suburbia, where “the houses in pedantic rows, the
planted / sanitary trees, assert / levelness of surface like a rebuke." The rebuke
is returned, though, as
234 ce Richard Hunt

the too-fixed stare of the wide windows

give[s] momentary access to

the landscape behind or under
the future cracks in the plaster

when the houses, capsized, will slide

obliquely into the clay seas, gradual as glaciers
that right now nobody notices. (27)

In “Pre-Amphibian” the speaker, presumably no longer in the morass of sub-

urbia, finds herself in a swamp “where we transmuted are / part of this warm
rotting / of vegetable flesh.” The distinction between mediated and unmedi-
ated nature is clear, as are Atwood’s preferences. She depicts the suburbs in
harsh terms: cracked plaster, capsized houses sliding into the sea. The artifice
of the contemporary suburb can lead only to oblivion, both for the land itself
and for the speaker. In contrast, Atwood depicts humans as “warm fish mov-
ing” through that primordial swamp, back to the sea, to which, as she well
knows, all life can trace a common ancestry.
With The Animals in That Country Atwood continues her critique of our
culture’s intrusive relationship with nature. The title figure of “Progressive In-
sanities of a Pioneer” moves further and further toward insanity as he asserts
himself on what he perceives to be a hostile farmland. At the poem’s center is
a telling sequence in which the pioneer complains about the resistance of the
land he has sought unsuccessfully to tame:

This is not order

but the absence
of order.

He was wrong, the unanswering

forest implied:

It was
an ordered absence.”

The pioneer does not, Atwood implies, understand the land he has been work-
ing. The pioneer is “obstinate”; refusing to take the land on its own terms, de-
manding that it be as his fancy prescribes, he vanishes “down through the
 Transpersonal Wild in Margaret Atwood = ce» 235

stone” (38). Because he does not know how—or is unwilling—to reconcile his
own needs with those of the land he seeks to inhabit, the pioneer seems likely
to disappear entirely, one more disappointed, displaced visitor in a land to
which he never would belong. He dissolves into the land, becomes part of the
land, leaving only a “green / vision” behind (39). Atwood leaves the pioneer
sunk only knee-deep in the soil; his eventual place remains undetermined. He
continues to stand, like so many of us, poised both as a part of and apart from
the land and now seems, in effect, to occupy two places at once.
In “The Animals in That Country,’ Atwood defines those two places in
terms of their animal inhabitants: “that country’—in which “the animals /
have the faces of people”; and “this country”—in which they “have the faces of
/ animals.” The narrator stands between the two countries. Atwood considers
the process by which one country has mutated into the other in “Elegy for the
Giant Tortoises.” The speaker wants to engage in “a meditation / upon the
giant tortoises / withering finally on a remote island” (23). But she is unable to
concentrate on the disappearing tortoises; she tries to focus, but the site of her
meditations—subways and (city) parks—proves too much of a distraction. In
the end we see the tortoises

lumbering up the steps, under the archways

toward the square glass altars

where the brittle gods are kept,

the relics of what we have destroyed,
our holy and obsolete symbols. (23)

The ancient animals may well be holy, but in a world of subways and cities,
where ancient species survive only in “square glass altars,” that very holiness it-
self is becoming “obsolete.” The poem ends on this note; there is no message
of hope nor even a call for reconciliation. The two countries have irrevocably
split, and we humans are left in the lesser place.
The title character in Atwood’s next book, The Journals of Susanna Moodie,
speaks from that lesser place.'* Always a stranger in her wilderness home, in
“Disembarking at Quebec” Moodie complains that “The moving water will
not show me / my reflection.’ As a recent immigrant she realizes that she has
“entered a large darkness” in the wild and, further, that “It was our own / ig-
norance we entered. // I have not come out yet” (12). Like the insane pioneer
whose situation she so recalls, Moodie never comes to love, nor even to truly
inhabit, the land. In “Death of a Young Son by Drowning” she contrasts the
236 ce Richard Hunt

image of a child “hung in the river like a heart” with the place of the tragedy,
where “the sun kept shining, the new grass / lept to solidity”; she plants her
dead son in the ground “like a flag” (31). But a flag is always both an artifice
and an abstraction; both her dead son and the land in which he is buried re-
main artificial. In the book’s final poem, “A Bus along St Clair: December,” At-
wood imagines Moodie as an old woman riding a city bus, circa 1970. She
looks about her and realizes that the modern streets she sees cover the wilder-
ness of her youth. She speaks to a fellow passenger:

Turn, look down:

there is no city;
this is the centre of a forest
your place is empty. (61)

This is but a nostalgic recollection, though; Moodie remains essentially igno-

rant. She felt no less “empty” when living in the wilderness; she ceases to re-
gard the wilderness as ugly and hostile only when she is far enough removed
from it that it can offer her no further threat.
The constraints of the Moodie project allow Atwood only so much space
for maneuver; however stylized her Moodie becomes, Atwood cannot turn the
historical Moodie into a contemporary environmentalist. But Atwood uses
Moodie’s experience as a map to the prevailing cultural attitude toward na-
ture. In her second 1970 publication, Procedures for Underground, Atwood ex-
pands on the questions she could not have Susanna Moodie consider. She of-
fers a counter to Moodie’s prolonged estrangement from the land with “Two
Gardens,” in which a planted garden contains

fabttc——
textured zinnias; asters the colours of chintz; thick
pot-shaped marigolds, the sunflowers brilliant as
17
imitations.

Each flower, although brilliant and beautiful, is described in terms of a

human-made object. Outside this cultured garden is the second garden, where

plants that grow

without sunlight
... have their roots
in another land. (16-17)
 Transpersonal Wild in Margaret Atwood = cw. 237

Our vision may linger only on the surface of the cultivated flowers; but the
others “are mist,’ and “if you touch them, your / eyes go through them” (17).
The wild plants, Atwood tells us, have a depth to them that those of the do-
mestic garden cannot approach.
Atwood’s resistance to control seems particularly strong in her next vol-
ume, the aptly titled Power Politics. Unlike her previous books, Power Politics
has no table of contents and thus even in its structure resists being “domesti-
cated” or controlled. In addition, many of the poems are untitled, further re-
sisting control. In one of the untitled poems the speaker recalls the split we
saw in “Two Gardens”:

You want to go back

to where the sky was inside us
animals ran through us, our hands
blessed and killed according to our
wisdom.”

But Atwood is no sentimentalist wishing for a return to some proto-

Rousseauian benign jungle; we cannot go back to an animal existence, she de-
clares, for

we have been
improved, our heads float several inches above our necks
moored to us by
rubber tubes. (9)

Although she may be less than generous in this description, she recognizes the
inevitability of human progress. Such a recognition, though, does not obscure
the dangers inherent in that progress. In a later poem in Power Politics she
speaks in the voice of nature, which, she implies, is becoming increasingly
tired of our continued interference, our manipulations, our blunders:

I’m through, I won’t make

any more flowers for you

I judge you as the trees do

by dying. (32-33)

It is a harsh judgment, although perhaps one not entirely unwarranted.

238 ce Richard Hunt

Atwood’s next book, You Are Happy, consists of four separate poem cycles,
two of which focus on elements of the natural world. In “Songs of the Trans-
formed” Atwood speaks in the voices of ten different animals, offering valida-
tions for the harsh judgments of Power Politics. In “Pig Song” the pig com-
plains that humans have transformed it into nothing more than “a greypink
vegetable with slug / eyes, buttock / incarnate.” Elsewhere we encounter
worms who “know the philosophy of boots” that squash them into the pave-
ment. The worms remind us, though, of their inevitable retribution:

we are waiting
under your feet.
When we say Attack you will hear nothing
at first (35).

In the final poem of the sequence, “Corpse Song,” the speaker offers

something
you do not want:
news of the country I am trapped in,
news of your future:
soon you will have no voice. (43)

Thus the sequence that begins with the transformation of a pig into a mere
commodity, and moves from there to a reminder that the worms will get you
in the end, closes with a corpse telling of a silent future “swollen with words
you never said, / swollen with hoarded love” (44). We might read such a se-
quence as a cause-and-effect scenario, in which rampant commodification of
nature leads to both physical and spiritual corruption. “Songs of the Trans-
formed” both calls our attention to our fundamentally dysfunctional relation-
ship with the natural world and implicitly demands that we take action to
avoid the dire results of that dysfunction.
The second “nature” cycle in You Are Happy, the “Circe / Mud Poems,” con-
sists of two dozen untitled poems, each spoken by the mythical Circe about
her encounter with Odysseus. In the title’s conjunction of character and land
Atwood offers an alternative to the relationship depicted in “Songs of the
Transformed.” We enter through a landscape marked by a “forest / burned and
sparse” (46), in which the events of the sequence occur. The landscape plays a
crucial role in the entire sequence, but Atwood’s speaking persona, whether
Circe or landscape, refuses to describe the landscape to the reader: “Why
 Transpersonal Wild in Margaret Atwood = cw» 239

should I describe the landscape for you?” she demands. “You live here, don’t
you? .. . See for yourself” (52). The irony in this, of course, is that Odysseus
did not actually live on Circe’s island at all. He was just visiting. The implica-
tion is clear: we, who too often proceed as though we were merely visiting the
land, are equally incapable of seeing it for ourselves.
In another of the “Circe /Mud Poems” Circe relates a secondhand tale, one
told “by another traveller, just passing through” (61). This traveler tells of two
boys who fashion a woman out of mud on an island. They use the mud
woman for sexual gratification, “sinking with ecstasy into her soft moist belly”
until finally the mud woman is “swept away in a sudden flood.” The traveler
concludes by saying that “no woman since then has equalled her.” Circe then
regains the narrative, asking the reader, “Is this what you would like me to be,
this mudwoman?” (61). The question is provocative, especially when com-
bined with Atwood’s association of Circe and mud. It is as though the land it-
self were speaking, asking us what it is we want of it. The story of the mud
woman also calls attention to the biblical traditions that have so often led us
to think we can, like the boys on the island, have our way with the land. But,
as Atwood has often warned us, that biblical tradition can work two ways. Al-
though it may appear to permit us to transform the land as we please, those
transformations may have dire consequences—a sudden flood may, indeed,
occur, leaving us as empty as it left the two boys whose creation was washed
away.
Not flood but fire opens Two-Headed Poems. In “Burned Space” Atwood
looks at the aftereffects of a forest fire. “Before the burn,” she writes, “this was
a forest. / Now it’s something else.” Something else: another “transforma-
tion.” Unlike the one performed on the pig, however, this transformation is
not about degradation but regeneration; for amid the fire’s “dampened em-
bers” we also see “reddish flowers and glowing seeds” (9-10). In “Marsh,
Hawk” Atwood pictures a swamp filled with garbage, which “spreads on the /
land like a bruise” (87). The speaker knows that the swamp, however fouled,
remains an important link between the human and the nonhuman worlds.
We can see only so much, Atwood offers, and it is “from the places / we can’t
see” that the .

guttural swamp voices

impenetrable, not human,
utter their one-note
syllables, boring and :
significant as oracles and quickly over. (87)
240 ce Richard Hunt

The speaker, although able to hear these voices, is unable to attract their at-
tention, is unable to gain entry to the world of the swamp. We might suspect
that such entry would be akin to that of the relentless pioneers of Atwood’s
earlier poems. But, we quickly learn,

intrusion is not what we want,

we want it to open, the marsh rushes
to bend aside, the water
accept us.” (87)

The matter remains, in the end, unresolved: the speaker wants to merge with
the swamp,

to have it slide
through us, disappearance
of the skin, this is what we are looking for
the way in. (88)

This is clearly not the stuff all those pioneers are made of; at last we begin to
see the suggestion of a new role for humans in the natural world.
For Atwood seeks to inspire a change in the way we perceive the relation-
ship among all living things. In “Vultures,” from True Stories, Atwood writes of
creatures whose role is to carve out “a little / territory of murder.’’! The
speaker asks the vulture, “frowzy old saint,” a single question: “what do you
make / of death, which you do not / cause, which you eat daily?” The vulture
replies, “I make life, which is a prayer” (73). Atwood does two interesting
things in this passage. First, she illustrates the economy of nature that the
great scavengers personify. All things lead into one another, she tells us; all are
connected—an understanding that might have made Susanna Moodie’s life in
the bush far happier, that might have saved the pioneer of The Animals in That
Country from his progressive insanity.
The second point Atwood makes in “Vultures” is perhaps more subtle. She
equates not life itself but the making of life with prayer. The praying figure is
a vulture, a creature that plays its particular role in the cycle of life and death;
here Atwood recognizes its actions as holy. It is not so much the particulars of
the vulture’s actions that are holy but the way it fits into its own environment.
Perhaps, Atwood suggests, we would be wise, like the vulture, to know our
proper role within the natural world and to treat that role with reverence. It is
not necessary, Atwood proclaims, that we understand every feature of the nat-
 Transpersonal Wild in Margaret Atwood = cw. 241

ural world, but we must acknowledge that nature has inherent rights of
its own.
Those rights are addressed in another of Atwood’s poem cycles. In the
eleven “Snake Poems” of Interlunar Atwood suggests that the snake, among
the most despised of creatures, is “a snarled puzzle,” the only animal that does
not sing. “The reason for them,” Atwood concludes, “is the same / as the rea-
son for the stars, and not human.” The snake is thus portrayed in a manner
that eludes anthropocentricity, a theme Atwood returns to frequently as she
seeks to establish a renovated relationship between the human and the wild in
nature.
If there remains little doubt where Atwood stands, we are not yet enlight-
ened as to how we might respond beyond a lingering sense of unease or guilt.
But ever the activist, Atwood is not content merely to complain, which returns
us to Morning in the Burned House. In one of that collection’s strongest eco-
logical poems, “The Moment,” Atwood tells the descendants of her insane pi-
oneer—those who firmly believe that “hard work and a long voyage” give
them some sort of cachet to do as they please with the land—to understand
that all their sturm und drang on the land has been for naught. Once anyone,
any pioneer, says “I own this,” the natural world simply recedes: the trees, the
birds, the cliffs, the very air retreat. In the poem’s concluding lines Atwood
moves beyond her individual voice and begins to speak once more in the voice
of that receding natural world:

You own nothing.

Cw
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was the other way round.”

In the final line we see Atwood beginning to approach the basis for what Re-
becca Raglon has called a “kinder, more ethical relationship with the natural
world.” The error of someone like Atwood’s pioneer, someone like her Su-
sanna Moodie, is to think of the land as something one can own, something
on which one can impose one’s own human will. By presenting a natural
world that belongs only to itself, “The Moment” echoes Aldo Leopold’s land
ethic, in which “the role of Homo sapiens [changes] from conqueror of the
land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”” For such a change to
occur, Leopold continues, our “ethical sequence” must move away from the
current paradigm, in which “the land-relation is still strictly economic” —that
242 ce Richard Hunt

is, one based on ownership—into one “dealing with man’s relation to land and
to the animals and plants which grow upon it” (207). This is the ethical stance
we see emerging through ecological poetry, but in itself this ethic offers no
modus operandi.
An ethical stance suggested by Australian philosopher Warwick Fox offers
one possible way to implement Leopold’s enhanced ethical sequence. Fox’s
proposed “transpersonal ecology,” where an individual’s “forms of identifica-
tion ... tend to promote impartial identification with all entities,” leads to an
“approach to ecology [that] is concerned precisely with opening to ecological
awareness.” Atwood’s insane pioneer shows no such awareness; indeed, that
lack proves his undoing. Atwood’s regard for the endangered tortoises, along
with her concern for vanishing frogs, further illustrates the transpersonal ecol-
ogy underlying her ecological poetry. Whether assuming the voices of ani-
mals, as she does in “The Songs of the Transformed,” or the collective voice of
the natural world, as she does in “The Moment,” Atwood initiates Fox’s “dis-
tinctive approach” to ecological awareness. “The end that such approaches
serve, as Fox explains, is to regard “members or aspects of the nonhuman
world [as] morally considerable” in their own right.” Fox’s design is not so
much to step outside one’s individual self but to extend that individual self to
encompass the rest of the natural world. Atwood does precisely that in many
of her poems, and as her speaking self expands to encompass all of nature, she
also extends the inherent moral rights of humanity to include the whole of the
natural world.
Atwood scholars have long assured us that Atwood’s “use of landscape is
predominately and consistently figurative,” but in many cases I have found its
function to be quite the opposite.” I believe her “use of landscape” is very
often transpersonal and represents an effort to subvert the deleterious effects
so often associated with self-interest.” By employing the expanded vision of
self available through a transpersonal reading, Atwood translates that over-
weening human tendency for self interest—which apologists cite as a “nat-
ural” feature of humanity and to which many of the figures in Atwood’s po-
etry (the insane pioneer and Susanna Moodie come instantly to mind) fall
victim—into a position that enhances rather than diminishes the natural
world. I would argue that such a position, based on an enlightened and ex-
panded self-interest, is the underlying ethical premise we see in Atwood’s eco-
logical poetry; it is also a way to achieve the sort of ethical stance Aldo
Leopold argued for half a century ago, a stance for which the time has clearly
come.
 Transpersonal Wild in Margaret Atwood = ce» 243

Notes

1. Junichi Miyazawa, “Atwood Is in Japan,” e-mail to atwood-l listserv, April 2, 1997.

2. Margaret Atwood, Morning in the Burned House (Toronto: McClelland and Stew-
art, 1995), 56.
Sc ibid., 57.
4, Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto:
House of Anansi Press, 1972), 10.
5. Margaret Atwood, Conversations, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll (Princeton, N.J.: Ontario
Review Press, 1990), 46.
6. Coral Ann Howells, “‘It All Depends on Where You Stand in Relation to the For-
est’: Atwood and the Wilderness from Surfacing to Wilderness Tips,” in Various At-
woods: Essays on the Later Poems, Short Fiction, and Novels, ed. Lorraine M. York
(Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1995), 47—70.
7. John Wilson Foster, “The Poetry of Margaret Atwood,” Canadian Literature 74
(autumn 1977): 17.
8. Gary Ross, “The Circle Game,” Canadian Literature 60 (spring 1974): 54.
9. Judith McCombs, “Atwood’s Nature Concepts: An Overview,’ Waves 7, no. 1
(1978):
71, 72.
10. Atwood’s first book, Double Persephone (Toronto: Hawkshead Press, 1961), was
published in a limited, hand-set edition of 250. The Circle Game was reissued in 1996
by House of Anansi Press.
11. Margaret Atwood, The Circle Game (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1966), 27.
12. Ibid., 63.
13. Margaret Atwood, The Animals in That Country (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), 37.
14. Ibid., 2-3.
15. Margaret Atwood, The Journals of Susanna Moodie (Toronto: Oxford University
Press, 1970). Susanna Moodie (1805-1885) was an English immigrant to Upper
Canada (Ontario) in 1832. Moodie wrote two books about her life in the wilderness,
Roughing It in the Bush and Life in the Clearings, both of which are still in print.
Moodie and her husband lived for seven years in the wilderness before finally settling
in the nearby town of Belleville, Ontario, which is now a part of the city of Toronto. In
the afterword to The Journals of Susanna Moodie Atwood writes that her own poems
were “generated by a dream” (62) about Moodie’s life but are not a literal retelling of
the events in Moodie’s books.
16. Atwood, Journals of Susanna Moodie, 11.
17. Margaret Atwood, Procedures for Underground (Toronto: Oxford University
Press, 1970), 16.
18. Margaret Atwood, Power Politics (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1971), 9.
244 ce Richard Hunt

19. Margaret Atwood, You Are Happy (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1974), 30.
20. Margaret Atwood, Two-Headed Poems (1978; repr., New York: Touchstone,
1980), 9 (page citations are to the reprint edition).
21. Margaret Atwood, True Stories (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1981), 72.
22. Margaret Atwood, Interlunar (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1984), 12.
23. Atwood, Morning in the Burned House, 109.
24. Rebecca Raglon, “Women and the Great Canadian Wilderness: Reconsidering
the Wild,’ Women’s Studies 25 (1996): 529.
25. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (1949;
repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 204 (page citations are to the reprint
edition).
26. Warwick Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for
Environmentalism (1990; repr., Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 265, 198 (page citations are
to the reprint edition).
Dia lbid: e203:
28. Ross, 52.
29. My own reading of Fox suggests that his transpersonal self offers an enlightened
form of self-interest; if a tree, for instance, is conceived as a part of our (transpersonal)
self, we will be less likely to damage or destroy it than would be the case were the tree
conceived as external to our sense of self.
Bernard W. Quetchenbach
MePrimary Concerns
The Development of Current Environmental
‘Identity Poetry’

From Contemporary to Current

Contemporary poetry as we know it emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, after a

prolonged aesthetic struggle between the “academic” late moderns and the
proponents of a new, open-form, personal, and immediate poetics, which, the
story goes, eventually prevailed. As a result, the poetics advanced by Robert
Lowell, Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg, and others of their generation became the
established idiom of American poetry for several decades. In many ways it is
still the dominant idiom. However, in the mid- to late-1970s significant
changes occurred in the way poets conceived of the relationship among them-
selves, their subject matter, and their audience. These changes, the result of
both the rise of multiculturalism in American art and education and contem-
porary poets’ frustration with the limitations of the immediate, personal char-
acter of contemporary poetics, hold significant promise for the poetry of en-
vironmental concern, offering complex new Uh of looking at nature and
expanding the developing body of “ecopoetry,’ and of environmental litera-
ture ingeneral, to embrace writers and readers across the sociopolitical spec-
trum.
~ During the late 1970s and early 1980s I was a student in the creative writ-
ing program at SUNY-Brockport. The central anthology in use at the college
was A. Poulin Jr’s Contemporary American Poetry, then in its second and third
editions and now in its sixth. The anthology was chosen for the obvious rea-
son that Poulin was a professor at the college but also because it contained an
intelligent selection of most of the poets that the faculty thought important.
The collection’s publication history and durability reflect the perceptiveness
and care of its editor, and the poets represented are well served. But a brief
survey of the contents of the fifth (1991) edition shows just how homoge-
neous even a relatively recent version of the book is in socioeconomic and de-
mographic terms. Despite significant differences in ideas, poetic styles, and
lifestyles, the great majority of the poets are white and attended highly

245
246 ce Bernard W. Quetchenbach

regarded colleges and universities; many went on to become literature or cre-

ative writing professors. Of the fifty-six poets included, only twelve are female,
and only five are people of color. Jewish and gay and lesbian poets are repre-
sented, but Native American, Asian American, and Hispanic poets are not. My
professors and I never would have thought of an anthology including the likes
of Bly and Ginsberg as conservative. In an essay of his own Poulin declares his
allegiance to the “radical tradition,” which he considered to be the main source
of American poetry.' But by post-1970s standards the impression of a rather
closed society of elite figures is inescapable. Even the exceptions are pre-
dictable, consisting of well-established voices such as Rita Dove and Gwen-
dolyn Brooks.
Poulin’s collection contrasts sharply with such multicultural anthologies as
An Ear to the Ground, edited by Marie Harris and Kathleen Aguero, that reflect
the development of what I will call “current” poetics. Neither Contemporary
American Poetry nor An Ear to the Ground is particularly dedicated to ecolog-
ical themes, but ecopoetry does appear in both. Although Poulin’s anthology
includes romantic nature poems by writers such as Galway Kinnell and James
Wright, environmental concerns appear in Harris and Aguero’s book cast in a
more challenging and sweeping sociopolitical context. Harris and Aguero as-
sert that their anthology’s multicultural framework brings to light “artists
whose historical and literary presence has been ignored or denied altogether.”
As the founders of contemporary poetry did before them, Harris and Aguero
place themselves in opposition to “the university” with its emphasis on “male,
white bourgeois culture” (xx). By figuring poetry as “land” Harris and Aguero
phrase their goal in environmental, or at least geographical, terms: “Our maps
are out of date and lead us over and over the same terrain. We hope to begin
to chart not new territory, but a land that has too long gone unmapped” (xix).
At first glance the current poets seem simply to represent a younger gener-
ation of contemporary poets, and this has come to be the assumption in con-
siderations of what contemporary means in American poetry. Clearly, there
has not been an obvious break in style and poetic philosophy, as there was in
the rejection of the 1950s academic verse that gave rise to the contemporary
generation. This is not to say that there has been no ongoing sense of conflict
in poetry since the 1950s. In introducing Adrienne Rich’s edition of the Best
American Poetry 1996, David Lehman notes that “American poetry sometimes
seems to be split down the middle.”* American poetry has never really resolved
the dialectic of “academics” or “insiders” versus “outsiders,” although, ironi-
cally, the outsider poets of the 1950s are now cast as insiders. Poet and editor
Andrei Codrescu recognizes this irony, noting that the “drunken village of
 Primary Concerns Ce. 247

poet-professors” of the 1950s was replaced in the mid-1970s by “the professor-

poet.”* Eliot Weinberger observes that the dialectic remains, even though its
terms may have changed, and, “even more confusing, the ruling party tends
to adopt, years later, the opposition platform.”> There has been considerable
discussion of renewing poetic form and technique, but despite the
l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poets and New Formalists, the personal lyric in free verse
is still the dominant mode. In fact, mainstream literary magazines often in-
clude such pillars of contemporary poetics as Robert Bly and W. S. Merwin in
company with young poets just out of MFA programs. Despite the renewal of
“anthology wars,” signaled by such works as An Ear to the Ground, the reex-
amination of audience and subject has come into American poetry as a kind
of undercurrent. One could probably read several issues of the major univer-
sity journals before detecting it.
The distinction that I seek to establish between contemporary poetry and
current poetry is primarily a matter of assumptions concerning the relation-
ship among writer, subject, and audience. Current poetry shares contempo-
rary poetry’s personal focus. But there is an important difference. In a typical
contemporary poem the speaker is usually indistinguishable from the poet
her- or himself, whereas the current poets tend to see themselves as spokesper-
sons for or examples of particular social, ethnic, class, racial, or gender-de-
fined communities. The poetry may still be personal, but it is shown to origi-
nate in the shared experience that determines and constitutes a poem’s subject
matter. For example, Jimmy Santiago Baca’s poem “Ese Chicano” draws on his
own prison experience, but the title and second-person narration place the
autobiographical content in a socially defined context: “You wear dark glasses
/ like your Indio ancestors / wore black war paint.”* The blending of languages
in Hispanic and to a lesser extent in current Native American and Asian
American poetry serves to further identify the poetry’s “primary audience” as
people who share a common blending not only of language but of whole cul-
tural milieux. The resulting poetry is individual, but it assumes a commonal-
ity that goes beyond what contemporary poetics could offer. In doing so it re-
structures the relationship among poet, subject, and audience. The audience
for such poetry need not be defined according to aesthetic or technical prefer-
ences. Instead, the reader is drawn to the work by a faith that the poet may be
saying something important. Current poetry, like poetry in general, demands
a kind of attention that other literature does not. But a reader motivated by
the possibility of finding something other than technique may be more will-
ing to expend the kind of energy needed to come to grips with poetry.
Moreover, a poetry that redefines the relationship among writer, subject, and
248 Ce Bernard W. Quetchenbach

audience might attract general readers who, having no stake in the literary dis-
cussion of what constitutes a good poem, have recently opted for other genres
that speak more directly to them and their concerns.
Just as contemporary poetics both derived from and rebelled against the
modernism it followed, so current poetry has ties to the earlier contempo-
raries. The idea of “primary audience’ itself is a child of the Black Arts Move-
ment of the 1960s and the feminist poetry of Adrienne Rich and others in the
1970s. As has been the case with these two movements, the influence current
poets have had is not limited to their primary audiences. The audience for a
current poem can be seen as a series of concentric circles rippling from the de-
fined primary audience through increasingly broader audiences sharing es-
sential characteristics with the primary audience and, ultimately, to the larger
sphere of the reading public in general. In this outer circle the poems serve the
purpose of consciousness raising. And the necessary overlapping of outer cir-
cles reveals affinities among apparently disparate writers and audiences. Even
the primary audience itself is likely to be multifaceted and complex. In Paula
Gunn Allen’s poetry, for example, the poet addresses Native American, femi-
nist, and environmental “interest groups” and illustrates common threads
running through all three.
The implications of the development of current identity poetics for envi-
ronmental poetry are significant and far-reaching. The “ecopoet,” like the
prose nature writer, is a kind of missionary, motivated by a fierce devotion to
a subject matter that is endangered and absolutely crucial to the poet’s well
being and, as even the largest circle of the general public is increasingly aware,
to the world at large. Because it seeks to establish a community of readers
whose common experience is assumed to be prior to and essential to the po-
etry, current identity poetics is well suited to reveal connections between indi-
viduals and communities. The kind of sociospiritual link between individual
and society envisioned by contemporary theorist-practitioners like Robert Bly
is brought to life in the work of poets like Baca and Allen, for whom the con-
nection between personal psyche and culture is the source of a richly layered
sense of spiritual, intellectual, and practical reality.
It may appear that the development of current identity poetics constitutes
an intensification of the individualism of contemporary poetry because the
background of the poet is central to the engendering and experience of the
poem. But it is not so much the writer’s identity that is important as it is the
reader’s identity, or the subject of identity itself. For one thing, identity is not
always a matter of ethnic origin. In cases in which the primary audience is de-
fined by something other than heritage—such as in the work of Vietnam vet-
 Primary Concerns = ws 249

erans, gays and lesbians, feminists, and environmentalists—the writer’s in-

tended audience is not obvious from the poet’s name or photograph. More-
over, readers drawn by a writer’s heritage are sometimes disappointed when
the writer strays from the expected subject matter. In a current interview in
The Missouri Review Li-young Lee remarks that “early on an Asian told me he
was really offended by my book. I asked him why and he said he went through
the table of contents and didn’t find any references to anything Asian.”’ Lee’s
impatience is understandable, as any writer is likely to object to “people think-
ing in classifications” (89), especially if those classifications have to be so ob-
vious as to be apparent simply from perusing a book’s table of contents. But
this example illustrates that the writer’s identity may ultimately be less impor-
tant than a reader’s expectations regarding subject matter and its relevance.
Perhaps the most significant assumption of current poets is that subject
matter is a key to establishing a connection between writer and reader. This
contradicts a long-held principle of American aesthetics—that it is artistic at-
tention that enlivens neutral subject matter, that the source of a poem’s value
is not so much what the poet says as how the poet says it. But it is undeniable
that subject-based writing has made significant inroads even in the literary
quarterlies and university presses. And perhaps the frustration that so many
poets express with the extensive but self-contained world of poetry and its afi-
cionados is a reflection that there are alternatives, that contemporary poets
like Adrienne Rich and Gary Snyder, who “sold out” to politically defined au-
diences, may actually have helped open doors that lead to a larger poetry with
concerns that are simply more important than the domestic content that has
long dominated contemporary poetry. In editing her 1996 edition of The Best
American Poetry, Rich found many poems in major literary reviews “personal
to the point of suffocation.” She concludes that “[a] great many poems rang
hollow and monotonous to me; at best they seemed ingenious literary devices,
at worst ‘publish or perish’ items for a vita or an MFA dissertation—academic
commodities.”* She believes, however, that there is also a current poetry that
does have substance, and for this, according to series editor Lehman, she em-
ploys the ecological metaphor of a living river, “a pulsing, racing convergence
of tributaries—regional, ethnic, racial, social, sexual.”
/
Varieties of Ecological Awareness in
Contemporary and Current Poetry

Rich’s “tributaries” appear in several forms of environmental awareness evi-

dent in recent poetry. Contemporary and current poets show renewed interest
250 ce» Bernard W. Quetchenbach

in pastoralism and regionalism. Mary Oliver in New England, Gary Snyder

and, later, Vi Gale in the Northwest, Maggie Anderson in Appalachia, and
Wendell Berry in Kentucky are just a few examples. Poets such as W. S. Mer-
win and Richard Shelton have become public spokespersons for their biore-
gions and have given their places prominence in their work. Snyder lists the
Pacific and Sierra forests in the acknowledgments of No Nature, his 1992 se-
lected poems.” Furthermore, Antler is identified by Harris and Aguero as a
“Great Lakes Bioregion poet,” following Snyder in moving from traditional re-
gionalism to bioregionalism.'' The regional impulse is perhaps most promi-
nent in the West, where a literary examination of the idea of “westernness” is
under way in both prose and poetry. In the Northwest especially, as Lars Nord-
strém has established, regionalism and environmentalism have converged in
the work of Snyder, Gale, William Stafford, and others.”
The ethnic and racial tributaries have also produced poets with ecological
sensibilities. Most obviously, Native American poets have spearheaded ecolog-
ical awareness in current American poetry. But environmental themes are not
unknown in the works of other groups either. In his essay “The Black Aes-
thetic” Timothy Seibles describes Bob Kaufman’s 1965 collection Solitudes
Crowded with Loneliness as including “a number of pastoral poems which fea-
tured a speaker at peace with, even delighted by, certain intervals of life.”
Seibles quotes “Cocoa Morning,” in which Kaufman combines the pastoral
impulse with the urban sound of jazz, “Dreaming of wild beats, softer still /
Yet free of violent city noise.” That this impulse is still alive in poetry by
African Americans is evidenced by Primus St. John’s poems in the October
1999 issue of Calapooya Literary Review. In “Listening to the Curandera” the
speaker longs to “be birdlike in my feelings / for things on the earth / that are
really dancers.” In another poem, “Lemon Verbena,” the speaker’s sexuality is
compared to that of a bugling elk plunging down a Northwestern “ridge /
Above a river.” And in “;Que Pasa?” St. John again figures emotional re-
sponses in natural imagery, echoing the ecopoet’s faith in nature as a source
and test of authenticity:

I’m in there, somewhere

Like a new moon
And my stillness is a hunger
Cunning as a wild animal—."°

Among the young African American poets whose work is collected in

Clarence Major’s The Garden Thrives, Leonard D. Moore’s “From the Field”
 Primary Concerns Ce. Zoi

blends appreciation for the natural order with knowledge of the hard history
of African American farm labor. The poem demonstrates sympathy for the re-
jection of that history by the young, who “won't do field work anymore,” but
concludes that “Rich soil linked us / like blessings that speak to us / without
a sound.’” In “Earth Screaming,” also selected by Major, Esther Iverem
evinces an environmentalist’s sense of empathy with the earth in its degrada-
tion: “Come out of the city’s human hum / to really hear / the earth scream-
ings”
Marilyn Chin’s “We Are Americans Now, We Live in the Tundra” links her
own Chinese American background with both African Americans and the en-
vironment:

A blues song; even a Chinese girl gets the blues

Her reticence is black and blue

Let’s talk about the extinct

Bengal tigers, about giant Pandas—.

If the primary audience for this poem consists of Asian Americans, the poem’s
imagery and language also enmesh both African Americans and environmen-
talists, whose spheres the poem connects by likening the minority experience
to that of those political representatives of the Chinese environment,inbing
Ling and Xing Xing, who are “quoted” in the following lines:

“Ling Ling loves Xing Xing... yet

We will not mate. We are

Not impotent, we are important.

We blame the environment, we blame the zoo!””

It is its connective quality that allows current identity poetry to appeal to

readers beyond the intended primary audience. Here the experience of Asian
Americans relates not only to other human minorities but also to nature itself,
caged and displayed like the pandas.
This connection between oppressed human populations and nonhuman
nature is at the core of ecofeminist writing. In her formative Woman and Na-
ture: The Roaring Inside Her, Susan Griffin makes this connection explicit. The
book, which Griffin places “in a realm between essay and poem, between real-
ity and myth,” counterpoints the “cool, professional, pretending to objectivity”
252 ce Bernard W. Quetchenbach

voice of “cultural authority” with “the chorus of women and nature, an

emotional, animal, embodied voice.” Griffin is aware of the irony and danger
of accepting a characterization developed by others. She begins the prologue
of Woman and Nature by acknowledging that the connection between woman
and nature originates with the patriarchy: “He says that woman speaks with
nature” (83). By the end of the prologue, however, it is clear that Griffin in-
tends to use the identification between the two as a source of empowerment
and knowledge: “We are women and nature. And he says he cannot hear us
speak. / But we hear” (83).
Because feminism is fundamentally a liberation movement, ecofeminists
have provided environmentalism with a clear sense of the essential and recip-
rocal relationship between environmental concerns and social justice. In her
essay “A Collaborative Intelligence” Griffin argues that “[i]f one would create
an egalitarian society, nature must be restored as the common ground of exis-
tence. Yet this common ground cannot be reclaimed without the transforma-
tion of an unjust social order.””!
In addition to ecofeminists, other ecopoets are defining a primary audience
based on environmental concern. In his environmental poetry, gathered in the
collection Pterodactyl Rose, William Heyen combines a regional Long Island
sensibility he traces to Walt Whitman with the apocalyptic sense he brings to
the other major social subject in his work, the Holocaust. Heyen’s poems of
extinction and despair are especially aimed at placing the individual experi-
ence, even when it seems innocent, in the larger sphere of the world economy,
where the trivial expands powerfully into nightmare, as in “Fast Food,” in
which “I sit at McDonald’s eating my fragment of forest,” and in “The Global
Economy,’ in which a dollar placed in the bank grows into a series of ques-
tions culminating with “What happened to all the trees?””
It would not be difficult to identify a substantial canon of contemporary
and current ecopoets, whose works are published in Amicus Journal, Ap-
palachia Journal, Orion, and in more overtly literary publications like Petro-
glyph, Albatross, and Green Fuse, as well as in the mainstream literary journals.
If, as I have argued, a reevaluation of the relationship among writer, audience,
and subject matter is a key to defining current poetry, it follows that, for
ecopoets, who have always been convinced of the significance of subject mat-
ter, the transition between the contemporary and the current would be less
obvious. For writers such as Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry, subject matter
has always been a defining factor in the makeup of their audiences. Although
Snyder’s prosody has considerable appeal, it is his environmental advocacy
and countercultural spirit that has carved him a special niche among readers
 Primary Concerns Ces MP)

and kept his books in print. Berry’s appeal also involves attachment to his sub-
ject matter and a clear sense of duty to his readers.
Given the ecopoet’s sense of purposiveness and commitment to both
reader and subject matter, it is not surprising that the distinction between
contemporary and current poetry is less pronounced among ecopoets than in
many other areas of poetry. Nevertheless, the convergence of Rich’s tributaries
is important to poets of the environment in that it broadens their appeal and
sets their work in a new, more expansive, and less-isolated context.

‘Anthologies, Multiculturalism, and the Ecology of Poets ©

As is the case with all innovations in literature, critics have engaged in spirited
and sometimes acrimonious discussions concerning current identity poetics.
The 1996 edition of The Best American Poetry evoked pointed criticism from
Harold Bloom, who left Rich’s edition completely unrepresented in his Best of
the Best compilation. The third edition of the Heath Anthology of American
Literature, especially its selection of contemporary poetry, has drawn similar
fire. In both cases the critics have claimed that the main criterion for inclusion
was the identity group of the author and not the artistry of the work. In the
AWP Chronicle, published by the Associated Writing Programs, Robert Wal-
lace took the Heath to task by claiming that traditional criteria of literary
value had been ignored in favor of social and political ones, a choice Wallace
sees as a capitulation to political correctness and, worse, as an inappropriate
adoption of nonliterary criteria for evaluating literary works.” But an anthol-
ogy’s purpose is not necessarily to gather all of the best works of a period. An-
thologies also aim to reflect the literary climate of a given place and time. In
this light it seems clear that the Heath Anthology does provide a legitimate re-
flection of the literary life of the period following the 1970s, in which hege-
monies of class, race, and gender began to give way to a new poetics, pio-
neered by social poets within contemporary poetry and resulting in the poetry
of identity that has flourished since that time. Paul Lauter, editor of the Heath
Anthology, notes the distinction between pre- and post-1980 literary climates
by asserting that “people who don’t think writers of color and white women
were being widely ignored” should “check out general American literature or
poetry anthologies before the 1980s.’”
Environmental concerns have made their way into the sphere of identity
and multicultural literature primarily through the work of Native American
poets. The influence of the “Native American Renaissance” of the 1970s is still
being felt in multicultural American literature, in which American Indian
254 ce Bernard W. Quetchenbach

writing holds a prominent place. A brief survey of Harper’s Anthology of Twen-

tieth Century Native American Poetry reveals the centrality of environmental
themes in the work of Indian poets. In his introduction to this collection,
edited by Duane Niatum, Brian Swann, who also serves as poetry editor for
the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Amicus Journal, points out that In-
dian poets seem “to work from a sense of social responsibility to the group as
much as from an intense individuality.”” Swann goes on to quote contempo-
rary poet Richard Hugo, who considered young Native American poets heirs
to the modernist tradition of T. S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats, “who felt we
inherited ruined worlds that, before they were ruined, gave man a sense of
self-esteem, social unity, spiritual certainty and being at home on the earth”
(xxi-xxii). The poems collected by Niatum, himself enrolled in the Klallam
tribe, demonstrate that for Native American poets Hugo’s “earth” includes
physical planet as well as cosmic homeland. The portrayals of nature and the
environment in Niatum’s collection are varied, but the volume includes many
poems embracing central principles of ecopoetics. Some of the poems address
ecological destruction. In “Drawings of the Song Animals” Niatum pictures a
contemporary Northwest in which “Dams abridge the Columbia Basin,” and
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn’s “Journey” begins with a landscape in which

Wet, sickly
smells of cattle yard silage fill the prairie air
far beyond the timber; the nightmare only just
begun, a blackened cloud moves past the sun
to dim the river’s glare, a malady of modern times.”

Ecopoets contrast the order found in natural systems with the overbearing but
ultimately illusory transformative power of modern technologies. Wendy
Rose’s “Loo-wit” recalls a Cowlitz personification of Mt. St. Helens, an old
woman spitting “her black tobacco,” although

Around her
machinery growls,
snarls and ploughs
great patches
of her skin.”

In Carter Revard’s “Driving in Oklahoma” the freedom of the meadowlark is

contrasted to the illusion of freedom provided by technology, the open road
 Primary Concerns = Ce 255

revealed as a constrained linear progression, the speaker discovering that al-

though he was “feeling / technology is freedom’s other name, it is really the
lark, not limited to the path of the highway, that “flies so easy, when he sings.”
Roberta Hill Whiteman’s “The White Land” also contrasts twentieth-century
technology with natural imagery, the return from the natural and spiritual
world of the poem’s dream vision disturbed by “the roar of that plane,” leav-
ing a troubled anticipation evident in the poem’s last two lines: “The dishwa-
ter’s luminous; a truck / grinds down the street.’ Images of connection
breaking through traditional Western dualities are also apparent throughout
the anthology, in poems such as Simon Ortiz’s Snyderesque “Bend in the
River”:

There are tracks

at river’s edge, raccoon,
coyote, deer, crow,
and now my own.”

Like Li-young Lee, American Indian writers resist stereotypical characteri-

zations (note, for example, Louise Erdrich’s playing with liberal white expec-
tations in “Dear John Wayne” and the unsympathetic portrayal of the white
Indian studies professor in Sherman Alexie’s novel Indian Killer). But current
Native American poetry shows that the identification of American Indians
with environmental concerns is not simply a matter of white expectations and
stereotypes. And American Indian writers have carried these concerns into
multicultural anthologies. An Ear to the Ground, for example, includes clearly
ecopoetic works by such poets as Gogisgi/Carroll Arnett:

I rise to make
four prayers of
thanksgiving for
this fine clear day,

this good brown

earth.”

And Lance Henson:

the fog lifts its gray cover to reveal

the carcasses of two dead deer
256 ce Bernard W. Quetchenbach

two silent places that have fallen upon the earth

at the side of a busy road.”

And Paula Gunn Allen:

Great Cities, piling drifting clouds

of chemical poisons that have long since
killed the air? Rivers and lakes long since
dead beneath the burden of filth dumped into
them for years?”

In The Best American Poetry 1996 Native American poets, although less
prominent, are represented. Ray A. Young Bear’s “Our Bird Aegis” presents an
evocative web of connective imagery drawn from nature (the “immature black
eagle”) and transformed into the mythology of aegis and “Bear-King.”” The
poem’s connective web entangles the speaker’s personal history in natural and
social spheres; the eagle/Bear-King, “subject to physical wounds and human /
tragedy,” “meditates” on the speaker’s “loss / of my younger brother” (239).
Rich’s The Best American Poetry 1996 also contains ecopoetry by Patiann
Rogers (“Abundance and Satisfaction”) and Heyen, whose “The Steadying” ac-
knowledges environmentalism’s debt to Native American cultures by granting
Oglala leader Crazy Horse a prominent place in a net of associations linking
the Holocaust and the environment (“cattlecars of redwoods voweling toward
Gotham in my dream’).*°
A fear evoked by current identity poetics is that it “Balkanizes” American
literature by appealing narrowly to one group of readers at the expense of oth-
ers, adopting an indifferent or even antagonistic stance toward readers not be-
longing to the primary audience. Rich herself has often been characterized as
hostile to readers who are not members of her intended audience, although
this criticism, especially in recent years, may say more about the fears of her
critics than about her own evolving attitudes. But such criticism neglects cur-
rent identity poetry’s tendency to construct provisional but concentric or
overlapping alignments of readers and the resulting encouragement of a pro-
foundly ecological concept of interlocking audiences in which each poet is
shown to be connected to many, perhaps all, others.
Claims that poets are included in works like The Best American Poetry 1996
on the basis of who they are and what group they represent obscure another
possible interpretation of the selections. In her introduction Rich rejects any
notion of an absolute and static list of best poems or even of American poems.
 Primary Concerns =ws 257

She does not seek to define aesthetic boundaries, which she sees as analogous
to the “official recantation of the idea that democracy should be continually
expanding, not contracting.”” Instead Rich sees editing a poetry anthology as
a way to create an alternative “space where other human and verbal relation-
ships are possible” (20). This space is home to ever-shifting relationships
among writers, readers, and the subject matter of the poem, an ecological in-
terplay of organisms and the environment in which they live.
A number of recent anthologies have been devoted to poetry on ecological
themes. Like so many of the developments in current poetry, the “green an-
thology” originates solidly in contemporary poetry. Robert Bly’s News of the
Universe provides an international selection of past and present poets, al-
though the selection is clearly dominated by Bly’s own sense of the centrality
of continental European romanticism. It is revealing, though, to contrast Bly’s
two most recent chronological groupings. Whereas the “Poems of Twofold
Consciousness: Early Twentieth Century” chapter consists almost exclusively
of well-known male American and European poets, the “1945-1979” section,
despite its relatively early closing date, offers a more diverse group of poems,
combining selections by “eco-canonical” contemporary figures like Berry,
Snyder, Denise Levertov, and Bly himself with works by Ray A. Young Bear,
Louis Jenkins, and international poets like Anna Akhmatova and Gabriella
Mistral. It is easy to imagine an editor with more inclusive tastes (or a less con-
fining agenda) broadening the selection still further by adding contemporary
works not normally identified with ecopoetry, such as Sylvia Plath’s “Pheas-
ant,” and by incorporating works by Allen, Baca, Antler, Griffin, St. John, and
others. The international 1991 anthology Poetry for the Earth, edited by Sara
Dunn and Alan Scholefield, exemplifies the breadth possible in even a rather
slender collection. If multicultural anthologies contextualize environmental
concerns in a large field of social issues, environmental poetry collections
could also serve to broaden the base of environmentalism by opening up the
largely white, upper-middle-class rolls of “card-carrying environmentalists” to
other populations who share their concerns but have not always considered
themselves welcome in environmentalist circles.
Such combinations are, of course, not always easy, and the more diverse a
collection of poets is, the less chance there is that their works will rest easily on
the page next to each other. But it is exactly the desire to avoid ideological or
aesthetic tension that has resulted in the narrow focus of anthologies such as
Bread Loaf’s relentlessly mainstream Poems for a Small Planet or Bly’s News of
the Universe. A more open collection, including if not uniting a comprehen-
sive spectrum of poets linked by environmental content, would be likely to
258 ce Bernard W. Quetchenbach

reveal and foster connections among these poets and among their audiences.
Such a collection, instead of serving to reinforce stereotypes of environmental
writers and their constituencies, would demonstrate both the underlying
common ground shared by such writers and the complicated differences
among them. Because ecopoetry has as its subject the world systems that sup-
port all life, the web of ecological poets is potentially impressive indeed. Poets
as diverse as Susan Griffin and Wendell Berry may never sit comfortably in
any sort of critical perspective. But this, perhaps, is the ultimate strength of
ecopoetry. The poets remain individual, resisting schools. What links them
and their audiences is the concern for the central subject matter. That Griffin
and Berry find common ground in sustainable agriculture and in their admi-
ration for the work of Gary Snyder is more surprising, and ultimately more
hopeful, than is the often remarked conjunction of Berry and Snyder.

“ Current Ecopoetry as Environmental Literature

One long-standing criticism of environmental literature in general involves

the “whiteness” of both its practitioners and its readers. One need only consult
the writings and discussions emanating from the Association for the Study of
Literature and the Environment (ASLE) to see how troubling this issue has
been to literary environmentalists, and the issue also appears frequently in the
mainstream environmental press. The basic contention is that although envi-
ronmental concern is widespread (that so many toxic waste sites are located in
and around minority areas has not escaped the attention of those who live
there), environmentalism as such is beholden to the “white hunter romanti-
cism” of Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway and to a basically reac-
tionary agrarianism that glosses over the racism of Thomas Jefferson. At the
1999 ASLE convention at Kalamazoo, Michigan, in which the midwestern lo-
cation seemed to bring out this latter aspect of environmental history, Native
American poet Gloria Bird injected some wry, pointed humor by offering to
read her poem about Jefferson. In publications like An Ear to the Ground,
however, environmental concern emerges in the context of a multifaceted
populist agenda.
Another criticism of environmental literature is that it is too intellectually
confining, that in Joyce Carol Oates’s infamous words, it “inspires a painfully
limited set of responses in ‘nature writers.”** A similar frustration is evident in
a recent Amicus Journal review of several collections of prose nature writing,
in which Lydia Millet claims that the genre often “fails to move beyond the
placid inertia of longing.”” Such comments indicate the degree to which na-
 Primary Concerns = Ces 259

ture and environmental writing have been linked to a particular kind of ro-
manticism, the history of which can be traced in publications like Thomas
Lyon’s This Incomperable Lande and Ann Ronald’s The Sierra Club Trailside
Reader. Responses like Oates’s and Millet’s may seem insensitive to the nu-
ances of this tradition, but a broader spectrum of environmental concern is
available in the work of current poets. Certainly the response to nature in the
work of Jimmy Santiago Baca is complex. Baca mixes an understanding of na-
ture as a measure of ultimate reality with the knowledge that less ultimate but
overpowering political factors have separated him and his ancestors from their
natural context, leaving Hispanic Americans, as he titles one of his books, Im-
migrants in Our Own Land. In “The Sun on Those,” the prose poem that opens
this collection, the speaker’s father is able to cling to the memory of the trees
he planted, which “in jail cell after jail cell .. . were his secret.” Even in the next
generation, “when they captured me,” one tree remains, “plunging its roots
deeper into the face of progress and land grabbers.’ In Baca’s Black Mesa
Poems images of nature damaged and degraded are placed in an overtly pas-
toral context, giving the poems a tension unusual in ecopoetry. In “Day’s
Blood” the poem’s speaker encounters slaughterhouse dogs along the Rio
Grande when “walking there myself at night / in the moonlight,” and in “A
God Loosened” the riparian woods appear like “the upturned claws / of great
dead eagles.”* Socioeconomic barriers, embodied in the “no trespassing signs
white flashing past” (62) of “Family Ties,” compromise the speaker’s access to
the natural world. Ultimately, however, the complexity of his relationship with
his environment does not alienate Baca from nature. In “Choices” he values a
sustaining if difficult agrarianism over the prosperity engendered by the mili-
tary-industrial economy, a choice the poem’s speaker must make when a
friend, beset by economic reverses on his farm, takes a job at the Los Alamos
Laboratory.”
What can the role of poetry be in a time of ecological crisis? At a poetry
reading in Arizona in 1994 Richard Shelton, speaking of his own work in de-
fense of the Sonoran Desert, claimed that poetry should not be inconsequen-
tial, but at the dawn of the twenty-first century poetry may seem irrelevant
and anachronistic. Yet considering the evident popularity of “street poetry”
and of poetry in public places such as city buses, and the even more ubiqui-
tous appeal of such popular versions of poetry as the rock or rap song lyric,
perhaps it is not unreasonable to think that a poetry conscious of its relation-
ship to subject and audience could have an impact on American culture as a
whole. And there are of course the many thousands of readers who are already
sampling the offerings of poets from university presses and little magazines. It
260 ce Bernard W. Quetchenbach

is also worth considering that, if American nature and environmental writing

in prose may still seem to be primarily white and upper class or bourgeois,
current ecopoetry is being written by a diverse group of writers in America
and around the world. One consequence of current ecopoetry, therefore, is to
reveal the environment as a fundamental concern linking university and bar-
rio, wilderness and city, feminist and agrarian. An additional consequence, the
assertion that the subject of a poem has value in its own right, reflects a fun-
damental principle of ecopoetics. In moving from the personal contemporary
to the more inclusive assumptions of current poetry, poets reveal that the
thing that is said—the content—is the poem’s surest connection to both the
reader and the earth.

Notes

1. A. Poulin Jr., “Contemporary American Poetry: The Radical Tradition,” in Con-

temporary American Poetry, 5th ed., ed. A. Poulin Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991),
651-670.
2. Marie Harris and Kathleen Aguero, preface to An Ear to the Ground: An Anthol-
ogy of Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Marie Harris and Kathleen Aguero (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1989), xix—xx.
3. David Lehman, foreword to The Best American Poetry 1996, ed. Adrienne Rich
(New York: Scribner, 1996), 9.
4. Andrei Codrescu, “Up Late: An Introduction,” in Contemporary Poetry since 1970:
Up Late, ed. Andrei Codrescu (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1987), xxxi,
XXXIV.
5. Eliot Weinberger, “A Note on the Selection,” American Poetry since 1950: Innova-
tors and Outsiders, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Marsilio, 1993), xii.
6. Jimmy Santiago Baca, “Ese Chicano,” in Harris and Aguero, 24.
7. Matthew Fluharty, “An Interview with Li-young Lee,’ Missouri Review 23, no. 1
(2000): 89.
« 8. Adrienne Rich, introduction to The Best American Poetry 1996, ed. Adrienne Rich
(New York: Scribner, 1996), 17.
9, Lehman, 11.
+ 10. Gary Snyder, No Nature: New and Selected Poems (New York: Pantheon, 1992).
11. Harris and Aguero, 322.
12. Lars Nordstrém, Theodore Roethke, William Stafford, and Gary Snyder: The Eco-
logical Metaphor as Transformed Realism (Stockholm: Uppsala, 1989).
13. Timothy Seibles, “The Black Aesthetic,” in A Profile of Twentieth Century Amer-
 Primary Concerns = Ce. 261

ican Poetry, ed. Jack Myers and David Wojahn (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univer-
sity Press, 1991), 180.
14. Primus St. John, “Listening to the Curandera,” Calapooya Literary Review 20
(1999): 1.
15, Primus St. John, “Lemon Verbena,” Calapooya Literary Review 20 (1999): 1.
16. Primus St. John, “;Que Pasa?” Calapooya Literary Review 20 (1999): 1.
s 17. Leonard D. Moore, “From the Field, in The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century
African-American Poetry, ed. Clarence Major (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 400.
® 18. Esther Iverem, “Earth Screaming,” in Major, 410.
19, Marilyn Chin, “We are Americans Now, We Live in the Tundra,” in Unsettling
America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, ed. Maria Mazzioti Gillan
and Jennifer Gillan (New York: Penguin, 1994): 10.
20. Susan Griffin, Made from This Earth: An Anthology of Writings (New York:
Harper and Row, 1982), 82.
21. Susan Griffin, The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender, and Society
(New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1995), 46.
22. William Heyen, Pterodactyl Rose: Poems of Ecology (St. Louis: Time Being Books,
1991), 41, 39.
9 23. Robert Wallace, “Reconstructing Contemporary American Poetry,’ AWP Chron-
icle, no. 4 (1994-1995): 14.
24. Paul Lauter, “Overviews and Notes,” Heath Anthology of American Literature,
available from <http://www.georgetown.edu/tamlit/newsletter/13/Lauter.htm> (ac-
cessed June 16, 2000).
25. Brian Swann, “Introduction: Only the Beginning,” in Harper’s Anthology of
Twentieth Century Native American Poetry, ed. Duane Niatum (New York: Harper and
Row, 1988): xix.
26. Niatum, “Drawings of the Song Animals,” in Niatum, 116.
27. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, “Journeys,” in Niatum, 41.
28. Wendy Rose, “Loo-wit,” in Niatum, 234.
29. Carter Revard, “Driving in Oklahoma,” in Niatum, 43.
30. Roberta Hill Whiteman, “The White Land,” in Niatum, 219.
31. Simon J. Ortiz, “Bend in the River,” in Niatum, 143.
32. Gogisgi/Carol Arnett, “Early Song,” in Harris and Aguero, 110.
33. Lance Henson, “sketches near youngstown, ohio,” in Harris and Aguero, 120.
34, Paula Gunn Allen, “Molly Brant, Iroquois Matron, Speaks,” in Harris and
Aguero, 7.
35. Ray A. Young Bear, “Our Bird Aegis,” in Rich, 239.
36. Heyen, “The Steadying,” in Rich, 100.
37. Rich, 16.
262 ce Bernard W. Quetchenbach

38. Joyce Carol Oates, “Against Nature,” in On Nature: Nature, Landscape, and Nat-
ural History, ed. by Daniel Halpern (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987), 236.
39. Lydia Millet, reviews of The Seacoast Reader, ed John A. Murray; The River
Reader, ed. Murray; American Nature Writing 1999, ed. Murray; At Home on the Earth,
ed. David Landis Barnhill, all in Amicus Journal (summer 2000): 39.
40. Jimmy Santiago Baca, Immigrants in Our Own Land (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1979), 1.
41. Jimmy Santiago Baca, Black Mesa Poems (New York: New Directions, 1986), 19, 34.
42. Ibid., 60.
Contributors

J. Scott Bryson is assistant professor of English at Mount St. Mary’s College in

Los Angeles. He is coeditor (with Roger Thompson) of two Dictionary of Lit-
erary Biography volumes on nature writing. His other publications include
work on Joy Harjo, Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Pynchon, and on teaching
composition. He is currently completing a second book manuscript, an exam-
ination of the ecopoetry of Wendell Berry, Joy Harjo, Mary Oliver, and W. S.
Merwin.

Laird Christensen is a ranger, teacher, writer, and native Cascadian, and he has
published his poems and essays in a variety of journals, including Wild Earth,
Northwest Review, Renascence, Earth First! Journal, and Studies in American In-
dian Literature. He is currently assistant professor of English literature at
Green Mountain College, an environmental liberal arts college in western Ver-
mont, where he teaches creative writing, American literature, environmental
writing, and Native American literatures.

Beverly Curran teaches in the Department of Creativity and Culture (Multi-

cultural Studies) of Aichi Shukutoku University in Nagoya, Japan. She is cur-
rently researching the media translation of Canadian poetry into radio plays.
Her Japanese translation of Nicole Brossard’s Journal intime has just been
published.

John Elder is Stewart Professor of English and Environmental Studies at Mid-

dlebury College, Vermont. He has written widely, including Imagining the
Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature, Reading the Mountains of Home, and
Following the Brush: An American Encounter with Classical Japanese Culture.
He is also the coeditor of The Norton Book of Nature Writing (with Robert
Finch), Spirit and Nature: Why the Environment Is a Religious Issue (with
Steven Rockefeller), and The Family of Earth and Sky: Indigenous Tales of Na-
ture from around the World (with Hertha Wong), as well as executive editor for
American Nature Writing.

Deborah Fleming is associate professor of English at Ashland University,

where she teaches modern poetry and environmental studies. She is the

263
264 Ce Contributors

author of “A man who does not exist”: The Irish Peasant in W. B. Yeats and J. M.
Synge and articles on Yeats, Eamon Grennan, and Robinson Jeffers. Her poetry
has appeared in such journals as Hiram Poetry Review, ISLE, Organization and
Environment, and Cottonwood.

Terry Gifford is reader in literature and environment at the University of

Leeds and author of Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry
(1995) and Pastoral (1999). His fifth collection of poetry was Whale Watching
with a Boy and a Goat (1998), and he has also published a collection of rock-
climbing poetry, The Rope (1996). Gifford has edited the complete works of
John Muir in two volumes: John Muir: The Eight Wilderness-Discovery Books
(1992) and John Muir: His Life and Letters and Other Writings (1996).

David Gilcrest teaches in the English department at Carroll College in Wauke-

sha, Wisconsin. He is the author of Greening the Lyre: Environmental Poetics
and Ethics.

Maggie Gordon is postdoctoral fellow in English at the University of Missis-

sippi, where she offers literature and gender studies seminars based on her dis-
sertation, “Reconceiving the Sacred: Louise GlYck and Postmodern Spiritual-
ity.” She received her Ph.D. from the University of Mississippi in 2000 and has
published articles on gender and mythology in twentieth-century American
literature and culture in journals including Literature/Film Quarterly and
Clues: A Journal of Detection.

Emily Hegarty received her Ph.D. in American literature from the CUNY
Graduate Center and currently teaches at Nassau Community College. She is
working on a book-length study of nationalism and ethnicity in American
ecopoetry.

Richard Hunt received his Ph.D. from the University of Nevada, Reno, in the
Literature and Environment program, in May 2000. He now teaches in both
the English and the music departments at Mesabi Range College in Virginia,
Minnesota. His primary research interests explore the connections and inter-
actions between science and faith as expressed through American nature
writing.

Roy Osamu Kamada is a Ph.D. candidate in the English department at the

University of California, Davis. His work has appeared in The Diasporic Imag-
 Contributors Ce 265

ination: Identifying Asian-American Representations in America and will ap-

pear in the forthcoming Asian-American Poets. He is currently completing
work on his dissertation, “Postcolonial Romanticisms: Landscape and the Pos-
sibilities of Inheritance.”

Mark C. Long is assistant professor of English and American studies at Keene

State College, where he teaches courses in American literature and culture,
with an emphasis in poetry and poetics, intellectual history and critical the-
ory, literature-and-environment studies, and expository writing. He has pub-
lished essays on writing program administration, theories of reading in the
study of American literature, ecocomposition, the early writing of William
Carlos Williams, and the poetics of Denise Levertov.

Bernard Quetchenbach is assistant professor of English at Florida Southern

College. He is the author of Back from the Far Field: American Nature Poetry in
the Late Twentieth Century (2000). He has published articles on American po-
etry and on literature and the environment in journals such as New Laurel Re-
view and Essays in Arts and Sciences, and in Thoreau’s Sense of Place: Essays in
American Environmental Writing. His poems have appeared in numerous lit-
erary magazines. From 1995-1999 he edited The River Review/La Revue riv-
iére, a multidisciplinary international annual.

Leonard M. Scigaj is professor of English at Virginia Tech, where he has taught

twentieth-century literature courses since 1978. He has authored two critical
studies and edited a collection of essays on Ted Hughes. He has also published
numerous articles on such poets as Sylvia Plath, A. R. Ammons, and Gary Sny-
der; on science fiction authors such as Frank Herbert and Ray Bradbury; and
on environmental poetry theory. His most recent book, Sustainable Poetry:
Four American Ecopoets [Ammons, Berry, Merwin, and Snyder], was pub-
lished in 1999.

Roger Thompson is assistant. professor of English at Virginia Military Insti-

tute, where he teaches courses in American literature, rhetoric, and environ-
mental literature. He is coeditor (with Scott Bryson) of two Dictionary of Lit-
erary Biography volumes on nature writing. His research is primarily in
nineteenth-century American literature and rhetorical theory, and he has
published articles in Rhetoric Review and in a collection of essays on kairos
edited by Philip Sipiora and James Baumlin. His current work includes an
investigation of nineteenth-century American literacy reform and _ its
266 Ce, Contributors

intersection with gender roles, an exploration of transatlantic rhetorical

theory, and an examination of the rhetoric of John McPhee.

Jeffrey Thomson’s collection of poetry, The Halo Brace, was published in 2000.
He has also published poetry and nonfiction in Quarterly West, Puerto del Sol,
Gulf Coast, and Willow Springs. He directs the creative writing program in en-
vironmental nonfiction at Chatham College in Pittsburgh.

Gyorgyi Voros, a poet, essayist, and scholar, teaches English at Virginia Tech.
She is the author of Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the Poetry of Wallace
Stevens (1997). Her current book project explores how metaphors for the
human-nature relationship in contemporary literature and the visual arts
have been altered by land transformation, ecological consciousness, and the
environmental movement. She lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Zhou Xiaojing teaches Asian American literature and Asian American studies
at the Sate University of New York, Buffalo. She is the author of Elizabeth
Bishop: Rebel “in Shades and Shadows” (1999). Her publications include nu-
merous articles on Asian American poets. Currently she is coediting a critical
anthology on Asian American literature and is working on a book-length
study on Asian American poetry.
Index

Abbey, Edward, 6 Bate, Jonathan: The Song of the Earth, 2;

Adams, Carol J., 222, 225 Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the
Aguero, Kathleen, 246 Environmental Tradition, 12n1, 70n3, 79
Albatross, 252 Berleant, Arnold, 188
Alford, Jean, 137 Berry, Patricia, 97
Alighieri, Dante, 117—8, 123; Divine Berry, Wendell, x, 35, 117-34, 207, 250,
Comedy, 117-18 252-53, 258; A Timbered Choir,
Allan, Gilbert, 39 117-34; The Gift of Good Land, 118;
Allen, Paula Gunn, 171, 172n2, 248, 256 Sabbaths, 119; Sabbaths: 1987-1990,
Almon, Bert, 79 119; Openings, 122
Altieri, Charles, 39 Bible, 117-34
Amicus Journal, 252, 254, 258 Bird, Gloria, 258
Ammons, A. R., x—xi, 88—100; Glare, Bishop, Elizabeth, ix, 153-54
92-93, 96-97; Garbage, 97 Black Arts Movement, 248
Anderson, Maggie, 250 Black Elk, 6
anti-pastoral poetry, 77—78 Blake, William, 78, 81, 84
Appalachia Journal, 252 Bloom, Harold, 253
Arnold, Matthew, 81 Blue Cloud, Peter, 6 :
Atwood, Margaret, x, 232-44; Morning in Bly, Robert, 2, 245-46, 247; News of the
the Burning House, 232, 241; Surfacing, Universe: Poems of a Twofold Conscious-
232; The Circle Game, 233; The Animals ness, 12n2, 70n3, 257
in That Country, 234; The Journals of Bonds, Diane, 140
Susanna Moodie, 235; Procedures for Bowering, George, 195
Underground, 236; Power Politics, 237; Bradstreet, Anne, 3
You Are Happy, 238; Two-Headed Brooks, Charles Timothy, 32
Poems, 239; True Stories, 240; Interlu- Brooks, Gwendolyn, 246
nar, 241 Brown, George Mackay: Fishermen with
Augustine, 25, 37n2, 117 Ploughs, 77
Bryson, i Scott, 12n3
Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 247, 259; Black Buber, Martin, 139-40, 227
Mesa Poems, 259 Buell, Lawrence, 5, 77, 78
Baldwin, James, 68 Burris, Sidney, 155
Barnes, Jim, 163 Butler, Judith: Gender Trouble, 219n13
Barrell, John, 217n4 Byers, Thomas B., 107, 111-12
Basho, x, 24 Byron, Lord (George Gordon): Don Juan,
Bass, Rick: Fiber, 78 VI

267
268 ce, Index

Callicot, J. Baird, 136 avoidance of “black concerns,” 208

Campbell, SueEllen, 150n1 ecofeminism, 78, 222-31, 252; history
Capra, Fritjof, 189 and characteristics of, 222
Carr, Brenda, 196 ecology, ix, 89, 135-36, 149-50, 167,
Carson, Anne, 88, 90, 96 180-8, 199-200, 222
Carson, Rachel, 3 ecopoetry, x, 18-9, 79, 101, 109-10, 162,
Cheng, Anne, 211 67, 180
180, 184, 222. 232-33, 245, 248,
Chin, Marilyn, 251 256-58; definition and history of, 2-7,
Christiansen, Laird, 12n3, 27n6, 70n3 18-20; and rhetoric, 29-38; and
Churchill, Ward, 173n15 language, 58—74; and the “ecological
Clare, John, 217 Indian,” 169; and physical sciences,
Codrescu, Andrei, 246—47 179-94; and postcolonial criticism,
Coetzee, J. M., 208 207-20
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor,.40.... Elder, John, 59, 66, 146; Imagining the
Collier, Mary: “The Woman’s Labour, 77 Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature,
Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth, 254 1, 59, 70n3, 70n4
Crabbe, George: The Village, 77 elegy, contemporary, 153-61
Creeley, Robert, 195 Eliot, T. S., 64, 254
Cummings, E. E., 68 Elton, Charles, 135
current environmental identity poetry, Emerson, Ralph Waldo, ix, 6, 30-32, 155
245-62 Endrezze, Anita, 168
England, Charles R., 173n2
Daniel, John: Wild Song: Poems of the Erdrich, Louise, 255
Natural World, 12n2, 70n3 Evernden, Neil, 27n6
Davey, Frank, 195
Davis, Cheri, 110 Fiumara, Gemma Corradi: The Other
Davison, Peter, 111 Side of Language, 199-200
d’Eaubonne, Francoise, 222 Foster, John Wilson, 233
de Chardin, Teilhard, 117 Fox, Matthew, 117, 118, 120, 124; The
Diggory, Terence, 45, 46 Coming of the Cosmic Christ, 117, 118
Dillard, Annie, 207, 233 Fox, Warwick, 242
Dove, Rita, 246 Frazier, Jane, 104
Duck, Stephen: The Thresher’s Labour, 77 Freud, Sigmund, 211
Dun, Tan, 193n27 Frost, Robert, ix, 2, 36, 89
Dunn, Sara: Beneath the Wide Wide
Heaven: Poetry of the Environment from Gale, Vi, 250
Antiquity to the Present (with Alan Gelpi, Albert, 6
Scholefield), 12n2, 70n3, 257 genocide, Native American, 162-75
Georgian Poetry, 77
Eckhart, Meister, 118, 123, Meditations, Gifford, Terry: Green Voices: Understand-
118 ing Contemporary Nature Poetry, 1, 5,
ecocriticism, 1, 59-60, 208; and 70n3, 70n4
 Index Ce 269

Gilbert, Roger, 89 Howells, Coral Ann, 233

Gilcrest, David, 12n3, 70n3 Huggan, Graham, 218-19n11
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 230n7 Hughes, Ted, 77, 79, 81; Moortown Diary,
Ginsberg, Allen, 245-46 WH.
Gliick, Louise, x, 221-31; Firstborn, 222, Hugo, Richard, 254
223, 228; The House on Marshland,
223; Descending Figure, 223; The Tri- Iverem, Esther, 251
umph of Achilles, 223; The Wild Iris,
223, 226, 228; Vita Nova, 223, 226; Jeffers, Robinson, ix, 2, 6, 39-57, 89
Ararat, 226; Meadowlands, 226, 228 Jefferson, Thomas, 258
Gogisgi/Carol Arnett, 255 Jonas, Hans, 99
Grabes, Herbert, 91 Jost, Walter, 36—37
Green Fuse, 252
Griffin, Susan, 258; Woman and Nature: Kaufman, Bob: Solitudes Crowded with
The Roaring Inside Her, 251-52 Loneliness, 250
Grontkowski, Christine B., 99 Kavanagh, Patrick: The Great Hunger, 77
Keller, Evelyn Fox, 99
Hale, Dorothy, 213 Kenyon, Jane, 155-57, 160
Han-shan, 20-21 King, Ynestra, 222—23, 224
Harjo, Joy, 6, 167, 169 Kinnell, Galway, 11, 246
Harper’s Anthology of Twentieth Century Klee, Paul: Notebooks, 132
Native American Poetry, 254 Kolodny, Annette: The Lay of the Land:
Harries-Jones, Peter, 188 Fantasy and Experience of the American
Harris, Marie, 246 Frontiers, 1630-1860, 151n29
Hass, Robert, 221—22, 229; Field Guide, Kumar, Sehdev, 117
222; Sun under Wood, 222
Hatt, Michael, 168 LaDuke, Winona, 173n15
Hawking, Stephen, 192n2 Langbaum, Robert, 2
Head, Dominic, 208 l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poets, 247,
Heath Anthology of American Literature, Lazer, Hank,34 eos
253 Lee, Li-young, 249, 255

Hemingway, EEnest,, 228.0 Lehman, David, 246

Hensen, Lance, Dah) Leopold, Aldo, x, 72, 241-42
Heyen, William: Pterodactyl Rose, 252, Levertov, Denise, 3, 67
256 Lickbarrow, Isabella: Poetical Effusions, 77
Hildegard of Bingen: Illuminations, 117, literary criticism, 208, 210; as an ecosys-
123 tem, xxi
Hogan, Linda, 162—75; Mean Spirit, 164; Lopez, Barry: Arctic Dreams, 207
Power, 169 Lowell, Robert, 245
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 80 Lyon, Thomas: This Incomperable Lande,
Howard, Ben, 139 259
Howard, Richard, 111
270 Ce, Index

Maclean, Sorley, 82 Naess, Arne, 188-89

Macy, Joanna, 136 Native American Renaissance, 253-54
Major, Clarence: The Garden Thrives, Niatum, Duane, 254
250-51 Nielsen, Dorothy, 167
Makdisi, Saree: Romantic Imperialism: Nordstrém, Lars, 250
Universal Empire and the Culture of
Modernity, 219n11 Oates,
Joyce Carol, 258
Marlatt, Daphne, x, 195-206; Vancouver Oliver, Mary, x, 135-52, 157-61, 169, 250;
Poems, 195-6; Stevetson, 196-206; Ana Twelve Moons, 137, 143; House of Light,
Historic, 197; Touch to My Tongue, 201; 138, 141, 144, 147; Winter Hours, 139;
Salvage, 202 New and Selected Poems, 145; American
Marx, Leo, 77 Primitive, 147, 157
Matthews, Freya, 27n6 Olson, Charles, 60, 195; Maximus Poems,
McCombs, Judith, 233 196
McNew, Janet, 142, 144 Ong, Walter J.: Interfaces of the Word:
Mechtild of Magdeburg, 118, 124; Medi- Studies in the Evolution of Conscious-
tations, 118 ness and Culture, 99
Merchant, Carolyn, 88 Orion, 252
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: The Prose of the Ortiz, Simon, 168, 255
World, 121, 128-9; The Visible and the
Invisible, 122, 125 Pack, Robert: Poems for a Small Planet:
Merrill, Christopher: The Forgotten Lan- Contemporary American Nature Poetry
guage: Contemporary Poets and Nature, (with Jay Parini), 12n2, 70n3
12n2
papentecieree
®& Merwin, W. S., x, 3-5, 29, 34-36, 101-16, Parini, Jay: Poems for a Small Planet:
247, 250; Drunk in the Furnace, 102; Contemporary American Nature Poetry
Rain in the Trees, 102; The River Sound, (with Robert Pack), 12n2, 70n3
102-3, 108; The Vixen, 108; Writings to pastoral poetry, 77—78, 187, 250
an Unfinished Accompaniment, 111; Pelikan, Jaroslav, 117
The Moving Target, 111, 112 Pennybacker, Mindy, 173n15
Millet, Lydia, 258 Perloff, Marjorie, 89
Milosz, Czeslaw, 229 Petroglyph, 252
Milton, John, 153 Phillips, Dana, 60
Minden, Robert, 197—98 Plath, Sylvia, 257
Missouri Review, The, 249 Plato, 20-25, 37n2
Mitchell, W. J. T., 43-44 Poems for a Small Planet, 257
Moore, Lawrence D., 250-51 Pope, Alexander: Windsor Forest, 77
“ Moore, Marianne, ix, 2, 3 post-pastoral poetry, 77-87; defined, 79
Muir, John, 78 Poulin, A., Jr.: Contemporary American
Murphy, Patrick, 78 Poetry, 245
 Index Ces Pai

Quetchenbach, Bernard W.: Back from Slaymaker, William, 208

the Far Field: American Nature Poets in Snyder, Gary, x, 3, 7, 79-87, 137, 167,
the Late Twentieth Century, 2, 70n3 174n31, 249, 250, 252-53, 258; Turtle
Island, 36, 174n31; Myths and Texts, 78;
Raglon, Rebecca, 241 No Nature, 83, 250
Ramazani, Jahan: The Poetry of Spretnak, Charlene, 225, 226-27
Mourning, 154 Ssu-K’ung T’u, 21-22
Revard, Carter, 254—55 St. Francis of Assisi, 117, 123
Rich, Adrienne, 67-68, 165, 246, 248, St. John, Primus, 250
249, 256 Stafford, William, 171, 250
Roethke, Theodore, 11 Stevens, Wallace, ix, 2, 3, 40, 89
Rogers, Pattiann, 11, 256 Suzuki, D. T., 19
Ronald, Ann: The Sierra Club Trailside Swann, Brian, 254
Reader, 259 Sydney, Sir Phillip: Arcadia, 77
Roosevelt, Theodore, 258 Sze, Arthur, x, 179-94; The Redshifting
Rorty, Richard: Philosophy and the Mirror Web, 179; Archipelago, 180-85; Dazzled
of Nature, 91 186
Rose, Wendy, 254
Ross, Gary, 233 Theocritus: Idylls, 77
Rotella, Guy: Reading & Writing Nature: Thieme, John: Derek Walcott, 218
The Poetry of Robert Frost, Wallace Thoreau, Henry David, 77, 89
Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Todd, Judith, 173n15
Bishop, 12n1, 70n3 transcendentalists, 30-34, 88
Rueckert, William, 36 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 104-5; Space and Place: The
Perspective of Experience, 101-2:
Sacks, Peter: The English Elegy, 153 Turner, Jack, 27n6
Scholefield, Alan: Beneath the Wide Wide
Heaven: Poetry of the Environment from von Halberg, Robert, 69
Antiquity to the Present (with Sara Voros, Gyorgyi, 99; Notations of the Wild:
Dunn), 12n2, 70n3, 257 Ecology in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens,
Schwartz, Judith, 187 1, 70n3, 70n4
Scigaj, Leonard M., 5, 66, 78, 95, 113,
116n37; Sustainable Poetry: Four Walcott, Derek, x, 207-20; The Schooner
Ecopoets, 2, 18—9, 59, 180, 189 Flight, 209; Omeros, 218n8; The
Scott, Winfield Townley, 45 Odyssey, 218n8
Seibles, Timothy, 250 Walker, David, 60
Sessions, George, 27n6 Wallace, Robert, 253
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 88-89 Weinberger, Eliot, 247
Shelton, Richard, 250, 259 Weir, Lorraine, 201
Silko, Leslie Marmon, 11, 167 White, Lynn, Jr., 118, 175
Maile ce Index

White, Nicholas P., 27n11 Wright, Charles, x, 17

Whiteman, Roberta Hill, 255 Wright, James, 246
Whitman, Walt, 3—5, 30, 147, 153, 168,
252.5 Yeats, W. B., ix, 39—57, 254
Williams, Raymond: The Country and the Young, Robert, 209-10
City, 43 Young Bear, Ray A., 256
Williams, Terry Tempest, 207 Yuasa, Nobuyuki, 24
Williams, William Carlos, ix, 2, 40,
58-74, 195; In the American Grain, Zaller, Robert, 39
61-62; Paterson, 62-65, 196
Wordsworth, William, ix, 82, 148, 208,
217n4
 The essays are uniformly shouighttul perceptive, and readable...
engage the current scholarship gracefully, without pretense or peda
Each chapter is stuffed with insights." —John Tailmadge,The, Union |

The burgeoning field of ecocriticism is begin-

ning to address the work of ecopoets such
as Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, W. S. Merwin,
and Wendell Berry, among others, whose |
poems increasingly deal with environmental
andecological issues. Ecopoetry: A Critical
Introduction assembles previously unpublish
contributions from many of the most import
scholars in the field as they discuss the
historical and crosscultural roots of
-ecopoetry, while expanding the boundaries _
to include such themes as genocide and extin
tion, the lesbian body, and postcolonialism.
This volume gathers these necessary voices in
the emerging conversation regarding poetry'
place in the environmental. debate.

a Scalt Bryson'tis assistant professor in the )

English department at Mount St. Mary's —_
Los Angeles. He lives in Pasadena.

Cover art by 5
Kate Starling (ee i
Crab Apples, oil ‘ :

Literary Criticism Nature and Environment

fee $19.95 .

_ The University of Utah Press C

0-87480- ™ 8 oo