From: fi@grebyn.com (Fiona Webster)
Subject: Re: Mastodon Poetry
Summary: Loren Eiseley, plus an argument for including mammoths
Organization: Grebyn Timesharing
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1993 22:07:25 GMT

Jim Kalb writes:
>It's good to see an addition to the genre of mastodon poetry.  The only
>other example I know of is a parody of _The Waste Land_:
>
>"You have no guide nor clue,
>For you know only puce snakes and violet mastodons,
>Where the brain beats, and a selzer is no anwer, a vomit no relief . . ."
>
>I seem to remember a few paleolithic and earlier references in Kipling
>("When the Cambrian measures were forming, we were promised perpetual
>peace . . ."), but I don't think he specifically mentions mastodons.
>Can anyone suggest any other examples?

Wow!  Best idea for a thread I've heard in '93 so far.  I'll start
digging through my poetry books looking for obscure mastodon poetry,
but I know right off the bat there are some in Loren Eiseley's _Inno-
cent_Assassins_.  In "Why Did They Go?" he writes:

	Mammoth, mastodon, beyond the knives of even such as these,
		they also ebbed away as the ice ebbed,
	as the first wolves grew scarcer, and as man, naked, shook
	his first flint-headed spear that had at last outsprung
	the giant cats.  Why did they go, through eras, centuries,
		the strong, the strongest?

"Had at last outsprung?"  Well, the point is, he mentions the M-word. 

		*	*	*	*	*

Now it's going to come up sooner or later anyway, so we might as
well decide from the start: will we allow poems containing references
to either of the two types of extinct woolly pachyderms?  Quick
refresher here for those who haven't been fifth-graders in a while:

	Mastodon --> 7 to 9.5 feet high; lived in North America;
                     long curving (but not curled) tusks; males
		     also had 2 short lower tusks (4 in all);
		     Miocene thru Pleistocene and into fairly recent
		     times; genus _Mammut_; tho't to be ancestors
		     of modern elephant

	Mammoth -->  9 feet at the shoulder with huge domed head
		     and long *curling* tusks up to 16 ft. long;
	             in Pleistocene (overlapping in time with masto-
		     don); genus _Mammuthus_; I don't know their
		     range, but first specimens found in Siberia;
		     *not* related to modern elephant

Of course the paleopachydermatologists <sic> get into things like ridged
molars for telling one genus from another, but this is how I'd make the
call: these are both huge extinct woolly elephants with impressive tusks,
and they overlapped in time; so even though they're considered very
different by biologists (different *genera*, no less), they're gonna
seem more or less the same to your average poet.  'Know what I mean?

		*	*	*	*	*

So, if we allow both mammoths and mastodons, then I could quote a lot
more (oh no!) from Eiseley's book, such as "The Green Lion"--

	This morning, early, I saw the green lion and I knew the secret.
				Listen, this is man's gift,
				The symbol before writing.
	You live all your life in snowstorms and brief tundra summers,
						             live
	with mammoth, reindeer, musk-ox, and the after-image stays
			that is the most of man, that is the secret.

--and also "Watch the Uneasy Landlords":

				The night blows on my hand
			        but will not tell
	even the method by which the world was changed
	and elephants in fur once walked, and shaggy beasts
	outnumbered my own kind.

Tricky, eh?  "Elephants in fur once walked" has the M-word, without
invoking the M-word _per_se_.

And that's only going halfway through the book.  But Eiseley's a
piece of cake: he's *obviously* going to have mastodons (and mammoths)
on the brain.  But let's go further afield now.  Robert Penn Warren?
Possible.  John Ashbery?  Not so sure--but it seems like everything
and the kitchen sink makes it into Ashbery sooner or later.  Ditto
with James Merrill.  Theodore Roethke's possible: he likes old animals.


				--well anyway,

				 happy mastodon/mammoth poetry hunting,

						Fiona
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