## John Wieners “Private Estate”

There exists a language of flowers, also known as “floriography.” It is a means of cryptological communication through the use or arrangement of flowers, probably systematized in 18th-century Turkey. If you hand a sprig of forget-me-not to someone, the name of the flower speaks for itself/ is self-explanatory. Nature is then appropriated as a sign. (This is by no means a western thing. Native-Americans would use pointer-trees to mark a trail.) Obviously, to the initiate, the well-identified symbolism of floriography leaves little room for ambiguity, and ambiguity is the soil of poetry. Is the present poem an instance of floriography? Is any nature left in it?

The poem’s rhyming title introduces the idea of a secret garden the reader is about to enter: he/she will be made privy to something undivulged before. This hinted-at secrecy matches the idea of cryptological communication floriography is inseparable from. But floriography is about hidden but unambiguous messages. The higgledy-piggledy enumeration of flowers in the first two stanzas immediately rules out the assumption that the author has conformed to the coded language of floriography: there are too many flowers there for them to be regarded as discreet signifiers. No fewer than fifteen flowers and plants are listed in the first three stanzas. All of them are “summer/flowers” (4-5). The date of writing given at the end of the poem, twenty-first of June, the exact start of summer, the solstice, confirms the poem’s seasonal specificity/ relevance to the author.

Until we get to the end of stanza three, all the extra information we have about these flowers is that they belong in the poetic persona’s garden of memory (1.4): they all “grow in [his] mind” (12).

It is the paronomasia joining “clover” and “lover” that, two-thirds into the poem, gives away the key to the list that precedes. The poem is addressed to a former lover, begging him to return, and all the flowers are “memory’s perennial[s]. The lover is now in prison and enduring some suffering, mostly emotional, it seems: his pain is said to be greater than the one inflicted by “lover’s arms or flower charming,” which sounds like troubadour language, the medieval poetic language of courtly love in which the pain of separation is a central topic. The first twenty lines of the poem come in one breath: only commas, no periods, all lines carry over into the next one, they’re all run-on lines; likewise, all stanzas run on into the next one. Only by line twenty does the speaker catch his breath. He has come to some resolve and determined that his lover’s pain will end, must end, is bound to come to an end. That pain cannot possibly be “more lasting” than love, painful as love may be. As if he intended his writing to be performative, that is to say make what it says happen, the speaker ends his long-winded sentence abruptly, to match his words about the necessary end to his lover’s pain. “Not more lasting” is followed by a period. But we’re not done with flowers.

The speaker’s decision itself is followed by a definitive-sounding statement about the power of a “wild tulip” to “outlast the prison wall/ no matter what grows within.” (21-22) That the wild tulip here stands for love is obvious enough. The sudden focus on a specific flower invites one to think that this one is meant to be symbolic: indeed, all language-of-flowers encyclopedia entries on the tulip concur: “The most known meaning of tulips is perfect and deep love.”<fnref n="20" />

What may grow within the prison, understand “other emotional involvements,” cannot destroy this tulip of a love. The positive experience of “fern path” (all fern symbolism is positive, associating the plant with eternal youth, new beginnings, sincerity) will survive all “stern hard-faced officers” and return.

<footnote n="20">²⁰ https://www.bloomandwild.com/the-meaning-and-symbolism-of-tulip-flowers</footnote>
At the end of the day, this poem sounds like a contemporary revisiting of the language-of-flowers tradition: at first, it seems to dismiss it as restrictive, unable to take or express the onrush of emotion. Once that onrush has been brought under control, the power of flower-language may return. Is nature lost sight of in this poem? Surely, the question is partly irrelevant but I would argue that the speaker's gushing catalog of summer flowers, "simple blossoms" (5) for the most part, and the poem's seasonal specificity, sound rather environmentally-friendly.
## Walt Whitman "The Voice of the Rain"

To continue with the topic of the conversation with nature, here we are with Whitman's poetic persona asking the rain a question. The rest of the poem is comprised of the rain's answer, to which the poet tags on an aside in the form of an extended simile comparing poetry to rain.

The poet uses archaic language to ask his question: “And who art thou?” Like the poet, the rain answers in archaic language, uses poetic diction, that is, *if* we are to trust the poet’s translation, since it is a translation: fronting an adjective (1.4), giving preference to Latinate (“descend,” “lave,” “atomies,”) or poetic words (“whence,” “heaven”). The poem provides a perfect example of pathetic fallacy. Do all these unnatural barriers not dry all rain out of the poem? Is anything of the rain left in it, aside from the marvelous initial reference to “the soft-falling shower,” which makes you look outside the window and check?

Paradoxically, the poet's acknowledgement that this is only a translation takes away some artificiality from the poem, or at least makes it less objectionable. Now what else can the ecologically-minded contemporary reader tease out of this poem? What makes it sound relevant to our ears is the Earth consciousness that it displays, the awareness that drouths and aridity are global concerns, that famine is always possible, that life on Earth depends on the eternal return of natural cycles. Those have become newsworthy items.

But paradoxically once again, what makes Whitman's poem memorable, then usable if not useful, is that it is not just about the rain and that the rain becomes a metaphor for poetry. Poetry, the poem argues, is just as essential to Earth, understand “earthlings,” as rain is. It too “rise[s] impalpable,” it too can “lave the drouths,” spiritual ones at least; it constantly finds its source “out of the land” and feeds itself, it too has this universal power to germinate seeds. So, if rain is the “Poem of Earth,” the poem too is the Rain for Earth. The idea of the rain as poem works rather well imaginatively. You can visualize it as a beneficent drizzle, the “soft-falling shower” referred to in 1.1. Here too, it being the source and fruit of a never-ending process is materialized by the absence of strong punctuation marks between 1.1 and 1.10. Only in the final two lines between brackets does the metaphor become explicit. In order to soften the jump to a more explanatory/expository discourse, the poet refers to poetry as “song” (11), describing its life cycle as an eternal loving return, expected or unexpected, after long wandering. What Whitman may have had in mind when writing these lines, at this late period of his life (1885), is the always puzzling but eternal return of inspiration, or the worldwide destiny of his own *Leaves of Grass*. But rain as the “Poem of Earth” is an image that sticks in the mind: it stays with you.
## Session 11: Environmental epic (1)

### Eleni Sikelianos: from *The California Poem*

*The California Poem* matches several defining criteria of the epic:

It is a long poem; it takes part in defining or redefining the identity of a place and of its inhabitants (as *Leaves of Grass* did for the USA, as *The Aeneid* did for the Romans, as the *Iliad* and the *Odyssey* did for Ancient Greece, as Dante’s *Divine Comedy* did for Italy; it includes history, looks back to origins, which often involve war; it feels like a sum (brings together many different areas of knowledge) and includes numerous lists (catalogs); it acknowledges and responds to the epic tradition and so forth.

But it does not revolve around a human hero or heroine. Here the hero/heroine is an aggregate, a community, a place, Southern California, with a strong focus on the non-human. To that extent, *The California Poem* can be labelled an environmental epic.

The title is a strong statement by itself: it suggests that the poem and California are one. Like Niedecker’s “Paean to Place,” *The California Poem* is an environment.

It is inscribed in longhand to “all the echinoderms and dinoflagellates”
Dinoflagellates are microscopic, unicellular marine organisms, commonly regarded as algae and forming one of the chief constituents of plankton. Classified as protists, i. e. organisms that are not fungi, plants, or animals.

Echinoderms: a category of organisms (phylum) which includes such radially symmetrical marine invertebrates as starfishes, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers. An eloquent example of celebrating the unsung!

The distich from p.9 is an example of the most recurring figure of speech in *The California Poem*: paronomasia, i.e. word play, which in *The California Poem* takes the form of showing how by changing a single letter in a word, that word becomes another word the meaning of which may be related to that of the first word. I see that widespread use of paronomasia by Sikelianos as a nod to Lucretius and his epic poem, with its striking didactic passages explaining the atomic theory by comparing atoms to letters of the alphabet. The triple paronomasia (your p. 96) linking “anther” (the pollen-bearing part of a stamen), “anthem” and “atom” may bear out this guess about a nod to Lucretius. (In the brief extract from p.140, the poet clearly reasserts her Lucretian wish to explore nature down to its most basic component, i. e. matter.)

I was referring to *The California Poem* as the poem of a community: throughout the poem, there are lists such as the one found on p.27, cataloging the members of a biotic community. A *biotic community*, also known as a biota or 'biocoenosis', is the group of organisms that live together and interact with each other within an environment.<fnref n="21" />

The environmentalist gesture consists in inventorying what may be endangered **milieux** and, when so doing, in always insisting on using the accurate word to refer to a species. Adapting to *The California Poem* what Claude Leroy writes in his preface to F.-J. Temple's *La Chasse Infinie et autres poèmes*, it can be said that the accuracy of the vocabulary used is

<footnote n="21">²¹ https://biologydictionary.net/community/</footnote>
the poet’s way to do justice to nature’s diversity. What does a butterfly mean? Nothing, unless
it is referred to as “Sleepy Orange, Alfalfa, Cloudless Sulphur, Cabbage White// California
Dogface” (45)? And a bird means nothing either, compared with “Sandpipe, Wandering
Tattler, Heermann’s & Western Gull” (27). Same with tree or plant compared with “Chamise,
Scrub Oak, Hard Tack, wild lilac, Bear Brush & Quinine, manzanita, Sugarbush”. (155) It is
the world’s abundance that Sikelianos celebrates, after Whitman, Snyder, and others.<fnref n="22" /> She
finds those great linguistic surveyors’ endless lists mesmerizing: their inventorying/ itemized
reports are a manner of replay of the world’s creation. Summoning things by their proper
name is not just about conserving them: it amounts to reanimating them.” (18-19)

Epics tell stories of foundation (as that of Rome in Virgil's *Aeneid*). Sikelianos does the same in the passage taken from p. 38-39.

She imagines America before it was America: when the geology of the land was still not
stabilized, when the first animals came out of the sea, when land became populated, when,
much later, the taming of animals began (“Soon cattle & their young corresponded/ to the
affections of the natural mind”) as Neolithic farmers started raising cattle. Her tale of origins
ventures into the field of paleo-linguistics as she forms hypotheses about the beginnings of
language as having largely been the product of humans’ environment.

(Note that, as in T.S. Eliot's *The Waste Land*, the famous modernist poem, *The California Poem* includes endnotes in the form of poetic extensions (like here) or documentary addenda.)

More guessing is offered, possibly (I’m also guessing here) about how the idea of
correspondence was born from observing the symmetrical morphology of birds (bottom of
your p.90 and top of your p.91): the correspondence/ dialectical relation between language
and the world in particular.

The world exists but we also “create/ the worlds/ by naming.”

The war waged by Sikelianos is not a military war; but it is a war all the same, waged for
the defense of the Earth, of endangered species, against “the tyranny/ of money” (43). She is
drawing on the epic intertext here, invoking and misquoting Whitman: “occasion to/sing war
& perfect soldiers” is a montage of phrases from “As I Ponder’d in Silence.” After Whitman
comes Virgil<fnref n="23" />: the poet blends a proto-environmentalist quotation from Virgil with the
inventory of a second biotic community (middle of your p.91).

*The California Poem* includes excursions elsewhere than in California: but even in New
York, in the wintertime, the attention of the poetic persona, which in the books identifies
herself as Eleni, is arrested at the sight of a flight of blackbirds, whose curves in space against
the sky she literally strives to read and wishes she could transfer onto the space: note the
extended metaphor, revisiting the concept of nature as a message to be deciphered.

The conservation of wetlands is a frequent cause for environmentalists: the third biotic
community inventoried by the poet is a “Freshwater Marsh.” Thickening even more the epic
intertext, Dante is then summoned into the poem (your p. 92). He no longer finds himself in a
*selva oscura* but is shown confronted with an arid and hostile Californian environment,
including the notorious “tule fog,” “a thick ground fog that settles in the San Joaquin Valley
and Sacramento Valley areas of California’s Central Valley.” The promised land of the days

<footnote n="22">²² What was the function of Juliana Spahr’s list in the third section of “Don’t Add to Heartache”?</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ Robert Mueller writes about *The California Poem* that it is “poised atop deep cultural foundations.”</footnote>
of the Gold Rush is now nothing but a “Gold Ruin”: all that remains of it are “hydraulic
scars” that are eroding, with a science-fiction touch to them (“quark scars”). He is light years
away from the pastoral world of Shakespeare’s *As You Like It*: “And this our life, exempt
from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones,
and good in everything.” (Note the paronomasia so pregnant with Lucretian meaning!) Is
Dante the one still “babbling great poetry” or is this a memory of the golden age when
language and nature were one? Both interpretations would work.

The concreting over of California's wild beaches by developers and various industries, and the attendant environmental damage is the topic of the next extract (your pages 92 and top of 93). A scary vision of it at present and in future came to the author as a nightmare. The evil invasion is materialized by the succession of run-on lines in the cluster starting "To the south ..." The ugliness of the coast now altered by concrete is contrasted with the dazzling beauty still found underwater: "an/ easy metropolis of sea—" inhabited by nudibranchs, those "soft-bodied, marine gastropod molluscs which shed their shells after their larval stage, and are noted for their often extraordinary colors and striking forms." (Wikipedia) In the dream, the speaker could still be a hunter-gatherer within a plentiful food web. But she was also conscious that such "patches" with well-preserved marine flora and fauna are bound to go too.

An essential element in *The California Poem*'s intertext is John Steinbeck's *The Log of the Sea of Cortez* (1941, 1951). In this next extract (your p.93 and top of p.94) largely dedicated to observations of marine fauna, dead or alive, Eleni borrows freely from her writer-naturalist predecessor, conjures up "moving pictures" related to fishing scenes, and to the preparation and consumption of sea food. This is California, so *moving* pictures suggests movies, that is to say motion pictures, suggesting movie-like lively pictures arousing emotion. The governing emotion here is nostalgia as the speaker is conscious that what *she* gets a chance to see cannot match up to what *Steinbeck* got a chance to see: "all the thing was alive and alive when/ you saw it." The brilliant colors of the film on the fish when still alive *and* of the metaphorical film are gone. The sadness of coming too late, the sadness of irrecoverable loss haunts the whole passage (becomes explicit at the top of your p.94). And the anguished question asked by Eleni is: "What is appearing?"

It is not just animal or vegetable species that go extinct. Entire nations do. That has certainly been the case with Native-American ones in overcrowded California. Their erasure from the land has meant that their languages disappeared too. "An epic," wrote Ezra Pound, "is a poem containing history." The brief reminder of the successive names of California through history (the Spanish Latinate etymology of the toponym "California" itself, and its former Indian name, with a contemporary allusion to the Red-Hot Chili Peppers' hit "Californication" ("sexy *cala-y-fornix*") adds a historical dimension to that story of disappearances.

The agent of all the destruction is “the human hurricane” and so, the poet wonders, what definition can be given of that “human”?

But the metaphors comparing the human to a “hurricane” or to a “black storm” seem to hint that Nature too may have a hand in the human’s passion for destruction. “[F]alse history” is a killer, as J. Steinbeck’s eloquent simile comparing the fate of cormorants to that of radicals makes plain. But history is not the only one to blame:

See Dale Jacobson’s e-mail in relation to that question of “responsibilities”: “Yes, the Earth will save us. Pursue that concept, the intelligence behind nature. This is increasingly clear. I see it everywhere! They sing this mantra in New Orleans daily. They don’t call Californian
culture "new age" for nothing. What I don't understand is why human intelligence is somehow NOT nature's intelligence. After all, where did human beings come from? "(Reader p.14-15)

Eleni has a hard time accepting Nature's responsibility

The organization and unfolding of *The California Poem* is anything but straightforward: you can look at it as the product of careful montage, in the sense of "a film editing technique in which a series of short shots are sequenced to condense space, time, and information." Fragments are juxtaposed in a way intended to pack/condense sense, create contrasts, like two stones rubbed against each other to produce a spark. There is nothing like straightforward "bilateral" symmetry informing the poem's aesthetics. On several occasions (as in the extract two-thirds down your p.94 and the footnote), the poet stresses the presence in nature of more complex forms of symmetry, radial symmetry for example, observed in all adult echinoderms. This praise of complexity may be an indirect way of vindicating the poem's complex aesthetics.

California is notorious for its earthquakes. Eleni could not have dispensed with including them at some point since there always lurks a totalizing, all-encompassing intention behind an epic project, as she herself points out (on your p.95): "Your job is to// tell the history of each & every piece," from foundation times to the present: earthquakes have to do with the geology of a place and geology is the modern discourse of foundations: she takes up the topic at the top of p.95 (she had already broached it a few pages earlier (your page 90).

That wish of an all-encompassing vision is what makes her see herself as a "moving viewer," with "an always-moving/ horizon at my front/ or at my back" (top of your p.95). An epic poem can welcome within its environment individuals' life-stories like the one on (your) p.95, of someone who, following a series of failures, stopped trying and let nature take over, happy with registering its moods, be they peaceful or wild.

Like all nature writers, Eleni has *not* given up on pursuing the perfect language that would be a true translation of the real but could do without words or speakers ("in which/ nothing can be said").

In its attempt at exhaustiveness, *The California Poem* continues with yet another inventory of a biotic community, this time the chaparral. The trees, birds, reptiles, butterflies and mammals living in chaparrals, "those areas covered by a dense growth of mostly small-leaved evergreen shrubs, especially in central and southern California," are dutifully listed, as in a naturalist's logbook. (with the bobcat deserving a special mention on account of the perfect symmetry of its coat). Such an all-inclusive community (inclusive of "every/amalgamated rock & singing string & dirt") now supersedes the united states as the reference scale; "the united states" becomes a mere metaphor for the former. The bigger picture, the larger reference scale cannot but be Earth, the planet. Earth/planetary consciousness was strong in Whitman and Dickinson: that is the scale against which an environmental epic must be set now. It is against this background that the poetic persona addresses herself and asks what her contribution has been.

Is her poem the flowering new anthem that takes the least atom in nature into account? The next three lines (three-fourths down your p. 96) return to foundations, those of the Earth this time, addressed as a familiar. In this environmental epic, the poetic persona is a constantly "moving viewer" (see your p.95) and the scale is constantly shifting: now she stands in outer
space, now she is back on Earth (bottom of your p.96). Where to locate herself is the question,
for her to “have a clear picture of [her] field” (bottom of your p.97): she wants to/ feels she
has to embrace all times (from origins to distant future) and all space (from the tide pool close
by to Pluto): ““twist the tide pool and the stars into the pattern of paleontology and time””
The poem outlines a new horology (“The science of measuring time.”) The huge time-span it
embraces is materialized in an environment-related chronology of California (not included in
your selection), and in such huge lists like the “*Endangered, Threatened, & Extinct Interlude*”
from which the extract you have on your p.97 is taken, with attending famous anecdotes like
the horror story of the invasion of mice.

To complete the epic intertext, modernist poet William Carlos Williams, author of *Paterson*, an epic poem which *The California Poem* owes much to, form-wise, is quoted just before the interlude, to introduce perspective on the poem's "chemistry" and the inclusion of such "objective" documents, the point of which academics may well fail to understand.

Including poetics statements/ meta-poetic statements along the way is a standard feature of
epics and long poems. They are essential to keep the structure together over the long distance.

## Session 12: Environmental epic (2)

### Walt Whitman: extract from “Song of Myself”

Many necessary ingredients of the environmental epic were in Whitman's *Leaves of Grass*.
He sowed; Eleni Sikelianos, after many others, reaped. If one uses *De Rerum Natura* or *The
California Poem* as benchmarks for identifying a poem as an environmental epic, where does
this extract from “SoM” stand?

The view that the whole of nature, the whole of Earth, is one interrelated system informs most
ecological thinking. Earth is our house (*oikos*) and we don't want to ruin it. And nature calls
for our care and attention at all scales. That high degree of attention is present in this extract
from “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman's famous long poem. The first cluster of lines in this
section 31 of “SoM” reveals a poet celebrating the unsung (“a leaf of grass,” “the pismire,”
“the tree-toad,” and so forth), disrupting usual human hierarchies (“the cow crunching with
depress'd head surpasses any statue,”). The title, “Song of Myself,” is still striking to the
contemporary reader when placed side by side with such a passage, because it testifies to an
unusually broad understanding of the self. What section 31 tells us is that the poetic persona
views his self as inclusive of, or consequent of, virtually any organism or form of matter (l.11-
13). The question is: what precise meaning should be given to the speaker's use of
“incorporate.” Does it mean he views his self as a kind of corporation to which all things and
beings can be admitted as members? Does it mean his self combines all forms of life and
matter into an organic whole? One may hesitate as to what the right answer is. One way or
another, it is an all-embracing self. The notion of an all-embracing self involves a measure of
ambiguity when it comes to its relation to nature: should we read it as evidence of great
humility or as undeniable proof of huge hubris? Christine Gerhardt has convincingly shown
that it is both.

The anaphora of “In vain” in the third cluster of lines in this poem shows the speaker’s
insatiable wish to win by tracking down, even hunting down any creature, object, or form of
matter that would not let itself be incorporated in his self.

The totalizing drive characteristic of the epic, with the catalog as its formal translation, is
present here. So is the grandiloquence: the first cluster of lines is rich in superlatives and
'extreme' statements or characterizations. Now, does it feel like an epic without a human
hero? That, clearly, is not the case. While nature has pride of place as regards the textual
volume dedicated to it, the human being remains firmly in control, opening or concluding the
three clusters of lines. But what also sticks in the mind are striking images resetting, founding
anew the status of the human being, taking him down from his pedestal: when the poetic
persona wonders at “the narrowest hinge in my hand [that] puts to scorn all machinery,” the
focus on the human being’s body rather than on his/her achievements brings his belonging to
the animal kingdom to the fore; when the speaker describes himself as ‘stucco’d with
quadrupeds and birds all over,” it calls to mind 16th-century artist Arcimboldo, best known for
creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers,
fish and books, which, whether it was acknowledged or not, challenge the human being’s
centrality and uniqueness. For these different reasons, “Song of Myself” blurred the dividing
lines between poetic genres: inclusively epic, but still lyrically focused when it deals with
nature, it may now be said to have paved the way for the ecocentric long poem.

“The First Dandelion”

Epics are about foundations and beginnings. They will feature conquering heroes or heroines. It being the first, this dandelion has something heroic about it. Then the etymology of the word – the French “dent-de-lion” [lion’s tooth] – cannot have escaped Whitman’s attention. So, here is an inconspicuous little flower with a lion’s tooth to it. This dandelion is an avatar of the democratic leaf of grass that Whitman made into a symbol of democracy. It is, unjustly, little celebrated, since the list of assets that, according to this short poem, it can boast, makes it another apt symbol of/ inspiration for what American poetry, even America as a nation, as envisioned by Whitman, meant to be or stand for: free of “artifice,” “simple and fresh,” “fresh,” “trustful” and so forth. *And* what made its emergence possible was “its sunny nook of shelter’d grass.” That the place, its natural world, had been shelter’d from Old World influences made it possible to believe in America as a fresh start.
Extract from Rasula's This Compost (p. 26-27)

Such foundational questions related to the American nation tie into Rasula's topic in this passage: "Place nourishes transformation," he writes. He contends, after Todorov, that it was European settlers' general use of military force to ensure their domination that blinded them to the specificity of the, to them, "New" World, and that blocked the transformation in outlook the place could have generated in them. As a result, it stopped them from smoothly integrating themselves into it. They were unable to conceive of earth/ the land as a subject with which dialogue/ a conversation could exist. Since Native-Americans stood for such a non-exploitative approach to the natural world, on an equal footing with it, they had to be disposed of. And they largely were. Their lore, what they "knew," was ignored and chronically misunderstood, as Wallace Stevens's Crispin successive attempted readjustments of his understanding of the New World show. He shows himself incapable of thinking of man as anything else than the "steward of earth," a belief that was inacceptable to the Native-American view. He embodies Europeans' inability to hear "the tropological lesson that the world in another's language is another world": the *topos/typos/tropos* Olsonian triplet, seeing turn (of mind, *tropos*) as the result, the impression (Greek *typos*) of a place (*topos*). Rasula's archeological gaze into America's start helps one to realize how the gradual restoration of an environmentally-aware responsible consciousness of place and the natural world, an ongoing restoration achieved by activists, poets, citizens and finally politicians was an uphill battle all the way and remains one to this day.
Eleni Sikelianos: from *Make Yourself Happy*

I wanted to introduce you to the more recent developments of Eleni Sikelianos's poetic thinking on the subject of fresh foundations for mankind, a subject which took her back to imagining and imaging a new start for earth tying language and matter, which is, remember, where we started from with Lucretius.

My contention is that Sikelianos's widespread use of paronomasia in *TCP* echoes Greek atomists' (Epicure and Democritus) and Lucretius's intuitions about, and presentations of, the structure of matter as linked with that of the alphabet. The passages in your reader excerpted from the poem which we have just discussed include three such instances of paronomasia: they link "word" to "world," "books" to "brooks," "anther," "anthem" to "atom." You find a more complete list at the top of p.99. You may also remember the way (in another short extract from *Make Yourself Happy* at the top of p.6 of your reader), Sikelianos moves from the material reality of "stress **wood**" to the concept of "stress **word** shift" which, I ventured to suggest, could usefully summarize the very reason for the existence of environmentalist writing.

I regard this interest in the generative power of micro-elements of linguistic and physical matter as part of that (Sikelianos's) ongoing exploration of the possible origins of language, as well as revealing a belief in the power of language to contribute to a fresh start at the deepest level in the way the natural world is taken into consideration. That atomist/ atomistic consciousness is the stuff Sikelianos's earth/ environmental consciousness is made of. The extract from p.121 of *Make Yourself Happy* (reader p.99) confirms her reliance on atoms to conjure up visions of our planet's beginnings.

The final section of *Make Yourself Happy* is entitled "Oracle Or, Utopia." It was inspired by a scientific experiment by the name of Biosphere 2 which was conducted in Oracle, Arizona, between 1987 and 1991. Biosphere 2 is a huge structure "originally built to be an artificial, materially closed ecological system, or vivarium. [...] It was, if you remember, originally meant to demonstrate the viability of closed ecological systems to support and maintain human life in outer space as a substitute for Earth's biosphere." From recreating Earth's biosphere to imagining that life too, might have to be started from scratch is but one short step which Sikelianos takes. My montage of quotations (also on p.99 in your reader) condenses the step-by-step scenario she imagines for that new start. Language goes through gradual disintegration on to a new start: "it got noisy" suggests that the quality of language decreased. Then "[what c[ould] no longer be held in language"] had to be sieved; next, words, got "sent through the [particle] collider"; "letters atomize[d]"; "atoms" and "vowels" were all over the place; all that was left to fuel a restart was "word-waste." The next eleven lines show that disintegration of language with the vowels going first: "at the end of time" becomes "at the end of tm." But somehow, possibly thanks to the word "spine" losing its "e," th Lucretian "spin" [clinamen] happened again: "spn th carousl round/ agan". (In *De rerum natura*, Lucretius imagines the origin of things as accidental: some switch is thrown and the great suspended universe starts to spin; his previously undifferentiated atoms assume character. Things go on from there ...<fnref n="24" />). Once all vowels are gone, the new biosphere gets going: the packs of consonants mime maximal concentration of verbal matter: if you unpack them after combing through the rest of "Oracle Or, Utopia," you get this: "the reactor/ Nuclear/ Heart atom/come." You are left to imagine a nuclear heart atom of letters getting a biosphere going again, which would unmetaphor/actualize the Greek atomists' pedagogical blend of letters

<footnote n="24">²⁴ William H. Owen, "Structural Patterns in Lucretius' *De Rerum Natura*," *The Classical World* Vol. 62, No. 4 (Dec., 1968), 121-127, The Johns Hopkins University Press.</footnote>
and atoms. That is Sikelianos’s radicalized poetic version of her environmentalist’s interest in
the “Tiny” (see Lew Welch), when letter-particles are shown to have the power to “do a new
biosphere.”
## Session 13: Nature and the times

Nature is not just where you go to escape the sound and the fury of the world. Those will catch up with you. The course of history will change landscapes and the lives of those who tend the land. For nature is also a workplace for billions of people. These different perspectives on nature can be found in the first poem we are going to hear about in the course of this session: ...

### William S. Merwin: “Forgotten Fountain”

Merwin: a poet who spent much time in the South-West of France exploring and translating medieval French poetry. He learnt Occitan, the regional language. He eventually moved to Hawaii where he became a dedicated activist for the defense of the environment.

Starting from the description of a very limited spot/place, “a green mossed crevice” in a cliff (2), the present poem gradually broadens its scope to span huge chunks of time. The topic of time is a useful entry into the poem. Time and the times.

The poem is without any punctuation: may be meant to convey the idea of a fountain (rather like a spring actually, a place from which water oozes) that never stopped flowing, like time, “year after year” “through” many different times.

The fountain was not always there. A few lines at mid-poem (14 to 20) condense the long, very long, history of that spot into a kind of mini creation-narrative/ mini-Genesis: the first chronological indication goes back to when history did not exist yet, a former geological era, when “the cliff rose from the seafloor” (14-15). Nature too is the result of a process. The narrative continues with the animals’ arrival, then by that of human beings, the pioneers who cleared the land to cultivate it. The speaker was a witness to a moment in that final phase, when he heard the villagers’ work songs, sung in their own language (Occitan). As he was witnessing that peaceful scene, he seems to have realized that it was the last time this would happen, which in retrospect proved true. At that very moment, the poetic persona realized the shock it must have been to the village, and to one of his acquaintances there, to be mobilized for the First World War, especially since the uprooting meant leaving the village for the Verdun inferno. It was the promise of the Book of Isaiah (2, 3-4) in reverse: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” It was a threshold, never to be re-crossed, when the times came to disrupt a way of life geared to natural rhythms.

The poem is threaded by the theme of color and colorlessness but interpreting the way that theme is handled calls for nuance. To some extent, the ‘treatment of color’ seems to back up/ echo/ come as an overtone of the poem’s overall rise-and-fall movement. First comes what appears as the rise (which is a physical fall) of the water drops from colorlessness to “the world in its full color” (10), reminiscent of the existentialist concept that existence precedes essence; it became possible only after the cliff rose; much later, that fountain meant that it made sense for the villagers’ mattocks to rise below the cliff to the rhythm of their work song. The reverse movement from color to colorlessness comes with the memory of Edouard’s “call to the colors” of the French flag which led him into “a moment with no color of its own” (32). One immediately thinks of the phrase “to be white with fear,” an emotion Edouard may have felt upon hearing that he was mobilized, then of the pallor of death which awaited those going to Verdun. The uprooting was all the more violent since it meant having to speak “the language of elsewhere,” i. e. standard French, which he must have mastered imperfectly. Hence his feeling that he “was leaving for Verdun with no words” (31).

The question is then, was the switch to “the world in its full color” a blessing since it entailed being called to the colors of war? The colors of the world, understand the colors of the times, look like a mixed blessing at best.
What permeates this poem may lean more towards nostalgia for a lost transparency: that of
the “clear drops arriving through the stone” (7), that of “the clear source” (22), when the
fluidity of a life geared to natural rhythms and of the local language made the inhabitants of
that place at one with their world.
Chuck Miller: “for Joe”

A poem focusing on an epiphanic moment, referred to as “it,” which the poetic persona experienced in a Californian redwood forest.

The poem consists of a succession of explanations, all of them introduced by “or,” of what may have made the moment what it was. Rather than one explanation or the other, it appears it was the sum total of them all which created that strong connection to the place (for lack of a better phrase to pin that feeling down).

Apart from a single long dash, no punctuation mark comes to interrupt the flow of thoughts related to that moment. They roam across time and space, from the time of dinosaurs to the present, from Manchuria to different places in California.

It is a nature poem inasmuch as the reminiscing about that redwood forest piles up a wealth of precise sensory – visual and auditory – impressions (see 27 to 33, 48 to 52). A strong sense of place is created and the perspective on nature is one of awe, the general feeling one of wonder and reverence. The speaker is awed by the longevity of the trees, their “immensity” (23). He senses that a measure of solemnity is called for (42-43).

But what the poem shows is that the sensory and emotional connection to the trees and to the place as a whole is nested within, and enhanced by, a dense and intricate web of thoughts loosely connected to the place. They may have to do with history: direct historical references include the Civilian Conservation Corps, created under Franklin Roosevelt's administration (19), the depression of the 30's and the Russian Revolution. The sight of the fallen redwoods reminds the poet of a poor family who carved out a home out of a fallen giant. Less direct references are those to writers: the American John Steinbeck (1902-1968), of *Grapes of Wrath* fame but also well-known for his interest in marine biology, and the German Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), whose novels of spiritual self-discovery inspired by Eastern culture were extremely popular during the 1960s. The simile comparing fallen redwoods to “elongated boxcars” recalls depression-time hoboes riding the rails. Memories of the speaker’s hard-up father and mother making it to the West Coast could also be lifted out of Steinbeck or Kerouac. More thoughts include arguments with absent addressees (9-13), consideration of alternatives to one’s personal situation (unemployment, 21), self-questioning (24), self-scrutiny (40-46), memories (62-67). The poem seems to go off-track from the moment Manchuria comes into the picture: the focus on the redwoods is lost. Memories of Manchuria supersede those of California. But the stream of thoughts we have been given access to, ends on a meta-analysis, that of the thinking process itself: “the thought that of the many things you see and experience/ one will stick with you/ of the thousand accidents of time and space/ that speak to you/ and enter in to you/ and might stay with you till the end” (73-78). Our most intense moments of connection with/to nature are still caught in a welter of other thoughts which one may choose to regard as parasitical but which are in fact unavoidable. Nature can never be the pure focus of our thoughts. The sound and the fury of our lives in the world gets in the way.
## Natacha Trethewey: “Liturgy”

“Liturgy” is part of *Beyond Katrina*, a book the author put together, to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the act of God (as these things are commonly referred to) that struck the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 2005: Hurricane Katrina. It consists of a series of dedications to the casualties of that natural disaster. It is an elegy, a poem which mourns one person’s or several people’s deaths, and at the same time fumbles for words towards redeeming that or those deaths. The title of today’s session, “Nature and the times,” becomes problematic on reading this poem, because nature in it largely contributed to making the time(s) historic. Nature appears here both as the tormentor and the victim. A distinction ought to be made between nature as place, as community, here the Mississippi Gulf Coast (which includes its inhabitants), and nature as the deaf and blind Other, which is a power of massive destruction. The inscription opening the poem, “*for the Mississippi Gulf Coast*,” and the poetic persona’s concluding statement to the effect that she *is* the Gulf Coast, obviously show nature as human beings’ *oikos*, but a home that is no more.

But it should be noted that nature as a destructive force barely features in the poem (on 1.8 and 28); one possible reason is, that plenty of evidence exists that the seriousness of the havoc wreaked by Katrina was largely the result of *human* neglect. Many deaths could have been avoided if only more had been done by those in charge. That is registered by the poet on 1.37 when she identifies the piece as “an indictment, a complaint.” It is therefore a poem about a time when nature *and* mankind ‘joined forces’ to make grim history.

Although the poetic persona expresses herself in the first-person singular, the poem cannot just be regarded as autobiographical. The “I” is also a lyric subject that embraces more than herself (has been conceptualized by Jacques Reda as “The fourth-person singular). Epic-like, this “I” speaks on behalf of a community, deals with the sorrow of many, includes them, draws a catalog. Like Odysseus, she can refer to her “nostos,” (40) her return to her homeland. The religious overtones of the title, taken up by such words and phrases as “praise song,” “benediction,” “requiem,” on 1.34-35, correlate/tally with/match this communal dimension. It is also a memorial service that is being celebrated here.

The effectiveness of the poem/prayer is based on a double use of rhetorical anaphora: first, of “To,” followed by the different dedicatees that are also the storm’s casualties, then of “This is,” followed by the speaker’s different ways of looking at the poem under writing/ in progress. The epiphora of “the (Gulf) Coast,” held through the poem works well in conveying the speaker’s obsession with the plight her native place is in.

**E-mail from Dale Jacobson**
**See below and p. 55 above.**
## Emily Dickinson: "Nature, the Gentlest mother"

Of course, the poem's initial statement may sound like gallows humor if read with Natasha Trethewey's poem in mind. To quote Dale Jacobson's e-mail again: "Yes, the Earth will save us. Pursue that concept, the intelligence behind nature. This is increasingly clear. I see it everywhere! They sing this mantra in New Orleans daily." (Reader p.14-15)

The present poem is based on an extended/ long drawn-out metaphor comparing nature to a mother. The point of this pathetic fallacy seems to have been to find a way of giving tangible existence to pleasant but ineffable impressions in relation to nature, as when the puzzling-looking moon becomes an enigmatic face.

Can you see why it might have looked like a misplaced poem, given the theme of the present session?

→The timeless characterization of nature (hinted at via two uninflected verbs, on 1. 8 and 15) in it contrasts with the history-laden perspectives on nature in the other poems to be discussed today. It reads as a counter-example.

It could also have been part of either of two previous sessions: "A conversation with nature;" or "Celebrating the unsung."

Indeed, part of the pathetic fallacy informing the poem, with Nature compared to the "Gentlest Mother," consists in gifting "Her" with speech. She is able to "admonish" her children; "Her Conversation" is described as "fair." Just by the sound of "Her Voice," she can incite each and every one to prayer; a mere gesture with her finger works wonders in ensuring that no noise disturbs the children's sleep. Nature's ability to communicate runs as an extended metaphor *within* the extended metaphor comparing Nature to a Gentle Mother.

This leaves little doubt as to the poetic persona's special relationship with Nature, her perfect adjustment to all its manifestations, to the point where she feels she can understand the whys and wherefores of those manifestations. The poem itself can be regarded as a translation of this perfect understanding. Specific sub-metaphors within the governing one can themselves be translated. The mother's "Admonition mild" may refer to the sound of a soft breeze; "When all the Children sleep — She turns as long away/ As will suffice to light Her lamps"/ may isolate that moment at dusk between nightfall and the lighting of stars.

That the poem could have been part of the reading assignment for the "Celebrating the Unsung" session is just as obvious. The Nature-Mother's all-encompassing kindness and benevolence is stressed again and again: the superlatives on 1.4 and the comparative on 1.28 make an all the more powerful confirmation of that mother's limitless generosity as two out of three ("the Waywardest" (4), "infiniter" (28)) themselves go 'beyond the limits' of grammatically correct language. (Proper usage would command "the most wayward" and rule out "infinite," it being already an extreme adjective, therefore intolerant of any degrees.) More direct proof of that Mother's infinite inclusiveness is her power to get "the minutest Cricket" and "The Most unworthy Flower" to join in the Assembly's prayer. One possible etymology of "religion" is the Latin verb religāre, *to tie fast*, and the dense lexical field of religion ("Assembly," "Aisles," "prayer") seems here to suggest that the ties between all members of the assembly are very strong. The image of Nature's "Household" has a very contemporary ring as the idea of Nature as a house matches the concept of "ecology" since "eco-" comes from *oikos*, the Greek word for "house." Associating Nature with "Care" also sounds very contemporary, except that now it would work the other way round with human beings being expected to care for nature, and Earth: is "Nature, the Gentlest Mother," still not "Impatient of [the human] child" who will not hear "Her Admonition mild"?

Two lines stick out from the rest of the poem as their meaning remains rather obscure: why and how could a Rampant (i.e. standing on its hind legs) Squirrel and an "impetuous Bird" be
restrained by Nature’s “Admonition”? Unless the admonishment come from a wayward human child in the form of a rifle shot or from some shrieking predator of these two species.

Dickinson has been called Amherst’s other lexicographer (the more famous one was Noah Webster) due to the large number of ‘definition poems’ that she wrote. This one tackles an ambitious topic since it is an attempt at defining nature, no less. The considerable number of dashes at line-ends suggests that writing this poem has involved much pondering of the subject. As definitions will, hers intended to sound definitive.
Ed Roberson:

“Urban Nature”<fnref n="25" />

The title: oxymoronic.

The point of the poem: show that it isn't the case. The times are urban. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

About a nondescript place in a city. Not a beauty spot!

A Petrarchan sonnet! (Octave + sestet) but here again are found imperfect remains of a perfect form.

As in “be careful,” the writing seems purposefully negligent.

- only traces of a rhyme scheme: 14-15: only a half rhyme (due to stress patterns); 7-8 a facile rhyme.

- unmotivated line breaks for the most part, at first sight.

- the divide between octave and sestet is materialized by a blank line but the division does not match the standard pattern question-answer, enigma-solution specific to sonnets. The description of the place starts in the octet and continues into the sestet.

- conspicuously inelegant repetitions: “simple quiet” (6-7); “no birds sing” (7-8)

- flaunted inaccuracy: “garden/thing” (2-3).

The place at first defined negatively: it is not like any of the places traditionally associated with pristine nature (1-2).

AND YET, it quickly becomes very clear that the poetic persona could not care less; does not care much for those sanitized preserved versions of nature that are the preserve of the sophisticated: places the enjoyment of which is relished, distilled, savored “peel by peel,” and where the moneyed crowd come in search of mystical illumination (“satori/-al leisure” (3-4), (“satori” is a spiritual awakening sought in Zen Buddhism, often coming suddenly)), and are only satisfied with the essence of beauty (“that core/ whiff”). Nature as privileged access to the spirit (the soul!).

Celebration of this nondescript place starts on line 5:

If you isolate 1.5, “Just a street” may be that “whiff of beauty as the spirit.”

For all its lack of sophistication, the place can boast precious assets: no bad smells and quiet. A double negative makes a positive: it is not because the place is quiet that it means that all birds have died. In fact, “not the same as no birds sing, / definitely not the dead of no birds sing” does not amount to saying that there aren’t any birds in that pocket park. “And no birds sing,” is borrowed from Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”). The Keatsian insert acts as a guarantee of the place’s compatibility with nature poetry.

The sestet details more assets of the place: all of them come with a reservation, some qualification. The “posture” i. e. placement of the bus stop has something nice about it provided no traffic is coming. You have to know how to make the most of a few instants.

There may be sound coming from underground and it may well be the underground trains, but why not savor the moment when those sounds are still distant and the sidewalk's grate is not rattling and vibrating? What “in open voice” refers to is uncertain: is it about the absence of any noisy sounds making it possible to have a conversation without straining one's voice? But the phrase adds a positive note to the whole. L.13 is a perfect illustration of “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”: if you manage to blinker your eyes and not look further than the end of the line, you can actually think that “sweet berries ripen in the street.” Only if you continue

<footnote n="25">²⁵ The Hamptons, part of the East End of Long Island, comprise a group of villages and hamlets in the towns of Southampton, East Hampton, which together form the South Fork of Long Island, in Suffolk County, New York. The Hamptons form a popular seaside resort and one of the historical summer colonies of the northeastern United States.</footnote>
into the next line do you realize that “street” is the first half of “street hawks” and that in fact
those are unripe berries ripening in the kiosk of a street vendor. *And*, as a critic notes, “in the
scene’s urban ornithology, the birds are street hawks and airplanes.”<sup>26</sup> But the point here
again is, why not choose to focus on the sweet berries? Same with the orange: no oranges
grow in this city; they arrive here by plane. Oranges are uprooted (“picked of [their] origin”).
As the street hawk maybe was. Despite all the reservations, you should be able to enjoy “this
very moment,” “pick[ing] it of its origin,” that is to say detaching it from anything you may
want to compare it to: pastoral surroundings, pristine nature. In such a place, “nature” does
not take a capital “n.”

Roberson’s point is that nature need not be sanitized<fnref n="27" /> or pure to be enjoyed. Before you mourn the absence of nature in cities, you ought to be aware of what’s there. Enjoyment of, connection to, nature need not be of a sophisticated kind. That is an African-American’s view.

Finally, such a poem might justify Lawrence Buell’s choice to privilege “environmental writing” over “nature writing” for texts that tackle subjects at the edges of what is traditionally regarded as “nature.”

<footnote n="26">26 Lynn Keller, *Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene*, University of Virginia Press, 2017.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ Sanitize: make more acceptable by removing unpleasant or offensive features from.</footnote>
## Ed Roberson’s “The Social Distance”

This poem was written earlier this year. It was inspired by the Covid-19 pandemic and the concept of social distance that was born with it. That physical distance is materialized five times in the poem, each time in a meaningful way, a point to which I will return.

It is a fourteen-line poem comprised of three quatrains and a distich, with occasional alternate rhymes (as in stanza 3), which gives it the appearance of a Shakespearean sonnet, a form associated with love poetry, emphatically *not* with social distance. “the laugh on us – ”, the poet writes. Indeed. The Shakespearean sonnet form adds to the ironic dimension of the poem. We, humans, who have so often acted like the kings of nature must now submit to it while the birds can go on with their business. Moreover, according to the speaker’s familiarity with their uses, they are *not* just acting as usual, they are overdoing the socializing: surprisingly, while red-wing[ed] blackbirds “usually fight each other away,” and “will whiz/ your head twisted off if you get too close,” here they are “making a joyous gang” (13) in the sycamore tree. True to his life-long commitment as a nature/naturalist poet, Roberson keeps his concern focused on accuracy: he knows these North-American passerine birds’ habits,<fnref n="28" /> describing them as “notoriously territorial/bombardiers.”

To return to the probable intention determining the location of the blanks inside the poem, the one on line 9 visualizes the blackbirds’ usual fierce defense of their territory; the one on line 14 materializes the social distance between us humans; the one on line 15 illustrates the “spreading further” bit (suspending the association of “further” with “pandemic” and making it an adverb); the one on the final line suggests “the larger view” is being taken. The cleverest case is the first one: keeping in mind that the form we have here is that of a Shakespearean sonnet, a love poem, the name of the tree outside the poet’s window begins to ring differently: you then can hear “sick amore” in it. Indeed, love and the closeness that goes with it would now be associated with the fear of disease. The empty space also leaves you time to get the pun. So, the actual tree may not have been a real sycamore. But the tree itself may be sick indeed since it should be leafing at this time of year.

Its sickness does make it an augur tree. It was predicting the future.

You can regard the spreading of the virus as a “natural migration[Ø]: if you can do so, you will be taking the larger view the poet is advising you to take in conclusion. And if you manage not to leave it at that, and manage to see us humans/yourself as birds isolated on our “local branch” but complaining, chorus-like, about the branch being shaken, you will have recovered your sense of solidarity with the whole of nature, your feathered friends and your fellow human beings!!!

<footnote n="28">²⁸ He only gets their name slightly wrong as they are usually called “red-winged blackbirds.” (They are listed by Eleni Sikelianos: see p.91 of your reader.)</footnote>
## Session 14: Allowing for chaos and disorder vs. feeling intimations of order

Lawrence Buell in *The Environmental Imagination* writes: “during the nineteenth century a vast amount of ‘natural theology’ for laypersons designed to show, or at least to celebrate, natural phenomena as the manifestation of some coherent spiritual plan or design. Emerson’s *Nature* is the one work of the sort that has become a literary classic” (Buell 402).

Remember Georg Herbert<fnref n="29" />’s “Thy word is all, if we could spell” (“The Flower”)

The different poems to be examined during this session broach this topic directly or indirectly.

## Walt Whitman: “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life”

A dysphoric poem of the sea-shore (“Zwischenraum,” or betweenland (to use Rilke’s word) The sight of the debris on the strand overwhelms him in a negative way.

The sea-drift makes a “slender windrow” (i.e., “a linear pile of cut hay or grain left to dry in a field before being gathered.) It is a heteroclite [’hetræklait] line: p.29, 1.15: “Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten”. In a more positive mood, the all-encompassing nature of these lines would make a suitable objective correlative of the Whitman line. The poetic persona seems to be conscious of the possible kinship: “I thought the old thought of likenesses” (p.29, 1.19). Poetry often originates in the uncovering/disclosure of motifs and patterns both in the world and in language. “I walk’d with that electric self seeking types.” (p.29, 1.22).

But this time it doesn’t work.

But this time, “the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot” (p.28, 1.9) is a malevolent one and instead of structuring things for him, it undoes them, making him feel estranged from life in the places he is most familiar with, himself included.

He comes to see himself as signifying “at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift, / A few sands and dead leaves to gather” (p.29, 1.30). The grand, happily materialist, vision of “This Compost” is gone.

A fit of depression is upon him and the world becomes a hostile place. Far from appearing as an achievement, his whole poetic venture now recoils upon him like a gun. He feels himself become the object of derision on the part of his “real Me” for failing to gain any self-knowledge despite so many attempts at doing so in his poems. And the feeling of persecution spreads to the outside world: “Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon me and sting me” (p.29, 1.46-47).<fnref n="30" />

The poem blends/superposes the real ocean and the ocean of life, of *his* life, the real sea-drift, “the leaves of soft lettuce left by the tide” (p.29, 1.16-17) and the “trail of drift and debris” (p.30, 1.64) of his life (which includes *Leaves of Grass*.) Everything has come undone: life itself is nothing but shreds (“These little shreds indeed standing for [...] all.” (p.29, 1.55) It is a case of “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” (Yeats) Self-doubt, a self-deprecating mood bring on a quasi-Oedipal regressive behavior, with the poet clinging to Paumanok which he calls his father and asking the ocean, which he calls a mother, for sympathy. The anaphora of “I too” is used here to find a way out of despair through bonding with fellow-human beings.

T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” ends: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”<fnref n="31" />

Section 4 of the poem shows a fragilized “I” also desperately shoring fragments against his ruins (p.30, 1.88-98). He is not rid of his paranoid feelings; nor of his inferiority complex, thinking himself at first in a kind of “Big Brother is Watching You” type of situation – “this

<footnote n="29">²⁹ 1593-1633</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ A variation on this situation is found in a short poem also first published in 1860, “As If a Phantom Caress’d Me”, p.375 (Norton).</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ To continue the parallel with “The Waste Land,” this final cluster is reminiscent of “Death by Water,” the fourth section of Eliot’s poem.</footnote>
phantom looking down where we lead, and following me and mine” (p.30, 1.85-86) –, then
addressing an indefinite person, which may include the reader, from the ground on which he
is lying, a self in shreds, divided into “Me and mine” (p.30, 1.88), “drifts at [people’s] feet”
(p.30, 1.104), or like a drowned person in the ocean of life: “See, from my dead lips the ooze
exuding at last” (p.30, 1.90).

In this black mood of despair, the only possible salvation lies in the “you” being addressed.
Will (s)he give the corpse the kiss of life?

The poem is haunted by the fear of formlessness induced by the sight of formlessness in
nature, when in his more celebratory moments, Whitman can tease out intimations of order
from the slightest item. He usually is the singer of triumphant emerging forms: “The shapes
arise!” (“Song of the Broad-Axe”)
### Emily Dickinson: “Four Trees”

The poetic persona is unable to see a design.

Still, the syntactic doubling<fnref n="32" /> of “Maintain” invalidates the initial impression. They “Maintain—// The Sun—”.

More order is posited with the assumed existence of God.

It seems to be a smoothly running system after all since:

a) The Acre gives the four trees a place to stand on;

b) they in turn give, secure for, Him (probably the afore-mentioned God) the Passer by's or other beings' attention. But that a Shadow should be among those likely to provide God with attention casts the validity of the whole structure into doubt.

By the final stanza, the poetic persona returns to a questioning position. The pattern of the four trees makes her stick to the idea of a Plan, of a “General Nature” they may fit snugly into. But she cannot event tell whether they further, promote, full awareness of this plan. That part remains “Unknown.”

In other words, the question is: is drawing conclusions about the existence of God from Nature possible, even a good idea? Do patterns in nature tell us something, should induce faith in a God-designed order?

Nothing is certain. Once again, all the long dashes invite you to think, pause and ponder the matter. Is the world proof of anything?

We're left with guesses at an order but guesses they're bound to remain.

The poem's beautiful lay-out in four loose-looking stanzas may have been meant to look like that “solitary Acre” which a world devoid of certainties certainly is.

<footnote n="32">³² “An example from ordinary speech would be ‘John eats the apple was large.’ [...] This doubling is the most striking form of Dickinson’s compression” (Cristanne Miller, 37)</footnote>
## “Darwin” by Lorine Niedecker

Her final poem! Did Niedecker respond to Darwin because she had spent years in close contact with nature on Black Hawk Island in central Wisconsin?

### Data for a better understanding of the poem:

- Port Desire is a seaport in Argentina, Patagonia.

- Santa Fe is also a place in Argentina.

- Fitzroy was the name of the captain of *The Beagle*, the ship on which Darwin sailed as a young scientist.

- Talcahuana Bay is in Chile.

- The Galapagos Islands are an archipelago approximately 600 miles to the west of South America. Darwin's study of the very special species living on these islands contributed to the inception of his theory of evolution by natural selection.

- Drosera is a carnivorous plant.

- Lyell was a famous geologist and a contemporary of Darwin.

- Carlyle was a 19th-century British philosopher.

- Good Success Bay is in Chile, in Tierra del Fuego.

### Ideas of order

A scientist's life is a search for new or more complex forms of order. Darwin's life as a scientist was a search for order in Nature.

To what extent does the poem convey this?

Although it never strays from its subject, the famous naturalist Darwin's life of research, the poem may at first feel a bit disorderly/ untidy as it pieces together heterogeneous types of material: the poet's narrative following no clear chronological thread, his comments that sometimes report those of Darwin's enemies, and extracts from Darwin's books and correspondence that add up to a kind of summary of his beliefs.

However, what glues the whole together is an original stanzaic pattern, three descending stairs-like lines followed by a fourth one starting from the left-hand margin. The pattern is stuck to, through the poem's thirty stanzas.

The general impression conveyed by Darwin's life-story is one of many hurdles cleared:

- health issues:

- physical ordeals:

- the skepticism he encountered: 11-15; 23-25 (The outrage created by Darwin's theory: ""Species are not/ (it is like confessing/ a murder)/ immutable""'. Or: "As to Man/ 'I believe Man . . . / in the same predicament/ with other animals'"'. So, Darwin was accused of taking the human species down from its pedestal, placing our species on an equal footing with other animals.); 55-64; 139-146

- most importantly, the theoretical equations seemingly impossible to solve (how to reduce so much chaos into a semblance of order): 30-32

Despite the zigzagging narrative thread, the poem's curve is a rising one: things are shown to brighten up through section 3, which ends on Darwin finding a "Paradise Puzzle" in the Galapagos Islands, "with the jig-saw gists/ beginning to fit". (Note the internal rhyme between "jig" and "gists" miming the incipient theoretical order.) + From the contrasts land/sea; hot/cold; Hell/Paradise to the finished puzzle.
Section 4 focuses on the years of theoretical work proper that followed his voyages: the ordering/ organizing of the data collected in the ‘field,’ the bridges to be launched between reigns/kingdoms, the slow progress towards publication and the collaboration with other scientists of great renown.

Although it is dominated by nostalgia (129-137), section 5 shows that his theoretical attempt was not in vain: the conclusions he reached are given in the last two stanzas: “the universe/ not built by brute force/ but designed by laws/ The details left/ to the working of chance,”: so he found evidence of laws governing the universe, but those could not account for everything. The part played by chance has to be allowed for.

Darwin’s theory of evolution is challenged by creationists to this day. In casting the adjective “holy” into prominence, the poem’s first line break immediately stresses the religious dimension of the questions raised by Darwin (The late arrival of the main word – “matter” – mimics the late arrival of scientific discoveries, which take a lot of time to happen.)

But he was gracious enough never to become dogmatic, as the words, *his* words, quoted in conclusion to the poem show. The absence of any final punctuation suggests an open-ended research. He would not impose any theoretical grid for ‘reading’ nature.

More on the poem’s lay-out: he lines look like stairs/ steps going down. Darwin proceeded step by step. Made progress in his understanding of matter (his research, his scientific quest led him downwards – a direction visualized by the first three lines – earthwards, not upwards, not heavenwards). And there were setbacks (visualized by l.4).

Stanzas: From section III on, many more stanzas are not self-contained: mirroring the mutability of the locations of land and sea, as well as the “instability of bioforms” (Buell 421) This is especially clear in section III – about the earthquake – and in IV, stanzas 3 & 4, which deal with biological characteristics common to plants & animals.

Writing style: Like all scientists on field-trips, Darwin kept logbooks, wrote down his observations in notebooks. He constantly made notes of what he observed. Notes have a syntax of their own. Sentences are characterized by brevity. Economical expression. No articles or personal pronouns. It is the style of writing of Darwin’s notebooks which Niedecker uses throughout the poem. The monosyllabic words of English contribute to the sought-after impression of brevity: in Section III: “Blood-bright crabs hunt ticks”. Concentration. (Remember Gary Snyder’s writing?)

The techniques used by Niedecker borrow from those of collage and montage: (A collage is defined as an artistic composition of materials and objects pasted over a surface, often with unifying lines and color (Here the stanzaic form is the unifying trick.). A work, such as a literary piece, composed of both borrowed and original material.)

Both definitions are relevant in this case. There is borrowed material and original material but the design of the poem, its tone are its unifying lines and color.

“Montage,” a term borrowed from film-making, also applies in that it is also up to us readers to find the connections between the quotations and the original material: juxtaposition is what characterizes montage. Those techniques were first used by the High Modernists of the early twentieth century Niedecker was an heir of.

**Final data:** In this country, about 10% of the people believe that the theory of evolution is false. In the United States, public non-acceptance of Darwin’s theory is close to 30%...
“The Geese” by Jorie Graham

The passage of flights of migratory geese got the poetic persona thinking.
The poem examines intimations of meaning out there, of some ordering nature gives us.
The speaker presents the tapering shape of a flight of geese as an invitation to believe in
teleology: “The philosophical interpretation of natural phenomena as exhibiting purpose or
design.” She reads that shape as a code. A coded message?

Migrations happen because of the change of seasons. Therefore, they send an ever-relevant
message: time is passing. But they may hint at more profound things: a direction? An
organizing notion (two possible ways of understanding “a most perfect heading”)?
Another web of connections is provided by the spiders which the speaker observes about her.
But instead of seeing the spider as a symbol of the hope that all filaments and spheres can
finally connect – which was the notion entertained by Whitman in his spider poem – the
speaker in Graham’s poem reports on, and echoes spiders’ failure: “things will not remain
connected.” There is no healing the world’s incoherence: no coherent narrative can prevail.
Neither the master narrative of history, nor the substitute master narrative of geo-graphy, the
“writing of the earth.”

We can only pile up layers of meanings on top of one another. It all amounts to creating
“texture” [from Latin *textūra* web, from *texere* to weave], that is to say a structure of
interwoven, interrelated elements determining the quality given to a piece of art, literature, or
music.

There are patterns everywhere: when you hang out the wash, you stand below a clothesline.
You see the sky through lines. If flights of geese are crossing the sky at this precise moment,
you see them through the lines; and if spiders spin threads between the lines, it's just a criss-
crossing of patterns. It thickens the texture but it does not further our knowledge/ make the
world more meaningful in any way.

The speaker does not confess to any personal fears but presents the spiders' binding frenzy as
evidence of *their* fear: "[A]s if, at any time, things could fall further apart/ and nothing could
help them/ recover their meaning" (25-27).

The allusion is to Irish poet William Butler Yeats's famous line in "The Second Coming
(1919):" "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."
Changed relevance of these lines: from historical circumstances to a more essential level...
Obvious empathy is tangible here, on the speaker's part. An indirect acknowledgement that
human beings are spider-like in their attempts to link everything?

Follows a decentring of point of view, rather typical of nature poetry, often animistic: what
if the spiders were in control? Would they let us into the secret of how the world is organized?
Would we be in the know or would they keep us ignorant of the design? The poetic persona
implies that the latter would be the case. The speaker then goes back inside, as if beating a
retreat.

After geese, spiders, the piece of nature closest to us is our body: no healing (17) can be
expected from it either because it is actually what creates a rift within ourselves, the rift
between body and mind. Coincidence is impossible.

"The real is crossing you." The real: a yawning gap. We can never get at it. We never reach it.

"The real": a Lacanian term: "The state of nature from which we have been forever severed
by our entrance into language."
"The Symbolic" (the social world of linguistic communication, intersubjective relations, knowledge of ideological conventions etc.) is how we desperately try to heal that rift by, for example reading coded meanings in the flight of geese, spiders' webs.<fnref n="33" />
Does human beings' freedom lie in this helplessness, as experienced in everyday life?

<footnote n="33">³³ The third Lacanian order is the Imaginary: "the fundamental narcissism by which the human subject creates fantasy images of both himself and his ideal object of desire."</footnote>
## Session 15: Just looking?

The Emersonian gaze: “Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, —all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; all the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.” (“Nature” p.39).

*

Words and quotations from Andrew Parkinson’s “Preface” to Sylvia Wishart’s drawings: “Observational drawing” (Poetry as?); “sharpness of focus”;

“A place can often remain ill-defined until its qualities and features are drawn out, studied and re-presented through an artist’s sensibility. The familiar road, house, wall, pier, or district remains commonplace and unworthy of note until attention is arrested by the gifted artist’s pen or brush”; “creating work that reveals not only what a place looked like, but how the artist ordered her thoughts about a place on paper.”; “each drawing [poem?] documents a moment of *beholding* that Wishart experienced in the countryside; interpreting through her individual eye, mind and hand a deeply held image of place in simple pen, ink and wash.”

### From Buell’s *The Environmental Imagination*:

“Seeing things new, seeing new things, expanding the notion of community so that it becomes situated within the ecological community—these are some ways in which environmental writing can reperceive the familiar in the interest of deepening the sense of place. [...] Such devices displace in order to replace [...] they also depend heavily on metaphor, myth, and even fantasy to put readers in touch with place” (266).

## Merrill Gilfillan: “Night Sky, Pawnee Creek”

“The paradoxical simultaneity of the minute and the cosmic” (Gerhardt, 20)

The title gives us the poetic persona’s location. It is a starry night. He is looking at the reflection of Rigel, a distant star,<fnref n="34" /> on the creek’s water. The ripple caused by a swimming otter makes it look as if it was the star itself that was causing the ripple. The links between the two are tenuous. Minimal patterns underpin the flimsy connection: their respective signifiers both include a double consonant, and “ri” is common to the *look* of “Rigel” and “ripple.” The incomplete feminine rhyme<fnref n="35" /> joining “otter” to “water” is the other, more natural, association materialized in the haiku-like poem. A haiku should always include a mention of, or hint about the season. It is done here through the mention of Rigel, since Rigel is visible on winter evenings in the Northern Hemisphere.<fnref n="36" /> Then a haiku will often include a bit of an enigma, which it solves, or not. We find it in the first line here: how on earth can Rigel leave a ripple? The next two lines provide the explanation. Brief as it is, this poem clearly shows that nature writing is never just about looking. It certainly takes patience and stillness to catch such a sight. But the observer must/will always introduce some kind of *clinamen* or spin,<fnref n="37" /> as a minimal signature: that slight mark of his/her presence is here the “ripple” attributed to Rigel. Once awareness of this tiny link has hit/registered with the observer/gazer/reader, it is likely/meant to generate a ripple effect<fnref n="38" /> in their thoughts: the sublime lurks on the edges of this tiny poem.

<footnote n="34">³⁴ Rigel [’raidjeul] is a star in the constellation Orion, approximately 815 light years from Earth.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ A rhyme in which the final syllable is unstressed, as in *feather/heather*.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Culminating every year at midnight on 12 December, and at 9:00 pm on 24 January.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ “Personifying figures generally prevent fact from having the last word, as if poets using them knew that no fact were sufficient without a spiritual and in that sense symbolic spin of some kind” (Fletcher 138).</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ A ripple effect occurs when an initial disturbance to a system propagates outward to disturb an increasingly larger portion of the system, like ripples expanding across the water when an object is dropped into it.</footnote>
## Emily Dickinson: #721 "Nature is what we see"

Your typical Dickinsonian definition poem ("Amherst's other lexicographer").

Most striking about the poem is the number of dashes, visualizing the deliberate pace at which the poet's thinking seems to progress.

Dickinson never gave titles to her poem: a poem like this one makes you see why she did not. What she has to say is almost always processual. First lines are often used as titles. In this case, it would totally betray her way of thinking to use the first line as a title. The poetic persona assesses the worth of different hypotheses/claims in succession to finally arrive at a disenchanted conclusion, possibly in the form of a twist in the tail, a scorpion's tail.

Her first two hypotheses in the attempt to define/pin down the nature of nature seem to amount to saying that we cannot go beyond our experiential, sensory connection with it: sight and then hearing are put forward as best enabling us to define nature, through surfaces or sounds. A list of hand-picked examples, a few of them Dickinson's familiars ("the Bumble bee," "The Bobolink"), is given for either sense. The dash coming after each item of the list conveys that impression of careful consideration. It should first be pointed out that the lists, the one related to sight especially, include odd items: what may "see an Afternoon" mean? Then, most importantly, each list of items perceptible through a sense, is followed by a comment, a sweeping very positive/laudatory value judgment about nature ("Heaven" and "Harmony") on the speaker's part: it is as if she checked herself ("Nay" i. e. "and not only so but"), almost chided herself for having been tempted to leave her definition at such a basic level. So, the third, logical stage consists in elevating Nature to the status of an object of knowledge. But that knowledge, or "Wisdom," as she ironically puts it, is immediately devalued by the disenchanted assessment that the limitations of our language cannot express it adequately. Nature's "Sincerity" remains ineffable and elusive forever. So we may be back to square one. But not quite.

The choice of "Sincerity" to characterize Nature's most essential feature/virtue is curious and certainly worthy of note, if only on account of the first syllable of the word, "sin."

Dickinson's stern religious education must have taught her that Original Sin had to do with/ resulted from the human being's natural side/inclinations. In praising Nature for its "Sincerity," she plays at exonerating it from any sinfulness and turns the accusation upside down. If Nature is sincere, those putting it down have to be the opposite, i. e. a bunch of hypocrites. Needless to say, the final dash then becomes devastatingly ironic.

A poem she wrote in her later years (1882) encapsulates her retrospective look on the creed she was raised in:

# 1577
The Bible is an antique Volume —
Written by faded Men
At the suggestion of Holy Spectres —
Subjects — Bethlehem —
Eden — the Brigadier
Judas — the Great Defaulter —
David — the Troubadour —
Sin — a distinguished Precipice
Others must resist <fnref n="39" />—

Boys that "believe" are very lonesome —
Other Boys are "lost" —
Had but the Tale a warbling Teller —
All the Boys would come —

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Emphasis mine.</footnote>
Orpheu’s Sermon captivated —
It did not condemn —

So, why not stop at enjoying nature through the senses?

N.B.: The other version of the final line of #721 substituting “Simplicity” for “Sincerity” (see p.16 in your reader) is much blander: it simply mocks the human being’s much-vaunted intellectual grandeur which finds itself unable to express/define what he/she is closest to on a daily basis: the natural world. Needless to say, the poetic persona includes herself among the vain species. With this ending, the poem becomes a criticism of naturalism (i. e. human exceptionalism) as defined by Descola.
## Theodor Roethke: “The Rose”

The poem starts by stating the importance of place, a signature characteristic of much nature writing.

Buell has this to say: “Altogether, it seems that place consciousness in literature, and most especially the consciousness of the nonhuman environment as a network enfolding human inhabitants, ought to be considered a utopian project that realizes itself, in its more instructive forms, not as a *fait accompli* but as an incompletion undertaken in awareness that place is something we are always in the process of finding, and always perforce creating in some degree as we find it.”

The time of day is evening, sunset (17).

The poetic persona is extremely attentive to all the bird species present in the place.

Two human figures: the “I” and a “he,” (2) who is that person to whom place matters very much and who remains unidentified. The dash ending line 3 stops us from hearing what to him, makes the importance of this place.

A decentering of the “I” occurs, as, he says, he “sway[s] outside [him]self” (24) and remembers another day, at sunrise, when he “wore a crown of birds,” a happy version of Christ’s “crown of thorns.” The movement that takes the “I” out of himself echoes that of the hawks, “sway[ing] out into the wind” (4).

The mention of “driftwood” in an American poem inevitably recalls the “Sea-Drift” section of Whitman’s *Leaves of Grass*, and the poem “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” more especially, in which the poetic persona finds himself coming undone, losing a grip on himself, and the sight of sea-drift along the shore confirms the dejected assessment of himself. While that sight rather seems to accompany an uplifting experience here, the common point between Whitman’s poem and this one is that the shore, a liminal place if any, is where the revelation, the epiphany, takes place.

In section 2, the poetic persona contrasts his own ongoing rapid and easy motion with the immobility of that unidentified other person’s wild rose. Despite its motionlessness, that wild rose somehow radiates from “its true place” and holds together the network that makes this place what it is. We are given a possible hint as regards the third-person pronoun reference: here and in section 1, “he” may refer to the speaker’s father, a horticulturist, a man working in “greenhouses,” interested in developing “hybrids,” and so not associated with pristine nature. His son’s memory pictures him “astride the cement benches” (60), thus associating him with a man-made matter/material, most inimical to nature. A question arises: how can he be the man growing roses and that of the “single wild rose” in the sea-wind?

Yet the greenhouses full of roses sound like the happiest of childhood memories as the poetic persona associates them with being held in his father’s arms: “What need for heaven, then.” (64)

The sight of all those roses was another time, may be the first time, the speaker had felt pulled out of himself, beckoned out of himself. (62-63)

While sections 1 and 2 are sight-dominated, section 3 is a symphony of “American sounds” (70) in which man-made sounds blend with natural ones harmoniously, verifying Leo Marx’s notion of “the machine in the garden” as a defining feature of American culture.
The perfect blend of nature and artefact (i. e. anything man-made) is suggested by the Whitmanesque list of sounds ‘see “Song of Myself,” sections 8 and 26⁴⁰: “The wind-harps<fnref n="41" /> having their say” (71), “The thin whine of telephone wires in the wind of a Michigan winter” (80). The perfect blending is described as not just **auditory**, but also as an experience of synesthesia (“that rare neurological condition which stimulates one sensory or cognitive pathway to a second sensory or cognitive pathway,” much favored by poets.): “And that sound, that single sound,/ When the mind remembers all,/ And gently the light enters the sleeping soul,/ A sound so thin it could not woo a bird.” (85-88) The human mind remains central as ‘synthesizer.’ The “I’s” prominence as the origin of “thought” is made clear on two occasions: 1. 70 & 91. The line that stands alone in section 3 celebrates the poet’s desire and seems to confirm in the speaker a naturalist’s view of the human being as unique. His desire, like a Deleuzian plane of consistency, is what informs and unifies his thoughts about nature. Unlike section 1 that takes place at sunset, the focus of the poet’s thoughts in the final cluster of section 3, is a moment just before daybreak, in which every thing seems to be about expectancy, as conveyed by the mention of that “drop of rain water [that] hangs at the tip of a leaf/ Shifting in the wakening sunlight” (99-100): the centrality of sight has returned, as suggested by the simile which concludes section 3, comparing the drop of rain to “the eye of a new-caught fish.” A Transcendentalist’s approach: “he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet” (Emerson, “Nature,” p.38).

Section 4 returns to the shore of section 1 whose liminality the speaker had stressed: “his place, where sea and fresh water meet” (2), and where “the tide rises up against the grass/ Nibbled by sheep and rabbits” (10). It is stressed again here as a place with “fringes,” “edges,” “[w]here the salmon,” a species at ease in fresh and sea water alike, “ease their way into the kelp beds” (112). It is actually not the shore itself but a more peaceful place, where the toppling waves do not crash, a place among rocks, neither chaotic nor completely orderly, a place in which a new order is taking shape: “And the sea rearranges itself among the small islands” (113). It is an imperfect place, with “weeds”, “holes” and “sea-slime.” Still, it is the place where, the speaker tells us, “I came upon the true ease of myself,/ As if another man appeared out of the depths of my being,/ And I stood outside myself” (116-118). “He” has vanished. Now “I” is the one to whom this place is important. It is tempting to think that “he” at the outset of the poem and in the central cluster of section 2, was the image of an “I” at odds with himself and that reconciliation has now taken place. The former outings out of himself had been tentative. The one that took place near the “rose in the sea-wind” brought the process to completion, a happy completion. That sea-change, that watershed moment, was powerful enough to make him unidentifiable to himself at first, “A something wholly other” (120); but then his reconciled self made him feel at one with all natural kingdoms on earth: the vegetable kingdom, the animal kingdom (all ‘tribes’ of it, on the earth, in the air or the water), the mineral kingdom, so all beings and locations listed in the previous three sections.

The rose, as in Dante’s *Paradise*, symbolizes perfect harmony, a beautiful gathering of opposites (air and stone, sound and silence, he and the sea-wind) achieved under the distant sign of the poet’s father, the horticulturist. But there is a major difference: the son’s rose stands in the sea wind, not in a greenhouse. In being what it is, it is more inclusive. This poem can be regarded as the best evidence of the enlarged self the poet has evolved.

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ “Now I will do nothing but listen, / To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it./ I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals./ I hear the sound of love, the sound of the human voice” “Song of Myself,” #26.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ Another name for it is the Aeolian harp, “an instrument consisting of an open box over which are stretched strings that sound when the wind passes over them,” frequently referred to in English Romantic poetry as exemplifying the pure voice of nature.</footnote>
Although by no means an environmentalist poem, “The Rose” is a kind of half-way house between hard naturalism and a blend of the other types of cosmologies singled out by Descola. Through the attention it pays to a specific place, and the massive way these natural surroundings (inclusive of its non-human inhabitants) tie into a specific human being’s development, it verges on analogism (as the microcosm of the place reconciles him with the whole of creation) but the self-discovery process detailed by the poem links it with totemism (the rose being the totem).

So, to contradict Emily Dickinson, Nature is not just what we see. Nature is also what it does to and ‘for’ us and, as we have all realized by now, it will increasingly be what we do to it. As regards poetry, and to prove Emily right this time, never fail to run a poem (yours or someone else’s) through her personal test of poetry: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?” (from one of her letters) Thank you very much.

## ADDENDA

Snyder’s: “‘Poetry’ as the skilled and inspired use of the voice and language to embody rare and powerful states of mind that are in immediate origin personal to the singer” (*Earth House Hold* 117).

*

Genette’s: “Poetic language reveals here, it seems to me, its true ‘structure,’ which is not to be a particular *form*, but rather a *state*, a degree of presence and intensity to which any statement may be led, so to speak, on condition that there is established around it a *margin of silence* which isolates it from its surroundings (but not from the gap) of everyday speech” (quoted in Fletcher 164).

*

Ecopoetry is defined by Bryson as “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 characteristics. The first is an emphasis on maintaining an ecocentric perspective that recognizes the interdependent nature of the world; [...] an imperative toward humility in relationships with both human and non-human nature [and] an intense skepticism concerning hyperrationality, a skepticism that usually leads to an indictment of an overtechnologized modern world and a warning concerning the very potential for ecological catastrophe (J. Scott Bryson, *Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction*, Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2002, 5-6, quoted in “‘All equal, far reaches, no bounds.’: Exploring and Redefining the American Space through Gary Snyder’s Wild Ecopoetry” by Pauline Boisgerault, *RFEA* n°163, 2ème trimestre 2020, 98-113).
COURSE READER<fnref n="42" />

TABLE OF CONTENTS

<footnote n="42">⁴² All the sources used for this course reader are listed on pp.</footnote>
From Lucretius's *De Rerum Natura* 109-110

From Angus Fletcher's *A New Theory for American Poetry* 110

From Philippe Descola's *Beyond Nature and Culture* 111-114

From Jed Rasula's *This Compost* 114-117

Dale Jacobson's e-mail message to Vincent Dussol
[117-118

From Christine Gerhardt's *A Place for Humility*
[118-121

John Shoptaw: "Why Ecopoetry?" 121-130

Walt Whitman (1809-1892):

"Song of Myself", section 31: 131

"As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of
[Life" 131-133

"A Noiseless Patient Spider" 134

"The Dalliance of the Eagles" 134

"As Consequent, Etc." 134-135

"This Compost" 135-136

"The First Dandelion" 137

"The Voice of the Rain" 137

Emily Dickinson: (1830-1886)

"The Grass so little has to do -"
[138

"'Nature' is what we see -" 138

"Within my Garden, rides a
[Bird] 138-139

"Nature, the Gentlest Mother is"
[139

"Four Trees - opon a solitary
[Acre -" 140

"To see the Summer Sky" 140

Robert Frost: (1874-1963) "The Bear" 141

William Carlos Williams: (1883-1963)

"A Sort Of A Song" 142

Marianne Moore: (1887-1972)

"The Pangolin" 143-145

Robinson Jeffers: (1887-1962) "Vulture" 146

e.e. cummings: (1894-1962) "l(a"; "Beautiful" 147

Don Gordon: (1902-1989) "On the Border" 148

Lorine Niedecker: ((1903-1970)

"Paean to Place" 149-154

"Darwin" 155-157

Kenneth Rexroth: (1905-1982)

"Lyell's Hypothesis Again"
[158-159

Theodore Roethke: (1908-1963) "The Rose" 160-
[162

Elizabeth Bishop: (1911-1979) "The Moose" 163-
166

Thomas McGrath: (1916-1990) "Praises" 167

Philip Whalen: (1923-2002)

"Monday in the Evening" 168-169

Lew Welch: (1926-1971)

"Song of the Turkey Buzzard" 170-172

"Springtime in the Rockies, Lichen"
[173

William S. Merwin: (1927-2019)

"Forgotten Fountain" 174

"For a Coming Extinction" 175

Gary Snyder: (b. 1930)

"Straight Creek—Great Burn" 176-
[177

"For all" 177

John Wieners: (1934-2002)

"At Big Sur" 178

"Private Estate" 178

Chuck Miller: (b. 1939)

"global warming" 179

"tree souls" 180

"for Joe" 181-182

Ed Roberson: (b. 1940)

"be careful" 183

"We Must Be Careful" 183-184

"Urban Nature" 185

"The Social Distance" 185

Robert Hass: (b. 1941)

"Ezra Pound's Proposition" 186

William Matthews: (1942-1997)

"The Bear at the Dump" 187

Merrill Gilfillan: (b. 1945)

"Night Sky, Pawnee Creek" 188

"Suddenly in the Sky" 188

Carol Ciavonne: (b. 1949)

"Statement of Belief" 189

Jorie Graham: (b. 1950) "The Geese" 190

Nin Andrews: (b. 1958)

"For I Will Consider Fracking" 191-192

Eleni Sikelianos: (b. 1965)

from *The California Poem* 193-200

"Making the Bird Happy" 201

"The Wind Is" 201

A montage drawn from *Make Yourself Happy*: 202

Timothy Liu: (b. 1965) "The Crisis" 203

Juliana Spahr: (b. 1966)

"Gentle Now, Don't Add to Heartache" 204-211

Natasha Trethewey: (b. 1966) "Liturgy" 212

Dre Cardinal: (?) "Trash" 213
Response to mutter: Those who pull a face at the mention of “Nature” are uncannily like those
who pull one at the mention of “Poetry” and reacting from an identical skewed hearsay:
Blind Spot Sanctified.

Merrill Gilfillan, *The Seasons* (2002), p.119.

how to do stress wood without/ the tiniest breeze (where the tree's flesh responds/ to wind, or
snow, gravity, and ground-shifts, goes tough/ and keeps the tree up) in the vivarium?//
stress word shift this this”

Eleni Sikelianos, *Make Yourself Happy* (2017), p.129

From LUCRETIUS, *The Poem on Nature, De Rerum Natura*, Tr. C. H. Sisson, Fyfield Books,
Carcanet, 1976, 2003.

[...] so many particles are combined
In so many ways in all the creatures there are
That different things have need of such different nourishments.
And it is significant just what the mixture is,
As well as how the particles are arranged
And what the pattern of movement is among them.
For the particles are the same in sky, sea, rivers,
Earth, sun, all crops, all trees, all living things,
But in different patterns and moving in different ways.
It is not so different as you might think with verses,
For so many letters are common to so many words,
Yet the words and verses differ from one another
And that is true of meaning as well as sound,
And this is only a change in the order of elements;
The variations for particles are more numerous
And so make all variations in nature.
(36)

Now perhaps you will see — as I have already explained it —
Why it matters so much how the particles lie,
In what position, or how they push one another?
With very small changes the identical particles
Make wood or fire, just as, you may say, the same letters
— Or almost the same — will produce the words *fir* or *fire*,
With different sounds and certainly different meanings.
(38)

[...] things indeed are made up of a mixture of elements.

And so of course it is in these very verses,
For many letters are common to many words
And yet you have to admit both the words and the verses
Differ clearly enough and are made of different elements:
No two are of identical composition
But as a rule they do not all resemble each other.
And so in other things there are common elements
But that does not mean that, looked at as a whole,
They do not differ widely from one another.

(62)

*

From Angus FLETCHER, *A New Theory for American Poetry*, Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press, 2004.

Fletcher offers several definitions of the *environment-poem*: “a genre where the poet neither writes *about* the surrounding world, thematizing it, nor analytically represents that world, but actually shapes the poem to *be* an Emersonian or esemplastic circle. Deeply influenced by Emerson, in Whitman’s case, these environment-poems aspire to surround the reader, such that to read them is to have an experience much like suddenly recognizing that one actually has an environment, instead of not perceiving the surround at all.”

(9)

“The environment-poem bridges the gap between the opaque thingness of nature lying ‘out there,’ and the philosophical and scientific access we gain by developing terms, formulas, explanations, and theories of the order and meaning hidden within that opaque nature.”

(11-12)

“[E]nvironments are a special kind of natural ensemble, where drama and story are not the issue, where emotion is subordinate to the presentation of the aggregate relations of all participants, rather than the striking enhancement of singular or single heroes and heroines” (123). [The environment-poem] “evinces a careless want of traditional form, rejecting hierarchical shapes and grammars. We might say that its democracy is shapeless” (123), “as if such a poetics could subtract the oneness from the One” (135).

“[T]his form [...] rarely or perhaps never presents an Aristotelian plot or *praxis*, with its strong sequential causality, but instead has an encircling, almost spatial character, like that of a good map, which arises from a different mode of action – the discovery of the surround” (232).

“The environment-poem is the opposite of, or requires an opposition to allegory” (237).

“To render and convince us vividly that any environment exists, the writer must always connect the elements of the scene with humans. [“There has to be the human integer in this equation” 234.] Indeed for poetry, unlike science, human belonging and not belonging is the criterion for membership in any environment, and all environment-poems strive to present this structure on two levels: (1) the poetry will express the mere existence of those creatures who belong or do not belong, and (2) it will show how this belonging occurs, especially tracing the boundaries that define inclusion and exclusion. In widening circles of analysis, this poetry therefore defines boundaries, edges, hedges, and horizons. The least creature among the flora and fauna, “rolled round in earth’s diurnal course/ With rocks and stones and trees,” belongs in the manifold and deserves its space, so that the poet’s almost unimaginable chorographic persona must be that of a second creator, a demiurge of the scene” (Fletcher 127-128).
From Philippe DESCOLA, *Beyond Nature and Culture* (2005), Tr. Janet Lloyd, University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Descola's four types of cosmology

1. Animism

For the Achuar<fnref n="43" />, technical know-how is indissociable from an ability to create an intersubjective ambience in which regulated relations between one person and another flourish: relations between a hunter, animals, and the spirits that are the masters of hunted game; between the women, the garden plants, and the mythical figure that engendered the cultivated species in the first place and continues to the present day to ensure their vitality. Far from being no more than prosaic food-producing places, the forest and the cultivated plots constitute theaters of a subtle sociability within which, day after day, humans engage in cajoling beings distinguishable from humans only by their different physical aspects and their lack of language. However, the forms of this sociability differ depending on whether it is directed toward plants or toward animals. The women, who are the mistresses of the gardens to which they devote much of their time, address their cultivated plants as though they are children that need to be guided with a firm hand toward maturity. This mothering relationship is explicitly modeled on the guardianship that Nunkui, the spirit of the gardens, provides for the plants that she herself initially created. Meanwhile, the men, for their part, regard an animal that they hunt as a brother-in-law. This is an unstable and tricky relationship that demands mutual respect and circumspection. Political coalitions are in general based upon alliances with relatives by marriage, but these are also the most immediate enemies in vendettas. Blood relatives and relatives by marriage constitute the two mutually exclusive categories that govern the social classification of the Achuar and determine their relationships with one another; and the opposition between the two is reproduced in the conduct prescribed toward nonhumans. For the women, their plants are blood relatives; for the men, animals are relatives by marriage: the natural beings thus become real social partners.

But in these circumstances, is the description of “natural beings” any more than a linguistic convenience? Is there any place for nature in a cosmology that confers most of the attributes of human beings upon animals and plants? Can one speak of the appropriation or transformation of natural resources when the very activities favoring subsistence are regarded as one form of a multiplicity of individual pairings with humanized elements in the biosphere? Can one even describe as a “wild space” this forest that is barely touched by the Achuar, yet that they regard as an immense garden that is carefully cultivated by some spirit? A thousand leagues distant from Verlaine’s “fierce and taciturn god,” here nature is no transcendent element nor simply an object that needs to be socialized. Rather, it is a subject in a social relationship. It is an extension of the world of the homestead, and in truth it is domesticated even in its most inaccessible reaches.

The Achuar certainly draw distinctions between the entities by which the world is peopled. But the hierarchy of animate and inanimate objects that results is not based upon the degrees of perfection of the beings in question or upon the differences in their appearance or any progressive accumulation of their respective intrinsic properties. Rather, it is based upon the variations in the modes of communication that are made possible by an apprehension of perceived qualities that are unequally distributed. In that the category of “persons” includes spirits, plants, and animals, all of which are endowed with a soul, this cosmology does not discriminate between human beings and nonhuman beings. All that it does is create a

<footnote n="43">⁴³ An Amazonian community of some 18,500 individuals along either side of the border in between Ecuador and Peru.</footnote>
hierarchical order according to the levels of the exchange of information that is reputed to be
possible.

(16)<fnref n="44" />

If one strips the definition of animism of its sociological correlations, there remains one
characteristic that everybody can accept and that the etymology of the term indicates, which is
why I chose to preserve it despite the dubious uses made of it in the past. That characteristic is
the attribution by humans to nonhumans of an interiority identical to their own. This
attribution humanizes plants and, above all, animals, since the soul with which it endows them
allows them not only to behave in conformity with the social norms and ethical precepts of
humans but also to establish communicative relations both with humans and among
themselves. This similarity of interiorities justifies extending a state of “culture” to
nonhumans, together with all the attributes that this implies, ranging from intersubjectivity to
a mastery of techniques and including ritualized conduct and deference to conventions. All
the same, this humanization is not complete, since in animist systems these, as it were,
humans in disguise (i.e., the plants and animals) are distinct from humans precisely by reason
of their outward apparel of feathers, fur, scales, or bark—in other words, their physicality.

(70)

## 2. Totemism

[T]he identity of the totemic group is founded upon a specific collection of physical and moral attributes shared by all its members, whether human or nonhuman. This constitutes a kind of ontological prototype of which the totemic species constitutes the emblematic expression, not the concrete prototype, from which those qualities are derived.

(83)

[I]n animist systems, human and animal persons are clearly distinguished, and it is precisely this that makes it possible to construct a wide range of dyadic relations between the two kinds of individuals. In contrast, an Australian sorcerer's person seems completely fused with the animal species that he has adopted as his totem. The essence of that species has become his own essence, and he himself physically feels everything that affects any member of the animal group whose destiny he has now espoused. So here, it is not a matter of an alliance or a contract of assistance between the sorcerer and his totemic species. Instead, a hybridization is both sought and assumed [...].

(79)

Far from mutually apprehending each other as subjects engaged in a social relationship,
humans and nonhumans are merely particularized materializations of classes of properties that
transcend their own existences.

(86)

[E]ach group of humans claims to share with a group of nonhumans a collection of physical
and psychic dispositions that distinguishes them, as an ontological class, from others.

(87)

## 3. Naturalism

Faced with the combined evidence of, on the one hand, physical similarities and, on the other
hand, differences in their respective dispositions and aptitudes, the opportunities that a
naturalist ontology offers for comparative speculation are strictly limited. One can either
underline the connection between humans and animals mediated by their biological attributes

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ Page references refer to an online copy of Descola’s book at https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/438860/mod_resource/content/1/Descola%20Beyond%20Nature%20and%20Culture%202013.pdf</footnote>
(if necessary, adding a more or less large dose of common internal faculties to make the transition more gradual), or else one can relegate that physical continuity to the background and lay the emphasis primarily on the exceptional nature of the internal attributes by which humans are distinguishable from other existing beings. In the West, it is the second of those two attitudes that has for a long time prevailed and that is still largely dominant when it comes to defining the essence of humanity. As Ingold rightly points out, philosophers have seldom asked, “What makes humans animals of a particular kind?,” the typical preferred question about naturalism being “What makes humans different in kind from animals?” In the first of those questions, humanity is a particular form of animality defined by membership in the *Homo sapiens* species; in the second it is an exclusive state, a self-referential principle, a moral condition.

(91)

So it is not hard to imagine the astonishment of a Jivaro, a Cree, or a Chewong when faced with this strange, shifting human figure. They might well say, “How can you not see that our bodies and behavior patterns are very different from those of other organisms, even if they are made up of identical substances? And how can you be sure that animals do not possess an interiority identical to our own, even if we never catch them talking? Why should reflective consciousness, intentionality, and a moral and civil sense be limited to the human species, when so many indications show us that that is not the case?” An Australian Aboriginal might be just as puzzled, albeit for other reasons. “Why attach such importance to the literality of things?” he might say. “Why concentrate on the superficial differences of forms and capacities between existing beings when it is far simpler to think, rather in the manner of that Greek philosopher whom you rate so highly, that the world has always been divided into a whole collection of physical prototypes and spiritual generators of specific qualities, all of them fertile sources that bring forth those great aggregates of humans and nonhumans that you call hybrids simply because your ontological classifications differ from ours?”

(92)

## 4. Analogism

By this I mean a mode of identification that divides up the whole collection of existing beings into a multiplicity of essences, forms, and substances separated by small distinctions and sometimes arranged on a graduated scale so that it becomes possible to recompose the system of initial contrasts into a dense network of analogies that link together the intrinsic properties of the entities that are distinguished in it. This way of distributing the differences and correspondences detectable on the world's surface is very common. For example, it finds expression in the correlations between microcosms and macrocosms that are established by Chinese geomancy and divination, in the idea, common in Africa, that social disorders are capable of provoking climatic catastrophes [...)

[A]nalogy is a hermeneutic dream of plenitude that arises out of a sense of dissatisfaction. Noting that the general segmentation of the world's components is based on a scale of small differences, it nurtures the hope of weaving these slightly heterogeneous elements into a web of meaningful affinities and attractions that gives the appearance of constituting a continuity.

(102)

As for the topographical aspect, considered as an ontological attribute, this follows from the fact that every existing being must occupy a place appropriate to its identity, in both physical space and social space. This is well illustrated by the meaning of the [Nahuatl] term [for] “misfortune” (*aompayotl*); literally, it is “the condition of something outside of its place.” It is worth noting that the physical determination of the entities of the world by the position that is assigned to them also appears in ancient China, where space was considered, not simply as an
extension resulting from the juxtaposition of homogeneous parts, but as a collection of concrete sites that served to classify beings and things from the point of view of action. Using position in space as an additional means of particularizing each existing thing seems to be a common feature of most analogical systems.

(106)

RASULA, Jed, *This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry*, University of Georgia Press, 2012.

p.26-27

Place nourishes transformation. Each place is a place, with its own bio-anatomy of stability and transfiguration. A place is not “anywhere”: it is always *here*. This is what the European settlement of the Americas refused to concede, and such imaginative parsimony was the principle by which Columbus troped Caribs into Indians. Tzvetan Todorov notes that by imposing themselves militarily on native populations, the European conquistadors “destroyed their own capacity to integrate themselves into the world.” By this he means that a particular hermeneutic circle was closed: just as global circumnavigation returns all travelers home in the end, military authority ensures that all communications are returned to sender, secured in the language of domination.

[T]here exist two major forms of communication, one between man and man, the other between man and the world.... We are accustomed to conceiving of communication as only interhuman, for since the “world” is not a subject, our dialogue with it is quite asymmetrical (if there is any such dialogue at all) (*Conquest of America*, 97)

The world viewed as unresponsive object forecloses earth as place or home from any but the most mercantile considerations. The manifest resistance of America's places to such calculation appeared to the settlers in the form of Indians. These people were not recognized as “natives” because their habitation of the land didn't conform to European habits of soil dependency. They were therefore disposable: human weeds impending cultivation. But as Todorov suggests, the main strike against them was the innate bias of their own communication axis, which privileged dialogue with an articulate natural world over interhuman exchange. European travelers returned home with enslaved Americans in tow, to be displayed in the metropole as pure ciphers of difference, parts of speech bereft of context, living verbs shorn of scholastic declensions. They were not solicited for what they might know, but exhibited as mute artifacts, *tableaux vivants*. By this means Europeans spurned the tropological lesson that the world in another's language is another world. Rather than being an animate environment, the “New World” was simply a less defiled—if more unruly—version of the Old World.

Wallace Stevens's Crispin is a figure of the colonial imagination wrestling a space for itself out of tropic wilderness. “The Comedian as the Letter C” opens with a proposition: “Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil,/ The sovereign ghost.... As he encounters “the fecund minimum” in the tropics, Crispin readjusts his principle: “Nota: his soil is man’s intelligence. / That’s better. That’s worth crossing seas to find.” Yet this is but the Satanic temptation of man conceived as steward of earth, restlessly seeking “A still new continent in which to dwell,” because “the purpose of his pilgrimage/ . . . [is] to drive away/ The shadow of his fellows from the skies.”<fnref n="45" />

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ See how Descola pairs off animism and naturalism.</footnote>
p.39-40

From the mute bodies of exhumed bog people (victims by hanging) to the ceremonial transit in a death barge, D.H. Lawrence's "Ship of Death," "Bavarian Gentians," and the rest of his *Last Poems*, or Whitman's late "little tags and fringe-dots (maybe specks, stains)" and Dickinson's "Goblin—on the Bloom" (no. 757), there is a fitful alliance of writing with mortuary circumstance, at once commemoration and indictment, celebration and dispatch. There is a sense with the exhumed bodies of Egyptian kings—in vaults filled with trunks of books, the walls of the vaults covered with writing, the kings’ bodies wrapped in discarded papyrus—that the bodies *are writing* [...].

The dead that persist in books: this is what religious teachings commonly report and verify. Earlier Egyptian and Mesopotamian scriptural and burial practices indicate that an entire library is required for the passage into death. Writing commemorates a relationship to death, a faith in the transmissibility of the dead psyche (or breath-soul) through association with the logos, that break in the flow that spurts, leaks, stains, ruptures into sediment. The dead are a library, a fulcrum of layers that unfold, unwrap, *untomb*. The interanimating negotiation of those apparently opposing principles, life and death, is made pliable to the mind in Lucretius's fecund concept of the *clinamen*, or unaccountable swerve of the atoms plummeting through the void. The swerve affords contact between them [...]. The swerving atom endows a turbulent pocket, a cove or shelter of generation. These pockets are pleats of the manifold, the creases through which nature increases (the *pli* in complication, explication, application) in clump and clot. Clinamen: tiniest aperture opening on animation.

p.40-41

It may be through Heraclitus [...] that we can trace the origin of *psyche* as the conceptual animation of a subhuman continuity through this rumored difficult domain of the imponderably small. Heraclitus is unique among his contemporaries in taking psyche to be something other than a synonym for any of the general "soul words" (*thumos, menos, etor, ker, kradin, noos, phrenes*). Among Heraclitus's esoteric resources were the visionary topographies of Persia and India, enabling him to speak of psyche in such a way as to imply "a connection between the soul as the psychological animator and the cosmic processes to which, in that capacity, it is plainly analogized" (David B. Claus, *Toward the Soul: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Ψυχή before Plato*, Yale University Press, 1981, p.127). [...]

Heraclitus and the atomist philosopher-poets of the sixth century B.C. lived at the end of a civilization longer than that which the Christian West can claim for itself. Their relation to the mutation of lore and text in religious dogma, shrines and oracles, mysteries and myths may have encouraged an awareness that human perception registers with certain evident restrictions: we see something too far away to make out, hear something too faintly to know the words, touch too small a surface to know what we touch. By such analogies analytic thought was first imagined; by intuitions developed into the mutable world, on the principle (everywhere abundantly illustrated) that all organic matter cycles through compost, some could imagine these words that were by no means abstractions (or generalizations), but attempts at indicating specifics beyond the capacity of the isolate human perceptual apparatus to verify. They imagined all to be composed of atoms, they imagined the earth was round; they imagined words so deep nobody could ascertain their limits, and breath-potency so persistent it could survive the mortal body as logos or psyche—but only in a cosmos, a place where such minute imponderable contingencies could register as continuities (where truth must dazzle gradually, as Dickinson puts it [no. 1263]. This is—enlarged to a universal frame—the library, where all is stored consequentially [...].
Memoranda and signatures

Order is relative.

'An apparent confusion if lived with long enough
May become orderly'. Charles Ives

... accumulating,

a humus! (The upper strata—dry, newly-
fallen leaves, twigs, lichen.
Seeds from the size of the whispered dandelion, to
acorns
big as thumbs

This passage (from Ronald Johnson's "The Different Musics" [in *The Valley of the Many-colored Grasses*, 1969, as all subsequent quotations from Johnson in this extract]) continues in a scrupulous documentation of layers of disintegration, to "the under-ooze and loose loam of slug & worm."

... to find, out of the design,
words may be pulled up
like onions, a humus still
clinging to them, sweet to the taste—
nutty & fragrant.

One way that nuttiness and fragrance is plucked is in the hybrid medium of the anatomized citation (made even sweeter here in a palimpsest of Emerson on Goethe):

All things
are engaged in writing their history.<fnref n="46" />

The air is

full of sounds;

the sky, of tokens;

the ground is all memoranda & signatures

& every object

covered over with hints

which speak

to the intelligent.

[...] Johnson fancies himself, like Thoreau,

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ history the dark crumble

of last year's compost
filtering softly through your living hand</footnote>
... engrossed,

'between a microscopic & a telescopic
world',

attempting to read

the twigged, branchy writing

of frost, spider & galactic cluster.

[...] Entities appear as transcarnate compassions. And companions—as the implicate order in the “Dizzy ravine” of “Mont Blanc” provokes Michael McClure’s consideration that “These lines seem to be the energy of the universe expressing itself upon the complex organism of Shelley’s body as if he were a typewriter of protein spirit” (*Scratching the Beat Surface*, 67).

[...] “If I am overflowing with life,” Thoreau discovers in a journal entry (day 10, 1853), “all nature will *fable* and every natural phenomenon will be a myth.” Everything signifies. Every signature applies. The sign *has* a nature.

p.153-154

[T]he catalog of American poetry pledged to some version of *De Rerum natura* is copious and diverse. Newton Arvin offers the attractive parallel that Emerson was to Whitman what Epicurus was to Lucretius. The Lucretian epicureanism of Whitman seems a plausible source for the fully manifest *Leaves of Grass* of 1855, prior to which he wrote undistinguished verse in the idiom of his day. As immediate foreground, Whitman had in fact been patiently transcribing into his notebooks (seedbeds for his new poetry) a thematized summary of the Reverend J.S. Watson’s translation of *De Rerum natura* published in 1851. The catalog rhetoric so conspicuous in Whitman is comparably profuse in the Roman poet. But the single most decisive gift of Lucretius to Whitman, and the ongoing legacy of composting poetry, is his vision of human life fully absorbed into the atomic fabric of the cosmos, a scene of propagations and admixtures inclusive of all creaturely life, but enfolding it in a plenitude far exceeding the bounds of sentience.

> Time was we were molten, time was we were vapor.
> What set us on fire and what set us revolving
> Lucretius the Epicurean might tell us

This is Frost in “Too Anxious for Rivers.” The lines might have been by Jeffers; but Frost too went west with his Lucretius. Asked what book he’d take to a desert island, Frost replied, “Well, once I came out to Monrovia, California, and I brought along a single book you could never guess. It was a book of Lucretius’s poems [sic] in Latin”. What Frost retains from *De Rerum natura* is not the Whitmanian catalog of metamorphoses and interpenetrating life cycles, but the sense of nature as trickster [...].

*

Dale Jacobson’s e-mail message to V. Dussol, 14/05/2007 22:52.

Yes, the Earth will save us. Pursue that concept, the intelligence behind nature. This is increasingly clear. I see it everywhere! They sing this mantra in New Orleans daily. They don't call Californian culture "new age" for nothing. What I don't understand is why human
intelligence is somehow NOT nature's intelligence. After all, where did human beings come
from?

[I]t seems to me that if any tradition of poetry in America has consistently been interested in
not exploiting nature, it has been the political one, "the dust migrating from the exploited
earth..."

*

From Christine GERHARDT, *A Place for Humility: Whitman, Dickinson, and the Natural World*. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2014.

p.221-226 (The conclusion to the book)

The main point of the readings I have offered is that Dickinson’s and Whitman’s widely
divergent bodies of poetry share a fundamental interest in imagining more equitable
relationships with the natural world, an interest that specifically responds to a number of
nineteenth-century environmental discourses. In many ways their related poetic projects are
so deeply resonant with the development of modern environmental consciousness that they
mark a foundational moment in the history of American environmental literature. Together,
Dickinson and Whitman have contributed to the creation of a lyrical idiom that brings nature
as autonomous subject matter, a nature-oriented aesthetic, and ethics into a dynamic
interrelationship that propels the poetic speaker toward rethinking our conflicted ways of
being in the world. Reading them against their culture’s upsurge of proto-ecological sciences,
natural history prose, and popular environmental concern reveals with particular saliency how
their poems absorb and also revise the shifting environmental perspectives of their time. This
is true even though, or precisely because, they do so in works whose significance reaches far
beyond their eco-ethical implications.

“‘Nature’ is what we see — / The Hill — the Afternoon — / Squirrel — Eclipse — the Bumble bee —” (#721), Dickinson wrote, letting her lyrical definition of nature start out from the tension between the mind’s creative faculties and its embrace of the world’s physical diversity. The preceding chapters have shown that the green resonances of Dickinson’s and Whitman’s poetry often begin with such a move of making room for sincere attentiveness to natural phenomena, in conjunction with their overarching concerns with perception, language, and the self. Both poets seek to talk about nature and human-nonhuman relationships as they are specific to particular natural and cultural contexts in a language “proportionate to Nature,” developing a differentiated poetics of place that is responsive to the environmental debates of their historical moment while reaching far beyond them.

For example, on the microscale, Dickinson’s snapshots of seemingly “needless” creatures
bring the language and perspectives of the emerging proto-ecological sciences together with
sentimental discourses, forging an idiosyncratic poetic language that not only amplifies
certain concerns of taxonomy, botanic, and ornithology but also revises the limiting
identification of women with (small) nature through an aesthetic that empowers the natural
environment. Whitman’s poetry, too, echoes the time’s scientifically informed attention to
previously overlooked life-forms, in numerous lines on weeds and insects that often serve as
remedial gestures and link the speaker’s transcendental urge to subtle critique of ecological
myopia. At the same time, their quick gestures of noticing selected small phenomena also
respond to the scientific challenge of dealing with a wealth of physiological detail by means
of nuanced lyrical modes of their own. Similarly, on the local scale, their poems engage the
descriptive mode of environmentally oriented nature essayists, in particular, and devise
different yet related poetic descriptions of familiar naturescapes that relatively de-center the
human observer. On the regional scale, they access their culture’s conflicting narratives about
how to relate to nature as resource or value and thus indirectly talk back to emerging
conservationist debates. And on the global scale, they envision the earth in ways that face the
challenge of making an unfathomably vast entity graspable by grounding their work in a more
empirical understanding of nature's smaller realms, as well as by imagining personal
relationships with the earth, taking up perspectives of the time's globally oriented scientists
and conservationists. Across all scales, Dickinson and Whitman develop poetic strategies that
connect the transcendent and metaphysical with the concrete, corporeal encounter between
self and nature as it is specific to particular geographies, yielding a differentiated and
environmentally resonant poetics of place that is an integral part of their overall aesthetic
achievement.

Throughout the previous chapters I have also argued that apart from their shared
investment in turning toward specific natural phenomena and human-nature relations, the
environmental resonance of Dickinson's and Whitman's poetry is vitally linked to how they
face the ineffability of the nonhuman world. As Dickinson writes in the final stanza of her
"definition" of nature:

Nature is what we know —
Yet have no art to say —
So impotent Our Wisdom is
To her Simplicity.

In Dickinson’s and Whitman’s poetry, the insight into nature’s alterity goes beyond
confronting the limited ability of language, even lyrical language, to grasp or embody the
phenomenal world. Dickinson and Whitman frequently express a sense of humans as being
always outside of and apart from nature and thus not essentially incapable of knowing nature
but also potentially disruptive and appropriative. Yet both of them keep attempting the
impossible to carve out a language that allows their speakers to relate to nature in
nondominating ways. In this they again echo perspectives, or rather a profound dilemma, that
permeated the environmental discussions around them, while their finely modulated lyrical
language moves beyond the edge of what most natural scientists, activists, and essayists
would be interested in or could afford to explore.

On the microlevel, this becomes manifest in their speakers' attempts to move close to and
identify with specific natural phenomena and become like them to the point that human
subjectivity is allowed to dissolve. Yet such dissolution into nature comes with the realization
that even at the point of death, language can never bridge the gap, never overcome nature's
alterity or undo the mechanisms of control inherent in the act of speaking. On the local level,
Dickinson and Whitman similarly try to familiarize nature, often through ecologically
resonant household metaphors or notions of organicism, while also granting the land a
dynamic presence that ultimately unsettles such attempts. At the same time, the two poets'
revisions of popular forms of nature description, to the point of writing the speaker's
linguistic agency almost completely out of the scene, cannot keep them from asserting
symbolic power over the object of description. On all geographic scales, their poems push
toward an idiom that attempts to speak about nature or let nature speak itself by minimizing
linguistic mastery, while communicating the dilemma that even in the most radical linguistic
self-effacement, elimination of all human control is impossible.

The term I have found most appropriate in talking about the epistemological and ethical
import of Dickinson's and Whitman's nature-oriented poetry is humility. While the concept
may seem fraught with outdated notions of human conduct, its groundedness in the nineteenth
century also serves as a conceptual bridge between the ethical assumptions that guided
environmentally oriented debates of Dickinson's and Whitman's time and their equivalents
today. It has been my argument throughout that humility as it figures in Dickinson's and
Whitman's nature-related poetry reconfigures traditional virtues as eco-ethical positions in
ways that enter into a conversation with the environmental debates of their time while also pointing forward to twentieth- and twenty-first-century green discourses, especially debates around eco- and anthropocentrism.

Dickinson and Whitman enter this conversation from different positions. To Dickinson's female speakers, gestures of nature-centeredness are more readily available than for her male contemporaries, by way of the gendered notion of modesty that was so central to standard concepts of nineteenth-century womanhood. However, this nexus between environmental humility and conventional feminine modesty renders Dickinson's "bashful" regard for nature also more at risk of collapsing back into conventional female domesticity and self-effacement, quite remote from any sense of self-sustained individuality, which is a necessary condition for an ethical stance. Yet a number of her environmentally sensitive poems push such modesty toward an eco-ethical speaking position by sounding out the dialectical relationship between humility and hubris. Her assertiveness and pride in particularly compelling poetic renditions of nature (as in "Blazing in Gold and quenching in Purple") tend to include a subtextual recognition of nature's vulnerability and ultimate inaccessibility. Conversely, the conspicuously unassuming pose she sometimes assumes toward natural phenomena is not the disingenuous modesty for which it tends to be taken but stakes out the claims of a female speaker as subject, either through the paradoxical notion of achieved humility or by letting the self re-emerge on the other side of its apparent self-effacement, "with modesties enlarged" (as in "Our little Kinsmen — after Rain," "The Sun went down — no Man looked on —," and "Sweet Mountains — Ye tell Me no lie —").

For Whitman, the problem is the reverse, since his poetry is informed by ideas of masculine independence, arrogance, and pride as grounding for humanity and citizenship. Humility, toward nature as well, indirectly threatens to submit the male speaker to conventional religiosity and even emasculation. And yet Whitman admits humility into perspectives largely guided by pride, from the 1855 preface to *Leaves of Grass*, in which he claims that great poetry emerges from a soul that "has sympathy as measureless as its pride and the one balances the other," to his late "Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads": "Defiant of ostensible literary and other conventions, I avowedly chant 'the great pride of man in himself,' and permit it to be more or less a *motif* of nearly all my verse. I think this pride Indispensable to an American. I think it not inconsistent with obedience, humility, deference, and self-questioning" (*CPCP* 667-668). Like Dickinson, he probes the poetic potential of the tension between hubris and humility in many of his nature-related poems. And even though he speaks from a perspective that can never fully step outside of an androcentric, imperial, even colonial framework, he likewise moves to the verge of dissolving the human subject vis-à-vis nature (most hauntingly in "As I Ebb'd"). Moving through such dissolution, his speaker ultimately emerges with a reconstituted subjecthood, assertive of his human capacity to speak, yet with his poetic pride forever changed by such profoundly humbling encounters.

It has also turned out that, although Dickinson expresses ecosensitive perspectives that are particularly available to those who occupy positions defined by social subjugation, while Whitman more critically reflects human actions against the natural world that imperil its continued existence, both poets challenge conceptual restraints of nineteenth-century morality and gender roles. They turn a prescribed female submissiveness and a culturally condoned male destructiveness into new forms of humility that resonate as an environmentally oriented speaking position. It is a humble, and humbling position that moves toward a complex ethical understanding of the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman life. In the nineteenth century, "humility" referred not simply to "freedom from pride and arrogance" (Webster, *Dictionary* [1847]), but was increasingly understood as a position that "consists in rating our claims low, in being *willing to waive our rights*, and take a lower place than might be our due" yet that "*does not require of us to underate ourselves*" (Webster, *Dictionary* [1859];
emphasis added). Whitman and Dickinson transform this remedial, relative, and relational
mode provisionally yielding control into a way of responding poetically to the natural
environment, making it the foundation for an environmentally sensitive epistemology.

Considering the resonance of such humility in terms of twenty-first century environmental discourses, I have argued that one of its strengths is that it runs counter to the opposition between ecocentrism and anthropocentrism still common in ecocritical and other discussions. The humility that is so vital to Dickinson’s and Whitman’s poetry acknowledges human failure, including the poetic limitations of the speaking subject, also and especially in recognition of the agency of the nonhuman other, even if this agency is not expressed in language. In contrast to Whitman’s term “sympathy,” such humility does not expect a response in kind; it establishes a relationship that is not based on exchange or dialogue but on a sense of common createdness, or being in the world. At the same time, complete self-effacement is not a position from which one can be humble. The notion of humility as it emerges from these poems is quite distinct from the ideal of complete human relinquishment, in that he courageously takes on the human need to subsist on nature while also emphasizing the significance of the poetic imagination to the ecological project. Indeed, such relinquishment, even if it strives for an ecocentric position, actually presupposes a monodirectional economy that must by definition be human-centered.

By contrast, the environmental humility of Whitman's and Dickinson's poetry makes the self accountable for its own actions, and in this sense, it is always provisionally human-centered. Such a poetic humility concedes a human-centeredness that inevitably attends to the act of speaking, yet it is human-centeredness that is grounded in doubt. As such it is not only skeptical about the human ability to achieve a balance between the interests of the self and those of the natural environment, but also passionate about the responsibility of the self to keep striving for such a balance. This is ultimately the most radical implication of the environmental humility that is such a central feature of their art. Their poetic projects, in dialogue with their time and each other, create an ethical stance that accomplishes a vision of the impossible without settling for a safe position or some middle ground. Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, their poetry may be seen to be moving toward the verge of the unspeakable.

*

From *Poetry Magazine*

## Why Ecopoetry?

There's no Planet B.

By [John Shoptaw](https://www.johnshoptaw.com)

Before getting to why, I need to ask what: What is ecopoetry? What must an ecopoem be to do justice to its name? My answer is twofold: an ecopoem needs to be environmental and it needs to be environmentalist. By environmental, I mean first that an ecopoem needs to be about the nonhuman natural world — wholly or partly, in some way or other, but really and not just figuratively. In other words, an ecopoem is a kind of nature poem. But an ecopoem needs more than the vocabulary of nature. Consider [John Ashbery](https://www.johnashbery.com)’s “River of the Canoefish”:

> These wilds came naturally by their monicker.
> In 1825 the first canoefish was seen hanging offshore.
> A few years later another one was spotted.
Today they are abundant as mackerel, as far as the eye can see,
tumbled, tumescent, tinted all the colors of the rainbow
though not in the same order,
a swelling, scumbled mass, rife with incident
and generally immune to sorrow.

Shall we gather at the river? On second thought, let's not.

The first tipoff that this amusing poem is not about nature is the “canofish,” which doesn’t exist; another is the “river” of “Shall we gather at the river?” which is from the familiar hymn. Ashbery is a poet of manner, less of nature than of “naturally.” A parody of natural history, the poem riffs on gay culture (“rainbow,” “tumescent,” “immune”). Ashbery’s culture poem is still fine and fun. But in my terms it can’t count as an ecopoem.

This is not to say that ecopoetry is merely nature served uncooked on the literal page. In *Redstart: An Ecological Poetics*, Forrest Gander declares himself “less interested in ‘nature poetry’ — where nature features as theme — than in poetry that investigates — both thematically and formally — the relationship between nature and culture, language and perception.” I share Gander’s preferences, and I think he makes an important point: ecopoets cannot be naive about matters of perception and poetic representation, which are biologically and culturally specific (a bee’s world is not a human’s). Yet I’m sure Gander would agree that nature exists not only in the sensorium of the beholder; it’s really “out there.” There are, for instance, environmental facts — such as the unnerving one that the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide has now reached an unsustainable 400 parts per million — that we know objectively and can render independently of our personal or cultural perceptions, in an essay or a poem. However self-aware and self-reflexive it may be, an ecopoem must be tethered to the natural world.

The second way in which an ecopoem is environmental is that it is ecocentric, not anthropocentric. Human interests cannot be the be-all and end-all of an ecopoem. A familiar example of an anthropocentric nature poem is Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar”:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

How I’ve relished this impish poem, though for me, a son of the shallow South, “slovenly”
always rankled. How ardently I lectured my classes that nature here mimics art, as in a
sculpture garden; that this artifact, though non-generative, gives birth to “Tennessee,” itself an
artificial domain bound on top and bottom by imaginary parallel lines, not unlike the poem’s
“Tennessee” borderlines. Now, though I still love “Anecdote of the Jar,” I am sobered by the
line “It took dominion everywhere.” So God blessed the humans in Eden: “Have dominion
over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth
upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28), a blessing which created anthropocentrism. (It does no good,
by the way, to claim that “Anecdote of the Jar” merely or ironically represents the
domineering posture; you can say that about any problematic poem.)
Ecopoetry must be really environmental, and so cannot be distinguished from nature poetry by form or technique alone. Here I part ways with writers such as Timothy Morton, who offers as an example of an environmental poem a one-liner by Charles Bernstein:

*this poem intentionally left blank*

I suspect Bernstein thinks of this as a conceptual poem, a found poem that by transposition becomes paradoxically self-referential. But for Morton, the poem is environmental because it is “recursive” and so “ambient,” like our surroundings. Morton gleefully concedes that Bernstein’s poem has no natural content or environmentalist message: “The poem is not about rabbit rabbits, mountains, or pollution.” I agree that subject matter alone doesn’t make poetry significant, but I bristle at Morton’s mockingly sentimental rhetoric of “bunny rabbits,” a discourse used by anti-environmentalists to ridicule those defending wild life. Morton argues that by waking us from an immersion in a “lifeworld,” ambient art such as Bernstein’s poem “compels us to assume responsibility for global warming, a direct cause of the ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction Event.” Really? As Morton knows, these imminent extinctions are of plants and animals, not of recursive algorithms. My second objection to this line of argument is more general: if Bernstein’s poem is environmental, what poem isn’t? Morton agrees: “All poems are environmental, because they include the spaces in which they are written and read.” OK, but why environmental and not, say, spatio-temporal? If all poems are environmental poems, environmental poetry means nothing and matters not at all.

A similarly formal approach to environmental poetry is made by Angus Fletcher. In *A New Theory for American Poetry*, Fletcher traces the US tradition of formally environmental poetry (culminating in Ashbery’s prosaic poems) back to Whitman’s “environment-poem,” with its cataloging phrasal lines. Like Morton, Fletcher foregrounds form by dismissing content: “His poems are not *about* the environment.... They *are* environments.” Though I understand how one may be immersed in a poem, my problem with this definition is that it turns every Whitman poem into an “environment-poem.” I am happy to apply this label to “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” because of the specificity of its descriptions — such as the unsnatched and unhatched “four light-green eggs spotted with brown” — and because of its story of the Long Island boy delivered into song by hearing a mockingbird grieving for its mate, and finally because of its translation of the mockingbird’s mournful song into an operatic aria:

*High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves,
Surely you must know who is here, is here,
You must know who I am, my love.*

But it isn’t the form that makes “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” environmental. Whitman mounted a similarly operatic poem in 1874, “The Song of the Redwood-Tree,” which he set in Northern California: “Just back from the rock-bound shore and the caves, / In the saline air from the sea in the Mendocino country.” The scene is a disturbing one of deforestation: “I heard the mighty tree its death-chant chanting. //The choppers heard not.” As he did earlier, Whitman verbalizes the redwood’s chant in operatic italics. But the redwood’s song is startlingly hospitable:

*With Nature’s calm content, with tacit huge delight,
We welcome what we wrought for through the past,
And leave the field for them.*
For them predicted long,
For a superber race.

The word “race” confirms Whitman’s unwritten pun on *sequoia*. The clearing of the redwoods in the 1850s meant the genocide of the red men — primarily the Yuki. Their land was occupied by the “superber” white-skins, their trees sold, their inhabitants killed, enslaved, or herded into reservations — all of which led to the so-called Mendocino War of 1859, nationally notorious for its brutality. I know Fletcher would find “The Song of the Redwood Tree” objectionable, but I don’t see how he could deny its being an “environment-poem” by his strictly stylistic criteria.

I turn next to another pair of stylistically similar poems, both from *The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral*. In his introduction to the anthology, Joshua Corey imagines the right balance between Arcadian simulacra and their underlying reality: “To write the postmodern pastoral poem is ... to be a digital native with dirt between one’s toes.” Yet the opening selection, from Brent Cunningham’s “Bird & Forest,” soars above vulgar reality into postmodern pastiche:

> An empty background for the bird’s traversal, set with obstacles to be navigated: isn’t this the principle?

> ....................................................................
The bird enters the forest; it is introduced. It doesn’t think, but uses the machine of instinct
buried in its flesh, a device wrapped in an assembly.

Cunningham is an accomplished poet who has adapted Whitman’s prosaic measures to the stately abstractions of Stevens and the deadpan ruminations of Michael Palmer. But his notion that birds are machines for whom trees are not habitat but obstructions is mired in an intensely problematic argument advanced by Descartes. In his *Meditations on First Philosophy*, the philosopher famously described animals, as opposed to ensouled humans, as mere animated automatons, devoid of thought or emotion, incapable even of experiencing pain. Come now, aren’t birds bird-brained? Let’s consult one. Laying out a pair of green and blue rectangles on a tray, the animal psychologist Irene M. Pepperberg asked her African gray parrot, “Alex, what’s same?” “Shape,” Alex replied. “What’s different?” “Color.” When I read about that experiment in *Alex and Me* I had to get up and go for a walk. If Alex, with a brain the size of a walnut, was capable of abstracting color from shape and then shape from color, then Descartes’s claims about animals were based not on scientific observation but on arbitrary belief.

Later in the anthology we find another poem in the same stanzaic prose, Juliana Spahr’s “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache,” which I do not hesitate to call an ecopoem. This poem (recalling Whitman’s “There Was a Child Went Forth”) is an Edenic allegory of our fall from love for nature into love for each other, and our consequent entry into an environmentally ruinous economy. It is charged with natural specifics:

> Our hearts took on the shape of well-defined riffles and pools, clean substrates, woody debris, meandering channels, floodplains, and mature streamside forests.

Here Spahr is drawing on Randall E. Sanders’s *A Guide to Ohio Streams*:
While everybody knows clean water is essential for a healthy stream, few realize they also need diverse physical features such as well-defined riffles and pools, clean substrates, woody debris, meandering channels, floodplains, and mature streamside forests.

To be sure, Spahr's postmodern poem is choral and citational rather than personal and recollective. But her citational method doesn't disqualify "Gentle Now, Don't Add to Heartache" as an ecopoem. The detailed environmental language reverberates in the hollows of the fallen consumerist world:

> I replaced what I knew of the stream with Lifestream Total Cholesterol Test Packets, with Snuggle Emerald Stream Fabric Softener Dryer Sheets, with Tisserand Aromatherapy Aroma-Stream Cartridges, with Filter Stream Dust Tamer, and Streamzap PC Remote Control, Acid Stream Launcher, and Viral Data Stream.

The language of this collage is postmodern but it's also referential. It draws its energy and its pathos from the difference between the real stream and the metonymic "stream" of products.

Now for my second criterion. An ecopoem must be not only environmental but environmentalist. First, the environment of an ecopoem is, implicitly or explicitly, impacted by humans. As Ursula K. Heise puts it, ecopoetry is "related to the broader genre of nature poetry but can be distinguished from it by its portrayal of nature as threatened by human activities." In *Well Then There Now* Spahr draws a similar distinction: "even when [the nature poem] got the birds and the plants and the animals right it tended to show the beautiful bird but not so often the bulldozer off to the side that was destroying the bird's habitat." While we should remember that *Gary Snyder* had already in 1959 written from bitter experience about the bulldozer in the ancient forest, I appreciate Spahr's problem with nature poetry. If a contemporary nature poem leaves its reader in still contemplation of Mother Nature's creatures, it risks being complacent, even what Spahr judges "immoral." But when Spahr adds that nature poems "often show up in the *New Yorker* or various other establishment journals," she is talking not environmental but poetry politics. An ecopoem may be innovative or it may be what I call "renovative" (where any poetic feature, past or present, is available for renewal), or it may even be resolutely traditionalist — and it may appear anywhere. We need all kinds of poems to find and stir up all sorts of poetry readers.

An ecopoem is environmentalist not only thematically, in that it represents environmental damage or risk, but rhetorically: it is urgent, it aims to unsettle. But doesn't environmentalist poetry then risk complacency at least as much as nature poetry? Aren't ecopoets deluding themselves into thinking that their poems can change anything? "For poetry," as *Auden* declared in his elegy "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," "makes nothing happen." Auden's proposition, though, is not a fact but a belief. A similar skepticism today informs discussions about efficacy and causality. Hurricane Sandy, arctic glacial melt, the California drought, and so on, can't be specifically linked to global warming — so climate change makes nothing in particular happen. At least so far as we know. But Rachel Carson's *Silent Spring* helped make legislation happen. Is poetry uniquely ineffectual? Who thinks now that sixties culture didn't help make the sixties happen? Even if we can never specify its means or results, ecopoetry can also help make environmentalism happen.

The more immediate hazard for ecopoetry, then, is didacticism. If a contemporary nature poem risks being immoral, an ecopoem, whatever its effects, risks being moralistic. How can an ecopoem usher us into a new environmental imagination without teaching us a tiresome lesson? In light of the prevailing tendency to value poetic form over (natural) content, it may
be instructive to summarize the history of aestheticism, from which this tendency derives.
Kant's non-teleological, purely formal "purposiveness without purpose" passes into
[romanticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism) ("Beauty is truth, truth beauty") and the aesthetic movement ("art for art's
sake"); then into [New Criticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism) with its "autotelic" verbal icon and Wimsatt and Beardsley's
affective fallacy, which might have been called the effective fallacy ("a confusion between ...
what [a poem] *is* and what it *does*"); from there into de Manian [deconstruction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/deconstruction) and early non-
representational [Language poetry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-poetry). Whatever the variety of formalist aestheticism, the
antithesis to form is not so much content as it is message or moral, though as the aesthetic
movement progresses into pure poetry, meaning itself becomes suspect by association ("A
poem should not mean/But be." — Archibald MacLeish). Poetics wasn't always this way. For
[Horace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace), a poem both pleases and instructs. (Didaskein means to teach; a *chorodidaskalos*
trained the chorus.) A familiar argument against didactic poetry is that it preaches to the choir.
A poem should not *preach*, but it may teach the choir a new tune, the chorus a new step. Of
course, there will always be self-indulgent didactic poetry; a poem won't save the rhinos by
telling us to. But I don't believe poetry that changes us, moves, unsettles, motivates us, or
awakens us to the pleasures and wonders of the natural world is by definition bad.

How might poetry be good and environmentalist? Here are a few instances from the twentieth
and the twenty-first centuries. Frost wittily broached didacticism in "The Oven Bird." The
song of the bird (whose domelike ground nest is shaped like a Dutch oven) is commonly
translated *preacher*, *preacher* or *teacher*, *teacher*. Frost plants thoughts and words into his
didactic bird's beak and brain. Here is his sonnet's discordant sestet:

And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Wagon dust? Maybe, but I think he had the automobile in mind. The first triumph of fossil-
fueled industry, Ford's Model T, began raising dust throughout the U.S. in 1908; it wasn't
until 1913 that most highways were paved. Frost wrote "The Oven Bird" the following year in
England. The poem is not overtly didactic. Frost doesn't tell us what to think; but he knows
better than to celebrate and sing the Model T.

Marianne Moore is variously unsettling in "He 'Digesteth Harde Yron,'" perhaps the first
poem in English to take up species extinction ("the aepyornis," "the moa"; "the harmless
solitaire //or great auk"). Her poem focuses on the ostrich, the last of the large flightless birds.
In *The Necessary Angel*, Stevens took Moore's poem as a test case, arguing that even a poem
of "an extraordinarily factual appearance" (he quotes a horrifying passage beginning "Six
hundred ostrich-brains served /at one banquet") represents not an objectively "bare fact" but
"an individual reality," conveyed by means of Moore's "finical phraseology," "irony"
(activating Moore's titular pun), and "abstraction." But Moore's abstraction is not Fabergé's.
Her eggs do not appear jeweled and mounted but brooded, hatched, and guarded by a father
ostrich "with /a maternal concentration, after /he has sat on the eggs /at night six weeks." If
we had the gift "To see oursels as ithers see us!" as Burns imagines in "To a Louse," "What
airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us." In Moore's case, the noble and cunning hunter is imagined
ironically from the perspective of his "birdwitted" prey (I quote from Moore's first version,
which preserves her alternately unrhymed and rhymed couplets):
How

could he, prized for plumes and eggs and young, used
even as a riding-
beast, respect men hiding
actorlike in ostrich-skins, with
the right hand making the neck move
as if alive and
from a bag the left hand

strewing grain, that ostriches
might be decoyed and killed!

I know what you're thinking, Darwinian reader. In disdaining their "actorlike" hunters, in preserving their species, ostriches guarding their eggs are behaving not courageously but instinctively. (Something they've so far been quite good at; their current conservation status is Least Concern.) However well-intentioned, Moore's poem is moralistic, not to say anthropomorphic. Let's take up these objections in turn. The outraged exclamation is not tacked on here, but flows from Moore's bird's-eye view. Imagine you are hunted by an alien, who, donning the skin of a relative's corpse, nods at you with it, and with it crumbles up some bread for you, and you have something of the horror and disgust of Moore's "individual reality."

The rhetorical strategy of taking up an animal's case by assuming its viewpoint is now pervasive. Anthropomorphism — the ascription of human attributes to something nonhuman (God, animals, plants, things) — assumes that nonhumans exist on an utterly alien order of being. Hence, we can only project human attributes, not recognize them, in other animals. But this presumption is not something we know; it's only something we believe. The opposite belief is probably more familiar to us today: the reduction of the mind to the brain, which makes us all automatons. Not so fast, argued Thomas Nagel in his influential 1974 essay, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" Not what it's like for us to be a bat — to wheel about, bat-winged, by echolocation — but what it's like for a *bat* to be a bat. This, the subjectivity or consciousness of another animal, is something we'll never really know — and this is why we can never confidently reduce humans or other animals to machines. What we *do* know is that it is like *something* to be a bat. And if a bat has experiences, it can think and feel. In my view, those who refuse to grant animals subjectivity are not cognitive skeptics but consciousness-deniers (with their heads buried in the sand, something not even ostriches do!). The bonobo and the human are woven from at least ninety-eight percent of the same DNA strands. How can we humans be sure we're unique? While it may be fanciful to describe goats as sarcastic or clouds as weeping, the prohibition against anthropomorphism and its offshoot, John Ruskin's pathetic fallacy, strikes me as arbitrary. To empathize beyond humankind, ecopoets must be ready to commit the pathetic fallacy and to be charged with anthropomorphism.

Let's return for a moment to "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking": can birds really grieve? Isn't such a belief an unscientific, sentimental projection? In *Bird Sense*, the ornithologist Tim Birkhead writes of being in the Canadian High Arctic:

> I notice a pair of brent geese ... and am saddened to see that one of the geese has been shot. Beside its lifeless form stands the bird's partner. A week later I pass the same pond again, and the two birds, one live and one dead, are still there.
Was the vigilant goose grieving? Darwin would have said so. But many contemporary ornithologists, wary of projecting, restrict their descriptions to external behavior. Is there any way beyond such behavioralism? Birkhead describes an experiment. Wild-caught great tits were shown, on separate occasions, an owl and a finch. Their behavioral responses were identical, but only the owl “elicited a surge of the stress hormone corticosterone, clear evidence that the great tits were more frightened by the owl.” If birds can be fearful, can’t we grant them the possibility of being mournful? But, the skeptic persists, how do we know that their fear is the same as our fear? Well, how do I know that your fear is the same as mine? Biology (hormone analysis, shared genomic evolution) and situation (a bird lingering with a dead mate) reveal the unreasoning denial behind an unfeeling skepticism. I act on the assumption that my experiences are not wholly unique, to me or to humans.

In this century, environmentalist poetry is suffused with the deniable but inescapable conditions of species extinction and global warming. Still, today's green poets confront the familiar prejudice against didacticism. In an interview with *Earthlines*, Jorie Graham articulates what ecopoetry can do to persuade suspicious readers, who feel anything remotely "political" to be polemical and thus didactic. They feel they "know this information already, so why do they need it in a poem." That is precisely the point. They "know" it. They are not "feeling it." That is what activists in the environmental movement are asking of us: help it be felt, help it be imagined.

In her two primarily ecological poetry books, *Sea Change* and *Place*, Graham helps readers see feelingly into “the ‘deep future’ — seven to ten generations hence.” How? By imagining the far in terms of the near. “Dialogue (Of the Imagination’s Fear)” (from *Place*) opens the morning after the bursting of the housing bubble, with its bleak economic environment of mass expulsions “All around in /houses near us.” Meanwhile, it’s the exclamatory “Spring!” of E.E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams. But if our future on an earth laid waste is also foreclosed, Eliot’s season of resurrection seems cruel. Harking back to George Herbert’s “The Flower,” Graham’s buried bulbs think twice about coming up:

> I cannot say it but the
> smell is hope meeting terrifying regret, I would say do not open again, do not go up,
> stay under here there is
> no epoch, we are
> in something but it is not “the world,” why try to make
> us feel at
> home down
> here, take away the poem, take away this desire that
> has you entering this waste dark space, there are not even pockets of time here,
> there are no mysteries, there is no laughter and nothing ever dies, the foreclosure
> you are standing beside look to it, there is a
> woman crying on the second floor as she does not understand what it will be like to
> not have a home now, and how to explain to the children at 3:35 when the bus drops
> them off—

For her two ecobooks, Graham invented a chimerical form of immeasurably long and vertiginously short lines, a form that is environmentalist not in imitating an environment, but in eliciting an unsettling feeling. Most of us can’t experience or feel global warming, but we can imagine what it’s like to be dispossessed, to be at a loss to explain to one’s children why they must leave home. But when it comes to a foreclosed Mother Earth, as the placard says, there’s no Planet B.
Whereas Graham imagines the apocalyptic future, Ed Roberson witnesses it in his own lifetime. Like Moore, Roberson studied biology in college, and like Snyder he works in nature. As he relates in “We Must Be Careful,” his essay on ecopoetics in *Black Nature*, “I was an undergraduate research assistant in limnology, freshwater chemistry, collecting samples in the field,” in particular, the frozen streams of Alaska, as recorded in his 1970 poem, “be careful”:

i must be careful about such things as these.
the thin-grained oak. the quiet grizzlies scared
into the hills by the constant tracks squeezing
in behind them closer in the snow.

Care taken by the limnologist is care modeled for the poem's readers. Returning to the scene in the title poem of his recent volume, *To See the Earth Before the End of the World* (2010), Roberson testifies to the acceleration of glacial into human time: “watched ice was speed made invisible, now — it's days, and a few feet further away.” Roberson refracts his personal experience through a journalistic headline — “Media note *people chasing glaciers*” — an occurrence of what we now call ecotourism. At the end, the poem teeters on the tipping point of mutual extinction:

All that once chased us and we
chased to a balance chasing back, tooth for spear,
knife for claw,
locks us in this grip
we just now see
our own lives taken by
taking them out. Hunting the bear,
we hunt the glacier with the changes come
of that choice.

Graham in “Dialogue” imagined the deep future through the imperiled present; Roberson here imagines the endangered present through the deep past. According to one theory, the paleo-American Clovis people, known for their fluted spear points, hunted the megafauna (including the short-faced bear) through North America, driving them, and themselves, into extinction. And do we choose to follow them? The “we” in Roberson’s cautionary tale includes not only curious ecotourists (and greedy petroleum deposit hunters) but the rest of us who choose (or not) to do what we can to preserve the environmental balance.

Graham crosses economics (eco-, *oikos*: home) with nature, Roberson crosses ecology with anthropology — both increasingly common hybrids in ecopoetry. Robert Hass proceeds similarly in “Ezra Pound’s Proposition,” but his crossings are causal. The “proposition” is Hass’s rendering of Pound’s multi-disciplinary poetics, gleaned from “Mauberly” and the Cantos:

Beauty is sexual, and sexuality
Is the fertility of the earth and the fertility
Of the earth is economics.

As Hass explained in a 2007 interview, the poem draws on his experience with International Rivers, “which has been concerned particularly with where environmental issues meet human-rights issues around big-dam projects, many of which have proved destructive,
displacing millions of people around the world.” The International Rivers website reproduces “Ezra Pound’s Proposition” and directs readers to the building of the Pak Mun Dam in Thailand. International Rivers itself resists dam construction by “provid[ing] unbiased hydrological and financial analyses of these dam projects to the dam-affected people in the Third World.” Its pedagogical method bears interesting comparison with Hass’s own. The poet might have recorded the history of the dam, along with the local occupations and chaotic displacements; instead, he begins downstream, in Bangkok, with a child prostitute’s own disarming “proposition”: “How about a party, big guy?” In the poem’s second and final stanza, the poet explains how she got there:

Here is more or less how it works:
The World Bank arranges the credit and the dam
Floods three hundred villages, and the villagers find their way
To the city where their daughters melt into the teeming streets,
And the dam's great turbines, beautifully tooled
In Lund or Dresden or Detroit, financed
By Lazard Frères in Paris or the Morgan Bank in New York,
Enabled by judicious gifts from Bechtel of San Francisco
Or Halliburton of Houston to the local political elite,
Spun by the force of rushing water,
Have become hives of shimmering silver
And, down river, they throw that bluish throb of light
Across her cheekbones and her lovely skin.

“Ezra Pound’s Proposition” is not polemical or didactic in the usual sense. Hass does not tell us what to do or how to feel. But he does tell us what happened, and he teaches us that the economic injustice flows from a damnable environmental injustice. In a single “unbiased,” just perceptibly ironic, meandering sentence, Hass traces the inhumane misdeed to its source. Beauty of wealth and expertise at the beginning sheds light on the beauty of displaced youth at the end. Having laid out the chain of events, Hass leaves us to ponder the links.

Ecopoetry is nature poetry that has designs on us, that imagines changing the ways we think, feel about, and live and act in the world. If an ecopoem is only a postmodern or a contemporary nature poem, why ecopoetry? The essential difference between nature poetry and ecopoetry cannot be stylistic. But as Frost, Moore, Spahr, Graham, Roberson, Hass, and many other poets have shown us, the ways of being ecopoetic are increasingly diverse. Let me add what my last decade of reading and teaching confirms: nature poetry, even without broaching ruination or restoration, can also be environmentalist. If Hopkins can get me excited about species acting out their names (“As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame”); if John Clare or Emily Dickinson or Snyder or Kay Ryan can encourage me to see myself in an animal; or if Wendell Berry or W.S. Merwin or Brenda Hillman can place me in and beyond the poem, then they have motivated me to want these creatures and environments to stay. By showing us also that some things must go (dams, oil rigs, plastic bags, animal concentration camps, virtual disconnectedness), ecopoetry doesn’t supplant nature poetry but enlarges it.

Originally Published: January 4th, 2016

John Shoptaw teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. He wrote *Times Beach* (Notre Dame University Press, 2015) and has finished a new collection of poems, *Near-Earth Object*.
10 The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land of the globe.

Fascinated, my eyes reverting from the south, dropt, to follow
those slender windrows,

15 Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten,
Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the
tide,
Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves the other side of me,
Paumanok there and then as I thought the old thought of likenesses,

20 These you presented to me you fish-shaped island,
As I wended the shores I know,
As I walk'd with that electric self seeking types.

2

25
As I wend to the shores I know not,
As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck'd,
As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,
As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,

30
I too but signify at the utmost a little wash'd-up drift,
A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.

O baffled, balk'd, bent to the very earth,
Oppress'd with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,
Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I
have not once had the least idea who or what I am,
But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet
untouch'd, untold, altogether unreachable'd,

40
Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and
bows,
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written,
Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.

45
I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single
object, and that no man ever can,

Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart
upon me and sting me,

Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.

50 3

You oceans both, I close with you,
We murmur alike reproachfully rolling sands and drift, knowing
not why,

55 These little shreds indeed standing for you and me and all.

You friable shore with trails of debris,
You fish-shaped island, I take what is underfoot,
What is yours is mine my father.

60

I too Paumanok,
I too have bubbled up, floated the measureless float, and been
wash'd on your shores,
I too am but a trail of drift and debris,

65

I too leave little wrecks upon you, you fish-shaped island.

I throw myself upon your breast my father,
I cling to you so that you cannot unloose me,
I hold you so firm till you answer me something.

70

Kiss me my father,
Touch me with your lips as I touch those I love,
Breathe to me while I hold you close the secret of the murmuring
I envy.

75

4

Ebb, ocean of life, (the flow will return,)
Cease not your moaning you fierce old mother,
Endlessly cry for your castaways, but fear not, deny not me,
Rustle not up so hoarse and angry against my feet as I touch you
or gather from you.

80

I mean tenderly by you and all,
I gather for myself and for this phantom looking down where we
lead, and following me and mine.

85

Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses,
Froth, snowy white, and bubbles,
(See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last,
See, the prismatic colors glistening and rolling,)
Tufts of straw, sands, fragments,
Buoy'd hither from many moods, one contradicting another,
From the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell,
Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil,
Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown,
A limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves floating,
drifted at random,
Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature,
Just as much whence we come that blare of the cloud-trumpets,
We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out
before you,
You up there walking or sitting,
Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet.

90

95

100
## A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

5

10

## The Dalliance of the Eagles.

Skirting the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,)
Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles,
The rushing amorous contact high in space together,
The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel,
Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling,
In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling,
Till o'er the river pois'd, the twain yet one, a moment's lull,
A motionless still balance in the air, then parting, talons loosing,
Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting, their separate diverse
flight,
She hers, he his, pursuing.

5

10

## As Consequent, Etc.

AS consequent from store of summer rains,
Or wayward rivulets in autumn flowing,
Or many a herb-lined brook's reticulations,
Or subterranean sea-rills making for the sea,
Songs of continued years I sing.

Life's ever-modern rapids first, (soon, soon to blend,
With the old streams of death.)

Some threading Ohio's farm-fields or the woods,
Some down Colorado's cañons from sources of perpetual snow,
Some half-hid in Oregon, or away southward in Texas,
Some in the north finding their way to Erie, Niagara, Ottawa,
Some to Atlantica's bays, and so to the great salt brine.

In you whoe'er you are my book perusing,
In I myself, in all the world, these currents flowing,
All, all toward the mystic ocean tending.

Currents for starting a continent new,

5

10

15

20
Overtures sent to the solid out of the liquid,
Fusion of ocean and land, tender and pensive waves,
(Not safe and peaceful only, waves rous'd and ominous too,
Out of the depths the storm's abysmic waves, who knows whence?
Raging over the vast, with many a broken spar and tatter'd sail.)

25

Or from the sea of Time, collecting vasting all, I bring,
A windrow-drift of weeds and shells.

30

O little shells, so curious-convolute, so limpid-cold and voiceless,
Will you not little shells to the tympans of temples held,
Murmurs and echoes still call up, eternity's music faint and far,
Wafted inland, sent from Atlantica's rim, strains for the soul of the
prairies,
Whisper'd reverberations, chords for the ear of the West joyously
sounding,
Your tidings old, yet ever new and untranslatable,
Infinitesimals out of my life, and many a life,
(For not my life and years alone I give—all, all I give,)
These waifs from the deep, cast high and dry,
Wash'd on America's shores?

35

40

## This Compost

### 1

SOMETHING startles me where I thought I was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.

5

O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards,
grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper'd corpses within you?
Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead?

10

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv'd,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through
the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

15

20

### 2
25

Behold this compost! behold it well!

Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick person—yet
behold!

The grass of spring covers the prairies,

The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,

30

The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,

The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,

The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its
graves,

The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,

35

The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit
on their nests,

The young of poultry break through the hatch'd eggs,

The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow,
the colt from the mare,

40

Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark green leaves,

Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the
dooryards,

The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those
strata of sour dead.

45

What chemistry!

That the winds are really not infectious,

That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea
which is so amorous after me,

50

That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its
tongues,

That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited
themselves in it,

That all is clean forever and forever,

55

That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,

That blackberries are so flavorful and juicy,

That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that
melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me,

That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,

60

Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once
a catching disease.

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,

It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,

It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless
successions of diseas'd corpses,

65

It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,

It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptu-
ous crops,

It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings
from them at last.

70
## The First Dandelion.

Simple and fresh and fair from winter's close emerging,
As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been,
Forth from its sunny nook of shelter'd grass—innocent, golden,
calm as the dawn,
The spring's first dandelion shows its trustful face.

## The Voice of the Rain

And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,
Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:
I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain,
Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,
Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form'd, altogether changed,
and yet the same,
I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,
And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn;
And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own
origin, and make pure and beautify it;
(For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfilment, wander-
ing,
Reck'd or unreck'd, duly with love returns.)

5

10
Emily DICKINSON (1830-1886)

#379

The Grass so little has to do —
A Sphere of simple Green —
With only Butterflies to brood
And Bees to entertain —

5

And stir all day to pretty Tunes
The Breezes fetch along —
And hold the Sunshine in its lap
And bow to everything —

10

And thread the Dews, all night, like Pearls —
And make itself so fine
A Duchess were too common
For such a noticing —

15

And then, in Sovereign Barns to dwell —
And dream the Days away,
The Grass so little has to do
I wish I were a Hay —

#721

"Nature" is what we see —
The Hill — the Afternoon —

3

Squirrel — Eclipse — the Bumble bee —
Nay — Nature is Heaven —
Nature is what we hear —

6

The Bobolink — the Sea —
Thunder — the Cricket —
Nay — Nature is Harmony —

9

Nature is what we know —
Yet have no art to say —
So impotent Our Wisdom is

12

To her Sincerity —

#370

Within my Garden, rides a Bird
Upon a single Wheel —
Whose spokes a dizzy Music make
As 'twere a travelling Mill—

5

He never stops, but slackens
Above the Ripest Rose —
Partakes without alighting
And praises as he goes,

10

Till every spice is tasted —
And then his Fairy Gig
Reels in remoter atmospheres —
And I rejoin my Dog,

15

And He and I, perplex us
If positive, 'twere we —
Or bore the Garden in the Brain
This Curiosity —

20

But He, the best Logician,
Refers my clumsy eye —
To just vibrating Blossoms!
An Exquisite Reply!

#741

Nature, the Gentlest Mother is,
Impatient of no child —
The feeblest or the Waywardest, —
Her Admonition mild —

5

In Forest — and the Hill —
By Traveller — be heard —
Restraining Rampant Squirrel —
Or too impetuous Bird —

10

How fair Her Conversation —
A Summer Afternoon —
Her Household, Her Assembly —
And when the Sun go down —

15

Her Voice among the Aisles
Incites the timid prayer
Of the minutest Cricket —
The most unworthy Flower —

20

When all the Children sleep —
She turns as long away
As will suffice to light Her lamps —
Then, bending from the Sky—

25

With infinite Affection —
And infiniter Care —
Her Golden finger on Her lip —
Wills Silence — everywhere —

30
#778

Four Trees — opon a solitary Acre —
Without Design
Or Order, or Apparent Action —
Maintain —

5
The Sun — opon a Morning meets them —
The Wind —
No nearer Neighbor — have they —
But God —

The Acre gives them — Place —
10
They — Him — Attention of Passer by —
Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply —
Or Boy —

What Deed is Theirs unto the General Nature —
What Plan
15
They severally — retard — or further —
Unknown —

#1491

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie —
True Poems flee —
Robert FROST (1874-1963)

The Bear

The bear puts both arms around the tree above her
And draws it down as if it were a lover
And its chokecherries lips to kiss good-bye,
Then lets it snap back upright in the sky.
Her next step rocks a boulder on the wall
(She's making her cross-country in the fall).
Her great weight creaks the barbed wire in its staples
As she flings over and off down through the maples,
Leaving on one wire tooth a lock of hair.
Such is the uncaged progress of the bear.
The world has room to make a bear feel free;
The universe seems cramped to you and me.
Man acts more like the poor bear in a cage,
That all day fights a nervous inward rage,
His mood rejecting all his mind suggests.
He paces back and forth and never rests
The me-nail click and shuffle of his feet,
The telescope at one end of his beat,
And at the other end the microscope,
Two instruments of nearly equal hope,
And in conjunction giving quite a spread.
Or if he rests from scientific tread,
'Tis only to sit back and sway his head
Through ninety-odd degrees of arc, it seems,
Between two metaphysical extremes.
He sits back on his fundamental butt
With lifted snout and eyes (if any) shut
(He almost looks religious but he's not),
And back and forth he sways from cheek to cheek,
At one extreme agreeing with one Greek
At the other agreeing with another Greek
Which may be thought, but only so to speak.
A baggy figure, equally pathetic
When sedentary and when peripatetic.

5

10

15

20

25

30
William CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883-1963)

A Sort Of A Song

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing

be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.

---through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.

Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!

Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

1944
The Pangolin

Another armored animal—scale
lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity until they
form the uninterrupted central
tail-row! This near artichoke with head and legs and grit-equipped
gizzard,
the night miniature artist engineer is,
yes, Leonardo da Vinci's replica—
impressive animal and toiler of whom we seldom hear.
Armor seems extra. But for him,
the closing ear-ridge—
or bare ear lacking even this small
eminence and similarly safe

contracting nose and eye apertures
impenetrably closable, are not; a true ant-eater,
not cockroach eater, who endures
exhausting solitary trips through unfamiliar ground at night,
returning before sunrise, stepping in the moonlight,
on the moonlight peculiarly, that the outside
edges of his hands may bear the weight and save the claws
for digging. Serpentined about
the tree, he draws
away from danger unpugnaciously,
with no sound but a harmless hiss; keeping

the fragile grace of the Thomas-
of-Leighton Buzzard Westminster Abbey wrought-iron vine, or
rolls himself into a ball that has
power to defy all effort to unroll it; strongly intailed, neat
head for core, on neck not breaking off, with curled-in-feet.
Nevertheless he has sting-proof scales; and nest
of rocks closed with earth from inside, which can thus
darken.
Sun and moon and day and night and man and beast
each with a splendor
which man in all his vileness cannot
set aside; each with an excellence!

"Fearful yet to be feared," the armored
ant-eater met by the driver-ant does not turn back, but
engulfs what he can, the flattened sword-
edged leafpoints on the tail and artichoke set leg- and body-plates
quivering violently when it retaliates
45

and swarms on him. Compact like the furled fringed frill
on the hat-brim of Gargallo's hollow iron head of a
matador, he will drop and will
then walk away
unhurt, although if unintruded on,
he cautiously works down the tree, helped

50

by his tail. The giant-pangolin-
tail, graceful tool, as a prop or hand or broom or ax, tipped like
an elephant's trunk with special skin,
is not lost on this ant- and stone-swallowing uninjurable
artichoke which simpletons thought a living fable
whom the stones had nourished, whereas ants had done
so. Pangolins are not aggressive animals; between
dusk and day they have not unchain-like machine-like
form and frictionless creep of a thing
made graceful by adversities, con-

55

60

versities. To explain grace requires
a curious hand. If that which is at all were not forever,
why would those who graced the spires
with animals and gathered there to rest, on cold luxurious
low stone seats—a monk and monk and monk—between
the thus
ingenious roof supports, have slaved to confuse
grace with a kindly manner, time in which to pay a debt,
the cure for sins, a graceful use
of what are yet
approved stone mullions branching out across
the perpendiculars? A sailboat

65

70

75

was the first machine. Pangolins, made
for moving quietly also, are models of exactness,
on four legs; on hind feet plantigrade,
with certain postures of a man. Beneath sun and moon, man slaving
to make his life more sweet, leaves half the flowers worth having,
needing to choose wisely how to use his strength;
a paper-maker like the wasp; a tractor of foodstuffs,
like the ant; spidering a length
of web from bluffs
above a stream; in fighting, mechanicked
like the pangolin; capsizing in

80

85

disheartenment. Bedizened or stark
naked, man, the self, the being we call human, writing-
masters to this world, griffons a dark
"Like does not like like that is obnoxious"; and writes error
with four
r's. Among animals, one has sense of humor.
Humor saves a few steps, it saves years. Unignorant,

90
95

modest and unemotional, and all emotion,
he has everlasting vigor,
power to grow,
though there are few creatures who can make one
breathe faster and make one erecter.

100

Not afraid of anything is he,
and then goes cowering forth, tread paced to meet an obstacle
at every step. Consistent with the
formula—warm blood, no gills, two pairs of hands and a few hairs—
that
is a mammal; there he sits on his own habitat,
serge-clad, strong-shod. The prey of fear, he, always
curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work partly
done,
says to the alternating blaze,
"Again the sun!
anew each day; and new and new and new,
that comes into and steadies my soul."

105

110

(1936)
Robinson JEFFERS (1887-1962)

## Vulture

I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside

Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling high up
in heaven,

And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit narrowing, I
understood then

That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and heard the flight-feathers

Whistle above me and make their circle and come nearer. I could see the
naked red head between the great wings

Beak downward staring. I said "My dear bird, we are wasting time here."

These old bones will still work; they are not for you." But how beautiful
he'd looked, gliding down

On those great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering away in the sea-light
over the precipice. I tell you solemnly

That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak and
become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes -

What a sublime end of one's body, what an enskyment; what a life after
death.
l(a

le

af

fa

ll

s)

one

l

iness

*

Beautiful

is the
unmea
ning
of(sil

ently)fal

ling(e
ver
yw
here)s

Now
Don GORDON (1902-1989)

On the Border

I remember the hour of dusk in El Paso
When the birds in their thousands
Settled in the trees of the plaza,
Winding their small clocks into sleep.

5

In the morning they flew over the Rio Grande,
Hoping to find seeds in Mexico,
Or their cousins, or friends of animals.

10

They had no problem at the border.
They were unarmed and singing
As they soared onto the warmth of the wide-open day.

They scatter seeds for others in all countries.
The language of birds, uncoded, is between themselves
Though anyone can listen, even hawks.

15

Now in the falling northern city
I think of the birds of evening in El Paso,
Their calm arrivals and departures,
Their easy crossing like brothers.

20

*The Sea of Tranquillity* (1989).
Lorine NIEDECKER (1903-1970)

Paean to Place<fnref n="47" />

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ Listen to the poem at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYVEscDHWAw</footnote>
And the place
was water

Fish
fowl
flood
Water lily mud

5 My life

in the leaves and on water
My mother and I
born

10 in swale and swamp and sworn
to water

My father
thru marsh fog

15 sculled down
from high ground
saw her face

at the organ

20 bore the weight of lake water
and the cold—
he seined for carp to be sold
that their daughter

25 might go high
on land
to learn
Saw his wife turn
deaf

30 and away
She
who knew boats
and ropes

35 no longer played

She helped him string out nets
for tarring
And she could shoot

40 He was cool
to the man

who stole his minnows
by night and next day offered
45 to sell them back
He brought in a sack
of dandelion greens

if no flood

50 No oranges—none at hand
No marsh marigold
where the water rose
He kept us afloat

55 I mourn her not hearing canvasbacks
their blast-off rise
from the water
Not hearing sora
rails's sweet

60
spoon-tapped waterglass-
descending scale-
tear-drop-tittle
Did she giggle

65 as a girl?

His skiff skimmed
the coiled celery now gone
from these streams

70 due to carp
He knew duckweed

fall-migrates
toward Mud Lake bottom

75 Knew what lay
under leaf decay
and on pickerel weeds

before summer hum

80 To be counted on:
new leaves
new dead
leaves

85 He could not
—like water bugs—
stride surface tension
He netted
loneliness

90
As to his bright new car
my mother—her house
next his—averred:
A hummingbird

95 can't haul

Anchored here
in the rise and sink
of life—

100 middle years' nights
he sat

beside his shoes
rocking his chair

105 Roped not “looped
in the loop
of her hair”

I grew in green

110 slide and slant
of shore and shade
Child-time—wade
thru weeds

115 Maples to swing from
Pewee-glissando
sublime
slime-
song

120 Grew riding the river
Books
at home-pier
Shelley could steer

125 as he read

I was the solitary plover
a pencil
for a wing-bone

130 From the secret notes
I must tilt

upon the pressure
execute and adjust

135 In us sea-air rhythm
“We live by the urgent wave
of the verse”
Seven year molt

140 for the solitary bird
and so young
Seven years the one
dress

145 for town once a week
One for home
faded blue-striped
as she piped
her cry

150
Dancing grounds
my people had none
woodcocks had—
backland-

155 air around

Solemnities
such as what flower
to take

160 to grandfather's grave
unless

water lilies—
he who'd bowed his head

165 to grass as he mowed
Iris now grows
on fill

for the two

170 and for him
where they lie
How much less am I
in the dark than they?

175 Effort lay in us
before religions
at pond bottom
All things move toward
the light

180
except those
that freely work down
to oceans' black depths
In us an impulse tests
185 the unknown

River rising—flood
Now melt and leave home
Return—broom wet

190 naturally wet
Under

soak-heavy rug
water bugs hatched—

195 no snake in the house
Where were they?—
she

who knew how to clean up

200 after floods
he who bailed boats, houses
Water endows us
with buckled floors

205 You with sea water running
in your veins sit down in water
Expect the long-stemmed blue
speedwell to renew
itself

210

O my floating life
Do not save love
for things

215 Throw *things*
to the flood

ruined
by the flood

220 Leave the new unbought—
all one in the end—
water

I possessed

225 the high word:
The boy my friend
played his violin
in the great hall

230 On this stream
my moonnight memory
washed of hardships
maneuvers barges
thru the mouth

235

of the river
They fished in beauty
It was not always so
In Fishes

240

red Mars

rising
rides the sloughs and sluices
of my mind

245

with the persons
on the edge<fnref n="48" />

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ No single stranded cut-off thing (Merrill Gilfillan, “Bull Run in October,” *The Poker* (2003).</footnote>
Darwin

I
His holy
slowly
mulled over

5 matter

not all “delirium
of delight”
as were the forests

10 of Brazil

“Species are not
(it is like confessing
a murder)

15 immutable”

He was often becalmed
in this Port Desire by illness
or rested from species

20 at billiard table

As to Man
“I believe Man...
in the same predicament

25 with other animals”

II
Cordilleras to climb—Andean
peaks “tossed about
like the crust
of a broken pie”

30

Icy wind
Higher, harder
Chileans advised eat onions
for shortness of breath

35

Heavy on him:
Andes miners carried up
great loads—not allowed
to stop for breath

40

Fossil bones near Santa Fé
Spider-bite-scauld
Fever
Tended by an old woman

45

“Dear Susan...
I am ravenous
for the sound
of the pianoforte”

50
III

55 FitzRoy blinked—
sea-shells on mountain tops!
The laws of change
rode the seas

60 without the good captain
who could not concede
land could rise from the sea
until—before his eyes

65 earthquake—
Talcahuana Bay drained out—
all-water wall
up from the ocean

70 —six seconds—
demolished the town
The will of God?
Let us pray

75 And now the Galápagos Islands—
hideous black lava
The shore so hot
it burned their feet

80 through their boots
Reptile life
Melville here later
said the chief sound was a hiss

85 A thousand turtle monsters
drive together to the water
Blood-bright crabs hunt ticks
on lizards' backs

90 Flightless cormorants
Cold-sea creatures—
penguins, seals
here in tropical waters

95 Hell for FitzRoy
but for Darwin Paradise Puzzle
with the jig-saw gists
beginning to fit

100
IV
Years... balancing
probabilities
I am ill, he said

105 and books are slow work

Studied pigeons
barnacles, earthworms
Extracted seeds

110 from bird dung

Brought home Drosera—
saw insects trapped
by its tentacles—the fact

115 that a plant should secrete

an acid acutely akin
to the digestive fluid
of an animal! Years

120 till he published

He wrote Lyell: Don't forget
to send me the carcass
of your half-bred African cat

125 should it die

V

I remember, he said

130 those tropical nights at sea—
we sat and talked
on the booms

Tierra del Fuego's

135 shining glaciers translucent
blue clear down
(almost) to the indigo sea

(By the way Carlyle)

140 thought it most ridiculous
that anyone should care
whether a glacier

moved a little quicker

145 or a little slower
or moved at all)
Darwin

sailed out

150 of Good Success Bay
to carcass-
conclusions—

the universe

155 not built by brute force
but designed by laws
The details left

to the working of chance

160 “Let each man hope
and believe
what he can”