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# "WRITING NATURE in AMERICAN POETRY: from WALT WHITMAN to PRESENT"

Vincent Dussol

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Vincent Dussol. "WRITING NATURE in AMERICAN POETRY: from WALT WHITMAN to PRESENT". Master. Technical University, Dortmund, Germany. 2020, pp.215. [hal-04966990](https://hal.science/hal-04966990v1)

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# “WRITING NATURE in AMERICAN POETRY: from WALT WHITMAN to PRESENT”

## Vincent Dussol

Blockseminar 10.-13.12.2020, Technical University, Dortmund

The seminar will be dedicated to the close reading of poems related to the subject of nature, inclusive of that growing corpus of ‘nature poetry’ reflecting the shift of focus from Nature to the Earth, the environment, and their despoiling. A poet’s views of, and experience of, nature (themselves likely to be influenced by their politics, gender, race, ethnicity and so forth) will translate into the form of their ‘nature poems,’ the form simultaneously feeding back onto the content. Complementarily, we will explore Angus Fletcher’s proposition of the poem as environment (surroundings), and keeping in mind the culture-specific dimension of this course, we will test Jed Rasula’s notion of American poetry as a compost that evolved widespread environmental awareness. The poets discussed will include such luminaries as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, W.S. Merwin, or Gary Snyder, but also lesser-known names, among them Lorine Niedecker, Thomas McGrath, Ed Roberson, John Wieners, Philip Whalen, Chuck Miller, Merrill Gilfillan, and Eleni Sikelianos.

https://webmail.tu-dortmund.de/squirrelmail/src/login.php

“poetry is a vast muttering/ of what you always knew it would be about” (Chuck Miller)

## Course syllabus

**Sessions 1-2:** Friday November 6<sup>th</sup>, 15:00→18:00

1. Mutual introductions – Presentation of the reader & instructions as to how to use it – Matters of evaluation

2. A conversation with nature?

Lucretius: excerpts from *De Rerum Natura*<fnref n="1" />

Excerpts from Rasula’s *This Compost* (153-154)

Excerpts on “Animism” and “Naturalism” in Descola’s *Beyond Nature and Culture*

Emily Dickinson: “Within my Garden rides a Bird”; “To see the summer sky”;

Eleni Sikelianos: “Making the Bird Happy”; “The Wind Is ...”

William Carlos Williams: “A Sort of Song”

Chuck Miller: “tree souls”

William. S. Merwin: “For a Coming Extinction”

Merrill Gilfillan: “Suddenly in the Sky”

Philip Whalen: “Monday in the Evening”

**Sessions 3-4:** Friday November 20<sup>th</sup>, 15:00 → 18:00

<footnote n="1">¹ The reader for the course can be found at the back of these class notes, pp. 107-213.</footnote>
### 3. Decentered speakers

Excerpt from Christina Gerhardt's *A Place for Humility*

Ed Roberson: "We Must Be Careful"; "be careful"

Walt Whitman: "As Consequent, Etc."; "The Dalliance of the Eagles"

Gary Snyder: "Straight Creek — Great Burn"; "For All"

Emily Dickinson: "The grass so little has to do"

### 4. Noticing the unsung

Marianne Moore: "The Pangolin"

Lew Welch: "Springtime in the Rockies: lichen"

Thomas McGrath: "Praises"

**Sessions 5-6:** Thursday December 10th, 18:00→ 21:00

### 5. Environmentalist poetry (1)

John Shoptaw: "Why ecopoetry?"

Juliana Spahr: "Gentle Now, Don't Add to Heartache"

### 6. Environmentalist poetry (2)

Carol Ciavonne: "Statement of Belief"

Nin Andrews: "For I Will Consider Fracking"

Dre Cardinal: "Trash"

Timothy Liu: "The Crisis"

Robert Hass: "Ezra Pound's Proposition"

Chuck Miller: "Global warming"

William Matthews: "The Bear at the Dump"

**Sessions 7-8:** Friday December 11th, 12:00 → 15:00

### 7. Poems as environments

Excerpts from Fletcher's *A New Theory for American Poetry*

Excerpt on "Analogism" in Descola's *Beyond Nature and Culture*

Lorine Niedecker: "Paean to Place"

Elizabeth Bishop: "The Moose"

Kenneth Rexroth: "Lyell's Hypothesis Again"

### 8. Mimesis in nature poetry

Walt Whitman: "A Noiseless Patient Spider"

e.e. cummings: "I(a"; "Beautiful"

John Wieners: "At Big Sur"

**Sessions 9-10:** Friday December 11th, 15:30 → 18:30
## 9. Recycling

Walt Whitman: “This Compost”

Extract from Rasula's *This Compost* (p.39-40; 125-126, 128)

Excerpt on “Totemism” in Descola’s *Beyond Nature and Culture*

Lew Welch: “Song of the Turkey Buzzard”

Robinson Jeffers: “Vulture”

## 10. Damageable metaphors?

Robert Frost: “The Bear”

Don Gordon: “On the Border”

John Wieners: “Private Estate”

Walt Whitman: “The Voice of the Rain”

**Sessions 11-12:** Saturday December 12th, 9:00 → 12:00

## 11. Environmental epic (1)

Eleni Sikelianos: from *The California Poem*;

## 12. Environmental epic (2)

Walt Whitman: extract from “Song of Myself”; “First Dandelion”

Extract from Rasula's *This Compost* (p. 26-27)

Eleni Sikelianos: from *Make Yourself Happy*

**Sessions 13-14-15:** Saturday December 12th, 13:00 → 17:30

## 13. Nature and the times

William S. Merwin: “Forgotten Fountain”

Chuck Miller: “for Joe”

Natacha Trethewey: “Liturgy”

E-mail from Dale Jacobson

Emily Dickinson: “Nature, the Gentlest mother”

Ed Roberson: “Urban Nature”; “The Social Distance”

## 14. Allowing for chaos and disorder vs. feeling intimations of order

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

Emily Dickinson: “Four Trees”

Lorine Niedecker: “Darwin”

Jorie Graham: “The Geese”

## 15. Just looking?

Merrill Gilfillan: “Night Sky, Pawnee Creek”

Emily Dickinson: “Nature is what we see”
Theodor Roethke: “The Rose”
November 6th: sessions 1-2

A. Mutual introductions (1h)

A great honor to be teaching this course. I want to thank Pr. Walter Grünzweig for giving me the opportunity to do so and for setting up everything for me, including this Webex meeting. I hope online teaching will not spoil things too much at your end. As for me, it's a first. First time I've taught a course digitally. So please do not hesitate to tell me if anything is not working properly.

First thing we should do today: I would like you to introduce yourselves briefly. I'll then tell you a few things about me. Then we'll go over the reader together. Next, I will tell you how I want sessions to go. If everything is clear by then, we'll get going and start looking at today's quite substantial reading assignment.

Who are you? What are your subjects? Your plans? What made you choose this course? What is your experience of nature? Of poetry?

I'm 65. My interest in poetry goes back a very long way. But I only got to teaching it at university level 15 years ago. Prior to that, I had taught English in high school: six years in junior high, nineteen years in high school proper. I defended my dissertation when I was forty-nine and was immediately hired by the University of Montpellier. But poetry always had a place in my teaching. As a high school teacher, I did poetry workshops, gathered booklets of poems written by students, introduced a bit of Shakespeare, Raymond Carver, Charles Reznikoff, here and there, picked songs with lyrics that lent themselves to close reading.

Around the age of twenty-five, I wrote to the editor of a poetry journal I admired, asking him if I could do translations for it. That's how I go started translating American poets. My latest published translation was a joint venture, if I may say so, with Pr. Grünzweig, as I'm sure you've heard. We translated work by an Iowan poet, Chuck Miller, into our respective languages and the book was published jointly by a German press here in Dortmund and in France. I am now one fourth of the way into the translation of a long poem, *Letter to an Imaginary Friend*, by Thomas McGrath. I should also tell you that I come from linguistics.

When at university, I took my Master's degree in linguistics, wrote my mini-thesis on a German dialect. I have found that grammar and linguistics go well with poetry.

I was always interested in nature poetry. But it's the first time I've put together such a reader, which gathers most of the poets I know best, plus others I never got the opportunity to teach. I should tell you that, prior to preparing for this course, it had seemed to me that the subject of nature, even of environment, and not just for obvious reasons, was conspicuously absent from Black poets' concerns. Reading the *Black Nature* anthology has made me realize how wrong I was. This is as good a place as any to explain that I intentionally did not include any Native-American poets in this reader. I did not want to tokenize them. Contemporary Native-American nature poetry could/should be the subject of a whole seminar. It is all the more specific since, in the words of poet trained as anthropologist Gary Snyder, "there is so little 'landscape poetry' from the cultures of the old ways." "Nature description," he notes, "is a kind of writing that comes with civilization" "The Etiquette of Freedom" (*The Practice of the Wild*, 21).

The book-length poem I have been reading recently is entitled *Nature Poem* (2017). Its author is Tommy Pico, a Native-American poet from the Kumeyaay [kumyaï] nation in Southern California. It includes these lines: "I can't write a nature poem/ bc it's fodder for the noble savage/ narrative. I wd slap a tree across the face,/ I say to my audience." (2)

For the time being, I'll be happy to show how, the world-view of the former inhabitants, to use a Thoreauvian term, rather than Leslie Fiedler's "vanishing American," has made a spectacular return, and percolated into white poets' nature writing.

About the reader:
I suppose a fitting title for your reader would be “American nature poetry: between celebration and concern.”

There was a time when the concepts of Nature and History made a contrastive pair. A time when the teleology of History was expected to lead somewhere. History was an arrow even if the definition of the bull's eye was problematic. But reaching the target might bring some kind of happiness.

Nature on the other hand was by and large regarded as cyclical. Things returned on a regular basis. That is how you could tentatively explain that if a Celtic country like Ireland had remained impervious to Marxism, it was on account of a conceptual framework largely informed by the notion of the eternal return of the same, itself a fruit of a nature-inspired mythology.

Things have changed. Time's arrow has inflicted an open wound on Nature. Historical time now impacts nature negatively. When nature poetry would oppose man's impermanence, the human being's essential transience to Nature's permanent tranquility, making the latter a possible source of solace, an emotional refuge, nature poetry today can no longer afford to rely on the same givens. If/ When it does, it may be considered a form of escapism. Today, you will actually find that poets with an inclination to write about Nature will often document their poetry with objective data: either found in the news, or coming from more reliable sources in (hard) science. With a few noteworthy exceptions – Lucretius's *De Rerum Natura* topping the list – it had not been the case. Pastoral poetry embodied this attempt to step out of History and the inclusion of data from hard science into it would have been deemed an intrusion. (Hard science is on the side of the temporal as the data it provides are fated to be proven false sooner or later.) The times have impinged upon nature's domain. Which means that the bulk of significant nature poetry is now environmental, even environmentalist.

*And* today's perspective/lookout enables the reader to tease out truly (proto)environmental(ist) concerns in the poetry of the past decades and centuries: compassion, outrage, concerns about sustainability were by no means absent in pre-environmentalist (pre-1970s) days.

The reader mostly consists of poetry, of course. But I also included in it some secondary literature as I wanted the reader to make a self-sufficient whole, so that you would be encouraged to concentrate on it.

To analyze the reader in greater detail, the first topic is “a conversation with nature” as I wanted to make you aware how nature and language have always been regarded by poets, American ones in particular, as narrowly intertwined. Language provided Pre-Socratic philosopher-poets with their first hypotheses about matter. I like to think that poets’ imaginary conversations with nature may be a trace of the origins of human language. Once that original essential bond between nature and language has been posited, if not established, the next two sessions will revolve around two characteristics of nature writing, as brought out by Lawrence Buell in *The Environmental Imagination* (1995): the relinquishment by the human subject of its centrality. This implies humility on their part, which in turn enables poets to pay attention to beings, entities, phenomena in nature which had been overlooked: species going extinct, environmental damage and so forth. That is what I called ‘celebrating the unsung.’ Time, by then, over sessions 5 and 6, to gain a more precise understanding of what has been called ecopoetry, which we will do by discussing an insightful essay by John Shoptaw and analyzing very contemporary poems, to see if they meet Shoptaw’s criteria. Sessions 7 and 8 both revolve around the idea that, more than other genres, poetry can, poems by themselves can,
not only represent, but also be an experience of nature in some way, when the page becomes
spage and the poem an environment. Here again, the attempts are worth exploring. One way
human beings can show some sense regarding their place in nature can be to consider
themselves, as Native-Americans do, as part of a trophic chain, acknowledging the position
they occupy in a food web. American poets' considerations on the human being as part of
such a chain will be the topic of session 9. But the question, finally raised in session 10, and
which will require some thinking back on the material covered so far, is: "does not the
appropriation of nature through metaphors" invalidate poetry as an ecological gesture? Going
on to sessions 11 and 12, I will take you into my more specialized field within American
poetry, i.e. the long poem, an American variation on the epic. One of the best recent examples
is Eleni Sikelianos's *The California Poem*, a poem I consider an environmental epic,
testifying to the blending of nature and history I was referring to earlier on. We will take a
lengthy look at it, alongside more of her recent poetry and some more Whitman, which will
also take us back to Lucretius and atomism. More examples of how the times, present history,
including the current epidemic, show in American nature poetry, is the topic of session 13.
Once we're there, we should, by session 14, be reasonably well-equipped to look at poems
confronting such a broad question as: Which, of order and chaos, is the bigger picture of
nature American poets have favored? Our final session will ponder the overarching centrality
of the sense of sight in nature writing.

For all of the above reasons, as Pr. Grünzweig explained, I will be expecting you to have the
reader next to you. No discussion of a poem is valid unless you are referring to specific
passages. If it's the poem under study you are talking about, you should always give line
numbers. If you are referring to another poem, do not forget to give the class page numbers
and line numbers.

The first four sessions will consist in class discussion of the reading assignments. From
session 5 on, here is how I want things to go:

You will all be in charge of presenting a topic, either in pairs or on your own. When your
turn comes, I will expect you to introduce the material to be discussed during the session.
Most of the time, it will be two of you speaking. Each student should speak for ten minutes.
If the material you have to cover includes theory, you should do a synthetic presentation of
the extract, raise questions that encourage participation. With poems, after briefly stating their
subject matter, you should always prioritize micro-readings: that is to say, focus on the more
interesting and/or challenging lines, looking at the way the author has implemented/used the
familiar arsenal of poetic tools, by which I mean: line break, stanza break, meter, punctuation,
rhyme, alliteration, assonance, metaphor, simile, juxtaposition (parataxis), hypallage (play on
syntactic location not matching the expected semantic one), personification (pathetic fallacy),
specific forms and so forth. And to what end poets have used this or that poetic tool. Always
keep in mind that more than any other genre, poetry thickens the textual web of connections.
When you create a metaphor or a simile, you are creating a connection that did not exist
before. When you create alliteration or assonance, you highlight/ bring out a link between
words through sound, hoping that this sameness of sounds will suggest sameness of sense.
Paul Valéry once wrote: "Poetry is a constant hesitation between sound and sense." Two
important points to finish: a) if on the day you're presenting, you want to introduce extra
material, it should be in the form of a file which you will have sent to the group and me before
you get started. The screen should remain available and free as our space for discussion.
b) More likely than not, the impassioned discussions of specific poems will mean that, by the
end of some sessions, not all the material that was set for the day has been dealt with. My
view is that it can then become the subject of an essay, of a project, of personal work I will
take into account in the assessment of your work. Throughout the semester, feel free to write
to me. I will be glad to answer any question on the material of this course and American
poetry in general.

## B. A conversation with nature? (2h)

At the start of a course on *American* nature poetry, an obvious point should be made. I will let Gary Snyder do it for me, in reference to a key moment in American history, later to become a keystone in United States' mythology: "Much has been said about the frontier in American history, but overlooking perhaps some key points: the American confrontation with a vast wild ecology, an earthly paradise of grass, water, and game —was mind-shaking." (Snyder, *Earth House Hold* 119). (If you have never seen the first fifteen minutes of Terence Mallick's *The New World*, you should check them out as it is to me a rarely successful attempt at putting across what may have made arrival in the New World a source of amazed wonder.)

This no doubt accounts to a large extent for the sheer mass of productions, poetic ones among them, documenting this encounter with North-American nature to the present day.

As it is poetry issuing from the United States that is the focus of this course, you may have wondered about the exact reasons for the presence in your reader of extracts from the work of an atom-fond Roman poet of the 1st century B.C. The extract from Jed Rasula's *This Compost* provides you with a first answer: Lucretius's poem has enjoyed great popularity with American poets: its author's extreme attention to the physical world, his view of nature as a combination of tiny parts, his fondness for catalogs, found a 'natural' audience with American poets over the decades.

Whitman's matter-of-fact reference to "every atom of my blood" in the first section of "Song of Myself" is the first example that comes to mind of American poets' familiarity with atomism. The renewed interest in such theories in the first decades of the 19th century owed much to British physicist Francis Dalton who had made major advances in the field around the turn of the century. And Whitman knew about Dalton's findings. But Rasula reminds us that Whitman was also exposed to *De Rerum Natura* shortly before he started writing the 1855 volume. Many passages from Lucretius's poem would not sound out of place in *LoG*. Lucretius's infectious enthusiasm over nature's achievements, over its disorderly order, must have been to the taste of the author of *Leaves of Grass*.

Note in the first extract the exclamatory, emphasis-bearing "so many," repeated several times, the proto-Whitmanian lists, the piling up of evidence in the anaphoric use of "And". And the awe-inspired quantifiers "all" (1.2 and final.)

The same emphasis is found throughout: in the second extract, in the poet's urgent addressing of his addressee ("you will see," "as you may say") and the repetitions ("different"); in extract three, in the constant stressing of the logic of the speaker's argument ("And so," "and yet," "but", "and so," "but that does not mean" and so forth.)

Of course, you have to allow for the translator's choices but the poetic persona's thrill as he goes on making his points is unmistakable. And proved contagious!

A second and both more tentative and profound reason for invoking Lucretius at this initial stage in this context is a wish to reboot our approach to the link between nature and language. Taken at face value, Lucretius's use of the letters of the alphabet to set forth his atomistic view of nature, is inspired by pedagogical concerns. He may actually have found the idea of his metaphor in the Greek atomists' writings: Democritus or Epicure. But I do not think one should leave it at that. I also read his explication as evidence of a poet's immemorial urge to reset poetic language using nature as a benchmark, a tuning fork. This parallel between letters
and atoms serves as a reminder that the close link between nature and language should not be lost sight of. It would remind us that nature, understood as the outside world, may have provided the first linguistic matter. I am no paleo-linguist but consciousness of the discreet, of the discontinuous in nature may be where the idea of segmenting the chain of one's vocal emissions initially lay. Then it was on from that point to more intricate patterns, possibly partly in imitation to natural sounds. But perception of those natural sounds must have played a part from the outset.

Once again, I'll let Gary Snyder take over at this point: "Language is a mind-body system that coevolved with our needs and nerves. [...] We cannot as individuals or even as a species take credit for this power. It came from someplace else: from the way clouds divide and mingle [...] from the way many flowerlets of a composite blossom divide and redivide, from the gleaming calligraphy of the ancient riverbeds under present riverbeds of the Yukon River streaming out the Yukon flats, from the wind in the pine needles, from the chuckles of grouse in the ceanothus bushes. [...] The power, the *virtu*, remains on the side of the wild," Snyder writes in "The Etiquette of Freedom" (*The Practice of the Wild*, 17).

Yes, the popularity of Lucretius's *De Rerum Natura* has got to have something to do with it being that powerful reminder of the original link between language and nature.

And Lucretius's reception by poets must have been made easier by the fact that the examples he used to make atomistic theories easy to grasp referred to poet's daily subjects of interest: the combinations of letters, words and verses, he says, work in the same way as the combination of particles. Out of a limited number of elements, a limitless number of composites can be generated. He was 'talking shop' to his fellows in the poetic trade when writing such lines as: "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."

At this point, let us attempt to get one major terminological issue out of the way. When I say "nature," I am saying it in full awareness that I am putting things from a naturalistic perspective. Animist cultures, as redefined by anthropologist Philippe Descola, have no conceptual word for "nature," as they do not conceive of any deep-running separation between humans and animals or plants. There is nothing natural to the "nature" vs. "culture" opposition. This ties into what Snyder was saying about the virtual absence of nature description in Native-American poetry. In fact, it is this perception of nature as being the other to culture which Descola's book goes a long way in deconstructing, and powerfully eroding. Western naturalism was gradually evolved over the centuries by Christian theologians and numerous philosophers, all of them eager to contain or educate the wilderness outside and inside the human being. But poets always resisted. Nature poets are often natural animists. One could extend the understanding of "poetic license" to content and say that a form of poetic animism was always tolerated.

Let's briefly look at the two extracts from Descola's book ...

## #370 by Emily Dickinson

Placing her judgment on an equal footing with her dog's goes some way in that direction/gestures toward that notion in Dickinson's #370. Upon observing the dazzling sight of a hummingbird feeding off a rose, which she depicts in anthropocentric terms – the Wheel, the spokes, the Mill, with the first two making a circus acrobat out of the hummingbird – the poet then undercuts the human appropriation, cuts a figure of humility, by turning to her dog for confirmation that she was not delusive in believing her eyes. She distrusts her "clumsy eye." The dog is clearly posited as a thinking being, since he too looks as perplexed as she is at the dance just witnessed. The pronoun referring to it is "He" with a capitalized "H." The dog is
then named “the best Logician” as, it seems, simply from the direction of his gaze, (or is it
from a slight rotation of the head) he gets the human speaker to focus her gaze on the “just
vibrating Blossoms,” sufficient proof of the hummingbird’s passage.

The effectiveness of the poem largely relies on the numerous sibilants, both voiced and
unvoiced, peppering the poem, and mimetically testifying to the bird's hissing and buzzing
passage in front of their eyes.

In the same way as the Dog is elevated to the dignity of “Logician,” the brain is knocked off
its human pedestal, becoming a mere “Garden.” Silent as the conversation has been, the dog’s
answer to the speaker’s doubts is said to be “an Exquisite Reply.” No human words could
have achieved as much.

The poem demonstrates the powers of articulate language while proving in at least two ways –
the mere sounds of it and the dog’s wordless reply – how it can be dispensed with.

# 1491

This poem displays in the most concise manner how poetic contemplation of nature becomes
a substitute for a conversation with it. Nature, the poet tells us, will always elude true poetry
while offering what is closest to it. As a result, the only thing left to do is to take note in verse
of the frustrated conversation.

If the Summer Sky were to be successfully couched on book paper, it would then be bound to
be a “lie” (see how this word, albeit in a different sense, is found next to “true”.)

After a perfectly iambic departure in line 1, with the promise of poetry, the meter comes
undone either side of the comma in 1.2, then turns trochaic, suggesting a promise not
materializing with the meter working in the opposite way. The spondaic third line – three
strongly stressed syllables followed by a loud long pause – marks the end of all attempts.

The poem reads like a late, muted, rewrite of the first stanza of #533: "I reckon – when I
count at all – / First – Poets – Then the Sun – / Then Summer – Then the Heaven of God –/
And then – the List is done –". Even poets are helpless in the later poem.
## “MAKING THE BIRD HAPPY” by Eleni Sikelianos

The triple simile within this very short poem manifests the poet’s eagerness to blend her language with nature. You may call it a form of appropriation, unless you decide to overrule such guilt-inducing stances and focus on how the line breaks are successful in conveying the finches’ constant motion.

The poem’s title echoes the book’s title. Is irony intended? At the speaker’s/ the human being’s own expense?

How can you be so conceited as to think you can make a bird happy ... unless you think in animistic terms...?

Another negative interpretation of the title consists in reading it as the description of a forcible transformative process at work here, aiming at turning the bird into something other than what it is, thanks to the rosy-colored lenses of language and punctuation. Is the poem about admitting to, and mocking, this uncontrollable anthropomorphizing of nature? Or is it inspired by nostalgia for a prelinguistic form of communication when no articulation (segmentation) came to spoil animal sounds of which those uttered by humans were a part, thus enabling the whole animal kingdom to converse with one another in perfect clarity?

A different extract from *Make Yourself Happy* (footnote p.72) inclines one to think that it is this prelapsarian longing that makes the poet see exclamation marks and commas in branches rather than a wish to clear her perception of “nothing that is not there” (“The Snowman,” W. Stevens) and just see “house finches”:

> Animals utter indivisible sounds so
> Often yet
> Aristotle dos not call any of them
> a letter. Still, an
> animal sound will
> make yourself happy. Listen to this
> kitten. We can call its noises an alphabet without confusion.

(4)

## “THE WIND IS”

We all remember Bob Dylan’s “The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.”

Or Wallace Stevens, in “To the Roaring Wind,” addressing the wind as “Vocalissimus”:

> What syllable are you seeking,
> Vocalissimus,
> In the distances of sleep?
> Speak it.

(*Collected Poems* 113).

In this case, the poet proposes to take trees as role models, follow their example in showing flexibility whenever the wind blows. There lies the recipe for happiness.

The mocking intent becomes obvious from the start of the third cluster of lines with the equally obvious Whitmanian subtext. “Live Oak with Moss” was the title of small handmade notebook comprised of 12 poems which Whitman worked on four years after the first edition of *Leaves of Grass* and which is now regarded as his first celebration of same-sex love. Much of the material of this booklet was to be recycled as part of the “Calamus” section of *Leaves of Grass*. In the present case, the live oak presents the speaker with a problem as it “stays stiff,” thereby belying the exemplar flexibility of trees she has just praised which made her identify with them. But then a further problem is hinted at through a facile piece of double entendre. The gender of this oak-tree is uncertain. Penis-like with its stiffness, it is nevertheless wearing a dress. Identification becomes less simple. And the poet seems to give up on the idea of patterning her conduct after that of trees.
The final cluster starts with an expression of disenchantment. She is urging the outside world to come closer to her but her words "make nothing happen." A second trace of intertextual composting is found here, with W.H. Auden's words in "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" ("Poetry makes nothing happen") recycled here. Conversation with nature proves impossible. The speaker's mocking intent at her own expense continues in the final lines (13-18). Anthropomorphizing nature is mocked here through overdoing it, with the poet putting very strong language in a bird's mouth. While *she* receives birdsong as "The morning's sweet word" after her confrontation with the wind, she also imagines being totally wrong, misinterpreting that voice of nature. The sweet song may amount to an exchange of expletives between the birds, one of them complaining about their neighbor's excessive loudness. "Shut the fuck up, Motherfucker," may also be the poet's address to herself. Be done with this ridiculous idea of emulating nature, let alone conversing with it.

You will find another extract from *Make Yourself Happy* relative to wind on p.6. I placed it there in the reader because it somehow can be considered from a more general perspective. The quotation calls for some contextualizing to be understandable. A section of *Make Yourself Happy* was inspired by the Biosphere 2 experiment conducted in Oracle, Arizona, between 1987 and 1991. It is defined in *Wikipedia* as "an American Earth system science research facility originally meant to demonstrate the viability of closed ecological systems to support and maintain human life in outer space." We'll return to this text in more detail at some later point but, let's stick to wind and trees for now. An interesting observation during the Biosphere 2 experiment was that the absence of wind within the vivarium meant that trees did not grow any "stress wood," a product of the response of "the tree's flesh [...] to wind, or snow, gravity, and ground-shifts" which toughens the tree and "keeps [it] up."

From "stress wood," the poet moves on to "stress word shift," visualizing the shift on the page by introducing a blank space within the line.

I was thinking that environmental(ist) poetry as a whole could be thought of as and named stress verse as it gets written as a result of 'rough weather' outside.
## "A Sort Of A Song" by W.C. Williams

Even when the idea of a conversation with nature is ruled out, the distance between the speaker and their object can be made to feel greater or shorter. Reducing that distance is what this poem is about. So that, although the poem is framed by two notations about nature located in the poem's first and last two lines, its content is mostly theoretical. Hence its title: "A Sort of A Song." "The compositional rule becomes the *locus* of meaning (Aji on Zukofsky)." The poem includes a statement of its own poetics: "through metaphor to reconcile/ the people and the stones." Anthropos/ Cosmos reunited through logos.

"Snake" and "weed," — i.e. unwanted grass. And the "saxifrage," etymologically a plant that "breaks stone."

The association of "snake" and "weed" recalls the hackneyed phrase "Snake in the grass": a deceitful or treacherous person. The snake is of course also readily associated with what, according to the Book of Genesis, caused original sin to take place; alternatively, psychoanalytic criticism has identified it as a possible symbol for the penis and the fear of it. A heavily symbolical object/ creature.

This poem is about ridding/ cleansing poetry of all hackneyed symbols and paying renewed attention to what makes it what it is, what it is ultimately made of: words.

"To cleanse:" "free from dirt, defilement, or guilt; purge or clean."

"Let the snake wait under his weed:" Let us let the snake just be a "snake," i. e. a word. Let us refrain from immediately introducing symbols.

The poet aims at a renewed immediacy through more attention paid to words, which means to their sounds. It is materialized here by the striking use of monosyllabic words (with Anglo-Saxon roots rather than of words with Latin roots) most noticeable in ll. 5-6, two lines in which the language does what it says. Language, not the snake, should never go to sleep in order to retain its power to strike; meaning should not be ready-made.

Note the imperatives: "Compose" and "Invent!" A bit of a manifesto poem.

New items in nature become foci of attention: "stones," "the rocks." but devoid of any sublime dimension.

"To reconcile/ the people and the stones" involves "breaking new ground" for poetry, among other things by using material that seemed out of the precincts of poetry, esp. Romantic poetry. There *were* stones and rocks in Romantic poetry but they would be associated with the sublime. This time, "stones" and "the rocks" are devoid of any sublime dimension.

Here too, what the poem advocates is a rebooting through voluntary symbol-free dieting.

From time immemorial, mystics have always gone to live in rocky deserts in search of illumination.

It is an idea found in Rimbaud, in *A Season in Hell*:

### FAIM

Si j'ai du goût, ce n'est guère
Que pour la terre et les pierres.
Je déjeune toujours d'air,
De roc, de charbons, de fer.

Mes faims, tournez. Paissez, faims,
Le pré des sons.
Attirez le gai venin

### Des liserons.

Mangez les cailloux qu'on brise,
Les vieilles pierres d'églises ;
Les galets des vieux déluges,
Pains semés dans les vallées grises.

### HUNGER

I only find within my bones
A taste for eating earth and stones.
When I feed, I feed on air,
Rocks and coals and iron ore.

My hunger, turn. Hunger, feed,
*On a* field of *bran/sounds*.
Gather as you can the bright
Poison weed.

Eat the rocks *that are broken*,
The stones of ancient *churches*
Pebbles *from ancient* floods
Loaves *scattered* in *gray valleys*.

Rimbaud is the tail-end of Romanticism. Rimbaud left Europe to become a gun-runner in Abyssinia, an arid and stony place. This giving up of poetry by Rimbaud has become symbolical of radical change in poetry, called for after the Romantic lush rhetoric. You go on a temporary diet after a rich meal. Same goes for poetry.

The etymology of “saxifrage” is “breaks stone”. A flower commonly found in the mountains. Nature is ultimately still the vehicle of a metaphor for Williams’ theory of poetry. Saxifrage grows by plunging its roots in rock. That difficult way should also be the one of modern poetry. It is the price to pay for inventiveness and maybe getting a fresh feel of nature.
"tree souls" by Chuck Miller, dubbed "the last of the Beats" ... Definitely a wanderer.

Clearly, despite the tentativeness in the speaker' tone, the poet believes that some form of
communication can take place between trees and human beings. He also clearly believes that
trees may have a form of emotional life. In a former book of his (*How in the morning*) he
speaks admiringly of a Czech poet who wrote a poem about trees 's sadness at being confined
inside a schoolyard. A majority among poets are natural animists.

The notion that trees communicate among themselves and with their environment stopped
being a fanciful one some twenty-five years ago when Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard
established "that *trees communicate* their needs and send *each other* nutrients via a network of
latticed fungi buried in the soil".

Listen to her TED talk about her ground-breaking experiment at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un2yBgIAxYs

You must at least have heard of Peter Wohlleben's *The Hidden Life of Trees* (2016).

All this research partly un-metaphored the ageless animistic (but also poetic) notion of
conversations going on within kingdoms and between kingdoms.

Miller's poem was published in 2001. Had he heard of Simard's discovery?

No way to tell. He may have.

The poem's symmetrical lay-out partly reflects its first theme, which is, human beings may
have two souls, a wanderer's one and a more "rooted" one.

The three longer clusters of lines are bookended by a tercet followed by a distich.

Don't ask me why, the poem's symmetrical lay-out, its theme, the three central clusters, make
me feel like saying: "one, two, tree."

After all, trees too could have a vagabond soul.

The title admits of a second interpretation, provided you read it aloud. "Souls" is
homonymous with "soles", the underside of your shoes, those the wandering speaker in "Song
of Myself" refers to: "If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles" ("SoM",
section 52). So the title could also suggest, by way of a final commentary, that trees too may
have this wandering side to them. And that is precisely that first, journeying soul the existence
of which the poet hypothesizes. *The Lord of the Rings* features a class of talking and walking,
the Ents..

The Whitmanian presence (shall I say “compost”) is confirmed by the mention of his name
and of the title of one of his poems.

Also in relation to Whitman, specific lines magnetize the attention:

- "whirlwind of discordant coloration" as applied to Whitman's poem: no doubt the sound of aspiration in "whirlwind" is meant to echo that in "Whitman" in the next line;

- "while retaining everything in microcosm": here too, the Whitmanian note is sounded, his all-encompassing look at creation, be it through the microscope or the learned astronomer's telescope. However far this soul is wandering, it keeps in mind those parts of creation at closest range.

By the end of the first longer group of lines, the main subject becomes that hypothesized
stationary soul's special relationship to trees. As for trees, and going by the title, the poet does
not even question the existence of their having a soul. He merely regrets our grown-up's
generally lost ability to hear their language.

Fortunately, "unexpected voices penetrate us/ interpret for us these trees"
These voices penetrating us sound like those of poetic inspiration; they cannot be at your beck
and call; when they come, you/ we cannot turn off the sound.

But in this case, equating these voices with those of inspiration would be too restrictive. These
voices are not those of inspiration only. The poet has heard them.

Several details in the poem's form confirm this.

Note how there is “tree” both in “penetrate” and “interpret”. And the image of a possible
dialogue within “interpret” with “ter” and its mirror-image “ret”.

The magic knife at the end: a variation on the sword-in-the-stone motif, the sword, Excalibur,
which young Arthur pulled out of the stone, a feat that made him king. The Welsh origins of
the Arthurian legends are also present through this association of trees with magic and poetry,
as developed by Robert Graves in *The White Goddess*.

But “[T]he magic knife stuck in the wood” also evokes the poet’s pen plunging into the heart
of its subject matter, plugging itself into the tree so to say, with the sap of a song flowing into
the pen, causing it to vibrate.

Distant in appearance as the tree and human beings are (hence “tele” in “telepathic”), the song
can be heard. Deciphering it is a different matter, the poet admits.

The two longer clusters (19 to 43) preceding this final assessment are/make/ constitute a first
imaginative approach/step in the interpretive work.

The poet plays on the double relevance to human beings and trees of such a phrasal verb as
“cut down”, in order to put across the message of kinship across kingdoms. Tree-friends and
human friends alike can be cut down, by loggers or diseases and die untimely deaths.

But some conversation is definitely going on here.

(A poetic predecessor to Richard Powers's 2018 novel *The Over Story*)
## “For a Coming Extinction” by William S. Merwin

An environmentalist poem inspired to a poet known to be a dedicated conservationist by the dwindling population/ near extinction of gray whales.

What is the rhetoric deployed in this poem?

The whale is addressed in person.

It is not a naïve address. By stanza 2, the poet feels the need to explain that he is conscious he *is* pretending to be having this conversation, but also to explain why it makes sense, given the situation. He feels fully justified in doing so as “One must always pretend something/ Among the dying.”

By stanza 4, identifying who the second-person pronoun refers to, is no longer obvious. If it still stands for the whale, “you” may be the *last* gray whale which will be a direct witness of the death of its species and which will be left with nothing but the prospect of ending up in a huge species cemetery.

Mankind is in the dock for sending the gray whale to The End.

The capitalizing of “The End” and its characterization as “That great god” with the oxymoronic pairing of the derogatory “That” with “great god” in lower case suggests empty skies, absence of belief in a supreme being, a supreme being as a supreme fiction.

The poet includes himself in the human kind: it is the butt of the poet’s irony and he loathes it for its self-importance, its assurance to be a species apart: “we were made/ On another day”; “it is we who are important”, its inconsistency: we who [...] invented forgiveness/ [...] forgive nothing.”

The more mysterious lines deserve our attention:

What image can “the seas nodding on their stalks” conjure up? Giant kelp forests? In which case, “nodding” should be described as a hypallage.

Stanza 3 seems to be taking us inside the whale, the twists and turns either of its brain or of its bowels assuming the ability for it to be silently bewildered. But this bewilderment will pass, like the gray whale, and us.

The gray whale may die, but we will soon follow suit.

This conversation with one of nature’s most powerful symbols sounds like an apology.
"Suddenly in the Sky" by Merrill Gilfillan

The poet enjoys a friendly moment with a youngling goat. Gilfillan's father was a renowned ornithologist. He published non-fiction books about his travels on the Great Plains and the West, and his narratives often show the ornithologist's eye. The present prose poem makes much use of pathetic fallacy as the speaker allows himself to read animals' intentions and feelings: "a youngling goat [...] seeking simple nonspecific companionship [...] We sat there a good while, enjoying the camaraderie, talking a little, not much" + "and we looked up as one to watch them go over". His mention of a conversation with the youngling goat comes without any oratorical precautions, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. The nighthawks are said to be "tacking in in a loose unassuming group." The poet admits to imagining a brief instant of their flight: "I believed I was actually seeing them rise from the pines nearby at the very moment of stirring, of takeoff, like the instant of a leaf breaking from its twig." Not only is the description not a description proper but the poet tags a simile to it, extending the distance from an accurate witnessing even further. I would argue that the anthropomorphizing inherent in pathetic fallacy does not deter from the value/worth of the poem as nature writing, even environmentally friendly writing.

Location in space and time is extremely precise and there is nothing intrusive about the speaker's attitude. He treats the place as a friend, to whom, upon departing, one should say "goodbye.": "bidding a gradual farewell to a favorite place." The youngling goat comes to him, not the opposite. He just acknowledges his presence with a friendly gesture. And it seems they immediately become a community of two, fully absorbed in the scene going on in front of their eyes. He lets things happen, does not intervene in anything in any way. He is content with looking, and listening. True to his father's calling, he notes that the nighthawks' call is "unfamiliar," makes a note of it. This mimetic reproduction of the bird's talk does not sound more real than the offhand mention of the conversation with the youngling goat.
“Monday in the evening” by Philip Whalen

The first reason for including this poem in your reader is that it is printed as a facsimile of longhand writing – a relatively common gesture in Beat poetry. Several reasons accounted for that trend at the time: among them, the popularity of Eastern culture and of the art of calligraphy in particular, a general inclination to do without technology whenever possible. The importance of the first factor was major in Philip Whalen’s case as he, Gary Snyder and Lew Welch had studied under a renowned teacher of calligraphy at Reed College. Of the three friends, Whalen was the one who took the studies of Eastern culture furthest. By the end of his life, he was abbot of a Zen monastery in San Francisco. He practiced calligraphy throughout his life.

The present poem partly borrows from the form of the diary. The circumstances of writing give the poem its title. The subject matter of the poem – from paragraph 2 on – leads one to see a strong connection between it and the use of longhand. Paragraph 2 is about urgently restoring connection with the immediate ‘wilderness’ outside: the branch of a tree, a handful of foliage, a tree trunk, the thickness and texture of its bark, the ground) through touch and writing: “inspect the bark [...] note its color.” All the things listed are close at hand, including the writing ... in longhand. Close attention is paid to the generally overlooked: mosses, lickens, fungi, the gravel, fallen leaves, dead grasses.

The third paragraph continues on this course toward establishing connection with the outside. It focuses on the meeting with squirrels. As in Gilfillan’s “Suddenly in the Sky,” the relation of the interaction is not merely descriptive and involves the poet humanizing the movements of the squirrels, reading into them, projecting his interpretations on the squirrels’ bodily movements, to the point of guessing at a question the squirrels may be asking, so imagining a conversation.

The final paragraph tells us about the poet’s frequent urge to go outside, followed at times by a fit of panic and the equally urgent, panicky wish to return indoors. However, he goes on, taking out his notebook and recording the fact in it enables him to control himself and continue to pay attention to “particular objects.”

The poem is about the self’s problematic connection with the world outside and the negotiations to keep it in existence. The method the poem focuses on involves nature, and striking a conversation with it through imagined oral interchange or in written form, the writing being done *al fresco* (a Gilfillan phrase) i.e. in nature.

All of the above considerations lead me to think that printing this particular poem in longhand reveals a wish to materialize the closer and pacified connection with the non-human world outside, natural world; a wish to make even more real the shrinking of the distance that printed type inevitably introduces.

The poem’s opening sentence “I must remember to scream & holler more often” evinces an identical urge to reach out to reality. The other very indirect ways – a double negative turning into a positive – likely to help the poet regain some clarity of vision are the subject of the second sentence. Proof follows.

A different analysis of the poem would consist in reading it as the account of a panic attack, brought under control through the verbal restoration of the subject’s Panic connections, his connections with Pan, the great god of nature...
November 20th, sessions 3-4

Session 3: Decentered speakers

Decentering human speakers and celebrating unsung non-human entities calls for humility.

→From Christine Gerhardt's *A Place for Humility*

Humility as understood by Gerhardt does not entail that the human subject totally gives up its centeredness. Centrality cannot be totally erased if only because human language remains central; it is the necessary channel when the issue is writing (about) nature; a degree of human-centeredness is also inevitable because humility is based on ethics and that you cannot promote ethics from a self-effacing position. Humility is a concept that makes it possible to solve the sterile opposition between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism.

There is still a lot you can do while acknowledging that human-centeredness cannot be spirited/wished away.

Gerhardt shows us how Dickinson and Whitman each did their bit, starting from very different positions, coping with very different cultural expectations:

The kind of womanhood extolled in the 19th-century included such defining virtues as modesty and self-effacement. Those made a natural nexus with environmental humility: "gestures of nature-centeredness were more readily available to Dickinson's female speakers." But the risk was to collapse "back into conventional female domesticity." What Dickinson achieved was a combination of environmental sensitivity and assertiveness, staking out the claims of a female subject. She navigated between humility and hubris, often "letting the self re-emerge on the other side of its apparent self-effacement" (p.17).

"For Whitman, the problem [was] the reverse, since his poetry is informed by ideas of masculine independence, arrogance and pride," so that humility toward nature might be experienced as "emasculation." His (probably instinctive) negotiation of the issue was to "admit humility into perspectives largely guided by pride." Thus, he wrote: "I think this pride is indispensable to an American. I think it not inconsistent with obedience, humility, deference, and self-questioning." (17) But, Gerhardt writes, "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.")

Gerhardt shows how on the microlevel, on the local, regional and global levels, Dickinson and Whitman talked back to, engaged, all contemporary discourses on nature: scientific, proto-environmentalist, conservationist, metaphysical, and of course aesthetic.

If "they mark a foundational moment in the history of American environmental literature, [that is] because the significance of their works "reaches far beyond their eco-ethical implications." (15) In perfect awareness of humans' essential incapability of knowing nature, of their power to disrupt it, and their inclination to appropriate it, they kept "attempting the impossible to carve out a language that allows their speakers to relate to nature in non-dominating ways." (16)
"be careful" by Ed Roberson

A fourteen-line poem without, it seems, the formal and semantic characteristics of a sonnet.
(Octave + sestet or 1-12 + epigrammatic final couplet).

Roberson's carefulness with nature goes further than Dickinson's and Whitman's humility
towards it as he introduces a dimension of guilt in the transaction. He blames himself for
various things, sometimes preventively.

- insufficient attention to the beauty of nature and natural phenomena: the grain of oak-wood.

- participation in the general disturbance of nature: wild animals' lives, as with grizzlies;

- writing in a reductive and/or intrusive way; he fears making mistakes, using too loud a voice about the "gentle" wilderness.

The absence of capitals is surely intentional. It levels things, suggests a soft-voiced speaker. The poem also plays down human intervention by appearing somewhat disorderly, even slipshod and slovenly. It has an unfinished look to it. The first line could not be more informal. The few blanks suggest hesitations; hesitancy as to what to include in the two lists that make up the poem: the first comprising the animals and scenes he does not want to disturb (2-8); the second one comprised of do's and don't's (9-14) that should be complied with. Apart from the first line, no other one is end-stopped. And the run-on lines appear not to have been given much thought. No semantic effect can be detected in the location of line breaks, except the intention to appear to be seeking no particular effect. Note how "farness" (L.11 & 12) is split apart in order to introduce a couplet rhyme (of "far" with "jar") but even though it is the only rhyme of its kind in the poem, no special significance can be teased out of it. (It is as arbitrary as the decision to give the poem the appearance of a sonnet.) Taking a closer look at the items in each list, some of them hardly make sense: it is difficult to decide what "in a sleep" applies to. Could it be the fish, "hearing/ the thin taps" of the deer's hooves? But then the reason why those would lead away to collapse and why "the bear/ in the high quiet" would collapse too are unclear: could it be because they have been shot by hunters?

The poet calls words “precarious” (13). Compares them to rocks. Equating words with rocks calls to mind the title poem of Gary Snyder’s first collection: *Riprap*. The first two lines go: “Lay down these words/ Before your mind like rocks. / placed solid, by hands/ In choice of place.” The same collection includes a poem entitled “Thin Ice.”

Roberson writes that “by the end of [his] early poem, nature turns into words.” If we go by his word, the switch from his voice to Nature’s voice occurs on line 9: “i must be careful not to shake/ anything in too wild an elation” could be nature restraining itself from manifesting emotions too wildly, which could result in earthquakes, for example. It/she views mountains as “fragile” and from her perspective, the danger lies in rubbing them against paper, i.e. converting them into writing. The same perilous collapse onto a flat surface might await fog or the eagle:” (“i must [...] no[t] avalanche the fog or the eagle from the air.” L.13-14 sees nature using hyperbaton (inverting the standard word order), when setting down a rule for itself when “writing”: the line does what it says! Choosing this word order shows great care taken: “of the gentle wilderness I must set the precarious/ words” suggests that that is exactly what it is going to do and has started doing.

If we follow the author's reading, then the poem can be read as a sonnet: the first 8 lines are
his, then he passes the baton to nature as a resolution of his problem.
From this angle, the decentering of the human speaker is rather successful. Nature's soft sounds and hardly noticeable details are made room for; they can be heard or seen. So much so that nature's voice can take over from the poet's own.

## “We Must Be Careful”

The ideal companion piece to the poem since it partly deals with the poem's genesis. The text starts with a bit of autobiography, confirming the possible complementarity of hard science and poetry. Hard science *will* be conducive to poetry. That was the case with Roberson: “My orderly handling of the nature poem came from my feel for basic scientific observation and technique, not the order of a metaphysical imperative” (39-40).

He then delves into the subject of appropriation through language, in this case, when writing about nature. He defines appropriation as implying that “in the takeover, the taken object is changed to conform to the taker, the carrier” (13-14 science). The takeover entails a tremendous loss of substance (literally taking the teeth out of the grizzly bear) and should convince us that words are only right for our species, can only achieve so much, and that we cannot get outside that nature we are a part of: “our life exists inside [nature] as an act of Nature” (23-24). It is part of our species' language to experience its own limits.

Roberson shows how nature poetry hits a ceiling beyond which language cannot go. This amounts to a rediscovery of the sublime (minus the fear) in its etymological sense since “sublime” means “under the limit.” And, he says, the experience of the limitations of language is the source of “our mythology, our religion, our poetry.” The “supernatural” is what lies above that ceiling, beyond reach. Feeling/sensing the “supernatural” is part of our experience: that supernatural may be a “sense of the larger Earth” (28), which leads the individual to a kind of Copernican revolution: it is the Earth that runs the world (of humans), not the other way round.

Like other poets we shall be reading in this class (Lew Welch, Robinson Jeffers), he undoes/ deconstructs his human prominence by seeing himself as part of the trophic chain. Under certain circumstances, a human being will be regarded as potential food by other living beings. That is a sobering thought. “We exist in the midst of living as other living” (19-20).

He experienced that threat in the Upper Amazon jungle. The poetic outcome was a sense of “de-centered mortality” (48).

Roberson then moves on to examples of ways in which being an African-American poet has led him to write from such a decentered angle in an attempt to further a decolonized, non-exploitative relationship to nature. Restoring a sense of the earth within city culture and urban poetry in particular is a task Roberson has set out to do, inspired by the ancient lore of his ethnic group based on “an observant accumulating of the knowledge of self in an also living environment” (67-68).
I contend that some decentering of the human speaker is also what is achieved in
**Walt Whitman's "As Consequent, Etc."**

First, a word about the title: I believe the italicized "Etc" is a hapax in Whitman's poetry, i.e. a word that only appears once in a work. I take it as a decentering gesture on the part of the speaker: he seems to be relinquishing some of his authority in not bothering with a well-rounded title.

Then note how "I sing" only comes at the tail-end of the first line cluster (as is the case in the first cluster of another poem with a partly-decentered speaker, "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.") His song results from unpredictable sources, ones difficult to trace. The path of inspiration is sinewy: "wayward rivulets," "many a brook's reticulations," "subterranean sea-rills." So, is he the "great salt brine," "the mystic ocean" towards which all the rivers are flowing? The list of tributaries to his song continues in cluster 3: they are to be found in all parts of the United States, and not that easily either. Some of these watercourses are not in plain sight: mere threads (l.11), "half-hid" or in a part of the country very remote from the speaker's home base.

Although the speaker democratically extends the capacity to 'hold' all these currents in oneself to the reader (all readers), one should note that he remains the only one that sings them. This bears out Christine Gerhardt's point about humility being constantly counterbalanced by hubris in Whitman's and Dickinson's nature poetry.

However, the fifth cluster of lines (i. e. from "Currents for starting a continent new") stages a further loss of control, expressing uncertainty about the traceability of all these streams which end up in the oceanic maelstrom, itself a major source of danger and chaos, on the shore or out at sea. If the metaphor of the speaker-as-ocean holds, he too is buffeted by storms, liable to lose control, and expressing this loss through metaphors related to wreckage. Accepting this forced fluidity is the price to pay for novelty ("starting a continent new", l.21).

The last two clusters at once restore an essential part to the speaker, as the ultimate beachcomber collecting on the shore all the shells bearing the most precious "tidings," and downplay his centrality by showing his total dependence on these little inconspicuous things' "willingness" to make their music available. The whole final twelve-line cluster is one long request, a plea, an address to the shells, begging them to accept to act as transmitters of the valuable unheard news.

They, not the speaker, are in a position of strength. Clearly, this final cluster is about recovering the ability to tap the sources of poetry, not *any* kind of poetry, the one that will be relevant for the whole of the new nation. These finds strewn on the strand like a throw of the dice – "A windrow-drift of weeds and shells" – are key to bringing forth the right music all across the country. Music that is both "ever new" and suggestive of "eternity's music."

But things are even subtler. Neither 'side' can do without the other. For the music to flow, there have to be life materials – "infinitesimals" in the speaker's and others' lives – awaiting it, providing it with subject matter. Interestingly, in a final twist within the plea, the news-bearing shells are referred to as "waifs", i. e. homeless persons, forsaken children, unclaimed objects, in need of hospitality.

For all the metaphor-ing involved, the poem conjures up a clear picture of the strand strewn with weeds and shells. The shore always was a place of revelation for poets. But revelation is contingent upon attention paid to little shells. Whitman's often boisterous speaker *can* mute his voice.
“The Dalliance of the Eagles” by Walt Whitman

This short but intensely dramatic poem sees the speaker's presence confined to a single,
initial, line (partly bracketed at that), setting the stage then erasing himself from it. A stage it
is, since the eagle protagonists' entrance and exit bookend the remaining ten lines. The
speaker is just an ear, and an eye, a sound camera detailing an ongoing scene of the animal
kingdom from inception to conclusion. The poem is all process: seventeen -ING endings
within eleven breathlessly written lines, each line break, a new cliffhanger. How it will end is
the question. It is not indifferent that the natural world should be the subject of a scene treated
in such a self-effacing manner. The witness must be conscious that the opportunity to observe
such a scene in its entirety is a rare occasion and so lets it occupy centerstage. Eagles cannot
have been an endangered species at the time; so, no conservationist gesture was involved in
writing the poem. Still, it can be regarded as proto-environmentalist in that it invites the
reader to let themselves be captivated by the beauty of a scene in which human beings are out
of place.

The wilderness is there for us to see. All it takes to see it is our willingness not to interfere
with it. Eagles are not just a symbol of United States' power. Let mankind recede from
nature's domain.
## "Straight Creek—Great Burn" by Gary Snyder

"Lightly" is an essential notion. Not for nothing is this adverb the poem's opening word.

It sets the general approach: you do not want your imprint to be too visible anywhere, least so on the natural world. The high density in monosyllables also bespeaks a wish to be as concise as can be, to make as little noise as possible. Human language should aim for economy in such surroundings.

Most striking is the general absence of personal pronouns referring to the speaker and his companion. Only once does a pronoun refer to them and it is a direct object pronoun, not a subject pronoun ("us", l.37). Clearly, the human subject and speaker has tried to remove himself from centerstage. References to his presence are drastically limited. The account of his physical agency is cut down to a minimum: "walk" (22), "scrabble down" (31), "resting" (37). So are his more subjective interventions: the interjection "yes, so long ago. / 'Once upon a time.'" (28-29), the exclamation mark (46); the one-word poetics statements: "Lightly" (3), "writing choosing" (34) with the silent blank in between in place of more words; the metatextual closing line: "end of poem" (55). Traditional poetic ornamentation is used very sparingly: one simile to compare the flow-wear lines on the creek boulders to those carved by blood in the heart's main valve; a chiasmatic-structured line (21). The approving political comment on the flight of birds not needing a leader could also translate as a poetics statement. The two hints at metaphysics are quite subdued: one is cut short with a dash, literally dashed off (35!); the other one consists in capitalizing two words (39). No need for the poet to make his thoughts and presence too obvious. Let the poet become a naturalist! The other remarkable feature about the poem is indeed the naturalist's or geologist's field-note style in which it is written. Precise spatial-temporal location is available and each of the items in the landscape dealt with is treated with a miniaturist's eye, fastidiously detailed: the movement of creek-water, the "chartreuse lichen" on the burnt pine-tree. The scientist's note-taking style is a further index of the poet's extreme attentiveness to the physical world, and of his attempt at not forcing his subjectivity upon it.

## "For all" by Gary Snyder

The fact that the poem's title and its final line are identical makes the poem a circle, the most inclusive geometric figure. This ties into the subject matter of the poem which re-enacts an epiphanic moment when the speaker felt a universal connection, with the whole of the American continent and all beings, sentient or not.

Although the poem's centre of consciousness is the speaker, the epiphanic realization blurs the dividing lines between his self and all the rest, thus somewhat toning down same self's centrality. The poem details all that went into making that moment what it was.

- All the speaker's sensory channels of communication with the outside world/nature are open, evoking, conveying the notion of interrelatedness: paying attention to sounds ("rustle" (10) "creek music" (15), "heart music" (14); sights: "sunshine" (7), "shimmer" (10) + the sense of touch: "icy creek waters" (10), "stones turn underfoot" (11), "small and hard as toes" (11)); and the sense of smell: "smell of sun on gravel" (15), are also part of the speaker's experience of the time and place.

Lines 3 and 4 are not end-stopped maybe in order to materialize the fording of the stream, but also the crossing of the limit between self and outside world.

A levelling of hierarchies: no capitals for "northern rockies" (1.8): lower-case "n", lower-case "r".
As the epiphany gains momentum, punctuation marks (textual separations) virtually disappear (from the second stanza on.)

Although the poem is autobiographical, “I” only appears in the last third of the poem. Human presence is downplayed.

Apart from the capitals at the start of the stanzas, the only capitalized letter is the “W” in “with” (25): stressing connectedness.

The repetition of the word “music” stresses the echoes between the music of the world and the music inside. Poetry is about making music with words. Hence the occasional traces of rhymes: “shallows,” “toes,” “nose.” But the absence of rigid definite rhyme-scheme ensures that things are kept natural, fluid.

Close connection is also suggested by the title of the poem, which is also an inscription of a very special type since the poem is meant as a gift for all. The exclamatory “Ah” indicates gratefulness, harmony, inner peace, welcoming everything about the moment. It seems to be a way for the poet to settle his debt with all beings.

Here too we find a measure of hubris in the speaker's humble self since his epiphany leads him to compose a new Pledge of Allegiance,<fnref n="2" /> no less.

But the pledge is not given to a country, but to a continent: Turtle Island, the Native-American name for it, ignoring national borders, bringing down barriers between Whites and the former inhabitants. ¨ “a deep trust in the validity and holism of aboriginal place-sense” (Buell 275).

Pledging allegiance to “beings”: the poet uses the vaguest, the most general word, so as not to exclude anyone or anything. Introducing the word “ecosystem” into a poem is an activist’s gesture, bringing home the idea that science and poetry join forces in pursuit of a common goal/ good. “[I]nterpenetration for all” suggests an erotic interaction. Since joy is part of it, the connecting is successful. The speaker becomes superfluous and ‘vanishes’ himself/ spirits himself away.

<footnote n="2">² The Pledge of Allegiance to the United States is an oath of loyalty to the republic of the United States of America, originally composed by Francis Bellamy in 1892. The Pledge has been modified four times since then, with the most recent change adding the words "under God" in 1954. It now reads: "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."</footnote>
"The Grass so little has to do" by Emily Dickinson

I picked this poem as another proto-environmentalist example of a de-centred speaker for
several reasons.

First, the speaker only appears in person in the final line.

Then, when she does appear, it is to say she wishes she were *not* an “I”: she would rather be
“a Hay”.

What led her to expressing such a wish were her observations of the grass, that most
inconspicuous of plants. This, from a western Christian perspective, would entail loss of
personhood, that is to say loss of agency, intentionality, all that defines a human subject.
Indeed, what she finds most attractive about the life of the grass is that it requires so little
acting. The line “The Grass so little has to do” is repeated twice. She envies the grass for its
pleasurably idle life, a life of **indolence** and *dolce far niente*. There is a Keatsian note to this
poem, with its praise of idleness, indolence, daydreaming, rusticity, passiveness, communion
with nature, all to the strains of nature’s music. The “Barns” in the final stanza recall Keats’s
ode “To Autumn”. Surely, Emily Dickinson’s first reason for taking up this humble subject is
not part of a plea for democratic aesthetics, as may have been the case with Whitman. On the
other hand, it should be noted that the first mention of grass in “Song of Myself” is also
associated with loafing: “I lean and loafe at ease, observing a spear of summer grass” (section
1). Further evidence that E. Dickinson must have read Whitman: like Whitman, she picks
grass as an invitation not to work hard, showing a distaste for productivism, to say the least.
She’d be willing to let “the Breezes” do the stirring for her.

For the time being, she sits outside that “Sphere of simple Green” (2): the sheltered, enclosed
nature of the place is materialized by the bracketing of the bulk of the poem by the twice-
repeated “The Grass so little has to do”. The only line outside this enclosed and enviable
space is, logically enough, the line about the “I,” who wishes she could be inside the sphere.

Directing the reader's gaze to butterflies, bees, the grass, the beauty of dew, and expressing
a wish to relinquish one's humanity challenges thinking man's Cartesian outlook and superior
standing in nature. For all that, as Christine Gerhardt noted, this stepping down from the
human pedestal comes with a hubristic counterpart. In becoming like the grass, she would
outdo a Duchess and dwell in “Sovereign Barns” (16), which would make her an aristocrat, if
not a queen. Even more interesting is the final line: note how on the left-hand side of the line,
“I wish I” already *looks* like the first letter of a “Hay.” All it would take to complete the
transformation is to get rid of “wish” and replace it with a dash or a hyphen. Two “I’s” with a
dash between them make a perfect “H”. This calls for two remarks. In becoming “Hay,” she
augments her “I”. She is not relinquishing her “I” but doubles it. Making “Hay” a countable
noun also expresses a wish not to lose her singularity. Still, the syntactic transgressing use of
“Hay” as a countable noun materializes that animistic intuition, inclination, drive among
poets, American ones in particular, that makes them want to cross over into other reigns. Only
poetry makes it possible but it also an invitation to look at nature in a non-domineering way.
The only exact rhyme in the poem comes when “Hay” rhymes with “Days away”: the
harmony of sounds suggests pleasant closure.
## Session 4: Noticing the Unsung

### “The Pangolin” by Marianne Moore

Dickinson’s “The Grass so little has to do” can also be analyzed as an example of a poet giving rare prominence to a usually overlooked natural being, even if Whitman had preceded her in celebrating grass and if haiku masters or Celtic poets cannot have failed to do it too. I chose the next poem as ... topical, as the pangolin, as you all know, gained fame with the Covid 19 pandemic and was at first much maligned, at least indirectly, for being the staging post/ the intermediate host for the virus before it spread to humans. Then the blame spread to bats. No story is completely established to this day. What remains is a story of excessive encroachment of human beings upon the wild which generates contact that did not exist before.

A word or two about the pangolin’s plight. I am quoting a professor of Environmental Studies here: “Because of the demand for its scales and its flesh (considered a delicacy in Asian restaurants), this gentle mammal accounts for up to 20 percent of the entire wildlife black market” and is simply “the most hunted animal on earth.” The environmental significance of Moore’s poem has been brought to light as an antidote to all the either negative or alarming information on pangolins circulating since the start of the pandemic.

Marianne Moore’s poem goes a long way in fixing at least the symbolic damage done to pangolins’ reputation. Even in the 1930s,<fnref n="3" /> writing about this animal must have appeared as an extension of subjects suitable for nature poetry. That part of her intention was to repair an injustice and make up for past negligence is plain from her description of the pangolin as “impressive animal and toiler of who we seldom hear.” (9)

The final four lines in stanza three stand out as clear evidence of Moore’s general wish to celebrate all beasts’ excellence, which man’s “vileness,” as she puts it, prevents from seeing. She will be the dispenser of justice and deploys different strategies to that end.

One is aggrandizement through the comparisons summoning Leonardo (8), Thomas-of-Leighton-Buzzard,<fnref n="4" /> and Pablo Gargallo.<fnref n="5" /> Humor is another one, making the pangolin sound like an intriguing creature, in a positive way (“this near artichoke” (5), “this [...] uninjurable artichoke” (55-56)). As pointed out before about Ed Roberson’s work, poetry and science may work together: the biologist’s or the histologist’s accuracy (Marianne Moore held a degree in these sciences) is not incompatible with the artist’s empathy. Scientific discourse is all the more conducive to empathy as it succeeds in piquing the reader’s curiosity as Moore does with her descriptions focusing on the pangolin’s unique distinctive attributes: its armor, its way of walking, the way it rolls itself into a ball etc. These naturalist’s observations blend harmoniously (I think!) with characteristic anthropomorphizing endowing the creature with different virtues, courage most obviously, as when Moore describes the pangolin’s confrontation with the driver-ant (40-45), but also staying power, steadfastness, absence of aggressiveness and grace (26, 53, 61).

Halfway through the poem, a word is split at stanza break (61). The word (“conversities”) is a neologism. The stanza break occurs after the first syllable, “con-,” a prefix usually expressing connection. This is where the poem turns to the human being, only briefly returning to the pangolin in stanzas 6 and 7 (76-79, 85-88).

Does the poem stop being of ‘environmental use’ for the environmentally-friendly reader the moment it changes its initial subject to turn to the human being? Does it then defeat what seems to have been its initial purpose?

<footnote n="3">³ *The Pangolin and Other Verse* was published in 1936.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ Thomas was a blacksmith of national importance from the late 1200s. He took his name from the town of Leighton Buzzard and is the earliest blacksmith whose works, name and contract survive.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Pau Emili Gargallo Catalán (5 January 1881 – 28 December 1934) was a Spanish sculptor and painter.</footnote>
I argue that it doesn't as, first, the stage had been set for the comparison in the lines (35-38) where the poet blames the human being for his vileness. Then, the theme of grace works as a bridge between the two parts. Most importantly, the description of the human being examines him as (an) animal, in other words, plays down its usual status in western thinking as exceptional and essentially different.

A critic writes that “midway through the poem, Moore transports us to a medieval cathedral, where monks rest on stone seats beneath spires and roof supports embellished with carvings of animals.” She goes on: “through many readings of this poem, I assumed it was the emblematic animal sculptures that powered the transition from pangolin to monk. But recently I saw photos of pangolins walking as Moore describes, ‘on hind feet plantigrade, /with certain postures of a man.’ With its front legs folded in front and head slightly bowed, the grey-hued pangolin does indeed resemble a monk, circumambulating a cloister in contemplation.” The statement on lines 63-64: “To explain grace requires/ a curious hand” may also work as a link between the two parts since “the curious hand” could refer to the scientist’s inherent curiosity and, Moore may have meant, there is no dispensing with that curiosity if you want to account for grace. But the trivial or even standard Christian understandings of grace will not do: “a kindly manner, time in which to pay a debt, / the cure for sins”; and, grace(fulness) is beyond use. Grace belongs to a different order, simply to that which is, forever, like pangolins and human beings, and, to that extent, there is no trivializing it. Knocking the human being off its pedestal continues with the poet bringing together human being and pangolin as two equally efficient machines (76-78) (the ground for that point had been laid too on 1.59-61 by the strange description of pangolins as having “not unchain-like machine-like/ form and frictionless creep of a thing/ made graceful by adversities.”) Following the, it seems, field observation of certain shared postures between pangolin and the human species, the poet shows the human being as having it all wrong (overworking himself, blind to life’s beauty), therefore turning to animals for inspiration (82-88). Only a few redeeming features are granted the human being in stanza 9: one is “Humor [which]”, the poet says, “saves a few steps, [...] saves years.” (94) “Everlasting vigor,” modesty, and “the power to grow” are three others. But even his positive sides are cast in an uncertain light: the double negative “Unignorant” and the oxymoronic “unemotional, and all emotion” are not unambiguously laudatory. Aside from those positive points, the poet challenges the human being’s right to call himself “human,” ironizes about his fancying himself “writing masters to this world” when he can just “griffon”<fnref n="6" /> incomprehensible things, as illustrated by the clear-as-mud statement “Like does not like like that is obnoxious,” possibly an allusion to the human being’s bellicose instincts. Writing “error/ with four/ r’s” conveys the idea of a perpetually mistaken creature. Last but not least, few creatures of the species are truly remarkable. While the final stanza further animalizes the human species in many ways (“warm blood, no gills, two pairs of hands and a few hairs”), showing it as a badly struggling ill-adapted species, speaking of “its habitat,” it ends on a surprising, possibly hopeful picture and illustration of the human being’s power to grow, with his hailing, his welcoming of the sunrise as a daily, therefore constant opportunity for renewal. The human animal’s words include the poem’s single reference to his “soul” and its need for steadying. His/its difference may lie in this awareness of his imperfection. The human being’s self-assurance and unquestioned centrality has become questionable.

<footnote n="6">⁶ A French import into the text, from “griffonner,” “to scribble” or “to scrabble”; of course, the allusion is also to the griffin or griffon, “a fabulous beast with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion” (Wikipedia), one more challenging of the human being’s special status, through hinting that he will never rid himself of an animal part.</footnote>
“Springtime in the Rockies, Lichen” by Lew Welch

A whole poem about lichen! A fine example of an overlooked constituent of the natural world reclaimed by poetry, written into visibility.

But there is more to this poem than a naturalist's gaze in wonder at tiny energies. The poet seems to be using a magnifying glass (16) in order to assess the damage done by pollution, possibly acid rains: "How can the poisons reach them?" (25)

The first line cluster suggests that the speaker, like Marianne Moore on the pangolin, may have researched his poem by reading some scientific literature on his subject: "symbiotic splash of plant and fungus feeding/ on rock, on sun, a little moisture, air" (3-4).

Remember that lichen is also mentioned in Philip Whalen's "Monday in the Evening," and in Gary Snyder's "Straight Creek—Great Burn." They and Lew Welch were very close, all three of them former students at Reed College, Oregon, probably trained, by personal familiarity with pristine places in the North-West and, more importantly, their assiduous study of Eastern culture, not to hierarchize the constituents of the natural world. Even the flat writing style of the *Wikipedia* entry for "lichen" lets possible reasons for lichen-fascination in those proto-environmentalist times, seep through. "Symbiosis in lichens," it says, "is so well-balanced that lichens have been considered to be relatively self-contained *miniature ecosystems* in and of themselves. It is thought that lichens may be even more *complex symbiotic systems* that include non-photosynthetic bacterial *communities* performing other functions as *partners in a holobiont*." Another passage uses different but possibly no less appealing words: with lichen, it says, "the fungi, algae, or cyanobacteria have the potential to engage with other microorganisms in a functioning system that may evolve as an even more *complex composite organism*." (Underscoreing ours). Such descriptions of lichen show how the tiny organism must have appeared an objective correlative of a communal, animistic *Weltanschauung*/ ideal that had appeared with the Beats. Fascination with "Tiny" (21) predated economist Schumacher's slogan "Small is beautiful" by 15 years.<fnref n="7" />

Glancing through the poem, one is struck by the number of tiny inconspicuous words found at line break: "the" (three times), "this" (twice), "and" (twice), "to" (twice), "for" and "it": eleven lines out of thirty-two end on such a tiny word, maybe for the purpose of enhancing the tiny in the form of the poem too, thus matching its content.

The second line-cluster draws the reader's attention to the beauty of lichen. It makes cliffs look "like murals" (12), rather on the abstract Expressionist side ("Huge panels streaked and patched" (13)), found abstract art gracefully combining with the figurative real: "quietly/ with shooting-stars<fnref n="8" /> and lupine at the base" (14).

In the third cluster, the poet is kneeling, a magnifying glass in hand, scrutinizing lichen, which, under the magnifying glass, looks like "a city of cups" (16). The situation strikes the speaker as odd: and he wonders what drives him to focus on such a tiny constituent of nature when he is surrounded by such majestic natural surroundings: no answer is given but the intuition to relate the infinitely small to the bigger picture also shows an environmentalist's instinct to see all things and phenomena as related, especially when it comes to the impact of pollutants on nature. Follows a blank, probably standing for a moment's pause, then a grim-sounding statement: "These are the stamps of the final envelope." (23) Another blank, more thinking, then a flurry of questions in wonder at the effects of pollution in such a remote spot. More pausing. Then another grim statement: "Let it all die." (30). What he saw through the magnifying glass must have appalled him and led him to the conclusion that the situation was hopeless, that the fight to conserve nature was a losing battle and he seems to resign himself to the end of the world. Except that the poem comes to a much unexpected, happy resolution.

<footnote n="7">⁷ Ernst Friedrich Schumacher's *Small is Beautiful* was published in 1973.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ A kind of primrose.</footnote>
Is the poet's word performative? Has it achieved a miracle? Or are these final lines an image
of what the poem can do, giving the lie to W.H. Auden's statement "Poetry makes nothing
happen." But it does, as lichen may have now gained some visibility at least with Lew
Welch's numerous readers. Note Welch's use of exclamation marks, a standard transcription
of illumination, of realization in American poetry influenced by Eastern culture.
## “Praises” by Thomas McGrath

After the praise-poem to the pangolin, an ode to common fruit and vegetables coming from a Communist poet who may have been prompted into writing such a poem by Pablo Neruda's *Odas elementales* (1954). McGrath wrote other such odes, to bread and beer.

Aside from the mere fact of dedicating a poem to this subject, McGrath deploys in it a strategy aimed at enhancing the status of these staples of life.

He is not speaking in his own voice only but uses the first-person plural pronouns: “us” and “we.”

His strategy consists in systematically pairing a fruit or vegetable with a cultural reference: to historical periods, artistic movements, philosophical notions, myths, politics, ethnic issues, religion. Importantly, the references are not all to White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture:

- Lettuce elicits a metaphor comparing it with a “baroque ear. The “baroque,” is a style of architecture present in Latin America, *not* in North America.

- Celery is associated with Hispanics, associated with “bold strength”; further down, tomatoes are said to have “barrios” (1. An urban district or quarter in a Spanish-speaking country. 2. A chiefly Spanish-speaking community or neighborhood in a U.S. city)

- Corn is linked to Native-Americans and its grains are compared to wampum, money used by North American Indians, made of cylindrical shells strung or woven together, especially white shells rather than the more valuable black or purple ones across the continent. Cornsilk becomes a wigwam.

- Buddhism is summoned via green peppers.

- McGrath’s radical politics show too: cauliflower is said to have colonies and to enjoy its imperial power. Conversely, fruits and vegetables are also associated with rebellion: “the proletariat of the pomegranate,” the “cartridge clips” of peas which are found next to “beetsblood.” Note how blood stands in between the “barrios” and the “cartridge clips” on one hand and the “colonies of the imperial cauliflower on the other.”

A web of further references can be identified throughout the poem, most of them to so-called high culture or to the sciences.

The structure in concentric circles of an onion inspires the poet to relate it to astronomy, philosophy and literature at the same time (10-11). Without a determiner “Onion” sounds like “Orion,” the constellation and justifies the reference to Greek astronomer Ptolemaeus. Its circular structure, lending itself to easy symbolism and analogy, accounts for its description as a “tearful allegory,” which recalls an obvious fact: onions will cause your eyes to fill with tears. The concentric circles remind the poet of Plato. More analogy, this time related to ancient Greek myths, is tried out about cabbage (13), said to be reminiscent of a labyrinth, of Minotaur and Theseus fame. Mushroom remains within the confines of Christianity with its resemblance to “a papal hat.” More hard science comes into the picture with “pawpaw’s constant/ Affair with gravity.” (40-41)

McGrath was a Communist but also of Irish Catholic descent: you can tell by the title of the poem. “Praise” consists in glorifying (a god or saint) especially by the attribution of perfections. At several points, the poem conforms to the religious genre of praise, first through the anaphora of “we praise,” the epiphora of “please(s) us,” and the listing of the virtues of vegetables and fruits: “straightforwardness,” “infallible rectitude,” “nobility.” However, the Communist in McGrath cannot keep his words within the pen of the Church.

So, the poem includes a number of more or less sacrilegious associations: about Crucifixion with “the winy abacus of the holy grape on its cross/ Of alcohol” (35-36), or original sin with “the winter in the flesh of the apple” making it unlikely. His kind of fruit (the orange and the peach) elicits more solar or erotic associations. And what is “earth-given” is on a par with what is “heaven-hung” (31-32). Bananas have something “angelic” about them.
This poet’s use of religious language can never be taken completely at face value. He praises,
but not quite: “We praise/ By the skin of our teeth”. But the sentence also sounds like “we
pray/ By the skin of our teeth,” associating prayer with teeth, i. e. with eating. To the
materialist poet, eating can be regarded as a form of prayer.

Only in the final four lines does the lyric poet give free rein to unmitigated praise of the sensuous pleasures afforded by the earth and all its fruits, metaphorical and real ones. All of a sudden, we are in Virgil’s *Georgics*.

In creating this wealth of echoes radiating from food that is part of our most daily life, the
poet pulls it out of invisibility. And the lettuce provides the right material for the start of an
eighteenth-century sentimental novel ...
## Session 5: Environmentalist poetry (1)

An essay by John Shoptaw entitled “Why ecopoetry?” and subtitled “There’s no Planet B.” Written out of a wish to use clear terminology: an ecopoem needs to be both environmental (i. e. about the nonhuman natural world) and environmentalist.

(Which poems would you classify as eco-poems, so far? W.S. Merwin’s “For a Coming extinction,” “Lew Welch’s “Springtime in the Rockies: lichen.” Why not, for example, Whitman’s “The Dalliance of the Eagles”? etc.)

Forrest Gander’s distinction between “nature poetry” and poetry that investigates – both thematically and formally – the relationship between nature and culture: → of the poems we have discussed so far, which would clearly fit into one category rather than the other? Have we come across poems when the relationship between nature and culture is investigated formally, which I take to mean through the form of the poem? (Answer, yes, the field-note manner in Snyder’s “Straight Creek—Great Burn,” longhand writing in Whalen’s “Monday in the Evening,” the sonnet form in Ed Roberson’s “We Must Be Careful,” the form of praises in McGrath’s “Praises,” the decentered speaker in Dickinson’s “The Grass so little has to do”. No naïve approach to the matter of poetic representation of nature.)

An ecopoem should be ecocentric, *not* anthropocentric: according to this criterion, which poems would *not* qualify? “The Pangolin”? Dickinson’s poems (because they only go so far in relinquishing human centrality/ still too homocentric)? Whitman’s “As Consequent *Etc.*”? (See Christine Gerhardt’s qualified view of the opposition between anthropomorphism and ecocentrism as, for example, personification can be used to convey an ethical stance.)

Facile clever attempts (“recursive” poems<fnref n="9" />) at doing without “natural content or a clearly environmentalist message” won’t do.

Similarly, Shoptaw remains unconvinced by Angus Fletcher’s concept of environment poem as it is not focused enough. Form by itself cannot make a poem environmental. Shoptaw then discusses Joshua Corey’s *The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral*, an anthology of post-1995 nature-related poems, some of which overdo their modernity. It is not because we are in the twenty-first century that animals should be represented as machine-like. The opposite is true in fact: recent findings in animal psychology should make us think twice before dismissing the presence of thought or emotion in them.

Think of the dog in Dickinson’s “Within my Garden, rides a Bird.” Shoptaw dwells on a poem by Juliana Spahr that we’ll be discussing later today. Although distinctly postmodern (a heavily citational poem, proto-documentary poetry?), it is also clearly environmental(ist) and generates emotion.

When does an environmental poem become environmentalist, thus qualifying as eco-poetry?

Shoptaw can see the problem with a kind of contemporary nature poetry that might seem blissfully unaware of environmental damage; but he does not believe in prescribing or dismissing any specific form of poetry or channel of publication. No dogma. All forms – traditional or postmodern – can contribute to sensitizing readers. For Shoptaw regards Auden’s famous “Poetry makes nothing happen” as just another belief and comes up with a few cases when a cultural event, even a book brought about change.

The traps environmental(ist) poetry should steer clear of are of two kinds: didacticism or aestheticism. But here again, Shoptaw does not believe in being dogmatic. Why refuse that poetry can teach you something? “Didactic” doesn’t necessarily mean “self-indulgent.”

<footnote n="9">⁹ La récursivité est une démarche qui fait référence à l'objet même de la démarche à un moment du processus. Exemples possibles : décrire un processus dépendant de données en faisant appel à ce même processus sur d'autres données plus « simples » ; montrer une image contenant des images similaires ; définir un concept en invoquant le même concept.</footnote>
Shoptaw then goes on to give a few examples of what he regards as good environmentalist poetry. While discussing a poem about ostriches by Marianne Moore, Shoptaw rehabilitates anthropomorphism and pathetic fallacy as natural channels of empathy with animals, from which/ whom we should by now be convinced we are actually only separated by a thin partition. Wariness of projecting is excessive nowadays, all the more so as research now has plentiful evidence of an emotional life in animals.

"To empathize beyond humankind, ecopoets must be ready to commit the pathetic fallacy and to be charged with anthropomorphism" (24).

*And* emotions and feelings are precisely what poets can/should use to get across environmental messages to their readers: Shoptaw approvingly quotes an extract from a poem by Jorie Graham in which flower bulbs make convincing and effective speakers for commenting on a foreclosure; it is an example of rhetoric that works to get a message across. He seems to be suggesting that it may be an effective, if indirect way, of making people realize what finding themselves on a foreclosed Earth would feel like. Other examples of successful environmentalist poems in Shoptaw's view include poems by Ed Roberson (about global warming), Robert Hass (about human rights issues resulting from environmental ones).

Shoptaw's final proposal for a definition of ecopoetry is: “Ecopoetry is nature poetry that has designs on us,” adding that “the ways of ecopoetry are increasingly diverse” and that a number of former nature poems fulfill the same function as ecopoetry, just as successfully. “Ecopoetry does not supplant nature poetry but enlarges it” (27).
## “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache” by Juliana Spahr

A poem about a stream, in five sections.

1. The first one sounds like an origin myth, the genesis of a world, of a place, with a river flowing through it; it's about a birth. Although it refers to the past, it is told in the present tense, in a time out of time. The speaker speaks on behalf of a community. Or we can imagine a community speaking since the story is told in the first-person plural. The form is anaphoric: several lines start in the same way. The form of the poem seems to call for an oral rendition. This is a text meant to be read aloud, chanted, aiming at entrancing the audience; an audience that is also the subject of the poem.

2. The second section relates how the river community developed, how the bonds between its members (humans and non-humans) strengthened. It became a loving relationship. The bonds became bonds of love. But it was a process. The human community did not take that mutual love for granted: it took some effort, some learning on their part, some familiarizing with all the constituents of the place: its flora, its fauna. Like good neighbors, intent on developing a friendly relationship with the former inhabitants (see Walden), they were curious of them. It was as if they apprenticed at the river. The apprenticeship involved using different methods: inventorying (30), learning to identify species, aesthetic appreciation of the place (31-34), mimicking, attempting to know/feel/experience what it is like to be a certain tree, a certain fish, a certain larva. Getting to know the river also took some experiencing of its pleasant or painful qualities through the body (46-55; that that knowledge of the stream came to them through the senses is suggested by the listing of mere adjectives describing impressions with a possessive determiner in front of them referring to the stream). The stress is on the joint nature of the effort and on the fact that it was a labor of love (43-46).

3. That it was a labor and a labor of love, and that that love might end up in emotional pain is what the third section is about. At first, the focus is on what they learnt: the speaker has made a list of all the species that they learnt and he shares what he/she says is the beginning of it. It is a thirty-five-line list of the species living in, on, by and around the stream comprised of one hundred and seventeen species, including eighteen types of freshwater mussels. What should be noticed about the list is that its items are not classified: freshwater mollusks, birds, trees, fishes, insects, batrachians, come in jumbled order as the listing is meant to illustrate the lines preceding the catalog, stating that their learning of the stream was the learning of what a critic has called a mesh, a web, an interconnected multiverse: “we learned depth [...] we learned layers and [...] we learned connections between layers.” (57-59) Following that long list (the reader should make the effort of checking on the web all the constituents of this mesh), the reader is now equipped to tackle the rest of the section, which expands on the emotional developments of the relationship between the human members (the poem’s speakers) and the non-human members of the stream community (a number of previously unlisted ones – the mayfly, the raccoon, the snapping turtle, the water snake among them – are added in this part of the section.) Following the list, the anaphoric, chant-like, pattern is taken up: it consists in the reminiscing of all that the human community did in an attempt to bridge the gap separating them from non-humans, including the stream itself. It was a work of the heart. They let their hearts imbibe the whole environment, be shaped by it. The speaker is actually positive that it worked: “Our hearts took on the shape of” is repeated four times. The implication is that they became the place and its inhabitants. Their ability to represent themselves as animals was honed to shamanistic level, to the point of thinking they actually were under water, poking the side of a fish with their own “snout” (115-117). The chant-like repetitive pattern successfully conveys the idea of a rigorous training, like a shaman’s. The stress on the part played by the heart, not by the mind highlights the empathetic dimension of the process. Singing, we are told, accompanied that training and the words to the song follow.
The anaphora of “Gentle now” makes one think of an animal-trainer’s whispered words, whispering the animal into letting itself be tamed, whispering it out of resistance. You can either decide that what we have here is a perfect example of outrageous appropriation or simply conclude that there is a limit to what words can achieve in an attempt to convey the ineffable. One way of understanding the sixteen-fold repetition of “don’t add to heartache” is to regard it as a plea, issuing from the speakers’ hearts, asking that they not be denied entry into the other kingdoms, that they be admitted into the wider circle. Hence the section’s concluding line: “Circle our heart in rapture.”

4. The poem’s fourth section is about a watershed moment. It was when the utopian dream started ebbing. The stream is now described as “brackish,” which, given the context, must mean that the water was “spoiled by mixture.”; the mixture consisted in all kinds of trash and pollutants but, as it was a part of their beloved stream, they did not turn away and were not particular about what they were letting in, even though it must have been detrimental to their health. They chose to regard the negative turn as part of the times. The lists of trash items, sources of pollution and pollutants are long. Looking back, they realize that they were not aware of the full extent of the damage to come. But their song turned into a lament on realizing that any loss, any species becoming extinct induced a knock-on effect. It was at that point the beautiful mesh started getting undone. From this section on, the use of anaphora conveys a feeling of “it doesn’t rain but it pours”. Note the absence of any punctuation marks from 1.204 to the section’s end. The process had become unstoppable.

5. The story does not have a happy ending. The fifth section’s leitmotiv is a strange sentence indeed: “I turned to each other.” One thing seems clear: it was a change for the worse, as can be guessed when reading: “Ensnared, bewildered, I turned to each other and from the stream.” (227) That part of the poem sees the vanishing of the pronoun “We.” The “I” became absorbed in self and others like them, and turned away from the stream. The long verse (217-225) *à la Whitman* (refer to “I Sing the Body Electric”) celebrating parts of the human body marks the beginning of total human self-absorption. “I turned to each other” should be understood as: the human species severed its links with the natural world outside, and simply stopped caring: note the mind-numbing word-for-word repetition of the list of former, now extinct, river species he “didn’t even say goodbye to” (233-236, 243-246, 249-252, 257-260).

As if he/she would no longer bother to tally the exact species going extinct. Not only did “I” turn away from the river but he/she betrayed their former dream even further by working for some of the heaviest polluters (228-231). “I began to work at keeping men in jail” admits of two interpretations: the way he tags this information after the list of his betrayals may suggest that he was caught in a negative spiral, that’s why he accepted a job as a jail-keeper; alternatively, working “at keeping men in jail” can be understood metaphorically. In working for the serious polluters, he contributed to locking the human species in a jail-like suicidal prison of self-absorption. The next stage on the downhill descent was when he was content with replacing the real stream with goods/ commodities he bought or even concepts whose names included “stream” in them. He had become happy with simulacra of nature.

It all ended in isolation: the narrow pillow on a stone, where they had put their heads together and talked to each other because they loved (41-43) now makes it sound as if the colloquy had become a soliloquy with an imaginary audience (264-265). The story did not end well. He/she seems to have resigned themselves to a Beckettian end in just not doing anything at the end.

The mention of “otototoi” from Aeschylus’s play *Agamemnon*, refers to Cassandra who, when she knows she is about to be murdered, wails “otototoi”. So, there was no awareness whatsoever in him/her that a tragedy had been going on. A woeful ending indeed.

Resignation reigned among the non-existent community. No-one would rebel.
An environmental poem? (Yes, to a certain extent: the poem relies on meticulous research in freshwater species.) An environmentalist poem? (Yes, because it broaches the topic of river pollution and the frequent general public's indifference.) Does didacticism kill it? (No, there is drama and emotion, pathos even). Despite the aggressively modernist form, room is allowed for emotion, maybe because the poet's commitment seeps through. Repetition can be regarded as emotional stutter.
## Session 6: Environmentalist poetry (2)

For another take on the ingredients that might be said to comprise an environmentally oriented work, one may go to Lawrence Buell's *The Environmental Imagination*:

1. *The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history.*

2. *The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest.*

3. *Human accountability to the environment is part of the text's ethical orientation.*

4. *Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text.*" (7-8)

## Carol Ciavonne's "Statement of Belief"

**The manner:**

A communal statement: “we”

Strongly punctuated. Many full-stops. Firm statements.

The Whitmanian spirit: inclusiveness, openness: Anaphora+ the list → an index of comprehensiveness, leaving nothing or nobody out. (Poets and the list: a love story, since Homer (catalog).) A sense of wonder (exclamation mark l. 29)

Prayer-like: prayers often sound like chanting. The repetitions enhance that aspect of the poem.

I read the final line (32) as a way of making all that precedes sound definitive. Parodying Native-Americans who supposedly ended their statements with "I said that."

Borrowing from Native-American authority, the speaker is throwing her voice: shaman-like, she is now relaying nature's voice/ speaking on behalf of it..

**The subject matter:**

Belief = faith = necessarily including even what cannot be seen: 24-25 + 8

The speaker is saying that the material, tangible existence of many important things cannot be checked/ tested by human beings because they are not visible (“history,” “time” etc.) or not easily seen; for example, “We believe there is a species of fungus/ that reaches in underground filaments/ further than any living thing.”

But that is no reason for not believing. As a matter of fact, you cannot show climate change to anyone. But you had better believe in it.

Environmental ethics: coming after “and we have done those things which we ought/ not to have done,” “We believe that no one will rescue us” may be another way of saying “And there’s no planet B.”

Continuities: vertical (13-17), temporal (11-12) + 31: From molecules (3) to multiverses (24, 27)

“What word from what being will make now always”: That (divine?) being she wonders about could be some divinity with the power to make time timeless.

A successful poem?
## “For I Will Consider Fracking” by Nin Andrews

Whitman: “Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest poet but always his encouragement and support” (Preface 1855, p.626).

Snyder: “The primitive world view, far-out scientific knowledge and the poetic imagination are related forces which may help if not save the world or humanity, at least save the Redwoods” (*Earth House Hold* 128).

An imitation of one of the most famous poems in the English language: *Jubilate Agno*, (Latin: "Rejoice in the Lamb") is a 1200-line religious poem by Christopher Smart, and was written between 1759 and 1763, during Smart's confinement for insanity in St. Luke's Hospital.

The poem is chiefly remembered today – especially among cat lovers – for the 74-line section wherein Smart extols the many virtues and habits of his cat, Jeoffry.[31]

Smart believes that nature, like his cat, is always praising God but needs a poet in order to bring out that voice. His section on his cat Jeoffry is part of his larger desire to give a "voice" to nature.

"For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.

[...]

For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his Way.

[...]

For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.

For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion

The imitation of this part of Smart's poem (praise of nature through a praise of his cat) is all the more effective as it is about one of the most human-induced nature-unfriendly inventions: fracking.

Fracking: a technology; a new way of extracting oil from shale deposits via hydraulic fracturing.

E.P.A.: Environmental Protection Agency

Anaphora: stressing personal determination to expose wrong being done.

Close to slogan.

Repetition to ease memorizing.

The speaker distances himself from the bulk of Americans. He considers them to be naïve, gullible (4-5), inexplicably addicted to fossil-fuels/ industrial civilization (65-67), guilty of passivity and thus, ultimately accountable for the inevitable damage that will ensue (69-71).

End of the poem: standing for growing despair/ ironizing the American government's ostrich policy = irresponsible

An environmental poem?
## "Trash" by Dre Cardinal

Making use of the power of juxtaposition (Buell's phrase: "jolting juxtapositions"): a suicide attempt; the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch;" shots from a documentary showing the damage done to animal species by human trash

A poem in three parts.

→ About a human being.

→ About the planet: like the pill bottles "scattered everywhere" (5), garbage is: ["The Great Pacific garbage patch, also described as the Pacific trash vortex, is a gyre of marine debris particles in the central North Pacific Ocean. The patch is characterized by exceptionally high relative concentrations of pelagic plastics, chemical sludge and other debris that have been trapped by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre."]

→ About animal species.

The link through signifiers: "Ziploc," "slid open," open "bottle" of pills, "safety twist orange bottles," "red plastic cap," → "razor"

Message: very clear. Not addressing the problem of the recycling of trash is a childish and suicidal attitude for mankind.

The young ones are the ones that [will] suffer the most rapid damage: "her baby," "a chick."

Very precise times = the matter is urgent. A matter of life and death.

Harsh guttural sounds linking "skeleton" and "chick."

Cinema technique initially borrowed from poetry looping back to poetry.
## Timothy Liu's "The Crisis"

Alternation of couplets and single lines.

Weaving together different stories, all of them grim.

Damage done by/ associated with the modern world:

- destruction of wild life through leaving lights and electronic devices on in tall buildings

- cheating with nature: building skyscrapers with mirror-like glass façades

- globalization; bursting of financial bubbles

- terrorism and fanaticism

By the end of the poem, the speaker expresses the wish for his/her text messages to be replied to. He cannot take any more bad news by himself.

Poetry = possibility to follow the drift of thoughts: "the glass/ façade" and the "clear sky" operate the switch from environmental damage to the 9/11 attacks.

The condensed expression brings into close vicinity "paradise" and "suicide" while personification (pathetic fallacy) suggests a world gone out of human control: skyscrapers committing suicide and with an ability to influence global markets.

In the form of a message addressed to an unidentified "you."

Tying the myths of Narcissus<fnref n="10" /> and Icarus<fnref n="11" /> into the poem: myths the meaning of which the human kind has still not grasped. ["So much for ..." = "voilà ce que valent ..."].

It is more absorbed than ever in its narcissistic pride and blinded by its systems (economic and religious ones).

Images related to falling: the dead eagle, the base of the building, the window washers lowering themselves, skyscrapers committing suicide, global markets tumbling back to earth. The poem's form: framing the crisis in an attempt to contain it.

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ "In Greek mythology, **Narcissus** (/na:r'sısəs/; Ancient Greek: Νάρκισσος Nárkissos) was a hunter from Thespiae in Boeotia who was known for his beauty. According to Tzetzes, he was a Laconian hunter who loved everything beautiful.[11] Narcissus was excessively proud of his own handsomeness, rejecting others' advances because he thought only someone as beautiful as himself should pursue him, causing some to take their own lives to prove their devotion to his striking beauty. In most versions of his legend, he did finally meet someone he thought was good enough for him – himself, by way of his reflection in a pool of water. Usually, he is said to have wasted away longing to be with his mirror self, but in other stories he kills himself upon realizing he cannot have his own reflection as a lover. Either way, he dies, and in his place sprouts a flower bearing his name. ". (Wikipedia)</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ "In Greek mythology, **Icarus** (/íkərəs/; Ancient Greek: Ἱκαρος [í:karos]) is the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, the creator of the Labyrinth. Icarus and his father attempt to escape from Crete by means of wings that his father constructed from feathers and wax. Icarus' father warns him first of complacency and then of hubris, asking that he fly neither too low nor too high, so the sea's dampness would not clog his wings nor the sun's heat melt them. Icarus ignored his father's instructions not to fly too close to the sun; when the wax in his wings melted he tumbled out of the sky and fell into the sea where he drowned, sparking the idiom "don't fly too close to the sun" (Wikipedia).</footnote>
Robert Hass's "Ezra Pound's Proposition"

You have read what John Shoptaw had to say about this poem as a successful example of
environmental poetry.

The title refers to the Poundian method in *The Cantos*; the crossing of disciplines as a fruitful way of teasing out alternative views on history. Pound's method, forcible cross-pollination between fields, ended in disaster. The poem's first three lines exemplify the type of dangerous shortcuts that he took but, in this instance, as the poem will show, Pound's method works. The poem's structure is reminiscent of that of a Petrarchan sonnet (octave + sestet, in which the sestet offers a solution to a question/issue/problem raised in the octave.) In this case, the shorter nine-line cluster comes first: it relates an incident that calls for some explanation. That explanation comes next in the form of a thirteen-line succession of cause-and-effect relationships generating the kind of situation related in the first cluster. Paradoxically, what appeared at first as an example of Pound's rash shortcuts is borne out by the brutal mechanisms detailed in the second cluster. The best know-how in the world, the safest financial engineering will not prevent the building of a dam from bringing about disastrous human consequences, if the resulting human damage has not been properly assessed and allowed for.

The poem is successful as environmental *poetry* for different reasons:

1. This time, enjambment is used very effectively to convey the unstoppable: Pound's rash type of thinking, and the young girl's boldness in cluster one; the inexorable progress of the capitalist works once they have been set in motion, and the cascading run of causes and effects (in cluster two).

2. It is also successful because, as in Dre Cardinal's "Trash," it makes an effective use of the powers of juxtaposition in poetry: within the space of twenty-three lines, we have – in succession – an illustration of Pound's method; a street scene in Bangkok; a documented denunciation of the evil effects of capitalism's ruthlessness, which makes it all cohere. The poem's brevity and conciseness are in inverse ratio to its effectiveness.

3. The final sense of coherence is also reinforced by the feeling of closure which *ending* on a close shot of the young girl's beauty when the poem had *started* with considerations on beauty produces. For all these reasons, as Shoptaw puts it, the reader is more likely to be left pondering a contemporary and revised version of the David vs. Goliath story in which the little girl does not stand the chance of a snowball in hell against multinationals' power.
Chuck Miller's "Global Warming"

A perfectly dialectical poem with the speaker weighing the pros and cons of warm days in December. It goes like this: a) how pleasant these warm days are; b) but you shouldn't forget about all the negative consequences of global warming; c) still, why not see this unexpected climate mildness as a moment's respite for the poor that they should simply enjoy, the world over, before the end? The emotional climate of the poem is as mild as the kind of weather it describes. The virtual absence of punctuation marks (except for two insignificant question marks) conveys the impression of an uninterrupted stream of serene thoughts unfolding in the speaker's mind: he has stopped "in a little park," then stands up to leave but his serene mood remains unaltered: he feels at peace with the times, regardless of all that they will eventually entail. The run-on line joining the title to the poem's first line confirms that impression; the little aside in the form of a joke (9) does too.

Unlike William Matthews's "The Bear at the Dump," the length of lines in this poem varies but there are very few enjambments (the only striking one is between the title and the first line). As far as meaning is concerned, most lines are self-contained, make sense by themselves. The speaker maintains his composure throughout: no emotional imbalance comes to rush pauses at line ends. When read aloud, the poem should not be rushed through. A casual, slightly detached tone should be used.

While the poem ends on the word "irony," it is not sarcastic or ironical at all. The speaker shows empathy for those likely to be impacted hard by climate change. The irony lies elsewhere: here we are with an environmentally-aware poet writing about the likely good sides of global warming, proving true the saying "there's a silver lining to every cloud."
That's much unexpected. Could the "little nip in the air" be a clue to the Eastern serenity pervading the poem? This compassionate, slightly detached speaker, "laughing a little,"
"nodding, chuckling, rather fatalistic, with no inflamed sense of the tragic, has much in him of a Buddha figure. That light touch sits well with environmentally-friendly dispositions.
William Matthews’s “The Bear at the Dump”

It certainly is an environmentalist poem. It features/stages interaction between human beings
and a wild animal in a location most fitted to raise the issues such interaction involves: a
garbage dump. Several related topics are broached: garbage inflation/ waste disposal, the
indirect damage it causes to wild life (omnivorous as bears are, the kind of food they can find
in garbage dumps can't be all that good for them), how human beings should/will respond to
wild life's changing habits due to human encroachment upon nature.

The scene – a bear’s intrusion into a municipal garbage dump – is described in a very visual manner. The description of the scene is interspersed with snatches of conversation between a party of “city folks” with an interest in wildlife, the guardian of the dump who resents the extra work wild animals’ intrusions generate, and year-round residents. Incomprehension between city and countryside is extreme: it is blatant in the speaker’s words to himself (24-26), and in the brevity of his response to the year-round resident’s aggressive remark. The speaker’s obviously conservationist inclinations and tenderness for bears surface in one place rather loudly. They come out as babytalk, when, as if he could not help it, he half throws his voice and exclaims “What a good boy am he.” (15).

Aside from that exception, nature is not idealized in the poem. The bear is not shown as
"cute" (29-33). The poem does not poeticize its subject. It sticks to a low-profile manner
throughout.

So much so that it's worth asking what makes it a poem. The lay-out on the page provides one first answer: the almost even length of lines (varies between eight and ten syllables). All line breaks without any exception look arbitrary: the poet must have gone by syllabic count to decide upon when to stop a line (to which should be added his manifest wish not to cut words between two lines). This prosy treatment gives the poem its low-key, matter-of-fact approach which foregrounds content: ethical, ecological, the "story." The other decidedly poetic strategy is the poet's consistent choice of monosyllables, which probably tied into his attention to syllabic count. It results in a staccato, spondaic rhythm that also casts into relief content details or neighboring polysyllables (as in the final two lines). Among numerous possible examples: l. 1-2, 5-6, 12-15,17-18, 34-35. The poem's last word rounds things off perfectly, in meta-poetic manner: we've been told an anecdote all right, worth publishing, previously unrelated, thus in conformity to the etymology of that term: "A short account of an interesting or humorous incident." [C17: from Medieval Latin *anecdota* unpublished items, from Greek *anekdotos* unpublished, from an- + *ekdotos* published, from *ekdidonai*, from *ek-out* + *didonai* to give].
## Session 7: Poems as environments

### Excerpts from Fletcher's *A New Theory for American Poetry*

You may remember the objections raised by John Shoptaw about Fletcher's concept of "environment-poem." Shoptaw dismisses the concept as too vague and so, likely to be applied indiscriminately to poems bearing no relation to nature and/or environmental causes. While I can see his point, I nevertheless think *Fletcher* has one too in identifying a category of nature-related poems that "aspire to surround the reader." What are the defining criteria of that category? First, Fletcher says, environment poems, are poems in which readers feel some kind of esemplastic circle materialize as they read them.

"(Esemplastic": "having the ability to shape diverse elements or concepts into a unified whole; unifying.") Such poems bring into being a sense of strong interconnection among all the elements they include. This makes them especially suitable for raising the reader's awareness of mutual dependence within a specific place within nature. Secondly, for a poem to constitute an environment, Fletcher insists, "there has to be a human integer in the equation": but, in order that human presence may not become inflated and the impression of environmental balance destroyed, such poems will usually play down drama and emotion and avoid any excessive foregrounding of form, as it is a conspicuous sign of human intervention.

### Excerpt on “Analogism” in Descola’s *Beyond Nature and Culture*

With Descola's analogist type of cosmology, the world is both split into an infinity of minute differences and dense with crisscrossing relations, connections, affinities. The density of the relational network is meant to make up for the extreme fragmentation of the whole. It was indeed born from an anxiety to make it all cohere. Descola regards the notion of the Great Chain of Being,<fnref n="12" /> which only gave ground in the west after the Renaissance, as one expression of that type of cosmology.

With analogism, entities are bound to a place, to a specific environment, but numerous correspondences relate/connect entities, places, limited environments to counterparts elsewhere. The intuition of correspondences between microcosm and macrocosm, representations of the universe as a succession of concentric circles are informed by an analogist type of thinking/ cosmology.

The common emphasis on a well-defined place, rather than on time, as particularizing an entity, in Fletcher's notion of "environment poem" and in Descola's analogic model, is what led me to offering them as possible theoretical bases for discussing Niedecker's "Paean to Place," Bishop's "The Moose" and Rexroth's "Lyell's Hypothesis Again."

<footnote n="12">¹² The Great Chain of Being is a hierarchical structure of all matter and life, thought in medieval Christianity to have been decreed by God. The Great Chain of Being (Latin: scala naturae, "Ladder of Being") is a concept derived from Plato, Aristotle (in his Historia Animalium), Plotinus and Proclus.</footnote>

<footnote>A hierarchical order of all entities especially: an uninterrupted hierarchy of all beings arranged according to an order of perfection.</footnote>

<footnote>https://everythingwhat.com/what-is-chain-of-being-in-literature</footnote>
Lorine Niedecker: “Paean to Place” (1968)

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 [...].”

An ecological poem (even if “ecological” as a critical term used in literary studies post-dates this poem)

“Ecology”: **a.** The science of the relationships between organisms and their environments.

**b.** The relationship between organisms and their environment.

[German Ökologie: Greek oikos, *house*; + German -logie, *study* (from Greek -logiā, -logy).]

A poem which focuses on relations within a place, that place being the speaker’s extended “house.”

The epigraph gives away the poem’s esemplastic key: a water system with lakes, ponds, marshes, swamps, rivers, sloughs, sluices and oceans.

“On this stream/ my moonnight memory/ washed of hardships/ manoeuvers barges/ thru the mouth// of the river” (230-234). Freed from *hard ships* (note the pun), the poet’s memory can “manoeuver barges.” The stanza break that comes after “mouth” leaves the reader free to imagine the poem’s words as so many barges being manoeuvered on a stream of memory.

“Manoeuver” suggests careful plotting of one’s direction.

Water webs the poem together. But, as we shall see, there are numerous other ways in which the poem brings an environment into existence.

*A dense web of relations is suggested through form but it is a loose and fluid form*

Very visible/audible sound textures.

-> Bringing things together via alliteration: “all one in the end” (221)

[f]: 1. 1-3: Fish/fowl/flood: links water to air

[l]: 1. 2-5: fowl/flood/Water lily mud/My life: liquid consonant sounds materialize the strong link between the speaker's life and her environment. So does the alliterative title of the poem associating the place to joy, as a "paean" is a fervent expression of joy or praise.

[(s)w]: 10-11: “in swale<fnref n="13" /> and swamp and sworn/ to water”: here, the density in sibilants and liquids linking the natural world to the poet suggests the strength of her bond to it.

(A swale is “a low tract of land, especially when moist or marshy.”)

[Sibilants are consonants that let air through. Unlike plosives that are “characterized by momentary complete closure at some part of the vocal tract causing stoppage of the flow of air,” sibilants stand for “circulation.” They materialize passage from one thing to another, tightening the links between the parts of the whole network (comprising human beings, the natural world) created by Niedecker.]

The reader is likely to be baffled by abrupt passages from one topic to another (for example 64-65, 117-118.) These jumps are smoothened by the linking of words through sounds (glissandi ← a “glissando” = A rapid slide through a series of consecutive tones in a scalelike passage: “Pewee-glissando” 1.116).

Five-line stanzas, in which the third and fourth line(s) rhyme or half-rhyme

<footnote n="13">¹³ A swale is “a low tract of land, especially when moist or marshy.”</footnote>
Most stanzas are not end-stopped.

→ Influenced by renku: a Japanese practice of group composition. In the classic form, each new stanza simultaneously links to the previous stanza and shifts away from it.

The idea of group composition would have been especially fitting/appropriate for an extended work dealing with the interlinked lives of her family.

(When transcribed in western alphabets) a renku is made up of alternating stanzas of three and two lines → 3+2 structure echoed in Niedecker’s 5-line stanza with the rhyme between line 3 and 4 to link the two parts.

Concerning the stanza breaks and line breaks:

Writing about Ron Padgett’s handling of switches from one stanza to the next, Clayton Eshleman writes in *Companion Spider*:

"[E]ach new [stanza] swivels off the one before it [...] The 'swiveling' is a technique that Padgett employs like a master, pushing into new material almost seamlessly as aspects of prior material are also brought forward, weighting the poem while not losing its ongoing inquiry" ("Padgett the Collaborator" 213). Does this match the writing in "Paean to Place"? Yes, in places: "My life" (1.5); "can't haul"<fnref n="14" /> (95); "song" (119); "How much less am I/ in the dark than they?" (172-173);

More generally, Eshleman speaks of "shifts—single line changes of context which act as hinges to swing the poem off into a new direction" and of "poems [...] constructed on the basis of associational shifts (puns, correspondences, off-the-wall notions), which layer and densify the writing [...]" ("Padgett the Collaborator" 214).

*The relational content*

Autobiographical writing: the chronicle of a lifetime spent in the wilderness ("backland" 1.154), in a region of lakes, in Wisconsin.

Autobiography with a light touch. (Hardly egotistical. No statements of self-pity. Little sentimentality. "A depersonalized study of the self": influenced by Virginia Woolf, Niedecker went on to explore the idea of objectively viewing one's self.)

Autobiographical writing emphasizing relations and relationships with others, humans and non-humans alike: the story of a family (father, mother, grandfather) and of their interaction with their surroundings.

More precisely on the subject of relations, the poem includes details about:

→ the circumstances of her parents' initial meeting (13-19);

→ her parents' ambition for her: that their daughter might get the best possible education (23-27)

→ her father's way of relating to others at different points of his life (40-44, 85-107)

→ her own connection to the dead (her grandfather & her parents (157-173))

→ her own and her family's kind of religion (175-185)

→ how the natural world defined, shaped, impacted their lives

The very precise denotative references to nature indicate it was an essential part of the fabric of their lives

Birds: "canvasbacks" (55), "sora/rails" (58-59), pewee (116), plover (127), woodcocks (153)

Plants: "dandelion greens" (47), "marsh marigold" (51), "coiled celery" (68), "duckweed" (71), " pickerel weeds" (77), "long-stemmed blue/ speedwell" (207-208)

Fishes: "minnows" (43), "carp" (22)

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ “haul anchor”: See “haul anchor and set sail!”</footnote>
The natural disasters, the acts of god they had to face (an *Act of God* is a natural disaster outside human control) (187-203).

The poet's family depended on the natural surroundings for a living (22). They had more than a working knowledge of it. And we will see how vital it proved in the development of her poetic calling.

→ poetry as a means to restore relation:

A hearing loss affected her mother, isolating her from the community (28-35) and depriving her of connections with the natural world (55-63).

In a letter, Niedecker wrote: 'I like planting poems in deep silence, [where] each person gets at the poem for himself. He has to come to the poems with an ear for all the music they can give and he'll hear that as Beethoven heard tho deaf.'" This mention of deafness not preventing someone from hearing is especially significant in relation to the subject of the poet's mother's hearing loss. In the poem, some of the most richly patterned passages in terms of sound are found in l. 58-65 which are about the poet's mother's deafness: the richness in sound-patterns in these lines helps the reader feel all that her mother missed by going deaf but also suggests that we have an inner hear that makes it possible to hear sounds within ourselves while reading.

Chinese boxes, concentric circles, microcosm and macrocosm:

The poem celebrates a specific place; the general impression is that of a homey place, it was/felt home to the poet despite the "water bugs" (194) and the "buckled floors" (203) due to floods. The poet's familiarity with the non-human life in the place comes across strongly. But that place's warm center also defines an outside world. It appears at different junctions of the poem, alternately casting the nucleus of that environment into prominence, and showing its limitations: the outside world enriched that cozy nucleus, but also provided a salutary escape from it. The microcosm is not depicted as an island; its traffic with what lay outside it is taken into account, decentering it to an extent, thus creating an environment. "Paean to Place" is a poem you return to.

To list indices of the presence of the world outside, if only negatively:

The "high ground" (16) the father came from; the thief who stole the father's minnows (43); the absence of oranges in the place (50); how the place became a prison for the father in his middle years (85-107); the town the poet went to once a week as a child (145); mention of departing from home and returning (188-189); the "sea water/ running in [the speaker's] veins" (205-206); the flood evoked as a beneficial factor/force (215-220); "the great hall" where the poet's friend "played his violin" (227-228); "red Mars/ rising", possibly a reference to the Vietnam war (the poem was published in 1968); America's consumer society that she urges herself to stay away from: "O my floating life/ Do not save love/ for things/ Throw things/ to the flood/ [...] Leave the new unbought" (212-220); "the sloughs [slu:z] and sluices/ of [the speaker's] mind; the distance in time the poet is speaking from.

The meaning of the final two lines is uncertain: one way of understanding them is that, that place in Wisconsin, its sloughs and sluices, are now ridden by her "moonnight memory" (231) and her word-barges, and that the other people are now on the edge gravitating around her memory. But it is also tempting to think that it is the poetic persona will always belong to that edge of a place, in the company of the persons she has mentioned in the poem.

Environmental poetry always tends to stress how most everything is subtly connected.

*A close look at l. 109 → 149* confirms that view.

Niedecker described her work as a "condensery."
(Concern with economical language/condensery may be why she goes for American spelling: "thru." (14, 113, 234); ties into the above-mentioned Eastern influence towards concise expression, spare, terse language).

A common point with Oppen: “a rhetoric of reticence” (Perloff). Part of the “Objectivist” aesthetics.

Here again, everything is connected (the network is densified) via alliterations:
109-113 (“I **grew** in **green**” etc.)

High density of [s] sounds (sibilants) (115-119). Glissandi on sounds.

116: “glissando” = the word takes up “slide” in the previous stanza.

It is also a glissando that takes her up, to the sublime: the sublime is what takes you up to (*sub-*-) the limit (*limen*). No awe here. A happy definition of it.

Her growth as a poet: 119-140, closely linked to the natural world.

“Song” (119) emphasizes the musical part: this is lyric poetry.

The link through the [r] and [d] sounds between “riding the river” and “read” suggests that the
natural surroundings led her to read.

The association of water and poetry leads her to remember romantic poet Shelley (1792-1822)
who drowned in his sailing ship (In Shelley's pocket was a small book of Keats's poetry).

Shelley too was a poet of nature: see his odes, in particular “Ode to a Skylark.”

127-150: Through alliteration, joining “plover” to “pencil.” → Association of “writing” with “flying” (elevation); punning on the double meaning of “notes”: jotting down notes + the bird’s notes. The play on words conveys the strength of the link between the natural world and her writing: her pencil was like “a wing-bone” that made it possible for the flights of her imagination, of her inspiration to occur.

“I must tilt// upon the pressure/ execute and adjust/ In us sea-air rhythm/ ‘We live by the urgent wave/ of the verse’” is about the fact that she was compelled to write by inner necessity: she felt that pressure in her (“the urgent wave/ of the verse”). She had to “tilt,” i. e. incline (herself) “upon the pressure.”

“we live by the urgent wave of the verse” is a quotation from fellow-poet Robert Duncan.

As she now sees it, it seems to have taken her “seven years” (139-140) for her to turn herself (“molt”) into a fully-fledged poet: “I possessed/ the high word” (224-225).

Throughout the poem, the lexicon of nature predominates.
## "The Moose" by Elizabeth Bishop

Did you not feel as you were reading this poem that you were on the bus with the speaker, looking out the window at landscapes of Canada's maritime provinces, overhearing the quiet conversations going on around you, and sharing in the general surprise and wonder at the sudden appearance of the moose? I did. And that's what induced me that discuss "The Moose" during this session of the course on the poem as environment. I can almost physically feel all the concentric circles delineated by the poem:

- first, the ones close at hand with, in widening circles, the speaker's consciousness, the other passengers' presence, and the bus itself, like a travelling movie-camera and a cozy vessel which passengers board or get off of;

- secondly, the more distant ones with, the sparsely inhabited region the bus crosses, the tiny villages it stops at, and all of New Brunswick's nature, the wilderness out there, out of which the moose comes for its brief encounter with the bus.

- And I do not feel the speaker's gaze, her filtering consciousness as overbearing, stopping me from almost experiencing first-hand either the quiet scenes of coastal landscapes at sunset or the salutary shock of the unexpected meeting with the elk.

For all of the above reasons, I'd say "The Moose" qualifies as an environment poem as it gives the reader a strong sense of the place featured in it and, if indirectly so, makes a case for harmonious relations of mankind with the natural world. Today's pressing concern with the health of the planet, the conservation of species leads me to read this poem as a subtly delivered message about listening to what nature has to 'say.' Hearing the message is made easier by the poem's narrative quality. The six-line stanzas are just occasionally rhymed: no rhyme scheme. The occasional rhymes may suggest traces of harmony in the world which it is up to us to enhance.

By the way, why "The Moose" and not "The Elk," the alternative title of Edgar Allan Poe's "Morning on the Wissahiccon"?

*A prophet?*

Moose sounds like "Moses" the prophet.

In this poem, the long-delayed arrival of the moose, is like the long-expected arrival of a prophet, here the voice of the natural world, delivering a silent message to human beings, reminding them of its existence. From a contemporary perspective, an environmentalist text. Do not forget the wilderness!

The poem is felt to nest in its subject, to contour it, in many ways; "maps the physical and psychological terrain of New Brunswick."

## Geo-graphy

It includes very precise descriptions of natural phenomena and human additions defining the coastal landscape where the story unfolds: tidal movements, the huge tidal amplitude, fog, a type of road, the local vegetation

-> different types of trees: sugar maples (24), silver birches (28), elms (44);

-> different species of flowers: lupins (56), "sweet peas" (58), "foxgloves" (62) and fauna (herring, moose),

the local architecture, toponyms. A geo-graphic poem, putting a spot of earth on paper. The succession of prepositional phrases about movement which appear before and after the mention of the bus ("on," "down," "past," "through," "up") registers the contours of the land. Like Lorine Niedecker, condensed writing. Like a log book or field-notes in places

## Nature writing: minimizing of human presence

The first five stanzas are a description of a world that has no need of humans.
The first human being appears 1.39 in stanza 6.

Nature's independent agency is underlined. The bay, the river, the sun are agents: "the bay leaves the sea" (5); "the river (...) meets/ the bay" (12-13), the bay has a "home" (14).

On these coastal roads, "a bus journeys west": it's sunset time; that's why "the windshield [is] flashing pink" (32). The bus seems to be driving itself.

The precise description of the play of evening light on the bus almost endows the color "pink" with agency.

Human artefacts are shown as shaped by nature: the "clapboard churches" are "ridged as clamshells" (27);

Another way human presence is minimized is through the poetic persona's discreetness. A self-effacing poet is a signature feature of what is now called nature writing.

Her presence is only made manifest through her sensory perceptions: she intends to appear as little more than a recorder of what she sees outside the window (succession of snapshots in 40-42, 46-62, 69-72, 79-83), what she smells (74), what she feels and hears (75-76: "An iron bridge trembles/ and a loose plank rattles"; 84, 101→140: "Snores. Some long sighs.// a gentle, auditory,/ slow hallucination. ..."// In the creakings and noises,/ an old conversation/ not concerning us" (108-109) etc)).

With the fall of night, things and beings are reduced to metonymies of themselves: ll. 79-84. [A] red light" for a boat, two boots for a man and a "one bark" for a dog.

In the same way, as the poem develops, people are nothing but their voices.

### Acousmatic sounds

Those latter are acousmatic sounds. Acousmatic sound is sound one hears without seeing an originating cause. (The word *acousmatic*, from the French *acousmatique*, is derived from the Greek word *akousmatikoi* (ἀκουσματικοί), a term used to refer to probationary pupils of the philosopher Pythagoras who, so that they might better concentrate on his teachings, were required to sit in absolute silence while listening to their teacher deliver his lecture from behind a veil or screen.)

Hearing a voice without seeing it is the case with the grandparents' voices (112). The poet jots down snatches of their overheard conversation (115-140). Is she not offering here a metaphor for poetic inspiration as an acousmatic sound?

### A visitation from another world?

152 –> the end: the encounter of anthropos with cosmos thru logos (language-induced correspondences): "hood" and "wood;" "moose" and "macadam."

The moose is described as being "high as a church (140)" and "otherworldly" (153).

It is said to be "homely": a word that sounds very much like "homily," i. e. a sermon.

This confirms the obvious sound-similarity between "moose" and "Moses".

The phrase "a red sea" (18) takes on new meaning.

It seems that the appearance of the moose creates an instant community among the passengers: the first-person plural subject pronoun is repeated twice within two lines: "Why, why do we feel/ (we all feel) this sweet/ sensation of joy?" (180-181).

Like a visitation from another world: all the double "oo" look like so many signs of the infinite: "wood," "hood", "moose," "moonlit."

Final two lines: the word common to the two lines ("smell") is the operative word that brings "anthropos" and "cosmos" together.

Is the message hinted at, that a real moose today is worth the Moses of Scripture, that nature is our holy book, that there is no need of another world?
Kenneth Rexroth: “Lyell's Hypothesis Again”

"Sir Charles Lyell (1797 – 1875) was a Scottish geologist. His *Principles of Geology* (1830–33), presented to a wide public audience the idea that Earth was shaped by the same natural processes still in operation today, operating at similar intensities." (Wikipedia) That is Lyell's hypothesis. We shall have to determine how relevant that reference is to the overall meaning of the poem. Since the poem revolves around human agents, the question is: how are the processes in which they are shown to engage related to those that shaped and are still shaping the Earth?

The answer to that question should first be: via the channel of humor. The poem features two human agents engaged in lovemaking. One of them, who happens to be the speaker (the poet) notices red marks on his partner's body, which are very similar to marks he can see in the rocks of the place. That is how he can jokingly connect the natural process of lovemaking to the natural processes that shaped Earth.

Once this humorous facet of the poem has been made plain, it can be gotten out of the way and the way the rest of the poem works can be examined from other perspectives.

Going by Fletcher's criteria, what could justify including it in the category of environment poems?

Does it *feel* like one?

It features what feels like a secluded (4), sheltered (“the sunny lee of a cliff” (36)) and very limited corner of the natural world/ nook (1-11), captured at a very specific time (“April”); and the scene includes a human integer.

Form is not foregrounded: the poem consists of three sections written in lines the length of which seems partly governed by syllabic count (ranging from six to nine syllables) with limited use of significant line-breaks.

Is an aesthetics of relinquishment, decentering the human subject, at work here?

Yes: all three sections go some way toward minimizing the gap between the human species and the natural world: that is done/ achieved in several ways:

→ through similes: "The engorged creek" is said to roar and rustle "like a military/ Ball";

→ "life" is personified: pathetic fallacy<sup>15</sup> is indulged in quite passionately in the five-line sentence characterizing life (12-15);

→ the petals of scarlet larkspur falling on the surface of the water are compared to "flagellant/blood";

→ the world is capable of "vindictiveness" (25);

→ the speaker describes his ego as "as passionate, as apathetic, / As the lava flow that burned here once;/ And stopped here; and said, 'This far/ And no further.'" So, the speaker first endows the lava flow with the gift of speech, even if it makes a limited use of it as we're told that it "spoke thereafter/ In the simple diction of stone" (31-32). Still, "it spoke."

What may be the poem's most interesting passage is in the middle of the first section when the speaker verbalizes his self's attempt to break on through to the unself, the other side, freeing himself of what he calls the flesh's "Nessus' shirt."<sup>16</sup> (Interestingly, the poet seems to

<footnote n="15"><sup>15</sup> The attribution of human emotions or characteristics to inanimate objects or to nature; for example, *angry clouds; a cruel wind*.</footnote>

<footnote n="16"><sup>16</sup> The Shirt of Nessus, Tunic of Nessus, Nessus-robe, or Nessus' shirt in Greek mythology was the poisoned shirt that killed Heracles. In Greek mythology, it is the shirt (chiton) daubed with the tainted blood of the centaur Nessus that Heracles' wife, naively gave Heracles, burning him, and driving him to throw himself onto a funeral pyre. Metaphorically, it represents "a source of misfortune from which there is no escape;</footnote>
equate his flesh to his self.) He finally seems to succeed in the attempt, at least temporarily, as "The tissue/ Of sympathy and agony/ [...]/ The clotted cobweb of unself/ And self; sheds itself and flecks/ The sun's bed with darts of blossom/ Like flagellant blood above/ The water (...)." The heaping up of metaphor and simile in the passage conveys the temporary climactic breakthrough. What comes next, despite the parallel between the ego and the lava flow, marks an anticlimactic return to incommunicability between human beings and the stony world.

The second and third sections show an analogic mind searching for correspondences: as indicated before, the poet notes that the tiny red marks in his companion's flanks are "Like bites, where the redwood cones/ have pressed into [her/his] flesh," and that they are similar to those "In the lignite in the cliff/ Over [their] heads." (37-43) He returns to the subject in the final three lines, referring to those marks as "ideograms/ Printed on the immortal/ Hydrocarbons of flesh and stone." (59-61)

In a humorous way, the epigraph cancels the difference between *Cosmos* and *Anthropos*, as Lyell's geological "Causes Now in Operation," apt to lead to "Changes of the Earth's Surface," seem to be inclusive of the poet's lovemaking. The stress on the partners' nakedness — mentioned twice — links them to former geologic ages, here referred to via an extinct type of sequoia. But this moment has actually been one out of time. Their lovemaking has made them temporarily impervious to the passing of time and the damage this passing usually involves. All that is left/ matters is the present and those fresh marks on bodies reflecting those in the stone. The concluding "flesh and stone", patterned on the phrase "flesh and bone," suggests that our body is our prime link to the natural world.

Still, the human presence seems too overarching for the poem to qualify as an environment poem.
## Session 8: Mimesis in nature poetry

### “A Noiseless Patient Spider” by Walt Whitman

Two successive lines in a Whitman poem rarely are the same length.

Two waves breaking on the shore never reach exactly the same point.

Whitman said how the ocean had been a major respiration for his poetry.

In this case, the variable line length may well be an attempt to mime those filaments the noiseless patient spider is launching forth out of itself.

Unsurprisingly, the first line, which refers to the spider itself, is the shortest. It stands for the spider.

All lines are end-stopped by some punctuation mark. Each line stands for one filament, contributing to the construction of the web.

Other less conspicuous means may mimic the repetitive work that the weaving of the web involves:

→ The epizeuxis of “filament”: “It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself” (l. 4). “Epizeuxis” is “a form of repetition in which no words intervene between the repeated words or expressions.

→ The “diacope” of “ever”: diacope = the repetition of a word with one or a few words in between. The speaker describes the spider at work as working very hard at tying itself to the world:

→ the repetition of the “-ing” ending emphasizing process (6).

The very real spider of the first five lines becomes a symbol of the speaker’s soul in the last five.

In the same way as the spider constantly tries to, needs to connect itself to its surrounding(s), the human soul is “ceaselessly” trying to connect itself to things and to create connections.

(The word “gossamer” (12) is a synonym for “a thin film of cobweb.” It is here used about the soul.) Consequently, the repetitions in the second part of the poem are also ways of mimicking the spider’s ceaseless work, only indirectly so.

→ again, the insistent repetition of the “-ing” ending emphasizing process (10).

→ the diacope of “till” (11-12) emphasizing the soul’s spider-like persistence [“opiniâtreté”]

→ the repetition of the “-less” suffix in “measureless” and “ceaselessly” respectively (9-10) implying that the soul-spider’s effort is up to the task awaiting it.

The governing metaphor of the poem (soul compared to spider) is itself a materialization of the poet’s soul’s spider-like ability to create connections, to build bridges, cast ductile anchors in an effort to make sense of the world. (“Ductile” means which can be stretched into, for example, a wire.)

The history of this poem is worth knowing since, despite the unmistakable mimicking in it of the animal that inspired it, it was originally meant as a response to the worldwide growing interrelatedness or interconnection: the piercing of the Suez Canal, the junction in 1869 between the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroad lines in the Rocky Mountains, the laying down of a transatlantic cable and was part of the “Passage to India” section of *Leaves of Grass*. Whitman republished it as an older man, moving the poem to the section entitled “Whispers of Heavenly Death.” It became a poem about the fragility of our link with/ our ties to this world. The “gossamer thread” might break at any time. By then, the poem tied into mythology, echoing the figures of the Three Fates, the Parcae (Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos) whose respective jobs were to spin, measure out and cut the thread of life.
### “l(a” by e.e. cummings

*Ut pictura poesis*<fnref n="17" />: poets have long pursued that dream of matching the immediacy afforded by visual arts.

Among e. e. cummings’s various attempts to achieve that, one consisted in using the space of the page to support the meaning of his poem.

The first poem is a combination of the word “loneliness” and of the simple sentence between brackets: “a leaf falls”

“af” and “fa” represent the spiraling downward of a falling leaf.

Poets/ poetic tradition have associated autumn with melancholy.

Lower-case “l”’s look like the digit “1” or a capitalized “I.”

What seems to be represented here is how the sight of a falling leaf in the fall, in autumn, may make you melancholy, reminding you that there is only one of you. The fall of a leaf may remind you of your “iness.” The final line can be read as either the end of “loneliness” or “i-ness” to emphasize solitude.

What makes cummings’s poems all the more visual is that you cannot read them aloud. You should receive them visually, simply because you cannot read two different sounds at a time. They are extensions of the reality out there, when space becomes page.

### “Beautiful” by e.e. cummings

also visualizes a downward movement, the fall of a snowflake.

As you may see, this time, we have the intertwining of two adverbs “silently” and “everywhere” with the sentence: “Beautiful is the unmeaning of falling snow”

Why “unmeaning”?

The speaker means that you don’t need to look for a meaning: looking, gazing, seeing is enough. So that you should not try to complicate what you see by trying to think it through. Hence the isolating of “unmea.” Your self, your “me” should efface itself. Sometimes, you should just be able to look, enjoy the moment, enjoy the “here” and “now.”

Here again, the lay-out of the poem on the page forces you to change the original pronunciation of words

The final part of “everywhere” becomes “here.” The final three letters of “snow” become “now.”

So that you have to trust what you see to understand the full meaning of the poem, as with a painting.

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ "as is painting so is poetry": the statement (often repeated) occurs most famously in Horace's "Ars Poetica" (Wikipedia).</footnote>
## "At Big Sur" by John Wieners

A (quite successful) attempt to render a sound of nature, the buzzing of bees, by saturating the short poem with [z] consonants. Makes the surrounding sound of the bees overwhelmingly present.

Bees have been a favorite subject with poets since Virgil.

But the repetitions of the same consonant sound, staggered through the short poem, fulfill another function. They connect most of the non-human entities, belonging to different kingdoms, present in the scene: trees, poppies for the vegetable kingdom; bees, lizard, canaries for the animal kingdom.

Spatial prepositions located either at line inception ("in") or at line break ("through") also emphasize the importance of connection.

No trace of human self. It has cut down its agency to a minimum: being there, nested among the mineral, the animal and vegetable kingdoms.

If you pay attention to word length and stress patterns, you're bound to note that most words are monosyllables and that the pattern is either trochaic ("Lizard," "under," "yellow," "poppies") or spondaic, two beats that call attention to themselves, suggesting that everything matters in this scene.

Big Sur, as you will know, was a favorite place with the Beats. Maybe a few stimulants helped with the vision: what with "grass"/ and "poppies."

No human activity is going on: Lawrence Buell has pointed out how "rejection of the work ethic as conventionally understood" (153) is a frequent feature of American environmental texts. As with Thoreau, "pastoral otium open[s] up for [the poetic persona] the experience of place, of self as continuous with place" (Buell 154). He seems happy with being the passive and contemplative steward of this micro-community.

Inevitably, contemporary environmentalist poets will have come up with fresh implementations of this sensory mimicking of nature, in support of specific causes. This would make an interesting research paper.
## Session 9: Recycling

The title of today's session is misleading in a sense as it seems to refer to what has become an essential feature of industrial countries' green policies. Recycling depots and plants are now a familiar sight of suburban landscapes all over the rich world. The recycling that is the focus of this session is that of the human body as potential nutrient within nature's food web. The consciousness of this trophic chain is what Whitman's, Welch's and Jeffers's poems have in common. (Remember Ed Roberson's "Be Careful"?) These poems make the human body appear as the most natural basis from which an ecological awareness can be built.

## Walt Whitman: "This Compost"

Whitman could not have suspected that this poem's title<fnref n="18" /> by itself would ensure it special popularity among twenty-first century readers. His poem is *not* about the practice of

Author: Aspiz, Harold

Print source: J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, eds., *Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia* (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), reproduced by permission.

Originally titled "Poem of Wonder at The Resurrection of The Wheat," this exquisite lyric meditation on death was number 4 in the "Leaves of Grass" cluster in the 1860 edition, received its present intriguing title in 1867, and (having undergone several textual changes over the years) attained its present form in 1881, when it was placed in the "Autumn Rivulets" cluster of *Leaves of Grass* together with many other poems about death. Although compost generally refers to decomposing vegetable and animal matter used as fertilizer, the poem's title more specifically designates putrefying human carrion; the present line 17 originally read, "Behold! / This is the compost of billions of premature corpses" (1856 *Leaves*). The speaker appears terrified at the thought of such an ignominious destiny for all humanity and at the earth's apparent indifference toward mankind. (The poem makes brilliant use of the pathetic fallacy.) But since compost is a universal nutrient, he also beholds this compost as an element in nature's renewing and transformative powers and, paradoxically, as a promise of universal immortality.

The poem, whose subtext is the poet's struggle between his faith in spiritual regeneration and his fears of annihilation, expresses terror ("Something startles me where I thought I was safest" [section 1]) at the thought of coming in contact with the infectious earth. (Here Whitman echoes the widely accepted theory of miasma—the concept that living matter decomposes into infectious effluvia and poisonous vapors.) In a series of rhetorical questions, the speaker demands to know how the earth, "every mite" (section 2) of which is packed with "all the foul liquid and meat" of "distemper'd corpses" (section 1), can perpetually create wholesome life out of such corruption. Then he opens his eyes to the landscape. Out of the decay he beholds an awful beauty. Observing the leafing and flowering of plants and savoring the earth's bounty, he concludes that "The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead" (section 2). Echoing the poem's 1856 title, a key line—"The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves" (section 2)—alludes to the earth's vegetational cycle but also, by analogy, to spiritual immortality. Saint Paul's sermon on the conquest of death and the rebirth of the soul (1 Corinthians 15) speaks of the sown wheat resurrected in a divine body and of "the resurrection of the dead . . . sown in corruption" but "raised in incorruption" as a "spiritual body."

In the penultimate paragraph the speaker tries to allay his fears of death and decay with the thought that, despite the corruption and fevers deposited in the earth, he can enjoy the sea, the winds, and the vegetation without catching "any disease." "What chemistry!" he exclaims (section 2). Although "chemistry" is clearly a metaphor for nature's power to compost living and dead elements together to create new life, this exclamation also recalls Whitman's enthusiasm over Justus Liebig's 1846 textbook on chemistry, which defined "fermentation, or putrefaction" as "metamorphosis"—the simultaneous breakdown and re-creation of matter (Aspiz 63–64). Such a chemical "metamorphosis" suggests a dynamic metaphor for the transformative powers of nature, for what Whitman called American democracy's "kosmical, antiseptic power" to digest and transform its corrupt persons into worthy citizens (*Prose Works* 2:382), for the transformation of death into life, and for the poet's power to transform morbid experience into inspirational poetry.

This forty-seven-line masterpiece melds Whitman's anguished confessional mode and his strivings to accept and glorify life and death. Its series of parallel, anaphoric lines (generally forming short catalogues) have an almost breathless quality. Rich in detailed visual images, "This Compost" is also one of Whitman's finest nature poems.

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Title: "This Compost" (1856)</footnote>
composting as such, the carefully monitored breaking down of vegetable and animal matter
into humus to be used as fertilizer. As a matter of fact, while the practice of composting goes
back to Antiquity, it was not actively propounded in Europe until the 1920s as an essential
method in organic farming. Concerns over the sustainability of American farming only grew
significantly in the second half of the twentieth century. So, it would be an anachronism to
read Whitman's "This Compost" as a pre-environmentalist poem since the compost he is
obsessing about is that resulting from decomposed buried human bodies.

The consciousness of this composting seems to have come to him abruptly, and overwhelmed him. The poem makes very clear how the body is our main intuitive link to nature, and also how that closeness can be experienced equally as a source of wonder and a source of terror. The poem's opening stanza shows a person who used to enjoy nature to the full in the most sensuously direct way, i. e. through his sense of touch. But after the watershed moment of his realization of what the beauty of nature may plant its roots in, the high intensity of his former experience seems to cause him to shrink back from it all the more violently: he is determined (as shown by the triple anaphora of "I will not" in stanza 1) *not* to repeat it, being plagued by doubts about the power of the ground to transmute rotting carcasses into aboveground harmless loveliness. He fears for his own safety and will not repeat past intimacies with nature. His fears and doubts express themselves in a rapid-fire succession (all lines are end-stopped) of anguished and mostly rhetorical questions addressed to the earth and its manifestations (such as the "growths of spring" (9)), pressing them to corroborate his view. He is both sympathizing with the earth as being constantly imposed upon to accept "distemper'd corpses within [it]" and doubting that it could have processed them completely. He has limited faith in nature's recycling capabilities. The fair appearances of nature cannot but be deceptively harmless. As a consequence of his distrust, he resolves to put the earth, the soil, to the test: "I will run a furrow ..." (19-20)

Whether the poet's panic is real or feigned is hard to tell. Just as hard to decide is whether
his panic stems from the prospect of contamination as it appears on the surface or from an
underlying dread of physical annihilation. In all likelihood, the two explanations are
impossible to disentangle. One thing is sure: Whitman's poem shows its time of composition
(it was first published in 1860) if you take a societal perspective. Cremation as a way of
disposing of dead bodies was not as popular as it is nowadays in the west where it is often
praised as an environmentally-friendly gesture. I read this headline in a 2014 issue of *The
Atlantic*: "How to be eco-friendly when you're dead?" So that his fears in the poem's first
section now may sound hysterical in both senses of the word: showing uncontrollable emotion
and ... wildly funny.

The first half of the poem's second section shows a complete change of mood in the poet who cannot help but be charmed at the sight of nature's vernal rebirth. That the injunction to "behold" should first apply to the scary compost, then, without any transition, to all the items which make up the symphony of spring is clear enough: his misgivings are swept away by the massive evidence of life returning to all beings in vegetable and animal kingdoms. Here is a

**Bibliography**

Aspiz, Harold. *Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful*. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980.

Marriage, Anthony X. "Whitman's 'This Compost,' Baudelaire's 'Out of Decay Comes an Awful Beauty.'" *Walt Whitman Review* 27 (1981): 143–149.

Whitman, Walt. *Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems*. Ed. Sculley Bradley, Harold W.

Blodgett, Arthur Golden, and William White. Vol. 1. New York: New York UP, 1980.

______. *Prose Works* 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vols. New York: New York UP, 1963–1964.
So, you see, some environmental use *can* be teased out of this poem. More variations on the subject with the excerpts from Jed Rasula's *This Compost* we'll be looking at now.

### Extracts from Rasula's *This Compost* (;)

The three poems you read for this session deal with, shall I say using a contemporary vocabulary, an ecological way of thinking about, of looking at, death. Such an ecological way of looking at death ties into a way of regarding our body as a fragment of nature, a congeries of atoms only temporarily assembled.

Jed Rasula's *This Compost* explores ways in which American poetry, on topics relevant to nature, conservation and ecology, has tapped into the legacy of Greek and Roman atomist philosophers and poets, Lucretius in particular.

### p.39-40

In this first extract, Rasula reminds us how, from time immemorial, there has existed this link between writing (and, more broadly, “inscription” or “signs”) and death, more especially the body of the deceased. Writing as protection against or preparation for, death; but also writing as a consequence of death, as generated by death. At a trivial level, you can see how major poems have been written upon someone’s passing (Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”). Rasula goes further, equating death to a Lucretian clinamen, a fecund swerve of atoms allowing the new to be born: grass or new poetry.

### p.40-41

In this second extract, Rasula traces back the origins of the concept of *psyche* to ancient Persian and Indian sources. These sources, he argues, make *psyche* different from all other words referring to the “soul.” These sources laid stress on all that is “*physically*” unknown, be it very far (such as the cosmos) or very near but invisible. Matter held a secret. Rasula suggests that analytic thought may have originated in that frustrated thirst for knowledge and that the observation of composting (the transformation of organic matter) may have led poets and philosopher poets to the intuition that tiny things govern large ones, generate continuities, (in the same way as a thousand-side polygon – chiliagon – is indistinguishable from a circle to the human eye); and that may be how they arrived at atomism, and the notion of an invisible ‘thing’ surviving the mortal body; this tentative explanation complements that of the intuition of atomism via the alphabet. In any case, poets’ ability and inclination to imagine and project their bodies as part of the cycles of organic matter survived into modern times, as testified by the poems discussed during this session.

### p. 125-126, 128

In these other extracts, Rasula extends the idea of composting and humus to language (“words may be pulled up/ like onions, a humus still/ clinging to them”) and to literature seen as a palimpsest through the practice of citation (literature as a geological or humus-type of layering in which particles keep recombining.) He goes on to suggest that this parallel drawn between language and compost is not just metaphorical as language and writing(s) do not remain confined within books. They spill out into the natural world: “the ground is all memoranda and signatures.” This, in turn, explains why poets try to imagine that they can “read,” or “record” nature, be its typewriters, with nature at the keyboard: attempting to read// the twigged, branchy writing// of frost, spider & galactic cluster.” Thoreau writes that, provided we are in the right disposition (“overflowing with life”, he says), “nature will *fable*,” that is to say it will start telling stories through our channel. The flow of protein spirit will go both ways. As with Lew Welch’s and Robinson Jeffers’s poems, the bigger picture that emerges from these extracts is that of a restored continuum between the human and the non-human.
Excerpt on “Totemism” in Descola’s *Beyond Nature and Culture*

You will remember that animism and naturalism are like the obverse and the reverse side of
the coin: animism posits universal interiority despite differences in physicality, whereas
naturalism posits interiority as a human specificity, while emphasizing the physical, biological
etc. similarities underlying differences in physicality. Totemism, Descola convincingly
argues, works differently. It divides the world into abstract qualities, usually symbolized by
an animal, which define, determine ontological classes, classes of beings, that cut across the
human and non-human worlds and may include places. Those ontological classes share
“psychic and physical dispositions,” that is to say similar features are found both in their
physicality and in their interiority. Lew Welch’s poem is informed by such a cosmology.
Needless to say, as with animism, human centrality does not make sense in totemism. It is
challenged even more radically as neither human physicality, nor human interiority are
regarded as distinct, let alone exceptional, within such a cosmology.
## “Song of the Turkey Buzzard” by Lew Welch

[Lew Welch was ‘the real (Beat) thing.’ He actually chose to build his own cabin, lived like a hermit in the mountains, worked as a taxi driver, a salmon fisherman in Alaska, all this after leaving a well-paid job as an advertising executive in the East. He is famous for coming up with the advertising slogan "Raid Kills Bugs Dead." He set some of his poems to music.

This poem is an instance of a harmonious and very idiosyncratic blend of Native-American respect for the environment, Eastern compassion and very western anxiety.

The poem’s lay-out emphasizes forms of heterogeneity. Some clusters of lines are in italic, others look like prose, the final one is all in capitals.

One cluster (“A cunning man ...”) consists in a quotation.

The title says “Song”: so it is lyric poetry, primarily informed by emotion.

It is inscribed to a friend whose first name itself (“Rock”) appears as a reference to nature.

The poem includes a few proper nouns.

- Mount Tamalpais (pron.: /tæməl'paɪ.is/; known locally as Mount Tam) is a peak in Marin County, California, United States, often considered symbolic of Marin County.

- “Leo” is another version of “Lew.” But Leo is also the seventh sign of the Zodiac. “Leo” is Latin for “lion” and refers to the animal.

- “Milarepa” is a Tibetan yogi and poet. A kind of Tibetan saint.

The most puzzling phrase is found at the start of part I: “the rider riddle.” So that is what we should begin by clarifying.

It is very clearly explained in an interview – posted on March 4, 2013 – with a writer, Eric Paul Shaffer, who was an early Lew Welch scholar.

In that poem, Shaffer says, “[e]ssentially, Welch (...) encourages readers to re-connect with the places they inhabit and the planet. Readers are enjoined to make observations close enough to determine which “animal, plant, insect, reptile, or any of the Numberless Forms” of life is the one that the readers “ride,” or, in other words, which will be his or her guide. In effect, Welch asks us to climb “the Mountain,” look around, and recognize which one has the most to teach us about who, what, and where we are.” It amounts to a search for *your totemic animal* or *form of life in the natural world with which you feel some sort of kinship*. “The Mountain” stands for a place for meditation, a place from which you will return an enlightened being.

So the “rider riddle” is the mystery each and everyone should elucidate in their attempt to connect with the earth.

The poem is divided into two sections.

In the first section and in the first cluster of section II, the lines in italic sound like prayers, chanting.

“Praise” is a word that belongs to the field of theology (“louanges”). Remember McGrath’s “Praises”: “the extolling of a deity or the rendering of homage and gratitude to a deity”. In the Bible’s Psalms: “*Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel, who alone does wondrous things.*”

Here it is the personified female mountain which is being extolled.]<fnref n="19" />

### I.

The speaker, a Welch-sound-alike, tells us how he would have liked “Cougar” (the mountain lion) to be his totem animal. He regularly found “brilliant proofs” that it was. He finally realized that what he thought were “proofs” were “all made up” by his reading *into* facts.

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Send this part of the notes prior to the session</footnote>
The second cluster of italicized lines (“*They were always there ...*”) suggests how Welch came to the realization that the Turkey Buzzard, a kind of vulture, could be his totemic animal.

from “*They were*” to “Milarepa sang”

Milarepa's words: words of wisdom that must have drawn the speaker's attention to vultures' inspirational behavior: detachment, serenity, dignity in the face of adversity.

“Over and over again, that sign”: the speaker says how “over and over” again, he found signs that this special connection existed between him and these birds.

The poem proceeds with the account of two of these signs.

The first one (“I hit once ...”): how he nearly shot down one of these birds once. How it hardly disturbed the bird.

The second one: which came again and again, it seems. The present perfect (“I have seen them”) refers to familiarity he has acquired over an indefinite period of time.

His experience of the bird is associated with a context of contemplation, possibly meditation on the mountain.

The isolated “eye” nearly at the bottom of the first page may be meant to convey the experience of communion that took place between him and the bird. The poet’s “I” became the bird’s “eye”. He may have started looking at the world from the bird’s perspective.

The third sign (from “Another time”) is one which the speaker shared with a female companion of his: they witnessed the hatching of a turkey buzzard chick: “Wet, a hatching bird ...” The syntax is halting, the rhythm of the sentence is broken. It emphasizes the difficulty in being born, and the extreme vulnerability of life in the middle of an impassive, indifferent nature. Kinship with the human species is underlined by naming parts of the bird’s body after those of humans (“elbows”) and the use of a communal “we” to indifferently refer to human beings *and* animals.

Prospects of survival are hardly bright: “‘he’ll never make it.’” (56)

“*Praises, Tamalpais...*”:

The interpolation of this cluster recalls the continued adhesion to the world, regardless.

“Even so ...”:

The speaker continued to attempt to crack the rider riddle: “I didn’t get it for a long while”.

In contrast to the “Wet, a hatching bird” cluster, this cluster is about a turkey-buzzard’s near death. The opposite end of life.

The deep connection between the speaker and the bird is once again emphasized:

*He* was in a trance, a coma, not feeling alright, dizzy. The bird he came across was wounded.

The speaker says it was “as dizzy as I was”.

The description of the incident owes something both to Baudelaire’s “The Albatross” and Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Both poems feature giant birds downed, actually downed by human malevolence in the case of Coleridge’s poem, metaphorically and imaginatively downed in Baudelaire’s poem which compares the poet to an albatross, stating that like those of poets, their giant wings prevent them from walking, i.e. adjusting to ordinary life.

The speaker’s identification but also empathy with the bird’s suffering is plain to see.

When in Coleridge’s and Baudelaire’s cases, the bird was largely metaphorical, here there is a lot more to it. It is a symbol **and** an endangered species, a creature in the great chain of being.
It is a story of healing in which the speaker had a part: “We removed [the bullet] and cleansed the wound.” He almost nursed him (“Finally he ate ...”): like a dedicated zoo-keeper, like a passionate environmentalist washing oil off birds’ plumage. The subject of food is introduced for the first time in 1.76-77.

“They smell ...”:

The switch back to verse indicates access to higher ground, a more meditative level.

The semantic weight of each word is increased. The bird becomes a symbol: of different things. Resilience, resurrection, life: from “death” to “bird” and finally “birth.”

The bird’s diet – mostly the rotten meat of dead animals – is itself a symbol of the eternal cycle of life: it is “The very opposite of/death”.

“unkillable, wing-locked/ soarer till he’s but a// speck in the sky” materialize the bird’s return to life, returning to its life, becoming but a speck to the viewer. The isolated “a” is that “speck”.

Stress is laid on the happy interconnection of turkey-buzzards’ life and that of humans:

“baked concrete” is the concrete of highways in hot weather but the phrase also implies that humans’ concrete acts as cook for the birds’ meals. “squashed rabbit” is equated with “our good cheese,” suggesting they and we are not that different.

Finally, buzzards are shown to fit in finely in humans’ universe. Doing one of the dirty jobs.

## II

A line in the “Even so, I didn’t get it” cluster reads: “He wanted to die alone” referring to the wounded bird.

The poem’s second section turns to the subject of the speaker’s death since it includes his “last Will & Testament”.

The poem is unrhymed so that the occasional rhyme is of special significance:

“continuance” rhymes with “extravagance.”

The etymology of “extravagance” is to “wander outside.” This means that the speaker sees his existence after death as a “wandering outside,” not a stopping but a form of continuance.

In this second section of the poem, the italicized sections are the speaker’s last will.

He is not afraid of death, it seems. He looks at his future body as “meat”: “place my meat.”

The word “meat” echoes the first section in which it refers the reader back to the turkey-buzzards’ diet. He may want his remains to re-enter the cycle of life and death under a “new form” (1.141).

In asking for his body to be disemboweled “With proper ceremony” (137) and placed “On a marked rock”, he is thinking of a ritual slightly reminiscent of those of Native-Americans:

“The physical *body* of a deceased Sioux was *placed* in trees or on *wooden* (scaffold) *platforms*. But in the Sioux’ case, the idea of wooden platforms was to protect the *body* from animals, *not* to give them easier access to it.”

The Will & Testament also include a statement about contemporary America’s attitude to death. Was Lew Welch already thinking of taking his own life and wishing that the manner and moment of one’s death were left up to the individual’s free will? By calling Americans “*natives*,” (a scornful word that would be used by white settlers to refer to the former non-white inhabitants of the place) he is saying that the dominant attitude to death, hiding it, excluding it is only one custom among other possible options, for instance those of other cultures, Native-Americans’ for example.

This raises ethical and philosophical questions, of course, which European countries have been addressing in various ways.
The final cluster (in capitals) is comprised of few words. The air has rarefied. The size of the letters leaves room for fewer words.

He imagines the continuance of his body, his “meat” after death, when it becomes food for vultures, part of their diet. Instead of being locked in a bronze casket, he will be soaring in the skies above the ocean, having now become part of the vultures’ diet.

The dominant sound is “-ing,” the sound of process in English. Death is a “going-on forever.”

The triple repetition of the lyric address to nature “O” and the use of the archaic “thee” indicate a resolution into song. Harmony within nature.

Note the paronomasia between “bronze” and “brazen”: the two words are linked. (The etymology of “brazen” relates it to ‘brass’ (“laiton”)). Both bronze and brass are alloys with much copper in them.

But “brazen” should maybe be understood in the metaphorical sense here, as meaning: “Marked by flagrant and insolent audacity.”

The speaker’s final gesture is intended as a gesture of freedom, the freedom to re-enter the great cycle of nature.
## Robinson Jeffers: “Vulture”

The poem's most beautiful word is also a neologism, a word Jeffers invented, coined: you'll find it almost at the end of the poem. That word is “enskyment.” It is patterned after “entombment” = “lay inside a grave,” a word you find in Edgar Allan Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Of course, “enskyment” points to the opposite direction: the placing of a corpse in the sky!

Like other poems we read in our “A conversation with nature” session, this one features an imaginary dialogue between the poetic persona and a bird, in this case, a raptor, a vulture. If I ask you “can you think of a very famous ancient story featuring a vulture?” it is likely that you will refer to a Greek myth in which a giant, Tityos, is stretched out in Tartarus and tortured by two vultures who feed on his liver, which grows back every night. A punishment (for rape) which is comparable to that of the Titan Prometheus (whose liver was devoured by an eagle.)

In Jeffers' poem, the vulture is not a mythological one. It is a flesh-and-bone scavenger in a spectacular location: “a bare hillside/ Above the ocean” (1-2), next to “a precipice” (14). What is rather typical of nature writing here is the part played, or rather *not* played by the poetic persona here, and which consists in lying on the ground and observing the natural surroundings. It seems that the fact that his eyelids are “half-shut” (2) is meant to make him even more unintrusive. He is strictly a spectator but very quickly becomes the spectator inspected (“I was under inspection”, 1.7).

Incidentally, the beginning of the poem reminds that of Langland's *Piers Plowman* (14th century) in which the poetic persona lies down to rest on a hillside, falls asleep and has a vision which the rest of the poem recounts. In this poem, although the poetic persona also lies down, he does not fall asleep and focuses on a very real scene.

The scene is quite dramatic (spectacular), first because of the scenery, secondly because, although ultimately nothing happens, the poet makes it sound as if it was a close shave/ came within a hair's breadth of a real confrontation with the vulture: something might have happened in this silent confrontation between the vulture and him.

It is not indifferent that he should describe himself as “death-still” and that he should have contemplated the prospect of “be[ing] eaten by that beak” (15). Note the echo between “beak” and “become” (15-16) confirming that he was thinking of what would **become** of him in that **beak**.

The tone of the poem is quite solemn, as suggested by the poet himself (“I tell you solemnly” 1.14) and the extended length, the amplitude of the lines adds to the poem’s solemn character. Clearly, the speaker was spellbound by the vulture’s ballet (repetition of the exclamation “how beautiful he” 1.11, 13). So that after telling the bird he is not the right food for him yet (10-11), he has second thoughts and wishes he could have been.

When considering the prospect of being eaten by such a bird, he grows/waxes lyrical (see the thrice-repeated exclamation “what a” (17)) and speaks of a “sublime end” (17): the concept of the sublime refers to “awe-inspiring beauty”. Etymologically, “sublime” means “under the limit.” The encounter with that bird made him feel just under some limit, vaguely catching sight of another form of life after death.

Birds in poetry always conjure up some concept of elevation, a flight of the imagination, transcendence, the soul's departure and so forth. Jeffers's difference is that such intimations are built upon a naturalist's gift for observation of real nature and a deeply respectful and admiring turn of mind towards natural beauty.
## Session 10: Damageable metaphors?

Paul Ricoeur’s rule of metaphor: “its representations both warp us away and return us to the world” (Buell 266).

### Robert Frost: “The Bear”

A second ‘bear’ poem in our corpus. Question: how does it compare to the first one? Answer: the part actually devoted to the bear is only comprised of one fourth of the poem. And, within that part of the poem, the bear (a *she*-bear) is humanized through the rhetoric that is used, based on simile and metaphor. It, or rather, she, is said to draw down a tree above her “as if it were a lover/ And its chokecherries lips to kiss good-bye.” (2-3) She is also compared to a cross-country runner (6). The bear’s wandering path then serves as a metaphor for the human being’s restlessness and chronical dissatisfaction: hard science and metaphysics are pointed at as exemplifying that nervousness which drives him/her/them to range the world from one infinite to the other.

A classical way of demeaning the human being consists in animalizing him: that is the way Frost chooses to go when, in the poem’s final part, he refers to man’s “snout” (27), and to his “baggy figure,” thus making him into a bear. Another debasing strategy also implemented by Frost in this poem is to choose to focus on the less noble parts of the human body rather than on those more associated with the mind: the human being’s pretentiousness is here mocked through the mention of his “fundamental butt” and the informal use of “cheek” for “buttock,” metaphorically transferring the human face to the lower part of his body. Also detracting from the dignity of the human face are the doubts expressed about the presence of eyes in his face (27). A satirical use is made of rhyme when the capitalized “Greek” (standing for “philosopher”) rhymes with “cheek,” here understood as “buttock.” That satirical rhyme underpins what the poet says otherwise quite plainly when he doubts the worth of arguments among philosophers: “Which may be thought, but only so to speak” (32).

Like many poems the focus of which is nature, this one deflates human beings’ self-importance, his ego (“The me-nail click and shuffle of his feet” (17)). The question is: is it successful? Does the bear, as bear, not become virtually invisible through its use as allegory (“The representation of an abstract idea,” in this case, she stands for man’s other, all that man is not)? Bears do eat chokecherries and 1.4 to 8 provide a graphic/ vivid enough description of the bear in quick motion (run-on line + rapid-fire succession of place adverb particles and prepositions for place (8). So, while the bear is not just a pretext here, the poem’s title appears partly misleading as by the end of the poem, the wilderness has been lost sight of.

To try and tease out useful lines for an environmentalist cause, one might pick 13-14 and 16 as a condemnation of zoos; or 1.11: “The world has room to make a bear feel free,” a line which, despite the assurance the perfectly regular iambic meter confers upon it, can no longer considered as factual truth if you think of polar bears and the receding ice cap around the North Pole.
### Don Gordon: “On the Border” (1989)

The title tells us nature is not the poem's prime subject.

Poem's final word? → “brothers”: a political poem

The birds: symbols of freedom, freedom of movement, international brotherhood, friendliness. They cross the border unharmed: no need to carry a weapon: “unarmed” (12)

A symbol of peace? (“hawks” (17) = people always in favor of war). The speaker wishes more people (including hawks) listened to the language of birds (16-17). If more people did, there would be fewer wars.

The symbolical dimension of the poem is heightened by pathetic fallacy (personification) which makes you feel the birds are like human beings:

> They wind – pronounced [waind] – “their small clocks” (1.4): what you would expect people to do before going to sleep. (“wind” (“recharge” the mechanism of a clock); or do the birds recharge their ‘batteries’ by going to sleep?

> They have “cousins,”

> They have a “language.”

> “Uncoded” language → makes communication easy between them: the narrator does not pretend he can understand them.

The birds: symbols, but not just abstract symbols!

Huge flights of birds (probably starlings) taking off at regular intervals, coming and going between the same two places, are found all over the world. Birds *will* scatter seeds (15).

Precise location: El Paso, on the Rio Grande, at the border between the USA and Mexico,

The poem's symmetrical lay-out [similar type of symmetrical lay-out to Chuck Miller's “tree souls”] may represent that geographic reality: five stanzas (two quatrains (a four-line stanza)) bracketing three tercets (a three-line stanza)) with the two quatrains standing for the two places, on either side of the border, between which the birds come and go.

As regards punctuation, many lines are not end-stopped/ are run-on lines, possibly to underline/suggest this freedom of movement.

Absence of rhymes: nothing mechanical (to be contrasted with Frost's “The Bear” in which rhyme increases the feeling of human artifice.)

Tone of the poem is nostalgic. The first-person speaker introducing and closing the poem observed the unhampered movements of the birds a long time ago. He is now writing from a “failing northern city,” a characterization that suggests things are different now; the situation has deteriorated; freedom may be curtailed.

A scene from the natural world that takes on political meaning and cannot be isolated from the times, present and past alike: the USA/Mexico border, always a burning issue; and President Trump did nothing but fan the flames. But those birds are unforgettable.